.. < chapter cxxxii 26  THE SYMPHONY >

     It was a clear steel-blue day.  The
firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure;
only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look,
and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,
as Samson's chest in his sleep.
.. 

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to
and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.  But though thus contrasting within,

     the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one;
it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.  Aloft, like a royal
czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling
sea; even as bride to groom.  And at the girdling line of the horizon, a
soft and tremulous motion --most seen here at the equator --denoted the fond,
throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom
away.  Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his
splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.  Oh,
immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!  Invisible winged creatures
that frolic all round us!  Sweet childhood of air and sky!  how oblivious were
ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and
Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;
sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that
burnt-out crater of his brain.  Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle,
Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and
sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the
profundity.  But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to
dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad, happy air,
that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
so long cruel -- forbidding --now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her
.. 

heart to save and to bless.  From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear
into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop.  Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the
side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.  Careful not to touch
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.  Ahab
turned.  Starbuck!  Sir.  Oh, Starbuck!  it is a mild, mild wind, and a
mild looking sky.  On such a day --very much such a sweetness as this --I
struck my first whale --a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!  Forty-- forty--forty years
ago! --ago!  Forty years of continual whaling!  forty years of privation, and
peril, and storm-time!  forty years on the pitiless sea!  for forty years has
Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep!  Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent

     three ashore.  When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness,
which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without
--oh, weariness!  heaviness!  Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! --when
I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before
--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare -- fit emblem of the
dry nourishment of my soul --when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to
his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts --away,

     whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
pillow --wife?  wife? --rather a widow with her husband alive!  Aye, I widowed
that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the
frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey --more a demon
than a man! --aye, aye!  what a forty years' fool --fool --old fool, has old
Ahab been!  Why this strife of the chase?  why weary,
.. 

and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?  how the richer or
better is Ahab now?  Behold.  Oh, Starbuck!  is it not hard, that with this
weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?
Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.  Locks
so grey did never grow but from out some ashes!  But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck?  I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though
I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.  God!
God!  God! --crack my heart!-- stave my brain! --mockery!  mockery!  bitter,
biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem
and feel thus intolerably old?  Close!  stand close to me, Starbuck; let me
look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better
than to gaze upon God.  By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone!  this
is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.  No, no;
stay on board, on board! --lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase

     to Moby Dick.  That hazard shall not be thine.  No, no!  not with the far
away home I see in that eye!  Oh, my Captain!  my Captain!  noble soul!
grand old heart, after all!  why should any one give chase to that hated fish!

     Away with me!  let us fly these deadly waters!  let us home!  Wife and child,
too, are Starbuck's --wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing,
paternal old age!  Away!  let us away! --this instant let me alter the course!
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to
see old Nantucket again!  I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
even as this, in nantucket.  they have, they have.  I have seen them --some
summer days in the morning.  About this time --yes, it is his noon nap now --
the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me,
of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
dance him again.  Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!  She promised that my boy,
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
his father's sail!  Yes, yes!  no more!  it is done!  we head for Nantucket!
Come, my Captain, study out the course,
.. 

and let us away!  See, see!  the boy's face from the window!  the boy's hand
on the hill!  But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he
shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.  What is it, what
nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and
master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on
all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural
heart, I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who,
that lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an
errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible

     power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this
world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.  And all the time,
lo!  that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!  Look!  see yon Albicore!  who
put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish?  Where do murderers go,
man!  Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?  But it is
a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it
blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the
slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the
new-mown hay.  Sleeping?  Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the
field.  Sleep?  Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung
down, and left in the half-cut swaths --Starbuck!  But blanched to a
corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.  Ahab crossed the deck
to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in
the water there.  Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.
..