Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.

When Captain Ahab had hurled himself from the deck of the London whaler Samuel Enderby months prior, he’d landed with such violent force on a boat thwart that his ivory leg had taken a half-splintering shock. When he’d spun back to his own ship’s pivot-hole with a furious command to the steersman, that already damaged limb had twisted and wrenched so hard that, though it remained whole to casual eyes, Ahab no longer trusted it to hold his weight. It was small wonder he fretted over the dead bone that propped half his body: not long before the Pequod set sail from Nantucket, he’d been found insensible on the ground one night, his ivory leg displaced so violently it had stake-wise pierced his groin; only extreme effort had saved him from that agony. In his monomaniacal mind, that suffering was no accident—it was the direct offspring of the woe Moby Dick had wrought on him. Grief, he had reasoned, bred grief far more reliably than joy bred joy; the lineage of sorrow stretched back to the sourceless primogenitures of the gods themselves, marked on every human brow like a birthmark of the divine. That near-fatal accident had been the reason for his months of Grand-Lama-like reclusiveness before the Pequod sailed, a secrecy his first mate Peleg could never adequately explain, and which had wrapped the incident in whispers of spirit-wraiths and unspoken terror among the few Nantucket folk granted access to him. But Ahab had no time for morbid rumination now, not when his leg was at risk. He called the ship’s carpenter at once, ordered the crew to hand over every scrap of stout, clear-grained sperm whale jaw-ivory they’d collected on the voyage, and commanded the blacksmith to haul the ship’s forge up from the hold to begin work on whatever iron fittings the new limb would need. He wanted the leg finished before night fell, no delays, no excuses.

CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.

The Pequod’s carpenter was no ordinary workman, no unthinking duplicate of the common sailor. A jack of all shipboard trades, he could repair a stove boat, reshape a clumsy oar, drive new tree-nails into the hull, or build a pagoda-like cage for a lost tropical bird out of whale bone. He could mix a soothing lotion for a sprained wrist, drill a sailor’s ear for shark-bone earrings, or yank a rotten tooth with his wooden vice, heedless of the patient’s winces. His workbench, a long iron-and-wood vice table lashed to the rear of the try-works when whales weren’t alongside, was the stage for a thousand tiny, unplanned emergencies: a too-large belaying pin filed down, a set of oars painted with vermillion stars for Stubb, a tooth pulled with a grin and a quip. He was a strange, stolid creature, as impersonal and immovable as the quiet, pauseless world itself: he worked not by reason or instinct, but by a spontaneous, dumb process, like a Sheffield multum-in-parvo pocket knife that opens to a screwdriver or tweezers at a touch. He treated men as capstans, heads as top-blocks, teeth as bits of ivory, his brain long since oozed into the muscles of his fingers. Yet he was no automaton: a small, unaccountable life-principle kept him soliloquizing to himself all day, like a humming wheel, or a sentry talking to stay awake on guard. He had a crutch-like, antediluvian wit, dry and wheezy, the kind that might have passed the midnight watch on Noah’s ark, and a strange, stripped-bare indifference to the world, as if years of rolling from port to port had rubbed off every last clinging shred of attachment or pretense. He was sixty years old, a pure manipulator, and he would build Ahab’s new leg with the same quiet, unthinking efficiency he used to fix a oar or pull a tooth.

CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.

The first night watch found the carpenter hunched over his vice-bench by the light of two lanterns, filing ivory joists for the new leg, sneezing constantly at the fine bone dust that clogged his throat. “Drat the file, and drat the bone!” he muttered to himself. “That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft which should be hard. Saw a live tree, you don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, you don’t get it. Come, Smut, bear a hand with that ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently. Lucky there’s no knee-joint to make—this is easy as making hop-poles, only I’d like to put a good finish on it. Time, time—if I had the time, I could turn him out as neat a leg as ever was scraped for a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs in shop windows wouldn’t compare; they soak water, get rheumatic, need washes and lotions just like live legs. There, I’d better call the old Mogul to check the length before I saw it off. Ha! That’s the heel—here he comes now, or it’s somebody else, that’s certain.” Ahab advanced across the deck, the red glow of the forge flickering behind him. “Well, manmaker!” he called. The carpenter started, then rushed to mark the length of the leg against Ahab’s stump. “Measured for a leg! Good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it! That’s a cogent vice thou hast there—let me feel its grip. So, so; it does pinch some.” “Oh sir, it will break bones—beware!” the carpenter cried. “No fear,” Ahab grunted. “I like a good grip. I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there? The blacksmith, I mean—what’s he forging?” “The buckle-screw, sir. He needs white heat for this fine work.” “Um-m. So he must. I do deem it a most meaning thing that old Greek Prometheus, who made men, was a blacksmith, and animated them with fire. For what’s made in fire must properly belong to fire—and so hell’s probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he’s done with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.” The carpenter stared, bewildered. “Sir? Hold—while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then legs with roots to stay in one place; arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, a quarter acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.” “Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to?” the carpenter muttered aside. “’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No, no—I must have a lantern.” “Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.” “What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.” “I thought, sir, you spoke to the carpenter.” “Carpenter? Why that’s—but no; a very tidy, gentlemanlike business thou art in here, carpenter; or wouldst thou rather work in clay?” “Clay? That’s mud, sir; we leave clay to ditchers.” “The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?” “Bone is rather dusty, sir.” “Take the hint, then; when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people’s noses.” “Sir? Oh! ah!—I guess so; yes—oh dear!” Ahab leaned in, his voice sharp. “Look ye, carpenter—dost thou call thyself a right good workman? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if when I mount this leg thou makest, I still feel another leg in the same place? My old lost leg, the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?” The carpenter’s eyes widened. “Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score: how a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it pricks him at times. May I humbly ask if that be really so, sir?” “It is, man. Look—put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was. So, now: to the eye, there is only one distinct leg, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?” “I should humbly call it a poser, sir.” “Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest, in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be long dissolved, then why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!” “Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.” “Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises. How long before the leg is done?” “Perhaps an hour, sir.” “Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me.” He turned to go, then paused, muttering so low only he could hear: “Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich, I could have bid with the wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of the Roman Empire—and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra.” The carpenter, left alone, went back to his filing, muttering to himself: “Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer. He’s queer, says Stubb; queer, queer, and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! Has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like. Then a short, little old body like me should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for life-boats. And here’s the heron’s leg! Long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, like a tender-hearted old lady uses her coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! Bear a hand with those screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels to fill ’em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this to-morrow; he’ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!”