CHAPTER 112

  The Blacksmith

  Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned

in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active

pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old

blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again,

after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still

retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being

now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and

bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new

shaping their various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be

surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding

boat-spades, pikeheads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching

his every sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man's

was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no

impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and

solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he

toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his

hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.- Most miserable!

  A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful

appearing yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage

excited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their

persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass

that every one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.

  Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the

road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly

felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a

leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the

extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at

last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and

as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life's drama.

  He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had

postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin.

He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do;

owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving

wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a

cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under

cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning

disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed

them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself

did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was

the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew

the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise,

and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the basement of his

dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the

young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness,

but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed

old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through

the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery;

and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were

rocked to slumber.

  Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?

Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came

upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her

orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after

years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked

down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely

hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse

than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should

make him easier to harvest.

  Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day

grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter

than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless

eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children;

the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was

sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her

children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old

man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his

grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!

  Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it

is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense

Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the

death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some

interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and

all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of

unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures;

and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing

to them- "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without

the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural,

without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which,

to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more

oblivious than death. dome hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within

the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!"

  Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and

by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so

Perth went a-whaling.