_ 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 earthy
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
eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look
deep down and do believe."
And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, 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!" _