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. 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!"