Moby-Dick — Chapter 122: The Gilder
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Then, nor before, the hardy Lycians fled, And left their monarch with the common dead: Around, in heaps on heaps, a dreadful wall Of carnage rises, as the heroes fall. (So Jove decreed!) At length the Greeks obtain The prize contested, and despoil the slain. The radiant arms are by Patroclus borne; Patroclus’ ships the glorious spoils adorn.
“That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do), and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now walking, through the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here you see me!”
“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”
At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!
Jove view’d the combat with a stern survey, And eyes that flash’d intolerable day. Fix’d on the field his sight, his breast debates The vengeance due, and meditates the fates: Whether to urge their prompt effect, and call The force of Hector to Patroclus’ fall, This instant see his short-lived trophies won, And stretch him breathless on his slaughter’d son; Or yet, with many a soul’s untimely flight, Augment the fame and horror of the fight. To crown Achilles’ valiant friend with praise At length he dooms; and, that his last of days Shall set in glory, bids him drive the foe; Nor unattended see the shades below. Then Hector’s mind he fills with dire dismay; He mounts his car, and calls his hosts away; Sunk with Troy’s heavy fates, he sees decline The scales of Jove, and pants with awe divine.
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.
Their hearts sank as they heard him, but Eurymachus again spoke saying:
LAERTES. I pray you, give me leave.
Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a scrap of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step of one who remembered the way well, several dark and dirty streets--much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of terror--he stopped at a chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to ——”
“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the prison--seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!”
“Alan! This is kind of you. I thank you for coming.”
Danes. No, let’s come in.
“I am not one-and-twenty.”
Ulysses again glared at him and said, “Though you should give me all that you have in the world both now and all that you ever shall have, I will not stay my hand till I have paid all of you in full. You must fight, or fly for your lives; and fly, not a man of you shall.”
“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling after him. “And take a pipe with you!”
“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and now for the seizings.”