Chapter 31.00: CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.

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CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
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Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually
reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly
cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as
crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with
rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas
hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all
the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and
potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul,
especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her
crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these
subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the
old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked
deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to
live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the
cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into
one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an old captain
like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug
berth.”

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and
when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it
not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its
place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of
steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman
would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge,
gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering
touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually
abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates,
seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been
the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would
have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him
too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was
measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate,
came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness,
hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one
could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the
insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab
then.

“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that
fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where
such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last. —Down,
dog, and kennel!”

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I
am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
it, sir.”

“Avast! Gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as
if to avoid some passionate temptation.

“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a
dog, sir.”

“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or
I’ll clear the world of thee!”

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” muttered
Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s very queer.
Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go back and strike
him, or—what’s that? —down here on my knees and pray for him?
Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time
I ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer too; aye, take him
fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How
he flashed at me! —his eyes like powder-pans! Is he mad? Anyway
there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a
deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours
out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy,
the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s
hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot,
and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of
frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I
guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of
Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t
know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of
riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as
Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know?
Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But
there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn
me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall
right asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing
babies do, and that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are
queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against my principles. Think not,
is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So
here goes again. But how’s that? Didn’t he call me a dog? Blazes! He
called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that!
He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me,
and I didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow.
It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I
don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though—How?
How? How? —but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to hammock
again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over
by daylight.”