Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So,
wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle
of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards
the north with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom
you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to
inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The
Crossed Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further
on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came
such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and
ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost
lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,—rather weary for
me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because
from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most
miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing
one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds
of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last;
don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are
stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets
that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not
the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,
and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.
At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter
of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky
light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood
invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for
the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to
stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying
particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city,
Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then,
must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and
hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior
door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of
Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping
and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing
out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of “The Trap!”
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the
docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw
a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words
underneath—“The Spouter-Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought
I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this
Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated
little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here
from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied
as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,
where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than
ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless,
is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the
hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind
called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the
only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the
outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window,
where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is
the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred
to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes
are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they
didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a
little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements
now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips
were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering
his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his
tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and
put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the
tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken
wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty
night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their
oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the
privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the
line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in
order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a
Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there
is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted
feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
CHAPTER III.
THE SPOUTER-INN.
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of
the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out
what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas,
deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight
gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a
blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of
the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to
that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. _That_ once found
out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint
resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner
in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with
its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale,
purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of
impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots
of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed
mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal
and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking,
horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances
and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With
this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan
Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that
harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run
away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco.
The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle
sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last
was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
fire-places all round—you enter the public room. A still duskier place
is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s
cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like
table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the
further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude
attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the
vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost
drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old
decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction,
like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him),
bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells
the sailors deliriums and death.
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though
true cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to
_this_ mark, and your charge is but a penny; to _this_ a penny more;
and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp
down for a shilling.
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about
a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of _skrimshander_.
I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated
with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed
unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no
objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are
goin’ a whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”