Chapter 114: The Gilder
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or
paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes
calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their
pains.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably
mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they
purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when
beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one
forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly
remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards
it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops
of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves,
but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western
emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies
widely wade through the amazing verdure.
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of
the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood;
so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one
seamless whole.
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to
open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon
them prove but tarnishing.
Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,-
though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,- in ye, men
yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few
fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would
to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling
threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life;
we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:-
through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith,
adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief,
resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone
through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and
Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?
In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never
weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those
orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our
paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. And that same
day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:-“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eyes!-
Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways.
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Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do
believe.” And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scale, leaped up in that same golden
light:- “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
he has always been jolly!”
Zagonostra 