DALA
Digital American Literature
Anthology
Version 1.5
Edited by Dr. Michael O'Conner,
Millikin University
Unit Nine Readings: Melville
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
[image]
Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819 in New York City. At
the age of twelve, Melville attended Albany Academy, a preparatory
school for boys, after the loss of his father. Melville was an
exemplary student and worked as a bank clerk and later with his
uncle at the family fur and cap business. When Melville was in his
twenties, he became a crew member on a series of merchant vessels
and whaling ships. At one point, he jumped ship and lived among
South Pacific Marquesas islanders. Later, he enlisted in the Navy,
for a brief time. While visiting with family, Melville was
encouraged to record his experiences as a sailor. He began a
series of personal narratives about his time on the islands and
his life on sailing ships. Melville published Typee: A Peep at
Polynesian Life in 1846, a book of adventure in an exotic
setting with genuine narratives. In 1847, he continued with Omoo,
A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. These books
were followed by Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849),
and White-Jacket (1850). After the publication of his
first works, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the
Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The couple moved
to New York and then to Massachusetts, close to the home of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. During this time, Melville was inspired to
begin his eventual masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851).This
novel is one of the most well-known literary works in the world,
although Melville did not receive much financial gain or
recognition from it during his lifetime. After another
novel-length failure, Pierre (1852), Melville turned to
short story writing and magazine journalism. He collected some of
his best shorter work in Piazza Tales (1856). Melville
published his final longer work, The Confidence Man,in
1857, a fatalistic work on humans' gullibility. After a European
trip and a lecture tour, Melville worked at Customs House in New
York City for 20 years. During this period, he wrote a collection
of verses, some published in the volume Clarel (1876).
After battling an illness for several months, Melville died in his
New York City home on September 28, 1891, leaving behind much
unpublished poetry and an important unpublished short novel, Billy
Budd (1924). Two of Melville's best biographers are Hershel
Parker and Andrew Delbanco. There are numerous and wide-ranging
collections of critical essays, many focusing on each of
Melville's important individual works. Wyn Kelley's Herman
Melville: An Introduction (2008) provides a nice starting
place for students to wade into the vast sea of criticism
available.
Excerpts from Moby-dick or The Whale
Melville, Herman. Moby-dick or The Whale. New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1851.
sources of electronic text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago-never mind how long
precisely-having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a
little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I
find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of
every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and
methodically knocking people's hats off-then, I account it high
time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for
pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself
upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing
surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs-commerce surrounds it with
her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its
extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed
by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were
out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from
Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,
northward. What do you see?-Posted like silent sentinels all
around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men
fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some
seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of
ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving
to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of
week days pent up in lath and plaster-tied to counters, nailed to
benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields
gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water,
and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them
but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee
of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as
nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there
they stand-miles of them-leagues. Inlanders all, they come from
lanes and alleys, streets and avenues-north, east, south, and
west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue
of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them
thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of
lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries
you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.
There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged
in his deepest reveries-stand that man on his legs, set his feet
a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there
be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great
American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be
supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows,
meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in
all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs?
There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit
and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there
sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.
Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But
though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree
shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet
all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic
stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies-what is
the one charm wanting?-Water-there is not a drop of water there!
Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your
thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon
suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to
buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a
pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust
healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or
other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a
passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when
first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks
give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this
is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story
of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild
image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But
that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is
the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key
to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I
begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious
of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to
sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a
purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.
Besides, passengers get sea-sick-grow quarrelsome-don't sleep of
nights-do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;-no, I
never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do
I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I
abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who
like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable
toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking
care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for
going as cook,-though I confess there is considerable glory in
that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board-yet, somehow, I
never fancied broiling fowls;-though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one
who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a
broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of
the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that
you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses
the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the
mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal
mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump
from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at
first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's
sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established
family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or
Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your
hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a
sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics
to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in
time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a
broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount
to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you
think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me,
because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that
particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then,
however the old sea-captains may order me about-however they may
thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that
it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in
much the same way-either in a physical or metaphysical point of
view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all
hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point
of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a
single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers
themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world
between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the
most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves
entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,-what will compare with it? The
urbane activity with which a man receives money is really
marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be
the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied
man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to
perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this
world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern
(that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the
most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at
second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he
breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the
commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same
time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that
after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I
should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this
the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant
surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in
some unaccountable way-he can better answer than any one else.
And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of
the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time
ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must
have run something like this:
"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage
managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling
voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high
tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly
parts in farces-though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet,
now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a
little into the springs and motives which being cunningly
presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about
performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion
that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and
discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all
my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his
island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale;
these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian
sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men,
perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for
me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I
love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not
ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could
still be social with it-would they let me-since it is but well to
be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges
in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome;
the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the
wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there
floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale,
and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow
hill in the air.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a
wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots,
reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one
side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and
every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you
viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of
systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors,
that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.
Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you
almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by
dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated
ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window
towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion
that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether
unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of
indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that
fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with
yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and
anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you
through.-It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.-It's the unnatural
combat of the four primal elements.-It's a blasted heath.-It's a
Hyperborean winter scene.-It's the breaking-up of the icebound
stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one
portentous something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out,
and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint
resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my
own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged
persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture
represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered
ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone
visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over
the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the
three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a
heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly
set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were
tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a
vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown
grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and
wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a
death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed
with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken
and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long
lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill
fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon-so
like a corkscrew now-was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by
a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The
original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle
sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at
last was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way-cut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney
with fireplaces all round-you enter the public room. A still
duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and
such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you
trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling
night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On
one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked
glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide
world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the
room stands a dark-looking den-the bar-a rude attempt at a right
whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched
bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive
beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old
decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift
destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they
called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their
money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.
Though true cylinders without-within, the villanous green goggling
glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.
Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these
footpads' goblets. Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a
penny; to THIS a penny more; and so on to the full glass-the Cape
Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered
about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of
SKRIMSHANDER. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to
be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house
was full-not a bed unoccupied. "But avast," he added, tapping his
forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's
blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd
better get used to that sort of thing."
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I
should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might
be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for
me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather
than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I
would put up with the half of any decent man's blanket.
"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?-you want supper?
Supper'll be ready directly."
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench
on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further
adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently
working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand
at a ship under full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I
thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland-no fire at all-the landlord
said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey
jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half
frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind-not
only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for
supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to
these dumplings in a most direful manner.
"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty."
"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"
"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the
harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings,
he don't-he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."
"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he
here?"
"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if
it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress
and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing
not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of
the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the
landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in
the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship.
Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was
flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped
in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in
woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards
stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from
Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the
first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a
straight wake for the whale's mouth-the bar-when the wrinkled
little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers
all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which
Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he
swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever,
never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast
of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does
even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they
began capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and
though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his
shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained
from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at
once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon
become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as
this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little
description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble
shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such
brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his
white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of
his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him
much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner,
and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the
revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man
slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became
my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by
his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge
favourite with them, they raised a cry of "Bulkington! Bulkington!
where's Bulkington?" and darted out of the house in pursuit of
him.
It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate
myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to
the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good
deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it
is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when
it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn,
in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your
objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason
why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody
else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor
Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one
apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with
your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated
the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that
being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be,
would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began
to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent
harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he
should tumble in upon me at midnight-how could I tell from what
vile hole he had been coming?
"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.-I shan't
sleep with him. I'll try the bench here."
"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"-feeling of the knots
and notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's
plane there in the bar-wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough."
So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk
handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing
away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew
right and left; till at last the plane-iron came bump against an
indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist,
and I told him for heaven's sake to quit-the bed was soft enough
to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world
could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the
shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove
in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me
in a brown study.
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot
too short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a
foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four
inches higher than the planed one-so there was no yoking them. I
then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear space
against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back
to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught
of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this
plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the
rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed
a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot
where I had thought to spend the night.
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I
steal a march on him-bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed,
not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad
idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell
but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room,
the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock
me down!
Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of
spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable
prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait
awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I'll have a good look
at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after
all-there's no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and
threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he-does he always
keep such late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to
be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he
answered, "generally he's an early bird-airley to bed and airley
to rise-yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he
went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps
him so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."
"Can't sell his head?-What sort of a bamboozingly story is this
you are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend
to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this
blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his
head around this town?"
"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he
couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked."
"With what?" shouted I.
"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd
better stop spinning that yarn to me-I'm not green."
"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but
I rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears
you a slanderin' his head."
"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again
at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.
"It's broke a'ready," said he.
"Broke," said I-"BROKE, do you mean?"
"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm-"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand
one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and
want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the
other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this
harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me
the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in
me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my
bedfellow-a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and
confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to
speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether
I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And
in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story
about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence
that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping
with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by
trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render
yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."
"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a
purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But
be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of
has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of
'balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold
all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night,
cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human
heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted
to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the
door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a
string of inions."
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and
showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling
me-but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who
stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath,
engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead
idolators?
"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting
dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes-it's a nice bed;
Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.
There's plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an
almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put
our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming
and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the
floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it
wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and
so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to
lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in
the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday-you won't see that
harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere-come along
then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and
I was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished,
sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for
any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table;
"there, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I
turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none
of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I
then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre
table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a
rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a
man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the
room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in
one corner; also a large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's
wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a
parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to
the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible
to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can
compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the
edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained
porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or
slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South
American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober
harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of
any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it,
and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious
harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to
a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a
sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I
gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about
this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking
some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket,
and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off
my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But
beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and
remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not
coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no
more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then
blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to
the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken
crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and
could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light
doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of
Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a
glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a
word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that
identical New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the
room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a
good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began
working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke
of as being in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but
he kept it averted for some time while employed in unlacing the
bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round-when,
good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark,
purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a
terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and
here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced
to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they
could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his
cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew
not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth
occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man-a whaleman
too-who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I
concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant
voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest
in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly
complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it
might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never
heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow
one. However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the
sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now,
while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this
harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty
having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the
hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room,
he then took the New Zealand head-a ghastly thing enough-and
crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat-a new beaver
hat-when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no
hair on his head-none to speak of at least-nothing but a small
scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now
looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the
stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of
it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the
window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what
to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my
comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being
completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess
I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who
had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was
so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address
him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed
inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last
showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him
were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too,
was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a
Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a
sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as
if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of
young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some
abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the
South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to
think of it. A peddler of heads too-perhaps the heads of his own
brothers. He might take a fancy to mine-heavens! look at that
tomahawk!
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went
about something that completely fascinated my attention, and
convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy
grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on
a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a
curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and
exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo baby. Remembering
the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black
manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But
seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good
deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but
a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage
goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the papered
fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin,
between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside
were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling
but ill at ease meantime-to see what was next to follow. First he
takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket,
and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of
ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he
kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after
many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals
of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he
at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the
heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the
little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry
sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange
antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the
devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing
some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about
in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he
took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his
grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a
dead woodcock.
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his
business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it
was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to
break the spell in which I had so long been bound.
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal
one. Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head
of it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his
mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke.
The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild
cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I
sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of
astonishment he began feeling me.
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he
might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp
again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but
ill comprehended my meaning.
"Who-e debel you?"-he at last said-"you no speak-e, dam-me, I
kill-e." And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing
about me in the dark.
"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord!
Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!"
"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again
growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the
tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought
my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the
landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the
bed I ran up to him.
"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here
wouldn't harm a hair of your head."
"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that
that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"
"I thought ye know'd it;-didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin'
heads around town?-but turn flukes again and go to sleep.
Queequeg, look here-you sabbee me, I sabbee-you this man sleepe
you-you sabbee?"
"Me sabbee plenty"-grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
sitting up in bed.
"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a
civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him
a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean,
comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making
about, thought I to myself-the man's a human being just as I am:
he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of
him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or
pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short,
and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man
smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again
politely motioned me to get into bed-rolling over to one side as
much as to say-"I won't touch a leg of ye."
"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches
was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other
at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they
sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and
peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded
vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there,
though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into
the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I
instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for
my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in
the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was
strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical
incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I
could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand
them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the
solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.
But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness-to call it
so-which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship,
it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For
though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a
far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame
merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this-and rightly ascribed it-to
the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian
vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was
especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the
mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these
colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in
every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely
sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not
readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas
when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting
Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we
sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its
intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering,
but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when
with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a
vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I
mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as
I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran
over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his
quarter-deck.
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of
the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the
stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs
without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their
compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made
of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like
Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey
hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched
face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a
slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it,
and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the
bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving
the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was
born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate
wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,
throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it,
especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old
Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not
till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded,
and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but
in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed
inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old
sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket,
had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old
sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested
this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that
no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if
ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out-which might hardly
come to pass, so he muttered-then, whoever should do that last
office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to
sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and
the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments
I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was
owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had
previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been
fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye,
he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once;
"but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without
coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."
I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each
side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen
shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so,
into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm
elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect,
looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There
was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate,
unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward
dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures
and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion
in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some
mighty woe.
Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his
cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the
crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory
stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less
gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still
less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from
home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then
kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was
almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said,
or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as
unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making
a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent
to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ
or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval,
the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever
all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm
him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls,
April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even
the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least
send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted
visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the
playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put
forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
have soon flowered out in a smile.
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one
morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended
the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually
walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take
a few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced
his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they
were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar
mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and
dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger
foot-prints-the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing
thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even
as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full
of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made,
now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see
that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he
paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but
seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.
"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him
pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."
The hours wore on;-Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon,
pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his
aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there,
and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send
everybody aft.
"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never
given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come
down!"
When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious
and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he
looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up,
Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting
his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as
though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the
deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace,
unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb
cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them
there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this
did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:-
"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of
clubbed voices.
"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing
the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so
magnetically thrown them.
"And what do ye next, men?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners
began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was
that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly
purposeless questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving
in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and
tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:-
"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a
white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of
gold?"-holding up a broad bright coin to the sun-"it is a sixteen
dollar piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon
top-maul."
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking,
was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his
jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words
was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so
strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical
humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the
main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the
gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming:
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled
brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that
white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard
fluke-look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he
shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"
"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins
they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
topmaul: "a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp
for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out."
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with
even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the
mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as
if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.
"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same
that some call Moby Dick."
"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then,
Tash?"
"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?"
said the Gay-Header deliberately.
"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even
for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"
"And he have one, two, three-oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk,
like him-him-" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand
round and round as though uncorking a bottle-"like him-him-"
"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all
twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one,
like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket
wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he
fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it
is Moby Dick ye have seen-Moby Dick-Moby Dick!"
"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had
thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at
last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the
wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick-but it was not
Moby Dick that took off thy leg?"
"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck;
aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me;
Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye,
aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a
heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale
that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a
day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he
shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and
round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round
perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have
shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land,
and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls
fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I
think ye do look brave."
"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to
the excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp
lance for Moby Dick!"
"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless
ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's
this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white
whale? art not game for Moby Dick?"
"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too,
Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we
follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's
vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if
thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our
Nantucket market."
"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou
requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer,
man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house
the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts
of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a
great premium HERE!"
"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for?
methinks it rings most vast, but hollow."
"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote
thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb
thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
"Hark ye yet again-the little lower layer. All visible objects,
man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living
act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning
thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the
unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How
can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the
wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks
me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an
inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly
what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of
blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could
the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a
sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.
But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me?
Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than
fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and
palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye,
Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There
are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to
incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of
spotted tawn-living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The
Pagan leopards-the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live;
and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The
crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this
matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he
snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy
one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis
but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is
it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all
Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand
has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the
billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!-Aye, aye! thy silence, then,
THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my dilated nostrils,
he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot
oppose me now, without rebellion."
"God keep me!-keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate,
Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh
from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in
the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the
masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's
downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the
subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled
out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and
warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye
predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions
from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For
with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in
our being, these still drive us on.
"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before
him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while
his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest
of the ship's company formed a circle round the group; he stood
for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those
wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves
meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in
the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden
snare of the Indian.
"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to
the nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it,
round! Short draughts-long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's
hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye;
forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained.
That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me-here's a hollow!
Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone.
Steward, refill!
"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this
capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye
harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners,
ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my
fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that-Ha! boy,
come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this
pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St. Vitus'
imp-away, thou ague!
"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done!
Let me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped
the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while
so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile,
glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It
seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would
fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated
within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates
quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and
Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell
downright.
"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three
but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing,
THAT had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would
have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And
now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan
kinsmen there-yon three most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my
valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope
washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet
cardinals! your own condescension, THAT shall bend ye to it. I do
not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye
harpooneers!"
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with
the detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long,
held, barbs up, before him.
"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over!
know ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye
cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I
fill!" Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he
brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices!
Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble
league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now
waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye
men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow-Death to Moby Dick! God
hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long,
barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions
against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed
down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once
more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among
the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the
rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted,
and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in
my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the
history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the
others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew
of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly
seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly
given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large
number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled
over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously
pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or
never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a
single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of
each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing
from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and
indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning
Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels
reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such
or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his
assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not
an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have
been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale
fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of
great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked;
therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part,
were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it
were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to
the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous
encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly
regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by
chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had
every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for
him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such
calamities did ensue in these assaults-not restricted to sprained
wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations-but
fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous
repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby
Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many
brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually
come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still
the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.
For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very
body of all surprising terrible events,-as the smitten tree gives
birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that
of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate
reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in
this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of
maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors
which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a
body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly
astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its
greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in
such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and
passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled
hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in
such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he
does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make
his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit
over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White
Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of
morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural
agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors
unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many
cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those
rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those
hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at
work. Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the
Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of
the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.
There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right
whale, would perhaps-either from professional inexperience, or
incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale;
at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those
whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have
never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole
knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster
primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these
men will hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the
wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent
tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly
comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
naturalists-Olassen and Povelson-declaring the Sperm Whale not
only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but
also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst
for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were
these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural
History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm
Whale, all fish (sharks included) are "struck with the most lively
terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash
themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause
instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the
fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full
terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the
superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a
few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the
earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes
hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the
perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that
although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase
and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not
for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn
into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable
documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these
things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater
number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely,
without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without
superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee
from the battle if offered.
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be
linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously
inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous;
that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one
and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit
altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.
For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been
divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of
the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,
unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have
originated the most curious and contradictory speculations
regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby,
after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such
vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English
whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record
years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far
north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of
harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid,
that in some of these instances it has been declared that the
interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded
very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some
whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man,
was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living
experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of
the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was
said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa
fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come
from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous
narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
whalemen.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and
knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale
had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some
whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring
Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is
but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be
planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if
indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight
would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined
billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once
more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was
enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the
monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was
not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from
other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out-a peculiar
snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump.
These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the
limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long
distance, to those who knew him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled
with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his
distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed,
literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high
noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy
foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor
yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with
natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which,
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced
in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck
more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before
his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he
had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing
down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive
them back in consternation to their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though
similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means
unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the
White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every
dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as
having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the
minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the
chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades,
they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into
the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a
birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling
in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken
prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe,
blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep
life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that
suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby
Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in
the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could
have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to
doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had
cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more
fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam
before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious
agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are
left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible
malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion
even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which
the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
devil;-Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens
and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with
malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all
the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab,
were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby
Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the
general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's
shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant
rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in
darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a
sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the
stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily
laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced
to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab
and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid
winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his
torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so
interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him,
seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the
passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg,
yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was
moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced
to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock.
In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.
And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with
mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and,
to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him
with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den
into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm,
collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once
again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone;
even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is
oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it
fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler
form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted;
like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly,
but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his
narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had
been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his
great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent,
now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may
stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried
it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so
that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did
now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely
brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains
unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is
profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this
spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand-however grand and
wonderful, now quit it;-and take your way, ye nobler, sadder
souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the
fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his
whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried
beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid,
he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled
entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder
souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he
did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire
only will the old State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my
means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to
kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to
mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that
thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility,
not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed
in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at
last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally
grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which
had overtaken him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise
popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added
moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in
the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is
it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for
another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the
calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor
the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better
qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and
wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched
without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to
dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all
brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally
incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively
competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But
be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of
his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely
sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and
all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of
his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was
lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous
souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were
bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in
dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable,
and supernatural revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with
curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too,
chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals-morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere
unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable
jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the
pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed
specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly
responded to the old man's ire-by what evil magic their souls were
possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White
Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to
be-what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious
understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have
seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,-all this to
explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The
subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither
leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?
Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of
a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the
abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to
encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the
deadliest ill.
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at
times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick,
which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some
alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror
concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely
overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh
ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above
all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here;
and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in
marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in
some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even
the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of
the White Elephants" above all their other magniloquent
ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling
the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the
Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording
Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and
though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made
significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked
a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and
symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching,
noble things-the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though
among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of
wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,
whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the
Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens
drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of
the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the
divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers,
the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in
the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in
a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter
sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival
of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the
purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual
tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin
word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part
of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith,
white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given
to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in
white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth
there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations,
with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet
lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue,
which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which
affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of
whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and
coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that
terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the
poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth,
flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That
ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness,
even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their
aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat
can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*
*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by
him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is
not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the
intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that
heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the
circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature
stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our
minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.
But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the
whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose
in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely
tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they
bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with
"Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence REQUIEM denominating the
mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the
white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild
deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN.
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of
spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom
sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell;
but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*
*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my
forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and
there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing
of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At
intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to
embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook
it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost
in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,
methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white,
its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost
the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I
gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint,
the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied.
Goney! never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that
this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But
some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for
albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme
have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were
mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then
read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in
saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the
noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in
this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I
will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated
on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a
lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and
place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern
tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl
flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that
of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white
charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the
dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning
carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses,
whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky
Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward
trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the
hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving
comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent
than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most
imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived
the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a
god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether
marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless
cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio;
or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at
the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm
nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect
he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the
object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned
from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it
was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with
divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless
terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed
and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often
shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith
and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed
by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men-has
no substantive deformity-and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading
whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest
abortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable
but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her
forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy
aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been
denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has
the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly
it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked
in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of
Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of
all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this
hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in
the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble
pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like
the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal
trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the
expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in
our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round
our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog-Yea, while
these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors,
when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or
gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its
profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar
apparition to the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man
to account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we,
then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this
thing of whiteness-though for the time either wholly or in great
part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to
it aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the
same sorcery, however modified;-can we thus hope to light upon
some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to
subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into
these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the
imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared
by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at
the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but
loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does
the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long,
dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast
and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread,
unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does
the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an
eyeless statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors
and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the
White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the
imagination of an untravelled American, than those other storied
structures, its neighbors-the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody?
And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over
the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of
Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess?
Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the
name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy,
while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long
lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest
and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial
instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old
fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the
Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through
the green of the groves-why is this phantom more terrible than all
the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her
wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses
all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her
suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a
tossed pack of cards;-it is not these things alone which make
tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For
Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in
this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps
her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of
complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor
of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of
whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating
the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative
mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness
to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to
muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may
perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign
lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to
vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be
called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a
midnight sea of milky whiteness-as if from encircling headlands
shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he
feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the
whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the
lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they
both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so
much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that
hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in
the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at
such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness
it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the
same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative
indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow,
no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness.
Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas;
where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the
powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked,
instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views
what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness
is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest
to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful
valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey-why is it
that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe
behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its
wild animal muskiness-why will he start, snort, and with bursting
eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no
remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green
northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot
recall to him anything associated with the experience of former
perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of
the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of
miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild
foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling
into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak
rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate
shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to
Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened
colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the
mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects
this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres
were formed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more
strange and far more portentous-why, as we have seen, it is at
once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very
veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the
intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless
voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from
behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white
depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is
not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the
same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons
that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows-a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which
we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural
philosophers, that all other earthly hues-every stately or lovely
emblazoning-the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and
the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually
inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all
deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose
allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when
we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which
produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for
ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating
without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips
and roses, with its own blank tinge-pondering all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring
glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself
blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the
symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.-Third Day.
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more
the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by
crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost
every spar.
"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's
all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What
a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a
summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its
throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that
world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab
never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT'S tingling enough
for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and
privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness;
and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for
that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very
calm-frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which
the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is
growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no,
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere,
between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava.
How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn
shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile
wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and
cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes
blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!-it's tainted.
Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable
world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet,
'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In
every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it,
and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark
naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab
is a braver thing-a nobler thing than THAT. Would now the wind but
had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage
mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as
objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning,
oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear
it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the
wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens
blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and
veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea
may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift
and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the
eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good
ship on; these Trades, or something like them-something so
unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To
it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"
"Nothing, sir."
"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the
sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the
start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM-that's bad; I might
have known it, too. Fool! the lines-the harpoons he's towing. Aye,
aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of
ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!"
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the
Pequod's quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse
direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she
rechurned the cream in her own white wake.
"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured
Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon
the rail. "God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me,
and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my
God in obeying him!"
"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen
basket. "We should meet him soon."
"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and
once more Ahab swung on high.
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now
held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three
points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and
instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if
the tongues of fire had voiced it.
"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On
deck there!-brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's
too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand
over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I
must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at
the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow
so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy,
from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!-the same!-the same to
Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely
leewardings! They must lead somewhere-to something else than
common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale
goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer
quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What's
this?-green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such
green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now
between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both
grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my
ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has
the better of my live flesh every way. I can't compare with it;
and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of
men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What's that he
said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen
again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea,
supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I've been
sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many
more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;
but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head-keep a
good eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow,
nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head
and tail."
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily
lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his
shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent,
he waved to the mate,-who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck-and
bade him pause.
"Starbuck!"
"Sir?"
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage,
Starbuck."
"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are
missing, Starbuck!"
"Truth, sir: saddest truth."
"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;-and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested
comb, Starbuck. I am old;-shake hands with me, man."
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!-noble heart-go not-go not!-see, it's
a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion
then!"
"Lower away!"-cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand
by the crew!"
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window
there; "O master, my master, come back!"
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then;
and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship,
when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters
beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars,
every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied
the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening
to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times
apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures
hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But
these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod
since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was
that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and
therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks-a
matter sometimes well known to affect them,-however it was, they
seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.
"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side,
and following with his eyes the receding boat-"canst thou yet ring
boldly to that sight?-lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and
followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical
third day?-For when three days flow together in one continuous
intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the
noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing-be that
end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me,
and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,-fixed at the top of a
shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and
skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou
fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes
grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but
clouds sweep between-Is my journey's end coming? My legs feel
faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,-beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!-stave it off-move, move! speak
aloud!-Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the
hill?-Crazed;-aloft there!-keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:-
"Mark well the whale!-Ho! again!-drive off that hawk! see! he
pecks-he tears the vane"-pointing to the red flag flying at the
main-truck-"Ha! he soars away with it!-Where's the old man now?
see'st thou that sight, oh Ahab!-shudder, shudder!"
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the
mast-heads-a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had
sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held
on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew
maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves
hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost
heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no
coffin and no hearse can be mine:-and hemp only can kill me! Ha!
ha!"
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged
berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;
as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a
vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in
a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the
rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed
thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps
of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving
the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk
of the whale.
"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted
forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons
that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all
the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons
overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent
skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his
tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling
out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in
one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's
almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and
as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire
flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went
up. Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the
turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had
reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body
of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his
distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
"Befooled, befooled!"-drawing in a long lean breath-"Aye, Parsee!
I see thee again.-Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then
is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last
letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to
the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in
time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die-Down, men!
the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in,
that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my
legs; and so obey me.-Where's the whale? gone down again?"
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping
with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the
last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby
Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost
passed the ship,-which thus far had been sailing in the contrary
direction to him, though for the present her headway had been
stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only
intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the
third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou,
thou, that madly seekest him!"
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly
impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when
Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish
Starbuck's face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn
the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious
interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,
eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were
rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to
the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after the
other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying
glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among
bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard
the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving
a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the
vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to
Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for
another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the
resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or
whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him:
whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as
it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though
indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one as
before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying
sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;
and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at
almost every dip.
"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.
Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding
water."
"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and
smaller!"
"They will last long enough! pull on!-But who can tell"-he
muttered-"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
Ahab?-But pull on! Aye, all alive, now-we near him. The helm! take
the helm! let me pass,"-and so saying two of the oarsmen helped
him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging
along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious
of its advance-as the whale sometimes will-and Ahab was fairly
within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's
spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus
close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms
lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron,
and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and
curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick
sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the
bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the
boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the
gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been
tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen-who foreknew
not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared
for its effects-these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an
instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its
level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again;
the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and
swimming.
Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the
weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take
new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to
turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the
moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it
snapped in the empty air!
"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!-'tis whole again; oars!
oars! Burst in upon him!"
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale
wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that
evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;
seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions;
bethinking it-it may be-a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he
bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery
showers of foam.
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind;
hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't
night?"
"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.
"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be
for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his
mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save
my ship?"
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two
planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily
disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading,
splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the
pouring water.
Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head
hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag,
half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight
out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and
Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the
down-coming monster just as soon as he.
"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers
of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in
a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say-ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!
Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long
fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman,
steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his
unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he
cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"
"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will
now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou
grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but
Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a
mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with
brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun,
moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever
spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with
ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning
whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O
Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his
drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;-cherries!
cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"
"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I
hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few
coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up."
From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically
retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their
various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the
whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his
predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading
semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift
vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of
all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his
forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers
reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks,
the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks.
Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain
torrents down a flume.
"The ship! The hearse!-the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the
boat; "its wood could only be American!"
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along
its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface
again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's
boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked
keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm,
and Pole-pointed prow,-death-glorious ship! must ye then perish,
and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I
feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from
all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my
whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;
to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee;
for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine,
let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied
to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with
igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;-ran foul. Ahab
stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught
him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring
their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he
was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final
end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and
smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.
"The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the
gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while
fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty
perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking
lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone
boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every
lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and
round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out
of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over
the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few
inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming
yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical
coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;-at
that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted
in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet
faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had
followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the
stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this
bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between
the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial
thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his
hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic
shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole
captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship,
which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with
it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a
sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all
collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled
five thousand years ago.
Epilogue
"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?-Because
one did survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he
whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when
that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the
last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat,
was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing
scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the
sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the
closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy
pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the
button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by
reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy,
rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from
the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that
coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft
and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if
with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with
sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and
picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in
her retracing search after her missing children, only found
another orphan.
The End.
Bartleby, A Story of Wall-Street
Resources for
Melville
Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, A Story of Wall-Street." Piazza
Tales. New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856.
source of electronic text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15859
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the
last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact
with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of
men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been
written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very
many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased,
could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen
might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the
biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life
of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or
heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete
life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that
no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this
man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of
those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the
original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my
own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of
him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the
sequel.
Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is
fit I make some mention of myself, my employees, my
business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such
description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the
chief character about to be presented.
Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled
with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the
best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially
energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing
of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of
those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any
way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a
snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds and
mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an
eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage
little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in
pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method.
I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I
was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor;
a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and
orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely
add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good
opinion.
Some time prior to the period at which this little history
begins, my avocations had been largely increased. The good old
office, now extinct in the State of New York, of a Master in
Chancery, had been conferred upon me. It was not a very arduous
office, but very pleasantly remunerative. I seldom lose my temper;
much more seldom indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and
outrages; but I must be permitted to be rash here and declare,
that I consider the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of
Master in Chancery, by the new Constitution, as a—premature act;
inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits,
whereas I only received those of a few short years. But this is by
the way.
My chambers were up stairs at No.—Wall-street. At one end they
looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light
shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view
might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient
in what landscape painters call "life." But if so, the view from
the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if
nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an
unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and
everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out
its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted
spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes.
Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my
chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall
and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.
At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two
persons as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an
office-boy. First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut.
These may seem names, the like of which are not usually found in
the Directory. In truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred
upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of
their respective persons or characters. Turkey was a short, pursy
Englishman of about my own age, that is, somewhere not far from
sixty. In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine
florid hue, but after twelve o'clock, meridian—his dinner hour—it
blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued
blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane—till 6 o'clock, P.M.
or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the
face, which gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with
it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the
like regularity and undiminished glory. There are many singular
coincidences I have known in the course of my life, not the least
among which was the fact, that exactly when Turkey displayed his
fullest beams from his red and radiant countenance, just then,
too, at that critical moment, began the daily period when I
considered his business capacities as seriously disturbed for the
remainder of the twenty-four hours. Not that he was absolutely
idle, or averse to business then; far from it. The difficulty was,
he was apt to be altogether too energetic. There was a strange,
inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him. He
would be incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand. All his
blots upon my documents, were dropped there after twelve o'clock,
meridian. Indeed, not only would he be reckless and sadly given to
making blots in the afternoon, but some days he went further, and
was rather noisy. At such times, too, his face flamed with
augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on
anthracite. He made an unpleasant racket with his chair; spilled
his sand-box; in mending his pens, impatiently split them all to
pieces, and threw them on the floor in a sudden passion; stood up
and leaned over his table, boxing his papers about in a most
indecorous manner, very sad to behold in an elderly man like him.
Nevertheless, as he was in many ways a most valuable person to me,
and all the time before twelve o'clock, meridian, was the
quickest, steadiest creature too, accomplishing a great deal of
work in a style not easy to be matched—for these reasons, I was
willing to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed,
occasionally, I remonstrated with him. I did this very gently,
however, because, though the civilest, nay, the blandest and most
reverential of men in the morning, yet in the afternoon he was
disposed, upon provocation, to be slightly rash with his tongue,
in fact, insolent. Now, valuing his morning services as I did, and
resolved not to lose them; yet, at the same time made
uncomfortable by his inflamed ways after twelve o'clock; and being
a man of peace, unwilling by my admonitions to call forth unseemly
retorts from him; I took upon me, one Saturday noon (he was always
worse on Saturdays), to hint to him, very kindly, that perhaps now
that he was growing old, it might be well to abridge his labors;
in short, he need not come to my chambers after twelve o'clock,
but, dinner over, had best go home to his lodgings and rest
himself till teatime. But no; he insisted upon his afternoon
devotions. His countenance became intolerably fervid, as he
oratorically assured me—gesticulating with a long ruler at the
other end of the room—that if his services in the morning were
useful, how indispensable, then, in the afternoon?
"With submission, sir," said Turkey on this occasion, "I consider
myself your right-hand man. In the morning I but marshal and
deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their
head, and gallantly charge the foe, thus!"—and he made a violent
thrust with the ruler.
"But the blots, Turkey," intimated I.
"True,—but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am
getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not
to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age—even if it blot
the page—is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are
getting old."
This appeal to my fellow-feeling was hardly to be resisted. At
all events, I saw that go he would not. So I made up my mind to
let him stay, resolving, nevertheless, to see to it, that during
the afternoon he had to do with my less important papers.
Nippers, the second on my list, was a whiskered, sallow, and,
upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five
and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil
powers—ambition and indigestion. The ambition was evinced by a
certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an
unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as
the original drawing up of legal documents. The indigestion seemed
betokened in an occasional nervous testiness and grinning
irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over
mistakes committed in copying; unnecessary maledictions, hissed,
rather than spoken, in the heat of business; and especially by a
continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.
Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never
get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of
various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to
attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting
paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing
his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up
towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof
of a Dutch house for his desk:—then he declared that it stopped
the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his
waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore
aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers
knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to be
rid of a scrivener's table altogether. Among the manifestations of
his diseased ambition was a fondness he had for receiving visits
from certain ambiguous-looking fellows in seedy coats, whom he
called his clients. Indeed I was aware that not only was he, at
times, considerable of a ward-politician, but he occasionally did
a little business at the Justices' courts, and was not unknown on
the steps of the Tombs. I have good reason to believe, however,
that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who,
with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a
dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill. But with all his
failings, and the annoyances he caused me, Nippers, like his
compatriot Turkey, was a very useful man to me; wrote a neat,
swift hand; and, when he chose, was not deficient in a gentlemanly
sort of deportment. Added to this, he always dressed in a
gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected credit
upon my chambers. Whereas with respect to Turkey, I had much ado
to keep him from being a reproach to me. His clothes were apt to
look oily and smell of eating-houses. He wore his pantaloons very
loose and baggy in summer. His coats were execrable; his hat not
to be handled. But while the hat was a thing of indifference to
me, inasmuch as his natural civility and deference, as a dependent
Englishman, always led him to doff it the moment he entered the
room, yet his coat was another matter. Concerning his coats, I
reasoned with him; but with no effect. The truth was, I suppose,
that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a
lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time. As
Nippers once observed, Turkey's money went chiefly for red ink.
One winter day I presented Turkey with a highly-respectable
looking coat of my own, a padded gray coat, of a most comfortable
warmth, and which buttoned straight up from the knee to the neck.
I thought Turkey would appreciate the favor, and abate his
rashness and obstreperousness of afternoons. But no. I verily
believe that buttoning himself up in so downy and blanket-like a
coat had a pernicious effect upon him; upon the same principle
that too much oats are bad for horses. In fact, precisely as a
rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his
coat. It made him insolent. He was a man whom prosperity harmed.
Though concerning the self-indulgent habits of Turkey I had my
own private surmises, yet touching Nippers I was well persuaded
that whatever might by his faults in other respects, he was, at
least, a temperate young man. But indeed, nature herself seemed to
have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly
with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent
potations were needless. When I consider how, amid the stillness
of my chambers, Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his
seat, and stooping over his table, spread his arms wide apart,
seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim,
grinding motion on the floor, as if the table were a perverse
voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him; I plainly
perceive that for Nippers, brandy and water were altogether
superfluous.
It was fortunate for me that, owing to its peculiar
cause—indigestion—the irritability and consequent nervousness of
Nippers, were mainly observable in the morning, while in the
afternoon he was comparatively mild. So that Turkey's paroxysms
only coming on about twelve o'clock, I never had to do with their
eccentricities at one time. Their fits relieved each other like
guards. When Nippers' was on, Turkey's was off; and vice versa.
This was a good natural arrangement under the circumstances.
Ginger Nut, the third on my list, was a lad some twelve years
old. His father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the
bench instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my
office as student at law, errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper, at
the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself,
but he did not use it much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited
a great array of the shells of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to
this quick-witted youth the whole noble science of the law was
contained in a nut-shell. Not the least among the employments of
Ginger Nut, as well as one which he discharged with the most
alacrity, was his duty as cake and apple purveyor for Turkey and
Nippers. Copying law papers being proverbially dry, husky sort of
business, my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths very
often with Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the
Custom House and Post Office. Also, they sent Ginger Nut very
frequently for that peculiar cake—small, flat, round, and very
spicy—after which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning
when business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these
cakes, as if they were mere wafers—indeed they sell them at the
rate of six or eight for a penny—the scrape of his pen blending
with the crunching of the crisp particles in his mouth. Of all the
fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was
his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping
it on to a mortgage for a seal. I came within an ace of dismissing
him then. But he mollified me by making an oriental bow, and
saying—"With submission, sir, it was generous of me to find you in
stationery on my own account."
Now my original business—that of a conveyancer and title hunter,
and drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts—was considerably
increased by receiving the master's office. There was now great
work for scriveners. Not only must I push the clerks already with
me, but I must have additional help. In answer to my
advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my
office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can
see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably
forlorn! It was Bartleby.
After a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him,
glad to have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly
sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon
the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers.
I should have stated before that ground glass folding-doors
divided my premises into two parts, one of which was occupied by
my scriveners, the other by myself. According to my humor I threw
open these doors, or closed them. I resolved to assign Bartleby a
corner by the folding-doors, but on my side of them, so as to have
this quiet man within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to
be done. I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that
part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral
view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to
subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though
it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and
the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings,
as from a very small opening in a dome. Still further to a
satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen,
which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not
remove him from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and
society were conjoined.
At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if
long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself
on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day
and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should
have been quite delighted with his application, had he been
cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely,
mechanically.
It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business
to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are
two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in
this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the
original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I
can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be
altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the
mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with
Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages,
closely written in a crimpy hand.
Now and then, in the haste of business, it had been my habit to
assist in comparing some brief document myself, calling Turkey or
Nippers for this purpose. One object I had in placing Bartleby so
handy to me behind the screen, was to avail myself of his services
on such trivial occasions. It was on the third day, I think, of
his being with me, and before any necessity had arisen for having
his own writing examined, that, being much hurried to complete a
small affair I had in hand, I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my
haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my
head bent over the original on my desk, and my right hand
sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that
immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch
it and proceed to business without the least delay.
In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly
stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small
paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when
without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild,
firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to."
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties.
Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or
Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my
request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear
a one came the previous reply, "I would prefer not to."
"Prefer not to," echoed I, rising in high excitement, and
crossing the room with a stride. "What do you mean? Are you
moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take
it," and I thrust it towards him.
"I would prefer not to," said he.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his
gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had
there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence
in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily
human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him
from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of
turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I
stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his own writing,
and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought
I. What had one best do? But my business hurried me. I concluded
to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my future
leisure. So calling Nippers from the other room, the paper was
speedily examined.
A few days after this, Bartleby concluded four lengthy documents,
being quadruplicates of a week's testimony taken before me in my
High Court of Chancery. It became necessary to examine them. It
was an important suit, and great accuracy was imperative. Having
all things arranged I called Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut from
the next room, meaning to place the four copies in the hands of my
four clerks, while I should read from the original. Accordingly
Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut had taken their seats in a row,
each with his document in hand, when I called to Bartleby to join
this interesting group.
"Bartleby! quick, I am waiting."
I heard a slow scrape of his chair legs on the uncarpeted floor,
and soon he appeared standing at the entrance of his hermitage.
"What is wanted?" said he mildly.
"The copies, the copies," said I hurriedly. "We are going to
examine them. There"—and I held towards him the fourth
quadruplicate.
"I would prefer not to," he said, and gently disappeared behind
the screen.
For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt, standing at
the head of my seated column of clerks. Recovering myself, I
advanced towards the screen, and demanded the reason for such
extraordinary conduct.
"Why do you refuse?"
"I would prefer not to."
With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful
passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously
from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not
only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and
disconcerted me. I began to reason with him.
"These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor
saving to you, because one examination will answer for your four
papers. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine
his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!"
"I prefer not to," he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to
me that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved
every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could
not gainsay the irresistible conclusions; but, at the same time,
some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he
did.
"You are decided, then, not to comply with my request—a request
made according to common usage and common sense?"
He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment
was sound. Yes: his decision was irreversible.
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some
unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger
in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to
surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the
reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested
persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for
his own faltering mind.
"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? Am I not right?"
"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I
think that you are."
"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"
"I think I should kick him out of the office."
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being
morning, Turkey's answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms,
but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous
sentence, Nippers' ugly mood was on duty and Turkey's off.)
"Ginger Nut," said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in
my behalf, "what do you think of it?"
"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut
with a grin.
"You hear what they say," said I, turning towards the screen,
"come forth and do your duty."
But he vouchsafed no reply. I pondered a moment in sore
perplexity. But once more business hurried me. I determined again
to postpone the consideration of this dilemma to my future
leisure. With a little trouble we made out to examine the papers
without Bartleby, though at every page or two, Turkey
deferentially dropped his opinion that this proceeding was quite
out of the common; while Nippers, twitching in his chair with a
dyspeptic nervousness, ground out between his set teeth occasional
hissing maledictions against the stubborn oaf behind the screen.
And for his (Nippers') part, this was the first and the last time
he would do another man's business without pay.
Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to every thing
but his own peculiar business there.
Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another
lengthy work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his
ways narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed
that he never went any where. As yet I had never of my personal
knowledge known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual
sentry in the corner. At about eleven o'clock though, in the
morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would advance toward the
opening in Bartleby's screen, as if silently beckoned thither by a
gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy would then leave the
office jingling a few pence, and reappear with a handful of
ginger-nuts which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of
the cakes for his trouble.
He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner,
properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never
eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind
then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the
human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts
are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar
constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A
hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger,
then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should
have none.
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the
resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the
better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to
construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by
his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and
his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is
plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces
that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can
get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will
fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be
rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes.
Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend
Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me
little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually
prove a sweet morsel for my conscience. But this mood was not
invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes
irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new
opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my
own. But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with
my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap. But one afternoon the
evil impulse in me mastered me, and the following little scene
ensued:
"Bartleby," said I, "when those papers are all copied, I will
compare them with you."
"I would prefer not to."
"How? Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?"
No answer.
I threw open the folding-doors near by, and turning upon Turkey
and
Nippers, exclaimed in an excited manner—
"He says, a second time, he won't examine his papers. What do you
think of it, Turkey?"
It was afternoon, be it remembered. Turkey sat glowing like a
brass boiler, his bald head steaming, his hands reeling among his
blotted papers.
"Think of it?" roared Turkey; "I think I'll just step behind his
screen, and black his eyes for him!"
So saying, Turkey rose to his feet and threw his arms into a
pugilistic position. He was hurrying away to make good his
promise, when I detained him, alarmed at the effect of
incautiously rousing Turkey's combativeness after dinner.
"Sit down, Turkey," said I, "and hear what Nippers has to say.
What do you think of it, Nippers? Would I not be justified in
immediately dismissing Bartleby?"
"Excuse me, that is for you to decide, sir. I think his conduct
quite unusual, and indeed unjust, as regards Turkey and myself.
But it may only be a passing whim."
"Ah," exclaimed I, "you have strangely changed your mind then—you
speak very gently of him now."
"All beer," cried Turkey; "gentleness is effects of beer—Nippers
and I dined together to-day. You see how gentle I am, sir.
Shall I go and black his eyes?"
"You refer to Bartleby, I suppose. No, not to-day, Turkey," I
replied; "pray, put up your fists."
I closed the doors, and again advanced towards Bartleby. I felt
additional incentives tempting me to my fate. I burned to be
rebelled against again. I remembered that Bartleby never left the
office.
"Bartleby," said I, "Ginger Nut is away; just step round to the
Post Office, won't you? (it was but a three minute walk,) and see
if there is any thing for me."
"I would prefer not to."
"You will not?"
"I prefer not."
I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind
inveteracy returned. Was there any other thing in which I could
procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean,
penniless wight?—my hired clerk? What added thing is there,
perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?
"Bartleby!"
No answer.
"Bartleby," in a louder tone.
No answer.
"Bartleby," I roared.
Like a very ghost, agreeably to the laws of magical invocation,
at the third summons, he appeared at the entrance of his
hermitage.
"Go to the next room, and tell Nippers to come to me."
"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly
disappeared.
"Very good, Bartleby," said I, in a quiet sort of serenely severe
self-possessed tone, intimating the unalterable purpose of some
terrible retribution very close at hand. At the moment I half
intended something of the kind. But upon the whole, as it was
drawing towards my dinner-hour, I thought it best to put on my hat
and walk home for the day, suffering much from perplexity and
distress of mind.
Shall I acknowledge it? The conclusion of this whole business
was, that it soon became a fixed fact of my chambers, that a pale
young scrivener, by the name of Bartleby, and a desk there; that
he copied for me at the usual rate of four cents a folio (one
hundred words); but he was permanently exempt from examining the
work done by him, that duty being transferred to Turkey and
Nippers, one of compliment doubtless to their superior acuteness;
moreover, said Bartleby was never on any account to be dispatched
on the most trivial errand of any sort; and that even if entreated
to take upon him such a matter, it was generally understood that
he would prefer not to—in other words, that he would refuse
pointblank.
As days passed on, I became considerably reconciled to Bartleby.
His steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant
industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing
revery behind his screen), his great, stillness, his
unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a
valuable acquisition. One prime thing was this,—he was always
there;—first in the morning, continually through the day,
and the last at night. I had a singular confidence in his honesty.
I felt my most precious papers perfectly safe in his hands.
Sometimes to be sure I could not, for the very soul of me, avoid
falling into sudden spasmodic passions with him. For it was
exceeding difficult to bear in mind all the time those strange
peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions, forming the
tacit stipulations on Bartleby's part under which he remained in
my office. Now and then, in the eagerness of dispatching pressing
business, I would inadvertently summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid
tone, to put his finger, say, on the incipient tie of a bit of red
tape with which I was about compressing some papers. Of course,
from behind the screen the usual answer, "I prefer not to," was
sure to come; and then, how could a human creature with the common
infirmities of our nature, refrain from bitterly exclaiming upon
such perverseness—such unreasonableness. However, every added
repulse of this sort which I received only tended to lessen the
probability of my repeating the inadvertence.
Here it must be said, that according to the custom of most legal
gentlemen occupying chambers in densely-populated law buildings,
there were several keys to my door. One was kept by a woman
residing in the attic, which person weekly scrubbed and daily
swept and dusted my apartments. Another was kept by Turkey for
convenience sake. The third I sometimes carried in my own pocket.
The fourth I knew not who had.
Now, one Sunday morning I happened to go to Trinity Church, to
hear a celebrated preacher, and finding myself rather early on the
ground, I thought I would walk around to my chambers for a while.
Luckily I had my key with me; but upon applying it to the lock, I
found it resisted by something inserted from the inside. Quite
surprised, I called out; when to my consternation a key was turned
from within; and thrusting his lean visage at me, and holding the
door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt
sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered dishabille, saying
quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then,
and—preferred not admitting me at present. In a brief word or two,
he moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the block
two or three times, and by that time he would probably have
concluded his affairs.
Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my
law-chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously
gentlemanly nonchalance, yet withal firm and
self-possessed, had such a strange effect upon me, that
incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and did as desired.
But not without sundry twinges of impotent rebellion against the
mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener. Indeed, it was
his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but
unmanned me, as it were. For I consider that one, for the time, is
a sort of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to
dictate to him, and order him away from his own premises.
Furthermore, I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could
possibly be doing in my office in his shirt sleeves, and in an
otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was any thing
amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question. It was not to
be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person.
But what could he be doing there?—copying? Nay again, whatever
might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous
person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any
state approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was
something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he
would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the
day.
Nevertheless, my mind was not pacified; and full of a restless
curiosity, at last I returned to the door. Without hindrance I
inserted my key, opened it, and entered. Bartleby was not to be
seen. I looked round anxiously, peeped behind his screen; but it
was very plain that he was gone. Upon more closely examining the
place, I surmised that for an indefinite period Bartleby must have
ate, dressed, and slept in my office, and that too without plate,
mirror, or bed. The cushioned seat of a rickety old sofa in one
corner bore the faint impress of a lean, reclining form. Rolled
away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a
blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a
ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a
morsel of cheese. Yes, thought I, it is evident enough that
Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall
all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across
me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here
revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!
Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and
every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too,
which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall
echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And
here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which
he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius
brooding among the ruins of Carthage!
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging
melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a
not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me
irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and
Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and
sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like
sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them
with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness
courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides
aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad
fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain—led on to
other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of
Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me.
The scrivener's pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring
strangers, in its shivering winding sheet.
Suddenly I was attracted by Bartleby's closed desk, the key in
open sight left in the lock.
I mean no mischief, seek the gratification of no heartless
curiosity, thought I; besides, the desk is mine, and its contents
too, so I will make bold to look within. Every thing was
methodically arranged, the papers smoothly placed. The pigeon
holes were deep, and removing the files of documents, I groped
into their recesses. Presently I felt something there, and dragged
it out. It was an old bandanna handkerchief, heavy and knotted. I
opened it, and saw it was a savings' bank.
I now recalled all the quiet mysteries which I had noted in the
man. I remembered that he never spoke but to answer; that though
at intervals he had considerable time to himself, yet I had never
seen him reading—no, not even a newspaper; that for long periods
he would stand looking out, at his pale window behind the screen,
upon the dead brick wall; I was quite sure he never visited any
refectory or eating house; while his pale face clearly indicated
that he never drank beer like Turkey, or tea and coffee even, like
other men; that he never went any where in particular that I could
learn; never went out for a walk, unless indeed that was the case
at present; that he had declined telling who he was, or whence he
came, or whether he had any relatives in the world; that though so
thin and pale, he never complained of ill health. And more than
all, I remembered a certain unconscious air of pallid—how shall I
call it?—of pallid haughtiness, say, or rather an austere reserve
about him, which had positively awed me into my tame compliance
with his eccentricities, when I had feared to ask him to do the
slightest incidental thing for me, even though I might know, from
his long-continued motionlessness, that behind his screen he must
be standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his.
Revolving all these things, and coupling them with the recently
discovered fact that he made my office his constant abiding place
and home, and not forgetful of his morbid moodiness; revolving all
these things, a prudential feeling began to steal over me. My
first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest
pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew
and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into
fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible
too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery
enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond
that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably
this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It
rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive
and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to
effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it. What I saw
that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of
innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but
his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his
soul I could not reach.
I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that
morning. Somehow, the things I had seen disqualified me for the
time from church-going. I walked homeward, thinking what I would
do with Bartleby. Finally, I resolved upon this;—I would put
certain calm questions to him the next morning, touching his
history, etc., and if he declined to answer them openly and
unreservedly (and I supposed he would prefer not), then to give
him a twenty dollar bill over and above whatever I might owe him,
and tell him his services were no longer required; but that if in
any other way I could assist him, I would be happy to do so,
especially if he desired to return to his native place, wherever
that might be, I would willingly help to defray the expenses.
Moreover, if, after reaching home, he found himself at any time in
want of aid, a letter from him would be sure of a reply.
The next morning came.
"Bartleby," said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
"Bartleby," said I, in a still gentler tone, "come here; I am not
going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do—I
simply wish to speak to you."
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
"Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?"
"I would prefer not to."
"Will you tell me any thing about yourself?"
"I would prefer not to."
"But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I
feel friendly towards you."
He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed
upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind
me, some six inches above my head.
"What is your answer, Bartleby?" said I, after waiting a
considerable time for a reply, during which his countenance
remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor
of the white attenuated mouth.
"At present I prefer to give no answer," he said, and retired
into his hermitage.
It was rather weak in me I confess, but his manner on this
occasion nettled me. Not only did there seem to lurk in it a
certain calm disdain, but his perverseness seemed ungrateful,
considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had
received from me.
Again I sat ruminating what I should do. Mortified as I was at
his behavior, and resolved as I had been to dismiss him when I
entered my offices, nevertheless I strangely felt something
superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out
my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe
one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. At last,
familiarly drawing my chair behind his screen, I sat down and
said: "Bartleby, never mind then about revealing your history; but
let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with
the usages of this office. Say now you will help to examine papers
to-morrow or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you
will begin to be a little reasonable:—say so, Bartleby."
"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was
his mildly cadaverous reply.
Just then the folding-doors opened, and Nippers approached. He
seemed suffering from an unusually bad night's rest, induced by
severer indigestion then common. He overheard those final words of
Bartleby.
"Prefer not, eh?" gritted Nippers—"I'd prefer him,
if I were you, sir," addressing me—"I'd prefer him; I'd
give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray,
that he prefers not to do now?"
Bartleby moved not a limb.
"Mr. Nippers," said I, "I'd prefer that you would withdraw for
the present."
Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using
this word "prefer" upon all sorts of not exactly suitable
occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the
scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way.
And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?
This apprehension had not been without efficacy in determining me
to summary means.
As Nippers, looking very sour and sulky, was departing, Turkey
blandly and deferentially approached.
"With submission, sir," said he, "yesterday I was thinking about
Bartleby here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a
quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him,
and enabling him to assist in examining his papers."
"So you have got the word too," said I, slightly excited.
"With submission, what word, sir," asked Turkey, respectfully
crowding himself into the contracted space behind the screen, and
by so doing, making me jostle the scrivener. "What word, sir?"
"I would prefer to be left alone here," said Bartleby, as if
offended at being mobbed in his privacy.
"That's the word, Turkey," said I—"that's it."
"Oh, prefer? oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself.
But, sir, as
I was saying, if he would but prefer—"
"Turkey," interrupted I, "you will please withdraw."
"Oh certainly, sir, if you prefer that I should."
As he opened the folding-door to retire, Nippers at his desk
caught a glimpse of me, and asked whether I would prefer to have a
certain paper copied on blue paper or white. He did not in the
least roguishly accent the word prefer. It was plain that it
involuntarily rolled form his tongue. I thought to myself, surely
I must get rid of a demented man, who already has in some degree
turned the tongues, if not the heads of myself and clerks. But I
thought it prudent not to break the dismission at once.
The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his
window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not
write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.
"Why, how now? what next?" exclaimed I, "do no more writing?"
"No more."
"And what is the reason?"
"Do you not see the reason for yourself," he indifferently
replied.
I looked steadfastly at him, and perceived that his eyes looked
dull and glazed. Instantly it occurred to me, that his unexampled
diligence in copying by his dim window for the first few weeks of
his stay with me might have temporarily impaired his vision.
I was touched. I said something in condolence with him. I hinted
that of course he did wisely in abstaining from writing for a
while; and urged him to embrace that opportunity of taking
wholesome exercise in the open air. This, however, he did not do.
A few days after this, my other clerks being absent, and being in
a great hurry to dispatch certain letters by the mail, I thought
that, having nothing else earthly to do, Bartleby would surely be
less inflexible than usual, and carry these letters to the
post-office. But he blankly declined. So, much to my
inconvenience, I went myself.
Still added days went by. Whether Bartleby's eyes improved or
not, I could not say. To all appearance, I thought they did. But
when I asked him if they did, he vouchsafed no answer. At all
events, he would do no copying. At last, in reply to my urgings,
he informed me that he had permanently given up copying.
"What!" exclaimed I; "suppose your eyes should get entirely
well—better than ever before—would you not copy then?"
"I have given up copying," he answered, and slid aside.
He remained as ever, a fixture in my chamber. Nay—if that were
possible—he became still more of a fixture than before. What was
to be done? He would do nothing in the office: why should he stay
there? In plain fact, he had now become a millstone to me, not
only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear. Yet I was
sorry for him. I speak less than truth when I say that, on his own
account, he occasioned me uneasiness. If he would but have named a
single relative or friend, I would instantly have written, and
urged their taking the poor fellow away to some convenient
retreat. But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A
bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic. At length, necessities connected
with my business tyrannized over all other considerations.
Decently as I could, I told Bartleby that in six days' time he
must unconditionally leave the office. I warned him to take
measures, in the interval, for procuring some other abode. I
offered to assist him in this endeavor, if he himself would but
take the first step towards a removal. "And when you finally quit
me, Bartleby," added I, "I shall see that you go not away entirely
unprovided. Six days from this hour, remember."
At the expiration of that period, I peeped behind the screen, and
lo!
Bartleby was there.
I buttoned up my coat, balanced myself; advanced slowly towards
him, touched his shoulder, and said, "The time has come; you must
quit this place; I am sorry for you; here is money; but you must
go."
"I would prefer not," he replied, with his back still towards me.
"You must."
He remained silent.
Now I had an unbounded confidence in this man's common honesty.
He had frequently restored to me sixpences and shillings
carelessly dropped upon the floor, for I am apt to be very
reckless in such shirt-button affairs. The proceeding then which
followed will not be deemed extraordinary.
"Bartleby," said I, "I owe you twelve dollars on account; here
are thirty-two; the odd twenty are yours.—Will you take it?" and I
handed the bills towards him.
But he made no motion.
"I will leave them here then," putting them under a weight on the
table. Then taking my hat and cane and going to the door I
tranquilly turned and added—"After you have removed your things
from these offices, Bartleby, you will of course lock the
door—since every one is now gone for the day but you—and if you
please, slip your key underneath the mat, so that I may have it in
the morning. I shall not see you again; so good-bye to you. If
hereafter in your new place of abode I can be of any service to
you, do not fail to advise me by letter. Good-bye, Bartleby, and
fare you well."
But he answered not a word; like the last column of some ruined
temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of
the otherwise deserted room.
As I walked home in a pensive mood, my vanity got the better of
my pity. I could not but highly plume myself on my masterly
management in getting rid of Bartleby. Masterly I call it, and
such it must appear to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty of my
procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. There was no
vulgar bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring,
and striding to and fro across the apartment, jerking out vehement
commands for Bartleby to bundle himself off with his beggarly
traps. Nothing of the kind. Without loudly bidding Bartleby
depart—as an inferior genius might have done—I assumed the
ground that depart he must; and upon that assumption built all I
had to say. The more I thought over my procedure, the more I was
charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning, upon awakening, I had
my doubts,—I had somehow slept off the fumes of vanity. One of the
coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the
morning. My procedure seemed as sagacious as ever.—but only in
theory. How it would prove in practice—there was the rub. It was
truly a beautiful thought to have assumed Bartleby's departure;
but, after all, that assumption was simply my own, and none of
Bartleby's. The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he
would quit me, but whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a
man of preferences than assumptions.
After breakfast, I walked down town, arguing the probabilities pro
and con. One moment I thought it would prove a miserable
failure, and Bartleby would be found all alive at my office as
usual; the next moment it seemed certain that I should see his
chair empty. And so I kept veering about. At the corner of
Broadway and Canal-street, I saw quite an excited group of people
standing in earnest conversation.
"I'll take odds he doesn't," said a voice as I passed.
"Doesn't go?—done!" said I, "put up your money."
I was instinctively putting my hand in my pocket to produce my
own, when I remembered that this was an election day. The words I
had overheard bore no reference to Bartleby, but to the success or
non-success of some candidate for the mayoralty. In my intent
frame of mind, I had, as it were, imagined that all Broadway
shared in my excitement, and were debating the same question with
me. I passed on, very thankful that the uproar of the street
screened my momentary absent-mindedness.
As I had intended, I was earlier than usual at my office door. I
stood listening for a moment. All was still. He must be gone. I
tried the knob. The door was locked. Yes, my procedure had worked
to a charm; he indeed must be vanished. Yet a certain melancholy
mixed with this: I was almost sorry for my brilliant success. I
was fumbling under the door mat for the key, which Bartleby was to
have left there for me, when accidentally my knee knocked against
a panel, producing a summoning sound, and in response a voice came
to me from within—"Not yet; I am occupied."
It was Bartleby.
I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who,
pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in
Virginia, by a summer lightning; at his own warm open window he
was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy
afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.
"Not gone!" I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous
ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from
which ascendancy, for all my chafing, I could not completely
escape, I slowly went down stairs and out into the street, and
while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in
this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual
thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names
would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and
yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,—this too
I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing could be
done, was there any thing further that I could assume in
the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that
Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that
departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this
assumption, I might enter my office in a great hurry, and
pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him
as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree
have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that
Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of
assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan
seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with
him again.
"Bartleby," said I, entering the office, with a quietly severe
expression, "I am seriously displeased. I am pained, Bartleby. I
had thought better of you. I had imagined you of such a
gentlemanly organization, that in any delicate dilemma a slight
hint would have suffice—in short, an assumption. But it appears I
am deceived. Why," I added, unaffectedly starting, "you have not
even touched that money yet," pointing to it, just where I had
left it the evening previous.
He answered nothing.
"Will you, or will you not, quit me?" I now demanded in a sudden
passion, advancing close to him.
"I would prefer not to quit you," he replied, gently
emphasizing the not.
"What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent?
Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?"
He answered nothing.
"Are you ready to go on and write now? Are your eyes recovered?
Could you copy a small paper for me this morning? or help examine
a few lines? or step round to the post-office? In a word, will you
do any thing at all, to give a coloring to your refusal to depart
the premises?"
He silently retired into his hermitage.
I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it
but prudent to check myself at present from further
demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the
tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate
Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt,
being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting
himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his
fatal act—an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore
more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my
ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place
in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have
terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a
solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by
humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless,
of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been,
which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the
hapless Colt.
But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me
concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why,
simply by recalling the divine injunction: "A new commandment give
I unto you, that ye love one another." Yes, this it was that saved
me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a
vastly wise and prudent principle—a great safeguard to its
possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and
anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and
spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever
committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake. Mere
self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should,
especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity
and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the occasion in question, I
strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by
benevolently construing his conduct. Poor fellow, poor fellow!
thought I, he don't mean any thing; and besides, he has seen hard
times, and ought to be indulged.
I endeavored also immediately to occupy myself, and at the same
time to comfort my despondency. I tried to fancy that in the
course of the morning, at such time as might prove agreeable to
him. Bartleby, of his own free accord, would emerge from his
hermitage, and take up some decided line of march in the direction
of the door. But no. Half-past twelve o'clock came; Turkey began
to glow in the face, overturn his inkstand, and become generally
obstreperous; Nippers abated down into quietude and courtesy;
Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and Bartleby remained standing
at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries. Will
it be credited? Ought I to acknowledge it? That afternoon I left
the office without saying one further word to him.
Some days now passed, during which, at leisure intervals I looked
a little into "Edwards on the Will," and "Priestly on Necessity."
Under the circumstances, those books induced a salutary feeling.
Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine
touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity,
and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of
an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me
to fathom. Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought
I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless
as any of these old chairs; in short, I never feel so private as
when I know you are here. At last I see it, I feel it; I penetrate
to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may
have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world,
Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as
you may see fit to remain.
I believe that this wise and blessed frame of mind would have
continued with me, had it not been for the unsolicited and
uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends
who visited the rooms. But thus it often is, that the constant
friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of
the more generous. Though to be sure, when I reflected upon it, it
was not strange that people entering my office should be struck by
the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartleby, and so be
tempted to throw out some sinister observations concerning him.
Sometimes an attorney having business with me, and calling at my
office and finding no one but the scrivener there, would undertake
to obtain some sort of precise information from him touching my
whereabouts; but without heeding his idle talk, Bartleby would
remain standing immovable in the middle of the room. So after
contemplating him in that position for a time, the attorney would
depart, no wiser than he came.
Also, when a Reference was going on, and the room full of lawyers
and witnesses and business was driving fast; some deeply occupied
legal gentleman present, seeing Bartleby wholly unemployed, would
request him to run round to his (the legal gentleman's) office and
fetch some papers for him. Thereupon, Bartleby would tranquilly
decline, and yet remain idle as before. Then the lawyer would give
a great stare, and turn to me. And what could I say? At last I was
made aware that all through the circle of my professional
acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having
reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This
worried me very much. And as the idea came upon me of his possibly
turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and
denying my authority; and perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing
my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the
premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his
savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the
end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right
of his perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations
crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded
their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great
change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties
together, and for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus.
Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this
end, I first simply suggested to Bartleby the propriety of his
permanent departure. In a calm and serious tone, I commended the
idea to his careful and mature consideration. But having taken
three days to meditate upon it, he apprised me that his original
determination remained the same in short, that he still preferred
to abide with me.
What shall I do? I now said to myself, buttoning up my coat to
the last button. What shall I do? what ought I to do? what does
conscience say I should do with this man, or rather ghost.
Rid myself of him, I must; go, he shall. But how? You will not
thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal,—you will not thrust
such a helpless creature out of your door? you will not dishonor
yourself by such cruelty? No, I will not, I cannot do that. Rather
would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains
in the wall. What then will you do? For all your coaxing, he will
not budge. Bribes he leaves under your own paperweight on your
table; in short, it is quite plain that he prefers to cling to
you.
Then something severe, something unusual must be done. What!
surely you will not have him collared by a constable, and commit
his innocent pallor to the common jail? And upon what ground could
you procure such a thing to be done?—a vagrant, is he? What! he a
vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not
be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a
vagrant. That is too absurd. No visible means of support: there I
have him. Wrong again: for indubitably he does support
himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can
show of his possessing the means so to do. No more then. Since he
will not quit me, I must quit him. I will change my offices; I
will move elsewhere; and give him fair notice, that if I find him
on my new premises I will then proceed against him as a common
trespasser.
Acting accordingly, next day I thus addressed him: "I find these
chambers too far from the City Hall; the air is unwholesome. In a
word, I propose to remove my offices next week, and shall no
longer require your services. I tell you this now, in order that
you may seek another place."
He made no reply, and nothing more was said.
On the appointed day I engaged carts and men, proceeded to my
chambers, and having but little furniture, every thing was removed
in a few hours. Throughout, the scrivener remained standing behind
the screen, which I directed to be removed the last thing. It was
withdrawn; and being folded up like a huge folio, left him the
motionless occupant of a naked room. I stood in the entry watching
him a moment, while something from within me upbraided me.
I re-entered, with my hand in my pocket—and—and my heart in my
mouth.
"Good-bye, Bartleby; I am going—good-bye, and God some way bless
you; and take that," slipping something in his hand. But it
dropped upon the floor, and then,—strange to say—I tore myself
from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.
Established in my new quarters, for a day or two I kept the door
locked, and started at every footfall in the passages. When I
returned to my rooms after any little absence, I would pause at
the threshold for an instant, and attentively listen, ere applying
my key. But these fears were needless. Bartleby never came nigh
me.
I thought all was going well, when a perturbed looking stranger
visited me, inquiring whether I was the person who had recently
occupied rooms at No.—Wall-street.
Full of forebodings, I replied that I was.
"Then sir," said the stranger, who proved a lawyer, "you are
responsible for the man you left there. He refuses to do any
copying; he refuses to do any thing; he says he prefers not to;
and he refuses to quit the premises."
"I am very sorry, sir," said I, with assumed tranquility, but an
inward tremor, "but, really, the man you allude to is nothing to
me—he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold
me responsible for him."
"In mercy's name, who is he?"
"I certainly cannot inform you. I know nothing about him.
Formerly I employed him as a copyist; but he has done nothing for
me now for some time past."
"I shall settle him then,—good morning, sir."
Several days passed, and I heard nothing more; and though I often
felt a charitable prompting to call at the place and see poor
Bartleby, yet a certain squeamishness of I know not what withheld
me.
All is over with him, by this time, thought I at last, when
through another week no further intelligence reached me. But
coming to my room the day after, I found several persons waiting
at my door in a high state of nervous excitement.
"That's the man—here he comes," cried the foremost one, whom I
recognized as the lawyer who had previously called upon me alone.
"You must take him away, sir, at once," cried a portly person
among them, advancing upon me, and whom I knew to be the landlord
of No.—Wall-street. "These gentlemen, my tenants, cannot stand it
any longer; Mr. B—" pointing to the lawyer, "has turned him out of
his room, and he now persists in haunting the building generally,
sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in
the entry by night. Every body is concerned; clients are leaving
the offices; some fears are entertained of a mob; something you
must do, and that without delay."
Aghast at this torrent, I fell back before it, and would fain
have locked myself in my new quarters. In vain I persisted that
Bartleby was nothing to me—no more than to any one else. In
vain:—I was the last person known to have any thing to do with
him, and they held me to the terrible account. Fearful then of
being exposed in the papers (as one person present obscurely
threatened) I considered the matter, and at length said, that if
the lawyer would give me a confidential interview with the
scrivener, in his (the lawyer's) own room, I would that afternoon
strive my best to rid them of the nuisance they complained of.
Going up stairs to my old haunt, there was Bartleby silently
sitting upon the banister at the landing.
"What are you doing here, Bartleby?" said I.
"Sitting upon the banister," he mildly replied.
I motioned him into the lawyer's room, who then left us.
"Bartleby," said I, "are you aware that you are the cause of
great tribulation to me, by persisting in occupying the entry
after being dismissed from the office?"
No answer.
"Now one of two things must take place. Either you must do
something, or something must be done to you. Now what sort of
business would you like to engage in? Would you like to re-engage
in copying for some one?"
"No; I would prefer not to make any change."
"Would you like a clerkship in a dry-goods store?"
"There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a
clerkship; but I am not particular."
"Too much confinement," I cried, "why you keep yourself confined
all the time!"
"I would prefer not to take a clerkship," he rejoined, as if to
settle that little item at once.
"How would a bar-tender's business suit you? There is no trying
of the eyesight in that."
"I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not
particular."
His unwonted wordiness inspirited me. I returned to the charge.
"Well then, would you like to travel through the country
collecting bills for the merchants? That would improve your
health."
"No, I would prefer to be doing something else."
"How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some
young gentleman with your conversation,—how would that suit you?"
"Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing
definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not
particular."
"Stationary you shall be then," I cried, now losing all patience,
and for the first time in all my exasperating connection with him
fairly flying into a passion. "If you do not go away from these
premises before night, I shall feel bound—indeed I am
bound—to—to—to quit the premises myself!" I rather absurdly
concluded, knowing not with what possible threat to try to
frighten his immobility into compliance. Despairing of all further
efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final thought
occurred to me—one which had not been wholly unindulged before.
"Bartleby," said I, in the kindest tone I could assume under such
exciting circumstances, "will you go home with me now—not to my
office, but my dwelling—and remain there till we can conclude upon
some convenient arrangement for you at our leisure? Come, let us
start now, right away."
"No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all."
I answered nothing; but effectually dodging every one by the
suddenness and rapidity of my flight, rushed from the building,
ran up Wall-street towards Broadway, and jumping into the first
omnibus was soon removed from pursuit. As soon as tranquility
returned I distinctly perceived that I had now done all that I
possibly could, both in respect to the demands of the landlord and
his tenants, and with regard to my own desire and sense of duty,
to benefit Bartleby, and shield him from rude persecution. I now
strove to be entirely care-free and quiescent; and my conscience
justified me in the attempt; though indeed it was not so
successful as I could have wished. So fearful was I of being again
hunted out by the incensed landlord and his exasperated tenants,
that, surrendering my business to Nippers, for a few days I drove
about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs, in my
rockaway; crossed over to Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid
fugitive visits to Manhattanville and Astoria. In fact I almost
lived in my rockaway for the time.
When again I entered my office, lo, a note from the landlord lay
upon the desk. I opened it with trembling hands. It informed me
that the writer had sent to the police, and had Bartleby removed
to the Tombs as a vagrant. Moreover, since I knew more about him
than any one else, he wished me to appear at that place, and make
a suitable statement of the facts. These tidings had a conflicting
effect upon me. At first I was indignant; but at last almost
approved. The landlord's energetic, summary disposition had led
him to adopt a procedure which I do not think I would have decided
upon myself; and yet as a last resort, under such peculiar
circumstances, it seemed the only plan.
As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he
must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest
obstacle, but in his pale unmoving way, silently acquiesced.
Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the
party; and headed by one of the constables arm in arm with
Bartleby, the silent procession filed its way through all the
noise, and heat, and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon.
The same day I received the note I went to the Tombs, or to speak
more properly, the Halls of Justice. Seeking the right officer, I
stated the purpose of my call, and was informed that the
individual I described was indeed within. I then assured the
functionary that Bartleby was a perfectly honest man, and greatly
to be compassionated, however unaccountably eccentric. I narrated
all I knew, and closed by suggesting the idea of letting him
remain in as indulgent confinement as possible till something less
harsh might be done—though indeed I hardly knew what. At all
events, if nothing else could be decided upon, the alms-house must
receive him. I then begged to have an interview.
Being under no disgraceful charge, and quite serene and harmless
in all his ways, they had permitted him freely to wander about the
prison, and especially in the inclosed grass-platted yard thereof.
And so I found him there, standing all alone in the quietest of
the yards, his face towards a high wall, while all around, from
the narrow slits of the jail windows, I thought I saw peering out
upon him the eyes of murderers and thieves.
"Bartleby!"
"I know you," he said, without looking round,—"and I want nothing
to say to you."
"It was not I that brought you here, Bartleby," said I, keenly
pained at his implied suspicion. "And to you, this should not be
so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being
here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look,
there is the sky, and here is the grass."
"I know where I am," he replied, but would say nothing more, and
so I left him.
As I entered the corridor again, a broad meat-like man, in an
apron, accosted me, and jerking his thumb over his shoulder
said—"Is that your friend?"
"Yes."
"Does he want to starve? If he does, let him live on the prison
fare, that's all."
"Who are you?" asked I, not knowing what to make of such an
unofficially speaking person in such a place.
"I am the grub-man. Such gentlemen as have friends here, hire me
to provide them with something good to eat."
"Is this so?" said I, turning to the turnkey.
He said it was.
"Well then," said I, slipping some silver into the grub-man's
hands (for so they called him). "I want you to give particular
attention to my friend there; let him have the best dinner you can
get. And you must be as polite to him as possible."
"Introduce me, will you?" said the grub-man, looking at me with
an expression which seem to say he was all impatience for an
opportunity to give a specimen of his breeding.
Thinking it would prove of benefit to the scrivener, I
acquiesced; and asking the grub-man his name, went up with him to
Bartleby.
"Bartleby, this is Mr. Cutlets; you will find him very useful to
you."
"Your sarvant, sir, your sarvant," said the grub-man, making a
low salutation behind his apron. "Hope you find it pleasant here,
sir;—spacious grounds—cool apartments, sir—hope you'll stay with
us some time—try to make it agreeable. May Mrs. Cutlets and I have
the pleasure of your company to dinner, sir, in Mrs. Cutlets'
private room?"
"I prefer not to dine to-day," said Bartleby, turning away. "It
would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners." So saying he
slowly moved to the other side of the inclosure, and took up a
position fronting the dead-wall.
"How's this?" said the grub-man, addressing me with a stare of
astonishment. "He's odd, aint he?"
"I think he is a little deranged," said I, sadly.
"Deranged? deranged is it? Well now, upon my word, I thought that
friend of yourn was a gentleman forger; they are always pale and
genteel-like, them forgers. I can't pity'em—can't help it, sir.
Did you know Monroe Edwards?" he added touchingly, and paused.
Then, laying his hand pityingly on my shoulder, sighed, "he died
of consumption at Sing-Sing. So you weren't acquainted with
Monroe?"
"No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers. But I
cannot stop longer. Look to my friend yonder. You will not lose by
it. I will see you again."
Some few days after this, I again obtained admission to the
Tombs, and went through the corridors in quest of Bartleby; but
without finding him.
"I saw him coming from his cell not long ago," said a turnkey,
"may be he's gone to loiter in the yards."
So I went in that direction.
"Are you looking for the silent man?" said another turnkey
passing me. "Yonder he lies—sleeping in the yard there. 'Tis not
twenty minutes since I saw him lie down."
The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common
prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off
all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry
weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew
under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein,
by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by
birds, had sprung.
Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up,
and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw
the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went
close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were
open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping. Something prompted
me to touch him. I felt his hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my
arm and down my spine to my feet.
The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. "His dinner is
ready. Won't he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without
dining?"
"Lives without dining," said I, and closed his eyes.
"Eh!—He's asleep, aint he?"
"With kings and counselors," murmured I.
* * * * * * * *
There would seem little need for proceeding further in this
history. Imagination will readily supply the meager recital of
poor Bartleby's interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me
say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested
him, to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner
of life he led prior to the present narrator's making his
acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such curiosity I fully
share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know
whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to
my ear a few months after the scrivener's decease. Upon what basis
it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I
cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been
without certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it
may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention
it. The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate
clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had
been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I
think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions
which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?
Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid
hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it
than that of continually handling these dead letters, and
assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are
annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale
clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders
in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it
would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who
died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings
for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of
life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
DALA: Digital American Literature Anthology
Edited by Dr. Michael O'Conner, Millikin University
Unit 9: Herman Melville
digitalamlit.com
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