Work Text:
The last light was fading to purple dimness along the western horizon when Starbuck came to Ahab where he stood by the bulwarks, a hand clenched tightly on the aftermost of the mizzen shrouds to keep him upright on his solitary leg.
“Wilt thou not shift thy clothes, sir, and wash?” he asked gently.
He’d known it was futile to inquire while the sun was still in the sky and Moby Dick’s spoutings yet visible to leeward. But now the sails were set for the night and nothing remained for the captain to do on deck. It had been a week and more since Ahab had changed his linen, for he had not gone below since they spoke the Rachel, and the old man guarded his secrets too jealously to bare himself before the eyes of the crew.
Until now Starbuck had been content to let him go his own way, for he could see no great harm in it. After almost a year at sea they were none of them too cleanly, and if he were to press Ahab on anything, it would be to lie down and take some proper rest rather than leaning himself up against the side of the cabin-scuttle like a forgotten harpoon. He had not suggested that either. Captain Ahab did not welcome interference in his affairs.
But after two days’ immersion in the sea and two days’ drying in the sun, Starbuck could see that the salt-stiffened fabric was beginning to gall him. More, he needed to get his captain alone. He knew Ahab would not permit the doubt that had surfaced so briefly on deck today to erupt again before the crew, but if he could speak to him in the solitude of the cabin, then perhaps there was a chance.
It was a very long dart, as they said in the fishery, but Starbuck feared it was the only chance they had.
Ahab turned to him slowly. There was a sort of dazed confusion in his gaze, as if he had forgotten the existence of such things as washbasins and clean shirts.
“The salt, sir,” Starbuck said, with a gesture that was half lost in the dusk, motioning toward his sea-stiffened clothes, the white rime crusted on his hair and beard.
Comprehension sharpened in Ahab’s eyes. “Washing me down for my winding-sheet, Starbuck?”
Trying to keep thee from it, Starbuck thought, but he had not come to quarrel. And indeed it took no great effort of will to restrain himself, for he could muster no more than mild irritation at an accusation even Ahab must know was patently absurd. That shrewd mind was too caught up in the White Whale, Starbuck judged, to have much thought to spare for provoking his officers.
“Thou’lt be more comfortable, sir,” he said.
Ahab barked a mirthless laugh. “Comfortable!”
“Thy arm will have more play in the boat tomorrow,” Starbuck said, falling back on an argument more likely to move him.
Ahab scowled at him, but essayed a little experimental rotation of his free arm, frowning as the fabric resisted him.
“Aye. Aye, it may be so,” he conceded. “Very well. Tell that useless steward to ready a basin for me.”
Starbuck offered his arm to help him to the cabin-scuttle, but Ahab waved him away in disgust, tearing his makeshift cane free of the coil of rope on the pin-rail where he had thrust it for safekeeping and grimly propelling himself across the deck on his single foot. Leaning, it seemed, was to be a carefully rationed luxury, or else Starbuck was still in disgrace for his outburst that morning.
Starbuck went ahead of him and lifted a pane of the skylight to call down to Dough-Boy, who was laying the captain’s table for a late supper that the captain would not touch.
“Steward! Fetch a pitcher of fresh water and lay out a change of clothes – the old man is coming down.”
Dough-Boy looked up, startled, his face a pale glow in the light of the cabin lamp. Since Ahab had begun his ceaseless watch on deck the steward had been run ragged dashing up and down the gangway to bring up everything from lobscouse to logbooks, but in the cabin, at least, he was spared the terror of the old man’s presence. Starbuck suspected he was enjoying the liberty. They all were. Many times since they entered the Pacific, as he watched his captain grow ever wilder and more gaunt, his eyes ever brighter and more piercing in the hollowing sockets as though some inner fire consumed him from within, Starbuck had thought of begging him to take up once more his sworn-off suppers. But always he bit his tongue, and for once it was not the near certainty of a rebuff that kept him silent, but the slight possibility of success. He could not bear the thought of the betrayal he knew he would see in the eyes of his fellow mates, when they learned how he had robbed them of their one congenial meal.
As Dough-Boy scrambled to obey his orders, old Ahab gained at last the iron banister of the cabin-scuttle – grim struggle to traverse those scant few planks! With but his singular foot and a shivered lance to balance him, he was constrained to move in a peculiar sort of shuffling hop, lest a slip send him tumbling head over heels and make a clown of him before his crew. He shot Starbuck a sour look as he came abreast, though whether it was the rejection of the offer of assistance or the concession to go below at all that he now regretted, Starbuck could not say.
Ahab himself gave no sign of his thoughts, merely said, “The deck is thine, Mr. Starbuck,” and taking a firm grip of the banister, adroitly descended the scuttle, for he had still a sailor’s strength in his sinewed arms, and given a good handhold he was as agile on one leg as most men were on two.
With one half of his purpose accomplished, Starbuck set out to achieve the other. If he was to follow Ahab down to the cabin, he needed another officer to relieve him on the quarterdeck. He went forward to the brightness of the lantern-lit waist and the little clusters of activity around the boats.
Flask’s new boat was all but fitted out by now, but Stubb was still fussing over his. For a man so easy-going in other things, he had always been very particular about the outfitting of his whale-boat. Starbuck could not see what hope lay in such refinements against a foe so swift to smash a boat to splinters or crush it in his jaws, but if there was any good to be found in them, Stubb would need it on the morrow. Starbuck was loath to disturb his preparations.
Then, too, Ahab had been on to something when he likened them to the two poles of a magnet, though perhaps Ahab was himself the one pole and they were each the other, for since the night of the typhoon Starbuck had felt a curious repulsion towards the second mate. He was sorry for it, for Stubb had done nothing to occasion his antipathy but preserve his unassailable good humor in the face of their mounting peril, and even that had faded as they drew near the object of their quest. Nevertheless, the feeling remained, and it made him reluctant to approach Stubb now. Starbuck passed him by and went to Flask.
“Take the deck, Mr. Flask.”
Flask glanced aft at the empty quarterdeck, then at Stubb, whose right it was to assume command in Starbuck’s absence. When he looked back at Starbuck there was a question in his round face, but he chose not to ask it, merely offered a cordial “Aye, aye, sir,” set down the thole-pin he’d been carving, and rose to follow him aft.
Starbuck said nothing more, for there was no need for further orders; the helmsman had the course, and everyone on the ship knew the work that must be completed by daybreak. But as they were passing the mainmast Flask glanced up at him and gave him a faint smile. It was but a pale ghost of his former gaiety, but it was still the most warm-hearted thing Starbuck had seen in all that long day of fiendish exultation and terror.
“Cheer up, Mr. Starbuck. These are our last three boats. If Moby Dick chips them all like he did today, that’ll be the end of it. There’s no more to be had in this part of the world nearer than Hobart Town. And no one’s been killed yet, or even much hurt… excepting that Fedallah, and I don’t suppose anyone will miss him.”
“Thou shouldst not speak so of the dead.”
“You called him an evil shadow this forenoon, sir, and he was sooner dead then.”
This, from Flask, was such a staggeringly pert answer that it stopped Starbuck in his tracks. The third mate had always been a little shy of him; Starbuck had anticipated a shamefaced apology, not a charge of hypocrisy. But Flask met his gaze squarely, without the flinch or ducking away that had marked every previous occasion when his tongue had slipped his guard. The tension of this long chase was forging them all into something new and strange.
“It was ill said. We follow an evil course, but ’twas not the Parsee set it. I know that well enough.”
“Didn’t exactly keep us clear of it, though, did he? For all his charms and portents. Still, I suppose the old man ought to say a few words over him once all this is over.” Flask cocked his head thoughtfully. “I dunno what you do say, for a Parsee.”
“Captain Ahab will know,” Starbuck said, a little gloomily, and took himself below. He could not help feeling that too close a study of foreign religions had led his captain down a wrong path somewhere, although in truth Ahab had lost his own before he ever left Nantucket, and that through too close a study of the Nantucket Monthly Meeting, not of the works of Zoroaster.
Still, though Starbuck placed little hope in Flask’s chipped boats – with no other means of pursuit at his disposal, Ahab seemed more likely to try to harpoon Moby Dick from the bowsprit like a porpoise than to admit to the fatal futility of his crusade and give the cursed fish up – the day’s events had opened up a chink of light in the dark clouds that shadowed his spirit. For a moment, he had glimpsed a like crack in the old man’s resolve. The shattered wreck and the shrouded corpse aboard the Delight had not fazed Ahab, nor his own twice-cleaved boats, but something in Fedallah’s death had shaken his surety.
Starbuck’s task now was to find some way to pry that crack open, and therein lay his difficulty, for he knew that at the slightest pressure Ahab’s mind would spring shut like a bear trap. No captain cared to be challenged on his quarterdeck, and this one least of all. Oppose him, and he was obdurate – and it was not only Starbuck who found him so, but weather and whales. He should have known the shoals for which the Pequod was headed the first time the old man told him of his peculiar strategy for navigating squalls. Raise any obstacle before him, and Ahab immediately determined to bore straight through it.
It was not lost on Starbuck that it was only by yielding that he had finally persuaded his captain to save the leaking oil. Partly for this reason, he had obeyed without protest when Ahab ordered him to hoist him to the masthead. There were other considerations: for one, he knew that Ahab would have his will in any case, and better that Starbuck should guard the fateful rope than leave his captain’s safety in the hands of one whose care he trusted less.
Besides, he did not feel that he could rightly object, when he could not say with any confidence that Ahab was wrong to take the precaution. Standing his own mastheads, he had wondered what he would do if he should spy that signal spout – sing out and seal the doom of his captain and his crew, or remain silent and betray his charge? In all his past life, Starbuck had navigated with the easy certainty of an upright man, his conscience an unerring needle. He did not know how to live at this strange pole to which Ahab had steered them, where it spun in useless circles and all courses promised ill.
One day in his relentless pacing of the quarterdeck Ahab had reached the mainmast just as Starbuck was coming down, and Starbuck fancied his captain read some of the agony of indecision in his eyes. The next morning, Ahab had woven his basket of bowlines and bade Starbuck hoist him to the masthead in his place. Whether he meant to spare Starbuck some torment or his concern was only to secure his vengeance, Starbuck did not know, but it seemed churlish to refuse to mind the rope when there was a chance that Ahab was risking himself aloft for his sake.
But more than any of this, in his inmost heart he hoped that by offering no resistance to this, the lesser of Ahab’s mad schemes, he might by some sympathetic magic soften the iron will that bound him to the greater. It had seemed almost to work, in that mild noontime two days ago, until Ahab abruptly downed helm and set them back on their bitter course. Then they had raised Moby Dick, and even through that first lowering Starbuck had held to his mute obedience, praying that in that silence Ahab might somehow hear the small still voice of reason, and even at this late hour abandon his blasphemous folly.
It was only today, in the wake of the unmitigated disaster of their second lowering – a man lost, Ahab’s very leg once more snatched out from under him, three boats stove to splinters but none close enough to put a lance in that abominable whale – that Starbuck’s resolve had shattered. Bad enough to stand helpless on the quarterdeck and watch his shipmates once again plunge themselves into deadly peril, to see Ahab’s boat again broken in two and his captain pitched into the frothing maelstrom of the White Whale’s fury. Even then – even then! – he had offered not a word of criticism or complaint, merely helped Ahab aboard and offered him his shoulder to lean upon.
But to see Ahab waver at the discovery of the Parsee’s death, to see him stood there upon his solitary leg with great shudders wracking his body, and then to see him rally and wrench his will back to his unholy cause – that had been more than Starbuck could bear. All the fear and frustration of his long silence came bursting out of him like the black blood from a life-struck whale, and so in the space of a moment undid the careful work of weeks.
But not wholly undone. For there was yet something he could sacrifice on the altar of Ahab’s revenge, something that might propitiate that demoniac spirit of defiance within him long enough for his better instincts to prevail. Ahab had given it to Starbuck himself, that blue and balmy noon on the day before they raised Moby Dick. And now, if his captain would but hear him, Starbuck meant to give it back.
When he came into the cabin he found it empty of Ahab, and for a moment he thought it empty altogether, for Dough-Boy had finished his work and scurried off again to hide in the panty or the after hold. But then he spied with a start the tatterdemalion figure at the head of the table. In Ahab’s screwed-down chair sat Pip, perched butterfly-style with his knees akimbo and the soles of his feet pressed together. In his coat of ragged black, his hair growing out in corkscrews, the boy presented a strange mirror to his captain: a wilderness of youth to match the wilderness of age, one mind grooved to a deep channel by the inexorable erosion of its monomaniac purpose, the other a wide shallows throwing off random flashes of sunlight from its glittering waves.
Starbuck had half forgotten about Pip, who haunted the cabin at odd hours but tended to slip away into steerage or the steward’s pantry at mealtimes or the changing of the watch. Bolder with captain and crew than he had ever been before he was lost, his wandering wits had somehow fixed upon a fear of Stubb, and the boy made himself scarce at times when the second mate was likely to appear.
“Where’s thy captain, lad?” Starbuck asked him gently.
Pip jerked his head towards the door of Ahab’s stateroom, and then addressed his toes in mournful tones.
“He won’t stay with me. Might have stayed with Pip, before Pip jumped from a whale-boat, but who’ll keep company with cowards? No, we’ll have no cowards here! Not at our bone table eating off our bone plates, where only corpses come to dine!”
At this he looked up and surveyed the ivory-inlaid cabin table and the captain’s china dinner-service with evident satisfaction.
Starbuck’s heart turned over with pity and with horror. He knew these were only the morbid fascinations that had occupied the young castaway’s thoughts ever since they pulled him from the sea, and yet to hear such talk on this of all days filled him with foreboding. Poor twice-abandoned child! The boy seemed destined to be set adrift, for he had been deserted by his captain even as he had by his boatheader. Starbuck’s own thoughts had been too consumed with affairs on deck to spare any concern for what was happening here below, but Pip must have spent this past week dreadfully lonely, with only the harried Dough-Boy for companionship.
“Small wonder thy mind settles on such morbid themes, cooped up in this close cabin! Take a turn on deck, Pip, and stand a while beneath the open sky,” said Starbuck.
“Captain said to stay below,” said Pip, again addressing his toes.
As much as it went against his lifelong training to tell any crewman to disobey an order from their captain, Starbuck suspected Ahab would be more forthcoming without an audience, even one so harmless and half-comprehending as this. Besides, he thought he understood the intent behind that order better than Pip had.
“Aye, so he did, but that was when he was keeping his watch on deck, thou see’st? Now that he’s down here, thou must take his place on the quarterdeck.”
Pip cocked his head, considering whether the logic of this was mad enough to satisfy him. At length he nodded decisively.
“Aye, Mr. Starbuck, I would like to see a star again – those same stars that shine on old Tolland County, and maybe on poor Pip too, on whatever far-off shore his white bones lie. Aye, I’ll go, sir, and tell ‘em that tomorrow night they’ll sup on oysters. They’ll be glad of that, for salt fare does grow wearisome, though we dine on finest mahogany.”
He hopped up from his chair, as quick and lively as he’d ever been before his sojourn in the sea, and darted away up the gangway. Starbuck breathed an inward sigh of relief. He felt for the lad, and truly he thought it would do Pip good to get out into the open air and mingle with the crew. But also he was not sure how much more talk of bones and corpses he could take.
He sat down at the table to await his captain. Ahab did not keep him long, for the old man had no wish to linger over his ablutions. A dunk of his head and a quick scrub with a towel to cleanse the worst of the salt from his hair and beard, a swipe of the damp cloth over his body, and he was pulling on his clothes again, impatient to be on deck and take up once more his ceaseless vigil.
He opened the door to his stateroom and halted in surprise as Starbuck rose to greet him, for he had been too caught up in his own tempestuous thoughts to mark the exchange with Pip.
Displeasure furrowed the creased brow.
“Did I not leave thee on watch?”
“Mr. Flask has the deck, sir. Captain Ahab, I would speak with thee.” From the sharpness in his commander’s voice, Starbuck judged the audience would be a brief one, and decided he had best come out with it at once. “Wouldst thou have me lower with thee tomorrow, sir?”
Despite Starbuck’s secret hope that his submission might soothe Ahab’s rageful spirit enough to win sanity some sea-room, so that none of them need lower tomorrow, he made the offer in all sincerity.
Yesterday he had watched with his heart in his throat as Ahab wrestled with that terrible scrolled jaw, grappling with a doubled line of teeth twice his own height before giving way at last as it sheared through the gunwale mere inches from his hand. Today, watching Moby Dick dash all the boats to pieces and labor to drown their oarsmen in the churning foam, Starbuck had been submerged beneath still greater floods of terror. He wanted to live, to see his home and embrace his wife and child again, with a fervency so intense it ate away at him like an ulcer. But the anguish of bearing witness as Ahab willfully courted destruction was still more acute. He might find it less painful to join his captain in his whale-boat and perish alongside him than to stand on the quarterdeck and watch helplessly as he died.
Starbuck did not know himself whether he wished Ahab to take him up on his proposal. Torn between two loyalties, to his family on the far side of the world and the captain whose grand, tormented soul he had come over the course of this cursed voyage to respect and even reluctantly to love, he could not make out where the right path lay. Perhaps, as with the masthead, what he truly wanted was for Ahab to relieve him of the choice.
But certainly he had not expected to offer up his life and lance to his captain’s cause, in this final hour to give freely the pledge Ahab had tried and failed to wrest from him on the day he nailed the doubloon to the mast, only to have his sacrifice met with an indifferent shrug.
“We have but three boats. That wreck on the quarterdeck is beyond the carpenter’s skill,” said Ahab.
Ahab had also had a very long and trying day, Starbuck reminded himself with an effort. Undoubtedly he still bore a grudge over their confrontation that morning, and not without justification. If Starbuck’s outburst had been somewhat excusable, stemming as it did from a profound fear for the lives of his captain and his crew, nevertheless, it had by any measure been outrageously insubordinate. Could Ahab be blamed, now, for not taking this overture in the spirit it was intended? If there was to be any hope for this venture, Starbuck must keep calm and patiently explain.
“No, sir, I meant with thee. Thou wilt need a boatsteerer.”
“This is a new leaf! Art thou so keen, then, to save thy boat?” Ahab asked jeeringly, for it was he who had taken possession of the larboard quarter boat, leaving the mates to outfit the spares.
Starbuck reminded himself again that he must not rise to anything.
“Not the boat, sir,” he said.
It finally seemed to dawn on Ahab that he was in earnest. The harsh lines of his face softened a little, and he came out of the doorway and over to the table – two easy hops in the narrow confines of the cabin which carried him from handhold to handhold: the frame of his stateroom door to the table’s edge. He seated himself, not in his own chair, which would have necessitated another hop, but in Starbuck’s accustomed place on the bench.
“No. No, I do not ask that of thee, Starbuck.”
“I’ll send Queequeg, then.”
“No need for that; I’ll dart him myself. My bowsman can steer. Lend whom thou canst spare. Thy own bowsman, that dreamy little schoolteacher – he’ll do. Thou’lt have need of thy harpooneer, after.”
“‘After’? Thou canst not think there is any ’after’, sir!”
Ahab nodded at the bench beside him. “Sit.”
When Starbuck obeyed, Ahab leaned his makeshift cane against the table and took up Starbuck’s right hand in both of his.
“There is always an ‘after’, Starbuck. I sense that tomorrow there will be an end to this hunt, one way or another.”
“A leading, sir?” asked Starbuck, who was not above darting a little irony of his own when the occasion called for it. He was still feeling sore over the crack about saving his boat.
“Thou wouldst call it so. What god or devil speaks me, I do not presume to know. But I do know this: that when three days run together in one continuous chase, the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of the thing, whatever that end may be.”
“Aye, sir – that’s true enough. But it minds me of something else thou saidst, concerning threes: that drowning things rise twice, and then rise again to sink forever. It did not seem to me, sir, that Moby Dick was drowning. He swam marvelously well, I thought.”
He did not glance down at Ahab’s salt-stained coat sleeves, but from the grim look on Ahab’s face, his captain grasped his meaning.
“There will be an ‘after’ for somebody. I do not say for whom.”
“Mr. Flask thinks it may all come right. He says the boats will be chipped again tomorrow with no harm done to anyone.”
There was a pause, in which they both considered the prognostic abilities of a man who seemed incapable of fully entertaining the idea that a whale might be dangerous.
“Well,” Ahab said at length. “I damn well hope not. I mean to do a great deal of harm. But not to thee, Starbuck; never to thee.”
“And dost thou not think it will wound me, sir, to stand on the quarterdeck and watch thee die?” The tears came to Starbuck's eyes then, and he had to raise the hand Ahab did not hold captive to dash them away. “I’m sorry. But thou must know – it is not as chief mate of this ship that I would not see thee perish.”
“It is not as my chief mate that I would spare thee,” Ahab said, pressing Starbuck's hand between his. “But chief mate thou art, all the same. Remind me, Mr. Starbuck, how many barrels have we?”
Mr. Starbuck. Addressing him as mate, then, and not as… whatever they were to each other in these private moments. He was stung by the rebuff, but the answer came to his lips anyway, borne up by a whaleman’s bone-deep instinct: that tally well known to every man on board, but trusted especially to the chief mate’s keeping.
“496.”
“496 barrels, and thou sayest there is no ‘after’! Thou canst not turn this ship for home after one year with 496 barrels, Mr. Starbuck. A Nantucket whaler does not return with her hold three-quarters empty for so small a thing as the death of her captain.”
“Thou canst not expect me to simply go on, and continue the voyage as if nothing had happened, with thou–!”
“But I do expect it. The owners expect it. And what of those widows and orphans thou art forever plaguing me with? What of thy own wife and child, and mine, and all this crew and their dependents? Thou wilt be master of the ship, Mr. Starbuck. It will be for thee to decide her course, according to thy own duty and desires.”
Strange to know that all this time, his entreaties had been heard. Starbuck had assumed they fell on deaf ears, but they had gotten through somehow, only to drop uselessly into a locked casket buried somewhere beneath Ahab’s monomania. And to think he could have everything he’d wanted – everything he’d thought to take, that terrible night with the musket! – but only at this unspeakable price. Ahab was holding it out to him, all but shoving it into his unwilling arms, and now that it was nearly in his grasp…
“I want nothing less, than to be master of this ship.”
“Aye. I know it, Starbuck.” Ahab squeezed his hand again, and said dryly, “Mark ye, I am not overfond of the idea myself. But it will be a comfort to me, if things should go ill tomorrow, to know this old Pequod of mine is in good hands. Didst thou think it an accident, that I shipped a boat crew whose names are not down on the articles? If I could, I would not risk any of ye. Would that I could hunt him in a dinghy, and hazard only myself!” He shook his grey head ruefully. “I must have a ship to carry me to his domain, and a crew to sail her, and whale-boats to lower for him, and oarsmen to man those boats. But thou, thou and Pip – ye two at least I can spare.”
“Thou couldst spare us all, sir. Thou couldst spare thyself! I will not ask thee to forbear again – thou gavest me my orders this forenoon, sir, and I obey. But I cannot understand thee. I cannot understand why thou hast so much regard for my life, and so little for thine own.”
Ahab sat a moment in silent thought. At length he said, “Hast thou ever stood at the masthead as thy ship comes in round Tuckernuck Shoal, and seen the whole island spread itself out before thee?”
“Aye, Captain Ahab.”
It had been Starbuck’s favorite masthead, in the carefree years before an officer’s duties trapped him on deck to see the ship made ready to anchor. Raising Nantucket had been a headier pleasure than raising a whole school of whales. How many weary tricks at the helm he had once stood, what brimming pouches of tobacco he’d once collected, all to trade away so that he might claim that one precious homecoming vigil for himself!
Should Ahab never more see the island spread out in welcome? At the thought, the tears began to roll again down Starbuck’s cheeks. The notion of bringing the ship safely home without her captain – the goal he had once been prepared almost to do murder to achieve – was now a horror to him.
But Ahab had horrors of his own.
“So that far-off home of ours appears to me now, Starbuck. Old Nantucket, and my wife and child, and this good ship and crew, and thee, and all the world: as busy and minute as an anthill, sundered from me by a vast gulf of sea and air. And in that gulf he swims. I cannot cross it, not while he yet lives. I cannot come to thee. I cannot live, but that I slay him.”
Starbuck’s eyes were blind with tears, so that he felt more than saw his captain press something cool and smooth into his palm. He blinked them away and found himself holding a little vial of grey-brown sand.
“Nantucket soundings,” Ahab said, folding Starbuck’s limp fingers over it. “Keep it safe for me till I return.”
Picking up the shivered lance and using it to lever himself upright, he made his halting way across the cabin and back up to the deck.