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+I. The Period
+
+
+It was the best of times,
+it was the worst of times,
+it was the age of wisdom,
+it was the age of foolishness,
+it was the epoch of belief,
+it was the epoch of incredulity,
+it was the season of Light,
+it was the season of Darkness,
+it was the spring of hope,
+it was the winter of despair,
+we had everything before us,
+we had nothing before us,
+we were all going direct to Heaven,
+we were all going direct the other way--
+in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
+its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
+evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
+
+There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
+throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with
+a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer
+than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,
+that things in general were settled for ever.
+
+It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
+Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,
+as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
+blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
+heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
+made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane
+ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
+messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
+deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
+earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
+from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
+to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
+communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
+brood.
+
+France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
+sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
+hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
+Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
+achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
+torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not
+kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
+which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty
+yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
+Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
+already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
+boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in
+it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
+of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were
+sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
+rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which
+the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
+the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
+unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
+with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
+that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
+
+In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
+justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
+highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
+families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing
+their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman
+in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
+challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of
+“the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the
+mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and
+then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the
+failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace;
+that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand
+and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the
+illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London
+gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law
+fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;
+thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
+Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search
+for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
+musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
+much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
+and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing
+up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
+Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the
+hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
+Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
+and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of
+sixpence.
+
+All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
+upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
+Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
+those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
+fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
+with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred
+and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
+creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the
+roads that lay before them.
+
+
+
+
+II. The Mail
+
+
+It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
+before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.
+The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
+Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail,
+as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish
+for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill,
+and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the
+horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the
+coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back
+to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in
+combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
+otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals
+are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
+their duty.
+
+With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through
+the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were
+falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested
+them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the
+near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an
+unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the
+hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
+nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
+
+There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
+forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding
+none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the
+air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
+waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out
+everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings,
+and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed
+into it, as if they had made it all.
+
+Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
+side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
+ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
+anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
+hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from
+the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers
+were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on
+the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter,
+when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in
+“the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable
+non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard
+of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
+thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as
+he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet,
+and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a
+loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
+deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
+
+The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
+the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they
+all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but
+the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
+taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the
+journey.
+
+“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the
+top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to
+it!--Joe!”
+
+“Halloa!” the guard replied.
+
+“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?”
+
+“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”
+
+“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter’s
+yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
+
+The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
+made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed
+suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
+passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach
+stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three
+had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead
+into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of
+getting shot instantly as a highwayman.
+
+The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
+stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for
+the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
+
+“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his
+box.
+
+“What do you say, Tom?”
+
+They both listened.
+
+“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”
+
+“_I_ say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold
+of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king’s
+name, all of you!”
+
+With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on
+the offensive.
+
+The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
+the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He
+remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained
+in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,
+and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked
+back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up
+his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
+
+The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring
+of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet
+indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to
+the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the
+passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the
+quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding
+the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
+
+The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
+
+“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand!
+I shall fire!”
+
+The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering,
+a man’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
+
+“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”
+
+“_Is_ that the Dover mail?”
+
+“Why do you want to know?”
+
+“I want a passenger, if it is.”
+
+“What passenger?”
+
+“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”
+
+Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,
+the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
+
+“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist,
+“because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in
+your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”
+
+“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering
+speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”
+
+(“I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to
+himself. “He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)
+
+“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”
+
+“What is the matter?”
+
+“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”
+
+“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the
+road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two
+passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and
+pulled up the window. “He may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”
+
+“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ‘Nation sure of that,” said the
+guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”
+
+“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.
+
+“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that
+saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ‘em. For I’m a devil
+at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So
+now let’s look at you.”
+
+The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,
+and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider
+stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger
+a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and
+rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of
+the man.
+
+“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
+
+The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised
+blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman,
+answered curtly, “Sir.”
+
+“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must
+know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown
+to drink. I may read this?”
+
+“If so be as you’re quick, sir.”
+
+He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and
+read--first to himself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Mam’selle.’
+It’s not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED
+TO LIFE.”
+
+Jerry started in his saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,”
+ said he, at his hoarsest.
+
+“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as
+well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”
+
+With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at
+all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted
+their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general
+pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape
+the hazard of originating any other kind of action.
+
+The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round
+it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss
+in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and
+having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt,
+looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a
+few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was
+furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown
+and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut
+himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw,
+and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in
+five minutes.
+
+“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.
+
+“Hallo, Joe.”
+
+“Did you hear the message?”
+
+“I did, Joe.”
+
+“What did you make of it, Tom?”
+
+“Nothing at all, Joe.”
+
+“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it
+myself.”
+
+Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not
+only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and
+shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of
+holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his
+heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within
+hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the
+hill.
+
+“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your
+fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger,
+glancing at his mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange
+message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You’d
+be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion,
+Jerry!”
+
+
+
+
+III. The Night Shadows
+
+
+A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
+constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A
+solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every
+one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
+room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating
+heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of
+its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the
+awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I
+turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time
+to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable
+water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses
+of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the
+book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read
+but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an
+eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood
+in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,
+my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable
+consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
+individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In
+any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there
+a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their
+innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
+
+As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the
+messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the
+first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the
+three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail
+coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had
+been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the
+breadth of a county between him and the next.
+
+The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at
+ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his
+own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that
+assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with
+no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together--as if they
+were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too
+far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like
+a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and
+throat, which descended nearly to the wearer’s knees. When he stopped
+for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he
+poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he
+muffled again.
+
+“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode.
+“It wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn’t
+suit _your_ line of business! Recalled--! Bust me if I don’t think he’d
+been a drinking!”
+
+His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several
+times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown,
+which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all
+over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was
+so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked
+wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might
+have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
+
+While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night
+watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who
+was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the
+night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such
+shapes to the mare as arose out of _her_ private topics of uneasiness.
+They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
+
+What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon
+its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom,
+likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms
+their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
+
+Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank
+passenger--with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what
+lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger,
+and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special
+jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little
+coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the
+bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great
+stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,
+and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with
+all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then
+the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable
+stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a
+little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
+them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them
+safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
+
+But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach
+(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was
+always with him, there was another current of impression that never
+ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one
+out of a grave.
+
+Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him
+was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did
+not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by
+years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed,
+and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,
+defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another;
+so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands
+and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was
+prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this
+spectre:
+
+“Buried how long?”
+
+The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”
+
+“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
+
+“Long ago.”
+
+“You know that you are recalled to life?”
+
+“They tell me so.”
+
+“I hope you care to live?”
+
+“I can’t say.”
+
+“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”
+
+The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes
+the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.”
+ Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was,
+“Take me to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it
+was, “I don’t know her. I don’t understand.”
+
+After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,
+and dig, dig--now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his
+hands--to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth
+hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The
+passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the
+reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
+
+Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving
+patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating
+by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train
+of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the
+real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express
+sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out
+of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost
+it again.
+
+“Buried how long?”
+
+“Almost eighteen years.”
+
+“I hope you care to live?”
+
+“I can’t say.”
+
+Dig--dig--dig--until an impatient movement from one of the two
+passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
+securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two
+slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again
+slid away into the bank and the grave.
+
+“Buried how long?”
+
+“Almost eighteen years.”
+
+“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
+
+“Long ago.”
+
+The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in
+his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
+passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
+shadows of the night were gone.
+
+He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
+ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
+last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
+in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
+upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,
+and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
+
+“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious
+Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Preparation
+
+
+When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,
+the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his
+custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey
+from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous
+traveller upon.
+
+By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
+congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
+roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp
+and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather
+like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out
+of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and
+muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.
+
+“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”
+
+“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The
+tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed,
+sir?”
+
+“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”
+
+“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please.
+Show Concord! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
+gentleman’s boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)
+Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”
+
+The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
+mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
+head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the
+Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it,
+all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another
+drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all
+loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord
+and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a
+brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large
+square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to
+his breakfast.
+
+The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman
+in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat,
+with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still,
+that he might have been sitting for his portrait.
+
+Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a
+loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat,
+as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and
+evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain
+of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a
+fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He
+wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his
+head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which
+looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.
+His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings,
+was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring
+beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A
+face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the
+quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost
+their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and
+reserved expression of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his
+cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety.
+But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson’s Bank were
+principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps
+second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
+
+Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
+Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him,
+and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:
+
+“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any
+time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a
+gentleman from Tellson’s Bank. Please to let me know.”
+
+“Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in
+their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A
+vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company’s House.”
+
+“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”
+
+“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think,
+sir?”
+
+“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we--since I--came last
+from France.”
+
+“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people’s
+time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”
+
+“I believe so.”
+
+“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and
+Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen
+years ago?”
+
+“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from
+the truth.”
+
+“Indeed, sir!”
+
+Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
+table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,
+dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while
+he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the
+immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.
+
+When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on
+the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away
+from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine
+ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
+wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
+destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and
+brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong
+a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be
+dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little
+fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by
+night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide
+made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever,
+sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable
+that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.
+
+As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been
+at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became
+again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud
+too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting
+his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
+digging, digging, in the live red coals.
+
+A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no
+harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.
+Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last
+glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is
+ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has
+got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow
+street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.
+
+He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam’selle!” said he.
+
+In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette
+had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from
+Tellson’s.
+
+“So soon?”
+
+Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none
+then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson’s
+immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.
+
+The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to empty his
+glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen
+wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s apartment.
+It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black
+horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and
+oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room
+were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if _they_ were buried, in deep
+graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected
+from them until they were dug out.
+
+The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his
+way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for
+the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall
+candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and
+the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak,
+and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As
+his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden
+hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and
+a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth
+it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was
+not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright
+fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions--as his
+eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him,
+of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very
+Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran
+high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of
+the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital
+procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were
+offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the
+feminine gender--and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.
+
+“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a
+little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.
+
+“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier
+date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.
+
+“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that
+some intelligence--or discovery--”
+
+“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”
+
+“--respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw--so
+long dead--”
+
+Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
+hospital procession of negro cupids. As if _they_ had any help for
+anybody in their absurd baskets!
+
+“--rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate
+with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for
+the purpose.”
+
+“Myself.”
+
+“As I was prepared to hear, sir.”
+
+She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a
+pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he
+was than she. He made her another bow.
+
+“I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by
+those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to
+France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with
+me, I should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself,
+during the journey, under that worthy gentleman’s protection. The
+gentleman had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to
+beg the favour of his waiting for me here.”
+
+“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the charge. I shall
+be more happy to execute it.”
+
+“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me
+by the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the
+business, and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising
+nature. I have done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a
+strong and eager interest to know what they are.”
+
+“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes--I--”
+
+After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the
+ears, “It is very difficult to begin.”
+
+He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young
+forehead lifted itself into that singular expression--but it was pretty
+and characteristic, besides being singular--and she raised her hand,
+as if with an involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing
+shadow.
+
+“Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?”
+
+“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outwards with
+an argumentative smile.
+
+Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of
+which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression
+deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which
+she had hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the
+moment she raised her eyes again, went on:
+
+“In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you
+as a young English lady, Miss Manette?”
+
+“If you please, sir.”
+
+“Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to
+acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me any more than
+if I was a speaking machine--truly, I am not much else. I will, with
+your leave, relate to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”
+
+“Story!”
+
+He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he added,
+in a hurry, “Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call
+our connection our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific
+gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a Doctor.”
+
+“Not of Beauvais?”
+
+“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
+gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
+gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there.
+Our relations were business relations, but confidential. I was at that
+time in our French House, and had been--oh! twenty years.”
+
+“At that time--I may ask, at what time, sir?”
+
+“I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married--an English lady--and
+I was one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other
+French gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson’s hands.
+In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for
+scores of our customers. These are mere business relations, miss;
+there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like
+sentiment. I have passed from one to another, in the course of my
+business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in
+the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere
+machine. To go on--”
+
+“But this is my father’s story, sir; and I begin to think”--the
+curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--“that when I was
+left an orphan through my mother’s surviving my father only two years,
+it was you who brought me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”
+
+Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced
+to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then
+conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding
+the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub
+his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood looking
+down into her face while she sat looking up into his.
+
+“Miss Manette, it _was_ I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself
+just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold
+with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect
+that I have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of
+Tellson’s House since, and I have been busy with the other business of
+Tellson’s House since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance
+of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary
+Mangle.”
+
+After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry
+flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most
+unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was
+before), and resumed his former attitude.
+
+“So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your
+regretted father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died
+when he did--Don’t be frightened! How you start!”
+
+She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.
+
+“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from
+the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped
+him in so violent a tremble: “pray control your agitation--a matter of
+business. As I was saying--”
+
+Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:
+
+“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly
+and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not
+been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could
+trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a
+privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest people afraid
+to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the
+privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one
+to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time; if his wife had
+implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of
+him, and all quite in vain;--then the history of your father would have
+been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”
+
+“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”
+
+“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”
+
+“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this
+moment.”
+
+“You speak collectedly, and you--_are_ collected. That’s good!” (Though
+his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business.
+Regard it as a matter of business--business that must be done. Now
+if this doctor’s wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit,
+had suffered so intensely from this cause before her little child was
+born--”
+
+“The little child was a daughter, sir.”
+
+“A daughter. A-a-matter of business--don’t be distressed. Miss, if the
+poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born,
+that she came to the determination of sparing the poor child the
+inheritance of any part of the agony she had known the pains of, by
+rearing her in the belief that her father was dead--No, don’t kneel! In
+Heaven’s name why should you kneel to me!”
+
+“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”
+
+“A--a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact
+business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly
+mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many
+shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so
+much more at my ease about your state of mind.”
+
+Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had
+very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp
+his wrists were so much more steady than they had been, that she
+communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.
+
+“That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You have business before
+you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with
+you. And when she died--I believe broken-hearted--having never slackened
+her unavailing search for your father, she left you, at two years old,
+to grow to be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud
+upon you of living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his
+heart out in prison, or wasted there through many lingering years.”
+
+As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the
+flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have
+been already tinged with grey.
+
+“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what
+they had was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new
+discovery, of money, or of any other property; but--”
+
+He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the
+forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was
+now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.
+
+“But he has been--been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too
+probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best.
+Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant
+in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to
+restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”
+
+A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a
+low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,
+
+“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost--not him!”
+
+Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There, there,
+there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you, now.
+You are well on your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair
+sea voyage, and a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”
+
+She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I
+have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”
+
+“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
+wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found under
+another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be
+worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek to
+know whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly
+held prisoner. It would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries,
+because it would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject,
+anywhere or in any way, and to remove him--for a while at all
+events--out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even
+Tellson’s, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of
+the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring
+to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries,
+and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’
+which may mean anything. But what is the matter! She doesn’t notice a
+word! Miss Manette!”
+
+Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she
+sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and fixed
+upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were carved or
+branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he
+feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called
+out loudly for assistance without moving.
+
+A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed to
+be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some
+extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most
+wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too,
+or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the
+inn servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from the
+poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him
+flying back against the nearest wall.
+
+(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathless
+reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)
+
+“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants.
+“Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring
+at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t you go and fetch
+things? I’ll let you know, if you don’t bring smelling-salts, cold
+water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”
+
+There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she
+softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and
+gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her
+golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.
+
+“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
+“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her
+to death? Look at her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do
+you call _that_ being a Banker?”
+
+Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to
+answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler
+sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the inn
+servants under the mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something
+not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a
+regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head
+upon her shoulder.
+
+“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”
+
+“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and
+humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to France?”
+
+“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever
+intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence
+would have cast my lot in an island?”
+
+This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to
+consider it.
+
+
+
+
+V. The Wine-shop
+
+
+A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The
+accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled
+out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just
+outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
+
+All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their
+idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular
+stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have
+thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them,
+had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own
+jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down,
+made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help
+women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all
+run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in
+the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with
+handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’
+mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;
+others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and
+there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new
+directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
+pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted
+fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the
+wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up
+along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street,
+if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous
+presence.
+
+A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women,
+and children--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There
+was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a
+special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part
+of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the
+luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths,
+shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen
+together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been
+most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
+demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who
+had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in
+motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of
+hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own
+starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men
+with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into
+the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom
+gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
+
+The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street
+in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had
+stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many
+wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks
+on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was
+stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.
+Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a
+tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his
+head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled
+upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.
+
+The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the
+street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
+
+And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
+gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
+heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
+waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
+but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a
+terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the
+fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner,
+passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered
+in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which
+had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the
+children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the
+grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh,
+was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out
+of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and
+lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and
+paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of
+firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
+chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,
+among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the
+baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of
+bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
+was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
+chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every
+farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant
+drops of oil.
+
+Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
+street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
+diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags
+and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them
+that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some
+wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and
+slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor
+compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted
+into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or
+inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops)
+were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman
+painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
+meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops,
+croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were
+gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a
+flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler’s knives
+and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the
+gunmaker’s stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement,
+with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but
+broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down
+the middle of the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
+rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across
+the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
+pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,
+and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly
+manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and
+the ship and crew were in peril of tempest.
+
+For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region
+should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so
+long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling
+up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their
+condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over
+France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of
+song and feather, took no warning.
+
+The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
+appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside
+it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle
+for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug
+of the shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring
+another.”
+
+There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke,
+he called to him across the way:
+
+“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”
+
+The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often
+the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is
+often the way with his tribe too.
+
+“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop
+keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of
+mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write
+in the public streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place
+to write such words in?”
+
+In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,
+perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped it with his
+own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing
+attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his
+hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly
+practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.
+
+“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish
+there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s
+dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on
+his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.
+
+This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty,
+and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a
+bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder.
+His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to
+the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own
+crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good
+eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on
+the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong
+resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing
+down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn
+the man.
+
+Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he
+came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with
+a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand
+heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of
+manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might
+have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself
+in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being
+sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright
+shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large
+earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick
+her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported
+by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but
+coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting
+of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a
+line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the
+shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while
+he stepped over the way.
+
+The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they
+rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in
+a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing
+dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply
+of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the
+elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”
+
+“What the devil do _you_ do in that galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge
+to himself; “I don’t know you.”
+
+But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse
+with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.
+
+“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is
+all the spilt wine swallowed?”
+
+“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.
+
+When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
+picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,
+and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
+
+“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur
+Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or
+of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”
+
+“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned.
+
+At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still
+using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of
+cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
+
+The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty
+drinking vessel and smacked his lips.
+
+“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle
+always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I
+right, Jacques?”
+
+“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge.
+
+This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment
+when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and
+slightly rustled in her seat.
+
+“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen--my wife!”
+
+The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three
+flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and
+giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the
+wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose
+of spirit, and became absorbed in it.
+
+“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly
+upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you
+wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the
+fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard
+close to the left here,” pointing with his hand, “near to the window of
+my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been
+there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”
+
+They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur
+Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly
+gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.
+
+“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to
+the door.
+
+Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first
+word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had
+not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then
+beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge
+knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.
+
+Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus,
+joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his own
+company just before. It opened from a stinking little black courtyard,
+and was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited
+by a great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the
+gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee
+to the child of his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was
+a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a very remarkable
+transformation had come over him in a few seconds. He had no good-humour
+in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a secret,
+angry, dangerous man.
+
+“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.”
+ Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began
+ascending the stairs.
+
+“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.
+
+“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other, in the
+same low voice.
+
+“Is he always alone, then?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Of his own desire?”
+
+“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they
+found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be
+discreet--as he was then, so he is now.”
+
+“He is greatly changed?”
+
+“Changed!”
+
+The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand,
+and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so
+forcible. Mr. Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his
+two companions ascended higher and higher.
+
+Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded
+parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile
+indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation
+within the great foul nest of one high building--that is to say,
+the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general
+staircase--left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides
+flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and
+hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted
+the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their
+intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost
+insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt
+and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to
+his young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr.
+Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made
+at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left
+uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed
+to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were
+caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer
+or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any
+promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.
+
+At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the
+third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination
+and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story
+was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in
+advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he
+dreaded to be asked any question by the young lady, turned himself about
+here, and, carefully feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over
+his shoulder, took out a key.
+
+“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.
+
+“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.
+
+“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?”
+
+“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge whispered it
+closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be
+frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what
+harm--if his door was left open.”
+
+“Is it possible!” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.
+
+“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a beautiful
+world we live in, when it _is_ possible, and when many other such things
+are possible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under
+that sky there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.”
+
+This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word
+of it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she trembled
+under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety,
+and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent
+on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.
+
+“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a
+moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then,
+all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you
+bring to him, begin. Let our good friend here, assist you on that side.
+That’s well, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!”
+
+They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were
+soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at
+once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at
+the side of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which
+the door belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing
+footsteps close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed
+themselves to be the three of one name who had been drinking in the
+wine-shop.
+
+“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur
+Defarge. “Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”
+
+The three glided by, and went silently down.
+
+There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of
+the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr.
+Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a little anger:
+
+“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”
+
+“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”
+
+“Is that well?”
+
+“_I_ think it is well.”
+
+“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”
+
+“I choose them as real men, of my name--Jacques is my name--to whom the
+sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is another
+thing. Stay there, if you please, a little moment.”
+
+With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in
+through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck
+twice or thrice upon the door--evidently with no other object than to
+make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it,
+three or four times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned
+it as heavily as he could.
+
+The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the
+room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more
+than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.
+
+He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr. Lorry
+got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and held her; for he
+felt that she was sinking.
+
+“A-a-a-business, business!” he urged, with a moisture that was not of
+business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”
+
+“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.
+
+“Of it? What?”
+
+“I mean of him. Of my father.”
+
+Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of
+their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his
+shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He sat her
+down just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.
+
+Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside,
+took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did,
+methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he
+could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to
+where the window was. He stopped there, and faced round.
+
+The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim
+and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the
+roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from
+the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any
+other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this
+door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way.
+Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it
+was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit
+alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work
+requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being
+done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face
+towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at
+him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very
+busy, making shoes.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Shoemaker
+
+
+“Good day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that
+bent low over the shoemaking.
+
+It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the
+salutation, as if it were at a distance:
+
+“Good day!”
+
+“You are still hard at work, I see?”
+
+After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the
+voice replied, “Yes--I am working.” This time, a pair of haggard eyes
+had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
+
+The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the
+faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no
+doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was
+the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo
+of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and
+resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once
+beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and
+suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive
+it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller,
+wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered
+home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.
+
+Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked
+up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical
+perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were
+aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
+
+“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker,
+“to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?”
+
+The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening,
+at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the
+other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+“You can bear a little more light?”
+
+“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a
+stress upon the second word.)
+
+The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that
+angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and
+showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his
+labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his
+feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very
+long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and
+thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet
+dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really
+otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so.
+His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body
+to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose
+stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion
+from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of
+parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.
+
+He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones
+of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze,
+pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without
+first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had
+lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without
+first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.
+
+“Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?” asked Defarge,
+motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?”
+
+“I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.”
+
+But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.
+
+Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When
+he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker
+looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the
+unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at
+it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then
+the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The
+look and the action had occupied but an instant.
+
+“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge.
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+“Here is a visitor.”
+
+The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his
+work.
+
+“Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe when
+he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it, monsieur.”
+
+Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
+
+“Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.”
+
+There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:
+
+“I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?”
+
+“I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s
+information?”
+
+“It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is in the
+present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.” He
+glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch of pride.
+
+“And the maker’s name?” said Defarge.
+
+Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand
+in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the
+hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and
+so on in regular changes, without a moment’s intermission. The task of
+recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he
+had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or
+endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a
+fast-dying man.
+
+“Did you ask me for my name?”
+
+“Assuredly I did.”
+
+“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
+
+“Is that all?”
+
+“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
+
+With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work
+again, until the silence was again broken.
+
+“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly
+at him.
+
+His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the
+question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back
+on the questioner when they had sought the ground.
+
+“I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I-I
+learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to--”
+
+He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his
+hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face
+from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and
+resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a
+subject of last night.
+
+“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after
+a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.”
+
+As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr.
+Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:
+
+“Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?”
+
+The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the
+questioner.
+
+“Monsieur Manette”; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s arm; “do you
+remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old
+banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your
+mind, Monsieur Manette?”
+
+As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr.
+Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent
+intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves
+through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded
+again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there. And
+so exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who
+had crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where
+she now stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been only
+raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and
+shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him,
+trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young
+breast, and love it back to life and hope--so exactly was the expression
+repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face, that it
+looked as though it had passed like a moving light, from him to her.
+
+Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, less and
+less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground
+and looked about him in the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he
+took the shoe up, and resumed his work.
+
+“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a whisper.
+
+“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have
+unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so
+well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”
+
+She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on
+which he sat. There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the
+figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped
+over his labour.
+
+Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, like a spirit,
+beside him, and he bent over his work.
+
+It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument
+in his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that side of him
+which was not the side on which she stood. He had taken it up, and was
+stooping to work again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He
+raised them, and saw her face. The two spectators started forward,
+but she stayed them with a motion of her hand. She had no fear of his
+striking at her with the knife, though they had.
+
+He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips began
+to form some words, though no sound proceeded from them. By degrees, in
+the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:
+
+“What is this?”
+
+With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her
+lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she
+laid his ruined head there.
+
+“You are not the gaoler’s daughter?”
+
+She sighed “No.”
+
+“Who are you?”
+
+Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench
+beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange
+thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he
+laid the knife down softly, as he sat staring at her.
+
+Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly pushed
+aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by little and
+little, he took it up and looked at it. In the midst of the action
+he went astray, and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his
+shoemaking.
+
+But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his
+shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to
+be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand
+to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag
+attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained
+a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden
+hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.
+
+He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It is
+the same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”
+
+As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to
+become conscious that it was in hers too. He turned her full to the
+light, and looked at her.
+
+“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned
+out--she had a fear of my going, though I had none--and when I was
+brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. ‘You will
+leave me them? They can never help me to escape in the body, though they
+may in the spirit.’ Those were the words I said. I remember them very
+well.”
+
+He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it.
+But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently,
+though slowly.
+
+“How was this?--_Was it you_?”
+
+Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a
+frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only
+said, in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near
+us, do not speak, do not move!”
+
+“Hark!” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”
+
+His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white
+hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but his
+shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and
+tried to secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and
+gloomily shook his head.
+
+“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. See what the
+prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not the face
+she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She was--and He
+was--before the slow years of the North Tower--ages ago. What is your
+name, my gentle angel?”
+
+Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees
+before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.
+
+“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was,
+and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history. But I
+cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may
+tell you, here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and to bless
+me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my dear!”
+
+His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and
+lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.
+
+“If you hear in my voice--I don’t know that it is so, but I hope it
+is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was
+sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in
+touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your
+breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when
+I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you
+with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the
+remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away,
+weep for it, weep for it!”
+
+She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a
+child.
+
+“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I
+have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at
+peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste,
+and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And
+if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father who is living,
+and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my
+honoured father, and implore his pardon for having never for his sake
+striven all day and lain awake and wept all night, because the love of
+my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep
+for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred
+tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank
+God for us, thank God!”
+
+He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a sight so
+touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which
+had gone before it, that the two beholders covered their faces.
+
+When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his heaving
+breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all
+storms--emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm
+called Life must hush at last--they came forward to raise the father and
+daughter from the ground. He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay
+there in a lethargy, worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his
+head might lie upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained
+him from the light.
+
+“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. Lorry as
+he stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, “all could be
+arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from the very door, he
+could be taken away--”
+
+“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.
+
+“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to
+him.”
+
+“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. “More
+than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France.
+Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?”
+
+“That’s business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his
+methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, I had better do it.”
+
+“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see how
+composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me
+now. Why should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from
+interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back,
+as quiet as you leave him. In any case, I will take care of him until
+you return, and then we will remove him straight.”
+
+Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and
+in favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage
+and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed,
+for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily
+dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away
+to do it.
+
+Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the
+hard ground close at the father’s side, and watched him. The darkness
+deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed
+through the chinks in the wall.
+
+Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and
+had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and
+meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the
+lamp he carried, on the shoemaker’s bench (there was nothing else in the
+garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and
+assisted him to his feet.
+
+No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in
+the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,
+whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that
+he was free, were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They
+tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to
+answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for
+the time to tamper with him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of
+occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not been seen
+in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his
+daughter’s voice, and invariably turned to it when she spoke.
+
+In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he
+ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak
+and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to
+his daughter’s drawing her arm through his, and took--and kept--her hand
+in both his own.
+
+They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.
+Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps
+of the long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and
+round at the walls.
+
+“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?”
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if
+she had repeated it.
+
+“Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.”
+
+That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his
+prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter,
+“One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it
+evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed
+him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his
+tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was
+no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he
+dropped his daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.
+
+No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the
+many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural
+silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and
+that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and
+saw nothing.
+
+The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed
+him, when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking,
+miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame
+Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and
+went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly
+brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned
+against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
+
+Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The
+postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble
+over-swinging lamps.
+
+Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better
+streets, and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay crowds,
+illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city
+gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers,
+travellers!” “See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge,
+getting down, and taking him gravely apart, “these are the papers of
+monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with
+him, at the--” He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the
+military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm
+in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day
+or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. “It is well.
+Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from Defarge. And so, under a short
+grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great
+grove of stars.
+
+Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from
+this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their
+rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything
+is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
+All through the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more
+whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry--sitting opposite the buried
+man who had been dug out, and wondering what subtle powers were for ever
+lost to him, and what were capable of restoration--the old inquiry:
+
+“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”
+
+And the old answer:
+
+“I can’t say.”
+
+
+The end of the first book.
+
+
+
+
+
+Book the Second--the Golden Thread
+
+
+
+
+I. Five Years Later
+
+
+Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
+year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
+dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
+moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were
+proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
+proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
+in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
+it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was
+no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
+convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted
+no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no
+embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but
+Tellson’s, thank Heaven--!
+
+Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
+question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was much
+on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for
+suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly
+objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
+
+Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection
+of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with
+a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps,
+and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little
+counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the
+wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of
+windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street,
+and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the
+heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing
+“the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back,
+where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its
+hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal
+twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden
+drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when
+they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they
+were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among
+the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good
+polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms
+made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their
+parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family
+papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
+dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year
+one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you
+by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released
+from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads
+exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of
+Abyssinia or Ashantee.
+
+But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
+with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson’s.
+Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?
+Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
+was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the
+purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder
+of a horse at Tellson’s door, who made off with it, was put to
+Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
+three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
+Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
+might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the
+reverse--but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
+particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked
+after. Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business,
+its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid
+low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately
+disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the
+ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.
+
+Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, the
+oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young
+man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was
+old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full
+Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to
+be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches
+and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.
+
+Outside Tellson’s--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an
+odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live
+sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless
+upon an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin
+of twelve, who was his express image. People understood that Tellson’s,
+in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always
+tolerated some person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted
+this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful
+occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the
+easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he had received the added
+appellation of Jerry.
+
+The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
+Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
+morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself
+always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under
+the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a
+popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)
+
+Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were
+but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it
+might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early as
+it was, on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed was
+already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged
+for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth
+was spread.
+
+Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin
+at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll
+and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair
+looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he
+exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:
+
+“Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!”
+
+A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a
+corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the
+person referred to.
+
+“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You’re at it
+agin, are you?”
+
+After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at
+the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the
+odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher’s domestic economy, that,
+whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he
+often got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.
+
+“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his
+mark--“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”
+
+“I was only saying my prayers.”
+
+“Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping
+yourself down and praying agin me?”
+
+“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”
+
+“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with. Here!
+your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your
+father’s prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful mother, you have, my son.
+You’ve got a religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping
+herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out
+of the mouth of her only child.”
+
+Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning
+to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal
+board.
+
+“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher, with
+unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of _your_ prayers may be?
+Name the price that you put _your_ prayers at!”
+
+“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than
+that.”
+
+“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain’t worth
+much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t
+afford it. I’m not a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If
+you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and
+child, and not in opposition to ‘em. If I had had any but a unnat’ral
+wife, and this poor boy had had any but a unnat’ral mother, I might
+have made some money last week instead of being counter-prayed and
+countermined and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck.
+B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting
+on his clothes, “if I ain’t, what with piety and one blowed thing and
+another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor
+devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my
+boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and
+then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I
+tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won’t be gone agin,
+in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as
+laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if
+it wasn’t for the pain in ‘em, which was me and which somebody else, yet
+I’m none the better for it in pocket; and it’s my suspicion that you’ve
+been at it from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for
+it in pocket, and I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you
+say now!”
+
+Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You’re religious, too.
+You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband
+and child, would you? Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks
+from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook
+himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.
+In the meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes,
+and whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did,
+kept the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor
+woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made
+his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother.
+--Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in
+again with an undutiful grin.
+
+Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came to his
+breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with particular
+animosity.
+
+“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?”
+
+His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”
+
+“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected
+to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s petitions. “I
+ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t have my wittles
+blest off my table. Keep still!”
+
+Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party
+which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried
+his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed
+inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled
+aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as
+he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation
+of the day.
+
+It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
+description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of
+a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool,
+young Jerry, walking at his father’s side, carried every morning to
+beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where,
+with the addition of the first handful of straw that could be gleaned
+from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s
+feet, it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr.
+Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar
+itself,--and was almost as in-looking.
+
+Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
+three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson’s,
+Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry
+standing by him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to
+inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on passing
+boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose. Father and son,
+extremely like each other, looking silently on at the morning traffic
+in Fleet-street, with their two heads as near to one another as the two
+eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys.
+The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance, that
+the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the
+youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else
+in Fleet-street.
+
+The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s
+establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:
+
+“Porter wanted!”
+
+“Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!”
+
+Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
+the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father
+had been chewing, and cogitated.
+
+“Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry.
+“Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t get no iron
+rust here!”
+
+
+
+
+II. A Sight
+
+
+“You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of
+clerks to Jerry the messenger.
+
+“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. “I _do_
+know the Bailey.”
+
+“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”
+
+“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much
+better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment
+in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”
+
+“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the
+door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”
+
+“Into the court, sir?”
+
+“Into the court.”
+
+Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
+interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
+
+“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that
+conference.
+
+“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
+Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry’s
+attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you have to do, is,
+to remain there until he wants you.”
+
+“Is that all, sir?”
+
+“That’s all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him
+you are there.”
+
+As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note,
+Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the
+blotting-paper stage, remarked:
+
+“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”
+
+“Treason!”
+
+“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”
+
+“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
+spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”
+
+“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to kill
+him, but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.”
+
+“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take
+care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take
+care of itself. I give you that advice.”
+
+“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry. “I
+leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”
+
+“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of
+gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry
+ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”
+
+Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
+deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one,
+too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination,
+and went his way.
+
+They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had
+not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.
+But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and
+villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came
+into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the
+dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It
+had more than once happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced
+his own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him.
+For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard,
+from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on
+a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a
+half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any.
+So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It
+was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted
+a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for
+the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and
+softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in
+blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
+leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed
+under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice
+illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism
+that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
+consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
+
+Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
+hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his
+way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in
+his letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play
+at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam--only the
+former entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey
+doors were well guarded--except, indeed, the social doors by which the
+criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.
+
+After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a
+very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into
+court.
+
+“What’s on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next
+to.
+
+“Nothing yet.”
+
+“What’s coming on?”
+
+“The Treason case.”
+
+“The quartering one, eh?”
+
+“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to
+be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own
+face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on,
+and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters.
+That’s the sentence.”
+
+“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.
+
+“Oh! they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be afraid of
+that.”
+
+Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he
+saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry
+sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged
+gentleman, the prisoner’s counsel, who had a great bundle of papers
+before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands
+in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him
+then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the
+court. After some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing
+with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up
+to look for him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.
+
+“What’s _he_ got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.
+
+“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.
+
+“What have _you_ got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”
+
+“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.
+
+The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling
+down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the
+central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there,
+went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.
+
+Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
+ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled
+at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round
+pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows
+stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court,
+laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help
+themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of him--stood a-tiptoe, got
+upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.
+Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked wall
+of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a
+whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with
+the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not,
+that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him
+in an impure mist and rain.
+
+The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
+five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and
+a dark eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman. He was plainly
+dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and
+dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out
+of his way than for ornament. As an emotion of the mind will express
+itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his
+situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the
+soul to be stronger than the sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed,
+bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.
+
+The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at,
+was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less
+horrible sentence--had there been a chance of any one of its savage
+details being spared--by just so much would he have lost in his
+fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled,
+was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered
+and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss the various
+spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts and
+powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.
+
+Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to
+an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that
+he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
+forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers
+occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French
+King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and
+so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of
+our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the
+said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise
+evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our
+said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation
+to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head
+becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with
+huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that
+the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood
+there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and
+that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.
+
+The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
+beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from
+the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and
+attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest;
+and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so
+composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which
+it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with
+vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.
+
+Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light down
+upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in
+it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s together. Haunted
+in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the
+glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one
+day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace
+for which it had been reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be
+that as it may, a change in his position making him conscious of a bar
+of light across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his
+face flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.
+
+It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court
+which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat,
+in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom his look
+immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his
+aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them.
+
+The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
+twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
+remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair,
+and a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind,
+but pondering and self-communing. When this expression was upon him, he
+looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred and broken up--as
+it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his daughter--he became a
+handsome man, not past the prime of life.
+
+His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by
+him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her
+dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had
+been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion
+that saw nothing but the peril of the accused. This had been so very
+noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who
+had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the whisper went about,
+“Who are they?”
+
+Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own
+manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his
+absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The crowd about
+him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and
+from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got
+to Jerry:
+
+“Witnesses.”
+
+“For which side?”
+
+“Against.”
+
+“Against what side?”
+
+“The prisoner’s.”
+
+The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them,
+leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was
+in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the
+axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.
+
+
+
+
+III. A Disappointment
+
+
+Mr. Attorney-General had to inform the jury, that the prisoner before
+them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices which
+claimed the forfeit of his life. That this correspondence with the
+public enemy was not a correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday, or
+even of last year, or of the year before. That, it was certain the
+prisoner had, for longer than that, been in the habit of passing and
+repassing between France and England, on secret business of which
+he could give no honest account. That, if it were in the nature of
+traitorous ways to thrive (which happily it never was), the real
+wickedness and guilt of his business might have remained undiscovered.
+That Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who
+was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the
+prisoner’s schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them to his
+Majesty’s Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.
+That, this patriot would be produced before them. That, his position and
+attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he had been the prisoner’s
+friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour detecting his
+infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no longer cherish
+in his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, if statues
+were decreed in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public
+benefactors, this shining citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as
+they were not so decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue,
+as had been observed by the poets (in many passages which he well
+knew the jury would have, word for word, at the tips of their tongues;
+whereat the jury’s countenances displayed a guilty consciousness that
+they knew nothing about the passages), was in a manner contagious; more
+especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country.
+That, the lofty example of this immaculate and unimpeachable witness
+for the Crown, to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, had
+communicated itself to the prisoner’s servant, and had engendered in him
+a holy determination to examine his master’s table-drawers and pockets,
+and secrete his papers. That, he (Mr. Attorney-General) was prepared to
+hear some disparagement attempted of this admirable servant; but that,
+in a general way, he preferred him to his (Mr. Attorney-General’s)
+brothers and sisters, and honoured him more than his (Mr.
+Attorney-General’s) father and mother. That, he called with confidence
+on the jury to come and do likewise. That, the evidence of these two
+witnesses, coupled with the documents of their discovering that would be
+produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with lists of
+his Majesty’s forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both by
+sea and land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed
+such information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be
+proved to be in the prisoner’s handwriting; but that it was all the
+same; that, indeed, it was rather the better for the prosecution, as
+showing the prisoner to be artful in his precautions. That, the proof
+would go back five years, and would show the prisoner already engaged
+in these pernicious missions, within a few weeks before the date of the
+very first action fought between the British troops and the Americans.
+That, for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they
+were), and being a responsible jury (as _they_ knew they were), must
+positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether
+they liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads upon their
+pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying
+their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion
+of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that
+there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon
+pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head was taken off. That head
+Mr. Attorney-General concluded by demanding of them, in the name of
+everything he could think of with a round turn in it, and on the faith
+of his solemn asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as
+good as dead and gone.
+
+When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if
+a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in
+anticipation of what he was soon to become. When toned down again, the
+unimpeachable patriot appeared in the witness-box.
+
+Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader’s lead, examined the
+patriot: John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure soul was
+exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it to be--perhaps, if
+it had a fault, a little too exactly. Having released his noble bosom
+of its burden, he would have modestly withdrawn himself, but that the
+wigged gentleman with the papers before him, sitting not far from Mr.
+Lorry, begged to ask him a few questions. The wigged gentleman sitting
+opposite, still looking at the ceiling of the court.
+
+Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation.
+What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn’t
+precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody’s.
+Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very
+distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors’
+prison? Didn’t see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors’
+prison?--Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three
+times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever
+been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked downstairs?
+Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell
+downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at
+dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who
+committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true?
+Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not
+more than other gentlemen do. Ever borrow money of the prisoner? Yes.
+Ever pay him? No. Was not this intimacy with the prisoner, in reality a
+very slight one, forced upon the prisoner in coaches, inns, and packets?
+No. Sure he saw the prisoner with these lists? Certain. Knew no more
+about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself, for instance? No.
+Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in regular government
+pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do anything? Oh dear
+no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but motives of sheer
+patriotism? None whatever.
+
+The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a
+great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith and
+simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard the Calais
+packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had engaged him.
+He had not asked the prisoner to take the handy fellow as an act of
+charity--never thought of such a thing. He began to have suspicions of
+the prisoner, and to keep an eye upon him, soon afterwards. In arranging
+his clothes, while travelling, he had seen similar lists to these in the
+prisoner’s pockets, over and over again. He had taken these lists from
+the drawer of the prisoner’s desk. He had not put them there first. He
+had seen the prisoner show these identical lists to French gentlemen
+at Calais, and similar lists to French gentlemen, both at Calais and
+Boulogne. He loved his country, and couldn’t bear it, and had given
+information. He had never been suspected of stealing a silver tea-pot;
+he had been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be
+only a plated one. He had known the last witness seven or eight years;
+that was merely a coincidence. He didn’t call it a particularly curious
+coincidence; most coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a
+curious coincidence that true patriotism was _his_ only motive too. He
+was a true Briton, and hoped there were many like him.
+
+The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called Mr. Jarvis
+Lorry.
+
+“Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson’s bank?”
+
+“I am.”
+
+“On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and
+seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel between London and
+Dover by the mail?”
+
+“It did.”
+
+“Were there any other passengers in the mail?”
+
+“Two.”
+
+“Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?”
+
+“They did.”
+
+“Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two passengers?”
+
+“I cannot undertake to say that he was.”
+
+“Does he resemble either of these two passengers?”
+
+“Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all so
+reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.”
+
+“Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up as
+those two passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and stature to
+render it unlikely that he was one of them?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“So at least you say he may have been one of them?”
+
+“Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been--like
+myself--timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous
+air.”
+
+“Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry?”
+
+“I certainly have seen that.”
+
+“Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to your
+certain knowledge, before?”
+
+“I have.”
+
+“When?”
+
+“I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at Calais, the
+prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the
+voyage with me.”
+
+“At what hour did he come on board?”
+
+“At a little after midnight.”
+
+“In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on board
+at that untimely hour?”
+
+“He happened to be the only one.”
+
+“Never mind about ‘happening,’ Mr. Lorry. He was the only passenger who
+came on board in the dead of the night?”
+
+“He was.”
+
+“Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?”
+
+“With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here.”
+
+“They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?”
+
+“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough, and
+I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.”
+
+“Miss Manette!”
+
+The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now
+turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and
+kept her hand drawn through his arm.
+
+“Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.”
+
+To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was
+far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd.
+Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all
+the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him
+to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs
+before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts
+to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour
+rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again.
+
+“Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the same
+occasion.”
+
+“You are the young lady just now referred to?”
+
+“O! most unhappily, I am!”
+
+The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical voice
+of the Judge, as he said something fiercely: “Answer the questions put
+to you, and make no remark upon them.”
+
+“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that
+passage across the Channel?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Recall it.”
+
+In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began: “When the
+gentleman came on board--”
+
+“Do you mean the prisoner?” inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.
+
+“Yes, my Lord.”
+
+“Then say the prisoner.”
+
+“When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,” turning
+her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside her, “was much fatigued
+and in a very weak state of health. My father was so reduced that I was
+afraid to take him out of the air, and I had made a bed for him on the
+deck near the cabin steps, and I sat on the deck at his side to take
+care of him. There were no other passengers that night, but we four.
+The prisoner was so good as to beg permission to advise me how I could
+shelter my father from the wind and weather, better than I had done. I
+had not known how to do it well, not understanding how the wind would
+set when we were out of the harbour. He did it for me. He expressed
+great gentleness and kindness for my father’s state, and I am sure he
+felt it. That was the manner of our beginning to speak together.”
+
+“Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“How many were with him?”
+
+“Two French gentlemen.”
+
+“Had they conferred together?”
+
+“They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was
+necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.”
+
+“Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these lists?”
+
+“Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don’t know what
+papers.”
+
+“Like these in shape and size?”
+
+“Possibly, but indeed I don’t know, although they stood whispering very
+near to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to have the
+light of the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp, and they
+spoke very low, and I did not hear what they said, and saw only that
+they looked at papers.”
+
+“Now, to the prisoner’s conversation, Miss Manette.”
+
+“The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me--which arose out
+of my helpless situation--as he was kind, and good, and useful to my
+father. I hope,” bursting into tears, “I may not repay him by doing him
+harm to-day.”
+
+Buzzing from the blue-flies.
+
+“Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that
+you give the evidence which it is your duty to give--which you must
+give--and which you cannot escape from giving--with great unwillingness,
+he is the only person present in that condition. Please to go on.”
+
+“He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and
+difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was
+therefore travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business
+had, within a few days, taken him to France, and might, at intervals,
+take him backwards and forwards between France and England for a long
+time to come.”
+
+“Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular.”
+
+“He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he said
+that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on
+England’s part. He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George
+Washington might gain almost as great a name in history as George the
+Third. But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was said
+laughingly, and to beguile the time.”
+
+Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in
+a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be
+unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully
+anxious and intent as she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when
+she stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its effect upon
+the counsel for and against. Among the lookers-on there was the same
+expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority
+of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors reflecting the witness,
+when the Judge looked up from his notes to glare at that tremendous
+heresy about George Washington.
+
+Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it
+necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the young lady’s
+father, Doctor Manette. Who was called accordingly.
+
+“Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him before?”
+
+“Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or
+three years and a half ago.”
+
+“Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the packet, or
+speak to his conversation with your daughter?”
+
+“Sir, I can do neither.”
+
+“Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to do
+either?”
+
+He answered, in a low voice, “There is.”
+
+“Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without
+trial, or even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?”
+
+He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, “A long imprisonment.”
+
+“Were you newly released on the occasion in question?”
+
+“They tell me so.”
+
+“Have you no remembrance of the occasion?”
+
+“None. My mind is a blank, from some time--I cannot even say what
+time--when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the
+time when I found myself living in London with my dear daughter
+here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God restored
+my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say how she had become
+familiar. I have no remembrance of the process.”
+
+Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down
+together.
+
+A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand being
+to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter untracked,
+in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five years ago, and
+got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a place where he did
+not remain, but from which he travelled back some dozen miles or more,
+to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected information; a witness
+was called to identify him as having been at the precise time required,
+in the coffee-room of an hotel in that garrison-and-dockyard town,
+waiting for another person. The prisoner’s counsel was cross-examining
+this witness with no result, except that he had never seen the prisoner
+on any other occasion, when the wigged gentleman who had all this time
+been looking at the ceiling of the court, wrote a word or two on a
+little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Opening
+this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with great
+attention and curiosity at the prisoner.
+
+“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?”
+
+The witness was quite sure.
+
+“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?”
+
+Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken.
+
+“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” pointing
+to him who had tossed the paper over, “and then look well upon the
+prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?”
+
+Allowing for my learned friend’s appearance being careless and slovenly
+if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise,
+not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought
+into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside
+his wig, and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became
+much more remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner’s
+counsel), whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned
+friend) for treason? But, Mr. Stryver replied to my Lord, no; but he
+would ask the witness to tell him whether what happened once, might
+happen twice; whether he would have been so confident if he had seen
+this illustration of his rashness sooner, whether he would be so
+confident, having seen it; and more. The upshot of which, was, to smash
+this witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to
+useless lumber.
+
+Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his
+fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr.
+Stryver fitted the prisoner’s case on the jury, like a compact suit
+of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and
+traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
+scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did look
+rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his friend and partner,
+and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those forgers and false
+swearers had rested on the prisoner as a victim, because some family
+affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did require his making
+those passages across the Channel--though what those affairs were, a
+consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbade him,
+even for his life, to disclose. How the evidence that had been warped
+and wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they
+had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent
+gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman
+and young lady so thrown together;--with the exception of that
+reference to George Washington, which was altogether too extravagant and
+impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a monstrous joke.
+How it would be a weakness in the government to break down in this
+attempt to practise for popularity on the lowest national antipathies
+and fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the most of it;
+how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous
+character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the
+State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord interposed
+(with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying that he could
+not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.
+
+Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next to
+attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes Mr.
+Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and
+Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the
+prisoner a hundred times worse. Lastly, came my Lord himself, turning
+the suit of clothes, now inside out, now outside in, but on the whole
+decidedly trimming and shaping them into grave-clothes for the prisoner.
+
+And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed again.
+
+Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court,
+changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement.
+While his learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers before him,
+whispered with those who sat near, and from time to time glanced
+anxiously at the jury; while all the spectators moved more or less, and
+grouped themselves anew; while even my Lord himself arose from his seat,
+and slowly paced up and down his platform, not unattended by a suspicion
+in the minds of the audience that his state was feverish; this one man
+sat leaning back, with his torn gown half off him, his untidy wig put
+on just as it had happened to light on his head after its removal, his
+hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the ceiling as they had been all
+day. Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him
+a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he
+undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnestness,
+when they were compared together, had strengthened), that many of the
+lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one another they would
+hardly have thought the two were so alike. Mr. Cruncher made the
+observation to his next neighbour, and added, “I’d hold half a guinea
+that _he_ don’t get no law-work to do. Don’t look like the sort of one
+to get any, do he?”
+
+Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he
+appeared to take in; for now, when Miss Manette’s head dropped upon
+her father’s breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly:
+“Officer! look to that young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out.
+Don’t you see she will fall!”
+
+There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much
+sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to
+him, to have the days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown
+strong internal agitation when he was questioned, and that pondering or
+brooding look which made him old, had been upon him, like a heavy cloud,
+ever since. As he passed out, the jury, who had turned back and paused a
+moment, spoke, through their foreman.
+
+They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with George
+Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not agreed,
+but signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch and ward,
+and retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the lamps in
+the court were now being lighted. It began to be rumoured that the
+jury would be out a long while. The spectators dropped off to get
+refreshment, and the prisoner withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat
+down.
+
+Mr. Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father went out,
+now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened interest,
+could easily get near him.
+
+“Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep in the
+way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don’t be a moment
+behind them, for I want you to take the verdict back to the bank. You
+are the quickest messenger I know, and will get to Temple Bar long
+before I can.”
+
+Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
+acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. Carton came up
+at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the arm.
+
+“How is the young lady?”
+
+“She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and she
+feels the better for being out of court.”
+
+“I’ll tell the prisoner so. It won’t do for a respectable bank gentleman
+like you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.”
+
+Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
+in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar.
+The way out of court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed him, all
+eyes, ears, and spikes.
+
+“Mr. Darnay!”
+
+The prisoner came forward directly.
+
+“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette. She
+will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.”
+
+“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell her so
+for me, with my fervent acknowledgments?”
+
+“Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.”
+
+Mr. Carton’s manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He stood,
+half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow against the bar.
+
+“I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.”
+
+“What,” said Carton, still only half turned towards him, “do you expect,
+Mr. Darnay?”
+
+“The worst.”
+
+“It’s the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their
+withdrawing is in your favour.”
+
+Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard no
+more: but left them--so like each other in feature, so unlike each other
+in manner--standing side by side, both reflected in the glass above
+them.
+
+An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal crowded
+passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies and ale.
+The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after taking that
+refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and a rapid tide
+of people setting up the stairs that led to the court, carried him along
+with them.
+
+“Jerry! Jerry!” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when he got
+there.
+
+“Here, sir! It’s a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!”
+
+Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “Quick! Have you got
+it?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+Hastily written on the paper was the word “ACQUITTED.”
+
+“If you had sent the message, ‘Recalled to Life,’ again,” muttered
+Jerry, as he turned, “I should have known what you meant, this time.”
+
+He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else,
+until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out
+with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz
+swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in
+search of other carrion.
+
+
+
+
+IV. Congratulatory
+
+
+From the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of the
+human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off, when
+Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the solicitor
+for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round Mr.
+Charles Darnay--just released--congratulating him on his escape from
+death.
+
+It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise
+in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the
+shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him
+twice, without looking again: even though the opportunity of observation
+had not extended to the mournful cadence of his low grave voice, and
+to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent
+reason. While one external cause, and that a reference to his long
+lingering agony, would always--as on the trial--evoke this condition
+from the depths of his soul, it was also in its nature to arise of
+itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as incomprehensible to those
+unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual
+Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was three
+hundred miles away.
+
+Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from
+his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his
+misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice,
+the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial
+influence with him almost always. Not absolutely always, for she could
+recall some occasions on which her power had failed; but they were few
+and slight, and she believed them over.
+
+Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had turned
+to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man of little
+more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout,
+loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing
+way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and
+conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.
+
+He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at his
+late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry clean
+out of the group: “I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr.
+Darnay. It was an infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the
+less likely to succeed on that account.”
+
+“You have laid me under an obligation to you for life--in two senses,”
+ said his late client, taking his hand.
+
+“I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good as
+another man’s, I believe.”
+
+It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, “Much better,” Mr. Lorry
+said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested
+object of squeezing himself back again.
+
+“You think so?” said Mr. Stryver. “Well! you have been present all day,
+and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too.”
+
+“And as such,” quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law had
+now shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously shouldered
+him out of it--“as such I will appeal to Doctor Manette, to break up
+this conference and order us all to our homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr.
+Darnay has had a terrible day, we are worn out.”
+
+“Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver; “I have a night’s work to
+do yet. Speak for yourself.”
+
+“I speak for myself,” answered Mr. Lorry, “and for Mr. Darnay, and for
+Miss Lucie, and--Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us all?”
+ He asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.
+
+His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at
+Darnay: an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust,
+not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression on him his
+thoughts had wandered away.
+
+“My father,” said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.
+
+He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.
+
+“Shall we go home, my father?”
+
+With a long breath, he answered “Yes.”
+
+The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the
+impression--which he himself had originated--that he would not be
+released that night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in the
+passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a rattle,
+and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning’s interest of
+gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-iron, should repeople it.
+Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie Manette passed into
+the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father and daughter
+departed in it.
+
+Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way back
+to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group, or
+interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been leaning
+against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had silently strolled
+out after the rest, and had looked on until the coach drove away. He now
+stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood upon the pavement.
+
+“So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay now?”
+
+Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton’s part in the day’s
+proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none the
+better for it in appearance.
+
+“If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the
+business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
+appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.”
+
+Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, “You have mentioned that before,
+sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own masters. We
+have to think of the House more than ourselves.”
+
+“_I_ know, _I_ know,” rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. “Don’t be
+nettled, Mr. Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt: better,
+I dare say.”
+
+“And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “I really don’t
+know what you have to do with the matter. If you’ll excuse me, as very
+much your elder, for saying so, I really don’t know that it is your
+business.”
+
+“Business! Bless you, _I_ have no business,” said Mr. Carton.
+
+“It is a pity you have not, sir.”
+
+“I think so, too.”
+
+“If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”
+
+“Lord love you, no!--I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Carton.
+
+“Well, sir!” cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference,
+“business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And, sir,
+if business imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr.
+Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance
+for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir!
+I hope you have been this day preserved for a prosperous and happy
+life.--Chair there!”
+
+Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as with the barrister, Mr.
+Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson’s. Carton,
+who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed
+then, and turned to Darnay:
+
+“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must
+be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on
+these street stones?”
+
+“I hardly seem yet,” returned Charles Darnay, “to belong to this world
+again.”
+
+“I don’t wonder at it; it’s not so long since you were pretty far
+advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly.”
+
+“I begin to think I _am_ faint.”
+
+“Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined, myself, while those
+numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to--this, or
+some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.”
+
+Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to
+Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were
+shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting
+his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat
+opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port
+before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon him.
+
+“Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr.
+Darnay?”
+
+“I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far
+mended as to feel that.”
+
+“It must be an immense satisfaction!”
+
+He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large
+one.
+
+“As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it.
+It has no good in it for me--except wine like this--nor I for it. So we
+are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are
+not much alike in any particular, you and I.”
+
+Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with
+this Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was
+at a loss how to answer; finally, answered not at all.
+
+“Now your dinner is done,” Carton presently said, “why don’t you call a
+health, Mr. Darnay; why don’t you give your toast?”
+
+“What health? What toast?”
+
+“Why, it’s on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be, I’ll
+swear it’s there.”
+
+“Miss Manette, then!”
+
+“Miss Manette, then!”
+
+Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast, Carton
+flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered to
+pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.
+
+“That’s a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. Darnay!”
+ he said, filling his new goblet.
+
+A slight frown and a laconic “Yes,” were the answer.
+
+“That’s a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How does it
+feel? Is it worth being tried for one’s life, to be the object of such
+sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay?”
+
+Again Darnay answered not a word.
+
+“She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not
+that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was.”
+
+The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this
+disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the
+strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him
+for it.
+
+“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,” was the careless rejoinder.
+“It was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don’t know why I did
+it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a question.”
+
+“Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.”
+
+“Do you think I particularly like you?”
+
+“Really, Mr. Carton,” returned the other, oddly disconcerted, “I have
+not asked myself the question.”
+
+“But ask yourself the question now.”
+
+“You have acted as if you do; but I don’t think you do.”
+
+“_I_ don’t think I do,” said Carton. “I begin to have a very good
+opinion of your understanding.”
+
+“Nevertheless,” pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, “there is
+nothing in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our
+parting without ill-blood on either side.”
+
+Carton rejoining, “Nothing in life!” Darnay rang. “Do you call the whole
+reckoning?” said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative, “Then
+bring me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at
+ten.”
+
+The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night.
+Without returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat
+of defiance in his manner, and said, “A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think
+I am drunk?”
+
+“I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton.”
+
+“Think? You know I have been drinking.”
+
+“Since I must say so, I know it.”
+
+“Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I
+care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”
+
+“Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better.”
+
+“May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don’t let your sober face elate you,
+however; you don’t know what it may come to. Good night!”
+
+When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a
+glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.
+
+“Do you particularly like the man?” he muttered, at his own image; “why
+should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing
+in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have
+made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you
+what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change
+places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as
+he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and
+have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.”
+
+He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few
+minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the
+table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.
+
+
+
+
+V. The Jackal
+
+
+Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is
+the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate
+statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow
+in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a
+perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration.
+The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
+learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr.
+Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
+practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
+drier parts of the legal race.
+
+A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had
+begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which
+he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite,
+specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the
+visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench, the
+florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of
+the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from
+among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.
+
+It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib
+man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that
+faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is
+among the most striking and necessary of the advocate’s accomplishments.
+But, a remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more
+business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its
+pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney
+Carton, he always had his points at his fingers’ ends in the morning.
+
+Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver’s great
+ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas,
+might have floated a king’s ship. Stryver never had a case in hand,
+anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring
+at the ceiling of the court; they went the same Circuit, and even there
+they prolonged their usual orgies late into the night, and Carton was
+rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily
+to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about,
+among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton
+would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he
+rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.
+
+“Ten o’clock, sir,” said the man at the tavern, whom he had charged to
+wake him--“ten o’clock, sir.”
+
+“_What’s_ the matter?”
+
+“Ten o’clock, sir.”
+
+“What do you mean? Ten o’clock at night?”
+
+“Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.”
+
+“Oh! I remember. Very well, very well.”
+
+After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man
+dexterously combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes,
+he got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple,
+and, having revived himself by twice pacing the pavements of King’s
+Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into the Stryver chambers.
+
+The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone
+home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers on,
+and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He
+had that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which
+may be observed in all free livers of his class, from the portrait of
+Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises of
+Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.
+
+“You are a little late, Memory,” said Stryver.
+
+“About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.”
+
+They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with papers,
+where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in
+the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon
+it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.
+
+“You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.”
+
+“Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day’s client; or
+seeing him dine--it’s all one!”
+
+“That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
+identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?”
+
+“I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have
+been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck.”
+
+Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.
+
+“You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get to work.”
+
+Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining
+room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel
+or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them
+out, he folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down
+at the table, and said, “Now I am ready!”
+
+“Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory,” said Mr. Stryver,
+gaily, as he looked among his papers.
+
+“How much?”
+
+“Only two sets of them.”
+
+“Give me the worst first.”
+
+“There they are, Sydney. Fire away!”
+
+The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the
+drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table
+proper, on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses ready to
+his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table without stint, but each in
+a different way; the lion for the most part reclining with his hands in
+his waistband, looking at the fire, or occasionally flirting with some
+lighter document; the jackal, with knitted brows and intent face,
+so deep in his task, that his eyes did not even follow the hand he
+stretched out for his glass--which often groped about, for a minute or
+more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the
+matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on
+him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the
+jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as
+no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious
+gravity.
+
+At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and
+proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution,
+made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal
+assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his
+hands in his waistband again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then
+invigorated himself with a bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application
+to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a second meal;
+this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not
+disposed of until the clocks struck three in the morning.
+
+“And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said Mr.
+Stryver.
+
+The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming
+again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.
+
+“You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses
+to-day. Every question told.”
+
+“I always am sound; am I not?”
+
+“I don’t gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to
+it and smooth it again.”
+
+With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.
+
+“The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver, nodding
+his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, “the
+old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and
+now in despondency!”
+
+“Ah!” returned the other, sighing: “yes! The same Sydney, with the same
+luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.”
+
+“And why not?”
+
+“God knows. It was my way, I suppose.”
+
+He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before
+him, looking at the fire.
+
+“Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air,
+as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour
+was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney
+Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, “your way
+is, and always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look
+at me.”
+
+“Oh, botheration!” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more
+good-humoured laugh, “don’t _you_ be moral!”
+
+“How have I done what I have done?” said Stryver; “how do I do what I
+do?”
+
+“Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it’s not worth
+your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to
+do, you do. You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.”
+
+“I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?”
+
+“I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,” said
+Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.
+
+“Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,”
+ pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into
+mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of Paris,
+picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that we
+didn’t get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always
+nowhere.”
+
+“And whose fault was that?”
+
+“Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always
+driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless degree
+that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It’s a gloomy
+thing, however, to talk about one’s own past, with the day breaking.
+Turn me in some other direction before I go.”
+
+“Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, holding up
+his glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction?”
+
+Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.
+
+“Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. “I have had
+enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who’s your pretty witness?”
+
+“The picturesque doctor’s daughter, Miss Manette.”
+
+“_She_ pretty?”
+
+“Is she not?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!”
+
+“Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge
+of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!”
+
+“Do you know, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with sharp eyes,
+and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: “do you know, I rather
+thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired doll,
+and were quick to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?”
+
+“Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a
+yard or two of a man’s nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass.
+I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now I’ll have no more drink;
+I’ll get to bed.”
+
+When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light
+him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy
+windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the
+dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a
+lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round
+before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and
+the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city.
+
+Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still
+on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the
+wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and
+perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries
+from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the
+fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight.
+A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of
+houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its
+pillow was wet with wasted tears.
+
+Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of
+good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise,
+incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight
+on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
+
+
+
+
+VI. Hundreds of People
+
+
+The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not
+far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the
+waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried
+it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis
+Lorry walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived,
+on his way to dine with the Doctor. After several relapses into
+business-absorption, Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor’s friend, and the
+quiet street-corner was the sunny part of his life.
+
+On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in
+the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine
+Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie;
+secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed to be with
+them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of window, and
+generally getting through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have
+his own little shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the
+Doctor’s household pointed to that time as a likely time for solving
+them.
+
+A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be
+found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of
+the Doctor’s lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that
+had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then,
+north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers
+grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a
+consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom,
+instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a
+settlement; and there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which
+the peaches ripened in their season.
+
+The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part
+of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow,
+though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a
+glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful
+place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.
+
+There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and
+there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where
+several callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was
+audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them at night. In
+a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree
+rustled its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made, and silver
+to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant
+who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of the front hall--as if
+he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar conversion of all
+visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured
+to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have
+a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a stray
+workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered
+about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a
+thump from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions
+required to prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind
+the house, and the echoes in the corner before it, had their own way
+from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.
+
+Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and
+its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him.
+His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
+ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request, and
+he earned as much as he wanted.
+
+These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry’s knowledge, thoughts, and
+notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the corner,
+on the fine Sunday afternoon.
+
+“Doctor Manette at home?”
+
+Expected home.
+
+“Miss Lucie at home?”
+
+Expected home.
+
+“Miss Pross at home?”
+
+Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to
+anticipate intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the
+fact.
+
+“As I am at home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “I’ll go upstairs.”
+
+Although the Doctor’s daughter had known nothing of the country of her
+birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to
+make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most
+agreeable characteristics. Simple as the furniture was, it was set off
+by so many little adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy,
+that its effect was delightful. The disposition of everything in the
+rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours,
+the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by
+delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense; were at once so pleasant in
+themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that, as Mr. Lorry
+stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seemed to ask him,
+with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this
+time, whether he approved?
+
+There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they
+communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through them
+all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which
+he detected all around him, walked from one to another. The first was
+the best room, and in it were Lucie’s birds, and flowers, and books,
+and desk, and work-table, and box of water-colours; the second was
+the Doctor’s consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third,
+changingly speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the
+Doctor’s bedroom, and there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker’s
+bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the
+dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.
+
+“I wonder,” said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, “that he keeps
+that reminder of his sufferings about him!”
+
+“And why wonder at that?” was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.
+
+It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose
+acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and
+had since improved.
+
+“I should have thought--” Mr. Lorry began.
+
+“Pooh! You’d have thought!” said Miss Pross; and Mr. Lorry left off.
+
+“How do you do?” inquired that lady then--sharply, and yet as if to
+express that she bore him no malice.
+
+“I am pretty well, I thank you,” answered Mr. Lorry, with meekness; “how
+are you?”
+
+“Nothing to boast of,” said Miss Pross.
+
+“Indeed?”
+
+“Ah! indeed!” said Miss Pross. “I am very much put out about my
+Ladybird.”
+
+“Indeed?”
+
+“For gracious sake say something else besides ‘indeed,’ or you’ll
+fidget me to death,” said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from
+stature) was shortness.
+
+“Really, then?” said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.
+
+“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better. Yes, I am
+very much put out.”
+
+“May I ask the cause?”
+
+“I don’t want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of Ladybird, to
+come here looking after her,” said Miss Pross.
+
+“_Do_ dozens come for that purpose?”
+
+“Hundreds,” said Miss Pross.
+
+It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her
+time and since) that whenever her original proposition was questioned,
+she exaggerated it.
+
+“Dear me!” said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.
+
+“I have lived with the darling--or the darling has lived with me, and
+paid me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take
+your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her
+for nothing--since she was ten years old. And it’s really very hard,”
+ said Miss Pross.
+
+Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook his head;
+using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that would
+fit anything.
+
+“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet,
+are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it--”
+
+“_I_ began it, Miss Pross?”
+
+“Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?”
+
+“Oh! If _that_ was beginning it--” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“It wasn’t ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard
+enough; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except
+that he is not worthy of such a daughter, which is no imputation on
+him, for it was not to be expected that anybody should be, under any
+circumstances. But it really is doubly and trebly hard to have crowds
+and multitudes of people turning up after him (I could have forgiven
+him), to take Ladybird’s affections away from me.”
+
+Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by
+this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those
+unselfish creatures--found only among women--who will, for pure love and
+admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost
+it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were
+never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon
+their own sombre lives. He knew enough of the world to know that there
+is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart; so
+rendered and so free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted
+respect for it, that in the retributive arrangements made by his own
+mind--we all make such arrangements, more or less--he stationed Miss
+Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably
+better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at Tellson’s.
+
+“There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird,” said
+Miss Pross; “and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn’t made a
+mistake in life.”
+
+Here again: Mr. Lorry’s inquiries into Miss Pross’s personal history had
+established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless scoundrel
+who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to
+speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with
+no touch of compunction. Miss Pross’s fidelity of belief in Solomon
+(deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious
+matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his good opinion of her.
+
+“As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of
+business,” he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room and had
+sat down there in friendly relations, “let me ask you--does the Doctor,
+in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking time, yet?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?”
+
+“Ah!” returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. “But I don’t say he don’t
+refer to it within himself.”
+
+“Do you believe that he thinks of it much?”
+
+“I do,” said Miss Pross.
+
+“Do you imagine--” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up
+short with:
+
+“Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.”
+
+“I stand corrected; do you suppose--you go so far as to suppose,
+sometimes?”
+
+“Now and then,” said Miss Pross.
+
+“Do you suppose,” Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his
+bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, “that Doctor Manette has any
+theory of his own, preserved through all those years, relative to
+the cause of his being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of his
+oppressor?”
+
+“I don’t suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me.”
+
+“And that is--?”
+
+“That she thinks he has.”
+
+“Now don’t be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a
+mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business.”
+
+“Dull?” Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.
+
+Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, “No, no,
+no. Surely not. To return to business:--Is it not remarkable that Doctor
+Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are all well assured
+he is, should never touch upon that question? I will not say with me,
+though he had business relations with me many years ago, and we are now
+intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly
+attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me, Miss
+Pross, I don’t approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of
+zealous interest.”
+
+“Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad’s the best, you’ll tell
+me,” said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, “he is afraid
+of the whole subject.”
+
+“Afraid?”
+
+“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful
+remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not
+knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never
+feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the
+subject pleasant, I should think.”
+
+It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. “True,” said
+he, “and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my mind, Miss
+Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression
+always shut up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness
+it sometimes causes me that has led me to our present confidence.”
+
+“Can’t be helped,” said Miss Pross, shaking her head. “Touch that
+string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone.
+In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in
+the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking
+up and down, walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to
+know then that his mind is walking up and down, walking up and down, in
+his old prison. She hurries to him, and they go on together, walking up
+and down, walking up and down, until he is composed. But he never says
+a word of the true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it
+best not to hint at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down
+together, walking up and down together, till her love and company have
+brought him to himself.”
+
+Notwithstanding Miss Pross’s denial of her own imagination, there was a
+perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea,
+in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to
+her possessing such a thing.
+
+The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it
+had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it
+seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro had
+set it going.
+
+“Here they are!” said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference;
+“and now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!”
+
+It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a
+peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
+looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied
+they would never approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as though
+the steps had gone; but, echoes of other steps that never came would be
+heard in their stead, and would die away for good when they seemed close
+at hand. However, father and daughter did at last appear, and Miss Pross
+was ready at the street door to receive them.
+
+Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking
+off her darling’s bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up
+with the ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust off it, and
+folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing her rich hair with
+as much pride as she could possibly have taken in her own hair if she
+had been the vainest and handsomest of women. Her darling was a pleasant
+sight too, embracing her and thanking her, and protesting against
+her taking so much trouble for her--which last she only dared to do
+playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt, would have retired to her own
+chamber and cried. The Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on at
+them, and telling Miss Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with
+eyes that had as much spoiling in them as Miss Pross had, and would
+have had more if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a pleasant sight too,
+beaming at all this in his little wig, and thanking his bachelor
+stars for having lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But, no
+Hundreds of people came to see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain
+for the fulfilment of Miss Pross’s prediction.
+
+Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of
+the little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and
+always acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest
+quality, were so well cooked and so well served, and so neat in their
+contrivances, half English and half French, that nothing could be
+better. Miss Pross’s friendship being of the thoroughly practical
+kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent provinces, in search of
+impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and half-crowns, would
+impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons and daughters
+of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the woman and girl
+who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress,
+or Cinderella’s Godmother: who would send out for a fowl, a rabbit,
+a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into anything she
+pleased.
+
+On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor’s table, but on other days
+persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the lower
+regions, or in her own room on the second floor--a blue chamber, to
+which no one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion,
+Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird’s pleasant face and pleasant efforts
+to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was very pleasant, too.
+
+It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the
+wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit
+there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about her,
+they went out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for
+the special benefit of Mr. Lorry. She had installed herself, some
+time before, as Mr. Lorry’s cup-bearer; and while they sat under the
+plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass replenished. Mysterious backs
+and ends of houses peeped at them as they talked, and the plane-tree
+whispered to them in its own way above their heads.
+
+Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. Darnay
+presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he
+was only One.
+
+Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss Pross
+suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body, and
+retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this
+disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversation, “a fit of the
+jerks.”
+
+The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The
+resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and as
+they sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he resting
+his arm on the back of her chair, it was very agreeable to trace the
+likeness.
+
+He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual
+vivacity. “Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under the
+plane-tree--and he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand,
+which happened to be the old buildings of London--“have you seen much of
+the Tower?”
+
+“Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough of
+it, to know that it teems with interest; little more.”
+
+“_I_ have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a smile,
+though reddening a little angrily, “in another character, and not in a
+character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me a
+curious thing when I was there.”
+
+“What was that?” Lucie asked.
+
+“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon, which
+had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of
+its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by
+prisoners--dates, names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone
+in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to
+execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were done with
+some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand.
+At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully
+examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no record or
+legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses
+were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested
+that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The
+floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the
+earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found
+the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case
+or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he
+had written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler.”
+
+“My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill!”
+
+He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner and
+his look quite terrified them all.
+
+“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they
+made me start. We had better go in.”
+
+He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in large
+drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it. But, he
+said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had been told
+of, and, as they went into the house, the business eye of Mr. Lorry
+either detected, or fancied it detected, on his face, as it turned
+towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that had been upon it
+when it turned towards him in the passages of the Court House.
+
+He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had doubts of
+his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more
+steady than he was, when he stopped under it to remark to them that he
+was not yet proof against slight surprises (if he ever would be), and
+that the rain had startled him.
+
+Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon
+her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in, but he
+made only Two.
+
+The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and
+windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was
+done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the
+heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton
+leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of
+the thunder-gusts that whirled into the corner, caught them up to the
+ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.
+
+“The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said Doctor
+Manette. “It comes slowly.”
+
+“It comes surely,” said Carton.
+
+They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in a
+dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.
+
+There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to
+get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes
+resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a
+footstep was there.
+
+“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” said Darnay, when they had
+listened for a while.
+
+“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I have
+sat here of an evening, until I have fancied--but even the shade of
+a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and
+solemn--”
+
+“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”
+
+“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we
+originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have
+sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made
+the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming
+by-and-bye into our lives.”
+
+“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,”
+ Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
+
+The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more
+rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some,
+as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some
+coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in
+the distant streets, and not one within sight.
+
+“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or
+are we to divide them among us?”
+
+“I don’t know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you
+asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and
+then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come
+into my life, and my father’s.”
+
+“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “_I_ ask no questions and make no
+stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette,
+and I see them--by the Lightning.” He added the last words, after there
+had been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.
+
+“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder. “Here they
+come, fast, fierce, and furious!”
+
+It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him,
+for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and
+lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment’s
+interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at
+midnight.
+
+The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking one in the cleared air, when
+Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set
+forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were solitary patches
+of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful
+of foot-pads, always retained Jerry for this service: though it was
+usually performed a good two hours earlier.
+
+“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry, “to
+bring the dead out of their graves.”
+
+“I never see the night myself, master--nor yet I don’t expect to--what
+would do that,” answered Jerry.
+
+“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good night, Mr.
+Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”
+
+Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar,
+bearing down upon them, too.
+
+
+
+
+VII. Monseigneur in Town
+
+
+Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
+fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in
+his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to
+the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur
+was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
+things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather
+rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so
+much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four
+strong men besides the Cook.
+
+Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
+Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his
+pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to
+conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried
+the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed
+the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function;
+a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold
+watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to
+dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
+place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon
+his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three
+men; he must have died of two.
+
+Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy
+and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at
+a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so
+impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far
+more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and
+state secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance
+for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly
+favoured!--always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted
+days of the merry Stuart who sold it.
+
+Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
+was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
+business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go
+his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and
+particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world
+was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original
+by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: “The earth and the fulness
+thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.”
+
+Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into
+his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
+affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
+public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
+must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
+private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after
+generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
+Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet
+time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could
+wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
+poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with
+a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer
+rooms, much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior
+mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked
+down upon him with the loftiest contempt.
+
+A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
+stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
+waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
+forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial
+relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality
+among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.
+
+For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
+every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could
+achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any
+reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not
+so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost
+equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would
+have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have
+been anybody’s business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
+destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
+civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the
+worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives;
+all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in
+pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of
+Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which
+anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the
+score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State,
+yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives
+passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were
+no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
+for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly
+patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
+discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
+State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
+root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
+they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
+Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
+card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
+Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
+wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
+the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has been
+since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
+subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
+exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
+notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies
+among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half
+of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among
+the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and
+appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
+bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
+towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing
+known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
+and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
+supped as at twenty.
+
+The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
+upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional
+people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
+things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
+them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic
+sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
+whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the
+spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the
+Future, for Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
+three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
+jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of the
+Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got
+out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of
+the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre,
+by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
+discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never
+became manifest.
+
+But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
+Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been
+ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally
+correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such
+delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant
+swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would
+surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen
+of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they
+languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells;
+and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and
+fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and
+his devouring hunger far away.
+
+Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
+things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that
+was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through
+Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
+of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball
+descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm, was
+required to officiate “frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,
+and white silk stockings.” At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a
+rarity--Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother
+Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call
+him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at
+Monseigneur’s reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year
+of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled
+hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would
+see the very stars out!
+
+Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
+chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown
+open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and
+fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in
+body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have
+been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never
+troubled it.
+
+Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
+happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably
+passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of
+Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due
+course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate
+sprites, and was seen no more.
+
+The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,
+and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There was soon
+but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm
+and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his
+way out.
+
+“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,
+and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “to the Devil!”
+
+With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the
+dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.
+
+He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and
+with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every
+feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,
+beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top
+of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little
+change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing
+colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted
+by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of
+treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with
+attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the
+line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much
+too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a
+handsome face, and a remarkable one.
+
+Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and
+drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
+stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer
+in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable
+to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and
+often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were
+charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no
+check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had
+sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age,
+that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician
+custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a
+barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second
+time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were
+left to get out of their difficulties as they could.
+
+With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of
+consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage
+dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming
+before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of
+its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its
+wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a
+number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.
+
+But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
+stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded
+behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,
+and there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.
+
+“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
+
+A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of
+the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was
+down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
+
+“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is
+a child.”
+
+“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”
+
+“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes.”
+
+The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,
+into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly
+got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the
+Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
+
+“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at
+their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”
+
+The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was
+nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness
+and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the
+people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they
+remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat
+and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes
+over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.
+
+He took out his purse.
+
+“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care
+of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in
+the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give
+him that.”
+
+He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads
+craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The
+tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
+
+He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest
+made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,
+sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were
+stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They
+were as silent, however, as the men.
+
+“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my
+Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to
+live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour
+as happily?”
+
+“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. “How do
+they call you?”
+
+“They call me Defarge.”
+
+“Of what trade?”
+
+“Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.”
+
+“Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Marquis,
+throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses
+there; are they right?”
+
+Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the
+Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the
+air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had
+paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly
+disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.
+
+“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! Who threw that?”
+
+He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a
+moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on
+the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the
+figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.
+
+“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
+except as to the spots on his nose: “I would ride over any of you very
+willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal
+threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he
+should be crushed under the wheels.”
+
+So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of
+what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not
+a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.
+But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the
+Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his
+contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he
+leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word “Go on!”
+
+He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
+succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
+Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the
+whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats
+had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking
+on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the
+spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through
+which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and
+bidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle
+while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running
+of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who
+had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness
+of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran
+into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule,
+time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together
+in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all
+things ran their course.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. Monseigneur in the Country
+
+
+A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.
+Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas
+and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On
+inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent
+tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected
+disposition to give up, and wither away.
+
+Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
+lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up
+a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was
+no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was
+occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting
+sun.
+
+The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it
+gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. “It will
+die out,” said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, “directly.”
+
+In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the
+heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down
+hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed
+quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow
+left when the drag was taken off.
+
+But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village
+at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a
+church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a
+fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects
+as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was
+coming near home.
+
+The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor
+tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor
+fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All
+its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,
+shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the
+fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of
+the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor,
+were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax
+for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be
+paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until
+the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.
+
+Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,
+their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest
+terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill;
+or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.
+
+Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’
+whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as
+if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in
+his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the
+fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him.
+He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow
+sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
+meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the
+truth through the best part of a hundred years.
+
+Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that
+drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before
+Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was, that these faces
+drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender
+of the roads joined the group.
+
+“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.
+
+The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round
+to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.
+
+“I passed you on the road?”
+
+“Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.”
+
+“Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?”
+
+“Monseigneur, it is true.”
+
+“What did you look at, so fixedly?”
+
+“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.”
+
+He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
+carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.
+
+“What man, pig? And why look there?”
+
+“Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag.”
+
+“Who?” demanded the traveller.
+
+“Monseigneur, the man.”
+
+“May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You
+know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?”
+
+“Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of
+all the days of my life, I never saw him.”
+
+“Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?”
+
+“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.
+His head hanging over--like this!”
+
+He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his
+face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
+himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.
+
+“What was he like?”
+
+“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,
+white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!”
+
+The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all
+eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur
+the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his
+conscience.
+
+“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
+vermin were not to ruffle him, “to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
+and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur
+Gabelle!”
+
+Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary
+united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
+examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
+official manner.
+
+“Bah! Go aside!” said Monsieur Gabelle.
+
+“Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village
+to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.”
+
+“Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.”
+
+“Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?”
+
+The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen
+particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some
+half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and
+presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.
+
+“Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?”
+
+“Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as
+a person plunges into the river.”
+
+“See to it, Gabelle. Go on!”
+
+The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the
+wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky
+to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or
+they might not have been so fortunate.
+
+The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the
+rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually,
+it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many
+sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer
+gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the
+points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the
+courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.
+
+At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground,
+with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor
+figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had
+studied the figure from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was
+dreadfully spare and thin.
+
+To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been
+growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She
+turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and
+presented herself at the carriage-door.
+
+“It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition.”
+
+With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
+Monseigneur looked out.
+
+“How, then! What is it? Always petitions!”
+
+“Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.”
+
+“What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
+cannot pay something?”
+
+“He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.”
+
+“Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?”
+
+“Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
+grass.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?”
+
+“Again, well?”
+
+She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
+grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together
+with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door--tenderly,
+caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to
+feel the appealing touch.
+
+“Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of
+want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”
+
+“Again, well? Can I feed them?”
+
+“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is,
+that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name, may be placed
+over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly
+forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I
+shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they
+are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
+Monseigneur!”
+
+The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into
+a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far
+behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly
+diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and
+his chateau.
+
+The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
+the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group
+at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid
+of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his
+man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they
+could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled
+in little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more
+stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having
+been extinguished.
+
+The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging trees,
+was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged
+for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door
+of his chateau was opened to him.
+
+“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?”
+
+“Monseigneur, not yet.”
+
+
+
+
+IX. The Gorgon’s Head
+
+
+It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,
+with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of
+staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony
+business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and
+stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in
+all directions. As if the Gorgon’s head had surveyed it, when it was
+finished, two centuries ago.
+
+Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau
+preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness
+to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile
+of stable building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the
+flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great
+door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being
+in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none,
+save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of
+those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then
+heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.
+
+The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a
+hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;
+grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a
+peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord
+was angry.
+
+Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
+Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up
+the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him
+to his own private apartment of three rooms: his bed-chamber and two
+others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon
+the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries
+befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country.
+The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to
+break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;
+but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old
+pages in the history of France.
+
+A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round
+room, in one of the chateau’s four extinguisher-topped towers. A small
+lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds
+closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of
+black, alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.
+
+“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; “they
+said he was not arrived.”
+
+Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.
+
+“Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the
+table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”
+
+In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
+sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and
+he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his
+lips, when he put it down.
+
+“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the
+horizontal lines of black and stone colour.
+
+“Monseigneur? That?”
+
+“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”
+
+It was done.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are
+here.”
+
+The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into
+the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind him, looking round
+for instructions.
+
+“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”
+
+That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was
+half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand,
+hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the
+front of the chateau.
+
+“Ask who is arrived.”
+
+It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind
+Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
+rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road.
+He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.
+
+He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and
+there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.
+He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.
+
+Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake
+hands.
+
+“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he took his
+seat at table.
+
+“Yesterday. And you?”
+
+“I come direct.”
+
+“From London?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a smile.
+
+“On the contrary; I come direct.”
+
+“Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
+intending the journey.”
+
+“I have been detained by”--the nephew stopped a moment in his
+answer--“various business.”
+
+“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.
+
+So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.
+When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,
+looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a
+fine mask, opened a conversation.
+
+“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that
+took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is
+a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have
+sustained me.”
+
+“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to death.”
+
+“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried me to
+the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.”
+
+The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight
+lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a
+graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good
+breeding that it was not reassuring.
+
+“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you may have
+expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
+circumstances that surrounded me.”
+
+“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.
+
+“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at him with
+deep distrust, “I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
+and would know no scruple as to means.”
+
+“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the
+two marks. “Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago.”
+
+“I recall it.”
+
+“Thank you,” said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.
+
+His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical
+instrument.
+
+“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once your
+bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in
+France here.”
+
+“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his coffee.
+“Dare I ask you to explain?”
+
+“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and had not
+been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de cachet would
+have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”
+
+“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the honour
+of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent.
+Pray excuse me!”
+
+“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
+yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.
+
+“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with refined
+politeness; “I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
+consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence
+your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for
+yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say,
+at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle
+aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that
+might so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest
+and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted
+(comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such
+things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right
+of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such
+dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),
+one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing
+some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter? We have
+lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the
+assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as
+to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very
+bad!”
+
+The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head;
+as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still
+containing himself, that great means of regeneration.
+
+“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern
+time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe our name to be
+more detested than any name in France.”
+
+“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the
+involuntary homage of the low.”
+
+“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face I can
+look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any
+deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.”
+
+“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the family,
+merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
+Hah!” And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly
+crossed his legs.
+
+But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
+thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at
+him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness,
+and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer’s assumption of
+indifference.
+
+“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
+and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs
+obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts
+out the sky.”
+
+That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
+chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as
+they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to
+him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from
+the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof
+he vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new
+way--to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead
+was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.
+
+“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and repose
+of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we
+terminate our conference for the night?”
+
+“A moment more.”
+
+“An hour, if you please.”
+
+“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
+of wrong.”
+
+“_We_ have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
+and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.
+
+“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account
+to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father’s time, we did
+a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
+our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father’s time,
+when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint
+inheritor, and next successor, from himself?”
+
+“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.
+
+“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system that is
+frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to
+execute the last request of my dear mother’s lips, and obey the last
+look of my dear mother’s eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to
+redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.”
+
+“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis, touching him on the
+breast with his forefinger--they were now standing by the hearth--“you
+will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.”
+
+Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was
+cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking
+quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he
+touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine point of
+a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the
+body, and said,
+
+“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have
+lived.”
+
+When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
+box in his pocket.
+
+“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a small
+bell on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,
+Monsieur Charles, I see.”
+
+“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, sadly; “I
+renounce them.”
+
+“Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
+is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”
+
+“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed
+to me from you, to-morrow--”
+
+“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”
+
+“--or twenty years hence--”
+
+“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer that
+supposition.”
+
+“--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
+relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”
+
+“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.
+
+“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity,
+under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
+mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,
+and suffering.”
+
+“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.
+
+“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
+qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
+weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave
+it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in
+another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
+on it, and on all this land.”
+
+“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
+philosophy, graciously intend to live?”
+
+“I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
+their backs, may have to do some day--work.”
+
+“In England, for example?”
+
+“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The
+family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.”
+
+The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be
+lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The
+Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his
+valet.
+
+“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
+prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew
+with a smile.
+
+“I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may
+be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.”
+
+“They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You
+know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“With a daughter?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!”
+
+As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy
+in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,
+which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same
+time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin
+straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that
+looked handsomely diabolic.
+
+“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
+commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!”
+
+It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face
+outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew
+looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the door.
+
+“Good night!” said the uncle. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you
+again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his
+chamber there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,” he
+added to himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his
+valet to his own bedroom.
+
+The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his
+loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still
+night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no
+noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:--looked like some
+enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose
+periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just
+coming on.
+
+He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the
+scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow
+toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the
+prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at
+the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the
+chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,
+the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the
+tall man with his arms up, crying, “Dead!”
+
+“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to bed.”
+
+So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin
+gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence
+with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.
+
+The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night
+for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables
+rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with
+very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to
+the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures
+hardly ever to say what is set down for them.
+
+For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,
+stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,
+dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.
+The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass
+were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might
+have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village,
+taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as
+the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and
+the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and
+freed.
+
+The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain
+at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away, like the
+minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark
+hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light,
+and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.
+
+Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still
+trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water
+of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces
+crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the
+weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur
+the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might.
+At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open
+mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.
+
+Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement
+windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth
+shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely
+lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the
+fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men
+and women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows
+out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church
+and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter
+prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its
+foot.
+
+The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
+surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
+reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;
+now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked
+round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at
+doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs
+pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.
+
+All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the
+return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the
+chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried
+figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and
+everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?
+
+What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already
+at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day’s dinner (not
+much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow’s while to
+peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it
+to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or
+no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life,
+down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the
+fountain.
+
+All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about
+in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other
+emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought
+in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly
+on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their
+trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of
+the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and
+all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded
+on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way, that was
+highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated
+into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting
+himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend,
+and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind
+a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle
+(double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of
+the German ballad of Leonora?
+
+It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.
+
+The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added
+the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited
+through about two hundred years.
+
+It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine
+mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the
+heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt
+was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:
+
+“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.”
+
+
+
+
+X. Two Promises
+
+
+More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr. Charles
+Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French
+language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he
+would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with
+young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study of a
+living tongue spoken all over the world, and he cultivated a taste for
+its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides, in
+sound English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not
+at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were
+to be, were not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had
+dropped out of Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a
+tutor, whose attainments made the student’s way unusually pleasant and
+profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to his
+work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became
+known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over, with the
+circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing interest.
+So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.
+
+In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor
+to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he
+would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and
+did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.
+
+A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he
+read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a
+contraband trade in European languages, instead of conveying Greek
+and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time he passed in
+London.
+
+Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days
+when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has
+invariably gone one way--Charles Darnay’s way--the way of the love of a
+woman.
+
+He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never
+heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;
+he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was
+confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for
+him. But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination
+at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long,
+long, dusty roads--the solid stone chateau which had itself become the
+mere mist of a dream--had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so
+much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.
+
+That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a
+summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation,
+he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity
+of opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer
+day, and he knew Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.
+
+He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy
+which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated
+their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a
+very energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength
+of resolution, and vigour of action. In his recovered energy he was
+sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first been in the
+exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had never been
+frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.
+
+He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with
+ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at
+sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.
+
+“Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your
+return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were
+both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.”
+
+“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he answered,
+a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. “Miss
+Manette--”
+
+“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your return will
+delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will
+soon be home.”
+
+“Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her
+being from home, to beg to speak to you.”
+
+There was a blank silence.
+
+“Yes?” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “Bring your chair here,
+and speak on.”
+
+He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less
+easy.
+
+“I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,”
+ so he at length began, “for some year and a half, that I hope the topic
+on which I am about to touch may not--”
+
+He was stayed by the Doctor’s putting out his hand to stop him. When he
+had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:
+
+“Is Lucie the topic?”
+
+“She is.”
+
+“It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me
+to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.”
+
+“It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor
+Manette!” he said deferentially.
+
+There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:
+
+“I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.”
+
+His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
+originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles
+Darnay hesitated.
+
+“Shall I go on, sir?”
+
+Another blank.
+
+“Yes, go on.”
+
+“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly
+I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and
+the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been
+laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
+disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love
+her. You have loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!”
+
+The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the
+ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly,
+and cried:
+
+“Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!”
+
+His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles
+Darnay’s ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had
+extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter
+so received it, and remained silent.
+
+“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some
+moments. “I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.”
+
+He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or
+raise his eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair
+overshadowed his face:
+
+“Have you spoken to Lucie?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Nor written?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is
+to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks
+you.”
+
+He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.
+
+“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know, Doctor
+Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, that between
+you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so
+belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it
+can have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and
+child. I know, Doctor Manette--how can I fail to know--that, mingled
+with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there
+is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy
+itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is
+now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present
+years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the
+early days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if
+you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you could
+hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that
+in which you are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to
+you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your
+neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her mother at her
+own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,
+loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I
+have known this, night and day, since I have known you in your home.”
+
+Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a
+little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.
+
+“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you
+with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as
+long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even
+now feel, that to bring my love--even mine--between you, is to touch
+your history with something not quite so good as itself. But I love her.
+Heaven is my witness that I love her!”
+
+“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought so
+before now. I believe it.”
+
+“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice
+struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my fortune were so cast as
+that, being one day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time
+put any separation between her and you, I could or would breathe a
+word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I
+should know it to be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at
+a remote distance of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my
+heart--if it ever had been there--if it ever could be there--I could not
+now touch this honoured hand.”
+
+He laid his own upon it as he spoke.
+
+“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like
+you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like
+you, striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting
+in a happier future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your
+life and home, and being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide
+with Lucie her privilege as your child, companion, and friend; but to
+come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be.”
+
+His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the touch for a
+moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of
+his chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the
+conference. A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that
+occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.
+
+“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank
+you with all my heart, and will open all my heart--or nearly so. Have
+you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”
+
+“None. As yet, none.”
+
+“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once
+ascertain that, with my knowledge?”
+
+“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I
+might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.”
+
+“Do you seek any guidance from me?”
+
+“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it
+in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some.”
+
+“Do you seek any promise from me?”
+
+“I do seek that.”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well
+understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her
+innocent heart--do not think I have the presumption to assume so much--I
+could retain no place in it against her love for her father.”
+
+“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?”
+
+“I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor’s
+favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason,
+Doctor Manette,” said Darnay, modestly but firmly, “I would not ask that
+word, to save my life.”
+
+“I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as
+well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and
+delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one
+respect, such a mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her
+heart.”
+
+“May I ask, sir, if you think she is--” As he hesitated, her father
+supplied the rest.
+
+“Is sought by any other suitor?”
+
+“It is what I meant to say.”
+
+Her father considered a little before he answered:
+
+“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here too,
+occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.”
+
+“Or both,” said Darnay.
+
+“I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want
+a promise from me. Tell me what it is.”
+
+“It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own
+part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will
+bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you
+may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against
+me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The
+condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to
+require, I will observe immediately.”
+
+“I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I believe
+your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I
+believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties
+between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me
+that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you.
+If there were--Charles Darnay, if there were--”
+
+The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as
+the Doctor spoke:
+
+“--any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever,
+new or old, against the man she really loved--the direct responsibility
+thereof not lying on his head--they should all be obliterated for her
+sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me
+than wrong, more to me--Well! This is idle talk.”
+
+So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange
+his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own
+hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.
+
+“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile.
+“What was it you said to me?”
+
+He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
+condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:
+
+“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my
+part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother’s, is
+not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and
+why I am in England.”
+
+“Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.
+
+“I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no
+secret from you.”
+
+“Stop!”
+
+For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for
+another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips.
+
+“Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie
+should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you
+promise?”
+
+“Willingly.
+
+“Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she
+should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!”
+
+It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and
+darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone--for
+Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs--and was surprised to find his
+reading-chair empty.
+
+“My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”
+
+Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
+bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at
+his door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her
+blood all chilled, “What shall I do! What shall I do!”
+
+Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at
+his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of
+her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down
+together for a long time.
+
+She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He
+slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished
+work, were all as usual.
+
+
+
+
+XI. A Companion Picture
+
+
+“Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his
+jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.”
+
+Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before,
+and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making
+a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver’s papers before the setting in
+of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver
+arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until
+November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and
+bring grist to the mill again.
+
+Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
+application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
+through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded
+the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled
+his turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at
+intervals for the last six hours.
+
+“Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the portly, with
+his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on
+his back.
+
+“I am.”
+
+“Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather
+surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as
+shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”
+
+“_Do_ you?”
+
+“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”
+
+“I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”
+
+“Guess.”
+
+“Do I know her?”
+
+“Guess.”
+
+“I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with my brains
+frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask
+me to dinner.”
+
+“Well then, I’ll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
+posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
+because you are such an insensible dog.”
+
+“And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are such a
+sensitive and poetical spirit--”
+
+“Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don’t prefer
+any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still
+I am a tenderer sort of fellow than _you_.”
+
+“You are a luckier, if you mean that.”
+
+“I don’t mean that. I mean I am a man of more--more--”
+
+“Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.
+
+“Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said Stryver,
+inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, “who cares more to
+be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how
+to be agreeable, in a woman’s society, than you do.”
+
+“Go on,” said Sydney Carton.
+
+“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying
+way, “I’ll have this out with you. You’ve been at Doctor Manette’s house
+as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your
+moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and
+hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you,
+Sydney!”
+
+“It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to
+be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to be much obliged
+to me.”
+
+“You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
+rejoinder at him; “no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you--and I tell you
+to your face to do you good--that you are a devilish ill-conditioned
+fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.”
+
+Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.
+
+“Look at me!” said Stryver, squaring himself; “I have less need to make
+myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
+Why do I do it?”
+
+“I never saw you do it yet,” muttered Carton.
+
+“I do it because it’s politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I
+get on.”
+
+“You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions,”
+ answered Carton, with a careless air; “I wish you would keep to that. As
+to me--will you never understand that I am incorrigible?”
+
+He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.
+
+“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend’s answer,
+delivered in no very soothing tone.
+
+“I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney Carton.
+“Who is the lady?”
+
+“Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable,
+Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness
+for the disclosure he was about to make, “because I know you don’t mean
+half you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I
+make this little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to
+me in slighting terms.”
+
+“I did?”
+
+“Certainly; and in these chambers.”
+
+Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend;
+drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend.
+
+“You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young
+lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or
+delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a
+little resentful of your employing such a designation; but you are not.
+You want that sense altogether; therefore I am no more annoyed when I
+think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of
+a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music
+of mine, who had no ear for music.”
+
+Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers,
+looking at his friend.
+
+“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don’t care about
+fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to
+please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She
+will have in me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man,
+and a man of some distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her,
+but she is worthy of good fortune. Are you astonished?”
+
+Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be
+astonished?”
+
+“You approve?”
+
+Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I not approve?”
+
+“Well!” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than I fancied
+you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would
+be; though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your
+ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had
+enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I
+feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels
+inclined to go to it (when he doesn’t, he can stay away), and I feel
+that Miss Manette will tell well in any station, and will always do me
+credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to
+say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad way, you
+know; you really are in a bad way. You don’t know the value of money,
+you live hard, you’ll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor;
+you really ought to think about a nurse.”
+
+The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as
+big as he was, and four times as offensive.
+
+“Now, let me recommend you,” pursued Stryver, “to look it in the face.
+I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face,
+you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of
+you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women’s society, nor
+understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some
+respectable woman with a little property--somebody in the landlady way,
+or lodging-letting way--and marry her, against a rainy day. That’s the
+kind of thing for _you_. Now think of it, Sydney.”
+
+“I’ll think of it,” said Sydney.
+
+
+
+
+XII. The Fellow of Delicacy
+
+
+Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
+fortune on the Doctor’s daughter, resolved to make her happiness known
+to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental
+debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as
+well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange
+at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
+before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it
+and Hilary.
+
+As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly
+saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly
+grounds--the only grounds ever worth taking into account--it was a
+plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the
+plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for
+the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to
+consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer
+case could be.
+
+Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
+proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
+Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present
+himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.
+
+Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple,
+while the bloom of the Long Vacation’s infancy was still upon it.
+Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
+on Saint Dunstan’s side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way
+along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have
+seen how safe and strong he was.
+
+His way taking him past Tellson’s, and he both banking at Tellson’s and
+knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
+Stryver’s mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness
+of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle
+in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
+cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr.
+Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron
+bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything
+under the clouds were a sum.
+
+“Halloa!” said Mr. Stryver. “How do you do? I hope you are well!”
+
+It was Stryver’s grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
+place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson’s, that old clerks
+in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
+squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading
+the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if
+the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.
+
+The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
+recommend under the circumstances, “How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How do
+you do, sir?” and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner
+of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson’s who shook
+hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a
+self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.
+
+“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?” asked Mr. Lorry, in his
+business character.
+
+“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I
+have come for a private word.”
+
+“Oh indeed!” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
+to the House afar off.
+
+“I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
+desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to
+be not half desk enough for him: “I am going to make an offer of myself
+in marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.”
+
+“Oh dear me!” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
+visitor dubiously.
+
+“Oh dear me, sir?” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “Oh dear you, sir?
+What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?”
+
+“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, friendly and
+appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and--in short,
+my meaning is everything you could desire. But--really, you know, Mr.
+Stryver--” Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest
+manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
+“you know there really is so much too much of you!”
+
+“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
+opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “if I understand you,
+Mr. Lorry, I’ll be hanged!”
+
+Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that
+end, and bit the feather of a pen.
+
+“D--n it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?”
+
+“Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible!” said Mr. Lorry. “If you say
+eligible, you are eligible.”
+
+“Am I not prosperous?” asked Stryver.
+
+“Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“And advancing?”
+
+“If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
+able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.”
+
+“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?” demanded Stryver,
+perceptibly crestfallen.
+
+“Well! I--Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry.
+
+“Straight!” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.
+
+“Then I think I wouldn’t, if I was you.”
+
+“Why?” said Stryver. “Now, I’ll put you in a corner,” forensically
+shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business and bound to
+have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn’t you go?”
+
+“Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “I wouldn’t go on such an object without
+having some cause to believe that I should succeed.”
+
+“D--n _me_!” cried Stryver, “but this beats everything.”
+
+Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry
+Stryver.
+
+“Here’s a man of business--a man of years--a man of experience--_in_
+a Bank,” said Stryver; “and having summed up three leading reasons for
+complete success, he says there’s no reason at all! Says it with his
+head on!” Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have
+been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.
+
+“When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
+when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
+causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
+lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the
+young lady. The young lady goes before all.”
+
+“Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring his
+elbows, “that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at
+present in question is a mincing Fool?”
+
+“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. Lorry,
+reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady
+from any lips; and that if I knew any man--which I hope I do not--whose
+taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could
+not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at
+this desk, not even Tellson’s should prevent my giving him a piece of my
+mind.”
+
+The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver’s
+blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry;
+Mr. Lorry’s veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in
+no better state now it was his turn.
+
+“That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray let there
+be no mistake about it.”
+
+Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
+hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
+toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:
+
+“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
+to go up to Soho and offer myself--_my_self, Stryver of the King’s Bench
+bar?”
+
+“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?”
+
+“Yes, I do.”
+
+“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.”
+
+“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, “that
+this--ha, ha!--beats everything past, present, and to come.”
+
+“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of business, I am
+not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of
+business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried
+Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and
+of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have
+spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I
+may not be right?”
+
+“Not I!” said Stryver, whistling. “I can’t undertake to find third
+parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense
+in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It’s
+new to me, but you are right, I dare say.”
+
+“What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself--And
+understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, “I
+will not--not even at Tellson’s--have it characterised for me by any
+gentleman breathing.”
+
+“There! I beg your pardon!” said Stryver.
+
+“Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:--it might be
+painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
+Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
+painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You
+know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with
+the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you
+in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a
+little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon
+it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its
+soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied
+with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is
+best spared. What do you say?”
+
+“How long would you keep me in town?”
+
+“Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
+evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.”
+
+“Then I say yes,” said Stryver: “I won’t go up there now, I am not so
+hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look
+in to-night. Good morning.”
+
+Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
+concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it
+bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength
+of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were
+always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly
+believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in
+the empty office until they bowed another customer in.
+
+The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
+gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than
+moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to
+swallow, he got it down. “And now,” said Mr. Stryver, shaking his
+forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, “my way
+out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong.”
+
+It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found
+great relief. “You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,” said Mr.
+Stryver; “I’ll do that for you.”
+
+Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o’clock,
+Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the
+purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of
+the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was
+altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.
+
+“Well!” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of
+bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. “I have been to
+Soho.”
+
+“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! What am I
+thinking of!”
+
+“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in the
+conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my
+advice.”
+
+“I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, “that I
+am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father’s
+account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let
+us say no more about it.”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
+final way; “no matter, no matter.”
+
+“But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged.
+
+“No it doesn’t; I assure you it doesn’t. Having supposed that there was
+sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is
+not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is
+done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
+repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
+aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been
+a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am
+glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
+for me in a worldly point of view--it is hardly necessary to say I could
+have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not
+proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means
+certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
+that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and
+giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
+will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you,
+I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account.
+And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you,
+and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do;
+you were right, it never would have done.”
+
+Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
+Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of
+showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head.
+“Make the best of it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no more about it;
+thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!”
+
+Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver
+was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy
+
+
+If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the
+house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year,
+and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he
+cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing,
+which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely
+pierced by the light within him.
+
+And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house,
+and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night
+he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no
+transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary
+figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams
+of the sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture
+in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time
+brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable,
+into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known
+him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon
+it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that
+neighbourhood.
+
+On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal
+that “he had thought better of that marrying matter”) had carried his
+delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the
+City streets had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health
+for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney’s feet still trod
+those stones. From being irresolute and purposeless, his feet became
+animated by an intention, and, in the working out of that intention,
+they took him to the Doctor’s door.
+
+He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had
+never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little
+embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at
+his face in the interchange of the first few common-places, she observed
+a change in it.
+
+“I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!”
+
+“No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What
+is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?”
+
+“Is it not--forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips--a pity to
+live no better life?”
+
+“God knows it is a shame!”
+
+“Then why not change it?”
+
+Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that
+there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he
+answered:
+
+“It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall
+sink lower, and be worse.”
+
+He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The
+table trembled in the silence that followed.
+
+She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her to
+be so, without looking at her, and said:
+
+“Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of
+what I want to say to you. Will you hear me?”
+
+“If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it would make you happier,
+it would make me very glad!”
+
+“God bless you for your sweet compassion!”
+
+He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.
+
+“Don’t be afraid to hear me. Don’t shrink from anything I say. I am like
+one who died young. All my life might have been.”
+
+“No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am
+sure that you might be much, much worthier of yourself.”
+
+“Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better--although in the
+mystery of my own wretched heart I know better--I shall never forget
+it!”
+
+She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair
+of himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have
+been holden.
+
+“If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the
+love of the man you see before yourself--flung away, wasted, drunken,
+poor creature of misuse as you know him to be--he would have been
+conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would
+bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you,
+disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have
+no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot
+be.”
+
+“Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton? Can I not recall
+you--forgive me again!--to a better course? Can I in no way repay your
+confidence? I know this is a confidence,” she modestly said, after a
+little hesitation, and in earnest tears, “I know you would say this to
+no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr. Carton?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very
+little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that
+you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not
+been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this
+home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had
+died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that
+I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from
+old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I
+have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off
+sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all
+a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down,
+but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
+
+“Will nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!”
+
+“No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
+undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the
+weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me,
+heap of ashes that I am, into fire--a fire, however, inseparable in
+its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no
+service, idly burning away.”
+
+“Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more unhappy
+than you were before you knew me--”
+
+“Don’t say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if
+anything could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.”
+
+“Since the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events,
+attributable to some influence of mine--this is what I mean, if I can
+make it plain--can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for
+good, with you, at all?”
+
+“The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come
+here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life,
+the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world;
+and that there was something left in me at this time which you could
+deplore and pity.”
+
+“Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with
+all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!”
+
+“Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself,
+and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let
+me believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life
+was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there
+alone, and will be shared by no one?”
+
+“If that will be a consolation to you, yes.”
+
+“Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?”
+
+“Mr. Carton,” she answered, after an agitated pause, “the secret is
+yours, not mine; and I promise to respect it.”
+
+“Thank you. And again, God bless you.”
+
+He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.
+
+“Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this
+conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it
+again. If I were dead, that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In
+the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance--and
+shall thank and bless you for it--that my last avowal of myself was made
+to you, and that my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried
+in your heart. May it otherwise be light and happy!”
+
+He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so
+sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept
+down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he
+stood looking back at her.
+
+“Be comforted!” he said, “I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An
+hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn
+but yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any
+wretch who creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I
+shall always be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be
+what you have heretofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make
+to you, is, that you will believe this of me.”
+
+“I will, Mr. Carton.”
+
+“My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve
+you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and
+between whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say
+it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to
+you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that
+there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would
+embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold
+me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one
+thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new
+ties will be formed about you--ties that will bind you yet more tenderly
+and strongly to the home you so adorn--the dearest ties that will ever
+grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a
+happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright
+beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is
+a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”
+
+He said, “Farewell!” said a last “God bless you!” and left her.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. The Honest Tradesman
+
+
+To the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in
+Fleet-street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and
+variety of objects in movement were every day presented. Who could sit
+upon anything in Fleet-street during the busy hours of the day, and
+not be dazed and deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending
+westward with the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun,
+both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red and purple where
+the sun goes down!
+
+With his straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two streams,
+like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty
+watching one stream--saving that Jerry had no expectation of their ever
+running dry. Nor would it have been an expectation of a hopeful kind,
+since a small part of his income was derived from the pilotage of timid
+women (mostly of a full habit and past the middle term of life) from
+Tellson’s side of the tides to the opposite shore. Brief as such
+companionship was in every separate instance, Mr. Cruncher never failed
+to become so interested in the lady as to express a strong desire to
+have the honour of drinking her very good health. And it was from
+the gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this benevolent
+purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed.
+
+Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in
+the sight of men. Mr. Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a public place,
+but not being a poet, mused as little as possible, and looked about him.
+
+It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds were
+few, and belated women few, and when his affairs in general were so
+unprosperous as to awaken a strong suspicion in his breast that Mrs.
+Cruncher must have been “flopping” in some pointed manner, when an
+unusual concourse pouring down Fleet-street westward, attracted his
+attention. Looking that way, Mr. Cruncher made out that some kind of
+funeral was coming along, and that there was popular objection to this
+funeral, which engendered uproar.
+
+“Young Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his offspring, “it’s a
+buryin’.”
+
+“Hooroar, father!” cried Young Jerry.
+
+The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysterious
+significance. The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he watched
+his opportunity, and smote the young gentleman on the ear.
+
+“What d’ye mean? What are you hooroaring at? What do you want to conwey
+to your own father, you young Rip? This boy is a getting too many for
+_me_!” said Mr. Cruncher, surveying him. “Him and his hooroars! Don’t
+let me hear no more of you, or you shall feel some more of me. D’ye
+hear?”
+
+“I warn’t doing no harm,” Young Jerry protested, rubbing his cheek.
+
+“Drop it then,” said Mr. Cruncher; “I won’t have none of _your_ no
+harms. Get a top of that there seat, and look at the crowd.”
+
+His son obeyed, and the crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing
+round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach
+there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were
+considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position
+appeared by no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble
+surrounding the coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and
+incessantly groaning and calling out: “Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!”
+ with many compliments too numerous and forcible to repeat.
+
+Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. Cruncher; he
+always pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed
+Tellson’s. Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance
+excited him greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:
+
+“What is it, brother? What’s it about?”
+
+“_I_ don’t know,” said the man. “Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!”
+
+He asked another man. “Who is it?”
+
+“_I_ don’t know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth
+nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the
+greatest ardour, “Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi--ies!”
+
+At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled
+against him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the
+funeral of one Roger Cly.
+
+“Was he a spy?” asked Mr. Cruncher.
+
+“Old Bailey spy,” returned his informant. “Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey
+Spi--i--ies!”
+
+“Why, to be sure!” exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had
+assisted. “I’ve seen him. Dead, is he?”
+
+“Dead as mutton,” returned the other, “and can’t be too dead. Have ‘em
+out, there! Spies! Pull ‘em out, there! Spies!”
+
+The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea,
+that the crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the
+suggestion to have ‘em out, and to pull ‘em out, mobbed the two vehicles
+so closely that they came to a stop. On the crowd’s opening the coach
+doors, the one mourner scuffled out by himself and was in their hands
+for a moment; but he was so alert, and made such good use of his time,
+that in another moment he was scouring away up a bye-street, after
+shedding his cloak, hat, long hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and
+other symbolical tears.
+
+These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great
+enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a
+crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded.
+They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin
+out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to
+its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being
+much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and
+the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out,
+while as many people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any
+exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers
+was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head from
+the observation of Tellson’s, in the further corner of the mourning
+coach.
+
+The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in
+the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices
+remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory
+members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief.
+The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the
+hearse--advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under
+close inspection, for the purpose--and with a pieman, also attended
+by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a
+popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional
+ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his
+bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to
+that part of the procession in which he walked.
+
+Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite
+caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting
+at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination
+was the old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there
+in course of time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally,
+accomplished the interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and
+highly to its own satisfaction.
+
+The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of
+providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter
+genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual
+passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase
+was given to some scores of inoffensive persons who had never been near
+the Old Bailey in their lives, in the realisation of this fancy, and
+they were roughly hustled and maltreated. The transition to the sport of
+window-breaking, and thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy
+and natural. At last, after several hours, when sundry summer-houses had
+been pulled down, and some area-railings had been torn up, to arm
+the more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the Guards were
+coming. Before this rumour, the crowd gradually melted away, and perhaps
+the Guards came, and perhaps they never came, and this was the usual
+progress of a mob.
+
+Mr. Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had remained
+behind in the churchyard, to confer and condole with the undertakers.
+The place had a soothing influence on him. He procured a pipe from a
+neighbouring public-house, and smoked it, looking in at the railings and
+maturely considering the spot.
+
+“Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual way,
+“you see that there Cly that day, and you see with your own eyes that he
+was a young ‘un and a straight made ‘un.”
+
+Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he turned
+himself about, that he might appear, before the hour of closing, on his
+station at Tellson’s. Whether his meditations on mortality had touched
+his liver, or whether his general health had been previously at all
+amiss, or whether he desired to show a little attention to an eminent
+man, is not so much to the purpose, as that he made a short call upon
+his medical adviser--a distinguished surgeon--on his way back.
+
+Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported No
+job in his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came out, the
+usual watch was set, and Mr. Cruncher and his son went home to tea.
+
+“Now, I tell you where it is!” said Mr. Cruncher to his wife, on
+entering. “If, as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes wrong to-night, I
+shall make sure that you’ve been praying again me, and I shall work you
+for it just the same as if I seen you do it.”
+
+The dejected Mrs. Cruncher shook her head.
+
+“Why, you’re at it afore my face!” said Mr. Cruncher, with signs of
+angry apprehension.
+
+“I am saying nothing.”
+
+“Well, then; don’t meditate nothing. You might as well flop as meditate.
+You may as well go again me one way as another. Drop it altogether.”
+
+“Yes, Jerry.”
+
+“Yes, Jerry,” repeated Mr. Cruncher sitting down to tea. “Ah! It _is_
+yes, Jerry. That’s about it. You may say yes, Jerry.”
+
+Mr. Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corroborations,
+but made use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to express general
+ironical dissatisfaction.
+
+“You and your yes, Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, taking a bite out of his
+bread-and-butter, and seeming to help it down with a large invisible
+oyster out of his saucer. “Ah! I think so. I believe you.”
+
+“You are going out to-night?” asked his decent wife, when he took
+another bite.
+
+“Yes, I am.”
+
+“May I go with you, father?” asked his son, briskly.
+
+“No, you mayn’t. I’m a going--as your mother knows--a fishing. That’s
+where I’m going to. Going a fishing.”
+
+“Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don’t it, father?”
+
+“Never you mind.”
+
+“Shall you bring any fish home, father?”
+
+“If I don’t, you’ll have short commons, to-morrow,” returned that
+gentleman, shaking his head; “that’s questions enough for you; I ain’t a
+going out, till you’ve been long abed.”
+
+He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to keeping a
+most vigilant watch on Mrs. Cruncher, and sullenly holding her in
+conversation that she might be prevented from meditating any petitions
+to his disadvantage. With this view, he urged his son to hold her in
+conversation also, and led the unfortunate woman a hard life by dwelling
+on any causes of complaint he could bring against her, rather than
+he would leave her for a moment to her own reflections. The devoutest
+person could have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an
+honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a
+professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story.
+
+“And mind you!” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games to-morrow! If I, as a
+honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two, none
+of your not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a honest
+tradesman, am able to provide a little beer, none of your declaring
+on water. When you go to Rome, do as Rome does. Rome will be a ugly
+customer to you, if you don’t. _I_‘m your Rome, you know.”
+
+Then he began grumbling again:
+
+“With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don’t
+know how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink here, by your
+flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he _is_
+your’n, ain’t he? He’s as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother,
+and not know that a mother’s first duty is to blow her boy out?”
+
+This touched Young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his mother to
+perform her first duty, and, whatever else she did or neglected, above
+all things to lay especial stress on the discharge of that maternal
+function so affectingly and delicately indicated by his other parent.
+
+Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry
+was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar injunctions,
+obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with
+solitary pipes, and did not start upon his excursion until nearly one
+o’clock. Towards that small and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair,
+took a key out of his pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought
+forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other
+fishing tackle of that nature. Disposing these articles about him
+in skilful manner, he bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher,
+extinguished the light, and went out.
+
+Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to
+bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he
+followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the
+court, followed out into the streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning
+his getting into the house again, for it was full of lodgers, and the
+door stood ajar all night.
+
+Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his
+father’s honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts,
+walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his
+honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not
+gone far, when he was joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and
+the two trudged on together.
+
+Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the
+winking lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a
+lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up here--and that so silently,
+that if Young Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the
+second follower of the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split
+himself into two.
+
+The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped
+under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low
+brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and
+wall the three turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which
+the wall--there, risen to some eight or ten feet high--formed one side.
+Crouching down in a corner, peeping up the lane, the next object that
+Young Jerry saw, was the form of his honoured parent, pretty well
+defined against a watery and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate.
+He was soon over, and then the second fisherman got over, and then the
+third. They all dropped softly on the ground within the gate, and lay
+there a little--listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on their hands
+and knees.
+
+It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate: which he did,
+holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking
+in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass!
+and all the gravestones in the churchyard--it was a large churchyard
+that they were in--looking on like ghosts in white, while the church
+tower itself looked on like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not
+creep far, before they stopped and stood upright. And then they began to
+fish.
+
+They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent
+appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew.
+Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard, until the awful
+striking of the church clock so terrified Young Jerry, that he made off,
+with his hair as stiff as his father’s.
+
+But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not
+only stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They
+were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for
+the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a
+screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were
+strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the
+earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what
+it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to
+wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he
+made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.
+
+He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath,
+it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable
+to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen
+was running after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt
+upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him
+and hopping on at his side--perhaps taking his arm--it was a pursuer to
+shun. It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it
+was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the
+roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them
+like a dropsical boy’s kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways
+too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up
+to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road,
+and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was
+incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy
+got to his own door he had reason for being half dead. And even then
+it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs with a bump on every
+stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on
+his breast when he fell asleep.
+
+From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was awakened after
+daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his father in the
+family room. Something had gone wrong with him; at least, so Young Jerry
+inferred, from the circumstance of his holding Mrs. Cruncher by the
+ears, and knocking the back of her head against the head-board of the
+bed.
+
+“I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.”
+
+“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” his wife implored.
+
+“You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry, “and me
+and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey; why the devil don’t
+you?”
+
+“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, with tears.
+
+“Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business? Is it
+honouring your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying your
+husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his business?”
+
+“You hadn’t taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.”
+
+“It’s enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife of a
+honest tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations
+when he took to his trade or when he didn’t. A honouring and obeying
+wife would let his trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious
+woman? If you’re a religious woman, give me a irreligious one! You have
+no more nat’ral sense of duty than the bed of this here Thames river has
+of a pile, and similarly it must be knocked into you.”
+
+The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and terminated in
+the honest tradesman’s kicking off his clay-soiled boots, and lying down
+at his length on the floor. After taking a timid peep at him lying on
+his back, with his rusty hands under his head for a pillow, his son lay
+down too, and fell asleep again.
+
+There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. Mr.
+Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an iron pot-lid
+by him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs. Cruncher, in case
+he should observe any symptoms of her saying Grace. He was brushed
+and washed at the usual hour, and set off with his son to pursue his
+ostensible calling.
+
+Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father’s side
+along sunny and crowded Fleet-street, was a very different Young Jerry
+from him of the previous night, running home through darkness and
+solitude from his grim pursuer. His cunning was fresh with the day,
+and his qualms were gone with the night--in which particulars it is not
+improbable that he had compeers in Fleet-street and the City of London,
+that fine morning.
+
+“Father,” said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to keep
+at arm’s length and to have the stool well between them: “what’s a
+Resurrection-Man?”
+
+Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he answered, “How
+should I know?”
+
+“I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy.
+
+“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and lifting off his
+hat to give his spikes free play, “he’s a tradesman.”
+
+“What’s his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry.
+
+“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his mind, “is a
+branch of Scientific goods.”
+
+“Persons’ bodies, ain’t it, father?” asked the lively boy.
+
+“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher.
+
+“Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I’m quite
+growed up!”
+
+Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and moral way.
+“It depends upon how you dewelop your talents. Be careful to dewelop
+your talents, and never to say no more than you can help to nobody, and
+there’s no telling at the present time what you may not come to be fit
+for.” As Young Jerry, thus encouraged, went on a few yards in advance,
+to plant the stool in the shadow of the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to
+himself: “Jerry, you honest tradesman, there’s hopes wot that boy will
+yet be a blessing to you, and a recompense to you for his mother!”
+
+
+
+
+XV. Knitting
+
+
+There had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of Monsieur
+Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the morning, sallow faces peeping
+through its barred windows had descried other faces within, bending over
+measures of wine. Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best
+of times, but it would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that
+he sold at this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its
+influence on the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No
+vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur
+Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in
+the dregs of it.
+
+This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been
+early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It had begun
+on Monday, and here was Wednesday come. There had been more of early
+brooding than drinking; for, many men had listened and whispered and
+slunk about there from the time of the opening of the door, who could
+not have laid a piece of money on the counter to save their souls. These
+were to the full as interested in the place, however, as if they could
+have commanded whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat,
+and from corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy
+looks.
+
+Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the wine-shop
+was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who crossed the
+threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him, nobody wondered to see
+only Madame Defarge in her seat, presiding over the distribution of
+wine, with a bowl of battered small coins before her, as much defaced
+and beaten out of their original impress as the small coinage of
+humanity from whose ragged pockets they had come.
+
+A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were perhaps
+observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as they looked in
+at every place, high and low, from the king’s palace to the criminal’s
+gaol. Games at cards languished, players at dominoes musingly built
+towers with them, drinkers drew figures on the tables with spilt drops
+of wine, Madame Defarge herself picked out the pattern on her sleeve
+with her toothpick, and saw and heard something inaudible and invisible
+a long way off.
+
+Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday. It was
+high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his streets and under
+his swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur Defarge: the other a
+mender of roads in a blue cap. All adust and athirst, the two entered
+the wine-shop. Their arrival had lighted a kind of fire in the breast
+of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as they came along, which stirred and
+flickered in flames of faces at most doors and windows. Yet, no one had
+followed them, and no man spoke when they entered the wine-shop, though
+the eyes of every man there were turned upon them.
+
+“Good day, gentlemen!” said Monsieur Defarge.
+
+It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited
+an answering chorus of “Good day!”
+
+“It is bad weather, gentlemen,” said Defarge, shaking his head.
+
+Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down
+their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.
+
+“My wife,” said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge: “I have
+travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called
+Jacques. I met him--by accident--a day and half’s journey out of Paris.
+He is a good child, this mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to
+drink, my wife!”
+
+A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the
+mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company,
+and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried some coarse dark
+bread; he ate of this between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near
+Madame Defarge’s counter. A third man got up and went out.
+
+Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine--but, he took less
+than was given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no
+rarity--and stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast.
+He looked at no one present, and no one now looked at him; not even
+Madame Defarge, who had taken up her knitting, and was at work.
+
+“Have you finished your repast, friend?” he asked, in due season.
+
+“Yes, thank you.”
+
+“Come, then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could
+occupy. It will suit you to a marvel.”
+
+Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a
+courtyard, out of the courtyard up a steep staircase, out of the
+staircase into a garret--formerly the garret where a white-haired man
+sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.
+
+No white-haired man was there now; but, the three men were there who had
+gone out of the wine-shop singly. And between them and the white-haired
+man afar off, was the one small link, that they had once looked in at
+him through the chinks in the wall.
+
+Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice:
+
+“Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness
+encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all.
+Speak, Jacques Five!”
+
+The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with
+it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?”
+
+“Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge’s not unreasonable reply, “at the
+commencement.”
+
+“I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this
+running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the
+chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun
+going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he
+hanging by the chain--like this.”
+
+Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in which
+he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been
+the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village
+during a whole year.
+
+Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before?
+
+“Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular.
+
+Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then?
+
+“By his tall figure,” said the mender of roads, softly, and with his
+finger at his nose. “When Monsieur the Marquis demands that evening,
+‘Say, what is he like?’ I make response, ‘Tall as a spectre.’”
+
+“You should have said, short as a dwarf,” returned Jacques Two.
+
+“But what did I know? The deed was not then accomplished, neither did he
+confide in me. Observe! Under those circumstances even, I do not
+offer my testimony. Monsieur the Marquis indicates me with his finger,
+standing near our little fountain, and says, ‘To me! Bring that rascal!’
+My faith, messieurs, I offer nothing.”
+
+“He is right there, Jacques,” murmured Defarge, to him who had
+interrupted. “Go on!”
+
+“Good!” said the mender of roads, with an air of mystery. “The tall man
+is lost, and he is sought--how many months? Nine, ten, eleven?”
+
+“No matter, the number,” said Defarge. “He is well hidden, but at last
+he is unluckily found. Go on!”
+
+“I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again about to
+go to bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the
+village below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see
+coming over the hill six soldiers. In the midst of them is a tall man
+with his arms bound--tied to his sides--like this!”
+
+With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with his
+elbows bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted behind him.
+
+“I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers
+and their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any
+spectacle is well worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I
+see no more than that they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and
+that they are almost black to my sight--except on the side of the sun
+going to bed, where they have a red edge, messieurs. Also, I see that
+their long shadows are on the hollow ridge on the opposite side of the
+road, and are on the hill above it, and are like the shadows of giants.
+Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the dust moves
+with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance quite near
+to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would
+be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as
+on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same spot!”
+
+He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it
+vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.
+
+“I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not
+show the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with
+our eyes. ‘Come on!’ says the chief of that company, pointing to the
+village, ‘bring him fast to his tomb!’ and they bring him faster. I
+follow. His arms are swelled because of being bound so tight, his wooden
+shoes are large and clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and
+consequently slow, they drive him with their guns--like this!”
+
+He imitated the action of a man’s being impelled forward by the
+butt-ends of muskets.
+
+“As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They
+laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust,
+but he cannot touch it; thereupon they laugh again. They bring him into
+the village; all the village runs to look; they take him past the mill,
+and up to the prison; all the village sees the prison gate open in the
+darkness of the night, and swallow him--like this!”
+
+He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding
+snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by
+opening it again, Defarge said, “Go on, Jacques.”
+
+“All the village,” pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and in a low
+voice, “withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the
+village sleeps; all the village dreams of that unhappy one, within the
+locks and bars of the prison on the crag, and never to come out of it,
+except to perish. In the morning, with my tools upon my shoulder, eating
+my morsel of black bread as I go, I make a circuit by the prison, on
+my way to my work. There I see him, high up, behind the bars of a lofty
+iron cage, bloody and dusty as last night, looking through. He has no
+hand free, to wave to me; I dare not call to him; he regards me like a
+dead man.”
+
+Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all
+of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the
+countryman’s story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was
+authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One
+and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on
+his hand, and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally
+intent, on one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding
+over the network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge
+standing between them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the
+light of the window, by turns looking from him to them, and from them to
+him.
+
+“Go on, Jacques,” said Defarge.
+
+“He remains up there in his iron cage some days. The village looks
+at him by stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, from a
+distance, at the prison on the crag; and in the evening, when the work
+of the day is achieved and it assembles to gossip at the fountain, all
+faces are turned towards the prison. Formerly, they were turned towards
+the posting-house; now, they are turned towards the prison. They
+whisper at the fountain, that although condemned to death he will not be
+executed; they say that petitions have been presented in Paris, showing
+that he was enraged and made mad by the death of his child; they say
+that a petition has been presented to the King himself. What do I know?
+It is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”
+
+“Listen then, Jacques,” Number One of that name sternly interposed.
+“Know that a petition was presented to the King and Queen. All here,
+yourself excepted, saw the King take it, in his carriage in the street,
+sitting beside the Queen. It is Defarge whom you see here, who, at the
+hazard of his life, darted out before the horses, with the petition in
+his hand.”
+
+“And once again listen, Jacques!” said the kneeling Number Three:
+his fingers ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, with a
+strikingly greedy air, as if he hungered for something--that was neither
+food nor drink; “the guard, horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner,
+and struck him blows. You hear?”
+
+“I hear, messieurs.”
+
+“Go on then,” said Defarge.
+
+“Again; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,” resumed the
+countryman, “that he is brought down into our country to be executed on
+the spot, and that he will very certainly be executed. They even whisper
+that because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the
+father of his tenants--serfs--what you will--he will be executed as a
+parricide. One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed
+with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds
+which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be
+poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally,
+that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man
+says, all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on
+the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies?
+I am not a scholar.”
+
+“Listen once again then, Jacques!” said the man with the restless hand
+and the craving air. “The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was
+all done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and
+nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than
+the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager
+attention to the last--to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall,
+when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed! And it was
+done--why, how old are you?”
+
+“Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.
+
+“It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might have seen
+it.”
+
+“Enough!” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “Long live the Devil! Go
+on.”
+
+“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else;
+even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday
+night when all the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from
+the prison, and their guns ring on the stones of the little street.
+Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by
+the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the
+water.”
+
+The mender of roads looked _through_ rather than _at_ the low ceiling,
+and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.
+
+“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out,
+the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers
+have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst
+of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is
+a gag--tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he
+laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs,
+from the corners of his mouth to his ears. “On the top of the gallows is
+fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged
+there forty feet high--and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”
+
+They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face,
+on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the
+spectacle.
+
+“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw
+water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have
+I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to
+bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church,
+across the mill, across the prison--seemed to strike across the earth,
+messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!”
+
+The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other
+three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.
+
+“That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do),
+and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was
+warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now
+walking, through the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here
+you see me!”
+
+After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, “Good! You have acted
+and recounted faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, outside the
+door?”
+
+“Very willingly,” said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge escorted to the
+top of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned.
+
+The three had risen, and their heads were together when he came back to
+the garret.
+
+“How say you, Jacques?” demanded Number One. “To be registered?”
+
+“To be registered, as doomed to destruction,” returned Defarge.
+
+“Magnificent!” croaked the man with the craving.
+
+“The chateau, and all the race?” inquired the first.
+
+“The chateau and all the race,” returned Defarge. “Extermination.”
+
+The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, “Magnificent!” and began
+gnawing another finger.
+
+“Are you sure,” asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, “that no embarrassment
+can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is
+safe, for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always
+be able to decipher it--or, I ought to say, will she?”
+
+“Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame my wife
+undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose
+a word of it--not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her
+own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in
+Madame Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives,
+to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or
+crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”
+
+There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the man who
+hungered, asked: “Is this rustic to be sent back soon? I hope so. He is
+very simple; is he not a little dangerous?”
+
+“He knows nothing,” said Defarge; “at least nothing more than would
+easily elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. I charge myself
+with him; let him remain with me; I will take care of him, and set him
+on his road. He wishes to see the fine world--the King, the Queen, and
+Court; let him see them on Sunday.”
+
+“What?” exclaimed the hungry man, staring. “Is it a good sign, that he
+wishes to see Royalty and Nobility?”
+
+“Jacques,” said Defarge; “judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her
+to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish
+him to bring it down one day.”
+
+Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found already
+dozing on the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself down on the
+pallet-bed and take some rest. He needed no persuasion, and was soon
+asleep.
+
+Worse quarters than Defarge’s wine-shop, could easily have been found
+in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious
+dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very
+new and agreeable. But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly
+unconscious of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that
+his being there had any connection with anything below the surface, that
+he shook in his wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he
+contended with himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady
+might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she should take it
+into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a
+murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go through
+with it until the play was played out.
+
+Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted
+(though he said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur
+and himself to Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have
+madame knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was
+additionally disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the
+afternoon, still with her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to
+see the carriage of the King and Queen.
+
+“You work hard, madame,” said a man near her.
+
+“Yes,” answered Madame Defarge; “I have a good deal to do.”
+
+“What do you make, madame?”
+
+“Many things.”
+
+“For instance--”
+
+“For instance,” returned Madame Defarge, composedly, “shrouds.”
+
+The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and the mender
+of roads fanned himself with his blue cap: feeling it mightily close
+and oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was
+fortunate in having his remedy at hand; for, soon the large-faced King
+and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the
+shining Bull’s Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing
+ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour
+and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both
+sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary
+intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen,
+Long live everybody and everything! as if he had never heard of
+ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were gardens, courtyards,
+terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull’s Eye,
+more lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept
+with sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three
+hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company,
+and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him
+from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to
+pieces.
+
+“Bravo!” said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a
+patron; “you are a good boy!”
+
+The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of
+having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.
+
+“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you make
+these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more
+insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”
+
+“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that’s true.”
+
+“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would
+stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than
+in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath
+tells them. Let it deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot
+deceive them too much.”
+
+Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in
+confirmation.
+
+“As to you,” said she, “you would shout and shed tears for anything, if
+it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?”
+
+“Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.”
+
+“If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to
+pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would
+pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?”
+
+“Truly yes, madame.”
+
+“Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were
+set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage,
+you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?”
+
+“It is true, madame.”
+
+“You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,” said Madame Defarge, with
+a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent;
+“now, go home!”
+
+
+
+
+XVI. Still Knitting
+
+
+Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the
+bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the
+darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by
+the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where
+the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to
+the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now,
+for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village
+scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead
+stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and
+terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that
+the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the
+village--had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had--that
+when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to
+faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled
+up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel
+look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the
+stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder
+was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which
+everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the
+scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the
+crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a
+skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all
+started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares
+who could find a living there.
+
+Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the
+stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres
+of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the
+night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole
+world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling
+star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse
+the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in
+the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every
+vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.
+
+The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight,
+in their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their
+journey naturally tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier
+guardhouse, and the usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual
+examination and inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two
+of the soldiery there, and one of the police. The latter he was intimate
+with, and affectionately embraced.
+
+When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings,
+and they, having finally alighted near the Saint’s boundaries, were
+picking their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his
+streets, Madame Defarge spoke to her husband:
+
+“Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?”
+
+“Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy
+commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he
+can say, but he knows of one.”
+
+“Eh well!” said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool
+business air. “It is necessary to register him. How do they call that
+man?”
+
+“He is English.”
+
+“So much the better. His name?”
+
+“Barsad,” said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had
+been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect
+correctness.
+
+“Barsad,” repeated madame. “Good. Christian name?”
+
+“John.”
+
+“John Barsad,” repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself.
+“Good. His appearance; is it known?”
+
+“Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair;
+complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face
+thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a
+peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore,
+sinister.”
+
+“Eh my faith. It is a portrait!” said madame, laughing. “He shall be
+registered to-morrow.”
+
+They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight),
+and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted
+the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the
+stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of
+her own, checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally
+dismissed him to bed. Then she turned out the contents of the bowl
+of money for the second time, and began knotting them up in her
+handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe keeping through the
+night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in his mouth, walked
+up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in which
+condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he
+walked up and down through life.
+
+The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
+neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge’s olfactory sense was
+by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than
+it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He
+whiffed the compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.
+
+“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the
+money. “There are only the usual odours.”
+
+“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.
+
+“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes had
+never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for
+him. “Oh, the men, the men!”
+
+“But my dear!” began Defarge.
+
+“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my dear! You are
+faint of heart to-night, my dear!”
+
+“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his
+breast, “it _is_ a long time.”
+
+“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time?
+Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”
+
+“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said
+Defarge.
+
+“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store
+the lightning? Tell me.”
+
+Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
+too.
+
+“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to
+swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
+earthquake?”
+
+“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.
+
+“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
+before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not
+seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”
+
+She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.
+
+“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis,
+“that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and
+coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it
+is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of all the world
+that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider
+the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with
+more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock
+you.”
+
+“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with his head
+a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and
+attentive pupil before his catechist, “I do not question all this. But
+it has lasted a long time, and it is possible--you know well, my wife,
+it is possible--that it may not come, during our lives.”
+
+“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
+were another enemy strangled.
+
+“Well!” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug.
+“We shall not see the triumph.”
+
+“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extended hand in
+strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all
+my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew
+certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
+would--”
+
+Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.
+
+“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
+cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”
+
+“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim
+and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that.
+When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the
+time with the tiger and the devil chained--not shown--yet always ready.”
+
+Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
+little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains
+out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene
+manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed.
+
+Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the
+wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she
+now and then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her
+usual preoccupied air. There were a few customers, drinking or not
+drinking, standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot,
+and heaps of flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous
+perquisitions into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell
+dead at the bottom. Their decease made no impression on the other flies
+out promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they
+themselves were elephants, or something as far removed), until they met
+the same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are!--perhaps they
+thought as much at Court that sunny summer day.
+
+A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she
+felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her
+rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.
+
+It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the
+customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the
+wine-shop.
+
+“Good day, madame,” said the new-comer.
+
+“Good day, monsieur.”
+
+She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting:
+“Hah! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black
+hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark,
+thin, long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a
+peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister
+expression! Good day, one and all!”
+
+“Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a
+mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.”
+
+Madame complied with a polite air.
+
+“Marvellous cognac this, madame!”
+
+It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame
+Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said,
+however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The
+visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity
+of observing the place in general.
+
+“You knit with great skill, madame.”
+
+“I am accustomed to it.”
+
+“A pretty pattern too!”
+
+“_You_ think so?” said madame, looking at him with a smile.
+
+“Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?”
+
+“Pastime,” said madame, still looking at him with a smile while her
+fingers moved nimbly.
+
+“Not for use?”
+
+“That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do--Well,” said
+madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of
+coquetry, “I’ll use it!”
+
+It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be
+decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two
+men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when,
+catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of
+looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away.
+Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there
+one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open,
+but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a
+poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and
+unimpeachable.
+
+“_John_,” thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted,
+and her eyes looked at the stranger. “Stay long enough, and I shall knit
+‘BARSAD’ before you go.”
+
+“You have a husband, madame?”
+
+“I have.”
+
+“Children?”
+
+“No children.”
+
+“Business seems bad?”
+
+“Business is very bad; the people are so poor.”
+
+“Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed, too--as you say.”
+
+“As _you_ say,” madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an
+extra something into his name that boded him no good.
+
+“Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so.
+Of course.”
+
+“_I_ think?” returned madame, in a high voice. “I and my husband have
+enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we
+think, here, is how to live. That is the subject _we_ think of, and
+it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without
+embarrassing our heads concerning others. _I_ think for others? No, no.”
+
+The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did
+not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but,
+stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame
+Defarge’s little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.
+
+“A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution. Ah! the poor
+Gaspard!” With a sigh of great compassion.
+
+“My faith!” returned madame, coolly and lightly, “if people use knives
+for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the
+price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.”
+
+“I believe,” said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone
+that invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary
+susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked face: “I believe there
+is much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor
+fellow? Between ourselves.”
+
+“Is there?” asked madame, vacantly.
+
+“Is there not?”
+
+“--Here is my husband!” said Madame Defarge.
+
+As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted
+him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, “Good day,
+Jacques!” Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.
+
+“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so much
+confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.
+
+“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the wine-shop.
+“You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.”
+
+“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: “good
+day!”
+
+“Good day!” answered Defarge, drily.
+
+“I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when
+you entered, that they tell me there is--and no wonder!--much sympathy
+and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.”
+
+“No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I know nothing
+of it.”
+
+Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his
+hand on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that barrier at the
+person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would
+have shot with the greatest satisfaction.
+
+The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious
+attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh
+water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it
+out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over
+it.
+
+“You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?”
+ observed Defarge.
+
+“Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested
+in its miserable inhabitants.”
+
+“Hah!” muttered Defarge.
+
+“The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,”
+ pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting
+associations with your name.”
+
+“Indeed!” said Defarge, with much indifference.
+
+“Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic,
+had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am
+informed of the circumstances?”
+
+“Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it conveyed
+to him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she knitted and
+warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.
+
+“It was to you,” said the spy, “that his daughter came; and it was
+from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown
+monsieur; how is he called?--in a little wig--Lorry--of the bank of
+Tellson and Company--over to England.”
+
+“Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge.
+
+“Very interesting remembrances!” said the spy. “I have known Doctor
+Manette and his daughter, in England.”
+
+“Yes?” said Defarge.
+
+“You don’t hear much about them now?” said the spy.
+
+“No,” said Defarge.
+
+“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little
+song, “we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe
+arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then,
+they have gradually taken their road in life--we, ours--and we have held
+no correspondence.”
+
+“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be married.”
+
+“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have been married long
+ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”
+
+“Oh! You know I am English.”
+
+“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame; “and what the tongue is, I
+suppose the man is.”
+
+He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
+of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the
+end, he added:
+
+“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to
+one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah,
+poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is
+going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard
+was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present
+Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is
+Mr. Charles Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.”
+
+Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
+effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter,
+as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was
+troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no
+spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.
+
+Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be
+worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad
+paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say,
+in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the
+pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes
+after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the
+husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should
+come back.
+
+“Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife
+as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: “what he has
+said of Ma’amselle Manette?”
+
+“As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, “it
+is probably false. But it may be true.”
+
+“If it is--” Defarge began, and stopped.
+
+“If it is?” repeated his wife.
+
+“--And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph--I hope, for her
+sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.”
+
+“Her husband’s destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure,
+“will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is
+to end him. That is all I know.”
+
+“But it is very strange--now, at least, is it not very strange”--said
+Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it,
+“that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her
+husband’s name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by
+the side of that infernal dog’s who has just left us?”
+
+“Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,” answered
+madame. “I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here
+for their merits; that is enough.”
+
+She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently
+took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head.
+Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable
+decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its
+disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very
+shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.
+
+In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned
+himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came
+to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame
+Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place
+to place and from group to group: a Missionary--there were many like
+her--such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women
+knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a
+mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the
+jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still,
+the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.
+
+But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame
+Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer
+among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left
+behind.
+
+Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. “A
+great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully
+grand woman!”
+
+Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and
+the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as
+the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another
+darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing
+pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into
+thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a
+wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty,
+Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat
+knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around
+a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting,
+counting dropping heads.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. One Night
+
+
+Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in
+Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat
+under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder
+radiance over great London, than on that night when it found them still
+seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.
+
+Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening
+for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.
+
+“You are happy, my dear father?”
+
+“Quite, my child.”
+
+They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it
+was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself
+in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in
+both ways, at his side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this
+time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.
+
+“And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the
+love that Heaven has so blessed--my love for Charles, and Charles’s love
+for me. But, if my life were not to be still consecrated to you, or
+if my marriage were so arranged as that it would part us, even by
+the length of a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and
+self-reproachful now than I can tell you. Even as it is--”
+
+Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
+
+In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face
+upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of
+the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and
+its going.
+
+“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite,
+quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will
+ever interpose between us? _I_ know it well, but do you know it? In your
+own heart, do you feel quite certain?”
+
+Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could
+scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than that,” he
+added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far brighter, Lucie,
+seen through your marriage, than it could have been--nay, than it ever
+was--without it.”
+
+“If I could hope _that_, my father!--”
+
+“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how plain
+it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot
+fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be
+wasted--”
+
+She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated
+the word.
+
+“--wasted, my child--should not be wasted, struck aside from the
+natural order of things--for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely
+comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself,
+how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?”
+
+“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy
+with you.”
+
+He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy
+without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
+
+“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
+Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
+should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have
+cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you.”
+
+It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
+refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
+sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long
+afterwards.
+
+“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon.
+“I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her
+light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think
+of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against
+my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic,
+that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I
+could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines
+with which I could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering
+manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I remember,
+and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”
+
+The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time,
+deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in
+the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present
+cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.
+
+“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn
+child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had
+been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had killed it. Whether it
+was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my
+imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it
+was a son who would never know his father’s story; who might even live
+to weigh the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own
+will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”
+
+She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
+
+“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of
+me--rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have
+cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married
+to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from
+the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a
+blank.”
+
+“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who
+never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.”
+
+“You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and restoration you have
+brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and
+the moon on this last night.--What did I say just now?”
+
+“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”
+
+“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence
+have touched me in a different way--have affected me with something as
+like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its
+foundations could--I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and
+leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her
+image in the moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held
+her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door.
+But, you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?”
+
+“The figure was not; the--the--image; the fancy?”
+
+“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of
+sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another
+and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than
+that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too--as you
+have--but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think?
+I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these
+perplexed distinctions.”
+
+His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running
+cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.
+
+“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight,
+coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married
+life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture
+was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active,
+cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.”
+
+“I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in my love
+that was I.”
+
+“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, “and
+they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed
+a prison of the State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked
+up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I
+imagined that she always brought me back after showing me such things.
+But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and
+blessed her.”
+
+“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless
+me as fervently to-morrow?”
+
+“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night
+for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great
+happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the
+happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us.”
+
+He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked
+Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went into the
+house.
+
+There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there was even to
+be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no
+change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it,
+by taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the
+apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.
+
+Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only
+three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles
+was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving
+little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.
+
+So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated.
+But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came
+downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears,
+beforehand.
+
+All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay
+asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his
+hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the
+shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his;
+then, leaned over him, and looked at him.
+
+Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he
+covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the
+mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
+resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be
+beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.
+
+She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that
+she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his
+sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once
+more, and went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves
+of the plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved
+in praying for him.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. Nine Days
+
+
+The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the
+closed door of the Doctor’s room, where he was speaking with Charles
+Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr.
+Lorry, and Miss Pross--to whom the event, through a gradual process of
+reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss,
+but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should
+have been the bridegroom.
+
+“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride,
+and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet,
+pretty dress; “and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought
+you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought
+what I was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring
+on my friend Mr. Charles!”
+
+“You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, “and
+therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”
+
+“Really? Well; but don’t cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.
+
+“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “_you_ are.”
+
+“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with her,
+on occasion.)
+
+“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it. Such
+a present of plate as you have made ‘em, is enough to bring tears into
+anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon in the collection,” said
+Miss Pross, “that I didn’t cry over, last night after the box came, till
+I couldn’t see it.”
+
+“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my honour, I
+had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance
+invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man
+speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there
+might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!”
+
+“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
+
+“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked the
+gentleman of that name.
+
+“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your cradle.”
+
+“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, “that
+seems probable, too.”
+
+“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross, “before you
+were put in your cradle.”
+
+“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely dealt
+with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my
+pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm soothingly round
+her waist, “I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and
+I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final
+opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear. You leave
+your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your
+own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the next
+fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s
+shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at
+the fortnight’s end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on
+your other fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent
+him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear
+Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an
+old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim his
+own.”
+
+For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the
+well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright
+golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and
+delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.
+
+The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with Charles
+Darnay. He was so deadly pale--which had not been the case when they
+went in together--that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face.
+But, in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to the
+shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the
+old air of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold
+wind.
+
+He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the chariot
+which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in
+another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange
+eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.
+
+Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little
+group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling,
+glanced on the bride’s hand, which were newly released from the
+dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry’s pockets. They returned home to
+breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that had
+mingled with the poor shoemaker’s white locks in the Paris garret, were
+mingled with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the
+door at parting.
+
+It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father
+cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her
+enfolding arms, “Take her, Charles! She is yours!”
+
+And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was
+gone.
+
+The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the
+preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry,
+and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into
+the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr. Lorry observed a great
+change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted
+there, had struck him a poisoned blow.
+
+He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been
+expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was
+the old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry; and through his absent
+manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own
+room when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of Defarge the
+wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.
+
+“I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, “I
+think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him.
+I must look in at Tellson’s; so I will go there at once and come back
+presently. Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine
+there, and all will be well.”
+
+It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson’s, than to look out of
+Tellson’s. He was detained two hours. When he came back, he ascended the
+old staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; going thus
+into the Doctor’s rooms, he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.
+
+“Good God!” he said, with a start. “What’s that?”
+
+Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. “O me, O me! All is
+lost!” cried she, wringing her hands. “What is to be told to Ladybird?
+He doesn’t know me, and is making shoes!”
+
+Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the
+Doctor’s room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had been
+when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent
+down, and he was very busy.
+
+“Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!”
+
+The Doctor looked at him for a moment--half inquiringly, half as if he
+were angry at being spoken to--and bent over his work again.
+
+He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the
+throat, as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old
+haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He worked
+hard--impatiently--as if in some sense of having been interrupted.
+
+Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a
+shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by
+him, and asked what it was.
+
+“A young lady’s walking shoe,” he muttered, without looking up. “It
+ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be.”
+
+“But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!”
+
+He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in
+his work.
+
+“You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper
+occupation. Think, dear friend!”
+
+Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at
+a time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would extract
+a word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and
+words fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on
+the air. The only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover, was, that
+he sometimes furtively looked up without being asked. In that, there
+seemed a faint expression of curiosity or perplexity--as though he were
+trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind.
+
+Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important above
+all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie;
+the second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In
+conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps towards the latter
+precaution, by giving out that the Doctor was not well, and required a
+few days of complete rest. In aid of the kind deception to be practised
+on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write, describing his having been
+called away professionally, and referring to an imaginary letter of
+two or three hurried lines in his own hand, represented to have been
+addressed to her by the same post.
+
+These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in
+the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept
+another course in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he
+thought the best, on the Doctor’s case.
+
+In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course
+being thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him
+attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He
+therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson’s for the
+first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same
+room.
+
+He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak
+to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that
+attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always
+before him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had
+fallen, or was falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the
+window, reading and writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and
+natural ways as he could think of, that it was a free place.
+
+Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on,
+that first day, until it was too dark to see--worked on, half an hour
+after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write.
+When he put his tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose
+and said to him:
+
+“Will you go out?”
+
+He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner,
+looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:
+
+“Out?”
+
+“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”
+
+He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But, Mr.
+Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk,
+with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in
+some misty way asking himself, “Why not?” The sagacity of the man of
+business perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it.
+
+Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him
+at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long
+time before he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down, he
+fell asleep. In the morning, he was up betimes, and went straight to his
+bench and to work.
+
+On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name,
+and spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He
+returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said, and
+that he thought about it, however confusedly. This encouraged Mr. Lorry
+to have Miss Pross in with her work, several times during the day;
+at those times, they quietly spoke of Lucie, and of her father then
+present, precisely in the usual manner, and as if there were nothing
+amiss. This was done without any demonstrative accompaniment, not long
+enough, or often enough to harass him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry’s
+friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and that he
+appeared to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding
+him.
+
+When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before:
+
+“Dear Doctor, will you go out?”
+
+As before, he repeated, “Out?”
+
+“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”
+
+This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer
+from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the
+meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had
+sat there looking down at the plane-tree; but, on Mr. Lorry’s return, he
+slipped away to his bench.
+
+The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry’s hope darkened, and his
+heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day.
+The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days,
+seven days, eight days, nine days.
+
+With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and
+heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was
+well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not fail to
+observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first,
+was growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on
+his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in
+the dusk of the ninth evening.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. An Opinion
+
+
+Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the
+tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun
+into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark
+night.
+
+He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had
+done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of the
+Doctor’s room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker’s bench
+and tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading
+at the window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face (which
+Mr. Lorry could distinctly see), though still very pale, was calmly
+studious and attentive.
+
+Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt
+giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking might
+not be a disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show him his
+friend before him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and employed
+as usual; and was there any sign within their range, that the change of
+which he had so strong an impression had actually happened?
+
+It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the
+answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real
+corresponding and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there?
+How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor
+Manette’s consulting-room, and to be debating these points outside the
+Doctor’s bedroom door in the early morning?
+
+Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he
+had had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have
+resolved it; but he was by that time clear-headed, and had none.
+He advised that they should let the time go by until the regular
+breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual
+had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary state of mind, Mr.
+Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek direction and guidance from
+the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so anxious to obtain.
+
+Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked
+out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical
+toilette, Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual
+white linen, and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the
+usual way, and came to breakfast.
+
+So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those
+delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the only safe
+advance, he at first supposed that his daughter’s marriage had taken
+place yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to
+the day of the week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and
+counting, and evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects, however,
+he was so composedly himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid
+he sought. And that aid was his own.
+
+Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the
+Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly:
+
+“My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on a
+very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is
+very curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may be less
+so.”
+
+Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the
+Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already glanced
+at his hands more than once.
+
+“Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the
+arm, “the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray
+give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake--and above all,
+for his daughter’s--his daughter’s, my dear Manette.”
+
+“If I understand,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, “some mental
+shock--?”
+
+“Yes!”
+
+“Be explicit,” said the Doctor. “Spare no detail.”
+
+Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.
+
+“My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock,
+of great acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings,
+the--the--as you express it--the mind. The mind. It is the case of a
+shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for how
+long, because I believe he cannot calculate the time himself, and there
+are no other means of getting at it. It is the case of a shock from
+which the sufferer recovered, by a process that he cannot trace
+himself--as I once heard him publicly relate in a striking manner. It is
+the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so completely, as to
+be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of mind, and
+great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions to his
+stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
+there has been,” he paused and took a deep breath--“a slight relapse.”
+
+The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, “Of how long duration?”
+
+“Nine days and nights.”
+
+“How did it show itself? I infer,” glancing at his hands again, “in the
+resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?”
+
+“That is the fact.”
+
+“Now, did you ever see him,” asked the Doctor, distinctly and
+collectedly, though in the same low voice, “engaged in that pursuit
+originally?”
+
+“Once.”
+
+“And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects--or in all
+respects--as he was then?”
+
+“I think in all respects.”
+
+“You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse?”
+
+“No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from her.
+It is known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted.”
+
+The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, “That was very kind. That was
+very thoughtful!” Mr. Lorry grasped his hand in return, and neither of
+the two spoke for a little while.
+
+“Now, my dear Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his most
+considerate and most affectionate way, “I am a mere man of business,
+and unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. I do not
+possess the kind of information necessary; I do not possess the kind of
+intelligence; I want guiding. There is no man in this world on whom
+I could so rely for right guidance, as on you. Tell me, how does this
+relapse come about? Is there danger of another? Could a repetition of it
+be prevented? How should a repetition of it be treated? How does it come
+about at all? What can I do for my friend? No man ever can have been
+more desirous in his heart to serve a friend, than I am to serve mine,
+if I knew how.
+
+“But I don’t know how to originate, in such a case. If your sagacity,
+knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might be
+able to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little.
+Pray discuss it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly,
+and teach me how to be a little more useful.”
+
+Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken, and
+Mr. Lorry did not press him.
+
+“I think it probable,” said the Doctor, breaking silence with an effort,
+“that the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was not quite
+unforeseen by its subject.”
+
+“Was it dreaded by him?” Mr. Lorry ventured to ask.
+
+“Very much.” He said it with an involuntary shudder.
+
+“You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer’s
+mind, and how difficult--how almost impossible--it is, for him to force
+himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him.”
+
+“Would he,” asked Mr. Lorry, “be sensibly relieved if he could prevail
+upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, when it is on
+him?”
+
+“I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. I even
+believe it--in some cases--to be quite impossible.”
+
+“Now,” said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor’s arm again,
+after a short silence on both sides, “to what would you refer this
+attack?”
+
+“I believe,” returned Doctor Manette, “that there had been a strong and
+extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that
+was the first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most
+distressing nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable that
+there had long been a dread lurking in his mind, that those associations
+would be recalled--say, under certain circumstances--say, on a
+particular occasion. He tried to prepare himself in vain; perhaps the
+effort to prepare himself made him less able to bear it.”
+
+“Would he remember what took place in the relapse?” asked Mr. Lorry,
+with natural hesitation.
+
+The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and
+answered, in a low voice, “Not at all.”
+
+“Now, as to the future,” hinted Mr. Lorry.
+
+“As to the future,” said the Doctor, recovering firmness, “I should have
+great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so soon, I
+should have great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a complicated
+something, long dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and contended against,
+and recovering after the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that
+the worst was over.”
+
+“Well, well! That’s good comfort. I am thankful!” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“I am thankful!” repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.
+
+“There are two other points,” said Mr. Lorry, “on which I am anxious to
+be instructed. I may go on?”
+
+“You cannot do your friend a better service.” The Doctor gave him his
+hand.
+
+“To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually energetic;
+he applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition of professional
+knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to many things. Now, does
+he do too much?”
+
+“I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in
+singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in
+part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy
+things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy
+direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery.”
+
+“You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?”
+
+“I think I am quite sure of it.”
+
+“My dear Manette, if he were overworked now--”
+
+“My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a
+violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.”
+
+“Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment,
+that he _was_ overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this
+disorder?”
+
+“I do not think so. I do not think,” said Doctor Manette with the
+firmness of self-conviction, “that anything but the one train of
+association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some
+extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After what has
+happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to imagine any
+such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, and I almost
+believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are exhausted.”
+
+He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing
+would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the
+confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal
+endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that
+confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he
+really was, and approached his second and last point. He felt it to
+be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning
+conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the
+last nine days, he knew that he must face it.
+
+“The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction
+so happily recovered from,” said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, “we
+will call--Blacksmith’s work, Blacksmith’s work. We will say, to put a
+case and for the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad
+time, to work at a little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly
+found at his forge again. Is it not a pity that he should keep it by
+him?”
+
+The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot
+nervously on the ground.
+
+“He has always kept it by him,” said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look at
+his friend. “Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?”
+
+Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the
+ground.
+
+“You do not find it easy to advise me?” said Mr. Lorry. “I quite
+understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think--” And there he
+shook his head, and stopped.
+
+“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause,
+“it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings
+of this poor man’s mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that
+occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved
+his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for
+the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more
+practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the mental
+torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of putting it
+quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is more hopeful of
+himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with a kind
+of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not
+find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may
+fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”
+
+He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr. Lorry’s
+face.
+
+“But may not--mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of business
+who only deals with such material objects as guineas, shillings, and
+bank-notes--may not the retention of the thing involve the retention of
+the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go
+with it? In short, is it not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the
+forge?”
+
+There was another silence.
+
+“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old
+companion.”
+
+“I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained
+in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “I would recommend him to
+sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good.
+Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter’s
+sake, my dear Manette!”
+
+Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
+
+“In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take
+it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there;
+let him miss his old companion after an absence.”
+
+Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They
+passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the
+three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth
+day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that
+had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously
+explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and
+she had no suspicions.
+
+On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into
+his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross
+carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and
+guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker’s bench to pieces, while
+Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder--for
+which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The
+burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the
+purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools,
+shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction
+and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross,
+while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its
+traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible
+crime.
+
+
+
+
+XX. A Plea
+
+
+When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who appeared, to
+offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They had not been at home
+many hours, when he presented himself. He was not improved in habits, or
+in looks, or in manner; but there was a certain rugged air of fidelity
+about him, which was new to the observation of Charles Darnay.
+
+He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and of
+speaking to him when no one overheard.
+
+“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”
+
+“We are already friends, I hope.”
+
+“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don’t
+mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be
+friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either.”
+
+Charles Darnay--as was natural--asked him, in all good-humour and
+good-fellowship, what he did mean?
+
+“Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “I find that easier to comprehend
+in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You
+remember a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than--than
+usual?”
+
+“I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess that
+you had been drinking.”
+
+“I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me, for I
+always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one day,
+when all days are at an end for me! Don’t be alarmed; I am not going to
+preach.”
+
+“I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but alarming
+to me.”
+
+“Ah!” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved that
+away. “On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number, as
+you know), I was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you. I
+wish you would forget it.”
+
+“I forgot it long ago.”
+
+“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to
+me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it,
+and a light answer does not help me to forget it.”
+
+“If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “I beg your forgiveness
+for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which, to my
+surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you, on the
+faith of a gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind. Good
+Heaven, what was there to dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to
+remember, in the great service you rendered me that day?”
+
+“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow to you, when
+you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap, I
+don’t know that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it.--Mind! I
+say when I rendered it; I am speaking of the past.”
+
+“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I will not
+quarrel with _your_ light answer.”
+
+“Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose;
+I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am
+incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it,
+ask Stryver, and he’ll tell you so.”
+
+“I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.”
+
+“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done
+any good, and never will.”
+
+“I don’t know that you ‘never will.’”
+
+“But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure
+to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent
+reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be
+permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might
+be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the
+resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of
+furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I
+doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I
+should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I
+dare say, to know that I had it.”
+
+“Will you try?”
+
+“That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
+indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?”
+
+“I think so, Carton, by this time.”
+
+They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute
+afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.
+
+When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss
+Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of
+this conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a
+problem of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not
+bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as anybody might who saw
+him as he showed himself.
+
+He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young
+wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found
+her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly
+marked.
+
+“We are thoughtful to-night!” said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.
+
+“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring
+and attentive expression fixed upon him; “we are rather thoughtful
+to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night.”
+
+“What is it, my Lucie?”
+
+“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to
+ask it?”
+
+“Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?”
+
+What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the
+cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!
+
+“I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and
+respect than you expressed for him to-night.”
+
+“Indeed, my own? Why so?”
+
+“That is what you are not to ask me. But I think--I know--he does.”
+
+“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?”
+
+“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very
+lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that
+he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep
+wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”
+
+“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite
+astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this
+of him.”
+
+“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
+scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable
+now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things,
+even magnanimous things.”
+
+She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man,
+that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours.
+
+“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her
+head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, “remember how strong
+we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!”
+
+The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember it, dear
+Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.”
+
+He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded
+her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets,
+could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops
+of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of
+that husband, he might have cried to the night--and the words would not
+have parted from his lips for the first time--
+
+“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”
+
+
+
+
+XXI. Echoing Footsteps
+
+
+A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where
+the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound
+her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and
+companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in
+the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of
+years.
+
+At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife,
+when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be
+dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes, something light,
+afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much.
+Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her:
+doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight--divided
+her breast. Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of
+footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would
+be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her
+eyes, and broke like waves.
+
+That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the
+advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of
+her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young
+mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and
+the shady house was sunny with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of
+children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take
+her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred
+joy to her.
+
+Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together,
+weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all
+their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the
+echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband’s
+step was strong and prosperous among them; her father’s firm and equal.
+Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an
+unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the
+plane-tree in the garden!
+
+Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not
+harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a
+pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant
+smile, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to
+leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” those were not
+tears all of agony that wetted his young mother’s cheek, as the spirit
+departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and
+forbid them not. They see my Father’s face. O Father, blessed words!
+
+Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the other
+echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath
+of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were
+mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
+murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore--as
+the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or
+dressing a doll at her mother’s footstool, chattered in the tongues of
+the Two Cities that were blended in her life.
+
+The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some
+half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in
+uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he had once
+done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other thing
+regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by
+all true echoes for ages and ages.
+
+No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
+blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,
+but her children had a strange sympathy with him--an instinctive
+delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in
+such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton
+was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms,
+and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of
+him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!”
+
+Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine
+forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in
+his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually
+in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped
+life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
+stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made
+it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his
+state of lion’s jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of
+rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with
+property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them
+but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.
+
+These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most
+offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three
+sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to
+Lucie’s husband: delicately saying “Halloa! here are three lumps of
+bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!” The polite
+rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr.
+Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the
+training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the
+pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of
+declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts
+Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to “catch” him, and on the
+diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him “not
+to be caught.” Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were occasionally
+parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the
+latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he believed
+it himself--which is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an
+originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender’s being carried
+off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.
+
+These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes
+amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little
+daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her
+child’s tread came, and those of her own dear father’s, always active
+and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband’s, need not be told.
+Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself
+with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any
+waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet
+in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her
+more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the
+many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed
+to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her “What is
+the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us,
+as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to
+have too much to do?”
+
+But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly
+in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about
+little Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound,
+as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.
+
+On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr.
+Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself down by Lucie and
+her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were
+all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had looked at the
+lightning from the same place.
+
+“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, “that
+I should have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We have been so full of
+business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which way
+to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a
+run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be able
+to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania
+among some of them for sending it to England.”
+
+“That has a bad look,” said Darnay--
+
+“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don’t know what reason
+there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson’s are
+getting old, and we really can’t be troubled out of the ordinary course
+without due occasion.”
+
+“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.”
+
+“I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade
+himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, “but I
+am determined to be peevish after my long day’s botheration. Where is
+Manette?”
+
+“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.
+
+“I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by
+which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without
+reason. You are not going out, I hope?”
+
+“No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,” said the
+Doctor.
+
+“I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be
+pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I can’t
+see.”
+
+“Of course, it has been kept for you.”
+
+“Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?”
+
+“And sleeping soundly.”
+
+“That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why anything should be
+otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out
+all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now,
+come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear
+the echoes about which you have your theory.”
+
+“Not a theory; it was a fancy.”
+
+“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. “They
+are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!”
+
+Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s
+life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the
+footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in
+the dark London window.
+
+Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
+heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy
+heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous
+roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms
+struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind:
+all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a
+weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
+
+Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what
+agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the
+heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could
+have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so were cartridges,
+powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every
+weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who
+could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to
+force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and
+heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat.
+Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented
+with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
+
+As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
+circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron
+had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,
+already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
+thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm
+another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
+
+“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do you, Jacques
+One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these
+patriots as you can. Where is my wife?”
+
+“Eh, well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever, but not
+knitting to-day. Madame’s resolute right hand was occupied with an axe,
+in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol
+and a cruel knife.
+
+“Where do you go, my wife?”
+
+“I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me at the head
+of women, by-and-bye.”
+
+“Come, then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots and
+friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”
+
+With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped
+into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on
+depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums
+beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack
+began.
+
+Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
+towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through
+the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against
+a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of the
+wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.
+
+Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
+cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work, comrades
+all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques
+Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all
+the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!” Thus Defarge of the
+wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.
+
+“To me, women!” cried madame his wife. “What! We can kill as well as
+the men when the place is taken!” And to her, with a shrill thirsty
+cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and
+revenge.
+
+Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
+drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
+displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
+weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work
+at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
+execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the
+furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the
+single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great
+towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot
+by the service of Four fierce hours.
+
+A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly
+perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly
+the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the
+wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer
+walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!
+
+So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to
+draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been
+struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the
+outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he
+made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side;
+Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the
+inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult,
+exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet
+furious dumb-show.
+
+“The Prisoners!”
+
+“The Records!”
+
+“The secret cells!”
+
+“The instruments of torture!”
+
+“The Prisoners!”
+
+Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, “The Prisoners!” was
+the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an
+eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost
+billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, and
+threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remained
+undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one of
+these men--a man with a grey head, who had a lighted torch in his
+hand--separated him from the rest, and got him between himself and the
+wall.
+
+“Show me the North Tower!” said Defarge. “Quick!”
+
+“I will faithfully,” replied the man, “if you will come with me. But
+there is no one there.”
+
+“What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?” asked
+Defarge. “Quick!”
+
+“The meaning, monsieur?”
+
+“Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I
+shall strike you dead?”
+
+“Kill him!” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.
+
+“Monsieur, it is a cell.”
+
+“Show it me!”
+
+“Pass this way, then.”
+
+Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed
+by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed,
+held by Defarge’s arm as he held by the turnkey’s. Their three heads had
+been close together during this brief discourse, and it had been as much
+as they could do to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the
+noise of the living ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and
+its inundation of the courts and passages and staircases. All around
+outside, too, it beat the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which,
+occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the
+air like spray.
+
+Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
+hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
+and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry
+waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,
+linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and
+there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and swept by;
+but when they had done descending, and were winding and climbing up a
+tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls
+and arches, the storm within the fortress and without was only audible
+to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they had
+come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.
+
+The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung
+the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed
+in:
+
+“One hundred and five, North Tower!”
+
+There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
+with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
+stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred
+across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
+on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were
+the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.
+
+“Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,” said
+Defarge to the turnkey.
+
+The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.
+
+“Stop!--Look here, Jacques!”
+
+“A. M.!” croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.
+
+“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the letters
+with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. “And here he
+wrote ‘a poor physician.’ And it was he, without doubt, who scratched
+a calendar on this stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it
+me!”
+
+He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden
+exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and
+table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.
+
+“Hold the light higher!” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. “Look
+among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,”
+ throwing it to him; “rip open that bed, and search the straw. Hold the
+light higher, you!”
+
+With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and,
+peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar,
+and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar
+and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and
+in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney
+into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a
+cautious touch.
+
+“Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light
+them, you!”
+
+The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping
+again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and
+retraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense
+of hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging flood once
+more.
+
+They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint
+Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard
+upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the people.
+Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de Ville for
+judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the people’s
+blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness) be
+unavenged.
+
+In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
+encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
+decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a
+woman’s. “See, there is my husband!” she cried, pointing him out.
+“See Defarge!” She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and
+remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him through
+the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained immovable
+close to him when he was got near his destination, and began to
+be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the
+long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him
+when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot
+upon his neck, and with her cruel knife--long ready--hewed off his head.
+
+The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea
+of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint
+Antoine’s blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the
+iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where the
+governor’s body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
+where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. “Lower
+the lamp yonder!” cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new
+means of death; “here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!” The
+swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.
+
+The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving
+of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces
+were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes,
+voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering
+until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.
+
+But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was
+in vivid life, there were two groups of faces--each seven in number--so
+fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore
+more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly
+released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high
+overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last
+Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.
+Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose
+drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive
+faces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them;
+faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped
+lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, “THOU DIDST
+IT!”
+
+Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
+accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters
+and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken
+hearts,--such, and such--like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint
+Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven
+hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay,
+and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad,
+and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask
+at Defarge’s wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
+stained red.
+
+
+
+
+XXII. The Sea Still Rises
+
+
+Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften
+his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with
+the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations, when Madame
+Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the customers.
+Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great brotherhood of
+Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary of trusting
+themselves to the saint’s mercies. The lamps across his streets had a
+portentously elastic swing with them.
+
+Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
+contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several
+knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense
+of power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on
+the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: “I know how
+hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself;
+but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to
+destroy life in you?” Every lean bare arm, that had been without work
+before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike.
+The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that
+they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint Antoine;
+the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
+last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.
+
+Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was
+to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her
+sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved
+grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had
+already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.
+
+“Hark!” said The Vengeance. “Listen, then! Who comes?”
+
+As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine
+Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
+murmur came rushing along.
+
+“It is Defarge,” said madame. “Silence, patriots!”
+
+Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked
+around him! “Listen, everywhere!” said madame again. “Listen to him!”
+ Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open
+mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had
+sprung to their feet.
+
+“Say then, my husband. What is it?”
+
+“News from the other world!”
+
+“How, then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other world?”
+
+“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people
+that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”
+
+“Everybody!” from all throats.
+
+“The news is of him. He is among us!”
+
+“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”
+
+“Not dead! He feared us so much--and with reason--that he caused himself
+to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have
+found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have
+seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have
+said that he had reason to fear us. Say all! _Had_ he reason?”
+
+Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had
+never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he
+could have heard the answering cry.
+
+A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked
+steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum
+was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.
+
+“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we ready?”
+
+Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating
+in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and
+The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about
+her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to
+house, rousing the women.
+
+The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked
+from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into
+the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
+such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their
+children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground
+famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one
+another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.
+Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant
+Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of
+these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon
+alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon
+who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread
+to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these
+breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our
+suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my
+knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers,
+and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon,
+Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend
+Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from
+him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy,
+whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they
+dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men
+belonging to them from being trampled under foot.
+
+Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at
+the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew
+his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out
+of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with
+such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not
+a human creature in Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the
+wailing children.
+
+No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where
+this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent
+open space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance,
+and Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance
+from him in the Hall.
+
+“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old villain bound
+with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back.
+Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!” Madame put her knife
+under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.
+
+The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of
+her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to
+others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the
+clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl,
+and the winnowing of many bushels of words, Madame Defarge’s frequent
+expressions of impatience were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at
+a distance: the more readily, because certain men who had by some
+wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the external architecture
+to look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a
+telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.
+
+At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or
+protection, directly down upon the old prisoner’s head. The favour was
+too much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had
+stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got
+him!
+
+It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge
+had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable
+wretch in a deadly embrace--Madame Defarge had but followed and turned
+her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied--The Vengeance and
+Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows
+had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high
+perches--when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, “Bring him
+out! Bring him to the lamp!”
+
+Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on
+his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at,
+and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his
+face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always
+entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of
+action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one
+another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through
+a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one
+of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go--as a cat
+might have done to a mouse--and silently and composedly looked at him
+while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately
+screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have
+him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope
+broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope
+broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and
+held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the
+mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.
+
+Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted
+and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when
+the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the
+people’s enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard
+five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes
+on flaring sheets of paper, seized him--would have torn him out of the
+breast of an army to bear Foulon company--set his head and heart on
+pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession
+through the streets.
+
+Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children,
+wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers’ shops were beset by
+long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while
+they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by
+embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them
+again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of ragged people shortened and
+frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high windows, and
+slender fires were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in
+common, afterwards supping at their doors.
+
+Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of
+most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused
+some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of
+cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full
+share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children;
+and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and
+hoped.
+
+It was almost morning, when Defarge’s wine-shop parted with its last
+knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in
+husky tones, while fastening the door:
+
+“At last it is come, my dear!”
+
+“Eh well!” returned madame. “Almost.”
+
+Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with
+her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum’s was the
+only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The
+Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had
+the same speech out of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon
+was seized; not so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint
+Antoine’s bosom.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII. Fire Rises
+
+
+There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
+the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the
+highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his
+poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the
+crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it,
+but not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of
+them knew what his men would do--beyond this: that it would probably not
+be what he was ordered.
+
+Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation.
+Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as
+shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down,
+dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated
+animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them--all worn
+out.
+
+Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
+blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of
+luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose;
+nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought
+things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for
+Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must
+be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements, surely! Thus it
+was, however; and the last drop of blood having been extracted from the
+flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that
+its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing
+to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and
+unaccountable.
+
+But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like
+it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung
+it, and had seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures
+of the chase--now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting
+the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces
+of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in
+the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than in the
+disappearance of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise beautified and
+beautifying features of Monseigneur.
+
+For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
+dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and
+to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in
+thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat if
+he had it--in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour,
+and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on
+foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those parts, but was now
+a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender of roads would discern
+without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian
+aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a
+mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many
+highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled
+with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways through woods.
+
+Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather,
+as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he
+could get from a shower of hail.
+
+The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill,
+and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects
+in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just
+intelligible:
+
+“How goes it, Jacques?”
+
+“All well, Jacques.”
+
+“Touch then!”
+
+They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.
+
+“No dinner?”
+
+“Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.
+
+“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “I meet no dinner anywhere.”
+
+He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
+steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held
+it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and
+thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.
+
+“Touch then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this
+time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.
+
+“To-night?” said the mender of roads.
+
+“To-night,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
+
+“Where?”
+
+“Here.”
+
+He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at
+one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge
+of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.
+
+“Show me!” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.
+
+“See!” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. “You go down
+here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain--”
+
+“To the Devil with all that!” interrupted the other, rolling his eye
+over the landscape. “_I_ go through no streets and past no fountains.
+Well?”
+
+“Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
+village.”
+
+“Good. When do you cease to work?”
+
+“At sunset.”
+
+“Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without
+resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you
+wake me?”
+
+“Surely.”
+
+The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his
+great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He
+was fast asleep directly.
+
+As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
+away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to
+by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap
+now, in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the
+heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he used
+his tools mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account.
+The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen
+red cap, the rough medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of
+beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen
+and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender
+of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were
+footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed
+with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long
+leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into
+sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at
+secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept
+with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips.
+Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and
+drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against
+this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and
+looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no
+obstacle, tending to centres all over France.
+
+The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
+brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps
+of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed
+them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then,
+the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things ready
+to go down into the village, roused him.
+
+“Good!” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “Two leagues beyond the
+summit of the hill?”
+
+“About.”
+
+“About. Good!”
+
+The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
+according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,
+squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and
+appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village.
+When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed,
+as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there. A
+curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered
+together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of
+looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur Gabelle,
+chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top
+alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his
+chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to
+the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be need
+to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.
+
+The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its
+solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened
+the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace
+flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a
+swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through
+the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the
+stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis
+had slept. East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four
+heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the
+branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four
+lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all
+was black again.
+
+But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely
+visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous.
+Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front,
+picking out transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches,
+and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter.
+Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the
+stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.
+
+A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left
+there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was
+spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the
+space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur
+Gabelle’s door. “Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!” The tocsin rang
+impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The
+mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood
+with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the
+sky. “It must be forty feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
+
+The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away
+through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on
+the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire;
+removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentlemen--officers! The
+chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by
+timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked towards the soldiers who
+looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting
+of lips, “It must burn.”
+
+As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the
+village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and
+fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of
+lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in
+every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything,
+occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of
+Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on
+that functionary’s part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to
+authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with,
+and that post-horses would roast.
+
+The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and
+raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the
+infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising
+and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were in
+torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the face with the
+two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke
+again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis, burning at the stake
+and contending with the fire.
+
+The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
+scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
+figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten
+lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran
+dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before the
+heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and
+splits branched out in the solid walls, like crystallisation; stupefied
+birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures
+trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the night-enshrouded
+roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their next
+destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and,
+abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
+
+Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and
+bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with
+the collection of rent and taxes--though it was but a small instalment
+of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those latter
+days--became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his
+house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon,
+Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel
+with himself. The result of that conference was, that Gabelle again
+withdrew himself to his housetop behind his stack of chimneys; this time
+resolved, if his door were broken in (he was a small Southern man
+of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the
+parapet, and crush a man or two below.
+
+Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the
+distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
+combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an
+ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
+which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour.
+A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of
+the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur
+Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the
+rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily dispersed,
+and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that
+while.
+
+Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were
+other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom
+the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they
+had been born and bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople
+less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the
+functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up
+in their turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West,
+North, and South, be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned.
+The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it,
+no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate
+successfully.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock
+
+
+In such risings of fire and risings of sea--the firm earth shaken by
+the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the
+flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on
+the shore--three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays
+of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful
+tissue of the life of her home.
+
+Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in
+the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging
+feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of
+a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in
+danger, changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted
+in.
+
+Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of
+his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as
+to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and
+this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with
+infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could
+ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after
+boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards for a great number of years,
+and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no
+sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.
+
+The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the
+mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good
+eye to see with--had long had the mote in it of Lucifer’s pride,
+Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a mole’s blindness--but it had dropped
+out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its
+outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was
+all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its Palace and
+“suspended,” when the last tidings came over.
+
+The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was
+come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.
+
+As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of
+Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are supposed to
+haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur
+without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be.
+Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was most
+to be relied upon, came quickest. Again: Tellson’s was a munificent
+house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen
+from their high estate. Again: those nobles who had seen the coming
+storm in time, and anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made
+provident remittances to Tellson’s, were always to be heard of there
+by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every new-comer
+from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson’s, almost as
+a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson’s was at that
+time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and this
+was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in
+consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes wrote the latest news
+out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for all who ran
+through Temple Bar to read.
+
+On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles
+Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The
+penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now
+the news-Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an
+hour or so of the time of closing.
+
+“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said Charles
+Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you--”
+
+“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
+disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you.”
+
+“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, “you touch
+some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe
+enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard
+upon fourscore when there are so many people there much better worth
+interfering with. As to its being a disorganised city, if it were not a
+disorganised city there would be no occasion to send somebody from our
+House here to our House there, who knows the city and the business, of
+old, and is in Tellson’s confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the
+long journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit
+myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s, after all
+these years, who ought to be?”
+
+“I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly,
+and like one thinking aloud.
+
+“Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!” exclaimed Mr.
+Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman born? You
+are a wise counsellor.”
+
+“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the
+thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed through
+my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having had some sympathy for
+the miserable people, and having abandoned something to them,” he spoke
+here in his former thoughtful manner, “that one might be listened to,
+and might have the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night,
+after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie--”
+
+“When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “Yes. I wonder you
+are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were going to
+France at this time of day!”
+
+“However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile. “It is
+more to the purpose that you say you are.”
+
+“And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” Mr. Lorry
+glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you can have no
+conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted, and
+of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved. The
+Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to numbers
+of people, if some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they
+might be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set
+afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now, a judicious selection from these
+with the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or otherwise
+getting of them out of harm’s way, is within the power (without loss of
+precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if any one. And shall
+I hang back, when Tellson’s knows this and says this--Tellson’s, whose
+bread I have eaten these sixty years--because I am a little stiff about
+the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half a dozen old codgers here!”
+
+“How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry.”
+
+“Tut! Nonsense, sir!--And, my dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, glancing at
+the House again, “you are to remember, that getting things out of
+Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an
+impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought
+to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to
+whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine,
+every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he passed
+the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would come and go, as easily
+as in business-like Old England; but now, everything is stopped.”
+
+“And do you really go to-night?”
+
+“I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to admit of
+delay.”
+
+“And do you take no one with you?”
+
+“All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have nothing
+to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has been my
+bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used to him.
+Nobody will suspect Jerry of being anything but an English bull-dog, or
+of having any design in his head but to fly at anybody who touches his
+master.”
+
+“I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
+youthfulness.”
+
+“I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this little
+commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson’s proposal to retire and
+live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old.”
+
+This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry’s usual desk, with
+Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he
+would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too
+much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it
+was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this
+terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under
+the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or
+omitted to be done, that had led to it--as if observers of the wretched
+millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
+should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
+years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
+vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
+restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
+and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
+without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it was
+such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of blood
+in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which had
+already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.
+
+Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King’s Bench Bar, far on his
+way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching
+to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating
+them from the face of the earth, and doing without them: and for
+accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to the abolition
+of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard
+with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay stood divided between
+going away that he might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his
+word, when the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.
+
+The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened letter
+before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the person to
+whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so close to Darnay
+that he saw the direction--the more quickly because it was his own right
+name. The address, turned into English, ran:
+
+“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde, of
+France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers,
+London, England.”
+
+On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent and
+express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name should
+be--unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation--kept inviolate
+between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own wife had no
+suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; “I have referred it,
+I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
+gentleman is to be found.”
+
+The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there
+was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry’s desk. He
+held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the
+person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at
+it in the person of that plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That,
+and The Other, all had something disparaging to say, in French or in
+English, concerning the Marquis who was not to be found.
+
+“Nephew, I believe--but in any case degenerate successor--of the
+polished Marquis who was murdered,” said one. “Happy to say, I never
+knew him.”
+
+“A craven who abandoned his post,” said another--this Monseigneur had
+been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a load of
+hay--“some years ago.”
+
+“Infected with the new doctrines,” said a third, eyeing the direction
+through his glass in passing; “set himself in opposition to the last
+Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them to
+the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope, as he deserves.”
+
+“Hey?” cried the blatant Stryver. “Did he though? Is that the sort of
+fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D--n the fellow!”
+
+Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on
+the shoulder, and said:
+
+“I know the fellow.”
+
+“Do you, by Jupiter?” said Stryver. “I am sorry for it.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Why, Mr. Darnay? D’ye hear what he did? Don’t ask, why, in these
+times.”
+
+“But I do ask why?”
+
+“Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to
+hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow,
+who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that
+ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the earth
+that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am sorry that a
+man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I’ll answer you. I am sorry
+because I believe there is contamination in such a scoundrel. That’s
+why.”
+
+Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself, and
+said: “You may not understand the gentleman.”
+
+“I understand how to put _you_ in a corner, Mr. Darnay,” said Bully
+Stryver, “and I’ll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I _don’t_
+understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You may also
+tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly goods and position
+to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the head of them. But, no,
+gentlemen,” said Stryver, looking all round, and snapping his fingers,
+“I know something of human nature, and I tell you that you’ll never
+find a fellow like this fellow, trusting himself to the mercies of such
+precious _protégés_. No, gentlemen; he’ll always show ‘em a clean pair
+of heels very early in the scuffle, and sneak away.”
+
+With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver
+shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation of
+his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the desk,
+in the general departure from the Bank.
+
+“Will you take charge of the letter?” said Mr. Lorry. “You know where to
+deliver it?”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have been
+addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to forward it, and
+that it has been here some time?”
+
+“I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?”
+
+“From here, at eight.”
+
+“I will come back, to see you off.”
+
+Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men,
+Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple, opened the
+letter, and read it. These were its contents:
+
+
+“Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.
+
+“June 21, 1792. “MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.
+
+“After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the
+village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and
+brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered a
+great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed--razed to the
+ground.
+
+“The crime for which I am imprisoned, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
+and for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, and shall lose my
+life (without your so generous help), is, they tell me, treason against
+the majesty of the people, in that I have acted against them for an
+emigrant. It is in vain I represent that I have acted for them, and not
+against, according to your commands. It is in vain I represent that,
+before the sequestration of emigrant property, I had remitted the
+imposts they had ceased to pay; that I had collected no rent; that I had
+had recourse to no process. The only response is, that I have acted for
+an emigrant, and where is that emigrant?
+
+“Ah! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is that
+emigrant? I cry in my sleep where is he? I demand of Heaven, will he
+not come to deliver me? No answer. Ah Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
+I send my desolate cry across the sea, hoping it may perhaps reach your
+ears through the great bank of Tilson known at Paris!
+
+“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
+your noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, to
+succour and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to you. Oh
+Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true to me!
+
+“From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer and
+nearer to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, the
+assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service.
+
+“Your afflicted,
+
+“Gabelle.”
+
+
+The latent uneasiness in Darnay’s mind was roused to vigourous life
+by this letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose
+only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so
+reproachfully in the face, that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple
+considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the passersby.
+
+He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had culminated
+the bad deeds and bad reputation of the old family house, in his
+resentful suspicions of his uncle, and in the aversion with which his
+conscience regarded the crumbling fabric that he was supposed to uphold,
+he had acted imperfectly. He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie,
+his renunciation of his social place, though by no means new to his own
+mind, had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that he ought to have
+systematically worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to
+do it, and that it had never been done.
+
+The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of being
+always actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of the time
+which had followed on one another so fast, that the events of this week
+annihilated the immature plans of last week, and the events of the week
+following made all new again; he knew very well, that to the force of
+these circumstances he had yielded:--not without disquiet, but still
+without continuous and accumulating resistance. That he had watched
+the times for a time of action, and that they had shifted and struggled
+until the time had gone by, and the nobility were trooping from
+France by every highway and byway, and their property was in course of
+confiscation and destruction, and their very names were blotting out,
+was as well known to himself as it could be to any new authority in
+France that might impeach him for it.
+
+But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so
+far from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had
+relinquished them of his own will, thrown himself on a world with no
+favour in it, won his own private place there, and earned his own
+bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the impoverished and involved estate
+on written instructions, to spare the people, to give them what little
+there was to give--such fuel as the heavy creditors would let them have
+in the winter, and such produce as could be saved from the same grip in
+the summer--and no doubt he had put the fact in plea and proof, for his
+own safety, so that it could not but appear now.
+
+This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had begun to make,
+that he would go to Paris.
+
+Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven
+him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him
+to itself, and he must go. Everything that arose before his mind drifted
+him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible
+attraction. His latent uneasiness had been, that bad aims were being
+worked out in his own unhappy land by bad instruments, and that he who
+could not fail to know that he was better than they, was not there,
+trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and assert the claims of mercy
+and humanity. With this uneasiness half stifled, and half reproaching
+him, he had been brought to the pointed comparison of himself with the
+brave old gentleman in whom duty was so strong; upon that comparison
+(injurious to himself) had instantly followed the sneers of Monseigneur,
+which had stung him bitterly, and those of Stryver, which above all were
+coarse and galling, for old reasons. Upon those, had followed Gabelle’s
+letter: the appeal of an innocent prisoner, in danger of death, to his
+justice, honour, and good name.
+
+His resolution was made. He must go to Paris.
+
+Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he
+struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The intention
+with which he had done what he had done, even although he had left
+it incomplete, presented it before him in an aspect that would be
+gratefully acknowledged in France on his presenting himself to assert
+it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the
+sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even
+saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging
+Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.
+
+As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered that
+neither Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was gone.
+Lucie should be spared the pain of separation; and her father, always
+reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old,
+should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in
+the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of his
+situation was referable to her father, through the painful anxiety
+to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he did not
+discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had its influence
+in his course.
+
+He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was time to
+return to Tellson’s and take leave of Mr. Lorry. As soon as he arrived
+in Paris he would present himself to this old friend, but he must say
+nothing of his intention now.
+
+A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and Jerry was
+booted and equipped.
+
+“I have delivered that letter,” said Charles Darnay to Mr. Lorry. “I
+would not consent to your being charged with any written answer, but
+perhaps you will take a verbal one?”
+
+“That I will, and readily,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it is not dangerous.”
+
+“Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye.”
+
+“What is his name?” said Mr. Lorry, with his open pocket-book in his
+hand.
+
+“Gabelle.”
+
+“Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle in prison?”
+
+“Simply, ‘that he has received the letter, and will come.’”
+
+“Any time mentioned?”
+
+“He will start upon his journey to-morrow night.”
+
+“Any person mentioned?”
+
+“No.”
+
+He helped Mr. Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and cloaks,
+and went out with him from the warm atmosphere of the old Bank, into the
+misty air of Fleet-street. “My love to Lucie, and to little Lucie,” said
+Mr. Lorry at parting, “and take precious care of them till I come back.”
+ Charles Darnay shook his head and doubtfully smiled, as the carriage
+rolled away.
+
+That night--it was the fourteenth of August--he sat up late, and wrote
+two fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong obligation
+he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length, the reasons
+that he had, for feeling confident that he could become involved in no
+personal danger there; the other was to the Doctor, confiding Lucie and
+their dear child to his care, and dwelling on the same topics with the
+strongest assurances. To both, he wrote that he would despatch letters
+in proof of his safety, immediately after his arrival.
+
+It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first
+reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter to
+preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious.
+But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and busy, made him
+resolute not to tell her what impended (he had been half moved to do it,
+so strange it was to him to act in anything without her quiet aid), and
+the day passed quickly. Early in the evening he embraced her, and her
+scarcely less dear namesake, pretending that he would return by-and-bye
+(an imaginary engagement took him out, and he had secreted a valise
+of clothes ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of the heavy
+streets, with a heavier heart.
+
+The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides
+and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his
+two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before
+midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey.
+“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
+your noble name!” was the poor prisoner’s cry with which he strengthened
+his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on earth behind him, and
+floated away for the Loadstone Rock.
+
+
+The end of the second book.
+
+
+
+
+
+Book the Third--the Track of a Storm
+
+
+
+
+I. In Secret
+
+
+The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from
+England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and
+ninety-two. More than enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad
+horses, he would have encountered to delay him, though the fallen and
+unfortunate King of France had been upon his throne in all his glory;
+but, the changed times were fraught with other obstacles than
+these. Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of
+citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state
+of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them,
+inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own,
+turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in
+hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning
+Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or
+Death.
+
+A very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when Charles
+Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country roads there
+was no hope of return until he should have been declared a good citizen
+at Paris. Whatever might befall now, he must on to his journey’s end.
+Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across
+the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in
+the series that was barred between him and England. The universal
+watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net,
+or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have
+felt his freedom more completely gone.
+
+This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty
+times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by
+riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him
+by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge. He had been
+days upon his journey in France alone, when he went to bed tired out, in
+a little town on the high road, still a long way from Paris.
+
+Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle’s letter from his
+prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His difficulty at the
+guard-house in this small place had been such, that he felt his journey
+to have come to a crisis. And he was, therefore, as little surprised as
+a man could be, to find himself awakened at the small inn to which he
+had been remitted until morning, in the middle of the night.
+
+Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in rough
+red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed.
+
+“Emigrant,” said the functionary, “I am going to send you on to Paris,
+under an escort.”
+
+“Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could
+dispense with the escort.”
+
+“Silence!” growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the butt-end
+of his musket. “Peace, aristocrat!”
+
+“It is as the good patriot says,” observed the timid functionary. “You
+are an aristocrat, and must have an escort--and must pay for it.”
+
+“I have no choice,” said Charles Darnay.
+
+“Choice! Listen to him!” cried the same scowling red-cap. “As if it was
+not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!”
+
+“It is always as the good patriot says,” observed the functionary. “Rise
+and dress yourself, emigrant.”
+
+Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where other
+patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by
+a watch-fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and hence he
+started with it on the wet, wet roads at three o’clock in the morning.
+
+The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tri-coloured
+cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on either
+side of him.
+
+The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to
+his bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round his
+wrist. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving in their
+faces: clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven town pavement,
+and out upon the mire-deep roads. In this state they traversed without
+change, except of horses and pace, all the mire-deep leagues that lay
+between them and the capital.
+
+They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak, and
+lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly clothed,
+that they twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched their ragged
+shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the personal discomfort of
+being so attended, and apart from such considerations of present danger
+as arose from one of the patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying
+his musket very recklessly, Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint
+that was laid upon him to awaken any serious fears in his breast; for,
+he reasoned with himself that it could have no reference to the merits
+of an individual case that was not yet stated, and of representations,
+confirmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were not yet made.
+
+But when they came to the town of Beauvais--which they did at eventide,
+when the streets were filled with people--he could not conceal from
+himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming. An ominous crowd
+gathered to see him dismount of the posting-yard, and many voices called
+out loudly, “Down with the emigrant!”
+
+He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and,
+resuming it as his safest place, said:
+
+“Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own
+will?”
+
+“You are a cursed emigrant,” cried a farrier, making at him in a
+furious manner through the press, hammer in hand; “and you are a cursed
+aristocrat!”
+
+The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider’s
+bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, “Let him
+be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris.”
+
+“Judged!” repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. “Ay! and condemned
+as a traitor.” At this the crowd roared approval.
+
+Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse’s head to the
+yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on, with
+the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his
+voice heard:
+
+“Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a
+traitor.”
+
+“He lies!” cried the smith. “He is a traitor since the decree. His life
+is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!”
+
+At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which
+another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his
+horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse’s flanks,
+and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier
+struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but, no
+more was done.
+
+“What is this decree that the smith spoke of?” Darnay asked the
+postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.
+
+“Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants.”
+
+“When passed?”
+
+“On the fourteenth.”
+
+“The day I left England!”
+
+“Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be
+others--if there are not already--banishing all emigrants, and
+condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he said
+your life was not your own.”
+
+“But there are no such decrees yet?”
+
+“What do I know!” said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders; “there
+may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?”
+
+They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and
+then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many
+wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride
+unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and
+lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor
+cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and
+would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night,
+circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn
+up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in
+Beauvais that night to help them out of it and they passed on once more
+into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and
+wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
+that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by
+the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their
+way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.
+
+Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier was
+closed and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.
+
+“Where are the papers of this prisoner?” demanded a resolute-looking man
+in authority, who was summoned out by the guard.
+
+Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay requested the
+speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller and French citizen,
+in charge of an escort which the disturbed state of the country had
+imposed upon him, and which he had paid for.
+
+“Where,” repeated the same personage, without taking any heed of him
+whatever, “are the papers of this prisoner?”
+
+The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. Casting his
+eyes over Gabelle’s letter, the same personage in authority showed some
+disorder and surprise, and looked at Darnay with a close attention.
+
+He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and went
+into the guard-room; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses outside the
+gate. Looking about him while in this state of suspense, Charles
+Darnay observed that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and
+patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that while ingress
+into the city for peasants’ carts bringing in supplies, and for similar
+traffic and traffickers, was easy enough, egress, even for the homeliest
+people, was very difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not
+to mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting to issue
+forth; but, the previous identification was so strict, that they
+filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of these people knew
+their turn for examination to be so far off, that they lay down on the
+ground to sleep or smoke, while others talked together, or loitered
+about. The red cap and tri-colour cockade were universal, both among men
+and women.
+
+When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of these
+things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in authority,
+who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he delivered to the
+escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him
+to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his tired horse,
+turned and rode away without entering the city.
+
+He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of common wine
+and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, asleep and awake,
+drunk and sober, and in various neutral states between sleeping and
+waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were standing and lying about. The
+light in the guard-house, half derived from the waning oil-lamps of
+the night, and half from the overcast day, was in a correspondingly
+uncertain condition. Some registers were lying open on a desk, and an
+officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided over these.
+
+“Citizen Defarge,” said he to Darnay’s conductor, as he took a slip of
+paper to write on. “Is this the emigrant Evremonde?”
+
+“This is the man.”
+
+“Your age, Evremonde?”
+
+“Thirty-seven.”
+
+“Married, Evremonde?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Where married?”
+
+“In England.”
+
+“Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?”
+
+“In England.”
+
+“Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to the prison of La
+Force.”
+
+“Just Heaven!” exclaimed Darnay. “Under what law, and for what offence?”
+
+The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.
+
+“We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences, since you were here.” He
+said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.
+
+“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response
+to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you. I
+demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that
+my right?”
+
+“Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde,” was the stolid reply. The officer
+wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he had written,
+sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the words “In secret.”
+
+Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must accompany
+him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed patriots attended
+them.
+
+“Is it you,” said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the
+guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, “who married the daughter of
+Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more?”
+
+“Yes,” replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.
+
+“My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter Saint
+Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.”
+
+“My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!”
+
+The word “wife” seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to Defarge, to say
+with sudden impatience, “In the name of that sharp female newly-born,
+and called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?”
+
+“You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the
+truth?”
+
+“A bad truth for you,” said Defarge, speaking with knitted brows, and
+looking straight before him.
+
+“Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so changed, so
+sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you render me a
+little help?”
+
+“None.” Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.
+
+“Will you answer me a single question?”
+
+“Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.”
+
+“In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some free
+communication with the world outside?”
+
+“You will see.”
+
+“I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means of
+presenting my case?”
+
+“You will see. But, what then? Other people have been similarly buried
+in worse prisons, before now.”
+
+“But never by me, Citizen Defarge.”
+
+Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a steady
+and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the fainter hope
+there was--or so Darnay thought--of his softening in any slight degree.
+He, therefore, made haste to say:
+
+“It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even better
+than I, of how much importance), that I should be able to communicate to
+Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank, an English gentleman who is now in Paris,
+the simple fact, without comment, that I have been thrown into the
+prison of La Force. Will you cause that to be done for me?”
+
+“I will do,” Defarge doggedly rejoined, “nothing for you. My duty is to
+my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of both, against you.
+I will do nothing for you.”
+
+Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his pride
+was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but see
+how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing along the
+streets. The very children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned
+their heads, and a few shook their fingers at him as an aristocrat;
+otherwise, that a man in good clothes should be going to prison, was no
+more remarkable than that a labourer in working clothes should be
+going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty street through which they
+passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was addressing an excited
+audience on the crimes against the people, of the king and the royal
+family. The few words that he caught from this man’s lips, first made
+it known to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the
+foreign ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at
+Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal
+watchfulness had completely isolated him.
+
+That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had
+developed themselves when he left England, he of course knew now. That
+perils had thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster and faster
+yet, he of course knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he
+might not have made this journey, if he could have foreseen the events
+of a few days. And yet his misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by
+the light of this later time, they would appear. Troubled as the future
+was, it was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant
+hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, within a few
+rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed
+garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it had
+been a hundred thousand years away. The “sharp female newly-born, and
+called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, or to the generality
+of people, by name. The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were
+probably unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How could
+they have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?
+
+Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel separation
+from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or the
+certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on
+his mind, which was enough to carry into a dreary prison courtyard, he
+arrived at the prison of La Force.
+
+A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom Defarge
+presented “The Emigrant Evremonde.”
+
+“What the Devil! How many more of them!” exclaimed the man with the
+bloated face.
+
+Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and withdrew,
+with his two fellow-patriots.
+
+“What the Devil, I say again!” exclaimed the gaoler, left with his wife.
+“How many more!”
+
+The gaoler’s wife, being provided with no answer to the question, merely
+replied, “One must have patience, my dear!” Three turnkeys who entered
+responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the sentiment, and one added, “For
+the love of Liberty;” which sounded in that place like an inappropriate
+conclusion.
+
+The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, and with a
+horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how soon the noisome
+flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such places that
+are ill cared for!
+
+“In secret, too,” grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written paper. “As
+if I was not already full to bursting!”
+
+He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles Darnay
+awaited his further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes, pacing to and
+fro in the strong arched room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat: in
+either case detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief and his
+subordinates.
+
+“Come!” said the chief, at length taking up his keys, “come with me,
+emigrant.”
+
+Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied him by
+corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them,
+until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with
+prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at a long table, reading
+and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering; the men were for the
+most part standing behind their chairs, or lingering up and down the
+room.
+
+In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and
+disgrace, the new-comer recoiled from this company. But the crowning
+unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once rising to
+receive him, with every refinement of manner known to the time, and with
+all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.
+
+So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and
+gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and
+misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand
+in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost
+of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of
+frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all
+waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes
+that were changed by the death they had died in coming there.
+
+It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the other
+gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to appearance
+in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked so extravagantly
+coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were
+there--with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the
+mature woman delicately bred--that the inversion of all experience and
+likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its
+utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress
+of disease that had brought him to these gloomy shades!
+
+“In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,” said a
+gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward, “I have the
+honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you
+on the calamity that has brought you among us. May it soon terminate
+happily! It would be an impertinence elsewhere, but it is not so here,
+to ask your name and condition?”
+
+Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required information, in
+words as suitable as he could find.
+
+“But I hope,” said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler with his
+eyes, who moved across the room, “that you are not in secret?”
+
+“I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard them say
+so.”
+
+“Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage; several
+members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it has lasted
+but a short time.” Then he added, raising his voice, “I grieve to inform
+the society--in secret.”
+
+There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed the room
+to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many voices--among
+which, the soft and compassionate voices of women were conspicuous--gave
+him good wishes and encouragement. He turned at the grated door, to
+render the thanks of his heart; it closed under the gaoler’s hand; and
+the apparitions vanished from his sight forever.
+
+The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When they had
+ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already counted
+them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed into a
+solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not dark.
+
+“Yours,” said the gaoler.
+
+“Why am I confined alone?”
+
+“How do I know!”
+
+“I can buy pen, ink, and paper?”
+
+“Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then. At
+present, you may buy your food, and nothing more.”
+
+There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. As
+the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the four
+walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the mind of
+the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that this gaoler
+was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person, as to look like
+a man who had been drowned and filled with water. When the gaoler was
+gone, he thought in the same wandering way, “Now am I left, as if I were
+dead.” Stopping then, to look down at the mattress, he turned from it
+with a sick feeling, and thought, “And here in these crawling creatures
+is the first condition of the body after death.”
+
+“Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
+paces by four and a half.” The prisoner walked to and fro in his cell,
+counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose like muffled
+drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. “He made shoes, he made
+shoes, he made shoes.” The prisoner counted the measurement again, and
+paced faster, to draw his mind with him from that latter repetition.
+“The ghosts that vanished when the wicket closed. There was one among
+them, the appearance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in the
+embrasure of a window, and she had a light shining upon her golden
+hair, and she looked like * * * * Let us ride on again, for God’s sake,
+through the illuminated villages with the people all awake! * * * * He
+made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four and
+a half.” With such scraps tossing and rolling upward from the depths of
+his mind, the prisoner walked faster and faster, obstinately counting
+and counting; and the roar of the city changed to this extent--that it
+still rolled in like muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he
+knew, in the swell that rose above them.
+
+
+
+
+II. The Grindstone
+
+
+Tellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris, was
+in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard and shut off from
+the street by a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to
+a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight from the
+troubles, in his own cook’s dress, and got across the borders. A
+mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still in his
+metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the preparation
+of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three strong men
+besides the cook in question.
+
+Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from the
+sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and
+willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and
+indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur’s
+house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all
+things moved so fast, and decree followed decree with that fierce
+precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month
+of September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of
+Monseigneur’s house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
+drinking brandy in its state apartments.
+
+A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of business in Paris,
+would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the Gazette.
+For, what would staid British responsibility and respectability have
+said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, and even to a Cupid
+over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson’s had whitewashed the
+Cupid, but he was still to be seen on the ceiling, in the coolest
+linen, aiming (as he very often does) at money from morning to
+night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this young Pagan, in
+Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of
+the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and
+also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest
+provocation. Yet, a French Tellson’s could get on with these things
+exceedingly well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had
+taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.
+
+What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and what would
+lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in
+Tellson’s hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons,
+and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with
+Tellson’s never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into
+the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis
+Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions. He sat by
+a newly-lighted wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was
+prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there was a
+deeper shade than the pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the
+room distortedly reflect--a shade of horror.
+
+He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of which
+he had grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced that they
+derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation of the main
+building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never calculated about
+that. All such circumstances were indifferent to him, so that he did
+his duty. On the opposite side of the courtyard, under a colonnade,
+was extensive standing--for carriages--where, indeed, some carriages
+of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of the pillars were fastened two
+great flaring flambeaux, and in the light of these, standing out in the
+open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly mounted thing which appeared
+to have hurriedly been brought there from some neighbouring smithy,
+or other workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these harmless
+objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by the fire. He had
+opened, not only the glass window, but the lattice blind outside it, and
+he had closed both again, and he shivered through his frame.
+
+From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there came
+the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring
+in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible
+nature were going up to Heaven.
+
+“Thank God,” said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, “that no one near and
+dear to me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He have mercy on all
+who are in danger!”
+
+Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he thought,
+“They have come back!” and sat listening. But, there was no loud
+irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and he heard the gate
+clash again, and all was quiet.
+
+The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that vague
+uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change would naturally
+awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well guarded, and he got up to
+go among the trusty people who were watching it, when his door suddenly
+opened, and two figures rushed in, at sight of which he fell back in
+amazement.
+
+Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, and with
+that old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensified, that it
+seemed as though it had been stamped upon her face expressly to give
+force and power to it in this one passage of her life.
+
+“What is this?” cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused. “What is the
+matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What has brought you here?
+What is it?”
+
+With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she panted
+out in his arms, imploringly, “O my dear friend! My husband!”
+
+“Your husband, Lucie?”
+
+“Charles.”
+
+“What of Charles?”
+
+“Here.
+
+“Here, in Paris?”
+
+“Has been here some days--three or four--I don’t know how many--I can’t
+collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity brought him here unknown to
+us; he was stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison.”
+
+The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same moment, the
+bell of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of feet and voices
+came pouring into the courtyard.
+
+“What is that noise?” said the Doctor, turning towards the window.
+
+“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Lorry. “Don’t look out! Manette, for your life,
+don’t touch the blind!”
+
+The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the window, and
+said, with a cool, bold smile:
+
+“My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been
+a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris--in Paris? In
+France--who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille, would
+touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in triumph.
+My old pain has given me a power that has brought us through the
+barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and brought us here. I
+knew it would be so; I knew I could help Charles out of all danger; I
+told Lucie so.--What is that noise?” His hand was again upon the window.
+
+“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. “No, Lucie, my
+dear, nor you!” He got his arm round her, and held her. “Don’t be so
+terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you that I know of no harm
+having happened to Charles; that I had no suspicion even of his being in
+this fatal place. What prison is he in?”
+
+“La Force!”
+
+“La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in
+your life--and you were always both--you will compose yourself now, to
+do exactly as I bid you; for more depends upon it than you can think, or
+I can say. There is no help for you in any action on your part to-night;
+you cannot possibly stir out. I say this, because what I must bid you
+to do for Charles’s sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must
+instantly be obedient, still, and quiet. You must let me put you in a
+room at the back here. You must leave your father and me alone for
+two minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you must not
+delay.”
+
+“I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I can do
+nothing else than this. I know you are true.”
+
+The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and turned the
+key; then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and opened the window and
+partly opened the blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor’s arm, and
+looked out with him into the courtyard.
+
+Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in number, or near
+enough, to fill the courtyard: not more than forty or fifty in all. The
+people in possession of the house had let them in at the gate, and they
+had rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had evidently been set up
+there for their purpose, as in a convenient and retired spot.
+
+But, such awful workers, and such awful work!
+
+The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two
+men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of
+the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than
+the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise.
+False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their
+hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with
+howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of
+sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung
+forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women
+held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping
+blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks
+struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and
+fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from
+the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the
+sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all
+over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain
+upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace
+and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through
+and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be
+sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to
+the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments
+of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And
+as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream
+of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
+their frenzied eyes;--eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have
+given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.
+
+All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of
+any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it
+were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor looked for
+explanation in his friend’s ashy face.
+
+“They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully round at
+the locked room, “murdering the prisoners. If you are sure of what you
+say; if you really have the power you think you have--as I believe you
+have--make yourself known to these devils, and get taken to La Force. It
+may be too late, I don’t know, but let it not be a minute later!”
+
+Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room,
+and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the blind.
+
+His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous
+confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water,
+carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse at the stone.
+For a few moments there was a pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and
+the unintelligible sound of his voice; and then Mr. Lorry saw him,
+surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of twenty men long, all
+linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to shoulder, hurried out with
+cries of--“Live the Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille prisoner’s
+kindred in La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in front there! Save
+the prisoner Evremonde at La Force!” and a thousand answering shouts.
+
+He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the window
+and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her father was
+assisted by the people, and gone in search of her husband. He found
+her child and Miss Pross with her; but, it never occurred to him to be
+surprised by their appearance until a long time afterwards, when he sat
+watching them in such quiet as the night knew.
+
+Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his feet,
+clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on his own
+bed, and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside her pretty
+charge. O the long, long night, with the moans of the poor wife! And O
+the long, long night, with no return of her father and no tidings!
+
+Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded, and the
+irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and spluttered.
+“What is it?” cried Lucie, affrighted. “Hush! The soldiers’ swords are
+sharpened there,” said Mr. Lorry. “The place is national property now,
+and used as a kind of armoury, my love.”
+
+Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and fitful.
+Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly detached himself
+from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked out again. A man, so
+besmeared that he might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping back
+to consciousness on a field of slain, was rising from the pavement by
+the side of the grindstone, and looking about him with a vacant air.
+Shortly, this worn-out murderer descried in the imperfect light one of
+the carriages of Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle,
+climbed in at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest on its
+dainty cushions.
+
+The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again,
+and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood
+alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had
+never given, and would never take away.
+
+
+
+
+III. The Shadow
+
+
+One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind of Mr.
+Lorry when business hours came round, was this:--that he had no right to
+imperil Tellson’s by sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under
+the Bank roof. His own possessions, safety, life, he would have hazarded
+for Lucie and her child, without a moment’s demur; but the great trust
+he held was not his own, and as to that business charge he was a strict
+man of business.
+
+At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding out
+the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in reference to
+the safest dwelling-place in the distracted state of the city. But, the
+same consideration that suggested him, repudiated him; he lived in the
+most violent Quarter, and doubtless was influential there, and deep in
+its dangerous workings.
+
+Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute’s delay
+tending to compromise Tellson’s, Mr. Lorry advised with Lucie. She said
+that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging for a short term, in that
+Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was no business objection to
+this, and as he foresaw that even if it were all well with Charles, and
+he were to be released, he could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry
+went out in quest of such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up
+in a removed by-street where the closed blinds in all the other windows
+of a high melancholy square of buildings marked deserted homes.
+
+To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and Miss Pross:
+giving them what comfort he could, and much more than he had himself.
+He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill a doorway that would bear
+considerable knocking on the head, and returned to his own occupations.
+A disturbed and doleful mind he brought to bear upon them, and slowly
+and heavily the day lagged on with him.
+
+It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank closed. He
+was again alone in his room of the previous night, considering what to
+do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair. In a few moments, a
+man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly observant look at him,
+addressed him by his name.
+
+“Your servant,” said Mr. Lorry. “Do you know me?”
+
+He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-five
+to fifty years of age. For answer he repeated, without any change of
+emphasis, the words:
+
+“Do you know me?”
+
+“I have seen you somewhere.”
+
+“Perhaps at my wine-shop?”
+
+Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: “You come from Doctor
+Manette?”
+
+“Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.”
+
+“And what says he? What does he send me?”
+
+Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It bore the
+words in the Doctor’s writing:
+
+    “Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet.
+     I have obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note
+     from Charles to his wife.  Let the bearer see his wife.”
+
+It was dated from La Force, within an hour.
+
+“Will you accompany me,” said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved after reading
+this note aloud, “to where his wife resides?”
+
+“Yes,” returned Defarge.
+
+Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and mechanical
+way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they went down into the
+courtyard. There, they found two women; one, knitting.
+
+“Madame Defarge, surely!” said Mr. Lorry, who had left her in exactly
+the same attitude some seventeen years ago.
+
+“It is she,” observed her husband.
+
+“Does Madame go with us?” inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that she moved as
+they moved.
+
+“Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the persons.
+It is for their safety.”
+
+Beginning to be struck by Defarge’s manner, Mr. Lorry looked dubiously
+at him, and led the way. Both the women followed; the second woman being
+The Vengeance.
+
+They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they might,
+ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted by Jerry,
+and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a transport by the
+tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and clasped the hand that
+delivered his note--little thinking what it had been doing near him in
+the night, and might, but for a chance, have done to him.
+
+     “DEAREST,--Take courage.  I am well, and your father has
+      influence around me.  You cannot answer this.
+      Kiss our child for me.”
+
+That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who received
+it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed one of the
+hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful, womanly
+action, but the hand made no response--dropped cold and heavy, and took
+to its knitting again.
+
+There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She stopped in
+the act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with her hands yet at her
+neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge met the lifted
+eyebrows and forehead with a cold, impassive stare.
+
+“My dear,” said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; “there are frequent
+risings in the streets; and, although it is not likely they will ever
+trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom she has the power
+to protect at such times, to the end that she may know them--that she
+may identify them. I believe,” said Mr. Lorry, rather halting in his
+reassuring words, as the stony manner of all the three impressed itself
+upon him more and more, “I state the case, Citizen Defarge?”
+
+Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a
+gruff sound of acquiescence.
+
+“You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to
+propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and our
+good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows no
+French.”
+
+The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than a
+match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and, danger,
+appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance,
+whom her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope
+_you_ are pretty well!” She also bestowed a British cough on Madame
+Defarge; but, neither of the two took much heed of her.
+
+“Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the
+first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it
+were the finger of Fate.
+
+“Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor prisoner’s darling
+daughter, and only child.”
+
+The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so
+threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively
+kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The
+shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall,
+threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.
+
+“It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “I have seen them. We
+may go.”
+
+But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it--not visible and
+presented, but indistinct and withheld--to alarm Lucie into saying, as
+she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge’s dress:
+
+“You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm. You will
+help me to see him if you can?”
+
+“Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame Defarge, looking
+down at her with perfect composure. “It is the daughter of your father
+who is my business here.”
+
+“For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child’s sake! She
+will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are more
+afraid of you than of these others.”
+
+Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband.
+Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her,
+collected his face into a sterner expression.
+
+“What is it that your husband says in that little letter?” asked Madame
+Defarge, with a lowering smile. “Influence; he says something touching
+influence?”
+
+“That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her
+breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it, “has
+much influence around him.”
+
+“Surely it will release him!” said Madame Defarge. “Let it do so.”
+
+“As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie, most earnestly, “I implore you to
+have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against
+my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think
+of me. As a wife and mother!”
+
+Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said,
+turning to her friend The Vengeance:
+
+“The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little
+as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have
+known _their_ husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them,
+often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in
+themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst,
+sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?”
+
+“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.
+
+“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes
+again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife
+and mother would be much to us now?”
+
+She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed. Defarge
+went last, and closed the door.
+
+“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her. “Courage,
+courage! So far all goes well with us--much, much better than it has of
+late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.”
+
+“I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a
+shadow on me and on all my hopes.”
+
+“Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the brave
+little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”
+
+But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself,
+for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.
+
+
+
+
+IV. Calm in Storm
+
+
+Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his
+absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as could be
+kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that
+not until long afterwards, when France and she were far apart, did she
+know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and all
+ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and nights had been
+darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air around her had been
+tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had been an attack upon
+the prisons, that all political prisoners had been in danger, and that
+some had been dragged out by the crowd and murdered.
+
+To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy on
+which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him through a
+scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had
+found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the prisoners were
+brought singly, and by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth
+to be massacred, or to be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back
+to their cells. That, presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he
+had announced himself by name and profession as having been for eighteen
+years a secret and unaccused prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the
+body so sitting in judgment had risen and identified him, and that this
+man was Defarge.
+
+That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table,
+that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded hard
+to the Tribunal--of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some
+dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not--for his life
+and liberty. That, in the first frantic greetings lavished on himself as
+a notable sufferer under the overthrown system, it had been accorded
+to him to have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and
+examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at once released, when
+the tide in his favour met with some unexplained check (not intelligible
+to the Doctor), which led to a few words of secret conference. That,
+the man sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette that
+the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his sake, be held
+inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the prisoner
+was removed to the interior of the prison again; but, that he, the
+Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and
+assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice or mischance,
+delivered to the concourse whose murderous yells outside the gate had
+often drowned the proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and
+had remained in that Hall of Blood until the danger was over.
+
+The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep by
+intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners who were
+saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against
+those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had
+been discharged into the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had
+thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress
+the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him
+in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies
+of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this
+awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man
+with the gentlest solicitude--had made a litter for him and escorted him
+carefully from the spot--had then caught up their weapons and plunged
+anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes
+with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of it.
+
+As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the face of
+his friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose within him that
+such dread experiences would revive the old danger.
+
+But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect: he had never
+at all known him in his present character. For the first time the Doctor
+felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the first time
+he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which
+could break the prison door of his daughter’s husband, and deliver him.
+“It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not mere waste and ruin.
+As my beloved child was helpful in restoring me to myself, I will be
+helpful now in restoring the dearest part of herself to her; by the aid
+of Heaven I will do it!” Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw
+the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm strong look and bearing
+of the man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, like a
+clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an energy which
+had lain dormant during the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.
+
+Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with, would
+have yielded before his persevering purpose. While he kept himself
+in his place, as a physician, whose business was with all degrees
+of mankind, bond and free, rich and poor, bad and good, he used his
+personal influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting physician
+of three prisons, and among them of La Force. He could now assure Lucie
+that her husband was no longer confined alone, but was mixed with the
+general body of prisoners; he saw her husband weekly, and brought sweet
+messages to her, straight from his lips; sometimes her husband himself
+sent a letter to her (though never by the Doctor’s hand), but she was
+not permitted to write to him: for, among the many wild suspicions of
+plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who were
+known to have made friends or permanent connections abroad.
+
+This new life of the Doctor’s was an anxious life, no doubt; still, the
+sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride in it.
+Nothing unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and worthy one;
+but he observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to that
+time, his imprisonment had been associated in the minds of his daughter
+and his friend, with his personal affliction, deprivation, and weakness.
+Now that this was changed, and he knew himself to be invested through
+that old trial with forces to which they both looked for Charles’s
+ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted by the change,
+that he took the lead and direction, and required them as the weak, to
+trust to him as the strong. The preceding relative positions of himself
+and Lucie were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and
+affection could reverse them, for he could have had no pride but in
+rendering some service to her who had rendered so much to him. “All
+curious to see,” thought Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, “but all
+natural and right; so, take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it
+couldn’t be in better hands.”
+
+But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get
+Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial,
+the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new
+era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of
+Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death
+against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the
+great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise
+against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils
+of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and
+had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and
+alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of
+the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds
+and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the
+fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore.
+What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year
+One of Liberty--the deluge rising from below, not falling from above,
+and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened!
+
+There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
+measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when
+time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other
+count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever
+of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the
+unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the
+head of the king--and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the
+head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned
+widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.
+
+And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in
+all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A
+revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand
+revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected,
+which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over
+any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged
+with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing;
+these things became the established order and nature of appointed
+things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old.
+Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before
+the general gaze from the foundations of the world--the figure of the
+sharp female called La Guillotine.
+
+It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache,
+it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a
+peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which
+shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window
+and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the
+human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts
+from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and
+believed in where the Cross was denied.
+
+It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted,
+were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young
+Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed
+the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and
+good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one
+dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes.
+The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief
+functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his
+namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God’s own Temple every
+day.
+
+Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the Doctor walked
+with a steady head: confident in his power, cautiously persistent in his
+end, never doubting that he would save Lucie’s husband at last. Yet the
+current of the time swept by, so strong and deep, and carried the time
+away so fiercely, that Charles had lain in prison one year and three
+months when the Doctor was thus steady and confident. So much more
+wicked and distracted had the Revolution grown in that December month,
+that the rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the
+violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and squares
+under the southern wintry sun. Still, the Doctor walked among the
+terrors with a steady head. No man better known than he, in Paris at
+that day; no man in a stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable
+in hospital and prison, using his art equally among assassins and
+victims, he was a man apart. In the exercise of his skill, the
+appearance and the story of the Bastille Captive removed him from all
+other men. He was not suspected or brought in question, any more than if
+he had indeed been recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were
+a Spirit moving among mortals.
+
+
+
+
+V. The Wood-Sawyer
+
+
+One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never
+sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her
+husband’s head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the
+tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright
+women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and
+old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all
+daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons,
+and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst.
+Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;--the last, much the easiest to
+bestow, O Guillotine!
+
+If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the time,
+had stunned the Doctor’s daughter into awaiting the result in idle
+despair, it would but have been with her as it was with many. But, from
+the hour when she had taken the white head to her fresh young bosom in
+the garret of Saint Antoine, she had been true to her duties. She was
+truest to them in the season of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good
+will always be.
+
+As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her father
+had entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged the little
+household as exactly as if her husband had been there. Everything had
+its appointed place and its appointed time. Little Lucie she taught,
+as regularly, as if they had all been united in their English home. The
+slight devices with which she cheated herself into the show of a belief
+that they would soon be reunited--the little preparations for his speedy
+return, the setting aside of his chair and his books--these, and the
+solemn prayer at night for one dear prisoner especially, among the many
+unhappy souls in prison and the shadow of death--were almost the only
+outspoken reliefs of her heavy mind.
+
+She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses, akin to
+mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as neat and as well
+attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days. She lost her colour,
+and the old and intent expression was a constant, not an occasional,
+thing; otherwise, she remained very pretty and comely. Sometimes, at
+night on kissing her father, she would burst into the grief she had
+repressed all day, and would say that her sole reliance, under Heaven,
+was on him. He always resolutely answered: “Nothing can happen to him
+without my knowledge, and I know that I can save him, Lucie.”
+
+They had not made the round of their changed life many weeks, when her
+father said to her, on coming home one evening:
+
+“My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles can
+sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get to
+it--which depends on many uncertainties and incidents--he might see you
+in the street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can
+show you. But you will not be able to see him, my poor child, and even
+if you could, it would be unsafe for you to make a sign of recognition.”
+
+“O show me the place, my father, and I will go there every day.”
+
+From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours. As the
+clock struck two, she was there, and at four she turned resignedly away.
+When it was not too wet or inclement for her child to be with her, they
+went together; at other times she was alone; but, she never missed a
+single day.
+
+It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street. The hovel
+of a cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only house at that
+end; all else was wall. On the third day of her being there, he noticed
+her.
+
+“Good day, citizeness.”
+
+“Good day, citizen.”
+
+This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had been
+established voluntarily some time ago, among the more thorough patriots;
+but, was now law for everybody.
+
+“Walking here again, citizeness?”
+
+“You see me, citizen!”
+
+The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of gesture (he
+had once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the prison, pointed
+at the prison, and putting his ten fingers before his face to represent
+bars, peeped through them jocosely.
+
+“But it’s not my business,” said he. And went on sawing his wood.
+
+Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her the moment she
+appeared.
+
+“What? Walking here again, citizeness?”
+
+“Yes, citizen.”
+
+“Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little citizeness?”
+
+“Do I say yes, mamma?” whispered little Lucie, drawing close to her.
+
+“Yes, dearest.”
+
+“Yes, citizen.”
+
+“Ah! But it’s not my business. My work is my business. See my saw! I
+call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his head
+comes!”
+
+The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket.
+
+“I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again!
+Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off _her_ head comes! Now, a child.
+Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off _its_ head comes. All the
+family!”
+
+Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, but it was
+impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at work, and not be in
+his sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good will, she always spoke to him
+first, and often gave him drink-money, which he readily received.
+
+He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite forgotten
+him in gazing at the prison roof and grates, and in lifting her heart
+up to her husband, she would come to herself to find him looking at her,
+with his knee on his bench and his saw stopped in its work. “But it’s
+not my business!” he would generally say at those times, and would
+briskly fall to his sawing again.
+
+In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds of
+spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and again
+in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at
+this place; and every day on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall.
+Her husband saw her (so she learned from her father) it might be once in
+five or six times: it might be twice or thrice running: it might be, not
+for a week or a fortnight together. It was enough that he could and did
+see her when the chances served, and on that possibility she would have
+waited out the day, seven days a week.
+
+These occupations brought her round to the December month, wherein her
+father walked among the terrors with a steady head. On a lightly-snowing
+afternoon she arrived at the usual corner. It was a day of some wild
+rejoicing, and a festival. She had seen the houses, as she came along,
+decorated with little pikes, and with little red caps stuck upon them;
+also, with tricoloured ribbons; also, with the standard inscription
+(tricoloured letters were the favourite), Republic One and Indivisible.
+Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!
+
+The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its whole
+surface furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He had got
+somebody to scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed Death in
+with most inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed pike
+and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he had stationed his
+saw inscribed as his “Little Sainte Guillotine”--for the great sharp
+female was by that time popularly canonised. His shop was shut and he
+was not there, which was a relief to Lucie, and left her quite alone.
+
+But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement
+and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment
+afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the corner by the
+prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with
+The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and
+they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was no other music
+than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song,
+keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison.
+Men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced
+together, as hazard had brought them together. At first, they were a
+mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as they
+filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly
+apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. They
+advanced, retreated, struck at one another’s hands, clutched at one
+another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one another and spun round
+in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those were down, the rest
+linked hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring broke,
+and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they
+all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then
+reversed the spin, and all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped
+again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width
+of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high
+up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible
+as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once
+innocent, delivered over to all devilry--a healthy pastime changed into
+a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the
+heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how
+warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly
+bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child’s head thus distracted, the
+delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of
+the disjointed time.
+
+This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and
+bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer’s house, the feathery snow
+fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.
+
+“O my father!” for he stood before her when she lifted up the eyes she
+had momentarily darkened with her hand; “such a cruel, bad sight.”
+
+“I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don’t be
+frightened! Not one of them would harm you.”
+
+“I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think of my
+husband, and the mercies of these people--”
+
+“We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left him climbing to
+the window, and I came to tell you. There is no one here to see. You may
+kiss your hand towards that highest shelving roof.”
+
+“I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!”
+
+“You cannot see him, my poor dear?”
+
+“No, father,” said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed her hand,
+“no.”
+
+A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. “I salute you, citizeness,”
+ from the Doctor. “I salute you, citizen.” This in passing. Nothing more.
+Madame Defarge gone, like a shadow over the white road.
+
+“Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an air of cheerfulness
+and courage, for his sake. That was well done;” they had left the spot;
+“it shall not be in vain. Charles is summoned for to-morrow.”
+
+“For to-morrow!”
+
+“There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are precautions
+to be taken, that could not be taken until he was actually summoned
+before the Tribunal. He has not received the notice yet, but I know
+that he will presently be summoned for to-morrow, and removed to the
+Conciergerie; I have timely information. You are not afraid?”
+
+She could scarcely answer, “I trust in you.”
+
+“Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; he shall
+be restored to you within a few hours; I have encompassed him with every
+protection. I must see Lorry.”
+
+He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing. They
+both knew too well what it meant. One. Two. Three. Three tumbrils faring
+away with their dread loads over the hushing snow.
+
+“I must see Lorry,” the Doctor repeated, turning her another way.
+
+The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had never left it. He
+and his books were in frequent requisition as to property confiscated
+and made national. What he could save for the owners, he saved. No
+better man living to hold fast by what Tellson’s had in keeping, and to
+hold his peace.
+
+A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, denoted
+the approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they arrived at the
+Bank. The stately residence of Monseigneur was altogether blighted and
+deserted. Above a heap of dust and ashes in the court, ran the letters:
+National Property. Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity, or Death!
+
+Who could that be with Mr. Lorry--the owner of the riding-coat upon the
+chair--who must not be seen? From whom newly arrived, did he come out,
+agitated and surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To whom did
+he appear to repeat her faltering words, when, raising his voice and
+turning his head towards the door of the room from which he had issued,
+he said: “Removed to the Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow?”
+
+
+
+
+VI. Triumph
+
+
+The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined
+Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were
+read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The
+standard gaoler-joke was, “Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you
+inside there!”
+
+“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!”
+
+So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.
+
+When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved
+for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles
+Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen
+hundreds pass away so.
+
+His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over them
+to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through the
+list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-three
+names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners so
+summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two had already been
+guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in the vaulted chamber
+where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on the night of his
+arrival. Every one of those had perished in the massacre; every human
+creature he had since cared for and parted with, had died on the
+scaffold.
+
+There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting was
+soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Force
+were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and a little
+concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tears
+there; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments had to be
+refilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lock-up hour, when the
+common rooms and corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs
+who kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were far from
+insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of the
+time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of fervour
+or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some persons to
+brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere
+boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In
+seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the
+disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have
+like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke
+them.
+
+The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its
+vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners were
+put to the bar before Charles Darnay’s name was called. All the fifteen
+were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour and a half.
+
+“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned.
+
+His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red cap
+and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing. Looking
+at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the
+usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were trying the
+honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never
+without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directing
+spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving,
+anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check. Of the men,
+the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore
+knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many
+knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under
+her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a man whom
+he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directly
+remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in
+his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed
+in the two figures was, that although they were posted as close to
+himself as they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to
+be waiting for something with a dogged determination, and they looked at
+the Jury, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette,
+in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr.
+Lorry were the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who
+wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the
+Carmagnole.
+
+Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor
+as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the decree
+which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that the
+decree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there was
+the decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.
+
+“Take off his head!” cried the audience. “An enemy to the Republic!”
+
+The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the
+prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in
+England?
+
+Undoubtedly it was.
+
+Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?
+
+Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.
+
+Why not? the President desired to know.
+
+Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful
+to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left
+his country--he submitted before the word emigrant in the present
+acceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industry in
+England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of France.
+
+What proof had he of this?
+
+He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, and
+Alexandre Manette.
+
+But he had married in England? the President reminded him.
+
+True, but not an English woman.
+
+A citizeness of France?
+
+Yes. By birth.
+
+Her name and family?
+
+“Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician who
+sits there.”
+
+This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in exaltation
+of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So capriciously were
+the people moved, that tears immediately rolled down several ferocious
+countenances which had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before, as
+if with impatience to pluck him out into the streets and kill him.
+
+On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his foot
+according to Doctor Manette’s reiterated instructions. The same cautious
+counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had prepared every
+inch of his road.
+
+The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did, and not
+sooner?
+
+He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no means
+of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in England,
+he lived by giving instruction in the French language and literature.
+He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written entreaty of
+a French citizen, who represented that his life was endangered by his
+absence. He had come back, to save a citizen’s life, and to bear his
+testimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the truth. Was that criminal
+in the eyes of the Republic?
+
+The populace cried enthusiastically, “No!” and the President rang his
+bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry “No!”
+ until they left off, of their own will.
+
+The President required the name of that citizen. The accused explained
+that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred with confidence
+to the citizen’s letter, which had been taken from him at the Barrier,
+but which he did not doubt would be found among the papers then before
+the President.
+
+The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured him that
+it would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it was produced
+and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did so. Citizen
+Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in the
+pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude of
+enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had been slightly
+overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact, had rather passed out
+of the Tribunal’s patriotic remembrance--until three days ago; when he
+had been summoned before it, and had been set at liberty on the Jury’s
+declaring themselves satisfied that the accusation against him was
+answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evremonde,
+called Darnay.
+
+Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,
+and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as he
+proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on his
+release from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in
+England, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
+their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocrat
+government there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, as
+the foe of England and friend of the United States--as he brought these
+circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with the
+straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
+populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur
+Lorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,
+had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate his
+account of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that
+they were ready with their votes if the President were content to
+receive them.
+
+At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the populace
+set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the prisoner’s
+favour, and the President declared him free.
+
+Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populace
+sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses towards
+generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-off against
+their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which of
+these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable; it is probable,
+to a blending of all the three, with the second predominating. No sooner
+was the acquittal pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood
+at another time, and such fraternal embraces were bestowed upon the
+prisoner by as many of both sexes as could rush at him, that after
+his long and unwholesome confinement he was in danger of fainting from
+exhaustion; none the less because he knew very well, that the very same
+people, carried by another current, would have rushed at him with
+the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the
+streets.
+
+His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be tried,
+rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to be tried
+together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had not
+assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensate
+itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these five came down to
+him before he left the place, condemned to die within twenty-four
+hours. The first of them told him so, with the customary prison sign
+of Death--a raised finger--and they all added in words, “Long live the
+Republic!”
+
+The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their proceedings,
+for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, there was a great
+crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every face he had seen in
+Court--except two, for which he looked in vain. On his coming out, the
+concourse made at him anew, weeping, embracing, and shouting, all by
+turns and all together, until the very tide of the river on the bank of
+which the mad scene was acted, seemed to run mad, like the people on the
+shore.
+
+They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had
+taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or passages.
+Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back of it they
+had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not
+even the Doctor’s entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home
+on men’s shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him,
+and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that
+he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he
+was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
+
+In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
+him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
+prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as
+they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried
+him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived. Her father
+had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband stood upon his
+feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.
+
+As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between his
+face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might come
+together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the
+rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the Carmagnole.
+Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman from the
+crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling and
+overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the river’s bank,
+and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled
+them away.
+
+After grasping the Doctor’s hand, as he stood victorious and proud
+before him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting in
+breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;
+after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round
+his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross who
+lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to their
+rooms.
+
+“Lucie! My own! I am safe.”
+
+“O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have
+prayed to Him.”
+
+They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again in
+his arms, he said to her:
+
+“And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this France
+could have done what he has done for me.”
+
+She laid her head upon her father’s breast, as she had laid his poor
+head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return he
+had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of his
+strength. “You must not be weak, my darling,” he remonstrated; “don’t
+tremble so. I have saved him.”
+
+
+
+
+VII. A Knock at the Door
+
+
+“I have saved him.” It was not another of the dreams in which he had
+often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a
+vague but heavy fear was upon her.
+
+All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately
+revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on
+vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that
+many as blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to
+her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her
+heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be.
+The shadows of the wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now
+the dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued
+them, looking for him among the Condemned; and then she clung closer to
+his real presence and trembled more.
+
+Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this
+woman’s weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking,
+no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the task
+he had set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let
+them all lean upon him.
+
+Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that was
+the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the people, but
+because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his imprisonment,
+had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards
+the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and
+partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant; the citizen and
+citizeness who acted as porters at the courtyard gate, rendered them
+occasional service; and Jerry (almost wholly transferred to them by
+Mr. Lorry) had become their daily retainer, and had his bed there every
+night.
+
+It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty,
+Equality, Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost of every
+house, the name of every inmate must be legibly inscribed in letters
+of a certain size, at a certain convenient height from the ground. Mr.
+Jerry Cruncher’s name, therefore, duly embellished the doorpost down
+below; and, as the afternoon shadows deepened, the owner of that name
+himself appeared, from overlooking a painter whom Doctor Manette had
+employed to add to the list the name of Charles Evremonde, called
+Darnay.
+
+In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all the usual
+harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor’s little household, as
+in very many others, the articles of daily consumption that were wanted
+were purchased every evening, in small quantities and at various small
+shops. To avoid attracting notice, and to give as little occasion as
+possible for talk and envy, was the general desire.
+
+For some months past, Miss Pross and Mr. Cruncher had discharged the
+office of purveyors; the former carrying the money; the latter, the
+basket. Every afternoon at about the time when the public lamps were
+lighted, they fared forth on this duty, and made and brought home
+such purchases as were needful. Although Miss Pross, through her long
+association with a French family, might have known as much of their
+language as of her own, if she had had a mind, she had no mind in that
+direction; consequently she knew no more of that “nonsense” (as she was
+pleased to call it) than Mr. Cruncher did. So her manner of marketing
+was to plump a noun-substantive at the head of a shopkeeper without any
+introduction in the nature of an article, and, if it happened not to be
+the name of the thing she wanted, to look round for that thing, lay hold
+of it, and hold on by it until the bargain was concluded. She always
+made a bargain for it, by holding up, as a statement of its just price,
+one finger less than the merchant held up, whatever his number might be.
+
+“Now, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red with felicity;
+“if you are ready, I am.”
+
+Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Pross’s service. He had worn
+all his rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky head down.
+
+“There’s all manner of things wanted,” said Miss Pross, “and we shall
+have a precious time of it. We want wine, among the rest. Nice toasts
+these Redheads will be drinking, wherever we buy it.”
+
+“It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should think,”
+ retorted Jerry, “whether they drink your health or the Old Un’s.”
+
+“Who’s he?” said Miss Pross.
+
+Mr. Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning “Old
+Nick’s.”
+
+“Ha!” said Miss Pross, “it doesn’t need an interpreter to explain the
+meaning of these creatures. They have but one, and it’s Midnight Murder,
+and Mischief.”
+
+“Hush, dear! Pray, pray, be cautious!” cried Lucie.
+
+“Yes, yes, yes, I’ll be cautious,” said Miss Pross; “but I may say
+among ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and tobaccoey
+smotherings in the form of embracings all round, going on in the
+streets. Now, Ladybird, never you stir from that fire till I come back!
+Take care of the dear husband you have recovered, and don’t move your
+pretty head from his shoulder as you have it now, till you see me again!
+May I ask a question, Doctor Manette, before I go?”
+
+“I think you may take that liberty,” the Doctor answered, smiling.
+
+“For gracious sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of
+that,” said Miss Pross.
+
+“Hush, dear! Again?” Lucie remonstrated.
+
+“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, “the
+short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious
+Majesty King George the Third;” Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; “and
+as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish
+tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!”
+
+Mr. Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the words
+after Miss Pross, like somebody at church.
+
+“I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though I wish you
+had never taken that cold in your voice,” said Miss Pross, approvingly.
+“But the question, Doctor Manette. Is there”--it was the good creature’s
+way to affect to make light of anything that was a great anxiety
+with them all, and to come at it in this chance manner--“is there any
+prospect yet, of our getting out of this place?”
+
+“I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.”
+
+“Heigh-ho-hum!” said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh as she
+glanced at her darling’s golden hair in the light of the fire, “then we
+must have patience and wait: that’s all. We must hold up our heads and
+fight low, as my brother Solomon used to say. Now, Mr. Cruncher!--Don’t
+you move, Ladybird!”
+
+They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and the
+child, by a bright fire. Mr. Lorry was expected back presently from the
+Banking House. Miss Pross had lighted the lamp, but had put it aside in
+a corner, that they might enjoy the fire-light undisturbed. Little Lucie
+sat by her grandfather with her hands clasped through his arm: and he,
+in a tone not rising much above a whisper, began to tell her a story of
+a great and powerful Fairy who had opened a prison-wall and let out
+a captive who had once done the Fairy a service. All was subdued and
+quiet, and Lucie was more at ease than she had been.
+
+“What is that?” she cried, all at once.
+
+“My dear!” said her father, stopping in his story, and laying his hand
+on hers, “command yourself. What a disordered state you are in! The
+least thing--nothing--startles you! _You_, your father’s daughter!”
+
+“I thought, my father,” said Lucie, excusing herself, with a pale face
+and in a faltering voice, “that I heard strange feet upon the stairs.”
+
+“My love, the staircase is as still as Death.”
+
+As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door.
+
+“Oh father, father. What can this be! Hide Charles. Save him!”
+
+“My child,” said the Doctor, rising, and laying his hand upon her
+shoulder, “I _have_ saved him. What weakness is this, my dear! Let me go
+to the door.”
+
+He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer rooms,
+and opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floor, and four rough
+men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols, entered the room.
+
+“The Citizen Evremonde, called Darnay,” said the first.
+
+“Who seeks him?” answered Darnay.
+
+“I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evremonde; I saw you before the
+Tribunal to-day. You are again the prisoner of the Republic.”
+
+The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child clinging
+to him.
+
+“Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner?”
+
+“It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and will
+know to-morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow.”
+
+Doctor Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, that he
+stood with the lamp in his hand, as if he were a statue made to hold it,
+moved after these words were spoken, put the lamp down, and confronting
+the speaker, and taking him, not ungently, by the loose front of his red
+woollen shirt, said:
+
+“You know him, you have said. Do you know me?”
+
+“Yes, I know you, Citizen Doctor.”
+
+“We all know you, Citizen Doctor,” said the other three.
+
+He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower voice,
+after a pause:
+
+“Will you answer his question to me then? How does this happen?”
+
+“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, reluctantly, “he has been denounced to
+the Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen,” pointing out the second who
+had entered, “is from Saint Antoine.”
+
+The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added:
+
+“He is accused by Saint Antoine.”
+
+“Of what?” asked the Doctor.
+
+“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, with his former reluctance, “ask no
+more. If the Republic demands sacrifices from you, without doubt you as
+a good patriot will be happy to make them. The Republic goes before all.
+The People is supreme. Evremonde, we are pressed.”
+
+“One word,” the Doctor entreated. “Will you tell me who denounced him?”
+
+“It is against rule,” answered the first; “but you can ask Him of Saint
+Antoine here.”
+
+The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved uneasily on his
+feet, rubbed his beard a little, and at length said:
+
+“Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced--and gravely--by
+the Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one other.”
+
+“What other?”
+
+“Do _you_ ask, Citizen Doctor?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then,” said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, “you will be
+answered to-morrow. Now, I am dumb!”
+
+
+
+
+VIII. A Hand at Cards
+
+
+Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home, Miss Pross threaded her
+way along the narrow streets and crossed the river by the bridge of the
+Pont-Neuf, reckoning in her mind the number of indispensable purchases
+she had to make. Mr. Cruncher, with the basket, walked at her side. They
+both looked to the right and to the left into most of the shops they
+passed, had a wary eye for all gregarious assemblages of people, and
+turned out of their road to avoid any very excited group of talkers. It
+was a raw evening, and the misty river, blurred to the eye with blazing
+lights and to the ear with harsh noises, showed where the barges were
+stationed in which the smiths worked, making guns for the Army of the
+Republic. Woe to the man who played tricks with _that_ Army, or got
+undeserved promotion in it! Better for him that his beard had never
+grown, for the National Razor shaved him close.
+
+Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure of oil
+for the lamp, Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they wanted.
+After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at the sign of the
+Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, not far from the National Palace,
+once (and twice) the Tuileries, where the aspect of things rather
+took her fancy. It had a quieter look than any other place of the same
+description they had passed, and, though red with patriotic caps, was
+not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr. Cruncher, and finding him of her
+opinion, Miss Pross resorted to the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity,
+attended by her cavalier.
+
+Slightly observant of the smoky lights; of the people, pipe in mouth,
+playing with limp cards and yellow dominoes; of the one bare-breasted,
+bare-armed, soot-begrimed workman reading a journal aloud, and of
+the others listening to him; of the weapons worn, or laid aside to be
+resumed; of the two or three customers fallen forward asleep, who in the
+popular high-shouldered shaggy black spencer looked, in that attitude,
+like slumbering bears or dogs; the two outlandish customers approached
+the counter, and showed what they wanted.
+
+As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another man in a
+corner, and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss Pross. No
+sooner did he face her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, and clapped
+her hands.
+
+In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That somebody was
+assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion was the
+likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see somebody fall, but only
+saw a man and a woman standing staring at each other; the man with all
+the outward aspect of a Frenchman and a thorough Republican; the woman,
+evidently English.
+
+What was said in this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of the
+Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something very
+voluble and loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss
+Pross and her protector, though they had been all ears. But, they had no
+ears for anything in their surprise. For, it must be recorded, that
+not only was Miss Pross lost in amazement and agitation, but,
+Mr. Cruncher--though it seemed on his own separate and individual
+account--was in a state of the greatest wonder.
+
+“What is the matter?” said the man who had caused Miss Pross to scream;
+speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low tone), and in
+English.
+
+“Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon!” cried Miss Pross, clapping her hands again.
+“After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you for so long a time,
+do I find you here!”
+
+“Don’t call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me?” asked the
+man, in a furtive, frightened way.
+
+“Brother, brother!” cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. “Have I ever
+been so hard with you that you ask me such a cruel question?”
+
+“Then hold your meddlesome tongue,” said Solomon, “and come out, if you
+want to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come out. Who’s this man?”
+
+Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no means
+affectionate brother, said through her tears, “Mr. Cruncher.”
+
+“Let him come out too,” said Solomon. “Does he think me a ghost?”
+
+Apparently, Mr. Cruncher did, to judge from his looks. He said not a
+word, however, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of her reticule
+through her tears with great difficulty paid for her wine. As she did
+so, Solomon turned to the followers of the Good Republican Brutus
+of Antiquity, and offered a few words of explanation in the French
+language, which caused them all to relapse into their former places and
+pursuits.
+
+“Now,” said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, “what do you
+want?”
+
+“How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned my love away
+from!” cried Miss Pross, “to give me such a greeting, and show me no
+affection.”
+
+“There. Confound it! There,” said Solomon, making a dab at Miss Pross’s
+lips with his own. “Now are you content?”
+
+Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence.
+
+“If you expect me to be surprised,” said her brother Solomon, “I am not
+surprised; I knew you were here; I know of most people who are here. If
+you really don’t want to endanger my existence--which I half believe you
+do--go your ways as soon as possible, and let me go mine. I am busy. I
+am an official.”
+
+“My English brother Solomon,” mourned Miss Pross, casting up her
+tear-fraught eyes, “that had the makings in him of one of the best and
+greatest of men in his native country, an official among foreigners, and
+such foreigners! I would almost sooner have seen the dear boy lying in
+his--”
+
+“I said so!” cried her brother, interrupting. “I knew it. You want to be
+the death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my own sister. Just
+as I am getting on!”
+
+“The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid!” cried Miss Pross. “Far
+rather would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I have ever
+loved you truly, and ever shall. Say but one affectionate word to me,
+and tell me there is nothing angry or estranged between us, and I will
+detain you no longer.”
+
+Good Miss Pross! As if the estrangement between them had come of any
+culpability of hers. As if Mr. Lorry had not known it for a fact, years
+ago, in the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious brother had spent
+her money and left her!
+
+He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more grudging
+condescension and patronage than he could have shown if their relative
+merits and positions had been reversed (which is invariably the case,
+all the world over), when Mr. Cruncher, touching him on the shoulder,
+hoarsely and unexpectedly interposed with the following singular
+question:
+
+“I say! Might I ask the favour? As to whether your name is John Solomon,
+or Solomon John?”
+
+The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had not
+previously uttered a word.
+
+“Come!” said Mr. Cruncher. “Speak out, you know.” (Which, by the way,
+was more than he could do himself.) “John Solomon, or Solomon John? She
+calls you Solomon, and she must know, being your sister. And _I_ know
+you’re John, you know. Which of the two goes first? And regarding that
+name of Pross, likewise. That warn’t your name over the water.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“Well, I don’t know all I mean, for I can’t call to mind what your name
+was, over the water.”
+
+“No?”
+
+“No. But I’ll swear it was a name of two syllables.”
+
+“Indeed?”
+
+“Yes. T’other one’s was one syllable. I know you. You was a spy--witness
+at the Bailey. What, in the name of the Father of Lies, own father to
+yourself, was you called at that time?”
+
+“Barsad,” said another voice, striking in.
+
+“That’s the name for a thousand pound!” cried Jerry.
+
+The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his hands behind
+him under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood at Mr. Cruncher’s
+elbow as negligently as he might have stood at the Old Bailey itself.
+
+“Don’t be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. Lorry’s, to his
+surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not present myself
+elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be useful; I present
+myself here, to beg a little talk with your brother. I wish you had a
+better employed brother than Mr. Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr. Barsad
+was not a Sheep of the Prisons.”
+
+Sheep was a cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaolers. The spy,
+who was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he dared--
+
+“I’ll tell you,” said Sydney. “I lighted on you, Mr. Barsad, coming out
+of the prison of the Conciergerie while I was contemplating the walls,
+an hour or more ago. You have a face to be remembered, and I remember
+faces well. Made curious by seeing you in that connection, and having
+a reason, to which you are no stranger, for associating you with
+the misfortunes of a friend now very unfortunate, I walked in your
+direction. I walked into the wine-shop here, close after you, and
+sat near you. I had no difficulty in deducing from your unreserved
+conversation, and the rumour openly going about among your admirers, the
+nature of your calling. And gradually, what I had done at random, seemed
+to shape itself into a purpose, Mr. Barsad.”
+
+“What purpose?” the spy asked.
+
+“It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in the
+street. Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes of your
+company--at the office of Tellson’s Bank, for instance?”
+
+“Under a threat?”
+
+“Oh! Did I say that?”
+
+“Then, why should I go there?”
+
+“Really, Mr. Barsad, I can’t say, if you can’t.”
+
+“Do you mean that you won’t say, sir?” the spy irresolutely asked.
+
+“You apprehend me very clearly, Mr. Barsad. I won’t.”
+
+Carton’s negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid of his
+quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret mind,
+and with such a man as he had to do with. His practised eye saw it, and
+made the most of it.
+
+“Now, I told you so,” said the spy, casting a reproachful look at his
+sister; “if any trouble comes of this, it’s your doing.”
+
+“Come, come, Mr. Barsad!” exclaimed Sydney. “Don’t be ungrateful.
+But for my great respect for your sister, I might not have led up so
+pleasantly to a little proposal that I wish to make for our mutual
+satisfaction. Do you go with me to the Bank?”
+
+“I’ll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I’ll go with you.”
+
+“I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner of her
+own street. Let me take your arm, Miss Pross. This is not a good city,
+at this time, for you to be out in, unprotected; and as your escort
+knows Mr. Barsad, I will invite him to Mr. Lorry’s with us. Are we
+ready? Come then!”
+
+Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life
+remembered, that as she pressed her hands on Sydney’s arm and looked up
+in his face, imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, there was a braced
+purpose in the arm and a kind of inspiration in the eyes, which not only
+contradicted his light manner, but changed and raised the man. She was
+too much occupied then with fears for the brother who so little deserved
+her affection, and with Sydney’s friendly reassurances, adequately to
+heed what she observed.
+
+They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way to Mr.
+Lorry’s, which was within a few minutes’ walk. John Barsad, or Solomon
+Pross, walked at his side.
+
+Mr. Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a cheery
+little log or two of fire--perhaps looking into their blaze for the
+picture of that younger elderly gentleman from Tellson’s, who had looked
+into the red coals at the Royal George at Dover, now a good many years
+ago. He turned his head as they entered, and showed the surprise with
+which he saw a stranger.
+
+“Miss Pross’s brother, sir,” said Sydney. “Mr. Barsad.”
+
+“Barsad?” repeated the old gentleman, “Barsad? I have an association
+with the name--and with the face.”
+
+“I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr. Barsad,” observed Carton,
+coolly. “Pray sit down.”
+
+As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr. Lorry wanted,
+by saying to him with a frown, “Witness at that trial.” Mr. Lorry
+immediately remembered, and regarded his new visitor with an undisguised
+look of abhorrence.
+
+“Mr. Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affectionate
+brother you have heard of,” said Sydney, “and has acknowledged the
+relationship. I pass to worse news. Darnay has been arrested again.”
+
+Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, “What do you
+tell me! I left him safe and free within these two hours, and am about
+to return to him!”
+
+“Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr. Barsad?”
+
+“Just now, if at all.”
+
+“Mr. Barsad is the best authority possible, sir,” said Sydney, “and I
+have it from Mr. Barsad’s communication to a friend and brother Sheep
+over a bottle of wine, that the arrest has taken place. He left the
+messengers at the gate, and saw them admitted by the porter. There is no
+earthly doubt that he is retaken.”
+
+Mr. Lorry’s business eye read in the speaker’s face that it was loss
+of time to dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that something
+might depend on his presence of mind, he commanded himself, and was
+silently attentive.
+
+“Now, I trust,” said Sydney to him, “that the name and influence of
+Doctor Manette may stand him in as good stead to-morrow--you said he
+would be before the Tribunal again to-morrow, Mr. Barsad?--”
+
+“Yes; I believe so.”
+
+“--In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be so. I own
+to you, I am shaken, Mr. Lorry, by Doctor Manette’s not having had the
+power to prevent this arrest.”
+
+“He may not have known of it beforehand,” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we remember how
+identified he is with his son-in-law.”
+
+“That’s true,” Mr. Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand at his
+chin, and his troubled eyes on Carton.
+
+“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games
+are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I
+will play the losing one. No man’s life here is worth purchase. Any one
+carried home by the people to-day, may be condemned tomorrow. Now, the
+stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend
+in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win, is Mr.
+Barsad.”
+
+“You need have good cards, sir,” said the spy.
+
+“I’ll run them over. I’ll see what I hold,--Mr. Lorry, you know what a
+brute I am; I wish you’d give me a little brandy.”
+
+It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful--drank off another
+glassful--pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.
+
+“Mr. Barsad,” he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking
+over a hand at cards: “Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican
+committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer,
+so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman
+is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a
+Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name.
+That’s a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican
+French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic
+English government, the enemy of France and freedom. That’s an excellent
+card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr.
+Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the
+spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom,
+the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so
+difficult to find. That’s a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my
+hand, Mr. Barsad?”
+
+“Not to understand your play,” returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.
+
+“I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section
+Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don’t
+hurry.”
+
+He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, and
+drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking himself
+into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him. Seeing it, he
+poured out and drank another glassful.
+
+“Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time.”
+
+It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards
+in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his honourable
+employment in England, through too much unsuccessful hard swearing
+there--not because he was not wanted there; our English reasons for
+vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern
+date--he knew that he had crossed the Channel, and accepted service in
+France: first, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among his own countrymen
+there: gradually, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among the natives. He
+knew that under the overthrown government he had been a spy upon Saint
+Antoine and Defarge’s wine-shop; had received from the watchful police
+such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette’s imprisonment,
+release, and history, as should serve him for an introduction to
+familiar conversation with the Defarges; and tried them on Madame
+Defarge, and had broken down with them signally. He always remembered
+with fear and trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he
+talked with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved.
+He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over
+again produce her knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the
+guillotine then surely swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed as
+he was did, that he was never safe; that flight was impossible; that
+he was tied fast under the shadow of the axe; and that in spite of
+his utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance of the reigning
+terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once denounced, and on such
+grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his mind, he foresaw
+that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had seen many
+proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would quash
+his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men soon
+terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify
+the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.
+
+“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the greatest
+composure. “Do you play?”
+
+“I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to Mr.
+Lorry, “I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence, to
+put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can
+under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that Ace
+of which he has spoken. I admit that _I_ am a spy, and that it is
+considered a discreditable station--though it must be filled by
+somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean
+himself as to make himself one?”
+
+“I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer on himself,
+and looking at his watch, “without any scruple, in a very few minutes.”
+
+“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always striving to
+hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “that your respect for my sister--”
+
+“I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally
+relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.
+
+“You think not, sir?”
+
+“I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.”
+
+The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
+ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour,
+received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,--who was a
+mystery to wiser and honester men than he,--that it faltered here and
+failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton said, resuming his former air
+of contemplating cards:
+
+“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I
+have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and
+fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country prisons;
+who was he?”
+
+“French. You don’t know him,” said the spy, quickly.
+
+“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice him
+at all, though he echoed his word. “Well; he may be.”
+
+“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it’s not important.”
+
+“Though it’s not important,” repeated Carton, in the same mechanical
+way--“though it’s not important--No, it’s not important. No. Yet I know
+the face.”
+
+“I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,” said the spy.
+
+“It-can’t-be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and idling his
+glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can’t-be. Spoke good
+French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?”
+
+“Provincial,” said the spy.
+
+“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as a
+light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the same man. We
+had that man before us at the Old Bailey.”
+
+“Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that gave his
+aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you really give
+me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this
+distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been dead several years. I
+attended him in his last illness. He was buried in London, at the church
+of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity with the blackguard
+multitude at the moment prevented my following his remains, but I helped
+to lay him in his coffin.”
+
+Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable
+goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it
+to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of all the
+risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher’s head.
+
+“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “and let us be fair. To show you
+how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is, I will
+lay before you a certificate of Cly’s burial, which I happened to have
+carried in my pocket-book,” with a hurried hand he produced and opened
+it, “ever since. There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take
+it in your hand; it’s no forgery.”
+
+Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and
+Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more
+violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the
+crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.
+
+Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on
+the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.
+
+“That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn and
+iron-bound visage. “So _you_ put him in his coffin?”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“Who took him out of it?”
+
+Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, “What do you mean?”
+
+“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn’t never in it. No! Not he!
+I’ll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.”
+
+The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in
+unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.
+
+“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and earth in
+that there coffin. Don’t go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a
+take in. Me and two more knows it.”
+
+“How do you know it?”
+
+“What’s that to you? Ecod!” growled Mr. Cruncher, “it’s you I have got a
+old grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen!
+I’d catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.”
+
+Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement at
+this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moderate and
+explain himself.
+
+“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present time is
+ill-conwenient for explainin’. What I stand to, is, that he knows well
+wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say he was,
+in so much as a word of one syllable, and I’ll either catch hold of his
+throat and choke him for half a guinea;” Mr. Cruncher dwelt upon this as
+quite a liberal offer; “or I’ll out and announce him.”
+
+“Humph! I see one thing,” said Carton. “I hold another card, Mr. Barsad.
+Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling the air, for
+you to outlive denunciation, when you are in communication with another
+aristocratic spy of the same antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has
+the mystery about him of having feigned death and come to life again!
+A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong
+card--a certain Guillotine card! Do you play?”
+
+“No!” returned the spy. “I throw up. I confess that we were so unpopular
+with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England at the risk
+of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up and down, that
+he never would have got away at all but for that sham. Though how this
+man knows it was a sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.”
+
+“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the contentious
+Mr. Cruncher; “you’ll have trouble enough with giving your attention to
+that gentleman. And look here! Once more!”--Mr. Cruncher could not
+be restrained from making rather an ostentatious parade of his
+liberality--“I’d catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a
+guinea.”
+
+The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said,
+with more decision, “It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and
+can’t overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it?
+Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to do anything in my
+office, putting my head in great extra danger, and I had better trust my
+life to the chances of a refusal than the chances of consent. In short,
+I should make that choice. You talk of desperation. We are all desperate
+here. Remember! I may denounce you if I think proper, and I can swear my
+way through stone walls, and so can others. Now, what do you want with
+me?”
+
+“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”
+
+“I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible,”
+ said the spy, firmly.
+
+“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the
+Conciergerie?”
+
+“I am sometimes.”
+
+“You can be when you choose?”
+
+“I can pass in and out when I choose.”
+
+Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out
+upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent, he
+said, rising:
+
+“So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that
+the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. Come
+into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.”
+
+
+
+
+IX. The Game Made
+
+
+While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the adjoining
+dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry looked
+at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s
+manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the
+leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of those limbs,
+and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very
+questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr. Lorry’s eye caught
+his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the
+hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an
+infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.
+
+“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.”
+
+Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance
+of him.
+
+“What have you been, besides a messenger?”
+
+After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron,
+Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, “Agicultooral
+character.”
+
+“My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a forefinger
+at him, “that you have used the respectable and great house of Tellson’s
+as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful occupation of an infamous
+description. If you have, don’t expect me to befriend you when you
+get back to England. If you have, don’t expect me to keep your secret.
+Tellson’s shall not be imposed upon.”
+
+“I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “that a gentleman like
+yourself wot I’ve had the honour of odd jobbing till I’m grey at it,
+would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so--I don’t say it
+is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be took into account that if
+it wos, it wouldn’t, even then, be all o’ one side. There’d be two sides
+to it. There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking
+up their guineas where a honest tradesman don’t pick up his
+fardens--fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens--half fardens! no, nor
+yet his quarter--a banking away like smoke at Tellson’s, and a cocking
+their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and going
+out to their own carriages--ah! equally like smoke, if not more so.
+Well, that ‘ud be imposing, too, on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse the
+goose and not the gander. And here’s Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos
+in the Old England times, and would be to-morrow, if cause given,
+a floppin’ again the business to that degree as is ruinating--stark
+ruinating! Whereas them medical doctors’ wives don’t flop--catch ‘em at
+it! Or, if they flop, their floppings goes in favour of more patients,
+and how can you rightly have one without t’other? Then, wot with
+undertakers, and wot with parish clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot
+with private watchmen (all awaricious and all in it), a man wouldn’t get
+much by it, even if it wos so. And wot little a man did get, would never
+prosper with him, Mr. Lorry. He’d never have no good of it; he’d want
+all along to be out of the line, if he, could see his way out, being
+once in--even if it wos so.”
+
+“Ugh!” cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless, “I am shocked at
+the sight of you.”
+
+“Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,” pursued Mr. Cruncher,
+“even if it wos so, which I don’t say it is--”
+
+“Don’t prevaricate,” said Mr. Lorry.
+
+“No, I will _not_, sir,” returned Mr. Crunches as if nothing were
+further from his thoughts or practice--“which I don’t say it is--wot I
+would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that there stool, at
+that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought up and growed up to
+be a man, wot will errand you, message you, general-light-job you, till
+your heels is where your head is, if such should be your wishes. If it
+wos so, which I still don’t say it is (for I will not prewaricate to
+you, sir), let that there boy keep his father’s place, and take care of
+his mother; don’t blow upon that boy’s father--do not do it, sir--and
+let that father go into the line of the reg’lar diggin’, and make amends
+for what he would have undug--if it wos so--by diggin’ of ‘em in with
+a will, and with conwictions respectin’ the futur’ keepin’ of ‘em safe.
+That, Mr. Lorry,” said Mr. Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his
+arm, as an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of his
+discourse, “is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man don’t
+see all this here a goin’ on dreadful round him, in the way of Subjects
+without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down
+to porterage and hardly that, without havin’ his serious thoughts of
+things. And these here would be mine, if it wos so, entreatin’ of you
+fur to bear in mind that wot I said just now, I up and said in the good
+cause when I might have kep’ it back.”
+
+“That at least is true,” said Mr. Lorry. “Say no more now. It may be
+that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and repent in
+action--not in words. I want no more words.”
+
+Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy
+returned from the dark room. “Adieu, Mr. Barsad,” said the former; “our
+arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear from me.”
+
+He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry. When they
+were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done?
+
+“Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured access
+to him, once.”
+
+Mr. Lorry’s countenance fell.
+
+“It is all I could do,” said Carton. “To propose too much, would be
+to put this man’s head under the axe, and, as he himself said, nothing
+worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It was obviously the
+weakness of the position. There is no help for it.”
+
+“But access to him,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it should go ill before the
+Tribunal, will not save him.”
+
+“I never said it would.”
+
+Mr. Lorry’s eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with his
+darling, and the heavy disappointment of his second arrest, gradually
+weakened them; he was an old man now, overborne with anxiety of late,
+and his tears fell.
+
+“You are a good man and a true friend,” said Carton, in an altered
+voice. “Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could not see my
+father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could not respect your
+sorrow more, if you were my father. You are free from that misfortune,
+however.”
+
+Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner, there
+was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and in his touch,
+that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of him, was wholly
+unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and Carton gently pressed it.
+
+“To return to poor Darnay,” said Carton. “Don’t tell Her of this
+interview, or this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see
+him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worse, to convey
+to him the means of anticipating the sentence.”
+
+Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to
+see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look, and
+evidently understood it.
+
+“She might think a thousand things,” Carton said, “and any of them would
+only add to her trouble. Don’t speak of me to her. As I said to you when
+I first came, I had better not see her. I can put my hand out, to do any
+little helpful work for her that my hand can find to do, without that.
+You are going to her, I hope? She must be very desolate to-night.”
+
+“I am going now, directly.”
+
+“I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and reliance
+on you. How does she look?”
+
+“Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh--almost like a sob. It
+attracted Mr. Lorry’s eyes to Carton’s face, which was turned to the
+fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have said which),
+passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over a hill-side on a
+wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back one of the little
+flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He wore the white riding-coat
+and top-boots, then in vogue, and the light of the fire touching their
+light surfaces made him look very pale, with his long brown hair,
+all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His indifference to fire was
+sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of remonstrance from Mr. Lorry;
+his boot was still upon the hot embers of the flaming log, when it had
+broken under the weight of his foot.
+
+“I forgot it,” he said.
+
+Mr. Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of the
+wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and having
+the expression of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he was strongly
+reminded of that expression.
+
+“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton, turning
+to him.
+
+“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
+unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped to
+have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I have
+my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”
+
+They were both silent.
+
+“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton, wistfully.
+
+“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”
+
+“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly occupied;
+trusted, respected, and looked up to?”
+
+“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I
+may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”
+
+“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will miss
+you when you leave it empty!”
+
+“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his head. “There
+is nobody to weep for me.”
+
+“How can you say that? Wouldn’t She weep for you? Wouldn’t her child?”
+
+“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.”
+
+“It _is_ a thing to thank God for; is it not?”
+
+“Surely, surely.”
+
+“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night,
+‘I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
+respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
+regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!’
+your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they
+not?”
+
+“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”
+
+Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a
+few moments, said:
+
+“I should like to ask you:--Does your childhood seem far off? Do the
+days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very long ago?”
+
+Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:
+
+“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw
+closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
+nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and
+preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances
+that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!),
+and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not
+so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”
+
+“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. “And
+you are the better for it?”
+
+“I hope so.”
+
+Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on with
+his outer coat; “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the theme, “you
+are young.”
+
+“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never the way to
+age. Enough of me.”
+
+“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”
+
+“I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless
+habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don’t be
+uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?”
+
+“Yes, unhappily.”
+
+“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find a
+place for me. Take my arm, sir.”
+
+Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the streets. A
+few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry’s destination. Carton left him
+there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the gate
+again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to
+the prison every day. “She came out here,” he said, looking about him,
+“turned this way, must have trod on these stones often. Let me follow in
+her steps.”
+
+It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of La Force,
+where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer, having
+closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.
+
+“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by; for, the
+man eyed him inquisitively.
+
+“Good night, citizen.”
+
+“How goes the Republic?”
+
+“You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount
+to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain sometimes, of being
+exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that Samson. Such a Barber!”
+
+“Do you often go to see him--”
+
+“Shave? Always. Every day. What a barber! You have seen him at work?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to yourself,
+citizen; he shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than two pipes! Less
+than two pipes. Word of honour!”
+
+As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to explain
+how he timed the executioner, Carton was so sensible of a rising desire
+to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.
+
+“But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “though you wear
+English dress?”
+
+“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.
+
+“You speak like a Frenchman.”
+
+“I am an old student here.”
+
+“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”
+
+“Good night, citizen.”
+
+“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling after
+him. “And take a pipe with you!”
+
+Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle of
+the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a scrap
+of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step of one who remembered
+the way well, several dark and dirty streets--much dirtier than usual,
+for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of
+terror--he stopped at a chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with
+his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill
+thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.
+
+Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
+counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew!” the chemist
+whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi! hi!”
+
+Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:
+
+“For you, citizen?”
+
+“For me.”
+
+“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen? You know the
+consequences of mixing them?”
+
+“Perfectly.”
+
+Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put them, one by
+one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the money for them,
+and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing more to do,” said he,
+glancing upward at the moon, “until to-morrow. I can’t sleep.”
+
+It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these words
+aloud under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expressive of
+negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner of a tired man, who
+had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who at length struck into
+his road and saw its end.
+
+Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a
+youth of great promise, he had followed his father to the grave. His
+mother had died, years before. These solemn words, which had been
+read at his father’s grave, arose in his mind as he went down the dark
+streets, among the heavy shadows, with the moon and the clouds sailing
+on high above him. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord:
+he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
+whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
+
+In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sorrow
+rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to death,
+and for to-morrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons,
+and still of to-morrow’s and to-morrow’s, the chain of association that
+brought the words home, like a rusty old ship’s anchor from the deep,
+might have been easily found. He did not seek it, but repeated them and
+went on.
+
+With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people were
+going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the horrors
+surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where no prayers
+were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled that length
+of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors, plunderers, and
+profligates; in the distant burial-places, reserved, as they wrote upon
+the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding gaols; and in the streets
+along which the sixties rolled to a death which had become so common and
+material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among
+the people out of all the working of the Guillotine; with a solemn
+interest in the whole life and death of the city settling down to its
+short nightly pause in fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for
+the lighter streets.
+
+Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be
+suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy
+shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, and the
+people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting home. At
+one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with a mother, looking
+for a way across the street through the mud. He carried the child over,
+and before the timid arm was loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.
+
+“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
+in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
+believeth in me, shall never die.”
+
+Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words
+were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm
+and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he
+heard them always.
+
+The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the
+water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the
+picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light
+of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the
+sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died,
+and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to
+Death’s dominion.
+
+But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden
+of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays.
+And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light
+appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river
+sparkled under it.
+
+The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial
+friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the
+houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the
+bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little
+longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the
+stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.--“Like me.”
+
+A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then
+glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its silent track
+in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken up out of his heart
+for a merciful consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors,
+ended in the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
+
+Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to surmise
+where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank nothing but a
+little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and changed to refresh
+himself, went out to the place of trial.
+
+The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep--whom many fell
+away from in dread--pressed him into an obscure corner among the crowd.
+Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor Manette was there. She was there,
+sitting beside her father.
+
+When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, so
+sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying
+tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the healthy
+blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated his heart. If
+there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her look, on Sydney
+Carton, it would have been seen to be the same influence exactly.
+
+Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure,
+ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have
+been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not
+first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the
+Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.
+
+Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots and good
+republicans as yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow and the day
+after. Eager and prominent among them, one man with a craving face, and
+his fingers perpetually hovering about his lips, whose appearance
+gave great satisfaction to the spectators. A life-thirsting,
+cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman, the Jacques Three of St.
+Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of dogs empannelled to try the deer.
+
+Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prosecutor.
+No favourable leaning in that quarter to-day. A fell, uncompromising,
+murderous business-meaning there. Every eye then sought some other eye
+in the crowd, and gleamed at it approvingly; and heads nodded at one
+another, before bending forward with a strained attention.
+
+Charles Evremonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Reaccused and
+retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last night. Suspected and
+Denounced enemy of the Republic, Aristocrat, one of a family of tyrants,
+one of a race proscribed, for that they had used their abolished
+privileges to the infamous oppression of the people. Charles Evremonde,
+called Darnay, in right of such proscription, absolutely Dead in Law.
+
+To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.
+
+The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or secretly?
+
+“Openly, President.”
+
+“By whom?”
+
+“Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of St. Antoine.”
+
+“Good.”
+
+“Therese Defarge, his wife.”
+
+“Good.”
+
+“Alexandre Manette, physician.”
+
+A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it, Doctor
+Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he had been seated.
+
+“President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and
+a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My
+daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who
+and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the husband
+of my child!”
+
+“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of
+the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer
+to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the
+Republic.”
+
+Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and
+with warmth resumed.
+
+“If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child
+herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is
+to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!”
+
+Frantic acclamations were again raised. Doctor Manette sat down, with
+his eyes looking around, and his lips trembling; his daughter drew
+closer to him. The craving man on the jury rubbed his hands together,
+and restored the usual hand to his mouth.
+
+Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to admit of his
+being heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the imprisonment, and of
+his having been a mere boy in the Doctor’s service, and of the release,
+and of the state of the prisoner when released and delivered to him.
+This short examination followed, for the court was quick with its work.
+
+“You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen?”
+
+“I believe so.”
+
+Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd: “You were one of the
+best patriots there. Why not say so? You were a cannonier that day
+there, and you were among the first to enter the accursed fortress when
+it fell. Patriots, I speak the truth!”
+
+It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of the audience,
+thus assisted the proceedings. The President rang his bell; but, The
+Vengeance, warming with encouragement, shrieked, “I defy that bell!”
+ wherein she was likewise much commended.
+
+“Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bastille,
+citizen.”
+
+“I knew,” said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at the
+bottom of the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily up at him;
+“I knew that this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been confined in a cell
+known as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. I knew it from himself. He
+knew himself by no other name than One Hundred and Five, North Tower,
+when he made shoes under my care. As I serve my gun that day, I resolve,
+when the place shall fall, to examine that cell. It falls. I mount to
+the cell, with a fellow-citizen who is one of the Jury, directed by a
+gaoler. I examine it, very closely. In a hole in the chimney, where a
+stone has been worked out and replaced, I find a written paper. This is
+that written paper. I have made it my business to examine some specimens
+of the writing of Doctor Manette. This is the writing of Doctor Manette.
+I confide this paper, in the writing of Doctor Manette, to the hands of
+the President.”
+
+“Let it be read.”
+
+In a dead silence and stillness--the prisoner under trial looking
+lovingly at his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with
+solicitude at her father, Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on the
+reader, Madame Defarge never taking hers from the prisoner, Defarge
+never taking his from his feasting wife, and all the other eyes there
+intent upon the Doctor, who saw none of them--the paper was read, as
+follows.
+
+
+
+
+X. The Substance of the Shadow
+
+
+“I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais, and
+afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful
+cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write
+it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it
+in the wall of the chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a
+place of concealment for it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when I
+and my sorrows are dust.
+
+“These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with
+difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed
+with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity. Hope
+has quite departed from my breast. I know from terrible warnings I have
+noted in myself that my reason will not long remain unimpaired, but I
+solemnly declare that I am at this time in the possession of my right
+mind--that my memory is exact and circumstantial--and that I write the
+truth as I shall answer for these my last recorded words, whether they
+be ever read by men or not, at the Eternal Judgment-seat.
+
+“One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December (I think the
+twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a retired
+part of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the frosty air,
+at an hour’s distance from my place of residence in the Street of the
+School of Medicine, when a carriage came along behind me, driven very
+fast. As I stood aside to let that carriage pass, apprehensive that it
+might otherwise run me down, a head was put out at the window, and a
+voice called to the driver to stop.
+
+“The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his horses,
+and the same voice called to me by my name. I answered. The carriage
+was then so far in advance of me that two gentlemen had time to open the
+door and alight before I came up with it.
+
+“I observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks, and appeared to
+conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the carriage door,
+I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, or rather
+younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, manner, voice,
+and (as far as I could see) face too.
+
+“‘You are Doctor Manette?’ said one.
+
+“I am.”
+
+“‘Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,’ said the other; ‘the young
+physician, originally an expert surgeon, who within the last year or two
+has made a rising reputation in Paris?’
+
+“‘Gentlemen,’ I returned, ‘I am that Doctor Manette of whom you speak so
+graciously.’
+
+“‘We have been to your residence,’ said the first, ‘and not being
+so fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were
+probably walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of
+overtaking you. Will you please to enter the carriage?’
+
+“The manner of both was imperious, and they both moved, as these words
+were spoken, so as to place me between themselves and the carriage door.
+They were armed. I was not.
+
+“‘Gentlemen,’ said I, ‘pardon me; but I usually inquire who does me
+the honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature of the case to
+which I am summoned.’
+
+“The reply to this was made by him who had spoken second. ‘Doctor,
+your clients are people of condition. As to the nature of the case,
+our confidence in your skill assures us that you will ascertain it for
+yourself better than we can describe it. Enough. Will you please to
+enter the carriage?’
+
+“I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. They both
+entered after me--the last springing in, after putting up the steps. The
+carriage turned about, and drove on at its former speed.
+
+“I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no doubt that
+it is, word for word, the same. I describe everything exactly as it took
+place, constraining my mind not to wander from the task. Where I make
+the broken marks that follow here, I leave off for the time, and put my
+paper in its hiding-place.
+
+        *****
+
+“The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, and
+emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league from the
+Barrier--I did not estimate the distance at that time, but afterwards
+when I traversed it--it struck out of the main avenue, and presently
+stopped at a solitary house, We all three alighted, and walked, by
+a damp soft footpath in a garden where a neglected fountain had
+overflowed, to the door of the house. It was not opened immediately, in
+answer to the ringing of the bell, and one of my two conductors struck
+the man who opened it, with his heavy riding glove, across the face.
+
+“There was nothing in this action to attract my particular attention,
+for I had seen common people struck more commonly than dogs. But, the
+other of the two, being angry likewise, struck the man in like manner
+with his arm; the look and bearing of the brothers were then so exactly
+alike, that I then first perceived them to be twin brothers.
+
+“From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we found
+locked, and which one of the brothers had opened to admit us, and had
+relocked), I had heard cries proceeding from an upper chamber. I was
+conducted to this chamber straight, the cries growing louder as we
+ascended the stairs, and I found a patient in a high fever of the brain,
+lying on a bed.
+
+“The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young; assuredly not much
+past twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and her arms were bound to
+her sides with sashes and handkerchiefs. I noticed that these bonds were
+all portions of a gentleman’s dress. On one of them, which was a fringed
+scarf for a dress of ceremony, I saw the armorial bearings of a Noble,
+and the letter E.
+
+“I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of the patient;
+for, in her restless strivings she had turned over on her face on the
+edge of the bed, had drawn the end of the scarf into her mouth, and was
+in danger of suffocation. My first act was to put out my hand to relieve
+her breathing; and in moving the scarf aside, the embroidery in the
+corner caught my sight.
+
+“I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to calm her
+and keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes were dilated and
+wild, and she constantly uttered piercing shrieks, and repeated the
+words, ‘My husband, my father, and my brother!’ and then counted up to
+twelve, and said, ‘Hush!’ For an instant, and no more, she would pause
+to listen, and then the piercing shrieks would begin again, and she
+would repeat the cry, ‘My husband, my father, and my brother!’ and
+would count up to twelve, and say, ‘Hush!’ There was no variation in the
+order, or the manner. There was no cessation, but the regular moment’s
+pause, in the utterance of these sounds.
+
+“‘How long,’ I asked, ‘has this lasted?’
+
+“To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the
+younger; by the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority. It
+was the elder who replied, ‘Since about this hour last night.’
+
+“‘She has a husband, a father, and a brother?’
+
+“‘A brother.’
+
+“‘I do not address her brother?’
+
+“He answered with great contempt, ‘No.’
+
+“‘She has some recent association with the number twelve?’
+
+“The younger brother impatiently rejoined, ‘With twelve o’clock?’
+
+“‘See, gentlemen,’ said I, still keeping my hands upon her breast, ‘how
+useless I am, as you have brought me! If I had known what I was coming
+to see, I could have come provided. As it is, time must be lost. There
+are no medicines to be obtained in this lonely place.’
+
+“The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, ‘There is
+a case of medicines here;’ and brought it from a closet, and put it on
+the table.
+
+        *****
+
+“I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put the stoppers to my
+lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic medicines that were
+poisons in themselves, I would not have administered any of those.
+
+“‘Do you doubt them?’ asked the younger brother.
+
+“‘You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,’ I replied, and said no
+more.
+
+“I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after many
+efforts, the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to repeat it
+after a while, and as it was necessary to watch its influence, I then
+sat down by the side of the bed. There was a timid and suppressed woman
+in attendance (wife of the man down-stairs), who had retreated into
+a corner. The house was damp and decayed, indifferently
+furnished--evidently, recently occupied and temporarily used. Some thick
+old hangings had been nailed up before the windows, to deaden the
+sound of the shrieks. They continued to be uttered in their regular
+succession, with the cry, ‘My husband, my father, and my brother!’ the
+counting up to twelve, and ‘Hush!’ The frenzy was so violent, that I had
+not unfastened the bandages restraining the arms; but, I had looked to
+them, to see that they were not painful. The only spark of encouragement
+in the case, was, that my hand upon the sufferer’s breast had this much
+soothing influence, that for minutes at a time it tranquillised the
+figure. It had no effect upon the cries; no pendulum could be more
+regular.
+
+“For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had sat by
+the side of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers looking on,
+before the elder said:
+
+“‘There is another patient.’
+
+“I was startled, and asked, ‘Is it a pressing case?’
+
+“‘You had better see,’ he carelessly answered; and took up a light.
+
+        *****
+
+“The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase, which
+was a species of loft over a stable. There was a low plastered ceiling
+to a part of it; the rest was open, to the ridge of the tiled roof, and
+there were beams across. Hay and straw were stored in that portion of
+the place, fagots for firing, and a heap of apples in sand. I had to
+pass through that part, to get at the other. My memory is circumstantial
+and unshaken. I try it with these details, and I see them all, in
+this my cell in the Bastille, near the close of the tenth year of my
+captivity, as I saw them all that night.
+
+“On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his head, lay a
+handsome peasant boy--a boy of not more than seventeen at the most.
+He lay on his back, with his teeth set, his right hand clenched on his
+breast, and his glaring eyes looking straight upward. I could not see
+where his wound was, as I kneeled on one knee over him; but, I could see
+that he was dying of a wound from a sharp point.
+
+“‘I am a doctor, my poor fellow,’ said I. ‘Let me examine it.’
+
+“‘I do not want it examined,’ he answered; ‘let it be.’
+
+“It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his hand away.
+The wound was a sword-thrust, received from twenty to twenty-four hours
+before, but no skill could have saved him if it had been looked to
+without delay. He was then dying fast. As I turned my eyes to the elder
+brother, I saw him looking down at this handsome boy whose life was
+ebbing out, as if he were a wounded bird, or hare, or rabbit; not at all
+as if he were a fellow-creature.
+
+“‘How has this been done, monsieur?’ said I.
+
+“‘A crazed young common dog! A serf! Forced my brother to draw upon him,
+and has fallen by my brother’s sword--like a gentleman.’
+
+“There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this
+answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient to
+have that different order of creature dying there, and that it would
+have been better if he had died in the usual obscure routine of his
+vermin kind. He was quite incapable of any compassionate feeling about
+the boy, or about his fate.
+
+“The boy’s eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, and they now
+slowly moved to me.
+
+“‘Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles; but we common dogs are
+proud too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat us, kill us; but
+we have a little pride left, sometimes. She--have you seen her, Doctor?’
+
+“The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued by the
+distance. He referred to them, as if she were lying in our presence.
+
+“I said, ‘I have seen her.’
+
+“‘She is my sister, Doctor. They have had their shameful rights, these
+Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we
+have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say
+so. She was a good girl. She was betrothed to a good young man, too: a
+tenant of his. We were all tenants of his--that man’s who stands there.
+The other is his brother, the worst of a bad race.’
+
+“It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily force
+to speak; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis.
+
+“‘We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs
+are by those superior Beings--taxed by him without mercy, obliged to
+work for him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged
+to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden
+for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own, pillaged and
+plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of meat, we
+ate it in fear, with the door barred and the shutters closed, that his
+people should not see it and take it from us--I say, we were so robbed,
+and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a
+dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should
+most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable
+race die out!’
+
+“I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth
+like a fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the people
+somewhere; but, I had never seen it break out, until I saw it in the
+dying boy.
+
+“‘Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at that time,
+poor fellow, and she married her lover, that she might tend and comfort
+him in our cottage--our dog-hut, as that man would call it. She had not
+been married many weeks, when that man’s brother saw her and admired
+her, and asked that man to lend her to him--for what are husbands among
+us! He was willing enough, but my sister was good and virtuous, and
+hated his brother with a hatred as strong as mine. What did the two
+then, to persuade her husband to use his influence with her, to make her
+willing?’
+
+“The boy’s eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to the
+looker-on, and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true. The two
+opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see, even in this
+Bastille; the gentleman’s, all negligent indifference; the peasant’s, all
+trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge.
+
+“‘You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to
+harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and
+drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their
+grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep
+may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome mists at
+night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day. But he was
+not persuaded. No! Taken out of harness one day at noon, to feed--if he
+could find food--he sobbed twelve times, once for every stroke of the
+bell, and died on her bosom.’
+
+“Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his determination to
+tell all his wrong. He forced back the gathering shadows of death, as
+he forced his clenched right hand to remain clenched, and to cover his
+wound.
+
+“‘Then, with that man’s permission and even with his aid, his
+brother took her away; in spite of what I know she must have told his
+brother--and what that is, will not be long unknown to you, Doctor, if
+it is now--his brother took her away--for his pleasure and diversion,
+for a little while. I saw her pass me on the road. When I took the
+tidings home, our father’s heart burst; he never spoke one of the words
+that filled it. I took my young sister (for I have another) to a place
+beyond the reach of this man, and where, at least, she will never be
+_his_ vassal. Then, I tracked the brother here, and last night climbed
+in--a common dog, but sword in hand.--Where is the loft window? It was
+somewhere here?’
+
+“The room was darkening to his sight; the world was narrowing around
+him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled
+over the floor, as if there had been a struggle.
+
+“‘She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us till he was
+dead. He came in and first tossed me some pieces of money; then struck
+at me with a whip. But I, though a common dog, so struck at him as to
+make him draw. Let him break into as many pieces as he will, the sword
+that he stained with my common blood; he drew to defend himself--thrust
+at me with all his skill for his life.’
+
+“My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the fragments of
+a broken sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was a gentleman’s. In
+another place, lay an old sword that seemed to have been a soldier’s.
+
+“‘Now, lift me up, Doctor; lift me up. Where is he?’
+
+“‘He is not here,’ I said, supporting the boy, and thinking that he
+referred to the brother.
+
+“‘He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is the
+man who was here? Turn my face to him.’
+
+“I did so, raising the boy’s head against my knee. But, invested for the
+moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely: obliging
+me to rise too, or I could not have still supported him.
+
+“‘Marquis,’ said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide, and
+his right hand raised, ‘in the days when all these things are to be
+answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of your bad race, to
+answer for them. I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that
+I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered for,
+I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for them
+separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do
+it.’
+
+“Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his
+forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the
+finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid him
+down dead.
+
+        *****
+
+“When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found her raving
+in precisely the same order of continuity. I knew that this might last
+for many hours, and that it would probably end in the silence of the
+grave.
+
+“I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side of
+the bed until the night was far advanced. She never abated the piercing
+quality of her shrieks, never stumbled in the distinctness or the order
+of her words. They were always ‘My husband, my father, and my brother!
+One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,
+twelve. Hush!’
+
+“This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. I had
+come and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she began to
+falter. I did what little could be done to assist that opportunity, and
+by-and-bye she sank into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.
+
+“It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long and
+fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to assist me to
+compose her figure and the dress she had torn. It was then that I knew
+her condition to be that of one in whom the first expectations of being
+a mother have arisen; and it was then that I lost the little hope I had
+had of her.
+
+“‘Is she dead?’ asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe as the
+elder brother, coming booted into the room from his horse.
+
+“‘Not dead,’ said I; ‘but like to die.’
+
+“‘What strength there is in these common bodies!’ he said, looking down
+at her with some curiosity.
+
+“‘There is prodigious strength,’ I answered him, ‘in sorrow and
+despair.’
+
+“He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. He moved a
+chair with his foot near to mine, ordered the woman away, and said in a
+subdued voice,
+
+“‘Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds, I
+recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation is high,
+and, as a young man with your fortune to make, you are probably mindful
+of your interest. The things that you see here, are things to be seen,
+and not spoken of.’
+
+“I listened to the patient’s breathing, and avoided answering.
+
+“‘Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor?’
+
+“‘Monsieur,’ said I, ‘in my profession, the communications of patients
+are always received in confidence.’ I was guarded in my answer, for I
+was troubled in my mind with what I had heard and seen.
+
+“Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried the
+pulse and the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking round as I
+resumed my seat, I found both the brothers intent upon me.
+
+        *****
+
+“I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so
+fearful of being detected and consigned to an underground cell and total
+darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no confusion or
+failure in my memory; it can recall, and could detail, every word that
+was ever spoken between me and those brothers.
+
+“She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand some few
+syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to her lips. She
+asked me where she was, and I told her; who I was, and I told her. It
+was in vain that I asked her for her family name. She faintly shook her
+head upon the pillow, and kept her secret, as the boy had done.
+
+“I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had told the
+brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another day. Until
+then, though no one was ever presented to her consciousness save the
+woman and myself, one or other of them had always jealously sat behind
+the curtain at the head of the bed when I was there. But when it came to
+that, they seemed careless what communication I might hold with her; as
+if--the thought passed through my mind--I were dying too.
+
+“I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger
+brother’s (as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and that
+peasant a boy. The only consideration that appeared to affect the mind
+of either of them was the consideration that this was highly degrading
+to the family, and was ridiculous. As often as I caught the younger
+brother’s eyes, their expression reminded me that he disliked me deeply,
+for knowing what I knew from the boy. He was smoother and more polite to
+me than the elder; but I saw this. I also saw that I was an incumbrance
+in the mind of the elder, too.
+
+“My patient died, two hours before midnight--at a time, by my watch,
+answering almost to the minute when I had first seen her. I was alone
+with her, when her forlorn young head drooped gently on one side, and
+all her earthly wrongs and sorrows ended.
+
+“The brothers were waiting in a room down-stairs, impatient to ride
+away. I had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their boots with
+their riding-whips, and loitering up and down.
+
+“‘At last she is dead?’ said the elder, when I went in.
+
+“‘She is dead,’ said I.
+
+“‘I congratulate you, my brother,’ were his words as he turned round.
+
+“He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. He now
+gave me a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but laid it on
+the table. I had considered the question, and had resolved to accept
+nothing.
+
+“‘Pray excuse me,’ said I. ‘Under the circumstances, no.’
+
+“They exchanged looks, but bent their heads to me as I bent mine to
+them, and we parted without another word on either side.
+
+        *****
+
+“I am weary, weary, weary--worn down by misery. I cannot read what I
+have written with this gaunt hand.
+
+“Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door in a
+little box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I had anxiously
+considered what I ought to do. I decided, that day, to write privately
+to the Minister, stating the nature of the two cases to which I had been
+summoned, and the place to which I had gone: in effect, stating all the
+circumstances. I knew what Court influence was, and what the immunities
+of the Nobles were, and I expected that the matter would never be
+heard of; but, I wished to relieve my own mind. I had kept the matter a
+profound secret, even from my wife; and this, too, I resolved to state
+in my letter. I had no apprehension whatever of my real danger; but
+I was conscious that there might be danger for others, if others were
+compromised by possessing the knowledge that I possessed.
+
+“I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my letter that
+night. I rose long before my usual time next morning to finish it.
+It was the last day of the year. The letter was lying before me just
+completed, when I was told that a lady waited, who wished to see me.
+
+        *****
+
+“I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set myself. It is
+so cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and the gloom upon me is so
+dreadful.
+
+“The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked for long
+life. She was in great agitation. She presented herself to me as the
+wife of the Marquis St. Evremonde. I connected the title by which the
+boy had addressed the elder brother, with the initial letter embroidered
+on the scarf, and had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that I
+had seen that nobleman very lately.
+
+“My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
+conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was, and I
+know not at what times I may be watched. She had in part suspected, and
+in part discovered, the main facts of the cruel story, of her husband’s
+share in it, and my being resorted to. She did not know that the girl
+was dead. Her hope had been, she said in great distress, to show her,
+in secret, a woman’s sympathy. Her hope had been to avert the wrath of
+Heaven from a House that had long been hateful to the suffering many.
+
+“She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living, and
+her greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell her nothing
+but that there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing. Her
+inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, had been the hope
+that I could tell her the name and place of abode. Whereas, to this
+wretched hour I am ignorant of both.
+
+        *****
+
+“These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with a warning,
+yesterday. I must finish my record to-day.
+
+“She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage. How
+could she be! The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his influence
+was all opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in dread of her
+husband too. When I handed her down to the door, there was a child, a
+pretty boy from two to three years old, in her carriage.
+
+“‘For his sake, Doctor,’ she said, pointing to him in tears, ‘I would do
+all I can to make what poor amends I can. He will never prosper in his
+inheritance otherwise. I have a presentiment that if no other innocent
+atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of him. What
+I have left to call my own--it is little beyond the worth of a few
+jewels--I will make it the first charge of his life to bestow, with the
+compassion and lamenting of his dead mother, on this injured family, if
+the sister can be discovered.’
+
+“She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, ‘It is for thine own dear
+sake. Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?’ The child answered her
+bravely, ‘Yes!’ I kissed her hand, and she took him in her arms, and
+went away caressing him. I never saw her more.
+
+“As she had mentioned her husband’s name in the faith that I knew it,
+I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not
+trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that day.
+
+“That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o’clock, a man in
+a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly followed
+my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs. When my servant came
+into the room where I sat with my wife--O my wife, beloved of my heart!
+My fair young English wife!--we saw the man, who was supposed to be at
+the gate, standing silent behind him.
+
+“An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said. It would not detain me,
+he had a coach in waiting.
+
+“It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was clear of the
+house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from behind, and
+my arms were pinioned. The two brothers crossed the road from a dark
+corner, and identified me with a single gesture. The Marquis took from
+his pocket the letter I had written, showed it me, burnt it in the light
+of a lantern that was held, and extinguished the ashes with his foot.
+Not a word was spoken. I was brought here, I was brought to my living
+grave.
+
+“If it had pleased _God_ to put it in the hard heart of either of the
+brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of
+my dearest wife--so much as to let me know by a word whether alive or
+dead--I might have thought that He had not quite abandoned them. But,
+now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to them, and that
+they have no part in His mercies. And them and their descendants, to the
+last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last
+night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony, denounce to the times
+when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven
+and to earth.”
+
+A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done. A
+sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but
+blood. The narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the time,
+and there was not a head in the nation but must have dropped before it.
+
+Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show
+how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other captured
+Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept it, biding their
+time. Little need to show that this detested family name had long been
+anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was wrought into the fatal register.
+The man never trod ground whose virtues and services would have
+sustained him in that place that day, against such denunciation.
+
+And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a
+well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife. One
+of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations of
+the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices and
+self-immolations on the people’s altar. Therefore when the President
+said (else had his own head quivered on his shoulders), that the good
+physician of the Republic would deserve better still of the Republic by
+rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and would doubtless feel
+a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a widow and her child an
+orphan, there was wild excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch of
+human sympathy.
+
+“Much influence around him, has that Doctor?” murmured Madame Defarge,
+smiling to The Vengeance. “Save him now, my Doctor, save him!”
+
+At every juryman’s vote, there was a roar. Another and another. Roar and
+roar.
+
+Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an enemy
+of the Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the
+Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty hours!
+
+
+
+
+XI. Dusk
+
+
+The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell under
+the sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, she uttered no
+sound; and so strong was the voice within her, representing that it was
+she of all the world who must uphold him in his misery and not augment
+it, that it quickly raised her, even from that shock.
+
+The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of doors,
+the Tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the court’s
+emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie stood
+stretching out her arms towards her husband, with nothing in her face
+but love and consolation.
+
+“If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens, if
+you would have so much compassion for us!”
+
+There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had
+taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to the
+show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, “Let her embrace
+him then; it is but a moment.” It was silently acquiesced in, and they
+passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place, where he, by
+leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.
+
+“Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We
+shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!”
+
+They were her husband’s words, as he held her to his bosom.
+
+“I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above: don’t suffer
+for me. A parting blessing for our child.”
+
+“I send it to her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to her by
+you.”
+
+“My husband. No! A moment!” He was tearing himself apart from her.
+“We shall not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart
+by-and-bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God
+will raise up friends for her, as He did for me.”
+
+Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to both
+of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying:
+
+“No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel
+to us! We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know, now what
+you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it. We
+know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for
+her dear sake. We thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and
+duty. Heaven be with you!”
+
+Her father’s only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair,
+and wring them with a shriek of anguish.
+
+“It could not be otherwise,” said the prisoner. “All things have worked
+together as they have fallen out. It was the always-vain endeavour to
+discharge my poor mother’s trust that first brought my fatal presence
+near you. Good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in
+nature to so unhappy a beginning. Be comforted, and forgive me. Heaven
+bless you!”
+
+As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him
+with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer, and
+with a radiant look upon her face, in which there was even a comforting
+smile. As he went out at the prisoners’ door, she turned, laid her head
+lovingly on her father’s breast, tried to speak to him, and fell at his
+feet.
+
+Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never moved,
+Sydney Carton came and took her up. Only her father and Mr. Lorry were
+with her. His arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head.
+Yet, there was an air about him that was not all of pity--that had a
+flush of pride in it.
+
+“Shall I take her to a coach? I shall never feel her weight.”
+
+He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a
+coach. Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took his seat
+beside the driver.
+
+When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not
+many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones of
+the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried her up
+the staircase to their rooms. There, he laid her down on a couch, where
+her child and Miss Pross wept over her.
+
+“Don’t recall her to herself,” he said, softly, to the latter, “she is
+better so. Don’t revive her to consciousness, while she only faints.”
+
+“Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!” cried little Lucie, springing up and
+throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief. “Now that
+you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to
+save papa! O, look at her, dear Carton! Can you, of all the people who
+love her, bear to see her so?”
+
+He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face. He
+put her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious mother.
+
+“Before I go,” he said, and paused--“I may kiss her?”
+
+It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face
+with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to
+him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a
+handsome old lady, that she heard him say, “A life you love.”
+
+When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on Mr. Lorry
+and her father, who were following, and said to the latter:
+
+“You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it at least
+be tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very friendly to
+you, and very recognisant of your services; are they not?”
+
+“Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I had the
+strongest assurances that I should save him; and I did.” He returned the
+answer in great trouble, and very slowly.
+
+“Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow afternoon are few
+and short, but try.”
+
+“I intend to try. I will not rest a moment.”
+
+“That’s well. I have known such energy as yours do great things before
+now--though never,” he added, with a smile and a sigh together, “such
+great things as this. But try! Of little worth as life is when we misuse
+it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it
+were not.”
+
+“I will go,” said Doctor Manette, “to the Prosecutor and the President
+straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name. I will
+write too, and--But stay! There is a Celebration in the streets, and no
+one will be accessible until dark.”
+
+“That’s true. Well! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not much the
+forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to know how you
+speed; though, mind! I expect nothing! When are you likely to have seen
+these dread powers, Doctor Manette?”
+
+“Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or two from
+this.”
+
+“It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or two. If I
+go to Mr. Lorry’s at nine, shall I hear what you have done, either from
+our friend or from yourself?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“May you prosper!”
+
+Mr. Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the
+shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn.
+
+“I have no hope,” said Mr. Lorry, in a low and sorrowful whisper.
+
+“Nor have I.”
+
+“If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare
+him--which is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man’s
+to them!--I doubt if they durst spare him after the demonstration in the
+court.”
+
+“And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound.”
+
+Mr. Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face upon it.
+
+“Don’t despond,” said Carton, very gently; “don’t grieve. I encouraged
+Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might one day be
+consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think ‘his life was wantonly
+thrown away or wasted,’ and that might trouble her.”
+
+“Yes, yes, yes,” returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, “you are right.
+But he will perish; there is no real hope.”
+
+“Yes. He will perish: there is no real hope,” echoed Carton.
+
+And walked with a settled step, down-stairs.
+
+
+
+
+XII. Darkness
+
+
+Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go. “At
+Tellson’s banking-house at nine,” he said, with a musing face. “Shall I
+do well, in the mean time, to show myself? I think so. It is best that
+these people should know there is such a man as I here; it is a sound
+precaution, and may be a necessary preparation. But care, care, care!
+Let me think it out!”
+
+Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took a
+turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought
+in his mind to its possible consequences. His first impression was
+confirmed. “It is best,” he said, finally resolved, “that these people
+should know there is such a man as I here.” And he turned his face
+towards Saint Antoine.
+
+Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine-shop in
+the Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for one who knew the city
+well, to find his house without asking any question. Having ascertained
+its situation, Carton came out of those closer streets again, and dined
+at a place of refreshment and fell sound asleep after dinner. For the
+first time in many years, he had no strong drink. Since last night he
+had taken nothing but a little light thin wine, and last night he had
+dropped the brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry’s hearth like a man who had
+done with it.
+
+It was as late as seven o’clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out
+into the streets again. As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he
+stopped at a shop-window where there was a mirror, and slightly altered
+the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat-collar, and
+his wild hair. This done, he went on direct to Defarge’s, and went in.
+
+There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three, of the
+restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man, whom he had seen upon
+the Jury, stood drinking at the little counter, in conversation with the
+Defarges, man and wife. The Vengeance assisted in the conversation, like
+a regular member of the establishment.
+
+As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifferent
+French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless
+glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then advanced
+to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered.
+
+He repeated what he had already said.
+
+“English?” asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark
+eyebrows.
+
+After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word were
+slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong foreign
+accent. “Yes, madame, yes. I am English!”
+
+Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he
+took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out its
+meaning, he heard her say, “I swear to you, like Evremonde!”
+
+Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.
+
+“How?”
+
+“Good evening.”
+
+“Oh! Good evening, citizen,” filling his glass. “Ah! and good wine. I
+drink to the Republic.”
+
+Defarge went back to the counter, and said, “Certainly, a little like.”
+ Madame sternly retorted, “I tell you a good deal like.” Jacques Three
+pacifically remarked, “He is so much in your mind, see you, madame.”
+ The amiable Vengeance added, with a laugh, “Yes, my faith! And you
+are looking forward with so much pleasure to seeing him once more
+to-morrow!”
+
+Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow
+forefinger, and with a studious and absorbed face. They were all leaning
+their arms on the counter close together, speaking low. After a silence
+of a few moments, during which they all looked towards him without
+disturbing his outward attention from the Jacobin editor, they resumed
+their conversation.
+
+“It is true what madame says,” observed Jacques Three. “Why stop? There
+is great force in that. Why stop?”
+
+“Well, well,” reasoned Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. After all,
+the question is still where?”
+
+“At extermination,” said madame.
+
+“Magnificent!” croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly
+approved.
+
+“Extermination is good doctrine, my wife,” said Defarge, rather
+troubled; “in general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor has
+suffered much; you have seen him to-day; you have observed his face when
+the paper was read.”
+
+“I have observed his face!” repeated madame, contemptuously and angrily.
+“Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed his face to be not the
+face of a true friend of the Republic. Let him take care of his face!”
+
+“And you have observed, my wife,” said Defarge, in a deprecatory manner,
+“the anguish of his daughter, which must be a dreadful anguish to him!”
+
+“I have observed his daughter,” repeated madame; “yes, I have observed
+his daughter, more times than one. I have observed her to-day, and I
+have observed her other days. I have observed her in the court, and
+I have observed her in the street by the prison. Let me but lift my
+finger--!” She seemed to raise it (the listener’s eyes were always on
+his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on the ledge before her, as
+if the axe had dropped.
+
+“The citizeness is superb!” croaked the Juryman.
+
+“She is an Angel!” said The Vengeance, and embraced her.
+
+“As to thee,” pursued madame, implacably, addressing her husband, “if it
+depended on thee--which, happily, it does not--thou wouldst rescue this
+man even now.”
+
+“No!” protested Defarge. “Not if to lift this glass would do it! But I
+would leave the matter there. I say, stop there.”
+
+“See you then, Jacques,” said Madame Defarge, wrathfully; “and see you,
+too, my little Vengeance; see you both! Listen! For other crimes as
+tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long time on my register,
+doomed to destruction and extermination. Ask my husband, is that so.”
+
+“It is so,” assented Defarge, without being asked.
+
+“In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he finds
+this paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the middle of the
+night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on this spot,
+by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so.”
+
+“It is so,” assented Defarge.
+
+“That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the lamp is
+burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and between
+those iron bars, that I have now a secret to communicate. Ask him, is
+that so.”
+
+“It is so,” assented Defarge again.
+
+“I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with these two
+hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, ‘Defarge, I was brought up
+among the fishermen of the sea-shore, and that peasant family so injured
+by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille paper describes, is my
+family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground
+was my sister, that husband was my sister’s husband, that unborn child
+was their child, that brother was my brother, that father was my father,
+those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things
+descends to me!’ Ask him, is that so.”
+
+“It is so,” assented Defarge once more.
+
+“Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” returned madame; “but don’t
+tell me.”
+
+Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature
+of her wrath--the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing
+her--and both highly commended it. Defarge, a weak minority, interposed
+a few words for the memory of the compassionate wife of the Marquis; but
+only elicited from his own wife a repetition of her last reply. “Tell
+the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!”
+
+Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English customer
+paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked, as
+a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace. Madame Defarge
+took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in pointing out the road.
+The English customer was not without his reflections then, that it might
+be a good deed to seize that arm, lift it, and strike under it sharp and
+deep.
+
+But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the
+prison wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to present
+himself in Mr. Lorry’s room again, where he found the old gentleman
+walking to and fro in restless anxiety. He said he had been with Lucie
+until just now, and had only left her for a few minutes, to come and
+keep his appointment. Her father had not been seen, since he quitted the
+banking-house towards four o’clock. She had some faint hopes that his
+mediation might save Charles, but they were very slight. He had been
+more than five hours gone: where could he be?
+
+Mr. Lorry waited until ten; but, Doctor Manette not returning, and
+he being unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged that he
+should go back to her, and come to the banking-house again at midnight.
+In the meanwhile, Carton would wait alone by the fire for the Doctor.
+
+He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but Doctor Manette
+did not come back. Mr. Lorry returned, and found no tidings of him, and
+brought none. Where could he be?
+
+They were discussing this question, and were almost building up some
+weak structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they heard him on
+the stairs. The instant he entered the room, it was plain that all was
+lost.
+
+Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been all that
+time traversing the streets, was never known. As he stood staring at
+them, they asked him no question, for his face told them everything.
+
+“I cannot find it,” said he, “and I must have it. Where is it?”
+
+His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look
+straying all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on the floor.
+
+“Where is my bench? I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and I
+can’t find it. What have they done with my work? Time presses: I must
+finish those shoes.”
+
+They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.
+
+“Come, come!” said he, in a whimpering miserable way; “let me get to
+work. Give me my work.”
+
+Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the
+ground, like a distracted child.
+
+“Don’t torture a poor forlorn wretch,” he implored them, with a dreadful
+cry; “but give me my work! What is to become of us, if those shoes are
+not done to-night?”
+
+Lost, utterly lost!
+
+It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore him,
+that--as if by agreement--they each put a hand upon his shoulder, and
+soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he should
+have his work presently. He sank into the chair, and brooded over the
+embers, and shed tears. As if all that had happened since the garret
+time were a momentary fancy, or a dream, Mr. Lorry saw him shrink into
+the exact figure that Defarge had had in keeping.
+
+Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this spectacle
+of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions. His lonely
+daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed to them both
+too strongly. Again, as if by agreement, they looked at one another with
+one meaning in their faces. Carton was the first to speak:
+
+“The last chance is gone: it was not much. Yes; he had better be taken
+to her. But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily attend to
+me? Don’t ask me why I make the stipulations I am going to make, and
+exact the promise I am going to exact; I have a reason--a good one.”
+
+“I do not doubt it,” answered Mr. Lorry. “Say on.”
+
+The figure in the chair between them, was all the time monotonously
+rocking itself to and fro, and moaning. They spoke in such a tone as
+they would have used if they had been watching by a sick-bed in the
+night.
+
+Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his
+feet. As he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was accustomed to
+carry the lists of his day’s duties, fell lightly on the floor. Carton
+took it up, and there was a folded paper in it. “We should look
+at this!” he said. Mr. Lorry nodded his consent. He opened it, and
+exclaimed, “Thank _God!_”
+
+“What is it?” asked Mr. Lorry, eagerly.
+
+“A moment! Let me speak of it in its place. First,” he put his hand in
+his coat, and took another paper from it, “that is the certificate which
+enables me to pass out of this city. Look at it. You see--Sydney Carton,
+an Englishman?”
+
+Mr. Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.
+
+“Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow, you
+remember, and I had better not take it into the prison.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“I don’t know; I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper that Doctor
+Manette has carried about him. It is a similar certificate, enabling him
+and his daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the barrier and the
+frontier! You see?”
+
+“Yes!”
+
+“Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against evil,
+yesterday. When is it dated? But no matter; don’t stay to look; put it
+up carefully with mine and your own. Now, observe! I never doubted until
+within this hour or two, that he had, or could have such a paper. It is
+good, until recalled. But it may be soon recalled, and, I have reason to
+think, will be.”
+
+“They are not in danger?”
+
+“They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by Madame
+Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words of that
+woman’s, to-night, which have presented their danger to me in strong
+colours. I have lost no time, and since then, I have seen the spy. He
+confirms me. He knows that a wood-sawyer, living by the prison wall,
+is under the control of the Defarges, and has been rehearsed by
+Madame Defarge as to his having seen Her”--he never mentioned Lucie’s
+name--“making signs and signals to prisoners. It is easy to foresee that
+the pretence will be the common one, a prison plot, and that it will
+involve her life--and perhaps her child’s--and perhaps her father’s--for
+both have been seen with her at that place. Don’t look so horrified. You
+will save them all.”
+
+“Heaven grant I may, Carton! But how?”
+
+“I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it could depend
+on no better man. This new denunciation will certainly not take place
+until after to-morrow; probably not until two or three days afterwards;
+more probably a week afterwards. You know it is a capital crime, to
+mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the Guillotine. She and her
+father would unquestionably be guilty of this crime, and this woman (the
+inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot be described) would wait to add that
+strength to her case, and make herself doubly sure. You follow me?”
+
+“So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, that for
+the moment I lose sight,” touching the back of the Doctor’s chair, “even
+of this distress.”
+
+“You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the seacoast
+as quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations have been
+completed for some days, to return to England. Early to-morrow have your
+horses ready, so that they may be in starting trim at two o’clock in the
+afternoon.”
+
+“It shall be done!”
+
+His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr. Lorry caught the
+flame, and was as quick as youth.
+
+“You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no better man?
+Tell her, to-night, what you know of her danger as involving her child
+and her father. Dwell upon that, for she would lay her own fair head
+beside her husband’s cheerfully.” He faltered for an instant; then went
+on as before. “For the sake of her child and her father, press upon her
+the necessity of leaving Paris, with them and you, at that hour. Tell
+her that it was her husband’s last arrangement. Tell her that more
+depends upon it than she dare believe, or hope. You think that her
+father, even in this sad state, will submit himself to her; do you not?”
+
+“I am sure of it.”
+
+“I thought so. Quietly and steadily have all these arrangements made in
+the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the carriage.
+The moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away.”
+
+“I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances?”
+
+“You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, and will
+reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place occupied, and
+then for England!”
+
+“Why, then,” said Mr. Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and steady
+hand, “it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have a young
+and ardent man at my side.”
+
+“By the help of Heaven you shall! Promise me solemnly that nothing will
+influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged to one
+another.”
+
+“Nothing, Carton.”
+
+“Remember these words to-morrow: change the course, or delay in it--for
+any reason--and no life can possibly be saved, and many lives must
+inevitably be sacrificed.”
+
+“I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully.”
+
+“And I hope to do mine. Now, good bye!”
+
+Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he even
+put the old man’s hand to his lips, he did not part from him then. He
+helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before the dying embers,
+as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to tempt it forth to find
+where the bench and work were hidden that it still moaningly besought
+to have. He walked on the other side of it and protected it to the
+courtyard of the house where the afflicted heart--so happy in
+the memorable time when he had revealed his own desolate heart to
+it--outwatched the awful night. He entered the courtyard and remained
+there for a few moments alone, looking up at the light in the window of
+her room. Before he went away, he breathed a blessing towards it, and a
+Farewell.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. Fifty-two
+
+
+In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited
+their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were
+to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless
+everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants
+were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday,
+the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow was already set
+apart.
+
+Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy,
+whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose
+poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered
+in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees;
+and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering,
+intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally
+without distinction.
+
+Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no
+flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every line
+of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his condemnation. He had
+fully comprehended that no personal influence could possibly save him,
+that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units could
+avail him nothing.
+
+Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife fresh
+before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold on life
+was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual efforts
+and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and
+when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it yielded,
+this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his thoughts,
+a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended against
+resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then his wife and
+child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and to make it a
+selfish thing.
+
+But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that there
+was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went the same
+road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, sprang up to stimulate
+him. Next followed the thought that much of the future peace of mind
+enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet fortitude. So,
+by degrees he calmed into the better state, when he could raise his
+thoughts much higher, and draw comfort down.
+
+Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he had
+travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase the means
+of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such time as the
+prison lamps should be extinguished.
+
+He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known nothing
+of her father’s imprisonment, until he had heard of it from herself,
+and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father’s and uncle’s
+responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been read. He had
+already explained to her that his concealment from herself of the name
+he had relinquished, was the one condition--fully intelligible now--that
+her father had attached to their betrothal, and was the one promise he
+had still exacted on the morning of their marriage. He entreated her,
+for her father’s sake, never to seek to know whether her father had
+become oblivious of the existence of the paper, or had had it recalled
+to him (for the moment, or for good), by the story of the Tower, on
+that old Sunday under the dear old plane-tree in the garden. If he had
+preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt that
+he had supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had found no
+mention of it among the relics of prisoners which the populace had
+discovered there, and which had been described to all the world. He
+besought her--though he added that he knew it was needless--to console
+her father, by impressing him through every tender means she could think
+of, with the truth that he had done nothing for which he could justly
+reproach himself, but had uniformly forgotten himself for their joint
+sakes. Next to her preservation of his own last grateful love and
+blessing, and her overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their
+dear child, he adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her
+father.
+
+To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her
+father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care. And
+he told him this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him from any
+despondency or dangerous retrospect towards which he foresaw he might be
+tending.
+
+To Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs.
+That done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm
+attachment, all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was so
+full of the others, that he never once thought of him.
+
+He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out. When
+he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.
+
+But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining
+forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had
+nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably released and light of
+heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream, and
+he had never gone away. A pause of forgetfulness, and then he had even
+suffered, and had come back to her, dead and at peace, and yet there
+was no difference in him. Another pause of oblivion, and he awoke in the
+sombre morning, unconscious where he was or what had happened, until it
+flashed upon his mind, “this is the day of my death!”
+
+Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the fifty-two heads
+were to fall. And now, while he was composed, and hoped that he could
+meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking
+thoughts, which was very difficult to master.
+
+He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How
+high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be
+stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed
+red, which way his face would be turned, whether he would be the first,
+or might be the last: these and many similar questions, in nowise
+directed by his will, obtruded themselves over and over again, countless
+times. Neither were they connected with fear: he was conscious of no
+fear. Rather, they originated in a strange besetting desire to know what
+to do when the time came; a desire gigantically disproportionate to the
+few swift moments to which it referred; a wondering that was more like
+the wondering of some other spirit within his, than his own.
+
+The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks struck the
+numbers he would never hear again. Nine gone for ever, ten gone for
+ever, eleven gone for ever, twelve coming on to pass away. After a hard
+contest with that eccentric action of thought which had last perplexed
+him, he had got the better of it. He walked up and down, softly
+repeating their names to himself. The worst of the strife was over.
+He could walk up and down, free from distracting fancies, praying for
+himself and for them.
+
+Twelve gone for ever.
+
+He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew he would
+be summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils jolted heavily
+and slowly through the streets. Therefore, he resolved to keep Two
+before his mind, as the hour, and so to strengthen himself in the
+interval that he might be able, after that time, to strengthen others.
+
+Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast, a very
+different man from the prisoner, who had walked to and fro at La Force,
+he heard One struck away from him, without surprise. The hour had
+measured like most other hours. Devoutly thankful to Heaven for his
+recovered self-possession, he thought, “There is but another now,” and
+turned to walk again.
+
+Footsteps in the stone passage outside the door. He stopped.
+
+The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was opened, or
+as it opened, a man said in a low voice, in English: “He has never seen
+me here; I have kept out of his way. Go you in alone; I wait near. Lose
+no time!”
+
+The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before him
+face to face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a smile on his
+features, and a cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney Carton.
+
+There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, for the
+first moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an apparition of his own
+imagining. But, he spoke, and it was his voice; he took the prisoner’s
+hand, and it was his real grasp.
+
+“Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me?” he said.
+
+“I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now. You
+are not”--the apprehension came suddenly into his mind--“a prisoner?”
+
+“No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the keepers
+here, and in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from her--your
+wife, dear Darnay.”
+
+The prisoner wrung his hand.
+
+“I bring you a request from her.”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to you
+in the most pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that you well
+remember.”
+
+The prisoner turned his face partly aside.
+
+“You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means; I have
+no time to tell you. You must comply with it--take off those boots you
+wear, and draw on these of mine.”
+
+There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the prisoner.
+Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of lightning, got
+him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot.
+
+“Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them; put your will to
+them. Quick!”
+
+“Carton, there is no escaping from this place; it never can be done. You
+will only die with me. It is madness.”
+
+“It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I? When I ask you
+to pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and remain here. Change
+that cravat for this of mine, that coat for this of mine. While you do
+it, let me take this ribbon from your hair, and shake out your hair like
+this of mine!”
+
+With wonderful quickness, and with a strength both of will and action,
+that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him.
+The prisoner was like a young child in his hands.
+
+“Carton! Dear Carton! It is madness. It cannot be accomplished, it never
+can be done, it has been attempted, and has always failed. I implore you
+not to add your death to the bitterness of mine.”
+
+“Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door? When I ask that,
+refuse. There are pen and ink and paper on this table. Is your hand
+steady enough to write?”
+
+“It was when you came in.”
+
+“Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, friend, quick!”
+
+Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at the table.
+Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close beside him.
+
+“Write exactly as I speak.”
+
+“To whom do I address it?”
+
+“To no one.” Carton still had his hand in his breast.
+
+“Do I date it?”
+
+“No.”
+
+The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing over him with
+his hand in his breast, looked down.
+
+“‘If you remember,’” said Carton, dictating, “‘the words that passed
+between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it.
+You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them.’”
+
+He was drawing his hand from his breast; the prisoner chancing to look
+up in his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, closing upon
+something.
+
+“Have you written ‘forget them’?” Carton asked.
+
+“I have. Is that a weapon in your hand?”
+
+“No; I am not armed.”
+
+“What is it in your hand?”
+
+“You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few words more.” He
+dictated again. “‘I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove
+them. That I do so is no subject for regret or grief.’” As he said these
+words with his eyes fixed on the writer, his hand slowly and softly
+moved down close to the writer’s face.
+
+The pen dropped from Darnay’s fingers on the table, and he looked about
+him vacantly.
+
+“What vapour is that?” he asked.
+
+“Vapour?”
+
+“Something that crossed me?”
+
+“I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the pen
+and finish. Hurry, hurry!”
+
+As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the
+prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at Carton
+with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing, Carton--his
+hand again in his breast--looked steadily at him.
+
+“Hurry, hurry!”
+
+The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.
+
+“‘If it had been otherwise;’” Carton’s hand was again watchfully and
+softly stealing down; “‘I never should have used the longer opportunity.
+If it had been otherwise;’” the hand was at the prisoner’s face; “‘I
+should but have had so much the more to answer for. If it had been
+otherwise--’” Carton looked at the pen and saw it was trailing off into
+unintelligible signs.
+
+Carton’s hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner sprang up
+with a reproachful look, but Carton’s hand was close and firm at his
+nostrils, and Carton’s left arm caught him round the waist. For a few
+seconds he faintly struggled with the man who had come to lay down his
+life for him; but, within a minute or so, he was stretched insensible on
+the ground.
+
+Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was, Carton
+dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside, combed back
+his hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had worn. Then, he
+softly called, “Enter there! Come in!” and the Spy presented himself.
+
+“You see?” said Carton, looking up, as he kneeled on one knee beside the
+insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: “is your hazard very
+great?”
+
+“Mr. Carton,” the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fingers, “my
+hazard is not _that_, in the thick of business here, if you are true to
+the whole of your bargain.”
+
+“Don’t fear me. I will be true to the death.”
+
+“You must be, Mr. Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right. Being
+made right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear.”
+
+“Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the
+rest will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and
+take me to the coach.”
+
+“You?” said the Spy nervously.
+
+“Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the gate by which
+you brought me in?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am fainter now you
+take me out. The parting interview has overpowered me. Such a thing has
+happened here, often, and too often. Your life is in your own hands.
+Quick! Call assistance!”
+
+“You swear not to betray me?” said the trembling Spy, as he paused for a
+last moment.
+
+“Man, man!” returned Carton, stamping his foot; “have I sworn by no
+solemn vow already, to go through with this, that you waste the precious
+moments now? Take him yourself to the courtyard you know of, place
+him yourself in the carriage, show him yourself to Mr. Lorry, tell him
+yourself to give him no restorative but air, and to remember my words of
+last night, and his promise of last night, and drive away!”
+
+The Spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, resting his
+forehead on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, with two men.
+
+“How, then?” said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. “So
+afflicted to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the lottery of
+Sainte Guillotine?”
+
+“A good patriot,” said the other, “could hardly have been more afflicted
+if the Aristocrat had drawn a blank.”
+
+They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had
+brought to the door, and bent to carry it away.
+
+“The time is short, Evremonde,” said the Spy, in a warning voice.
+
+“I know it well,” answered Carton. “Be careful of my friend, I entreat
+you, and leave me.”
+
+“Come, then, my children,” said Barsad. “Lift him, and come away!”
+
+The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his powers of
+listening to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might denote
+suspicion or alarm. There was none. Keys turned, doors clashed,
+footsteps passed along distant passages: no cry was raised, or hurry
+made, that seemed unusual. Breathing more freely in a little while, he
+sat down at the table, and listened again until the clock struck Two.
+
+Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning, then
+began to be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, and
+finally his own. A gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in, merely
+saying, “Follow me, Evremonde!” and he followed into a large dark room,
+at a distance. It was a dark winter day, and what with the shadows
+within, and what with the shadows without, he could but dimly discern
+the others who were brought there to have their arms bound. Some were
+standing; some seated. Some were lamenting, and in restless motion;
+but, these were few. The great majority were silent and still, looking
+fixedly at the ground.
+
+As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty-two
+were brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to embrace him,
+as having a knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a great dread of
+discovery; but the man went on. A very few moments after that, a young
+woman, with a slight girlish form, a sweet spare face in which there was
+no vestige of colour, and large widely opened patient eyes, rose from
+the seat where he had observed her sitting, and came to speak to him.
+
+“Citizen Evremonde,” she said, touching him with her cold hand. “I am a
+poor little seamstress, who was with you in La Force.”
+
+He murmured for answer: “True. I forget what you were accused of?”
+
+“Plots. Though the just Heaven knows that I am innocent of any. Is it
+likely? Who would think of plotting with a poor little weak creature
+like me?”
+
+The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him, that tears
+started from his eyes.
+
+“I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evremonde, but I have done nothing. I
+am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much good
+to us poor, will profit by my death; but I do not know how that can be,
+Citizen Evremonde. Such a poor weak little creature!”
+
+As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften to, it
+warmed and softened to this pitiable girl.
+
+“I heard you were released, Citizen Evremonde. I hoped it was true?”
+
+“It was. But, I was again taken and condemned.”
+
+“If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your
+hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me
+more courage.”
+
+As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in
+them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young
+fingers, and touched his lips.
+
+“Are you dying for him?” she whispered.
+
+“And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.”
+
+“O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?”
+
+“Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.”
+
+        *****
+
+The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in that
+same hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the crowd about
+it, when a coach going out of Paris drives up to be examined.
+
+“Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!”
+
+The papers are handed out, and read.
+
+“Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?”
+
+This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old man
+pointed out.
+
+“Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind? The
+Revolution-fever will have been too much for him?”
+
+Greatly too much for him.
+
+“Hah! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. Which is she?”
+
+This is she.
+
+“Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evremonde; is it not?”
+
+It is.
+
+“Hah! Evremonde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her child. English.
+This is she?”
+
+She and no other.
+
+“Kiss me, child of Evremonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good Republican;
+something new in thy family; remember it! Sydney Carton. Advocate.
+English. Which is he?”
+
+He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed out.
+
+“Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon?”
+
+It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented that
+he is not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a friend who is
+under the displeasure of the Republic.
+
+“Is that all? It is not a great deal, that! Many are under the
+displeasure of the Republic, and must look out at the little window.
+Jarvis Lorry. Banker. English. Which is he?”
+
+“I am he. Necessarily, being the last.”
+
+It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions. It
+is Jarvis Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on the coach
+door, replying to a group of officials. They leisurely walk round the
+carriage and leisurely mount the box, to look at what little luggage it
+carries on the roof; the country-people hanging about, press nearer to
+the coach doors and greedily stare in; a little child, carried by its
+mother, has its short arm held out for it, that it may touch the wife of
+an aristocrat who has gone to the Guillotine.
+
+“Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned.”
+
+“One can depart, citizen?”
+
+“One can depart. Forward, my postilions! A good journey!”
+
+“I salute you, citizens.--And the first danger passed!”
+
+These are again the words of Jarvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands, and
+looks upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping, there
+is the heavy breathing of the insensible traveller.
+
+“Are we not going too slowly? Can they not be induced to go faster?”
+ asks Lucie, clinging to the old man.
+
+“It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them too much;
+it would rouse suspicion.”
+
+“Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued!”
+
+“The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued.”
+
+Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings,
+dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues of leafless
+trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on
+either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the
+stones that clatter us and shake us; sometimes, we stick in ruts and
+sloughs there. The agony of our impatience is then so great, that in our
+wild alarm and hurry we are for getting out and running--hiding--doing
+anything but stopping.
+
+Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary
+farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos and threes,
+avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and taken us back
+by another road? Is not this the same place twice over? Thank Heaven,
+no. A village. Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued! Hush!
+the posting-house.
+
+Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands in
+the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon it
+of ever moving again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible
+existence, one by one; leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking and
+plaiting the lashes of their whips; leisurely, the old postilions count
+their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at dissatisfied results.
+All the time, our overfraught hearts are beating at a rate that would
+far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest horses ever foaled.
+
+At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are left
+behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the hill, and
+on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions exchange speech with
+animated gesticulation, and the horses are pulled up, almost on their
+haunches. We are pursued?
+
+“Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!”
+
+“What is it?” asks Mr. Lorry, looking out at window.
+
+“How many did they say?”
+
+“I do not understand you.”
+
+“--At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?”
+
+“Fifty-two.”
+
+“I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here would have it
+forty-two; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes
+handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop!”
+
+The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive, and
+to speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks him,
+by his name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven, and help
+us! Look out, look out, and see if we are pursued.
+
+The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and
+the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of
+us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. The Knitting Done
+
+
+In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate
+Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and
+Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did Madame
+Defarge confer with these ministers, but in the shed of the wood-sawyer,
+erst a mender of roads. The sawyer himself did not participate in the
+conference, but abided at a little distance, like an outer satellite who
+was not to speak until required, or to offer an opinion until invited.
+
+“But our Defarge,” said Jacques Three, “is undoubtedly a good
+Republican? Eh?”
+
+“There is no better,” the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill
+notes, “in France.”
+
+“Peace, little Vengeance,” said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with
+a slight frown on her lieutenant’s lips, “hear me speak. My husband,
+fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved
+well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. But my husband has
+his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent towards this Doctor.”
+
+“It is a great pity,” croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his head,
+with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; “it is not quite like a good
+citizen; it is a thing to regret.”
+
+“See you,” said madame, “I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may wear
+his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all one to
+me. But, the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and
+child must follow the husband and father.”
+
+“She has a fine head for it,” croaked Jacques Three. “I have seen blue
+eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson held
+them up.” Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.
+
+Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.
+
+“The child also,” observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment
+of his words, “has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a child
+there. It is a pretty sight!”
+
+“In a word,” said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction,
+“I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since
+last night, that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects;
+but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning,
+and then they might escape.”
+
+“That must never be,” croaked Jacques Three; “no one must escape. We
+have not half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day.”
+
+“In a word,” Madame Defarge went on, “my husband has not my reason for
+pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason for
+regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself,
+therefore. Come hither, little citizen.”
+
+The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the
+submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.
+
+“Touching those signals, little citizen,” said Madame Defarge, sternly,
+“that she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear witness to them
+this very day?”
+
+“Ay, ay, why not!” cried the sawyer. “Every day, in all weathers, from
+two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one, sometimes
+without. I know what I know. I have seen with my eyes.”
+
+He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental
+imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had
+never seen.
+
+“Clearly plots,” said Jacques Three. “Transparently!”
+
+“There is no doubt of the Jury?” inquired Madame Defarge, letting her
+eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile.
+
+“Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my
+fellow-Jurymen.”
+
+“Now, let me see,” said Madame Defarge, pondering again. “Yet once more!
+Can I spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way. Can
+I spare him?”
+
+“He would count as one head,” observed Jacques Three, in a low voice.
+“We really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think.”
+
+“He was signalling with her when I saw her,” argued Madame Defarge; “I
+cannot speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent, and
+trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen here. For, I am not a
+bad witness.”
+
+The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent
+protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of
+witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be a
+celestial witness.
+
+“He must take his chance,” said Madame Defarge. “No, I cannot spare
+him! You are engaged at three o’clock; you are going to see the batch of
+to-day executed.--You?”
+
+The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied in
+the affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most ardent
+of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most desolate of
+Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of
+smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation of the droll national
+barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, that he might have been
+suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes that looked contemptuously at
+him out of Madame Defarge’s head) of having his small individual fears
+for his own personal safety, every hour in the day.
+
+“I,” said madame, “am equally engaged at the same place. After it is
+over--say at eight to-night--come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we
+will give information against these people at my Section.”
+
+The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the
+citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed, evaded
+her glance as a small dog would have done, retreated among his wood, and
+hid his confusion over the handle of his saw.
+
+Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer to
+the door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:
+
+“She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will
+be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach the
+justice of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its enemies.
+I will go to her.”
+
+“What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!” exclaimed Jacques
+Three, rapturously. “Ah, my cherished!” cried The Vengeance; and
+embraced her.
+
+“Take you my knitting,” said Madame Defarge, placing it in her
+lieutenant’s hands, “and have it ready for me in my usual seat. Keep
+me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will probably be a
+greater concourse than usual, to-day.”
+
+“I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,” said The Vengeance with
+alacrity, and kissing her cheek. “You will not be late?”
+
+“I shall be there before the commencement.”
+
+“And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,” said
+The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned into the
+street, “before the tumbrils arrive!”
+
+Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and
+might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the
+mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the
+Juryman, looking after her as she walked away, were highly appreciative
+of her fine figure, and her superb moral endowments.
+
+There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully
+disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded
+than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a
+strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great
+determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart
+to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an
+instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have
+heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood
+with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class,
+opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without
+pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of
+her.
+
+It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of
+his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that
+his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was
+insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and
+her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made
+hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had
+been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which
+she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had
+been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any
+softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who
+sent her there.
+
+Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly
+worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her
+dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her
+bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened
+dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such
+a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually
+walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown
+sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.
+
+Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment
+waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned out last night,
+the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged Mr. Lorry’s
+attention. It was not merely desirable to avoid overloading the coach,
+but it was of the highest importance that the time occupied in examining
+it and its passengers, should be reduced to the utmost; since their
+escape might depend on the saving of only a few seconds here and there.
+Finally, he had proposed, after anxious consideration, that Miss Pross
+and Jerry, who were at liberty to leave the city, should leave it at
+three o’clock in the lightest-wheeled conveyance known to that period.
+Unencumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the coach, and,
+passing it and preceding it on the road, would order its horses in
+advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious hours
+of the night, when delay was the most to be dreaded.
+
+Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that
+pressing emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had
+beheld the coach start, had known who it was that Solomon brought, had
+passed some ten minutes in tortures of suspense, and were now concluding
+their arrangements to follow the coach, even as Madame Defarge,
+taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the
+else-deserted lodging in which they held their consultation.
+
+“Now what do you think, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose agitation
+was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand, or move, or live:
+“what do you think of our not starting from this courtyard? Another
+carriage having already gone from here to-day, it might awaken
+suspicion.”
+
+“My opinion, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “is as you’re right. Likewise
+wot I’ll stand by you, right or wrong.”
+
+“I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures,” said
+Miss Pross, wildly crying, “that I am incapable of forming any plan. Are
+_you_ capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr. Cruncher?”
+
+“Respectin’ a future spear o’ life, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “I
+hope so. Respectin’ any present use o’ this here blessed old head o’
+mine, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to take notice o’
+two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in this here
+crisis?”
+
+“Oh, for gracious sake!” cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, “record
+them at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man.”
+
+“First,” said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who spoke with
+an ashy and solemn visage, “them poor things well out o’ this, never no
+more will I do it, never no more!”
+
+“I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher,” returned Miss Pross, “that you
+never will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to think it
+necessary to mention more particularly what it is.”
+
+“No, miss,” returned Jerry, “it shall not be named to you. Second: them
+poor things well out o’ this, and never no more will I interfere with
+Mrs. Cruncher’s flopping, never no more!”
+
+“Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,” said Miss Pross,
+striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, “I have no doubt it
+is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own
+superintendence.--O my poor darlings!”
+
+“I go so far as to say, miss, moreover,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a
+most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit--“and let my words
+be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself--that wot my
+opinions respectin’ flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only
+hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present
+time.”
+
+“There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man,” cried the distracted
+Miss Pross, “and I hope she finds it answering her expectations.”
+
+“Forbid it,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with additional solemnity,
+additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold
+out, “as anything wot I have ever said or done should be wisited on my
+earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now! Forbid it as we shouldn’t all
+flop (if it was anyways conwenient) to get ‘em out o’ this here dismal
+risk! Forbid it, miss! Wot I say, for-_bid_ it!” This was Mr. Cruncher’s
+conclusion after a protracted but vain endeavour to find a better one.
+
+And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came
+nearer and nearer.
+
+“If we ever get back to our native land,” said Miss Pross, “you may rely
+upon my telling Mrs. Cruncher as much as I may be able to remember and
+understand of what you have so impressively said; and at all events
+you may be sure that I shall bear witness to your being thoroughly in
+earnest at this dreadful time. Now, pray let us think! My esteemed Mr.
+Cruncher, let us think!”
+
+Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer
+and nearer.
+
+“If you were to go before,” said Miss Pross, “and stop the vehicle and
+horses from coming here, and were to wait somewhere for me; wouldn’t
+that be best?”
+
+Mr. Cruncher thought it might be best.
+
+“Where could you wait for me?” asked Miss Pross.
+
+Mr. Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no locality but
+Temple Bar. Alas! Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away, and Madame
+Defarge was drawing very near indeed.
+
+“By the cathedral door,” said Miss Pross. “Would it be much out of
+the way, to take me in, near the great cathedral door between the two
+towers?”
+
+“No, miss,” answered Mr. Cruncher.
+
+“Then, like the best of men,” said Miss Pross, “go to the posting-house
+straight, and make that change.”
+
+“I am doubtful,” said Mr. Cruncher, hesitating and shaking his head,
+“about leaving of you, you see. We don’t know what may happen.”
+
+“Heaven knows we don’t,” returned Miss Pross, “but have no fear for me.
+Take me in at the cathedral, at Three o’Clock, or as near it as you can,
+and I am sure it will be better than our going from here. I feel certain
+of it. There! Bless you, Mr. Cruncher! Think-not of me, but of the lives
+that may depend on both of us!”
+
+This exordium, and Miss Pross’s two hands in quite agonised entreaty
+clasping his, decided Mr. Cruncher. With an encouraging nod or two, he
+immediately went out to alter the arrangements, and left her by herself
+to follow as she had proposed.
+
+The having originated a precaution which was already in course of
+execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of composing
+her appearance so that it should attract no special notice in the
+streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, and it was twenty
+minutes past two. She had no time to lose, but must get ready at once.
+
+Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the deserted
+rooms, and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every open door
+in them, Miss Pross got a basin of cold water and began laving her eyes,
+which were swollen and red. Haunted by her feverish apprehensions, she
+could not bear to have her sight obscured for a minute at a time by the
+dripping water, but constantly paused and looked round to see that there
+was no one watching her. In one of those pauses she recoiled and cried
+out, for she saw a figure standing in the room.
+
+The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet of
+Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and through much staining blood,
+those feet had come to meet that water.
+
+Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, “The wife of Evremonde;
+where is she?”
+
+It flashed upon Miss Pross’s mind that the doors were all standing open,
+and would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut them. There were
+four in the room, and she shut them all. She then placed herself before
+the door of the chamber which Lucie had occupied.
+
+Madame Defarge’s dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement,
+and rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross had nothing beautiful
+about her; years had not tamed the wildness, or softened the grimness,
+of her appearance; but, she too was a determined woman in her different
+way, and she measured Madame Defarge with her eyes, every inch.
+
+“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss
+Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of
+me. I am an Englishwoman.”
+
+Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of
+Miss Pross’s own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a tight,
+hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had seen in the same figure a
+woman with a strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew full well that
+Miss Pross was the family’s devoted friend; Miss Pross knew full well
+that Madame Defarge was the family’s malevolent enemy.
+
+“On my way yonder,” said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of
+her hand towards the fatal spot, “where they reserve my chair and my
+knitting for me, I am come to make my compliments to her in passing. I
+wish to see her.”
+
+“I know that your intentions are evil,” said Miss Pross, “and you may
+depend upon it, I’ll hold my own against them.”
+
+Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other’s words;
+both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what
+the unintelligible words meant.
+
+“It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this
+moment,” said Madame Defarge. “Good patriots will know what that means.
+Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear?”
+
+“If those eyes of yours were bed-winches,” returned Miss Pross, “and I
+was an English four-poster, they shouldn’t loose a splinter of me. No,
+you wicked foreign woman; I am your match.”
+
+Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in
+detail; but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was set
+at naught.
+
+“Woman imbecile and pig-like!” said Madame Defarge, frowning. “I take no
+answer from you. I demand to see her. Either tell her that I demand
+to see her, or stand out of the way of the door and let me go to her!”
+ This, with an angry explanatory wave of her right arm.
+
+“I little thought,” said Miss Pross, “that I should ever want to
+understand your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have,
+except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the truth, or any
+part of it.”
+
+Neither of them for a single moment released the other’s eyes. Madame
+Defarge had not moved from the spot where she stood when Miss Pross
+first became aware of her; but, she now advanced one step.
+
+“I am a Briton,” said Miss Pross, “I am desperate. I don’t care an
+English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here, the
+greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I’ll not leave a handful of that
+dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!”
+
+Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes
+between every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath.
+Thus Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.
+
+But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought the
+irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that Madame
+Defarge so little comprehended as to mistake for weakness. “Ha, ha!” she
+laughed, “you poor wretch! What are you worth! I address myself to that
+Doctor.” Then she raised her voice and called out, “Citizen Doctor! Wife
+of Evremonde! Child of Evremonde! Any person but this miserable fool,
+answer the Citizeness Defarge!”
+
+Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure in the
+expression of Miss Pross’s face, perhaps a sudden misgiving apart from
+either suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that they were gone.
+Three of the doors she opened swiftly, and looked in.
+
+“Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing, there
+are odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that room behind
+you! Let me look.”
+
+“Never!” said Miss Pross, who understood the request as perfectly as
+Madame Defarge understood the answer.
+
+“If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pursued and
+brought back,” said Madame Defarge to herself.
+
+“As long as you don’t know whether they are in that room or not, you are
+uncertain what to do,” said Miss Pross to herself; “and you shall not
+know that, if I can prevent your knowing it; and know that, or not know
+that, you shall not leave here while I can hold you.”
+
+“I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped me,
+I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door,” said
+Madame Defarge.
+
+“We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary courtyard, we are
+not likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength to keep you here,
+while every minute you are here is worth a hundred thousand guineas to
+my darling,” said Miss Pross.
+
+Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the
+moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her tight.
+It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike; Miss Pross,
+with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate,
+clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle
+that they had. The two hands of Madame Defarge buffeted and tore her
+face; but, Miss Pross, with her head down, held her round the waist, and
+clung to her with more than the hold of a drowning woman.
+
+Soon, Madame Defarge’s hands ceased to strike, and felt at her encircled
+waist. “It is under my arm,” said Miss Pross, in smothered tones, “you
+shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless Heaven for it. I hold
+you till one or other of us faints or dies!”
+
+Madame Defarge’s hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw
+what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood
+alone--blinded with smoke.
+
+All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful
+stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious woman
+whose body lay lifeless on the ground.
+
+In the first fright and horror of her situation, Miss Pross passed the
+body as far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to call for
+fruitless help. Happily, she bethought herself of the consequences of
+what she did, in time to check herself and go back. It was dreadful to
+go in at the door again; but, she did go in, and even went near it, to
+get the bonnet and other things that she must wear. These she put on,
+out on the staircase, first shutting and locking the door and taking
+away the key. She then sat down on the stairs a few moments to breathe
+and to cry, and then got up and hurried away.
+
+By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly have
+gone along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune, too, she
+was naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show disfigurement
+like any other woman. She needed both advantages, for the marks of
+gripping fingers were deep in her face, and her hair was torn, and her
+dress (hastily composed with unsteady hands) was clutched and dragged a
+hundred ways.
+
+In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river. Arriving
+at the cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and waiting there,
+she thought, what if the key were already taken in a net, what if
+it were identified, what if the door were opened and the remains
+discovered, what if she were stopped at the gate, sent to prison, and
+charged with murder! In the midst of these fluttering thoughts, the
+escort appeared, took her in, and took her away.
+
+“Is there any noise in the streets?” she asked him.
+
+“The usual noises,” Mr. Cruncher replied; and looked surprised by the
+question and by her aspect.
+
+“I don’t hear you,” said Miss Pross. “What do you say?”
+
+It was in vain for Mr. Cruncher to repeat what he said; Miss Pross could
+not hear him. “So I’ll nod my head,” thought Mr. Cruncher, amazed, “at
+all events she’ll see that.” And she did.
+
+“Is there any noise in the streets now?” asked Miss Pross again,
+presently.
+
+Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head.
+
+“I don’t hear it.”
+
+“Gone deaf in an hour?” said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with his mind
+much disturbed; “wot’s come to her?”
+
+“I feel,” said Miss Pross, “as if there had been a flash and a crash,
+and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this life.”
+
+“Blest if she ain’t in a queer condition!” said Mr. Cruncher, more and
+more disturbed. “Wot can she have been a takin’, to keep her courage up?
+Hark! There’s the roll of them dreadful carts! You can hear that, miss?”
+
+“I can hear,” said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her, “nothing. O,
+my good man, there was first a great crash, and then a great stillness,
+and that stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be
+broken any more as long as my life lasts.”
+
+“If she don’t hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh their
+journey’s end,” said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder, “it’s my
+opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in this world.”
+
+And indeed she never did.
+
+
+
+
+XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever
+
+
+Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
+tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
+insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
+are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in
+France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf,
+a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
+conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush
+humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will
+twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
+rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
+the same fruit according to its kind.
+
+Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
+they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
+the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the
+toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s
+house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!
+No; the great magician who majestically works out the appointed order
+of the Creator, never reverses his transformations. “If thou be changed
+into this shape by the will of God,” say the seers to the enchanted, in
+the wise Arabian stories, “then remain so! But, if thou wear this
+form through mere passing conjuration, then resume thy former aspect!”
+ Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.
+
+As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up
+a long crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces
+are thrown to this side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward.
+So used are the regular inhabitants of the houses to the spectacle, that
+in many windows there are no people, and in some the occupation of the
+hands is not so much as suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in
+the tumbrils. Here and there, the inmate has visitors to see the sight;
+then he points his finger, with something of the complacency of a
+curator or authorised exponent, to this cart and to this, and seems to
+tell who sat here yesterday, and who there the day before.
+
+Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all
+things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with
+a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with
+drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so
+heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as
+they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their eyes,
+and think, or try to get their straying thoughts together. Only one, and
+he a miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so shattered and made
+drunk by horror, that he sings, and tries to dance. Not one of the whole
+number appeals by look or gesture, to the pity of the people.
+
+There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils,
+and faces are often turned up to some of them, and they are asked some
+question. It would seem to be always the same question, for, it is
+always followed by a press of people towards the third cart. The
+horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently point out one man in it with
+their swords. The leading curiosity is, to know which is he; he stands
+at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down, to converse with a
+mere girl who sits on the side of the cart, and holds his hand. He has
+no curiosity or care for the scene about him, and always speaks to the
+girl. Here and there in the long street of St. Honore, cries are raised
+against him. If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as he
+shakes his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily
+touch his face, his arms being bound.
+
+On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils, stands
+the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them: not there.
+He looks into the second: not there. He already asks himself, “Has he
+sacrificed me?” when his face clears, as he looks into the third.
+
+“Which is Evremonde?” says a man behind him.
+
+“That. At the back there.”
+
+“With his hand in the girl’s?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+The man cries, “Down, Evremonde! To the Guillotine all aristocrats!
+Down, Evremonde!”
+
+“Hush, hush!” the Spy entreats him, timidly.
+
+“And why not, citizen?”
+
+“He is going to pay the forfeit: it will be paid in five minutes more.
+Let him be at peace.”
+
+But the man continuing to exclaim, “Down, Evremonde!” the face of
+Evremonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evremonde then sees the
+Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes his way.
+
+The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among the
+populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and
+end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in and
+close behind the last plough as it passes on, for all are following
+to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden of
+public diversion, are a number of women, busily knitting. On one of the
+fore-most chairs, stands The Vengeance, looking about for her friend.
+
+“Therese!” she cries, in her shrill tones. “Who has seen her? Therese
+Defarge!”
+
+“She never missed before,” says a knitting-woman of the sisterhood.
+
+“No; nor will she miss now,” cries The Vengeance, petulantly. “Therese.”
+
+“Louder,” the woman recommends.
+
+Ay! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear
+thee. Louder yet, Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet
+it will hardly bring her. Send other women up and down to seek her,
+lingering somewhere; and yet, although the messengers have done dread
+deeds, it is questionable whether of their own wills they will go far
+enough to find her!
+
+“Bad Fortune!” cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, “and
+here are the tumbrils! And Evremonde will be despatched in a wink, and
+she not here! See her knitting in my hand, and her empty chair ready for
+her. I cry with vexation and disappointment!”
+
+As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tumbrils
+begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are
+robed and ready. Crash!--A head is held up, and the knitting-women who
+scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could
+think and speak, count One.
+
+The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash!--And
+the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their Work, count Two.
+
+The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next
+after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but
+still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the
+crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she looks into
+his face and thanks him.
+
+“But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am
+naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been
+able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might
+have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were sent to me by
+Heaven.”
+
+“Or you to me,” says Sydney Carton. “Keep your eyes upon me, dear child,
+and mind no other object.”
+
+“I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when I let
+it go, if they are rapid.”
+
+“They will be rapid. Fear not!”
+
+The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as
+if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to
+heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart
+and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home
+together, and to rest in her bosom.
+
+“Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I
+am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little.”
+
+“Tell me what it is.”
+
+“I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I
+love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a
+farmer’s house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows
+nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how should I
+tell her! It is better as it is.”
+
+“Yes, yes: better as it is.”
+
+“What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still
+thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so
+much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor,
+and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may
+live a long time: she may even live to be old.”
+
+“What then, my gentle sister?”
+
+“Do you think:” the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much
+endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble:
+“that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land
+where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?”
+
+“It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.”
+
+“You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now? Is the
+moment come?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other.
+The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than
+a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before
+him--is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.
+
+“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
+in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
+believeth in me shall never die.”
+
+The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing
+on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells
+forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away.
+Twenty-Three.
+
+        *****
+
+They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
+peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
+sublime and prophetic.
+
+One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had asked
+at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to
+write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given any
+utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these:
+
+“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge,
+long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of
+the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease
+out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people
+rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in
+their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil
+of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural
+birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
+
+“I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful,
+prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see
+Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father,
+aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his
+healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their
+friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing
+tranquilly to his reward.
+
+“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of
+their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping
+for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their
+course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know
+that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul,
+than I was in the souls of both.
+
+“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
+winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him
+winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the
+light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him,
+fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name,
+with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--then fair to
+look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement--and I hear him
+tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.
+
+“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a
+far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The combined qualities of the realist and the idealist which Dickens
+possessed to a remarkable degree, together with his naturally jovial
+attitude toward life in general, seem to have given him a remarkably
+happy feeling toward Christmas, though the privations and hardships of
+his boyhood could have allowed him but little real experience with this
+day of days.
+
+Dickens gave his first formal expression to his Christmas thoughts in
+his series of small books, the first of which was the famous "Christmas
+Carol," the one perfect chrysolite. The success of the book was
+immediate. Thackeray wrote of it: "Who can listen to objections
+regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to
+every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness."
+
+This volume was put forth in a very attractive manner, with
+illustrations by John Leech, who was the first artist to make these
+characters live, and his drawings were varied and spirited.
+
+There followed upon this four others: "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the
+Hearth," "The Battle of Life," and "The Haunted Man," with illustrations
+on their first appearance by Doyle, Maclise, and others. The five are
+known to-day as the "Christmas Books." Of them all the "Carol" is the
+best known and loved, and "The Cricket on the Hearth," although third in
+the series, is perhaps next in point of popularity, and is especially
+familiar to Americans through Joseph Jefferson's characterisation of
+Caleb Plummer.
+
+Dickens seems to have put his whole self into these glowing little
+stories. Whoever sees but a clever ghost story in the "Christmas Carol"
+misses its chief charm and lesson, for there is a different meaning in
+the movements of Scrooge and his attendant spirits. A new life is
+brought to Scrooge when he, "running to his window, opened it and put
+out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring cold;
+cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sun-light; Heavenly sky;
+sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!" All this
+brightness has its attendant shadow, and deep from the childish heart
+comes that true note of pathos, the ever memorable toast of Tiny Tim,
+"God bless Us, Every One!" "The Cricket on the Hearth" strikes a
+different note. Charmingly, poetically, the sweet chirping of the little
+cricket is associated with human feelings and actions, and at the crisis
+of the story decides the fate and fortune of the carrier and his wife.
+
+Dickens's greatest gift was characterization, and no English writer,
+save Shakespeare, has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would
+be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens
+his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his
+comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and
+satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence
+of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and
+pathos. Yet the pictorial presentation of Dickens's characters has ever
+tended toward the grotesque. The interpretations in this volume aim to
+eliminate the grosser phases of the caricature in favour of the more
+human. If the interpretations seem novel, if Scrooge be not as he has
+been pictured, it is because a more human Scrooge was desired--a Scrooge
+not wholly bad, a Scrooge of a better heart, a Scrooge to whom the
+resurrection described in this story was possible. It has been the
+illustrator's whole aim to make these people live in some form more
+fully consistent with their types.
+
+                                   GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS.
+_Chatham, N.J._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS CAROL
+
+STAVE                                                                 PAGE
+
+  I _Marley's Ghost_                                                    11
+ II _The First of the Three Spirits_                                    32
+III _The Second of the Three Spirits_                                   51
+ IV _The Last of the Spirits_                                           76
+  V _The End of it_                                                     93
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS CAROL
+
+_"He had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church."_    Frontispiece
+
+_"A Merry Christmas, Uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice._     14
+
+_To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment,
+    would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him._                 26
+
+_"You recollect the way?" inquired the spirit. "Remember it!" cried
+    Scrooge, with fervour; "I could walk it blindfold."_                36
+
+_"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's dear old
+    honest Ali Baba!"_                                                  38
+
+
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS CAROL
+
+In Prose
+
+BEING A GHOST STORY OF CHRISTMAS
+
+
+
+
+STAVE ONE
+
+MARLEY'S GHOST
+
+
+Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
+The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the
+undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name
+was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old
+Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
+
+Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there
+is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined,
+myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in
+the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my
+unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
+will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as
+dead as a door-nail.
+
+Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?
+Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge
+was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his
+sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even
+Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was
+an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and
+solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.
+
+The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started
+from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly
+understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to
+relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died
+before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his
+taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts,
+than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning
+out after dark in a breezy spot--say St. Paul's Church-yard, for
+instance--literally to astonish his son's weak mind.
+
+Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years
+afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was
+known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called
+Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It
+was all the same to him.
+
+Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a
+squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old
+sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out
+generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
+The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose,
+shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin
+lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime
+was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his
+own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the
+dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
+
+External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could
+warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than
+he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain
+less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The
+heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet could boast of the
+advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down"
+handsomely and Scrooge never did.
+
+Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My
+dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?" No beggars
+implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was
+o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to
+such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to
+know him; and, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into
+doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they
+said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"
+
+But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his
+way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep
+its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.
+
+Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year, on Christmas
+Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak,
+biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court
+outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts,
+and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The City
+clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already--it had
+not been light all day--and candles were flaring in the windows of the
+neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The
+fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense
+without, that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses
+opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down,
+obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by
+and was brewing on a large scale.
+
+The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open, that he might keep his
+eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank,
+was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire
+was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't
+replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so
+surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that
+it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his
+white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which
+effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.
+
+"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice. It was
+the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this
+was the first intimation he had of his approach.
+
+"Bah!" said Scrooge. "Humbug!"
+
+He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this
+nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and
+handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
+
+"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean
+that, I am sure?"
+
+"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry?
+What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."
+
+"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be
+dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough."
+
+Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said,
+"Bah!" again; and followed it up with "Humbug!"
+
+"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.
+
+[Illustration: _"A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a
+cheerful voice._]
+
+"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world
+of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's
+Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time
+for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for
+balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
+of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said
+Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas'
+on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a
+stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
+
+"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.
+
+"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way,
+and let me keep it in mine."
+
+"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you don't keep it."
+
+"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you!
+Much good it has ever done you!"
+
+"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I
+have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew; "Christmas among
+the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it
+has come round--apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and
+origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a good
+time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know
+of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one
+consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people
+below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and
+not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
+uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I
+believe that it _has_ done me good, and _will_ do me good; and I say,
+God bless it!"
+
+The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately
+sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the
+last frail spark for ever.
+
+"Let me hear another sound from _you_," said Scrooge, "and you'll keep
+your Christmas by losing your situation! You're quite a powerful
+speaker, sir," he added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder you don't go
+into Parliament."
+
+"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow."
+
+Scrooge said that he would see him----Yes, indeed he did. He went the
+whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that
+extremity first.
+
+"But why?" cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"
+
+"Why did you get married?" said Scrooge.
+
+"Because I fell in love."
+
+"Because you fell in love!" growled Scrooge, as if that were the only
+one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. "Good
+afternoon!"
+
+"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give
+it as a reason for not coming now?"
+
+"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.
+
+"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be
+friends?"
+
+"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.
+
+"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never
+had any quarrel to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial
+in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humour to the last.
+So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"
+
+"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.
+
+"And A Happy New Year!"
+
+"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.
+
+His nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He
+stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the
+clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned
+them cordially.
+
+"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge, who overheard him: "my
+clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking
+about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."
+
+This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people
+in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with
+their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their
+hands, and bowed to him.
+
+"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the gentlemen, referring
+to his list. "Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr.
+Marley?"
+
+"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years," Scrooge replied. "He died
+seven years ago, this very night."
+
+"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving
+partner," said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.
+
+It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous
+word "liberality" Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the
+credentials back.
+
+"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman,
+taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make
+some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at
+the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries;
+hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."
+
+"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.
+
+"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
+
+"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in
+operation?"
+
+"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were
+not."
+
+"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.
+
+"Both very busy, sir."
+
+"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had
+occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I am very
+glad to hear it."
+
+"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind
+or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are
+endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and
+means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all
+others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I
+put you down for?"
+
+"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.
+
+"You wish to be anonymous?"
+
+"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish,
+gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas,
+and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the
+establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough; and those who are
+badly off must go there."
+
+"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
+
+"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and
+decrease the surplus population. Besides--excuse me--I don't know that."
+
+"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.
+
+"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's enough for a man to
+understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's.
+Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"
+
+Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the
+gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion
+of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.
+
+Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with
+flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in
+carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church,
+whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a
+Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and
+quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards, as if its
+teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became
+intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers
+were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier,
+round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their
+hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug
+being left in solitude, its overflowings suddenly congealed, and turned
+to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops, where holly sprigs and
+berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy
+as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers' trades became a splendid joke:
+a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that
+such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord
+Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his
+fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household
+should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on
+the previous Monday for being drunk and blood-thirsty in the streets,
+stirred up to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and
+the baby sallied out to buy the beef.
+
+Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good
+St. Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such
+weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he
+would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose,
+gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs,
+stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol;
+but, at the first sound of
+
+    "God bless you, merry gentleman,
+    May nothing you dismay!"
+
+Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer
+fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog, and even more congenial
+frost.
+
+At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an
+ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the
+fact to the expectant clerk in the tank, who instantly snuffed his
+candle out, and put on his hat.
+
+"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said Scrooge.
+
+"If quite convenient, sir."
+
+"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not fair. If I was to
+stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill used, I'll be bound?"
+
+The clerk smiled faintly.
+
+"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think _me_ ill used when I pay a
+day's wages for no work."
+
+The clerk observed that it was only once a year.
+
+"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of
+December!" said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. "But I
+suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next
+morning."
+
+The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl.
+The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends
+of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no
+great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of
+boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas-eve, and then ran
+home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's
+buff.
+
+Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and
+having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening
+with his banker's book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had
+once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of
+rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little
+business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run
+there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other
+houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and
+dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being
+all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who
+knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and
+frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed
+as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the
+threshold.
+
+Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the
+knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact
+that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
+in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy
+about him as any man in the City of London, even including--which is a
+bold word--the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne
+in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley since his
+last mention of his seven-years'-dead partner that afternoon. And then
+let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge,
+having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its
+undergoing any intermediate process of change--not a knocker, but
+Marley's face.
+
+Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects
+in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in
+a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as
+Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly
+forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath of hot air;
+and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.
+That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to
+be in spite of the face, and beyond its control, rather than a part of
+its own expression.
+
+As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
+
+To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of
+a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would
+be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned
+it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.
+
+He _did_ pause, with a moment's irresolution, before he shut the door;
+and he _did_ look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to
+be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the
+hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws
+and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said, "Pooh, pooh!" and closed
+it with a bang.
+
+The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above,
+and every cask in the wine merchant's cellars below, appeared to have a
+separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be
+frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall,
+and up the stairs: slowly, too: trimming his candle as he went.
+
+You may talk vaguely about driving a coach and six up a good old flight
+of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say
+you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise,
+with the splinter-bar towards the wall, and the door towards the
+balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and
+room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a
+locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen
+gas-lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so
+you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip.
+
+Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and
+Scrooge liked it. But, before he shut his heavy door, he walked through
+his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of
+the face to desire to do that.
+
+Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they should be. Nobody under
+the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and
+basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his
+head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody
+in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
+against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two
+fish baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.
+
+Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double
+locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against
+surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers,
+and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.
+
+It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was
+obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract
+the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The
+fire-place was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and
+paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the
+Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters, Queens of
+Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like
+feather beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in
+butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that
+face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet's rod,
+and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at
+first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the
+disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of
+old Marley's head on every one.
+
+"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the room.
+
+After several turns he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the
+chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that
+hung in the room, and communicated, for some purpose now forgotten, with
+a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great
+astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that, as he
+looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the
+outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and
+so did every bell in the house.
+
+This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an
+hour. The bells ceased, as they had begun, together. They were succeeded
+by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a
+heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar. Scrooge then
+remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
+dragging chains.
+
+The cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the
+noise much louder on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then
+coming straight towards his door.
+
+"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."
+
+His colour changed, though, when, without a pause, it came on through
+the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its
+coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him!
+Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.
+
+The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat,
+tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his
+pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he
+drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like
+a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes,
+keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His
+body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking
+through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.
+
+Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had
+never believed it until now.
+
+No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through
+and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling
+influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the
+folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not
+observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his
+senses.
+
+"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want
+with me?"
+
+"Much!"--Marley's voice, no doubt about it.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"Ask me who I _was_."
+
+"Who _were_ you, then?" said Scrooge, raising his voice. "You're
+particular, for a shade." He was going to say "_to_ a shade," but
+substituted this, as more appropriate.
+
+"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."
+
+"Can you--can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.
+
+"I can."
+
+"Do it, then."
+
+Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so
+transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt
+that, in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the
+necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the Ghost sat down on the
+opposite side of the fire-place, as if he were quite used to it.
+
+"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.
+
+"I don't," said Scrooge.
+
+"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your own
+senses?"
+
+"I don't know," said Scrooge.
+
+"Why do you doubt your senses?"
+
+"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder
+of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef,
+a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.
+There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
+
+Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in
+his heart by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
+smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his
+terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
+
+To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment,
+would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something
+very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
+atmosphere of his own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was
+clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its
+hair, and skirts, and tassels were still agitated as by the hot vapour
+from an oven.
+
+"You see this toothpick?" said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge,
+for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a
+second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.
+
+"I do," replied the Ghost.
+
+"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.
+
+"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."
+
+"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow this, and be for the
+rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own
+creation. Humbug, I tell you; humbug!"
+
+At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such
+a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair,
+to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his
+horror when the phantom, taking off the bandage round his head, as if it
+were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its
+breast!
+
+Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
+
+"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"
+
+"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or
+not?"
+
+"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and
+why do they come to me?"
+
+[Illustration: _To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence,
+for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him._]
+
+"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit
+within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and
+wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do
+so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is
+me!--and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth,
+and turned to happiness!"
+
+Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its
+shadowy hands.
+
+"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
+
+"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link
+by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my
+own free-will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to _you_?"
+
+Scrooge trembled more and more.
+
+"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the
+strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this,
+seven Christmas-eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a
+ponderous chain!"
+
+Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding
+himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable, but he
+could see nothing.
+
+"Jacob!" he said imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley, tell me more! Speak
+comfort to me, Jacob!"
+
+"I have none to give," the Ghost replied. "It comes from other regions,
+Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of
+men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all
+permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere.
+My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house--mark me;--in life my
+spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole;
+and weary journeys lie before me!"
+
+It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his
+hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he
+did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.
+
+"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob," Scrooge observed in a
+business-like manner, though with humility and deference.
+
+"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.
+
+"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling all the time?"
+
+"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No rest, no peace. Incessant torture
+of remorse."
+
+"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.
+
+"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.
+
+"You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years,"
+said Scrooge.
+
+The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so
+hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have
+been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.
+
+"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know
+that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth
+must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is
+all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in
+its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too
+short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of
+regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused! Yet such
+was I! Oh, such was I!"
+
+"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge,
+who now began to apply this to himself.
+
+"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my
+business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy,
+forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my
+trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my
+business!"
+
+It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all
+its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
+
+"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said, "I suffer most.
+Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down,
+and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a
+poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have
+conducted _me_?"
+
+Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this
+rate, and began to quake exceedingly.
+
+"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly gone."
+
+"I will," said Scrooge. "But don't be hard upon me! Don't be flowery,
+Jacob! Pray!"
+
+"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may
+not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day."
+
+It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the
+perspiration from his brow.
+
+"That is no light part of my penance," pursued the Ghost. "I am here
+to-night to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my
+fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."
+
+"You were always a good friend to me," said Scrooge. "Thankee!"
+
+"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."
+
+Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.
+
+"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?" he demanded in a
+faltering voice.
+
+"It is."
+
+"I--I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.
+
+"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot hope to shun the
+path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow when the bell tolls One."
+
+"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?" hinted
+Scrooge.
+
+"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third, upon
+the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate.
+Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember
+what has passed between us!"
+
+When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the
+table, and bound it round its head as before. Scrooge knew this by the
+smart sound its teeth made when the jaws were brought together by the
+bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural
+visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over
+and about its arm.
+
+The apparition walked backward from him; and, at every step it took, the
+window raised itself a little, so that, when the spectre reached it, it
+was wide open. It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they
+were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its hand,
+warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.
+
+Not so much in obedience as in surprise and fear; for, on the raising of
+the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent
+sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and
+self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in
+the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.
+
+Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked
+out.
+
+The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in
+restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains
+like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were
+linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to
+Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in
+a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who
+cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an
+infant, whom it saw below upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was,
+clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and
+had lost the power for ever.
+
+Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he
+could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the
+night became as it had been when he walked home.
+
+Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had
+entered. It was double locked, as he had locked it with his own hands,
+and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say "Humbug!" but stopped at
+the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the
+fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull
+conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of
+repose, went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon
+the instant.
+
+
+
+
+STAVE TWO
+
+THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS
+
+
+When Scrooge awoke it was so dark, that, looking out of bed, he could
+scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his
+chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret
+eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters.
+So he listened for the hour.
+
+To his great astonishment, the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and
+from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve!
+It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must
+have got into the works. Twelve!
+
+He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most preposterous
+clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve, and stopped.
+
+"Why, it isn't possible," said Scrooge, "that I can have slept through a
+whole day and far into another night. It isn't possible that anything
+has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon!"
+
+The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his
+way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve
+of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very
+little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and
+extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and
+fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if
+night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world.
+This was a great relief, because "Three days after sight of this First
+of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order," and so forth,
+would have become a mere United States security if there were no days to
+count by.
+
+Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over
+and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more
+perplexed he was; and, the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he
+thought.
+
+Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within
+himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew
+back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and
+presented the same problem to be worked all through, "Was it a dream or
+not?"
+
+Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more,
+when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a
+visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the
+hour was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep than
+go to Heaven, this was, perhaps, the wisest resolution in his power.
+
+The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he must
+have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. At length it
+broke upon his listening ear.
+
+"Ding, dong!"
+
+"A quarter past," said Scrooge, counting.
+
+"Ding, dong!"
+
+"Half past," said Scrooge.
+
+"Ding, dong!"
+
+"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.
+
+"Ding, dong!"
+
+"The hour itself," said Scrooge triumphantly, "and nothing else!"
+
+He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep,
+dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. Light flashed up in the room upon the
+instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.
+
+The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the
+curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which
+his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and
+Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face
+to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am
+now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
+
+It was a strange figure--like a child: yet not so like a child as like
+an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the
+appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a
+child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its
+back, was white, as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
+it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and
+muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength.
+Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper
+members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist
+was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a
+branch of fresh green holly in its hand: and, in singular contradiction
+of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But
+the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there
+sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and
+which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
+great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.
+
+Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness,
+was _not_ its strangest quality. For, as its belt sparkled and
+glittered, now in one part and now in another, and what was light one
+instant at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its
+distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with
+twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
+body: of which dissolving parts no outline would be visible in the dense
+gloom wherein they melted away. And, in the very wonder of this, it
+would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.
+
+"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?" asked
+Scrooge.
+
+"I am!"
+
+The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if, instead of being
+so close beside him, it were at a distance.
+
+"Who and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.
+
+"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."
+
+"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge; observant of its dwarfish stature.
+
+"No. Your past."
+
+Perhaps Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have
+asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and
+begged him to be covered.
+
+"What!" exclaimed the Ghost, "would you so soon put out, with worldly
+hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those
+whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years
+to wear it low upon my brow?"
+
+Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or any knowledge
+of having wilfully "bonneted" the Spirit at any period of his life. He
+then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.
+
+"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.
+
+Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not help thinking that
+a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end. The
+Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said immediately:
+
+"Your reclamation, then. Take heed!"
+
+It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the
+arm.
+
+"Rise! and walk with me!"
+
+It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the weather and the
+hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and
+the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly
+in his slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold
+upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand, was
+not to be resisted. He rose: but, finding that the Spirit made towards
+the window, clasped its robe in supplication.
+
+"I am a mortal," Scrooge remonstrated, "and liable to fall."
+
+"Bear but a touch of my hand _there_," said the Spirit, laying it upon
+his heart, "and you shall be upheld in more than this!"
+
+As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon
+an open country road, with fields on either hand. The city had entirely
+vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen. The darkness and the mist
+had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with the
+snow upon the ground.
+
+"Good Heaven!" said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked
+about him. "I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!"
+
+The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been
+light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man's sense
+of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air,
+each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and
+cares long, long forgotten!
+
+"Your lip is trembling," said the Ghost. "And what is that upon your
+cheek?"
+
+Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a
+pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.
+
+"You recollect the way?" inquired the Spirit.
+
+"Remember it!" cried Scrooge with fervour; "I could walk it blindfold."
+
+"Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!" observed the Ghost.
+"Let us go on."
+
+[Illustration: _"You recollect the way?" inquired the spirit. "Remember
+it!" cried Scrooge with fervour; "I could walk it blindfold."_]
+
+They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every gate, and post,
+and tree, until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its
+bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen
+trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other
+boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were
+in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were
+so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.
+
+"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said the Ghost.
+"They have no consciousness of us."
+
+The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named
+them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them? Why
+did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why
+was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
+Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and by-ways for their several
+homes? What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas!
+What good had it ever done to him?
+
+"The school is not quite deserted," said the Ghost. "A solitary child,
+neglected by his friends, is left there still."
+
+Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.
+
+They left the high-road by a well-remembered lane, and soon approached a
+mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather-cock surmounted cupola
+on the roof and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of
+broken fortunes: for the spacious offices were little used, their walls
+were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed.
+Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables; and the coach-houses and
+sheds were overrun with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient
+state within; for, entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the
+open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and
+vast. There was an earthly savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the
+place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by
+candle-light, and not too much to eat.
+
+They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the
+back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare,
+melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and
+desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and
+Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as
+he had used to be.
+
+Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice
+behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the
+dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent
+poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty storehouse door, no, not a
+clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with softening
+influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.
+
+The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self,
+intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man in foreign garments: wonderfully
+real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe
+stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.
+
+"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's dear old
+honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas-time when yonder
+solitary child was left here all alone, he _did_ come, for the first
+time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine," said Scrooge, "and his
+wild brother, Orson; there they go! And what's his name, who was put
+down in his drawers, asleep, at the gate of Damascus; don't you see him?
+And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii: there he is upon
+his head! Serve him right! I'm glad of it. What business had _he_ to be
+married to the Princess?"
+
+To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such
+subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and
+to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to
+his business friends in the City, indeed.
+
+[Illustration: _"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy.
+"It's dear old honest Ali Baba."_]
+
+"There's the Parrot!" cried Scrooge. "Green body and yellow tail, with
+a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is!
+Poor Robin Crusoe he called him, when he came home again after sailing
+round the island. 'Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin
+Crusoe?' The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't. It was the
+Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little
+creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!"
+
+Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character,
+he said, in pity for his former self, "Poor boy!" and cried again.
+
+"I wish," Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking
+about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: "but it's too late now."
+
+"What is the matter?" asked the Spirit.
+
+"Nothing," said Scrooge. "Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas
+Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something:
+that's all."
+
+The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying, as it did so,
+"Let us see another Christmas!"
+
+Scrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a
+little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked;
+fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were
+shown instead; but how all this was brought about Scrooge knew no more
+than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct: that everything had
+happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had
+gone home for the jolly holidays.
+
+He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge
+looked at the Ghost, and, with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced
+anxiously towards the door.
+
+It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting
+in, and, putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him,
+addressed him as her "dear, dear brother."
+
+"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the child, clapping
+her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. "To bring you home, home,
+home!"
+
+"Home, little Fan?" returned the boy.
+
+"Yes!" said the child, brimful of glee. "Home for good and all. Home for
+ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home's
+like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to
+bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home;
+and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And
+you're to be a man!" said the child, opening her eyes; "and are never to
+come back here; but first we're to be together all the Christmas long,
+and have the merriest time in all the world."
+
+"You are quite a woman, little Fan!" exclaimed the boy.
+
+She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his head; but,
+being too little, laughed again, and stood on tiptoe to embrace him.
+Then she began to drag him, in her childish eagerness, towards the door;
+and he, nothing loath to go, accompanied her.
+
+A terrible voice in the hall cried, "Bring down Master Scrooge's box,
+there!" and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on
+Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a
+dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him
+and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best parlour
+that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and
+terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced
+a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake,
+and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at
+the same time sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of
+"something" to the postboy who answered that he thanked the gentleman,
+but, if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not.
+Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the
+chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly;
+and, getting into it, drove gaily down the garden sweep; the quick
+wheels dashing the hoar frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the
+evergreens like spray.
+
+"Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered," said
+the Ghost. "But she had a large heart!"
+
+"So she had," cried Scrooge. "You're right. I will not gainsay it,
+Spirit. God forbid!"
+
+"She died a woman," said the Ghost, "and had, as I think, children."
+
+"One child," Scrooge returned.
+
+"True," said the Ghost. "Your nephew!"
+
+Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly, "Yes."
+
+Although they had but that moment left the school behind them, they were
+now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed
+and repassed; where shadowy carts and coaches battled for the way, and
+all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough,
+by the dressing of the shops, that here, too, it was Christmas-time
+again; but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.
+
+The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he
+knew it.
+
+"Know it!" said Scrooge. "Was I apprenticed here?"
+
+They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting
+behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches taller, he must
+have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great
+excitement:
+
+"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart, it's Fezziwig alive again!"
+
+Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which
+pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands; adjusted his
+capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his
+organ of benevolence; and called out, in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat,
+jovial voice:
+
+"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!"
+
+Scrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in,
+accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.
+
+"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!" said Scrooge to the Ghost. "Bless me, yes.
+There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear,
+dear!"
+
+"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig. "No more work to-night. Christmas-eve,
+Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the shutters up," cried old
+Fezziwig with a sharp clap of his hands, "before a man can say Jack
+Robinson!"
+
+You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it! They charged into
+the street with the shutters--one, two, three--had 'em up in their
+places--four, five, six--barred 'em and pinned 'em--seven, eight,
+nine--and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like
+race-horses.
+
+"Hilli-ho!" cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk with
+wonderful agility. "Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room
+here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!"
+
+Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared away, or
+couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in
+a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from
+public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps
+were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as
+snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room as you would desire to
+see upon a winter's night.
+
+In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and
+made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches. In came Mrs.
+Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs,
+beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they
+broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In
+came the housemaid, with her cousin the baker. In came the cook, with
+her brother's particular friend the milkman. In came the boy from over
+the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master;
+trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was
+proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came,
+one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some
+awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, any how and
+every how. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round
+and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and
+round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always
+turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again as soon
+as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help
+them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
+hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged
+his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose.
+But, scorning rest upon his reappearance, he instantly began again,
+though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been
+carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man
+resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.
+
+There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and
+there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold
+Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were
+mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came
+after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The
+sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told
+it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out
+to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of
+work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people
+who were not to be trifled with; people who _would_ dance, and had no
+notion of walking.
+
+But if they had been twice as many--ah! four times--old Fezziwig would
+have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to _her_, she
+was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not
+high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared
+to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance
+like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would
+become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone
+all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner,
+bow and curtsy, cork-screw, thread-the-needle, and back again to your
+place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his
+legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.
+
+When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr. and Mrs.
+Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side the door, and, shaking
+hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him
+or her a Merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but the two
+'prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died
+away, and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a counter
+in the back-shop.
+
+During the whole of this time Scrooge had acted like a man out of his
+wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. He
+corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and
+underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the bright
+faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he
+remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon
+him, while the light upon its head burnt very clear.
+
+"A small matter," said the Ghost, "to make these silly folks so full of
+gratitude."
+
+"Small!" echoed Scrooge.
+
+The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were
+pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig; and, when he had done
+so, said:
+
+"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money:
+three or four, perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?"
+
+"It isn't that," said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking
+unconsciously like his former, not his latter self. "It isn't that,
+Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our
+service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power
+lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it
+is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives
+is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."
+
+He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked the Ghost.
+
+"Nothing particular," said Scrooge.
+
+"Something, I think?" the Ghost insisted.
+
+"No," said Scrooge, "no. I should like to be able to say a word or two
+to my clerk just now. That's all."
+
+His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish;
+and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.
+
+"My time grows short," observed the Spirit. "Quick!"
+
+This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but
+it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was
+older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and
+rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care
+and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye,
+which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of
+the growing tree would fall.
+
+He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning
+dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that
+shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
+
+"It matters little," she said softly. "To you, very little. Another idol
+has displaced me; and, if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come
+as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve."
+
+"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.
+
+"A golden one."
+
+"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is
+nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it
+professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!"
+
+"You fear the world too much," she answered gently. "All your other
+hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid
+reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until
+the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"
+
+"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so much wiser, what
+then? I am not changed towards you."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor, and
+content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly
+fortune by our patient industry. You _are_ changed. When it was made you
+were another man."
+
+"I was a boy," he said impatiently.
+
+"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are," she
+returned. "I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart
+is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I
+have thought of this I will not say. It is enough that I _have_ thought
+of it, and can release you."
+
+"Have I ever sought release?"
+
+"In words. No. Never."
+
+"In what, then?"
+
+"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of
+life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of
+any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,"
+said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him, "tell me,
+would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!"
+
+He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition in spite of
+himself. But he said, with a struggle, "You think not."
+
+"I would gladly think otherwise if I could," she answered. "Heaven
+knows! When _I_ have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and
+irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow,
+yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless
+girl--you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by
+Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your
+one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and
+regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart,
+for the love of him you once were."
+
+He was about to speak; but, with her head turned from him, she resumed.
+
+"You may--the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will--have
+pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the
+recollection of it gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it
+happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have
+chosen!"
+
+She left him, and they parted.
+
+"Spirit!" said Scrooge, "show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you
+delight to torture me?"
+
+"One shadow more!" exclaimed the Ghost.
+
+"No more!" cried Scrooge. "No more! I don't wish to see it. Show me no
+more!"
+
+But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him
+to observe what happened next.
+
+They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or
+handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful
+young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same,
+until he saw _her_, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter.
+The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more
+children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count;
+and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty
+children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting
+itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but
+no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed
+heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to
+mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most
+ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of them! Though I
+never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn't for the wealth of all
+the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and, for the
+precious little shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul!
+to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold
+young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should have expected my arm to
+have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And
+yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
+questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the
+lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose
+waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in
+short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest
+licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
+
+But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately
+ensued that she, with laughing face and plundered dress, was borne
+towards it in the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time
+to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with
+Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and
+the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him,
+with chairs for ladders, to dive into his pockets, despoil him of
+brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round the
+neck, pummel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The
+shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package
+was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in
+the act of putting a doll's frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than
+suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden
+platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and
+gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough
+that by degrees, the children and their emotions got out of the parlour,
+and, by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house, where they went
+to bed, and so subsided.
+
+And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of
+the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her
+and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such
+another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have
+called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his
+life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
+
+"Belle," said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, "I saw an
+old friend of yours this afternoon."
+
+"Who was it?"
+
+"Guess!"
+
+"How can I? Tut, don't I know?" she added in the same breath, laughing
+as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."
+
+"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut
+up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His
+partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone.
+Quite alone in the world, I do believe."
+
+"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me from this place."
+
+"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been," said the
+Ghost. "That they are what they are, do not blame me!"
+
+"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed. "I cannot bear it!"
+
+He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face
+in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it
+had shown him, wrestled with it.
+
+"Leave me! Take me back! Haunt me no longer!"
+
+In the struggle--if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost,
+with no visible resistance on its own part, was undisturbed by any
+effort of its adversary--Scrooge observed that its light was burning
+high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him,
+he seized the extinguisher cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down
+upon its head.
+
+The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its
+whole form; but, though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he
+could not hide the light, which streamed from under it in an unbroken
+flood upon the ground.
+
+He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible
+drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a
+parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel
+to bed before he sank into a heavy sleep.
+
+
+
+
+STAVE THREE
+
+THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS
+
+
+Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in
+bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told
+that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was
+restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial
+purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to
+him through Jacob Marley's intervention. But, finding that he turned
+uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this
+new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own
+hands, and, lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the
+bed. For he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its
+appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise and made nervous.
+
+Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being
+acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of
+day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing
+that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter;
+between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide
+and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite
+as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was
+ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing
+between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
+
+Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means
+prepared for nothing; and consequently, when the bell struck One, and
+no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five
+minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came.
+All this time he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze
+of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the
+hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen
+ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at;
+and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an
+interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the
+consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think--as you
+or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the
+predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would
+unquestionably have done it too--at last, I say, he began to think that
+the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining
+room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea
+taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly, and shuffled in
+his slippers to the door.
+
+The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by
+his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
+
+It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone
+a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with
+living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which
+bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe,
+and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been
+scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney as
+that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or
+Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the
+floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry,
+brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages,
+mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,
+cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense
+twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim
+with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch there sat a
+jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not
+unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on
+Scrooge as he came peeping round the door.
+
+"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in! and know me better, man!"
+
+Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit. He was
+not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and, though the Spirit's eyes were
+clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
+
+"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me!"
+
+Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple deep green robe,
+or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the
+figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be
+warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the
+ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no
+other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining
+icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial
+face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its
+unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was
+an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was
+eaten up with rust.
+
+"You have never seen the like of me before!" exclaimed the Spirit.
+
+"Never," Scrooge made answer to it.
+
+"Have never walked forth with the younger members of my family; meaning
+(for I am very young) my elder brothers born in these later years?"
+pursued the Phantom.
+
+"I don't think I have," said Scrooge. "I am afraid I have not. Have you
+had many brothers, Spirit?"
+
+"More than eighteen hundred," said the Ghost.
+
+"A tremendous family to provide for," muttered Scrooge.
+
+The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.
+
+"Spirit," said Scrooge submissively, "conduct me where you will. I went
+forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working
+now. To-night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it."
+
+"Touch my robe!"
+
+Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.
+
+Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry,
+brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch,
+all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the
+hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning,
+where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk
+and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement
+in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence
+it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the
+road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.
+
+The house-fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker,
+contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with
+the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed
+up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows
+that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great
+streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the
+thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest
+streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen,
+whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all
+the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were
+blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very
+cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
+cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer
+sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.
+
+For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial
+and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now
+and then exchanging a facetious snowball--better-natured missile far
+than many a wordy jest--laughing heartily if it went right, and not less
+heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open,
+and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great,
+round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of
+jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the
+street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced,
+broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth
+like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at
+the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up
+mistletoe. There were pears and apples clustered high in blooming
+pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers'
+benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might
+water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and
+brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and
+pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were
+Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the
+oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy
+persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper
+bags, and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth
+among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
+stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going
+on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in
+slow and passionless excitement.
+
+The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters
+down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone
+that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that
+the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters
+were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
+scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the
+raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the
+sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious,
+the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the
+coldest lookers-on feel faint, and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that
+the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
+modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything
+was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all
+so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they
+tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets
+wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back
+to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best
+humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and
+fresh, that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons
+behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection,
+and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.
+
+But soon the steeples called good people all to church and chapel, and
+away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and
+with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged, from scores
+of by-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people,
+carrying their dinners to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor
+revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with
+Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and, taking off the covers as
+their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch.
+And it was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice, when there
+were angry words between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each
+other, he shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their
+good-humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to
+quarrel upon Christmas-day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!
+
+In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was
+a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners, and the progress of their
+cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker's oven; where the
+pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
+
+"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?"
+asked Scrooge.
+
+"There is. My own."
+
+"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?" asked Scrooge.
+
+"To any kindly given. To a poor one most."
+
+"Why to a poor one most?" asked Scrooge.
+
+"Because it needs it most."
+
+"Spirit!" said Scrooge after a moment's thought. "I wonder you, of all
+the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these
+people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."
+
+"I!" cried the Spirit.
+
+"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day,
+often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all," said
+Scrooge; "wouldn't you?"
+
+"I!" cried the Spirit.
+
+"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day," said Scrooge. "And
+it comes to the same thing."
+
+"_I_ seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.
+
+"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in
+that of your family," said Scrooge.
+
+"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay
+claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will,
+hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange
+to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember
+that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."
+
+Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on, invisible, as they
+had been before, into the suburbs of the town. It was a remarkable
+quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that,
+notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any
+place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
+gracefully and like a supernatural creature as it was possible he could
+have done in any lofty hall.
+
+And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in showing off this
+power of his, or else it was his own kind, generous, hearty nature, and
+his sympathy with all poor men, that led him straight to Scrooge's
+clerk's; for there he went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his
+robe; and, on the threshold of the door, the Spirit smiled, and stopped
+to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinklings of his torch.
+Think of that! Bob had but fifteen "Bob" a week himself; he pocketed on
+Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of
+Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!
+
+Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out but poorly in a
+twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap, and make a
+goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda
+Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master
+Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and,
+getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private
+property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the day) into his
+mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to
+show his linen in the fashionable Parks. And now two smaller Cratchits,
+boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker's they
+had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and, basking in
+luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced about
+the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not
+proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until the
+slow potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan lid to be let
+out and peeled.
+
+"What has ever got your precious father, then?" said Mrs. Cratchit. "And
+your brother, Tiny Tim? And Martha warn't as late last Christmas-day by
+half an hour!"
+
+"Here's Martha, mother!" said a girl, appearing as she spoke.
+
+"Here's Martha, mother!" cried the two young Cratchits. "Hurrah! There's
+_such_ a goose, Martha!"
+
+"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!" said Mrs.
+Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl and bonnet
+for her with officious zeal.
+
+"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night," replied the girl, "and
+had to clear away this morning, mother!"
+
+"Well! never mind so long as you are come," said Mrs. Cratchit. "Sit ye
+down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm, Lord bless ye!"
+
+"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young Cratchits, who were
+everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha, hide!"
+
+So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father, with at least
+three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before
+him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look
+seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a
+little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!
+
+"Why, where's our Martha?" cried Bob Cratchit, looking round.
+
+"Not coming," said Mrs. Cratchit.
+
+"Not coming!" said Bob with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for
+he had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church, and had come home
+rampant. "Not coming upon Christmas-day!"
+
+Martha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only in joke; so
+she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and ran into his
+arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off
+into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the
+copper.
+
+"And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Cratchit when she had
+rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his
+heart's content.
+
+"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow, he gets thoughtful,
+sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever
+heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the
+church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to
+remember upon Christmas-day who made lame beggars walk and blind men
+see."
+
+Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when
+he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.
+
+His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny
+Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister
+to his stool beside the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs--as
+if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby--compounded
+some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and
+round, and put it on the hob to simmer, Master Peter and the two
+ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon
+returned in high procession.
+
+Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of
+all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of
+course--and, in truth, it was something very like it in that house. Mrs.
+Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing
+hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss
+Belinda sweetened up the apple sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob
+took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young
+Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and,
+mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest
+they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At
+last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a
+breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking slowly all along the
+carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did,
+and when the long-expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of
+delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two
+young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and
+feebly cried Hurrah!
+
+There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was
+such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness,
+were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and
+mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family;
+indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
+atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every
+one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits, in particular, were
+steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being
+changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone--too nervous
+to bear witnesses--to take the pudding up, and bring it in.
+
+Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning
+out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard and
+stolen it, while they were merry with the goose--a supposition at which
+the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were
+supposed.
+
+Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell
+like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and
+a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to
+that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit
+entered--flushed, but smiling proudly--with the pudding, like a speckled
+cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of
+ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
+
+Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he
+regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since
+their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that, now the weight was off her
+mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour.
+Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it
+was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat
+heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a
+thing.
+
+At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth
+swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and
+considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a
+shovel full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew
+round the hearth in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a
+one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass. Two
+tumblers and a custard cup without a handle.
+
+These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden
+goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while
+the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob
+proposed:
+
+"A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!"
+
+Which all the family re-echoed.
+
+"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
+
+He sat very close to his father's side, upon his little stool. Bob held
+his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to
+keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.
+
+"Spirit," said Scrooge with an interest he had never felt before, "tell
+me if Tiny Tim will live."
+
+"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner,
+and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows
+remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."
+
+"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared."
+
+"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my
+race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If he be like
+to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
+
+Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and
+was overcome with penitence and grief.
+
+"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear
+that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and
+Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It
+may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit
+to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the
+Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry
+brothers in the dust!"
+
+Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and, trembling, cast his eyes
+upon the ground. But he raised them speedily on hearing his own name.
+
+"Mr. Scrooge!" said Bob. "I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the
+Feast!"
+
+"The Founder of the Feast, indeed!" cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. "I
+wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and
+I hope he'd have a good appetite for it."
+
+"My dear," said Bob, "the children! Christmas-day."
+
+"It should be Christmas-day, I am sure," said she, "on which one drinks
+the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr.
+Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do,
+poor fellow!"
+
+"My dear!" was Bob's mild answer. "Christmas-day."
+
+"I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's," said Mrs. Cratchit,
+"not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
+He'll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!"
+
+The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of their
+proceedings which had no heartiness in it. Tiny Tim drank it last of
+all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge was the Ogre of the
+family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which
+was not dispelled for full five minutes.
+
+After it had passed away they were ten times merrier than before, from
+the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done with. Bob Cratchit
+told them how he had a situation in his eye for Master Peter, which
+would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The two
+young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man
+of business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from
+between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular
+investments he should favour when he came into the receipt of that
+bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a milliner's,
+then told them what kind of work she had to do, and how many hours she
+worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for
+a good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at home. Also how
+she had seen a countess and a lord some days before, and how the lord
+"was much about as tall as Peter"; at which Peter pulled up his collars
+so high, that you couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All
+this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by-and-by
+they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny
+Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.
+
+There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family;
+they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof;
+their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely
+did, the inside of a pawn-broker's. But they were happy, grateful,
+pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they
+faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit's
+torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny
+Tim, until the last.
+
+By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as
+Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the
+roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms was
+wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a
+cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire,
+and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.
+There, all the children of the house were running out into the snow to
+meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the
+first to greet them. Here, again, were shadows on the window blinds of
+guests assembling; and there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and
+fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near
+neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw them
+enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!
+
+But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to
+friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to
+give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting
+company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how
+the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and opened its
+capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with a generous hand, its
+bright and harmless mirth on everything within its reach! The very
+lamp-lighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of
+light, and who was dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out
+loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamp-lighter that
+he had any company but Christmas.
+
+And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a
+bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast
+about, as though it were the burial-place or giants; and water spread
+itself wheresoever it listed; or would have done so, but for the frost
+that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse,
+rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
+red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye,
+and, frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of
+darkest night.
+
+"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.
+
+"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,"
+returned the Spirit. "But they know me. See!"
+
+A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced
+towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a
+cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and
+woman, with their children and their children's children, and another
+generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
+The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind
+upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song; it had been a
+very old song when he was a boy; and from time to time they all joined
+in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got
+quite blithe and loud; and, so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank
+again.
+
+The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and,
+passing on above the moor, sped whither? Not to sea? To sea. To
+Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful
+range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the
+thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the
+dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.
+
+Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore,
+on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there
+stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base,
+and storm-birds--born of the wind, one might suppose, as seaweed of the
+water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.
+
+But, even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire that
+through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of
+brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough
+table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their
+can of grog; and one of them, the elder too, with his face all damaged
+and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might
+be, struck up a sturdy song that was like a gale in itself.
+
+Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea--on, on--until,
+being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a
+ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the
+bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their
+several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
+had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of
+some bygone Christmas-day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And
+every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder
+word for one another on that day than on any day in the year; and had
+shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he
+cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember
+him.
+
+It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of
+the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the
+lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as
+profound as death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus
+engaged, to hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to
+Scrooge to recognise it as his own nephew's, and to find himself in a
+bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling by his
+side, and looking at that same nephew with approving affability!
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blessed
+in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can say is, I should like to
+know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.
+
+It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that, while there
+is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so
+irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour. When Scrooge's
+nephew laughed in this way, holding his sides, rolling his head, and
+twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions, Scrooge's
+niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled
+friends, being not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.
+
+"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"
+
+"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!" cried Scrooge's
+nephew. "He believed it, too!"
+
+"More shame for him, Fred!" said Scrooge's niece indignantly. Bless
+those women! they never do anything by halves. They are always in
+earnest.
+
+She was very pretty; exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
+surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made
+to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about
+her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed; and the
+sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head.
+Altogether she was what you would have called provoking, you know; but
+satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly satisfactory!
+
+"He's a comical old fellow," said Scrooge's nephew, "that's the truth;
+and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their
+own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him."
+
+"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred," hinted Scrooge's niece. "At least, you
+always tell _me_ so."
+
+"What of that, my dear?" said Scrooge's nephew. "His wealth is of no use
+to him. He don't do any good with it. He don't make himself comfortable
+with it. He hasn't the satisfaction of thinking--ha, ha, ha!--that he is
+ever going to benefit Us with it."
+
+"I have no patience with him," observed Scrooge's niece. Scrooge's
+niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed the same opinion.
+
+"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I am sorry for him; I couldn't be
+angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself always.
+Here he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine
+with us. What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a dinner."
+
+"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner," interrupted Scrooge's
+niece. Everybody else said the same, and they must be allowed to have
+been competent judges, because they had just had dinner; and, with the
+dessert upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by lamp-light.
+
+"Well! I am very glad to hear it," said Scrooge's nephew, "because I
+haven't any great faith in these young housekeepers. What do _you_ say,
+Topper?"
+
+Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's sisters,
+for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast, who had no right
+to express an opinion on the subject. Whereat Scrooge's niece's
+sister--the plump one with the lace tucker, not the one with the
+roses--blushed.
+
+"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands. "He never
+finishes what he begins to say! He is such a ridiculous fellow!"
+
+Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and, as it was impossible to
+keep the infection off, though the plump sister tried hard to do it with
+aromatic vinegar, his example was unanimously followed.
+
+"I was only going to say," said Scrooge's nephew, "that the consequence
+of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I
+think, that he loses some pleasant moments, which could do him no harm.
+I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own
+thoughts, either in his mouldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean
+to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for
+I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can't help
+thinking better of it--I defy him--if he finds me going there in good
+temper, year after year, and saying, 'Uncle Scrooge, how are you?' If it
+only puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, _that's_
+something; and I think I shook him yesterday."
+
+It was their turn to laugh, now, at the notion of his shaking Scrooge.
+But, being thoroughly good-natured, and not much caring what they
+laughed at, so that they laughed at any rate, he encouraged them in
+their merriment, and passed the bottle, joyously.
+
+After tea they had some music. For they were a musical family, and knew
+what they were about when they sung a Glee or Catch, I can assure you:
+especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a good one, and
+never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face over
+it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and played, among other
+tunes, a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle
+it in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched
+Scrooge from the boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost
+of Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the things
+that Ghost had shown him came upon his mind; he softened more and more;
+and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he
+might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with
+his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob
+Marley.
+
+But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After awhile they
+played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes, and never
+better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.
+Stop! There was first a game at blindman's buff. Of course there was.
+And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes
+in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and
+Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The
+way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker was an outrage on
+the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling
+over the chairs, bumping up against the piano, smothering himself
+amongst the curtains, wherever she went, there went he! He always knew
+where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had
+fallen up against him (as some of them did) on purpose, he would have
+made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an
+affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in
+the direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn't
+fair; and it really was not. But when, at last, he caught her; when, in
+spite of all her silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him,
+he got her into a corner whence there was no escape, then his conduct
+was the most execrable. For his pretending not to know her; his
+pretending that it was necessary to touch her head-dress, and further to
+assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain ring upon her
+finger, and a certain chain about her neck, was vile, monstrous! No
+doubt she told him her opinion of it when, another blind man being in
+office, they were so very confidential together behind the curtains.
+
+Scrooge's niece was not one of the blindman's buff party, but was made
+comfortable with a large chair and a footstool, in a snug corner where
+the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her. But she joined in the
+forfeits, and loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the
+alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was very
+great, and, to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat her sisters
+hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as Topper could have told you.
+There might have been twenty people there, young and old, but they all
+played, and so did Scrooge; for, wholly forgetting, in the interest he
+had in what was going on, that his voice made no sound in their ears, he
+sometimes came out with his guess quite loud, and very often guessed
+right, too, for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to
+cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in his
+head to be.
+
+The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood, and looked upon
+him with such favour, that he begged like a boy to be allowed to stay
+until the guests departed. But this the Spirit said could not be done.
+
+"Here is a new game," said Scrooge. "One half-hour, Spirit, only one!"
+
+It was a game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew had to think of
+something, and the rest must find out what; he only answering to their
+questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of questioning to
+which he was exposed elicited from him that he was thinking of an
+animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
+animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and
+lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn't made a show
+of, and wasn't led by anybody, and didn't live in a menagerie, and was
+never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a
+bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every
+fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar
+of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to
+get up off the sofa, and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a
+similar state, cried out:
+
+"I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!"
+
+"What is it?" cried Fred.
+
+"It's your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"
+
+Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal sentiment, though
+some objected that the reply to "Is it a bear?" ought to have been
+"Yes": inasmuch as an answer in the negative was sufficient to have
+diverted their thoughts from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had
+any tendency that way.
+
+"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure," said Fred, "and it
+would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass of mulled
+wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"
+
+"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they cried.
+
+"A merry Christmas and a happy New Year to the old man, whatever he is!"
+said Scrooge's nephew. "He wouldn't take it from me, but may he have it
+nevertheless. Uncle Scrooge!"
+
+Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light of heart, that
+he would have pledged the unconscious company in return, and thanked
+them in an inaudible speech, if the Ghost had given him time. But the
+whole scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
+nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.
+
+Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but
+always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick-beds, and they
+were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by
+struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty,
+and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and gaol, in misery's every
+refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast
+the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught
+Scrooge his precepts.
+
+It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts
+of this, because the Christmas holidays appeared to be condensed into
+the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that, while
+Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older,
+clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it,
+until they left a children's Twelfth-Night party, when, looking at the
+Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair
+was grey.
+
+"Are spirits' lives so short?" asked Scrooge.
+
+"My life upon this globe is very brief," replied the Ghost. "It ends
+to-night."
+
+"To-night!" cried Scrooge.
+
+"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near."
+
+The chimes were ringing the three-quarters past eleven at that moment.
+
+"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking
+intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not
+belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a
+claw?"
+
+"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's
+sorrowful reply. "Look here."
+
+From the foldings of its robe it brought two children; wretched, abject,
+frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung
+upon the outside of its garment.
+
+"Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
+
+They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but
+prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have
+filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a
+stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted
+them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
+enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no
+degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the
+mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
+dread.
+
+Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he
+tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves,
+rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
+
+"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
+
+"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they
+cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
+girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of
+all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
+unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out
+its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for
+your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!"
+
+"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
+
+"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last
+time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
+
+The bell struck Twelve.
+
+Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last
+stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob
+Marley, and, lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and
+hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.
+
+
+
+
+STAVE FOUR
+
+THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS
+
+
+The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near him,
+Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this
+Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
+
+It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its
+face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched
+hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure
+from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was
+surrounded.
+
+He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that
+its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no more,
+for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
+
+"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?" said
+Scrooge.
+
+The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.
+
+"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened,
+but will happen in the time before us," Scrooge pursued. "Is that so,
+Spirit?"
+
+The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its
+folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer
+he received.
+
+Although well used to ghostly company by this time, Scrooge feared the
+silent shape so much that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found
+that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit
+paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to
+recover.
+
+But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague
+uncertain horror to know that, behind the dusky shroud, there were
+ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his
+own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great
+heap of black.
+
+"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more than any spectre I
+have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope
+to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you
+company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?"
+
+It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
+
+"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is
+precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!"
+
+The phantom moved away as it had come towards him. Scrooge followed in
+the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him
+along.
+
+They scarcely seemed to enter the City; for the City rather seemed to
+spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they
+were in the heart of it; on 'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried
+up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
+groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their
+great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
+
+The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing
+that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their
+talk.
+
+"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I don't know much
+about it either way. I only know he's dead."
+
+"When did he die?" inquired another.
+
+"Last night, I believe."
+
+"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third, taking a vast
+quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box. "I thought he'd never
+die."
+
+"God knows," said the first with a yawn.
+
+"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a
+pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills
+of a turkey-cock.
+
+"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin, yawning again.
+"Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't left it to _me_. That's all
+I know."
+
+This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
+
+"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," said the same speaker; "for,
+upon my life, I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a
+party, and volunteer?"
+
+"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the gentleman with
+the excrescence on his nose. "But I must be fed if I make one."
+
+Another laugh.
+
+"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all," said the first
+speaker, "for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I'll
+offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I'm not at
+all sure that I wasn't his most particular friend; for we used to stop
+and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!"
+
+Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with other groups.
+Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an explanation.
+
+The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons
+meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie
+here.
+
+He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very
+wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing
+well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in
+a business point of view.
+
+"How are you?" said one.
+
+"How are you?" returned the other.
+
+"Well!" said the first. "Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?"
+
+"So I am told," returned the second. "Cold, isn't it?"
+
+"Seasonable for Christmas-time. You are not a skater, I suppose?"
+
+"No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!"
+
+Not another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their
+parting.
+
+Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should
+attach importance to conversations apparently so trivial; but, feeling
+assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to
+consider what it was likely to be. They could scarcely be supposed to
+have any bearing on the death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was
+Past, and this Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of
+any one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could apply them.
+But nothing doubting that, to whomsoever they applied, they had some
+latent moral for his own improvement, he resolved to treasure up every
+word he heard, and everything he saw; and especially to observe the
+shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation that the
+conduct of his future self would give him the clue he missed, and would
+render the solution of these riddles easy.
+
+He looked about in that very place for his own image, but another man
+stood in his accustomed corner, and, though the clock pointed to his
+usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself among
+the multitudes that poured in through the Porch. It gave him little
+surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his mind a change of
+life, and thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried out
+in this.
+
+Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched
+hand. When he roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied, from
+the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that
+the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and
+feel very cold.
+
+They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town,
+where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its
+situation and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops
+and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.
+Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
+smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole
+quarter reeked with crime, with filth and misery.
+
+Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling
+shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and
+greasy offal were bought. Upon the floor within were piled up heaps of
+rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse
+iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred
+and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
+sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a
+charcoal stove made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal, nearly
+seventy years of age, who had screened himself from the cold air without
+by a frouzy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters hung upon a line, and
+smoked his pipe in all the luxury of calm retirement.
+
+Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this man, just as a
+woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop. But she had scarcely
+entered, when another woman, similarly laden, came in too, and she was
+closely followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled by
+the sight of them than they had been upon the recognition of each other.
+After a short period of blank astonishment, in which the old man with
+the pipe had joined them, they all three burst into a laugh.
+
+"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!" cried she who had entered
+first. "Let the laundress alone to be the second; and let the
+undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look here, old Joe, here's a
+chance! If we haven't all three met here without meaning it!"
+
+"You couldn't have met in a better place," said old Joe, removing his
+pipe from his mouth. "Come into the parlour. You were made free of it
+long ago, you know; and the other two an't strangers. Stop till I shut
+the door of the shop. Ah! How it skreeks! There an't such a rusty bit of
+metal in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's no
+such old bones here as mine. Ha! ha! We're all suitable to our calling,
+we're well matched. Come into the parlour. Come into the parlour."
+
+The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The old man raked
+the fire together with an old stair-rod, and, having trimmed his smoky
+lamp (for it was night) with the stem of his pipe, put it into his mouth
+again.
+
+While he did this, the woman who had already spoken threw her bundle on
+the floor, and sat down in a flaunting manner on a stool; crossing her
+elbows on her knees, and looking with a bold defiance at the other two.
+
+"What odds, then? What odds, Mrs. Dilber?" said the woman. "Every person
+has a right to take care of themselves. _He_ always did!"
+
+"That's true, indeed!" said the laundress. "No man more so."
+
+"Why, then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid, woman! Who's the
+wiser? We're not going to pick holes in each other's coats, I suppose?"
+
+"No, indeed!" said Mrs. Dilber and the man together. "We should hope
+not."
+
+"Very well, then!" cried the woman. "That's enough. Who's the worse for
+the loss of a few things like these? Not a dead man, I suppose?"
+
+"No, indeed," said Mrs. Dilber, laughing.
+
+"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old screw,"
+pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural in his lifetime? If he had
+been, he'd have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with
+Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself."
+
+"It's the truest word that ever was spoke," said Mrs. Dilber, "It's a
+judgment on him."
+
+"I wish it was a little heavier judgment," replied the woman; "and it
+should have been, you may depend upon it, if I could have laid my hands
+on anything else. Open that bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value
+of it. Speak out plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for
+them to see it. We knew pretty well that we were helping ourselves
+before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle, Joe."
+
+But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this; and the man in
+faded black, mounting the breach first, produced _his_ plunder. It was
+not extensive. A seal or two, a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons,
+and a brooch of no great value, were all. They were severally examined
+and appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed to give
+for each upon the wall, and added them up into a total when he found
+that there was nothing more to come.
+
+"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give another sixpence,
+if I was to be boiled for not doing it. Who's next?"
+
+Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing apparel, two
+old-fashioned silver tea-spoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a few boots.
+Her account was stated on the wall in the same manner.
+
+"I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine, and that's
+the way I ruin myself," said old Joe. "That's your account. If you asked
+me for another penny, and made it an open question, I'd repent of being
+so liberal, and knock off half-a-crown."
+
+"And now undo _my_ bundle, Joe," said the first woman.
+
+Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience of opening it,
+and, having unfastened a great many knots, dragged out a large heavy
+roll of some dark stuff.
+
+"What do you call this?" said Joe. "Bed-curtains?"
+
+"Ah!" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward on her crossed
+arms. "Bed-curtains!"
+
+"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and all, with him lying
+there?" said Joe.
+
+"Yes, I do," replied the woman. "Why not?"
+
+"You were born to make your fortune," said Joe, "and you'll certainly do
+it."
+
+"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything in it by
+reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He was, I promise you,
+Joe," returned the woman coolly. "Don't drop that oil upon the blankets,
+now."
+
+"His blankets?" asked Joe.
+
+"Whose else's do you think?" replied the woman. "He isn't likely to take
+cold without 'em, I dare say."
+
+"I hope he didn't die of anything catching? Eh?" said old Joe, stopping
+in his work, and looking up.
+
+"Don't you be afraid of that," returned the woman. "I an't so fond of
+his company that I'd loiter about him for such things, if he did. Ah!
+You may look through that shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find
+a hole in it, nor a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine
+one too. They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."
+
+"What do you call wasting of it?" asked old Joe.
+
+"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure," replied the woman with
+a laugh. "Somebody was fool enough to do it, but I took it off again. If
+calico an't good enough for such a purpose, it isn't good enough for
+anything. It's quite as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than
+he did in that one."
+
+Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about
+their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he
+viewed them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been
+greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse
+itself.
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed the same woman when old Joe, producing a flannel bag
+with money in it, told out their several gains upon the ground. "This is
+the end of it, you see! He frightened every one away from him when he
+was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+"Spirit!" said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. "I see, I see. The
+case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way now.
+Merciful Heaven, what is this?"
+
+He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost
+touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which, beneath a ragged
+sheet, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was dumb,
+announced itself in awful language.
+
+The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with any accuracy,
+though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience to a secret impulse,
+anxious to know what kind of room it was. A pale light, rising in the
+outer air, fell straight upon the bed: and on it, plundered and bereft,
+unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.
+
+Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand was pointed to the
+head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of
+it, the motion of a finger upon Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the
+face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to
+do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the
+spectre at his side.
+
+Oh, cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and
+dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy
+dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head thou canst not
+turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is
+not that the hand is heavy, and will fall down when released; it is not
+that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open,
+generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a
+man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the
+wound, to sow the world with life immortal!
+
+No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and yet he heard them
+when he looked upon the bed. He thought, if this man could be raised up
+now, what would be his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard dealing, griping
+cares? They have brought him to a rich end, truly!
+
+He lay, in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child to
+say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind
+word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was
+a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What _they_ wanted in
+the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge
+did not dare to think.
+
+"Spirit!" he said, "this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not
+leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!"
+
+Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the head.
+
+"I understand you," Scrooge returned, "and I would do it if I could. But
+I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power."
+
+Again it seemed to look upon him.
+
+"If there is any person in the town who feels emotion caused by this
+man's death," said Scrooge, quite agonised, "show that person to me,
+Spirit! I beseech you."
+
+The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing;
+and, withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her
+children were.
+
+She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked
+up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the
+window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her
+needle; and could hardly bear the voices of her children in their play.
+
+At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door,
+and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though
+he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of
+serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to
+repress.
+
+He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire,
+and, when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a
+long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.
+
+"Is it good," she said, "or bad?" to help him.
+
+"Bad," he answered.
+
+"We are quite ruined?"
+
+"No. There is hope yet, Caroline."
+
+"If _he_ relents," she said, amazed, "there is! Nothing is past hope, if
+such a miracle has happened."
+
+"He is past relenting," said her husband. "He is dead."
+
+She was a mild and patient creature, if her face spoke truth; but she
+was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so with clasped hands.
+She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but the first was
+the emotion of her heart.
+
+"What the half-drunken woman, whom I told you of last night, said to me
+when I tried to see him and obtain a week's delay, and what I thought
+was a mere excuse to avoid me, turns out to have been quite true. He was
+not only very ill, but dying, then."
+
+"To whom will our debt be transferred?"
+
+"I don't know. But, before that time, we shall be ready with the money;
+and, even though we were not, it would be bad fortune indeed to find so
+merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep to-night with light
+hearts, Caroline!"
+
+Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children's
+faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little
+understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man's
+death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the
+event, was one of pleasure.
+
+"Let me see some tenderness connected with a death," said Scrooge; "or
+that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just now, will be for ever
+present to me."
+
+The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar to his feet;
+and, as they went along, Scrooge looked here and there to find himself,
+but nowhere was he to be seen. They entered poor Bob Cratchit's
+house,--the dwelling he had visited before,--and found the mother and
+the children seated round the fire.
+
+Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as still as statues
+in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter, who had a book before him.
+The mother and her daughters were engaged in sewing. But surely they
+were very quiet!
+
+"'And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them.'"
+
+Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had not dreamed them. The boy
+must have read them out, as he and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why
+did he not go on?
+
+The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her hand up to her
+face.
+
+"The colour hurts my eyes," she said.
+
+The colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!
+
+"They're better now again," said Cratchit's wife. "It makes them weak by
+candle-light; and I wouldn't show weak eyes to your father, when he
+comes home, for the world. It must be near his time."
+
+"Past it rather," Peter answered, shutting up his book. "But I think he
+has walked a little slower than he used, these few last evenings,
+mother."
+
+They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a steady, cheerful
+voice, that only faltered once:
+
+"I have known him walk with--I have known him walk with Tiny Tim upon
+his shoulder very fast indeed."
+
+"And so have I," cried Peter. "Often."
+
+"And so have I," exclaimed another. So had all.
+
+"But he was very light to carry," she resumed, intent upon her work,
+"and his father loved him so, that it was no trouble: no trouble. And
+there is your father at the door!"
+
+She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter--he had
+need of it, poor fellow--came in. His tea was ready for him on the hob,
+and they all tried who should help him to it most. Then the two young
+Cratchits got upon his knees, and laid, each child, a little cheek
+against his face, as if they said, "Don't mind it, father. Don't be
+grieved!"
+
+Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to all the family.
+He looked at the work upon the table, and praised the industry and speed
+of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls. They would be done long before Sunday,
+he said.
+
+"Sunday! You went to-day, then, Robert?" said his wife.
+
+"Yes, my dear," returned Bob. "I wish you could have gone. It would have
+done you good to see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. I
+promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little
+child!" cried Bob. "My little child!"
+
+He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he could have helped
+it, he and his child would have been farther apart, perhaps, than they
+were.
+
+He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above, which was
+lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close
+beside the child, and there were signs of some one having been there
+lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and, when he had thought a little and
+composed himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what
+had happened, and went down again quite happy.
+
+They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother working
+still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness of Mr. Scrooge's
+nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but once, and who, meeting him in the
+street that day, and seeing that he looked a little--"just a little
+down, you know," said Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him.
+"On which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman you
+ever heard, I told him. 'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr. Cratchit,' he
+said, 'and heartily sorry for your good wife.' By-the-bye, how he ever
+knew _that_ I don't know."
+
+"Knew what, my dear?"
+
+"Why, that you were a good wife," replied Bob.
+
+"Everybody knows that," said Peter.
+
+"Very well observed, my boy!" cried Bob. "I hope they do. 'Heartily
+sorry,' he said, 'for your good wife. If I can be of service to you in
+any way,' he said, giving me his card, 'that's where I live. Pray come
+to me.' Now, it wasn't," cried Bob, "for the sake of anything he might
+be able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was quite
+delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our Tiny Tim, and felt
+with us."
+
+"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said Mrs. Cratchit.
+
+"You would be sure of it, my dear," returned Bob, "if you saw and spoke
+to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised--mark what I say!--if he got
+Peter a better situation."
+
+"Only hear that, Peter," said Mrs. Cratchit.
+
+"And then," cried one of the girls, "Peter will be keeping company with
+some one, and setting up for himself."
+
+"Get along with you!" retorted Peter, grinning.
+
+"It's just as likely as not," said Bob, "one of these days; though
+there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But, however and whenever we
+part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny
+Tim--shall we--or this first parting that there was among us?"
+
+"Never, father!" cried they all.
+
+"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when we recollect how
+patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we
+shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in
+doing it."
+
+"No, never, father!" they all cried again.
+
+"I am very happy," said little Bob, "I am very happy!"
+
+Mrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the two young
+Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook hands. Spirit of Tiny
+Tim, thy childish essence was from God!
+
+"Spectre," said Scrooge, "something informs me that our parting moment
+is at hand. I know it, but I know not how. Tell me what man that was
+whom we saw lying dead?"
+
+The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as before--though at a
+different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these
+latter visions, save that they were in the Future--into the resorts of
+business men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not
+stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired,
+until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.
+
+"This court," said Scrooge, "through which we hurry now, is where my
+place of occupation is, and has been for a length of time. I see the
+house. Let me behold what I shall be in days to come."
+
+The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.
+
+"The house is yonder," Scrooge exclaimed. "Why do you point away?"
+
+The inexorable finger underwent no change.
+
+Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked in. It was an
+office still, but not his. The furniture was not the same, and the
+figure in the chair was not himself. The Phantom pointed as before.
+
+He joined it once again, and, wondering why and whither he had gone,
+accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look round
+before entering.
+
+A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man, whose name he had now to
+learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by
+houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death,
+not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A
+worthy place!
+
+The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced
+towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he
+dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.
+
+"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge,
+"answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will
+be, or are they shadows of the things that May be only?"
+
+Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
+
+"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in,
+they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the
+ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"
+
+The Spirit was immovable as ever.
+
+Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and, following the
+finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name,
+EBENEZER SCROOGE.
+
+"Am _I_ that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried upon his knees.
+
+The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
+
+"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"
+
+The finger still was there.
+
+"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the
+man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this
+intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"
+
+For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
+
+"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it:
+"your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may
+change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life?"
+
+The kind hand trembled.
+
+"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I
+will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all
+Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they
+teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"
+
+In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but
+he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger
+yet, repulsed him.
+
+Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw
+an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and
+dwindled down into a bedpost.
+
+
+
+
+STAVE FIVE
+
+THE END OF IT
+
+
+Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his
+own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make
+amends in!
+
+"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated
+as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits of all Three shall strive
+within me. Oh, Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised
+for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!"
+
+He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his
+broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing
+violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with
+tears.
+
+"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains
+in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here--I am
+here--the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled.
+They will be. I know they will!"
+
+His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside
+out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making
+them parties to every kind of extravagance.
+
+"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the
+same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings.
+"I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as
+a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
+everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop!
+Hallo!"
+
+He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there:
+perfectly winded.
+
+"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried Scrooge, starting
+off again, and going round the fire-place. "There's the door by which
+the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of
+Christmas Present sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering
+Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was
+a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long
+line of brilliant laughs!
+
+"I don't know what day of the month it is," said Scrooge. "I don't know
+how long I have been among the Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite
+a baby. Never mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop!
+Hallo here!"
+
+He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the
+lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clash, hammer; ding, dong,
+bell! Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!
+
+Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no
+mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood
+to dance to; Golden sun-light; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry
+bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!
+
+"What's to-day?" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday
+clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.
+
+"EH?" returned the boy with all his might of wonder.
+
+"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.
+
+"To-day!" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."
+
+"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The
+Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like.
+Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"
+
+"Hallo!" returned the boy.
+
+"Do you know the Poulterer's in the next street but one, at the corner?"
+Scrooge inquired.
+
+"I should hope I did," replied the lad.
+
+"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy! Do you know
+whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?--Not
+the little prize Turkey: the big one?"
+
+"What! the one as big as me?" returned the boy.
+
+"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure to talk to him.
+Yes, my buck!"
+
+"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.
+
+"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it."
+
+"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.
+
+"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell 'em to
+bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it.
+Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him
+in less than five minutes, and I'll give you half-a-crown!"
+
+The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger
+who could have got a shot off half so fast.
+
+"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's," whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands,
+and splitting with a laugh. "He shan't know who sends it. It's twice the
+size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to
+Bob's will be!"
+
+The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one; but write
+it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to open the street-door, ready
+for the coming of the poulterer's man. As he stood there, waiting his
+arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
+
+"I shall love it as long as I live!" cried Scrooge, patting it with his
+hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it
+has in its face! It's a wonderful knocker!--Here's the Turkey. Hallo!
+Whoop! How are you? Merry Christmas!"
+
+It _was_ a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird.
+He would have snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of
+sealing-wax.
+
+"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town," said Scrooge. "You
+must have a cab."
+
+The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid
+for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the
+chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by
+the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and
+chuckled till he cried.
+
+Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much;
+and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are
+at it. But, if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a
+piece of sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.
+
+He dressed himself "all in his best," and at last got out into the
+streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them
+with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and, walking with his hands behind
+him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so
+irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured
+fellows said, "Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!" And Scrooge
+said often afterwards that, of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard,
+those were the blithest in his ears.
+
+He had not gone far when, coming on towards him, he beheld the portly
+gentleman who had walked into his counting-house the day before, and
+said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?" It sent a pang across his heart
+to think how this old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but
+he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.
+
+"My dear sir," said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old
+gentleman by both his hands, "how do you do? I hope you succeeded
+yesterday. It was very kind of you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"
+
+"Mr. Scrooge?"
+
+"Yes," said Scrooge. "That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant
+to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness----"
+Here Scrooge whispered in his ear.
+
+"Lord bless me!" cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away.
+"My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?"
+
+"If you please," said Scrooge. "Not a farthing less. A great many
+back-payments are included in it, I assure you. Will you do me that
+favour?"
+
+"My dear sir," said the other, shaking hands with him, "I don't know
+what to say to such munifi----"
+
+"Don't say anything, please," retorted Scrooge. "Come and see me. Will
+you come and see me?"
+
+"I will!" cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he meant to do it.
+
+"Thankee," said Scrooge. "I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty
+times. Bless you!"
+
+He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people
+hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned
+beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the
+windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had
+never dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so much
+happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's
+house.
+
+He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and
+knock. But he made a dash, and did it.
+
+"Is your master at home, my dear?" said Scrooge to the girl. Nice girl!
+Very.
+
+"Yes sir."
+
+"Where is he, my love?" said Scrooge.
+
+"He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I'll show you
+up-stairs, if you please."
+
+"Thankee. He knows me," said Scrooge, with his hand already on the
+dining-room lock. "I'll go in here, my dear."
+
+He turned it gently, and sidled his face in round the door. They were
+looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these
+young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see
+that everything is right.
+
+"Fred!" said Scrooge.
+
+Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started! Scrooge had
+forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the
+footstool, or he wouldn't have done it on any account.
+
+"Why, bless my soul!" cried Fred, "who's that?"
+
+"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner. Will you let me in,
+Fred?"
+
+Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off. He was at home in
+five minutes. Nothing could be heartier. His niece looked just the same.
+So did Topper when _he_ came. So did the plump sister when _she_ came.
+So did every one when _they_ came. Wonderful party, wonderful games,
+wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!
+
+But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was early there! If
+he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late! That
+was the thing he had set his heart upon.
+
+And he did it; yes, he did! The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter
+past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time.
+Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the
+tank.
+
+His hat was off before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on
+his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to
+overtake nine o'clock.
+
+"Hallo!" growled Scrooge in his accustomed voice as near as he could
+feign it. "What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?"
+
+"I am very sorry, sir," said Bob. "I _am_ behind my time."
+
+"You are!" repeated Scrooge. "Yes. I think you are. Step this way, sir,
+if you please."
+
+"It's only once a year, sir," pleaded Bob, appearing from the tank. "It
+shall not be repeated. I was making rather merry yesterday, sir."
+
+"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge. "I am not going to
+stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore," he continued,
+leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that
+he staggered back into the tank again: "and therefore I am about to
+raise your salary!"
+
+Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He had a momentary
+idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the
+people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.
+
+"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge with an earnestness that could
+not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas,
+Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise
+your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will
+discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of
+smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires and buy another coal-scuttle
+before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"
+
+        *     *     *     *     *
+
+Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more;
+and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as
+good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City
+knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old
+world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them
+laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that
+nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did
+not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and, knowing that such as
+these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
+should wrinkle up their eyes in grins as have the malady in less
+attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for
+him.
+
+He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the
+Total-Abstinence Principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of
+him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed
+the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as
+Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
+
+
+
+
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+INTRODUCTION.
+
+The Crito seems intended to exhibit the character of Socrates in one light
+only, not as the philosopher, fulfilling a divine mission and trusting in
+the will of heaven, but simply as the good citizen, who having been
+unjustly condemned is willing to give up his life in obedience to the laws
+of the state...
+
+The days of Socrates are drawing to a close; the fatal ship has been seen
+off Sunium, as he is informed by his aged friend and contemporary Crito,
+who visits him before the dawn has broken; he himself has been warned in a
+dream that on the third day he must depart.  Time is precious, and Crito
+has come early in order to gain his consent to a plan of escape.  This can
+be easily accomplished by his friends, who will incur no danger in making
+the attempt to save him, but will be disgraced for ever if they allow him
+to perish.  He should think of his duty to his children, and not play into
+the hands of his enemies.  Money is already provided by Crito as well as by
+Simmias and others, and he will have no difficulty in finding friends in
+Thessaly and other places.
+
+Socrates is afraid that Crito is but pressing upon him the opinions of the
+many:  whereas, all his life long he has followed the dictates of reason
+only and the opinion of the one wise or skilled man.  There was a time when
+Crito himself had allowed the propriety of this.  And although some one
+will say 'the many can kill us,' that makes no difference; but a good life,
+in other words, a just and honourable life, is alone to be valued.  All
+considerations of loss of reputation or injury to his children should be
+dismissed:  the only question is whether he would be right in attempting to
+escape.  Crito, who is a disinterested person not having the fear of death
+before his eyes, shall answer this for him.  Before he was condemned they
+had often held discussions, in which they agreed that no man should either
+do evil, or return evil for evil, or betray the right.  Are these
+principles to be altered because the circumstances of Socrates are altered?
+Crito admits that they remain the same.  Then is his escape consistent with
+the maintenance of them?  To this Crito is unable or unwilling to reply.
+
+Socrates proceeds:--Suppose the Laws of Athens to come and remonstrate with
+him:  they will ask 'Why does he seek to overturn them?' and if he replies,
+'they have injured him,' will not the Laws answer, 'Yes, but was that the
+agreement?  Has he any objection to make to them which would justify him in
+overturning them?  Was he not brought into the world and educated by their
+help, and are they not his parents?  He might have left Athens and gone
+where he pleased, but he has lived there for seventy years more constantly
+than any other citizen.'  Thus he has clearly shown that he acknowledged
+the agreement, which he cannot now break without dishonour to himself and
+danger to his friends.  Even in the course of the trial he might have
+proposed exile as the penalty, but then he declared that he preferred death
+to exile.  And whither will he direct his footsteps?  In any well-ordered
+state the Laws will consider him as an enemy.  Possibly in a land of
+misrule like Thessaly he may be welcomed at first, and the unseemly
+narrative of his escape will be regarded by the inhabitants as an amusing
+tale.  But if he offends them he will have to learn another sort of lesson.
+Will he continue to give lectures in virtue?  That would hardly be decent.
+And how will his children be the gainers if he takes them into Thessaly,
+and deprives them of Athenian citizenship?  Or if he leaves them behind,
+does he expect that they will be better taken care of by his friends
+because he is in Thessaly?  Will not true friends care for them equally
+whether he is alive or dead?
+
+Finally, they exhort him to think of justice first, and of life and
+children afterwards.  He may now depart in peace and innocence, a sufferer
+and not a doer of evil.  But if he breaks agreements, and returns evil for
+evil, they will be angry with him while he lives; and their brethren the
+Laws of the world below will receive him as an enemy.  Such is the mystic
+voice which is always murmuring in his ears.
+
+That Socrates was not a good citizen was a charge made against him during
+his lifetime, which has been often repeated in later ages.  The crimes of
+Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides, who had been his pupils, were still
+recent in the memory of the now restored democracy.  The fact that he had
+been neutral in the death-struggle of Athens was not likely to conciliate
+popular good-will.  Plato, writing probably in the next generation,
+undertakes the defence of his friend and master in this particular, not to
+the Athenians of his day, but to posterity and the world at large.
+
+Whether such an incident ever really occurred as the visit of Crito and the
+proposal of escape is uncertain:  Plato could easily have invented far more
+than that (Phaedr.); and in the selection of Crito, the aged friend, as the
+fittest person to make the proposal to Socrates, we seem to recognize the
+hand of the artist.  Whether any one who has been subjected by the laws of
+his country to an unjust judgment is right in attempting to escape, is a
+thesis about which casuists might disagree.  Shelley (Prose Works) is of
+opinion that Socrates 'did well to die,' but not for the 'sophistical'
+reasons which Plato has put into his mouth.  And there would be no
+difficulty in arguing that Socrates should have lived and preferred to a
+glorious death the good which he might still be able to perform.  'A
+rhetorician would have had much to say upon that point.'  It may be
+observed however that Plato never intended to answer the question of
+casuistry, but only to exhibit the ideal of patient virtue which refuses to
+do the least evil in order to avoid the greatest, and to show his master
+maintaining in death the opinions which he had professed in his life.  Not
+'the world,' but the 'one wise man,' is still the paradox of Socrates in
+his last hours.  He must be guided by reason, although her conclusions may
+be fatal to him.  The remarkable sentiment that the wicked can do neither
+good nor evil is true, if taken in the sense, which he means, of moral
+evil; in his own words, 'they cannot make a man wise or foolish.'
+
+This little dialogue is a perfect piece of dialectic, in which granting the
+'common principle,' there is no escaping from the conclusion.  It is
+anticipated at the beginning by the dream of Socrates and the parody of
+Homer.  The personification of the Laws, and of their brethren the Laws in
+the world below, is one of the noblest and boldest figures of speech which
+occur in Plato.
+
+
+CRITO
+
+by
+
+Plato
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE:  Socrates, Crito.
+
+SCENE:  The Prison of Socrates.
+
+
+SOCRATES:  Why have you come at this hour, Crito? it must be quite early.
+
+CRITO:  Yes, certainly.
+
+SOCRATES:  What is the exact time?
+
+CRITO:  The dawn is breaking.
+
+SOCRATES:  I wonder that the keeper of the prison would let you in.
+
+CRITO:  He knows me because I often come, Socrates; moreover.  I have done
+him a kindness.
+
+SOCRATES:  And are you only just arrived?
+
+CRITO:  No, I came some time ago.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once
+awakening me?
+
+CRITO:  I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great
+trouble and unrest as you are--indeed I should not:  I have been watching
+with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason I did not awake
+you, because I wished to minimize the pain.  I have always thought you to
+be of a happy disposition; but never did I see anything like the easy,
+tranquil manner in which you bear this calamity.
+
+SOCRATES:  Why, Crito, when a man has reached my age he ought not to be
+repining at the approach of death.
+
+CRITO:  And yet other old men find themselves in similar misfortunes, and
+age does not prevent them from repining.
+
+SOCRATES:  That is true.  But you have not told me why you come at this
+early hour.
+
+CRITO:  I come to bring you a message which is sad and painful; not, as I
+believe, to yourself, but to all of us who are your friends, and saddest of
+all to me.
+
+SOCRATES:  What?  Has the ship come from Delos, on the arrival of which I
+am to die?
+
+CRITO:  No, the ship has not actually arrived, but she will probably be
+here to-day, as persons who have come from Sunium tell me that they have
+left her there; and therefore to-morrow, Socrates, will be the last day of
+your life.
+
+SOCRATES:  Very well, Crito; if such is the will of God, I am willing; but
+my belief is that there will be a delay of a day.
+
+CRITO:  Why do you think so?
+
+SOCRATES:  I will tell you.  I am to die on the day after the arrival of
+the ship?
+
+CRITO:  Yes; that is what the authorities say.
+
+SOCRATES:  But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow;
+this I infer from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now,
+when you fortunately allowed me to sleep.
+
+CRITO:  And what was the nature of the vision?
+
+SOCRATES:  There appeared to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely,
+clothed in bright raiment, who called to me and said:  O Socrates,
+
+'The third day hence to fertile Phthia shalt thou go.'  (Homer, Il.)
+
+CRITO:  What a singular dream, Socrates!
+
+SOCRATES:  There can be no doubt about the meaning, Crito, I think.
+
+CRITO:  Yes; the meaning is only too clear.  But, oh! my beloved Socrates,
+let me entreat you once more to take my advice and escape.  For if you die
+I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is
+another evil:  people who do not know you and me will believe that I might
+have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not
+care.  Now, can there be a worse disgrace than this--that I should be
+thought to value money more than the life of a friend?  For the many will
+not be persuaded that I wanted you to escape, and that you refused.
+
+SOCRATES:  But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the
+many?  Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering,
+will think of these things truly as they occurred.
+
+CRITO:  But you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be
+regarded, for what is now happening shows that they can do the greatest
+evil to any one who has lost their good opinion.
+
+SOCRATES:  I only wish it were so, Crito; and that the many could do the
+greatest evil; for then they would also be able to do the greatest good--
+and what a fine thing this would be!  But in reality they can do neither;
+for they cannot make a man either wise or foolish; and whatever they do is
+the result of chance.
+
+CRITO:  Well, I will not dispute with you; but please to tell me, Socrates,
+whether you are not acting out of regard to me and your other friends:  are
+you not afraid that if you escape from prison we may get into trouble with
+the informers for having stolen you away, and lose either the whole or a
+great part of our property; or that even a worse evil may happen to us?
+Now, if you fear on our account, be at ease; for in order to save you, we
+ought surely to run this, or even a greater risk; be persuaded, then, and
+do as I say.
+
+SOCRATES:  Yes, Crito, that is one fear which you mention, but by no means
+the only one.
+
+CRITO:  Fear not--there are persons who are willing to get you out of
+prison at no great cost; and as for the informers they are far from being
+exorbitant in their demands--a little money will satisfy them.  My means,
+which are certainly ample, are at your service, and if you have a scruple
+about spending all mine, here are strangers who will give you the use of
+theirs; and one of them, Simmias the Theban, has brought a large sum of
+money for this very purpose; and Cebes and many others are prepared to
+spend their money in helping you to escape.  I say, therefore, do not
+hesitate on our account, and do not say, as you did in the court (compare
+Apol.), that you will have a difficulty in knowing what to do with yourself
+anywhere else.  For men will love you in other places to which you may go,
+and not in Athens only; there are friends of mine in Thessaly, if you like
+to go to them, who will value and protect you, and no Thessalian will give
+you any trouble.  Nor can I think that you are at all justified, Socrates,
+in betraying your own life when you might be saved; in acting thus you are
+playing into the hands of your enemies, who are hurrying on your
+destruction.  And further I should say that you are deserting your own
+children; for you might bring them up and educate them; instead of which
+you go away and leave them, and they will have to take their chance; and if
+they do not meet with the usual fate of orphans, there will be small thanks
+to you.  No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to
+persevere to the end in their nurture and education.  But you appear to be
+choosing the easier part, not the better and manlier, which would have been
+more becoming in one who professes to care for virtue in all his actions,
+like yourself.  And indeed, I am ashamed not only of you, but of us who are
+your friends, when I reflect that the whole business will be attributed
+entirely to our want of courage.  The trial need never have come on, or
+might have been managed differently; and this last act, or crowning folly,
+will seem to have occurred through our negligence and cowardice, who might
+have saved you, if we had been good for anything; and you might have saved
+yourself, for there was no difficulty at all.  See now, Socrates, how sad
+and discreditable are the consequences, both to us and you.  Make up your
+mind then, or rather have your mind already made up, for the time of
+deliberation is over, and there is only one thing to be done, which must be
+done this very night, and if we delay at all will be no longer practicable
+or possible; I beseech you therefore, Socrates, be persuaded by me, and do
+as I say.
+
+SOCRATES:  Dear Crito, your zeal is invaluable, if a right one; but if
+wrong, the greater the zeal the greater the danger; and therefore we ought
+to consider whether I shall or shall not do as you say.  For I am and
+always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason,
+whatever the reason may be which upon reflection appears to me to be the
+best; and now that this chance has befallen me, I cannot repudiate my own
+words:  the principles which I have hitherto honoured and revered I still
+honour, and unless we can at once find other and better principles, I am
+certain not to agree with you; no, not even if the power of the multitude
+could inflict many more imprisonments, confiscations, deaths, frightening
+us like children with hobgoblin terrors (compare Apol.).  What will be the
+fairest way of considering the question?  Shall I return to your old
+argument about the opinions of men?--we were saying that some of them are
+to be regarded, and others not.  Now were we right in maintaining this
+before I was condemned?  And has the argument which was once good now
+proved to be talk for the sake of talking--mere childish nonsense?  That is
+what I want to consider with your help, Crito:--whether, under my present
+circumstances, the argument appears to be in any way different or not; and
+is to be allowed by me or disallowed.  That argument, which, as I believe,
+is maintained by many persons of authority, was to the effect, as I was
+saying, that the opinions of some men are to be regarded, and of other men
+not to be regarded.  Now you, Crito, are not going to die to-morrow--at
+least, there is no human probability of this, and therefore you are
+disinterested and not liable to be deceived by the circumstances in which
+you are placed.  Tell me then, whether I am right in saying that some
+opinions, and the opinions of some men only, are to be valued, and that
+other opinions, and the opinions of other men, are not to be valued.  I ask
+you whether I was right in maintaining this?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES:  The good are to be regarded, and not the bad?
+
+CRITO:  Yes.
+
+SOCRATES:  And the opinions of the wise are good, and the opinions of the
+unwise are evil?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES:  And what was said about another matter?  Is the pupil who
+devotes himself to the practice of gymnastics supposed to attend to the
+praise and blame and opinion of every man, or of one man only--his
+physician or trainer, whoever he may be?
+
+CRITO:  Of one man only.
+
+SOCRATES:  And he ought to fear the censure and welcome the praise of that
+one only, and not of the many?
+
+CRITO:  Clearly so.
+
+SOCRATES:  And he ought to act and train, and eat and drink in the way
+which seems good to his single master who has understanding, rather than
+according to the opinion of all other men put together?
+
+CRITO:  True.
+
+SOCRATES:  And if he disobeys and disregards the opinion and approval of
+the one, and regards the opinion of the many who have no understanding,
+will he not suffer evil?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly he will.
+
+SOCRATES:  And what will the evil be, whither tending and what affecting,
+in the disobedient person?
+
+CRITO:  Clearly, affecting the body; that is what is destroyed by the evil.
+
+SOCRATES:  Very good; and is not this true, Crito, of other things which we
+need not separately enumerate?  In questions of just and unjust, fair and
+foul, good and evil, which are the subjects of our present consultation,
+ought we to follow the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion
+of the one man who has understanding? ought we not to fear and reverence
+him more than all the rest of the world:  and if we desert him shall we not
+destroy and injure that principle in us which may be assumed to be improved
+by justice and deteriorated by injustice;--there is such a principle?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly there is, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES:  Take a parallel instance:--if, acting under the advice of those
+who have no understanding, we destroy that which is improved by health and
+is deteriorated by disease, would life be worth having?  And that which has
+been destroyed is--the body?
+
+CRITO:  Yes.
+
+SOCRATES:  Could we live, having an evil and corrupted body?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly not.
+
+SOCRATES:  And will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be
+destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?  Do we
+suppose that principle, whatever it may be in man, which has to do with
+justice and injustice, to be inferior to the body?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly not.
+
+SOCRATES:  More honourable than the body?
+
+CRITO:  Far more.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then, my friend, we must not regard what the many say of us:
+but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will
+say, and what the truth will say.  And therefore you begin in error when
+you advise that we should regard the opinion of the many about just and
+unjust, good and evil, honorable and dishonorable.--'Well,' some one will
+say, 'but the many can kill us.'
+
+CRITO:  Yes, Socrates; that will clearly be the answer.
+
+SOCRATES:  And it is true; but still I find with surprise that the old
+argument is unshaken as ever.  And I should like to know whether I may say
+the same of another proposition--that not life, but a good life, is to be
+chiefly valued?
+
+CRITO:  Yes, that also remains unshaken.
+
+SOCRATES:  And a good life is equivalent to a just and honorable one--that
+holds also?
+
+CRITO:  Yes, it does.
+
+SOCRATES:  From these premisses I proceed to argue the question whether I
+ought or ought not to try and escape without the consent of the Athenians:
+and if I am clearly right in escaping, then I will make the attempt; but if
+not, I will abstain.  The other considerations which you mention, of money
+and loss of character and the duty of educating one's children, are, I
+fear, only the doctrines of the multitude, who would be as ready to restore
+people to life, if they were able, as they are to put them to death--and
+with as little reason.  But now, since the argument has thus far prevailed,
+the only question which remains to be considered is, whether we shall do
+rightly either in escaping or in suffering others to aid in our escape and
+paying them in money and thanks, or whether in reality we shall not do
+rightly; and if the latter, then death or any other calamity which may
+ensue on my remaining here must not be allowed to enter into the
+calculation.
+
+CRITO:  I think that you are right, Socrates; how then shall we proceed?
+
+SOCRATES:  Let us consider the matter together, and do you either refute me
+if you can, and I will be convinced; or else cease, my dear friend, from
+repeating to me that I ought to escape against the wishes of the Athenians:
+for I highly value your attempts to persuade me to do so, but I may not be
+persuaded against my own better judgment.  And now please to consider my
+first position, and try how you can best answer me.
+
+CRITO:  I will.
+
+SOCRATES:  Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or
+that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is
+doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as
+has been already acknowledged by us?  Are all our former admissions which
+were made within a few days to be thrown away?  And have we, at our age,
+been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to
+discover that we are no better than children?  Or, in spite of the opinion
+of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, shall we
+insist on the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil
+and dishonour to him who acts unjustly?  Shall we say so or not?
+
+CRITO:  Yes.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then we must do no wrong?
+
+CRITO:  Certainly not.
+
+SOCRATES:  Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we
+must injure no one at all?  (E.g. compare Rep.)
+
+CRITO:  Clearly not.
+
+SOCRATES:  Again, Crito, may we do evil?
+
+CRITO:  Surely not, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES:  And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality
+of the many--is that just or not?
+
+CRITO:  Not just.
+
+SOCRATES:  For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?
+
+CRITO:  Very true.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any
+one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.  But I would have you
+consider, Crito, whether you really mean what you are saying.  For this
+opinion has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable
+number of persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed
+upon this point have no common ground, and can only despise one another
+when they see how widely they differ.  Tell me, then, whether you agree
+with and assent to my first principle, that neither injury nor retaliation
+nor warding off evil by evil is ever right.  And shall that be the premiss
+of our argument?  Or do you decline and dissent from this?  For so I have
+ever thought, and continue to think; but, if you are of another opinion,
+let me hear what you have to say.  If, however, you remain of the same mind
+as formerly, I will proceed to the next step.
+
+CRITO:  You may proceed, for I have not changed my mind.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then I will go on to the next point, which may be put in the
+form of a question:--Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought
+he to betray the right?
+
+CRITO:  He ought to do what he thinks right.
+
+SOCRATES:  But if this is true, what is the application?  In leaving the
+prison against the will of the Athenians, do I wrong any? or rather do I
+not wrong those whom I ought least to wrong?  Do I not desert the
+principles which were acknowledged by us to be just--what do you say?
+
+CRITO:  I cannot tell, Socrates, for I do not know.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then consider the matter in this way:--Imagine that I am about
+to play truant (you may call the proceeding by any name which you like),
+and the laws and the government come and interrogate me:  'Tell us,
+Socrates,' they say; 'what are you about? are you not going by an act of
+yours to overturn us--the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies?
+Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the
+decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by
+individuals?'  What will be our answer, Crito, to these and the like words?
+Any one, and especially a rhetorician, will have a good deal to say on
+behalf of the law which requires a sentence to be carried out.  He will
+argue that this law should not be set aside; and shall we reply, 'Yes; but
+the state has injured us and given an unjust sentence.'  Suppose I say
+that?
+
+CRITO:  Very good, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES:  'And was that our agreement with you?' the law would answer; 'or
+were you to abide by the sentence of the state?'  And if I were to express
+my astonishment at their words, the law would probably add:  'Answer,
+Socrates, instead of opening your eyes--you are in the habit of asking and
+answering questions.  Tell us,--What complaint have you to make against us
+which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the state?  In the
+first place did we not bring you into existence?  Your father married your
+mother by our aid and begat you.  Say whether you have any objection to
+urge against those of us who regulate marriage?'  None, I should reply.
+'Or against those of us who after birth regulate the nurture and education
+of children, in which you also were trained?  Were not the laws, which have
+the charge of education, right in commanding your father to train you in
+music and gymnastic?'  Right, I should reply.  'Well then, since you were
+brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the
+first place that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before
+you?  And if this is true you are not on equal terms with us; nor can you
+think that you have a right to do to us what we are doing to you.  Would
+you have any right to strike or revile or do any other evil to your father
+or your master, if you had one, because you have been struck or reviled by
+him, or received some other evil at his hands?--you would not say this?
+And because we think right to destroy you, do you think that you have any
+right to destroy us in return, and your country as far as in you lies?
+Will you, O professor of true virtue, pretend that you are justified in
+this?  Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is
+more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any
+ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of
+understanding? also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when
+angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not
+persuaded, to be obeyed?  And when we are punished by her, whether with
+imprisonment or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence; and if
+she lead us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right;
+neither may any one yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in
+battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his
+city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is
+just:  and if he may do no violence to his father or mother, much less may
+he do violence to his country.'  What answer shall we make to this, Crito?
+Do the laws speak truly, or do they not?
+
+CRITO:  I think that they do.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then the laws will say:  'Consider, Socrates, if we are speaking
+truly that in your present attempt you are going to do us an injury.  For,
+having brought you into the world, and nurtured and educated you, and given
+you and every other citizen a share in every good which we had to give, we
+further proclaim to any Athenian by the liberty which we allow him, that if
+he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the
+city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his
+goods with him.  None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him.
+Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a
+colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property.
+But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and
+administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied
+contract that he will do as we command him.  And he who disobeys us is, as
+we maintain, thrice wrong:  first, because in disobeying us he is
+disobeying his parents; secondly, because we are the authors of his
+education; thirdly, because he has made an agreement with us that he will
+duly obey our commands; and he neither obeys them nor convinces us that our
+commands are unjust; and we do not rudely impose them, but give him the
+alternative of obeying or convincing us;--that is what we offer, and he
+does neither.
+
+'These are the sort of accusations to which, as we were saying, you,
+Socrates, will be exposed if you accomplish your intentions; you, above all
+other Athenians.'  Suppose now I ask, why I rather than anybody else? they
+will justly retort upon me that I above all other men have acknowledged the
+agreement.  'There is clear proof,' they will say, 'Socrates, that we and
+the city were not displeasing to you.  Of all Athenians you have been the
+most constant resident in the city, which, as you never leave, you may be
+supposed to love (compare Phaedr.).  For you never went out of the city
+either to see the games, except once when you went to the Isthmus, or to
+any other place unless when you were on military service; nor did you
+travel as other men do.  Nor had you any curiosity to know other states or
+their laws:  your affections did not go beyond us and our state; we were
+your especial favourites, and you acquiesced in our government of you; and
+here in this city you begat your children, which is a proof of your
+satisfaction.  Moreover, you might in the course of the trial, if you had
+liked, have fixed the penalty at banishment; the state which refuses to let
+you go now would have let you go then.  But you pretended that you
+preferred death to exile (compare Apol.), and that you were not unwilling
+to die.  And now you have forgotten these fine sentiments, and pay no
+respect to us the laws, of whom you are the destroyer; and are doing what
+only a miserable slave would do, running away and turning your back upon
+the compacts and agreements which you made as a citizen.  And first of all
+answer this very question:  Are we right in saying that you agreed to be
+governed according to us in deed, and not in word only?  Is that true or
+not?'  How shall we answer, Crito?  Must we not assent?
+
+CRITO:  We cannot help it, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES:  Then will they not say:  'You, Socrates, are breaking the
+covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any
+haste or under any compulsion or deception, but after you have had seventy
+years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the
+city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to
+be unfair.  You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon
+or Crete, both which states are often praised by you for their good
+government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign state.  Whereas you, above
+all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the state, or, in other words,
+of us her laws (and who would care about a state which has no laws?), that
+you never stirred out of her; the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not
+more stationary in her than you were.  And now you run away and forsake
+your agreements.  Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not
+make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city.
+
+'For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what
+good will you do either to yourself or to your friends?  That your friends
+will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their
+property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the
+neighbouring cities, as, for example, Thebes or Megara, both of which are
+well governed, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their
+government will be against you, and all patriotic citizens will cast an
+evil eye upon you as a subverter of the laws, and you will confirm in the
+minds of the judges the justice of their own condemnation of you.  For he
+who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be a corrupter of the
+young and foolish portion of mankind.  Will you then flee from well-ordered
+cities and virtuous men? and is existence worth having on these terms?  Or
+will you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates?  And what
+will you say to them?  What you say here about virtue and justice and
+institutions and laws being the best things among men?  Would that be
+decent of you?  Surely not.  But if you go away from well-governed states
+to Crito's friends in Thessaly, where there is great disorder and licence,
+they will be charmed to hear the tale of your escape from prison, set off
+with ludicrous particulars of the manner in which you were wrapped in a
+goatskin or some other disguise, and metamorphosed as the manner is of
+runaways; but will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you
+were not ashamed to violate the most sacred laws from a miserable desire of
+a little more life?  Perhaps not, if you keep them in a good temper; but if
+they are out of temper you will hear many degrading things; you will live,
+but how?--as the flatterer of all men, and the servant of all men; and
+doing what?--eating and drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order
+that you may get a dinner.  And where will be your fine sentiments about
+justice and virtue?  Say that you wish to live for the sake of your
+children--you want to bring them up and educate them--will you take them
+into Thessaly and deprive them of Athenian citizenship?  Is this the
+benefit which you will confer upon them?  Or are you under the impression
+that they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still
+alive, although absent from them; for your friends will take care of them?
+Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care
+of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they will not
+take care of them?  Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good
+for anything, they will--to be sure they will.
+
+'Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up.  Think not of life
+and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that
+you may be justified before the princes of the world below.  For neither
+will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this
+life, or happier in another, if you do as Crito bids.  Now you depart in
+innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws,
+but of men.  But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for
+injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us,
+and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say,
+yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you
+while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive
+you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy
+us.  Listen, then, to us and not to Crito.'
+
+This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears,
+like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say,
+is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.  And I know
+that anything more which you may say will be vain.  Yet speak, if you have
+anything to say.
+
+CRITO:  I have nothing to say, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES:  Leave me then, Crito, to fulfil the will of God, and to follow
+whither he leads.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Crito, by Plato
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Great Expectations
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+Posting Date: August 20, 2008 [EBook #1400]
+Release Date: July, 1998
+Last Updated: September 25, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EXPECTATIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+[1867 Edition]
+
+by Charles Dickens
+
+
+[Project Gutenberg Editor’s Note: There is also another version of
+this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
+infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
+than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
+
+I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his
+tombstone and my sister,--Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
+As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness
+of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
+photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
+unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
+my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
+with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
+“Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that
+my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
+about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
+their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
+mine,--who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
+that universal struggle,--I am indebted for a belief I religiously
+entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
+in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
+existence.
+
+Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
+wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression
+of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable
+raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain
+that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and
+that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the
+above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham,
+Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead
+and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
+intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
+feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond
+was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was
+rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid
+of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
+
+“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
+among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you
+little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
+
+A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man
+with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his
+head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
+lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
+briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose
+teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
+
+“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it,
+sir.”
+
+“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”
+
+“Pip, sir.”
+
+“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”
+
+“Pip. Pip, sir.”
+
+“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”
+
+I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the
+alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.
+
+The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and
+emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When
+the church came to itself,--for he was so sudden and strong that he
+made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my
+feet,--when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high
+tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.
+
+“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you
+ha’ got.”
+
+I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my
+years, and not strong.
+
+“Darn me if I couldn’t eat em,” said the man, with a threatening shake
+of his head, “and if I han’t half a mind to’t!”
+
+I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to
+the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it;
+partly, to keep myself from crying.
+
+“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where’s your mother?”
+
+“There, sir!” said I.
+
+He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.
+
+“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.”
+
+“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your
+mother?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”
+
+“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d’ye live with,--supposin’
+you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?”
+
+“My sister, sir,--Mrs. Joe Gargery,--wife of Joe Gargery, the
+blacksmith, sir.”
+
+“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.
+
+After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer
+to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he
+could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine,
+and mine looked most helplessly up into his.
+
+“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you’re to be let
+to live. You know what a file is?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“And you know what wittles is?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
+greater sense of helplessness and danger.
+
+“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He
+tilted me again. “You bring ‘em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or
+I’ll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.
+
+I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both
+hands, and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright,
+sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”
+
+He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped
+over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright
+position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:--
+
+“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
+bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you
+never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
+seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
+live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
+small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted,
+and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man
+hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young
+man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar
+to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It
+is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A
+boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw
+the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but
+that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him
+open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present
+moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young
+man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?”
+
+I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken
+bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in
+the morning.
+
+“Say Lord strike you dead if you don’t!” said the man.
+
+I said so, and he took me down.
+
+“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember
+that young man, and you get home!”
+
+“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.
+
+“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I
+wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”
+
+At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
+arms,--clasping himself, as if to hold himself together,--and limped
+towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the
+nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked
+in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people,
+stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his
+ankle and pull him in.
+
+When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose
+legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I
+saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of
+my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
+again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking
+his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the
+marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or
+the tide was in.
+
+The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped
+to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not
+nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
+angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the
+river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
+prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon
+by which the sailors steered,--like an unhooped cask upon a pole,--an
+ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains
+hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on
+towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come
+down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible
+turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to
+gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all
+round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now
+I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I,
+and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbors
+because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out
+for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and
+heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as
+well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up
+by hand.
+
+She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general
+impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
+was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth
+face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed
+to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
+good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,--a sort
+of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.
+
+My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
+redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible
+she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall
+and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her
+figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
+front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
+merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this
+apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it
+at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it
+off, every day of her life.
+
+Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the
+dwellings in our country were,--most of them, at that time. When I ran
+home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting
+alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having
+confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I
+raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
+sitting in the chimney corner.
+
+“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s
+out now, making it a baker’s dozen.”
+
+“Is she?”
+
+“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.”
+
+At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat
+round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
+was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
+frame.
+
+“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at
+Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,” said Joe, slowly
+clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at
+it; “she Ram-paged out, Pip.”
+
+“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species
+of child, and as no more than my equal.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she’s been on the
+Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a coming! Get
+behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”
+
+I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
+and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and
+applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing
+me--I often served as a connubial missile--at Joe, who, glad to get hold
+of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me
+up there with his great leg.
+
+“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
+foot. “Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret
+and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you was
+fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”
+
+“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
+rubbing myself.
+
+“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn’t for me you’d have been
+to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by
+hand?”
+
+“You did,” said I.
+
+“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.
+
+I whimpered, “I don’t know.”
+
+“I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may
+truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
+It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without
+being your mother.”
+
+My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at
+the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
+mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
+under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me
+in the avenging coals.
+
+“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard,
+indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by the by, had
+not said it at all. “You’ll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one
+of these days, and O, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!”
+
+As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me
+over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
+calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
+grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
+right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
+his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.
+
+My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us,
+that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
+and fast against her bib,--where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
+sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she
+took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in
+an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,--using both
+sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding
+the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart
+wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off
+the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into
+two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.
+
+On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my
+slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
+acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew
+Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my
+larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore
+I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my
+trousers.
+
+The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I
+found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap
+from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water.
+And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In
+our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his
+good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
+the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each
+other’s admiration now and then,--which stimulated us to new exertions.
+To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast
+diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but
+he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and
+my untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
+considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it
+had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
+circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at
+me, and got my bread and butter down my leg.
+
+Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss
+of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he
+didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than
+usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like
+a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on
+one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw
+that my bread and butter was gone.
+
+The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold
+of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister’s
+observation.
+
+“What’s the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.
+
+“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious
+remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick
+somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.”
+
+“What’s the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.
+
+“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,”
+ said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is manners, but still your elth’s your
+elth.”
+
+By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
+and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while
+against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily
+on.
+
+“Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,” said my sister, out of
+breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”
+
+Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and
+looked at me again.
+
+“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek,
+and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone,
+“you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you,
+any time. But such a--” he moved his chair and looked about the floor
+between us, and then again at me--“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”
+
+“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.
+
+“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
+with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your
+age--frequent--and as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never
+see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted
+dead.”
+
+My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying
+nothing more than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”
+
+Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine
+medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard;
+having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the
+best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice
+restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new
+fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a
+pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater
+comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would
+be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
+swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
+meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from
+myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had
+none before.
+
+Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in
+the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret
+burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
+punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe--I
+never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the
+housekeeping property as his--united to the necessity of always keeping
+one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about
+the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then,
+as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the
+voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to
+secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until to-morrow,
+but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man
+who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me
+should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time,
+and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night,
+instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror,
+mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?
+
+It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with
+a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with
+the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
+load on HIS leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread
+and butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I slipped away,
+and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.
+
+“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm
+in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great guns,
+Joe?”
+
+“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”
+
+“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.
+
+Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
+“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.
+
+While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my
+mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe put his
+mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I
+could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”
+
+“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
+sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they’re
+firing warning of another.”
+
+“Who’s firing?” said I.
+
+“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work,
+“what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”
+
+It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be
+told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite
+unless there was company.
+
+At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost
+pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word
+that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs.
+Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn’t
+hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide, and shook
+the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make nothing of
+the word.
+
+“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know--if you
+wouldn’t much mind--where the firing comes from?”
+
+“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean
+that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”
+
+“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”
+
+Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”
+
+“And please, what’s Hulks?” said I.
+
+“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
+with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one
+question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
+right ‘cross th’ meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our
+country.
+
+“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?” said
+I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
+
+It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what,
+young fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring you up by hand to badger
+people’s lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
+People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
+and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
+questions. Now, you get along to bed!”
+
+I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs
+in the dark, with my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe’s thimble
+having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,--I
+felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
+handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
+questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
+
+Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
+that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
+No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
+mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was
+in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
+terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
+no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed
+me at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
+requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.
+
+If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
+down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly
+pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
+gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
+once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
+inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
+the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting
+a light by easy friction then; to have got one I must have struck it out
+of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate himself
+rattling his chains.
+
+As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot
+with gray, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way, and
+every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get up,
+Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than
+usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare hanging
+up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back was half
+turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection,
+no time for anything, for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread,
+some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in
+my pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some brandy from a
+stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used
+for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my
+room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard),
+a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork
+pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
+upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a
+covered earthenware dish in a corner, and I found it was the pie, and
+I took it in the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would
+not be missed for some time.
+
+There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
+unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe’s tools.
+Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which
+I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty
+marshes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the
+outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all
+night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the
+damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of
+spiders’ webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On
+every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick,
+that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village--a
+direction which they never accepted, for they never came there--was
+invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up
+at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a
+phantom devoting me to the Hulks.
+
+The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
+instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.
+This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and
+banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly
+as could be, “A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The
+cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes,
+and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black
+ox, with a white cravat on,--who even had to my awakened conscience
+something of a clerical air,--fixed me so obstinately with his eyes,
+and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
+round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t
+for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of
+smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and
+a flourish of his tail.
+
+All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I
+went, I couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as
+the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew
+my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a
+Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when
+I was ‘prentice to him, regularly bound, we would have such Larks there!
+However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to
+the right, and consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the
+bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide
+out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
+ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just scrambled
+up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me.
+His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding
+forward, heavy with sleep.
+
+I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast,
+in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on
+the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but
+another man!
+
+And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had a great iron
+on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that
+the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat
+broad-brimmed low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for
+I had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at
+me,--it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost knocked himself
+down, for it made him stumble,--and then he ran into the mist, stumbling
+twice as he went, and I lost him.
+
+“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified
+him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
+known where it was.
+
+I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
+man,--hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
+night left off hugging and limping,--waiting for me. He was awfully
+cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face
+and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when
+I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to
+me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did
+not turn me upside down this time to get at what I had, but left me
+right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.
+
+“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.
+
+“Brandy,” said I.
+
+He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
+manner,--more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
+hurry, than a man who was eating it,--but he left off to take some of
+the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite
+as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth,
+without biting it off.
+
+“I think you have got the ague,” said I.
+
+“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.
+
+“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the meshes,
+and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”
+
+“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he. “I’d do
+that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is
+over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, I’ll bet
+you.”
+
+He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all
+at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round
+us, and often stopping--even stopping his jaws--to listen. Some real or
+fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the
+marsh, now gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,--
+
+“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”
+
+“No, sir! No!”
+
+“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound
+indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
+warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
+is!”
+
+Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock,
+and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his
+eyes.
+
+Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down
+upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”
+
+“Did you speak?”
+
+“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”
+
+“Thankee, my boy. I do.”
+
+I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
+noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the
+man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
+swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast;
+and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
+there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie
+away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate
+it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without
+making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars
+he was very like the dog.
+
+“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after
+a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making
+the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was the
+certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.
+
+“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his
+crunching of pie-crust.
+
+“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”
+
+“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes!
+He don’t want no wittles.”
+
+“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.
+
+The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and
+the greatest surprise.
+
+“Looked? When?”
+
+“Just now.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
+asleep, and thought it was you.”
+
+He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his
+first idea about cutting my throat had revived.
+
+“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
+“and--and”--I was very anxious to put this delicately--“and with--the
+same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon
+last night?”
+
+“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.
+
+“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for
+we heard it up at home, and that’s farther away, and we were shut in
+besides.”
+
+“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a
+light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears
+nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees
+the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
+afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
+challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders ‘Make
+ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid hands on--and
+there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night--coming up
+in order, Damn ‘em, with their tramp, tramp--I see a hundred. And as to
+firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
+day,--But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
+being there; “did you notice anything in him?”
+
+“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I
+knew.
+
+“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with
+the flat of his hand.
+
+“Yes, there!”
+
+“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of
+his gray jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him down, like a
+bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file,
+boy.”
+
+I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
+and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet
+grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding
+his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he
+handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file. I
+was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself into
+this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping away
+from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he took no notice, so
+I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw
+of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
+fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last
+I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still
+going.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me
+up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet
+been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the
+house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
+the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,--an article into
+which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was
+vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.
+
+“And where the deuce ha’ you been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas salutation,
+when I and my conscience showed ourselves.
+
+I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
+Joe. “You might ha’ done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.
+
+“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a
+slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear the Carols,”
+ said Mrs. Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself, and that’s the
+best of reasons for my never hearing any.”
+
+Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
+retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
+conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes
+were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them
+to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This was so
+much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for weeks together,
+be, as to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to their legs.
+
+We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and
+greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had
+been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
+being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
+arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of
+breakfast; “for I ain’t,” said Mrs. Joe,--“I ain’t a going to have
+no formal cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I’ve got
+before me, I promise you!”
+
+So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a
+forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk
+and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In
+the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new
+flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and
+uncovered the little state parlor across the passage, which was never
+uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool
+haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four little white
+crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a
+basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other.
+Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of
+making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt
+itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
+their religion.
+
+My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that
+is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working-clothes, Joe was a
+well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes,
+he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else.
+Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
+everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion
+he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, the picture
+of misery, in a full suit of Sunday penitentials. As to me, I think my
+sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom
+an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over
+to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law.
+I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition
+to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the
+dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have
+a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of
+Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.
+
+Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle
+for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside was nothing to
+what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever
+Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be
+equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
+done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the
+Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the
+terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived the
+idea that the time when the banns were read and when the clergyman said,
+“Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose
+a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I
+might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to this
+extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.
+
+Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble
+the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle,
+but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler in
+the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was
+half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
+Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
+(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and
+everything most splendid. And still, not a word of the robbery.
+
+The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and
+the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large shining
+bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed
+it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him
+his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed
+that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would
+not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown
+open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens
+tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,--always giving the whole
+verse,--he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say,
+“You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this
+style!”
+
+I opened the door to the company,--making believe that it was a habit
+of ours to open that door,--and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next
+to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. I was
+not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.
+
+“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged
+slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair
+standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
+all but choked, and had that moment come to, “I have brought you as the
+compliments of the season--I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry
+wine--and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”
+
+Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with
+exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells.
+Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “O, Un--cle
+Pum-ble--chook! This is kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as
+he now retorted, “It’s no more than your merits. And now are you all
+bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.
+
+We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts
+and oranges and apples to the parlor; which was a change very like
+Joe’s change from his working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was
+uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more
+gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember
+Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a
+conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,--I
+don’t know at what remote period,--when she was much younger than he. I
+remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a
+sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in
+my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when
+I met him coming up the lane.
+
+Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t
+robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in
+at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the
+Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak
+(I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips
+of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork
+of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No;
+I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.
+But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity
+lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and
+then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate
+little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
+moral goads.
+
+It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
+theatrical declamation,--as it now appears to me, something like a
+religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,--and
+ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
+Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low
+reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”
+
+“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which
+brought you up by hand.”
+
+Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
+presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the
+young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for
+the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally
+wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a
+particularly unpleasant and personal manner.
+
+Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when
+there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and
+comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so
+at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty
+of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a
+pint.
+
+A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
+some severity, and intimated--in the usual hypothetical case of the
+Church being “thrown open”--what kind of sermon he would have given
+them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked
+that he considered the subject of the day’s homily, ill chosen; which
+was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many subjects
+“going about.”
+
+“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of
+subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
+tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject,
+if he’s ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short
+interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you
+want a subject, look at Pork!”
+
+“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,--and I
+knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced
+from that text.”
+
+(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)
+
+Joe gave me some more gravy.
+
+“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork
+at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,--“swine were
+the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us,
+as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who
+had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is
+detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”
+
+“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.
+
+“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably,
+“but there is no girl present.”
+
+“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you’ve
+got to be grateful for. If you’d been born a Squeaker--”
+
+“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.
+
+Joe gave me some more gravy.
+
+“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you
+had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you--”
+
+“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.
+
+“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had
+an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his
+elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
+rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
+wouldn’t. And what would have been your destination?” turning on me
+again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
+to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have
+come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you
+under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock
+to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have
+shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a
+bit of it!”
+
+Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.
+
+“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble,
+commiserating my sister.
+
+“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful
+catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
+of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled
+from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I
+had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I
+had contumaciously refused to go there.
+
+I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
+their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
+consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me, during
+the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it
+until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing in
+comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me when the
+pause was broken which ensued upon my sister’s recital, and in which
+pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with
+indignation and abhorrence.
+
+“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
+theme from which they had strayed, “Pork--regarded as biled--is rich,
+too; ain’t it?”
+
+“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.
+
+O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say
+it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under
+the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.
+
+My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle,
+and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man
+trifled with his glass,--took it up, looked at it through the light,
+put it down,--prolonged my misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were
+briskly clearing the table for the pie and pudding.
+
+I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the
+table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his
+glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink
+the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
+unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning
+round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance,
+and rushing out at the door; he then became visible through the window,
+violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces, and
+apparently out of his mind.
+
+I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t know how
+I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my
+dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and
+surveying the company all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank
+down into his chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”
+
+I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be
+worse by and by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day, by
+the vigor of my unseen hold upon it.
+
+“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come
+there?”
+
+But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn’t
+hear the word, wouldn’t hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all
+away with his hand, and asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had
+begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
+getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing
+them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on to the
+leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor of gratitude.
+
+By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
+pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
+The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the
+genial influence of gin and water. I began to think I should get over
+the day, when my sister said to Joe, “Clean plates,--cold.”
+
+I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my
+bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my soul.
+I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was gone.
+
+“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best
+grace--“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious
+present of Uncle Pumblechook’s!”
+
+Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!
+
+“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it’s a pie; a savory pork
+pie.”
+
+The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of
+having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said,--quite vivaciously,
+all things considered,--“Well, Mrs. Joe, we’ll do our best endeavors;
+let us have a cut at this same pie.”
+
+My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I
+saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the
+Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit of
+savory pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do
+no harm,” and I heard Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never
+been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
+merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that I
+could bear no more, and that I must run away. I released the leg of the
+table, and ran for my life.
+
+But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost
+into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair
+of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the but-ends of their
+loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise
+from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen
+empty-handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of
+“Gracious goodness gracious me, what’s gone--with the--pie!”
+
+The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring;
+at which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was
+the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
+company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his
+right hand, and his left on my shoulder.
+
+“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have
+mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver,” (which he hadn’t), “I
+am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”
+
+“And pray what might you want with him?” retorted my sister, quick to
+resent his being wanted at all.
+
+“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should
+reply, the honor and pleasure of his fine wife’s acquaintance; speaking
+for the king, I answer, a little job done.”
+
+This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
+Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”
+
+“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked
+out Joe with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find
+the lock of one of ‘em goes wrong, and the coupling don’t act pretty.
+As they are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over
+them?”
+
+Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
+necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer
+two hours than one. “Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
+blacksmith?” said the off-hand sergeant, “as it’s on his Majesty’s
+service. And if my men can bear a hand anywhere, they’ll make themselves
+useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping into the
+kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then
+they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands loosely clasped
+before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a belt or a
+pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out
+into the yard.
+
+All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I
+was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the
+handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the
+better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little
+more of my scattered wits.
+
+“Would you give me the time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to
+Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the
+inference that he was equal to the time.
+
+“It’s just gone half past two.”
+
+“That’s not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was
+forced to halt here nigh two hours, that’ll do. How far might you call
+yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”
+
+“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.
+
+“That’ll do. We begin to close in upon ‘em about dusk. A little before
+dusk, my orders are. That’ll do.”
+
+“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.
+
+“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They’re pretty well known to be out
+on the marshes still, and they won’t try to get clear of ‘em before
+dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”
+
+Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of
+me.
+
+“Well!” said the sergeant, “they’ll find themselves trapped in a circle,
+I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you’re ready,
+his Majesty the King is.”
+
+Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron
+on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its wooden
+windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the
+rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to
+hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.
+
+The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
+attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer
+from the cask for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass
+of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I’ll
+engage there’s no tar in that:” so, the sergeant thanked him and said
+that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take wine, if it
+was equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his Majesty’s
+health and compliments of the season, and took it all at a mouthful and
+smacked his lips.
+
+“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.
+
+“I’ll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that
+stuff’s of your providing.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”
+
+“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re
+a man that knows what’s what.”
+
+“D’ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have
+another glass!”
+
+“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the
+foot of yours,--the foot of yours to the top of mine,--Ring once, ring
+twice,--the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
+a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you
+are at the present moment of your life!”
+
+The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
+another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
+appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
+bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a
+gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the wine
+that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with the
+same liberality, when the first was gone.
+
+As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
+enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for
+a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
+themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened
+with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively
+anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
+seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke
+to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them,
+and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
+blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale
+afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have turned
+pale on their account, poor wretches.
+
+At last, Joe’s job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe
+got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us should
+go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook
+and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies’ society; but
+Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable,
+and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should have got leave
+to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe’s curiosity to know all about it and
+how it ended. As it was, she merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy
+back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look to me to put it
+together again.”
+
+The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
+Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
+sensible of that gentleman’s merits under arid conditions, as when
+something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in.
+Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and
+to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all out in
+the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I treasonably
+whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we shan’t find them.” and Joe whispered
+to me, “I’d give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip.”
+
+We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was
+cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming
+on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A
+few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came
+out. We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard.
+There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the sergeant’s
+hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the
+graves, and also examined the porch. They came in again without finding
+anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate
+at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us
+here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.
+
+Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
+thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
+hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should
+come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who
+had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
+imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the
+hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in
+treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?
+
+It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe’s
+back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a
+hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and
+to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a
+pretty wide line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
+the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
+Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it.
+Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the
+mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
+though all of a watery lead color.
+
+With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe’s broad shoulder, I
+looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I could
+hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his
+blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and
+could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
+start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a
+sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at
+us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet, stared
+angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except
+these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
+there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.
+
+The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we
+were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all
+stopped. For there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
+long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but
+it was long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised
+together,--if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.
+
+To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
+their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment’s listening,
+Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge)
+agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
+be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that his men
+should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the right
+(where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had to
+hold on tight to keep my seat.
+
+It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he
+spoke all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over gates,
+and splashing into dikes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared
+where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and
+more apparent that it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it
+seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped. When it broke
+out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate than ever, and we
+after them. After a while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one
+voice calling “Murder!” and another voice, “Convicts! Runaways! Guard!
+This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both voices would seem to be
+stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it had
+come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.
+
+The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two
+of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled
+when we all ran in.
+
+“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a
+ditch. “Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come
+asunder!”
+
+Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and
+blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to
+help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other
+one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but
+of course I knew them both directly.
+
+“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
+sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “I took him! I give him
+up to you! Mind that!”
+
+“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do you
+small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”
+
+“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more good
+than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He
+knows it. That’s enough for me.”
+
+The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
+bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
+He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
+separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
+falling.
+
+“Take notice, guard,--he tried to murder me,” were his first words.
+
+“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not
+do it? I took him, and giv’ him up; that’s what I done. I not only
+prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,--dragged
+him this far on his way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this
+villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
+him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
+him back!”
+
+The other one still gasped, “He tried--he tried-to--murder me.
+Bear--bear witness.”
+
+“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
+clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha’ got
+clear of these death-cold flats likewise--look at my leg: you won’t find
+much iron on it--if I hadn’t made the discovery that he was here. Let
+him go free? Let him profit by the means as I found out? Let him make a
+tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at
+the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his
+manacled hands, “I’d have held to him with that grip, that you should
+have been safe to find him in my hold.”
+
+The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
+companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
+man if you had not come up.”
+
+“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and
+he’ll die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it written there? Let him turn
+those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”
+
+The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not, however,
+collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set expression, looked
+at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but
+certainly did not look at the speaker.
+
+“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
+Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That’s how he looked
+when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”
+
+The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
+restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment on
+the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
+a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
+became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
+but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said the
+other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one
+could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon his
+lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.
+
+“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”
+
+As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down
+on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time,
+and saw me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the ditch
+when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when
+he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had
+been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
+innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
+my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
+all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for
+a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
+been more attentive.
+
+The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
+torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
+almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
+very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
+a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches kindled
+at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite
+bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”
+
+We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
+sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
+on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
+Don’t straggle, my man. Close up here.”
+
+The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard.
+I had hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr.
+Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so
+we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly
+on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there where a dike
+came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate. When
+I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us. The
+torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and
+I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see nothing
+else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their
+pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they
+limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
+of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
+had to halt while they rested.
+
+After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
+and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
+and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
+a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and
+a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
+overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen
+soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their
+great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads
+and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some
+kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I
+call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
+first.
+
+My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
+hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
+his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
+he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
+sergeant, and remarked,--
+
+“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
+persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”
+
+“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
+looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
+here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
+before it’s done with, you know.”
+
+“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t
+starve; at least I can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
+yonder,--where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”
+
+“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.
+
+“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”
+
+“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.
+
+“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.
+
+“It was some broken wittles--that’s what it was--and a dram of liquor,
+and a pie.”
+
+“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
+the sergeant, confidentially.
+
+“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know, Pip?”
+
+“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
+without the least glance at me,--“so you’re the blacksmith, are you?
+Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”
+
+“God knows you’re welcome to it,--so far as it was ever mine,” returned
+Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you have
+done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable
+fellow-creatur.--Would us, Pip?”
+
+The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat
+again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were
+ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes
+and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of
+convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested
+in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word,
+except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way,
+you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the
+torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of
+the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by
+massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be
+ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw
+him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were
+flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
+him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
+unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope
+it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.
+
+I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
+to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But
+I loved Joe,--perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
+because the dear fellow let me love him,--and, as to him, my inner self
+was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
+I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the
+whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that
+if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe’s
+confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night
+staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my
+tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never
+afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
+without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I
+never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday’s
+meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without thinking that he
+was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and
+at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his
+beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected tar in it,
+would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly
+to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing
+what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at
+that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this
+manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of
+action for myself.
+
+As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
+me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
+journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad
+temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
+excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
+his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such
+an insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
+kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
+hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.
+
+By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
+drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through having
+been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of
+tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the
+shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such
+a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them about the
+convict’s confession, and all the visitors suggesting different ways
+by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook made out, after
+carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got upon the roof of
+the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let
+himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut
+into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his
+own chaise-cart--over everybody--it was agreed that it must be so. Mr.
+Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with the feeble malice of a
+tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously
+set at naught,--not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood
+with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out: which was not
+calculated to inspire confidence.
+
+This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
+slumberous offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
+with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
+dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
+I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
+long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
+saving on exceptional occasions.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
+tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
+construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
+read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s
+exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
+had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
+the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions
+of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
+all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
+declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
+ laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
+house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
+by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.
+
+When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could
+assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or
+(as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about the
+forge, but if any neighbor happened to want an extra boy to frighten
+birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favored with the
+employment. In order, however, that our superior position might not be
+compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf,
+into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were
+dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed
+eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I
+had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.
+
+Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
+to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
+infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
+the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving
+opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr.
+Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to overhear him
+reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally
+bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined”
+ the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn
+up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over
+the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins’s Ode on
+the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge
+throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the
+War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then,
+as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions,
+and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of
+both gentlemen.
+
+Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
+kept in the same room--a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
+she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little
+greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue
+of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transactions.
+Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I confess myself
+quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
+to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been
+brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of
+her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always
+wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at
+heel. This description must be received with a week-day limitation. On
+Sundays, she went to church elaborated.
+
+Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
+Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
+a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
+letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
+seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
+baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
+read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.
+
+One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
+great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have
+been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long
+time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the
+hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print
+and smear this epistle:--
+
+“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
+U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
+BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”
+
+There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
+letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
+this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
+received it as a miracle of erudition.
+
+“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
+scholar you are! An’t you?”
+
+“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it; with
+a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.
+
+“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and
+a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”
+
+I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
+monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
+accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
+his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
+embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
+should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
+rest, Jo.”
+
+“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching eye,
+“One, two, three. Why, here’s three Js, and three Os, and three J-O,
+Joes in it, Pip!”
+
+I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the whole
+letter.
+
+“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”
+
+“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.
+
+“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.
+
+“But supposing you did?”
+
+“It can’t be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m uncommon fond of reading,
+too.”
+
+“Are you, Joe?”
+
+“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
+sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued,
+after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O, and
+says you, ‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting reading is!”
+
+I derived from this, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its
+infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,--
+
+“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
+
+“No, Pip.”
+
+“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
+
+“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to
+his usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
+between the lower bars; “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
+to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at
+my mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did,
+indeed, ‘xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only
+to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his
+anwil.--You’re a listening and understanding, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+“‘Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
+times; and then my mother she’d go out to work, and she’d say, “Joe,”
+ she’d say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
+she’d put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
+he couldn’t abear to be without us. So, he’d come with a most tremenjous
+crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where we was, that
+they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us and to give us
+up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us. Which, you see,
+Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the fire, and
+looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”
+
+“Certainly, poor Joe!”
+
+“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
+poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
+equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart,
+don’t you see?”
+
+I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.
+
+“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the
+pot won’t bile, don’t you know?”
+
+I saw that, and said so.
+
+“‘Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so
+I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he
+would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure you, Pip.
+In time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
+purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
+tombstone that, Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember reader he
+were that good in his heart.”
+
+Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
+perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.
+
+“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
+striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so much
+surprised in all my life,--couldn’t credit my own ed,--to tell you the
+truth, hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were
+my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs money, cut
+it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention
+bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for my mother.
+She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren’t long of following,
+poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”
+
+Joe’s blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first one of them, and
+then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the
+round knob on the top of the poker.
+
+“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
+acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,”--Joe looked firmly at me as
+if he knew I was not going to agree with him;--“your sister is a fine
+figure of a woman.”
+
+I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.
+
+“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world’s opinions, on that
+subject may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the
+poker after every word following, “a-fine-figure--of--a--woman!”
+
+I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so,
+Joe.”
+
+“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “I am glad I think so, Pip. A
+little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it
+signify to Me?”
+
+I sagaciously observed, if it didn’t signify to him, to whom did it
+signify?
+
+“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That’s it. You’re right, old chap! When I
+got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing
+you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said,
+along with all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance
+expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed, “if you could have
+been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you’d have
+formed the most contemptible opinion of yourself!”
+
+Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”
+
+“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When
+I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at
+such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to
+her, ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,’
+I said to your sister, ‘there’s room for him at the forge!’”
+
+I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck:
+who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends;
+an’t us, Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”
+
+When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:--
+
+“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That’s about where it lights; here
+we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell
+you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn’t see
+too much of what we’re up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly.
+And why on the sly? I’ll tell you why, Pip.”
+
+He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have
+proceeded in his demonstration.
+
+“Your sister is given to government.”
+
+“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea
+(and I am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in a favor
+of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.
+
+“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of
+you and myself.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“And she an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe
+continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a
+scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you see?”
+
+I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why--”
+ when Joe stopped me.
+
+“Stay a bit. I know what you’re a going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I don’t
+deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I don’t
+deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us
+heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip,” Joe
+sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, “candor compels fur
+to admit that she is a Buster.”
+
+Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital
+Bs.
+
+“Why don’t I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker in to his left hand, that he might
+feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that
+placid occupation; “your sister’s a master-mind. A master-mind.”
+
+“What’s that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But
+Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely
+stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look,
+“Her.”
+
+“And I ain’t a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look,
+and got back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip,--and this I want to
+say very serious to you, old chap,--I see so much in my poor mother,
+of a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never
+getting no peace in her mortal days, that I’m dead afeerd of going wrong
+in the way of not doing what’s right by a woman, and I’d fur rather
+of the two go wrong the t’other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced
+myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn’t
+no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself;
+but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you’ll
+overlook shortcomings.”
+
+Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that
+night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards
+at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had
+a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my
+heart.
+
+“However,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here’s the
+Dutch-clock a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of ‘em,
+and she’s not come home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook’s mare mayn’t have
+set a forefoot on a piece o’ ice, and gone down.”
+
+Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days,
+to assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a
+woman’s judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no
+confidences in his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe
+was out on one of these expeditions.
+
+Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to
+listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew
+keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of
+lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and
+considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them
+as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering
+multitude.
+
+“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”
+
+The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as she
+came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out, ready
+for Mrs. Joe’s alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might see a
+bright window, and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might
+be out of its place. When we had completed these preparations, they
+drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle
+Pumblechook was soon down too, covering the mare with a cloth, and we
+were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much cold air in with us that
+it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.
+
+“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
+throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings,
+“if this boy ain’t grateful this night, he never will be!”
+
+I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
+uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.
+
+“It’s only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won’t be Pompeyed. But
+I have my fears.”
+
+“She ain’t in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows better.”
+
+She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
+“She?” Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and eyebrows,
+“She?” My sister catching him in the act, he drew the back of his hand
+across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and
+looked at her.
+
+“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at?
+Is the house afire?”
+
+“--Which some individual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned--she.”
+
+“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss
+Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you’ll go so far as that.”
+
+“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.
+
+“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister.
+
+“She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he’s going. And
+he had better play there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an
+encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, “or I’ll work him.”
+
+I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,--everybody for miles round had
+heard of Miss Havisham up town,--as an immensely rich and grim lady who
+lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who
+led a life of seclusion.
+
+“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she come to know
+Pip!”
+
+“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”
+
+“--Which some individual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that
+she wanted him to go and play there.”
+
+“And couldn’t she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and
+play there? Isn’t it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be
+a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes--we won’t say quarterly
+or half-yearly, for that would be requiring too much of you--but
+sometimes--go there to pay his rent? And couldn’t she then ask Uncle
+Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn’t Uncle
+Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for us--though you
+may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the deepest reproach, as if
+he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention this boy, standing
+Prancing here”--which I solemnly declare I was not doing--“that I have
+for ever been a willing slave to?”
+
+“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed! Good
+indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”
+
+“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
+apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose,
+“you do not yet--though you may not think it--know the case. You may
+consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that
+Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell, this
+boy’s fortune may be made by his going to Miss Havisham’s, has offered
+to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to keep
+him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss Havisham’s
+to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my sister, casting off her
+bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs,
+with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door,
+and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the
+sole of his foot!”
+
+With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was
+squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of
+water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped,
+and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I
+may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than
+any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing
+unsympathetically over the human countenance.)
+
+When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
+stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
+trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered
+over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the
+Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been
+dying to make all along: “Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
+especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”
+
+“Good-bye, Joe!”
+
+“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”
+
+I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
+with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart.
+But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the
+questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s, and what
+on earth I was expected to play at.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Mr. Pumblechook’s premises in the High Street of the market town,
+were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a
+cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a
+very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and
+I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the
+tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
+ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.
+
+It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
+speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in
+an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the
+bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
+eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity
+between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did
+his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavor about the
+corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor
+about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew
+which was which. The same opportunity served me for noticing that Mr.
+Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the
+street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by keeping
+his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his
+hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded
+his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at his door and yawned at
+the chemist. The watchmaker, always poring over a little desk with
+a magnifying-glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group of
+smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window,
+seemed to be about the only person in the High Street whose trade
+engaged his attention.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o’clock in the parlor behind
+the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread
+and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I considered Mr.
+Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed by my sister’s
+idea that a mortifying and penitential character ought to be imparted
+to my diet,--besides giving me as much crumb as possible in combination
+with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm water into
+my milk that it would have been more candid to have left the milk out
+altogether,--his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On
+my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously, “Seven times
+nine, boy?” And how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in
+a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had
+swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
+breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And
+ten?” And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much
+as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat
+at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I
+may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.
+
+For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o’clock came and we started
+for Miss Havisham’s; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the
+manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady’s roof. Within
+a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old
+brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the
+windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were
+rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so
+we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come
+to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr.
+Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to hear him), and
+saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing
+was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
+time.
+
+A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which my
+conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,” and
+the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard,
+with keys in her hand.
+
+“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”
+
+“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and
+seemed very proud; “come in, Pip.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.
+
+“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”
+
+“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook,
+discomfited.
+
+“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don’t.”
+
+She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
+Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
+protest. But he eyed me severely,--as if I had done anything to
+him!--and departed with the words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let
+your behavior here be a credit unto them which brought you up by hand!”
+ I was not free from apprehension that he would come back to propound
+through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn’t.
+
+My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the courtyard.
+It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The
+brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it, and the
+wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood
+open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused.
+The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and
+it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the
+brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.
+
+She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt
+all the strong beer that’s brewed there now, boy.”
+
+“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.
+
+“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy;
+don’t you think so?”
+
+“It looks like it, miss.”
+
+“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that’s all done with,
+and the place will stand as idle as it is till it falls. As to strong
+beer, there’s enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor
+House.”
+
+“Is that the name of this house, miss?”
+
+“One of its names, boy.”
+
+“It has more than one, then, miss?”
+
+“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or
+Hebrew, or all three--or all one to me--for enough.”
+
+“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”
+
+“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it
+was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They
+must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t
+loiter, boy.”
+
+Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was
+far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much
+older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed;
+and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a
+queen.
+
+We went into the house by a side door, the great front entrance had two
+chains across it outside,--and the first thing I noticed was, that the
+passages were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there.
+She took it up, and we went through more passages and up a staircase,
+and still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.
+
+At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”
+
+I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”
+
+To this she returned: “Don’t be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And
+scornfully walked away, and--what was worse--took the candle with her.
+
+This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only
+thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told
+from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty
+large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to
+be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture,
+though much of it was of forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But
+prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass, and that
+I made out at first sight to be a fine lady’s dressing-table.
+
+Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no
+fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an
+elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the
+strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
+
+She was dressed in rich materials,--satins, and lace, and silks,--all
+of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
+from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
+white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and
+some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
+than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.
+She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,--the
+other was on the table near her hand,--her veil was but half arranged,
+her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
+with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and
+some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
+looking-glass.
+
+It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though
+I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I
+saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been
+white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw
+that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and
+like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her
+sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure
+of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had
+shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly
+waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
+lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches
+to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of
+a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
+have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if
+I could.
+
+“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.
+
+“Pip, ma’am.”
+
+“Pip?”
+
+“Mr. Pumblechook’s boy, ma’am. Come--to play.”
+
+“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”
+
+It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of
+the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped
+at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at
+twenty minutes to nine.
+
+“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has
+never seen the sun since you were born?”
+
+I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
+comprehended in the answer “No.”
+
+“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon
+the other, on her left side.
+
+“Yes, ma’am.” (It made me think of the young man.)
+
+“What do I touch?”
+
+“Your heart.”
+
+“Broken!”
+
+She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and
+with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards she kept
+her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they
+were heavy.
+
+“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done
+with men and women. Play.”
+
+I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she
+could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide
+world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.
+
+“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy
+that I want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement
+of the fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”
+
+For a moment, with the fear of my sister’s working me before my eyes, I
+had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character
+of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-cart. But I felt myself so unequal to the
+performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in
+what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she said, when
+we had taken a good look at each other,--
+
+“Are you sullen and obstinate?”
+
+“No, ma’am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can’t play just
+now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
+I would do it if I could; but it’s so new here, and so strange, and so
+fine,--and melancholy--.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or
+had already said it, and we took another look at each other.
+
+Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
+dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the
+looking-glass.
+
+“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
+familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”
+
+As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she was
+still talking to herself, and kept quiet.
+
+“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
+Call Estella. At the door.”
+
+To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
+bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive,
+and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost
+as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and her light came
+along the dark passage like a star.
+
+Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
+table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
+pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
+well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”
+
+“With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!”
+
+I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,--only it seemed so
+unlikely,--“Well? You can break his heart.”
+
+“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
+disdain.
+
+“Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss.”
+
+“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.
+
+It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
+stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
+Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
+taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table
+again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never
+been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent,
+and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been
+trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still
+of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on
+the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long
+veil so like a shroud.
+
+So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
+trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing
+then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in
+ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly
+seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if
+the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.
+
+“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before
+our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick
+boots!”
+
+I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began
+to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
+strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
+
+She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
+knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
+a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.
+
+“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
+on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
+do you think of her?”
+
+“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.
+
+“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.
+
+“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think she is very pretty.”
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a look
+of supreme aversion.)
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think I should like to go home.”
+
+“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”
+
+“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should like
+to go home now.”
+
+“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”
+
+Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
+sure that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a
+watchful and brooding expression,--most likely when all the things about
+her had become transfixed,--and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
+it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
+had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
+altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
+within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.
+
+I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
+threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
+despised them for having been won of me.
+
+“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”
+
+I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
+checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
+right hand.
+
+“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
+weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am.”
+
+“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam
+and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”
+
+I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
+stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the
+side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
+necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,
+and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
+many hours.
+
+“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
+closed the door.
+
+I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
+coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
+not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled
+me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
+taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
+knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then
+I should have been so too.
+
+She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
+put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread
+and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
+disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I
+cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name
+was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
+girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them.
+This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a
+contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure
+that I was so wounded--and left me.
+
+But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
+in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
+sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
+As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
+bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that
+needed counteraction.
+
+My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
+which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
+nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
+only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child
+is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
+hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
+myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
+injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
+sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
+cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her
+no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces,
+fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed
+this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
+unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid
+and very sensitive.
+
+I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
+brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
+face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
+were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
+in spirits to look about me.
+
+To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
+brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
+wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
+had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons
+in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in
+the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.
+All the uses and scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its
+last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks,
+which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about
+them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that
+was gone,--and in this respect I remember those recluses as being like
+most others.
+
+Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
+wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
+to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
+house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
+a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked
+there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But she
+seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation presented
+by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw her walking on them at
+the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me, and held her
+pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked round,
+and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery itself,--by which
+I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer,
+and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
+and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about
+me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light
+iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going
+out into the sky.
+
+It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
+to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
+stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes--a little dimmed by
+looking up at the frosty light--towards a great wooden beam in a low
+nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
+hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but
+one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
+trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
+Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
+she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure,
+and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment
+before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror
+was greatest of all when I found no figure there.
+
+Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of
+people passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving
+influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought
+me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon
+as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let
+me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I
+thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.
+
+She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that
+my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the
+gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her,
+when she touched me with a taunting hand.
+
+“Why don’t you cry?”
+
+“Because I don’t want to.”
+
+“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and
+you are near crying again now.”
+
+She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.
+I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to find
+him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was
+wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to
+our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
+revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands were coarse;
+that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit
+of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had
+considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived
+bad way.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
+Havisham’s, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
+getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small
+of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen
+wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient length.
+
+If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
+young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
+in mine,--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason
+to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,--it is the key to many
+reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham’s as my
+eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt
+convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and although
+she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression
+that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging
+her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before the
+contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could,
+and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.
+
+The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by
+a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came
+gaping over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged
+to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth
+open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat heaving
+with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence.
+
+“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the
+chair of honor by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”
+
+I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.
+
+“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer. Tell
+us what you mean by pretty well, boy?”
+
+Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
+perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
+obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered
+as if I had discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”
+
+My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me,--I
+had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge,--when Mr.
+Pumblechook interposed with “No! Don’t lose your temper. Leave this
+lad to me, ma’am; leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me
+towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said,--
+
+“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?”
+
+I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and
+finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could--which was
+somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my
+pence-table from “twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence
+make three and fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
+done for me, “Now! How much is forty-three pence?” To which I replied,
+after a long interval of reflection, “I don’t know.” And I was so
+aggravated that I almost doubt if I did know.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me,
+and said, “Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for
+instance?”
+
+“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was
+highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and
+brought him to a dead stop.
+
+“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when
+he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the
+screw.
+
+“Very tall and dark,” I told him.
+
+“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he had
+never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.
+
+“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. (“This is the way to have him!
+We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)
+
+“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always; you
+know so well how to deal with him.”
+
+“Now, boy! What was she a doing of, when you went in today?” asked Mr.
+Pumblechook.
+
+“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another--as they well
+might--and both repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”
+
+“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella--that’s her niece, I think--handed her
+in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had
+cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine,
+because she told me to.”
+
+“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.
+
+“Four dogs,” said I.
+
+“Large or small?”
+
+“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver
+basket.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
+amazement. I was perfectly frantic,--a reckless witness under the
+torture,--and would have told them anything.
+
+“Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.
+
+“In Miss Havisham’s room.” They stared again. “But there weren’t any
+horses to it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting
+four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of
+harnessing.
+
+“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”
+
+“I’ll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it’s a
+sedan-chair. She’s flighty, you know,--very flighty,--quite flighty
+enough to pass her days in a sedan-chair.”
+
+“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.
+
+“How could I,” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see
+her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”
+
+“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”
+
+“Why, don’t you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have
+been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the door
+has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don’t say you don’t
+know that, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play
+at, boy?”
+
+“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself
+with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.)
+
+“Flags!” echoed my sister.
+
+“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and
+Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out
+at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”
+
+“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”
+
+“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it,--and jam,--and
+pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up
+with candles.”
+
+“That’s true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That’s the
+state of the case, for that much I’ve seen myself.” And then they
+both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my
+countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers
+with my right hand.
+
+If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have
+betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that
+there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement
+but for my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear
+in the brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the
+marvels I had already presented for their consideration, that I escaped.
+The subject still held them when Joe came in from his work to have a cup
+of tea. To whom my sister, more for the relief of her own mind than for
+the gratification of his, related my pretended experiences.
+
+Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
+kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only as
+regarded him,--not in the least as regarded the other two. Towards
+Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster, while they sat
+debating what results would come to me from Miss Havisham’s acquaintance
+and favor. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham would “do something”
+ for me; their doubts related to the form that something would take.
+My sister stood out for “property.” Mr. Pumblechook was in favor of a
+handsome premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel trade,--say,
+the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into the deepest
+disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I might only
+be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets.
+“If a fool’s head can’t express better opinions than that,” said my
+sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it.”
+ So he went.
+
+After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing up,
+I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had done for
+the night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to
+tell you something.”
+
+“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge.
+“Then tell us. What is it, Pip?”
+
+“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve, and twisting
+it between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss
+Havisham’s?”
+
+“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”
+
+“It’s a terrible thing, Joe; it ain’t true.”
+
+“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
+amazement. “You don’t mean to say it’s--”
+
+“Yes I do; it’s lies, Joe.”
+
+“But not all of it? Why sure you don’t mean to say, Pip, that there was
+no black welwet co--eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least
+there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there
+warn’t no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?”
+
+“No, Joe.”
+
+“A dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”
+
+“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”
+
+As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay.
+“Pip, old chap! This won’t do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect to
+go to?”
+
+“It’s terrible, Joe; ain’t it?”
+
+“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”
+
+“I don’t know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt
+sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head;
+“but I wish you hadn’t taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I
+wish my boots weren’t so thick nor my hands so coarse.”
+
+And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t been
+able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
+me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s
+who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I
+knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies
+had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how.
+
+This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
+with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
+metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.
+
+“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
+rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t
+ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
+the same. Don’t you tell no more of ‘em, Pip. That ain’t the way to get
+out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make
+it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon
+small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”
+
+“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”
+
+“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I’ve
+seen letters--Ah! and from gentlefolks!--that I’ll swear weren’t wrote
+in print,” said Joe.
+
+“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s only
+that.”
+
+“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common
+scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
+his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts
+of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
+Prince, with the alphabet.--Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
+that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
+And I know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done it.”
+
+There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
+me.
+
+“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
+reflectively, “mightn’t be the better of continuing for to keep
+company with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
+ones,--which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”
+
+“No, Joe.”
+
+“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
+mightn’t be, is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without putting
+your sister on the Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be thought of as
+being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
+true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can’t get to
+be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through
+going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ‘em, Pip, and live well and die
+happy.”
+
+“You are not angry with me, Joe?”
+
+“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay
+of a stunning and outdacious sort,--alluding to them which bordered on
+weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,--a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
+their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
+That’s all, old chap, and don’t never do it no more.”
+
+When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
+Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
+unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
+Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
+how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
+in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
+Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the
+level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used to
+do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks or
+months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of
+remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.
+
+That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
+is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
+and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
+this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold,
+of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
+formation of the first link on one memorable day.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
+that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
+get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
+conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s
+at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life,
+and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she would impart
+all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging of girls,
+immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her promise
+within five minutes.
+
+The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
+may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples
+and put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
+collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
+a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the
+pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to
+hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and
+a little spelling,--that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
+volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of
+coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
+entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject
+of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon
+whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at
+them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been
+unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed
+at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with,
+speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the
+insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was
+usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory
+students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a
+page, and then we all read aloud what we could,--or what we couldn’t--in
+a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice,
+and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we
+were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time,
+it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who staggered at a boy
+fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate
+the Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
+intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no prohibition
+against any pupil’s entertaining himself with a slate or even with the
+ink (when there was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch
+of study in the winter season, on account of the little general shop
+in which the classes were holden--and which was also Mr. Wopsle’s
+great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber--being but faintly illuminated
+through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.
+
+It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
+these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
+very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
+information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist
+sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she
+had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed,
+until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.
+
+Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
+liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
+from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
+evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
+Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.
+
+There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
+scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
+be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
+had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
+country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
+to account.
+
+It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
+at these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
+merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
+end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire,
+and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
+stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
+moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.
+
+He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
+all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
+taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
+mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
+and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
+nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
+down there.
+
+But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
+resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
+for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
+and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
+when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg--in a very odd way, as
+it struck me.
+
+“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
+blacksmith.”
+
+“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.
+
+“What’ll you drink, Mr.--? You didn’t mention your name, by the bye.”
+
+Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll you
+drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of
+drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”
+
+“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
+Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”
+
+“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”
+
+“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
+sentiment.”
+
+“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.
+
+“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
+round!”
+
+“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
+“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
+church.”
+
+“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
+lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”
+
+“That’s it,” said Joe.
+
+The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put
+his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
+broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his
+head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he looked
+at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
+half-laugh, come into his face.
+
+“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
+solitary country towards the river.”
+
+“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.
+
+“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
+vagrants of any sort, out there?”
+
+“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t
+find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”
+
+Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
+but not warmly.
+
+“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.
+
+“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
+we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+The stranger looked at me again,--still cocking his eye, as if he were
+expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,--and said, “He’s a
+likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”
+
+“Pip,” said Joe.
+
+“Christened Pip?”
+
+“No, not christened Pip.”
+
+“Surname Pip?”
+
+“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
+infant, and is called by.”
+
+“Son of yours?”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
+anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
+the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
+discussed over pipes,--“well--no. No, he ain’t.”
+
+“Nevvy?” said the strange man.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
+is not--no, not to deceive you, he is not--my nevvy.”
+
+“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
+to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
+
+Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,
+having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man
+might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having
+his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling
+passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite
+enough to account for it when he added, “--as the poet says.”
+
+And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered
+it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into
+my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited
+at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory
+process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I
+was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family
+circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to
+patronize me.
+
+All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
+me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
+down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
+until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
+shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.
+
+It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
+pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me,
+and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and
+he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.
+
+He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
+he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be
+Joe’s file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
+instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his
+settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about
+turnips.
+
+There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
+before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which
+stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays
+than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water running out
+together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.
+
+“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I’ve
+got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy
+shall have it.”
+
+He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
+crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”
+
+I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
+and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle
+good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his
+aiming eye,--no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done
+with an eye by hiding it.
+
+On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk must
+have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
+the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
+open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in
+a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
+acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
+
+My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
+the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell
+her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe
+triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s look at
+it.”
+
+I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s
+this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
+paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”
+
+Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have
+been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in
+the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly
+Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down
+on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure
+that the man would not be there.
+
+Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
+Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
+Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
+some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
+the state parlor. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many
+a night and day.
+
+I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
+strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily
+coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with
+convicts,--a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten.
+I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least
+expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by
+thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw
+the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I
+screamed myself awake.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating
+ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting
+me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
+where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
+candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
+saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
+part of the house.
+
+The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
+basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
+however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
+opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in
+a small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
+detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
+manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
+outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room, and
+like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
+
+We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
+low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
+the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
+stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
+crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind,
+looking out.
+
+It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
+neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
+that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
+growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different color, as if
+that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
+was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
+some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
+but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden,
+and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window,
+as if it pelted me for coming there.
+
+I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
+its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
+except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
+all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.
+
+There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been
+standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that
+they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not
+to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission
+that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady
+and humbug.
+
+They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure,
+and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
+repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
+me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I found
+when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features. Indeed, when
+I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had any features
+at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her face.
+
+“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
+sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”
+
+“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said
+the gentleman; “far more natural.”
+
+“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbor.”
+
+“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
+neighbor, who is?”
+
+Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
+“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good
+idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
+emphatically, “Very true!”
+
+“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking
+at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone believe
+that when Tom’s wife died, he actually could not be induced to see the
+importance of the children’s having the deepest of trimmings to their
+mourning? ‘Good Lord!’ says he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so long
+as the poor bereaved little things are in black?’ So like Matthew! The
+idea!”
+
+“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
+forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
+will have, any sense of the proprieties.”
+
+“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,--“I was obliged to be firm. I
+said, ‘It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that,
+without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
+breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
+in his violent way, and said, with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank
+Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
+went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”
+
+“He paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.
+
+“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
+Camilla. “I bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
+when I wake up in the night.”
+
+The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
+call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the conversation
+and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they
+all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out, I heard
+Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla add, with
+indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-de-a!”
+
+As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped
+all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with
+her face quite close to mine,--
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.
+
+She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.
+
+“Am I pretty?”
+
+“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”
+
+“Am I insulting?”
+
+“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.
+
+“Not so much so?”
+
+“No.”
+
+She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with
+such force as she had, when I answered it.
+
+“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
+now?”
+
+“I shall not tell you.”
+
+“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”
+
+“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”
+
+“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”
+
+“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as
+false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her
+then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.
+
+We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
+up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.
+
+“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.
+
+“A boy,” said Estella.
+
+He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
+exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
+in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
+light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head, and
+had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling.
+His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and
+suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and strong black dots where his
+beard and whiskers would have been if he had let them. He was nothing
+to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be
+anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing
+him well.
+
+“Boy of the neighborhood? Hey?” said he.
+
+“Yes, sir,” said I.
+
+“How do you come here?”
+
+“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.
+
+“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
+you’re a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
+great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”
+
+With those words, he released me--which I was glad of, for his hand
+smelt of scented soap--and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
+he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor, or he
+would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much time
+to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room, where
+she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me
+standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her
+eyes upon me from the dressing-table.
+
+“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have worn
+away, have they?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. To-day is--”
+
+“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
+don’t want to know. Are you ready to play?”
+
+I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”
+
+“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.
+
+“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”
+
+“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
+impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”
+
+I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
+find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.
+
+“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind
+me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”
+
+I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
+From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an
+airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
+the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
+to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder
+than the clearer air,--like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches
+of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or it
+would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was
+spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible
+thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The
+most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it,
+as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
+stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the
+middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its
+form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow
+expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black
+fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home
+to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest
+public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
+
+I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
+occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took
+no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous
+elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not
+on terms with one another.
+
+These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
+them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
+In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and
+she looked like the Witch of the place.
+
+“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I
+will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”
+
+With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
+there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork
+at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
+
+“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
+stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”
+
+“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”
+
+“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”
+
+She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
+leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
+Walk me, walk me!”
+
+I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
+Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
+she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
+been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
+Pumblechook’s chaise-cart.
+
+She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
+ Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
+twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
+believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
+while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and
+roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
+appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
+and round the room.
+
+If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
+have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
+three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know
+what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss
+Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,--with a shame-faced
+consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.
+
+“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”
+
+“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”
+
+Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
+murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
+soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”
+
+“And how are you?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
+Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
+Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
+obnoxious to Camilla.
+
+“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
+expected.”
+
+“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
+sharpness.
+
+“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a
+display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the
+night than I am quite equal to.”
+
+“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.
+
+“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
+hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
+witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
+Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
+and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
+anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
+I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure
+I wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night--The
+idea!” Here, a burst of tears.
+
+The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
+him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point,
+and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it
+is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to
+the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”
+
+“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
+once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
+person, my dear.”
+
+Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
+old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells,
+and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this
+position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”
+
+“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.
+
+“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.
+
+“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
+rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! It’s a weakness
+to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be
+much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition
+if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to
+know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
+feeling.
+
+Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
+round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
+visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.
+
+“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
+never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
+with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my head
+over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where--”
+
+(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)
+
+“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
+Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”
+
+“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.
+
+“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
+personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
+thank you, my love?”
+
+“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
+Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
+is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
+inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
+tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
+supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,--and now to be told--”
+ Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical
+as to the formation of new combinations there.
+
+When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
+herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
+influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.
+
+“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly,
+“when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,--there,” striking
+the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your
+husband’s there! And Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there! Now
+you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me.
+And now go!”
+
+At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in
+a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.
+
+“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply
+and depart. It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and
+duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy
+satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have
+that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a
+display of my feelings, but it’s very hard to be told one wants to feast
+on one’s relations,--as if one was a Giant,--and to be told to go. The
+bare idea!”
+
+Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving
+bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I
+supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of
+view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah
+Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was
+too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful
+slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah
+Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss
+Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell
+countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.
+
+While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked
+with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she
+stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it
+some seconds,--
+
+“This is my birthday, Pip.”
+
+I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.
+
+“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here
+just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they
+dare not refer to it.”
+
+Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.
+
+“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
+decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the
+table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away
+together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of
+mice have gnawed at me.”
+
+She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking
+at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the
+once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state
+to crumble under a touch.
+
+“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when
+they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table,--which shall
+be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him,--so much the
+better if it is done on this day!”
+
+She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure
+lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too remained
+quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time. In
+the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in its
+remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that Estella and I might
+presently begin to decay.
+
+At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
+instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have
+you not begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as
+before; I was beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham
+watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella’s beauty, and
+made me notice it the more by trying her jewels on Estella’s breast and
+hair.
+
+Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before, except that she
+did not condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games,
+a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard
+to be fed in the former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left to
+wander about as I liked.
+
+It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which
+I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last
+occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I
+saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let
+the visitors out,--for she had returned with the keys in her hand,--I
+strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it. It was quite a
+wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it,
+which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of
+weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy
+offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.
+
+When I had exhausted the garden and a greenhouse with nothing in it but
+a fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal
+corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never questioning for
+a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in at another window,
+and found myself, to my great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a
+pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.
+
+This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside me.
+He had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him, and I
+now saw that he was inky.
+
+“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”
+
+Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to
+be best answered by itself, I said, “Halloa!” politely omitting young
+fellow.
+
+“Who let you in?” said he.
+
+“Miss Estella.”
+
+“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”
+
+“Miss Estella.”
+
+“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.
+
+What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question
+since; but what else could I do? His manner was so final, and I was
+so astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a
+spell.
+
+“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone many
+paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!”
+ In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one
+another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair,
+slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach.
+
+The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
+unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
+particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit out
+at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, “Aha! Would you?”
+ and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled
+within my limited experience.
+
+“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to
+his right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to
+his left. “Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!” Here,
+he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I
+looked helplessly at him.
+
+I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but I felt
+morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have
+had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to
+consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I
+followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by
+the junction of two walls and screened by some rubbish. On his asking me
+if I was satisfied with the ground, and on my replying Yes, he begged my
+leave to absent himself for a moment, and quickly returned with a bottle
+of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for both,” he said,
+placing these against the wall. And then fell to pulling off, not
+only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once
+light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty.
+
+Although he did not look very healthy,--having pimples on his face, and
+a breaking out at his mouth,--these dreadful preparations quite appalled
+me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he
+had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For
+the rest, he was a young gentleman in a gray suit (when not denuded
+for battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels considerably in
+advance of the rest of him as to development.
+
+My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
+demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were
+minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life,
+as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his
+back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly
+fore-shortened.
+
+But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with
+a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
+surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again,
+looking up at me out of a black eye.
+
+His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
+strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down;
+but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out
+of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself
+according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made
+me believe he really was going to do for me at last. He got heavily
+bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I
+hit him; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he got
+a bad fall with the back of his head against the wall. Even after that
+crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and round confusedly a
+few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his knees to his
+sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, “That means you
+have won.”
+
+He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the
+contest, I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go
+so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing as a species of
+savage young wolf or other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly
+wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?”
+ and he said “No thankee,” and I said “Good afternoon,” and he said “Same
+to you.”
+
+When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the keys.
+But she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her
+waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something
+had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too,
+she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me.
+
+“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”
+
+I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone
+through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was
+given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and
+that it was worth nothing.
+
+What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with
+the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the light
+on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming against
+a black night-sky, and Joe’s furnace was flinging a path of fire across
+the road.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. The
+more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman on
+his back in various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the
+more certain it appeared that something would be done to me. I felt that
+the pale young gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law would
+avenge it. Without having any definite idea of the penalties I had
+incurred, it was clear to me that village boys could not go stalking
+about the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and pitching into
+the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to severe
+punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home, and looked out at
+the kitchen door with the greatest caution and trepidation before going
+on an errand, lest the officers of the County Jail should pounce upon
+me. The pale young gentleman’s nose had stained my trousers, and I tried
+to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of night. I had cut
+my knuckles against the pale young gentleman’s teeth, and I twisted my
+imagination into a thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways of
+accounting for that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before
+the Judges.
+
+When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
+violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of Justice,
+specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the
+gate;--whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for
+an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers,
+draw a pistol, and shoot me dead:--whether suborned boys--a numerous
+band of mercenaries--might be engaged to fall upon me in the brewery,
+and cuff me until I was no more;--it was high testimony to my confidence
+in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I never imagined him
+accessory to these retaliations; they always came into my mind as the
+acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his
+visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.
+
+However, go to Miss Havisham’s I must, and go I did. And behold! nothing
+came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way, and no pale
+young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I found the same
+gate open, and I explored the garden, and even looked in at the windows
+of the detached house; but my view was suddenly stopped by the closed
+shutters within, and all was lifeless. Only in the corner where
+the combat had taken place could I detect any evidence of the young
+gentleman’s existence. There were traces of his gore in that spot, and I
+covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.
+
+On the broad landing between Miss Havisham’s own room and that other
+room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair,--a
+light chair on wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed
+there since my last visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular
+occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in this chair (when she was tired of
+walking with her hand upon my shoulder) round her own room, and across
+the landing, and round the other room. Over and over and over again,
+we would make these journeys, and sometimes they would last as long as
+three hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general mention of
+these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled that I should
+return every alternate day at noon for these purposes, and because I am
+now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten months.
+
+As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more
+to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was
+I going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I
+believed; and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know
+everything, in the hope that she might offer some help towards that
+desirable end. But she did not; on the contrary, she seemed to prefer my
+being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any money,--or anything
+but my daily dinner,--nor ever stipulate that I should be paid for my
+services.
+
+Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told
+me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me;
+sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite
+familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she
+hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were
+alone, “Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes
+(for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we
+played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of
+Estella’s moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were
+so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what
+to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness,
+murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts my
+pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”
+
+There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the
+burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of rendering
+homage to a patron saint, but I believe Old Clem stood in that relation
+towards smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure of beating upon
+iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s
+respected name. Thus, you were to hammer boys round--Old Clem! With a
+thump and a sound--Old Clem! Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem! With a
+clink for the stout--Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old
+Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher--Old Clem! One day soon after the
+appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the
+impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I was
+surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It
+happened so to catch her fancy that she took it up in a low brooding
+voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became
+customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella would often
+join in; though the whole strain was so subdued, even when there were
+three of us, that it made less noise in the grim old house than the
+lightest breath of wind.
+
+What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail
+to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were
+dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the
+misty yellow rooms?
+
+Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had
+not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which
+I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly
+fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger
+to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him.
+Besides, that shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed,
+which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time
+went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but Biddy; but I told
+poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy
+had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though
+I think I know now.
+
+Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
+almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
+Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
+discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
+this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands
+could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done
+it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that
+he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,--as it
+were, to operate upon,--and he would drag me up from my stool (usually
+by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the
+fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying, “Now, Mum,
+here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up
+your head, boy, and be forever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
+Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would rumple my hair
+the wrong way,--which from my earliest remembrance, as already hinted,
+I have in my soul denied the right of any fellow-creature to do,--and
+would hold me before him by the sleeve,--a spectacle of imbecility only
+to be equalled by himself.
+
+Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations
+about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me,
+that I used to want--quite painfully--to burst into spiteful tears, fly
+at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister
+spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at
+every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron,
+would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of
+my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.
+
+In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
+while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe’s perceiving that
+he was not favorable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old
+enough now to be apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on
+his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my
+sister would so distinctly construe that innocent action into opposition
+on his part, that she would dive at him, take the poker out of his
+hands, shake him, and put it away. There was a most irritating end to
+every one of these debates. All in a moment, with nothing to lead up to
+it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching sight of me as
+it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come! there’s enough of
+you! You get along to bed; you’ve given trouble enough for one night, I
+hope!” As if I had besought them as a favor to bother my life out.
+
+We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we
+should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when one day Miss
+Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my
+shoulder; and said with some displeasure,--
+
+“You are growing tall, Pip!”
+
+I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look, that
+this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no control.
+
+She said no more at the time; but she presently stopped and looked at me
+again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and moody.
+On the next day of my attendance, when our usual exercise was over, and
+I had landed her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a movement of
+her impatient fingers:--
+
+“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”
+
+“Joe Gargery, ma’am.”
+
+“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with
+you, and bring your indentures, do you think?”
+
+I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honor to be
+asked.
+
+“Then let him come.”
+
+“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”
+
+“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come
+along with you.”
+
+When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister
+“went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous
+period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under
+our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously
+thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such
+inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing,
+got out the dustpan,--which was always a very bad sign,--put on her
+coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied
+with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned
+us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard.
+It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and
+then she asked Joe why he hadn’t married a Negress Slave at once?
+Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and
+looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a
+better speculation.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see
+Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
+Havisham’s. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the
+occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his
+working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully
+uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled
+up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the
+crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.
+
+At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with
+us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook’s and called for “when we had
+done with our fine ladies”--a way of putting the case, from which Joe
+appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day,
+and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on
+the very rare occasions when he was not at work) the monosyllable
+HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow supposed to be flying in the
+direction he had taken.
+
+We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver
+bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited
+Straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it
+was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these articles were
+carried penitentially or ostentatiously; but I rather think they were
+displayed as articles of property,--much as Cleopatra or any other
+sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or
+procession.
+
+When we came to Pumblechook’s, my sister bounced in and left us. As it
+was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham’s house.
+Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took
+his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands; as if
+he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a
+quarter of an ounce.
+
+Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew
+so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back
+at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the
+greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides on the tips of
+his toes.
+
+Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff
+and conducted him into Miss Havisham’s presence. She was seated at her
+dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.
+
+“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”
+
+I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or
+so like some extraordinary bird; standing as he did speechless, with his
+tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm.
+
+“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this
+boy?”
+
+It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview, Joe persisted in
+addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.
+
+“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at
+once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great
+politeness, “as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time
+what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”
+
+“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the
+intention of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”
+
+“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it
+were looked for’ard to betwixt us, as being calc’lated to lead to
+larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the
+business,--such as its being open to black and sut, or such-like,--not
+but what they would have been attended to, don’t you see?”
+
+“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he
+like the trade?”
+
+“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening
+his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that
+it were the wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon
+him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on
+to say) “And there weren’t no objection on your part, and Pip it were
+the great wish of your hart!”
+
+It was quite in vain for me to endeavor to make him sensible that he
+ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures
+to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he
+persisted in being to Me.
+
+“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.
+
+“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little
+unreasonable, “you yourself see me put ‘em in my ‘at, and therefore you
+know as they are here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not
+to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good
+fellow,--I know I was ashamed of him,--when I saw that Estella stood
+at the back of Miss Havisham’s chair, and that her eyes laughed
+mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to
+Miss Havisham.
+
+“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium
+with the boy?”
+
+“Joe!” I remonstrated, for he made no reply at all. “Why don’t you
+answer--”
+
+“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, “which I
+meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself
+and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to
+be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?”
+
+Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was
+better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took
+up a little bag from the table beside her.
+
+“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are
+five-and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip.”
+
+As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in
+him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass,
+persisted in addressing me.
+
+“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such
+received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near,
+nor nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation,
+first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar
+expression were applied to Miss Havisham,--“and now, old chap, may we
+do our duty! May you and me do our duty, both on us, by one and another,
+and by them which your liberal present--have-conweyed--to be--for the
+satisfaction of mind-of--them as never--” here Joe showed that he felt
+he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued
+himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!” These words had
+such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.
+
+“Good-bye, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”
+
+“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.
+
+“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”
+
+Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe
+in a distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and
+that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no
+other and no more.”
+
+How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but
+I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding upstairs
+instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went
+after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we were outside the
+gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone. When we stood in the
+daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and said to me,
+“Astonishing!” And there he remained so long saying, “Astonishing” at
+intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were never coming
+back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure you this
+is as-TON-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and able to
+walk away.
+
+I have reason to think that Joe’s intellects were brightened by the
+encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook’s
+he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in
+what took place in Mr. Pumblechook’s parlor: where, on our presenting
+ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that detested seedsman.
+
+“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what’s
+happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor
+society as this, I am sure I do!”
+
+“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of
+remembrance, “made it wery partick’ler that we should give her--were it
+compliments or respects, Pip?”
+
+“Compliments,” I said.
+
+“Which that were my own belief,” answered Joe; “her compliments to Mrs.
+J. Gargery--”
+
+“Much good they’ll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.
+
+“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another
+effort of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham’s elth were
+sitch as would have--allowed, were it, Pip?”
+
+“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.
+
+“Of ladies’ company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.
+
+“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook.
+“She might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but
+it’s better late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole
+here?”
+
+“She giv’ him,” said Joe, “nothing.”
+
+Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.
+
+“What she giv’,” said Joe, “she giv’ to his friends. ‘And by his
+friends,’ were her explanation, ‘I mean into the hands of his sister
+Mrs. J. Gargery.’ Them were her words; ‘Mrs. J. Gargery.’ She mayn’t
+have know’d,” added Joe, with an appearance of reflection, “whether it
+were Joe, or Jorge.”
+
+My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden
+arm-chair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all
+about it beforehand.
+
+“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively
+laughing!
+
+“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.
+
+“They’d say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much,
+but pretty well.”
+
+“It’s more than that, then,” said Joe.
+
+That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he
+rubbed the arms of his chair, “It’s more than that, Mum.”
+
+“Why, you don’t mean to say--” began my sister.
+
+“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good
+in you! Go on!”
+
+“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”
+
+“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.
+
+“Well, then,” said Joe, “It’s more than twenty pound.”
+
+That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a
+patronizing laugh, “It’s more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up,
+Joseph!”
+
+“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my
+sister; “it’s five-and-twenty pound.”
+
+“It’s five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers,
+Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it’s no more than your
+merits (as I said when my opinion was asked), and I wish you joy of the
+money!”
+
+If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently
+awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody,
+with a right of patronage that left all his former criminality far
+behind.
+
+“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the
+arm above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with
+what they’ve begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That’s my way.
+Bound out of hand.”
+
+“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the
+money), “we’re deeply beholden to you.”
+
+“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical cornchandler. “A
+pleasure’s a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you know; we
+must have him bound. I said I’d see to it--to tell you the truth.”
+
+The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at
+once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial
+presence. I say we went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook,
+exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed,
+it was the general impression in Court that I had been taken red-handed;
+for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him through the crowd, I heard some
+people say, “What’s he done?” and others, “He’s a young ‘un, too, but
+looks bad, don’t he?” One person of mild and benevolent aspect even gave
+me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted
+up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled TO BE READ IN MY
+CELL.
+
+The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a
+church,--and with people hanging over the pews looking on,--and with
+mighty Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with
+folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading
+the newspapers,--and with some shining black portraits on the walls,
+which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and
+sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and
+attested, and I was “bound”; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while
+as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have those little
+preliminaries disposed of.
+
+When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put
+into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured,
+and who were much disappointed to find that my friends were merely
+rallying round me, we went back to Pumblechook’s. And there my sister
+became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve
+her but we must have a dinner out of that windfall at the Blue Boar, and
+that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles
+and Mr. Wopsle.
+
+It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For,
+it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole
+company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it
+worse, they all asked me from time to time,--in short, whenever they
+had nothing else to do,--why I didn’t enjoy myself? And what could I
+possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself,--when I wasn’t!
+
+However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the
+most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent
+contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table;
+and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had
+fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I
+played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company,
+or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared
+to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair
+beside him to illustrate his remarks.
+
+My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn’t
+let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up
+and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle
+gave us Collins’s ode, and threw his bloodstained sword in thunder
+down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials
+underneath sent up their compliments, and it wasn’t the Tumblers’ Arms.”
+ That, they were all in excellent spirits on the road home, and sang, O
+Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking the bass, and asserting with a tremendously
+strong voice (in reply to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece
+of music in a most impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about
+everybody’s private affairs) that he was the man with his white locks
+flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.
+
+Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom, I was truly
+wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like
+Joe’s trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
+ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
+deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
+
+Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s
+temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had
+believed in the best parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed
+in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose
+solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had
+believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment;
+I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and
+independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all
+coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella
+see it on any account.
+
+How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
+how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to
+me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or
+ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
+
+Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
+shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe’s ‘prentice, I should be
+distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
+that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight
+upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have
+been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have
+felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest
+and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more.
+Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
+life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road
+of apprenticeship to Joe.
+
+I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about
+the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
+own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
+between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
+there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite
+as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that
+after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe
+while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know
+of myself in that connection.
+
+For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
+proceed to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but because
+Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or
+a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
+industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
+that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible
+to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing
+man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has
+touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that
+intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe,
+and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.
+
+What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What
+I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and
+commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one
+of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she
+would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing
+the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.
+Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
+singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
+Havisham’s would seem to show me Estella’s face in the fire, with her
+pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,--often at
+such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall
+which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just
+drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.
+
+After that, when we went into supper, the place and the meal would have
+a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than
+ever, in my own ungracious breast.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s room, my
+education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until
+Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue
+of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a half-penny.
+Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were
+the opening lines.
+
+     When I went to Lunnon town sirs,
+     Too rul loo rul
+     Too rul loo rul
+     Wasn’t I done very brown sirs?
+     Too rul loo rul
+     Too rul loo rul
+
+--still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I
+thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the
+poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to
+bestow some intellectual crumbs upon me, with which he kindly complied.
+As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic
+lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied
+and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon
+declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his
+poetic fury had severely mauled me.
+
+Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so
+well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted
+to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my
+society and less open to Estella’s reproach.
+
+The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken
+slate and a short piece of slate-pencil were our educational implements:
+to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to
+remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my
+tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe
+at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else,--even
+with a learned air,--as if he considered himself to be advancing
+immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.
+
+It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing
+beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking
+as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the
+bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea
+with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and
+Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud
+or sail or green hillside or water-line, it was just the same.--Miss
+Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared
+to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.
+
+One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on
+being “most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on
+the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of
+Miss Havisham and Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the
+water, until at last I resolved to mention a thought concerning them
+that had been much in my head.
+
+“Joe,” said I; “don’t you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”
+
+“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”
+
+“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”
+
+“There is some wisits p’r’aps,” said Joe, “as for ever remains open to
+the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham. She might
+think you wanted something,--expected something of her.”
+
+“Don’t you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”
+
+“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she
+mightn’t.”
+
+Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard
+at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.
+
+“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss
+Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the
+handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were
+all.”
+
+“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”
+
+“ALL,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.
+
+“Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her.”
+
+“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were,--Make a
+end on it!--As you was!--Me to the North, and you to the South!--Keep in
+sunders!”
+
+I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me
+to find that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more
+probable.
+
+“But, Joe.”
+
+“Yes, old chap.”
+
+“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day
+of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after
+her, or shown that I remember her.”
+
+“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes
+all four round,--and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all
+four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of
+hoofs--”
+
+“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”
+
+But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.
+“Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain
+for the front door,--or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for
+general use,--or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork
+when she took her muffins,--or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such
+like--”
+
+“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly
+pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t. No, I would not. For
+what’s a door-chain when she’s got one always up? And shark-headers is
+open to misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into
+brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can’t show
+himself oncommon in a gridiron,--for a gridiron IS a gridiron,” said
+Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to
+rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but
+a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave,
+and you can’t help yourself--”
+
+“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t
+go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”
+
+“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all
+along; “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”
+
+“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack
+just now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would
+go uptown and make a call on Miss Est--Havisham.”
+
+“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain’t Estavisham, Pip, unless she
+have been rechris’ened.”
+
+“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it,
+Joe?”
+
+In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of
+it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received
+with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a
+visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a
+favor received, then this experimental trip should have no successor. By
+these conditions I promised to abide.
+
+Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick.
+He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge,--a clear
+Impossibility,--but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I
+believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but
+wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its
+understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of
+great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even
+seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere
+accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or
+went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew,
+as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever
+coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes, and on
+working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in
+his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck
+and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the
+sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched,
+locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or
+otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful,
+half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it
+was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.
+
+This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and
+timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner
+of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was
+necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and
+that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe’s ‘prentice, Orlick
+was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him;
+howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did
+anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat
+his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came
+in out of time.
+
+Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of
+my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just
+got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by
+and by he said, leaning on his hammer,--
+
+“Now, master! Sure you’re not a going to favor only one of us. If Young
+Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was
+about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient
+person.
+
+“Why, what’ll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.
+
+“What’ll I do with it! What’ll he do with it? I’ll do as much with it as
+him,” said Orlick.
+
+“As to Pip, he’s going up town,” said Joe.
+
+“Well then, as to Old Orlick, he’s a going up town,” retorted that
+worthy. “Two can go up town. Tain’t only one wot can go up town.
+
+“Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe.
+
+“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their uptowning! Now,
+master! Come. No favoring in this shop. Be a man!”
+
+The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in
+a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot
+bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it through my body,
+whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out,--as
+if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood,--and
+finally said, when he had hammered himself hot and the iron cold, and he
+again leaned on his hammer,--
+
+“Now, master!”
+
+“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.
+
+“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.
+
+“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said
+Joe, “let it be a half-holiday for all.”
+
+My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing,--she was
+a most unscrupulous spy and listener,--and she instantly looked in at
+one of the windows.
+
+“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle
+hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in
+that way. I wish I was his master!”
+
+“You’d be everybody’s master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an
+ill-favored grin.
+
+(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)
+
+“I’d be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister,
+beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn’t be a
+match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who’s the
+dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn’t be a match for the
+rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and
+the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”
+
+“You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that
+makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good’un.”
+
+(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)
+
+“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you
+say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me,
+with my husband standing by? Oh! oh! oh!” Each of these exclamations was
+a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all
+the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for
+her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she
+consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself
+into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the
+name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? Oh! Hold me!
+Oh!”
+
+“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I’d hold you, if
+you was my wife. I’d hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”
+
+(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)
+
+“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a
+scream together,--which was her next stage. “To hear the names he’s
+giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my
+husband standing by! Oh! Oh!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings
+and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and
+threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down,--which were the last stages
+on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete
+success, she made a dash at the door which I had fortunately locked.
+
+What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical
+interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant
+by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was
+man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of
+nothing less than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so,
+without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went
+at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighborhood
+could stand uplong against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he
+had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman, was very
+soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then Joe
+unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible
+at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think), and who was
+carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to revive,
+and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe’s hair.
+Then, came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and
+then, with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such
+a lull,--namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead,--I went upstairs
+to dress myself.
+
+When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any
+other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick’s nostrils,
+which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared
+from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a
+peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and philosophical influence on
+Joe, who followed me out into the road to say, as a parting observation
+that might do me good, “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage,
+Pip:--such is Life!”
+
+With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very
+serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to
+Miss Havisham’s, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed
+the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how
+I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should
+undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.
+
+Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.
+
+“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”
+
+When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah
+evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my
+business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and
+presently brought the sharp message that I was to “come up.”
+
+Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.
+
+“Well?” said she, fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing?
+You’ll get nothing.”
+
+“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing
+very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”
+
+“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come
+on your birthday.--Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her
+chair towards me, “You are looking round for Estella? Hey?”
+
+I had been looking round,--in fact, for Estella,--and I stammered that I
+hoped she was well.
+
+“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach;
+prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you
+have lost her?”
+
+There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words,
+and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what
+to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When
+the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I
+felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with
+everything; and that was all I took by that motion.
+
+As I was loitering along the High Street, looking in disconsolately at
+the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman,
+who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in
+his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that
+moment invested sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on
+the head of Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner
+did he see me, than he appeared to consider that a special Providence
+had put a ‘prentice in his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me,
+and insisted on my accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlor. As I
+knew it would be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the
+way was dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better
+than none, I made no great resistance; consequently, we turned into
+Pumblechook’s just as the street and the shops were lighting up.
+
+As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I
+don’t know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it
+took until half-past nine o’ clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle
+got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became
+so much slower than at any former period of his disgraceful career. I
+thought it a little too much that he should complain of being cut short
+in his flower after all, as if he had not been running to seed, leaf
+after leaf, ever since his course began. This, however, was a
+mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me, was the
+identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When
+Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic,
+Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took
+pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I
+was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever;
+Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer
+monomania in my master’s daughter to care a button for me; and all I can
+say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is,
+that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after
+I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat
+staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy,
+take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated
+murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the
+weakness to become my benefactor.
+
+It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with
+Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and
+it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the
+lamp’s usual place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on
+the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a
+change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon
+a man, slouching under the lee of the turnpike house.
+
+“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick there?”
+
+“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by a minute, on the
+chance of company.”
+
+“You are late,” I remarked.
+
+Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And you’re late.”
+
+“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance,--“we
+have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”
+
+Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all
+went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his
+half-holiday up and down town?
+
+“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn’t see you,
+but I must have been pretty close behind you. By the by, the guns is
+going again.”
+
+“At the Hulks?” said I.
+
+“Ay! There’s some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been
+going since dark, about. You’ll hear one presently.”
+
+In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the
+well-remembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily
+rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing
+and threatening the fugitives.
+
+“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We’d be puzzled how to
+bring down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night.”
+
+The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in
+silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening’s tragedy,
+fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his
+hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark,
+very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along. Now and then, the sound
+of the signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along
+the course of the river. I kept myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr.
+Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth
+Field, and in the greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes
+growled, “Beat it out, beat it out,--Old Clem! With a clink for the
+stout,--Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.
+
+Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it took us
+past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find--it being
+eleven o’clock--in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and
+unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up and put down scattered
+about. Mr. Wopsle dropped into ask what was the matter (surmising that
+a convict had been taken), but came running out in a great hurry.
+
+“There’s something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place,
+Pip. Run all!”
+
+“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.
+
+“I can’t quite understand. The house seems to have been violently
+entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody has
+been attacked and hurt.”
+
+We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no
+stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole
+village was there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there
+was Joe, and there were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst
+of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me,
+and so I became aware of my sister,--lying without sense or movement on
+the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow
+on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was
+turned towards the fire,--destined never to be on the Rampage again,
+while she was the wife of Joe.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe
+that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at
+all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under
+obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than
+any one else. But when, in the clearer light of next morning, I began to
+reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed around me on all sides, I
+took another view of the case, which was more reasonable.
+
+Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a
+quarter after eight o’clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there,
+my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged
+Good Night with a farm-laborer going home. The man could not be more
+particular as to the time at which he saw her (he got into dense
+confusion when he tried to be), than that it must have been before nine.
+When Joe went home at five minutes before ten, he found her struck down
+on the floor, and promptly called in assistance. The fire had not then
+burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle very long; the
+candle, however, had been blown out.
+
+Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond
+the blowing out of the candle,--which stood on a table between the door
+and my sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was
+struck,--was there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such
+as she herself had made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one
+remarkable piece of evidence on the spot. She had been struck with
+something blunt and heavy, on the head and spine; after the blows were
+dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at her with considerable
+violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe
+picked her up, was a convict’s leg-iron which had been filed asunder.
+
+Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith’s eye, declared it to have
+been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the
+Hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe’s opinion
+was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had left the
+prison-ships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed
+to know for certain that that particular manacle had not been worn by
+either of the two convicts who had escaped last night. Further, one of
+those two was already retaken, and had not freed himself of his iron.
+
+Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed
+the iron to be my convict’s iron,--the iron I had seen and heard him
+filing at, on the marshes,--but my mind did not accuse him of having put
+it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have
+become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account.
+Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.
+
+Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we
+picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the
+evening, he had been in divers companies in several public-houses, and
+he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against
+him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with
+everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if
+he had come back for his two bank-notes there could have been no dispute
+about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them.
+Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so
+silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look
+round.
+
+It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
+undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable
+trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last
+dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For
+months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the
+negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention
+came, after all, to this;--the secret was such an old one now, had so
+grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it
+away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief,
+it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he
+believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe
+it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a
+monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course--for,
+was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always
+done?--and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any
+such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the
+assailant.
+
+The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in
+the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for
+a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like
+authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously
+wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas,
+and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead
+of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood
+about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks
+that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a
+mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as
+taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.
+
+Long after these constitutional powers had dispers
+
diff --git a/Metarmophosis by Kafka.txt b/Metarmophosis by Kafka.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d836b8b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Metarmophosis by Kafka.txt	
@@ -0,0 +1,1949 @@
+I
+
+
+One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found
+himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.  He lay on
+his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could
+see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff
+sections.  The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready
+to slide off any moment.  His many legs, pitifully thin compared
+with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he
+looked.
+
+"What's happened to me?" he thought.  It wasn't a dream.  His room,
+a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully
+between its four familiar walls.  A collection of textile samples
+lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and
+above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an
+illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame.  It showed
+a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright,
+raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm
+towards the viewer.
+
+Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather.
+Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel
+quite sad.  "How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all
+this nonsense", he thought, but that was something he was unable to
+do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present
+state couldn't get into that position.  However hard he threw
+himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was.  He
+must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he
+wouldn't have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when
+he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt
+before.
+
+"Oh, God", he thought, "what a strenuous career it is that I've
+chosen! Travelling day in and day out.  Doing business like this
+takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on
+top of that there's the curse of travelling, worries about making
+train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different
+people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or
+become friendly with them.  It can all go to Hell!"  He felt a
+slight itch up on his belly; pushed himself slowly up on his back
+towards the headboard so that he could lift his head better; found
+where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of little
+white spots which he didn't know what to make of; and when he tried
+to feel the place with one of his legs he drew it quickly back
+because as soon as he touched it he was overcome by a cold shudder.
+
+He slid back into his former position.  "Getting up early all the
+time", he thought, "it makes you stupid.  You've got to get enough
+sleep.  Other travelling salesmen live a life of luxury.  For
+instance, whenever I go back to the guest house during the morning
+to copy out the contract, these gentlemen are always still sitting
+there eating their breakfasts.  I ought to just try that with my
+boss; I'd get kicked out on the spot.  But who knows, maybe that
+would be the best thing for me.  If I didn't have my parents to
+think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have
+gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him
+everything I would, let him know just what I feel.  He'd fall right
+off his desk! And it's a funny sort of business to be sitting up
+there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there,
+especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is
+hard of hearing.  Well, there's still some hope; once I've got the
+money together to pay off my parents' debt to him - another five or
+six years I suppose - that's definitely what I'll do.  That's when
+I'll make the big change.  First of all though, I've got to get up,
+my train leaves at five."
+
+And he looked over at the alarm clock, ticking on the chest of
+drawers.  "God in Heaven!" he thought.  It was half past six and the
+hands were quietly moving forwards, it was even later than half
+past, more like quarter to seven.  Had the alarm clock not rung? He
+could see from the bed that it had been set for four o'clock as it
+should have been; it certainly must have rung.  Yes, but was it
+possible to quietly sleep through that furniture-rattling noise?
+True, he had not slept peacefully, but probably all the more deeply
+because of that.  What should he do now? The next train went at
+seven; if he were to catch that he would have to rush like mad and
+the collection of samples was still not packed, and he did not at
+all feel particularly fresh and lively.  And even if he did catch
+the train he would not avoid his boss's anger as the office
+assistant would have been there to see the five o'clock train go, he
+would have put in his report about Gregor's not being there a long
+time ago.  The office assistant was the boss's man, spineless, and
+with no understanding.  What about if he reported sick? But that
+would be extremely strained and suspicious as in fifteen years of
+service Gregor had never once yet been ill.  His boss would
+certainly come round with the doctor from the medical insurance
+company, accuse his parents of having a lazy son, and accept the
+doctor's recommendation not to make any claim as the doctor believed
+that no-one was ever ill but that many were workshy.  And what's
+more, would he have been entirely wrong in this case? Gregor did in
+fact, apart from excessive sleepiness after sleeping for so long,
+feel completely well and even felt much hungrier than usual.
+
+He was still hurriedly thinking all this through, unable to decide
+to get out of the bed, when the clock struck quarter to seven.
+There was a cautious knock at the door near his head.  "Gregor",
+somebody called - it was his mother - "it's quarter to seven.
+Didn't you want to go somewhere?"  That gentle voice! Gregor was
+shocked when he heard his own voice answering, it could hardly be
+recognised as the voice he had had before.  As if from deep inside
+him, there was a painful and uncontrollable squeaking mixed in with
+it, the words could be made out at first but then there was a sort
+of echo which made them unclear, leaving the hearer unsure whether
+he had heard properly or not.  Gregor had wanted to give a full
+answer and explain everything, but in the circumstances contented
+himself with saying: "Yes, mother, yes, thank-you, I'm getting up
+now."  The change in Gregor's voice probably could not be noticed
+outside through the wooden door, as his mother was satisfied with
+this explanation and shuffled away.  But this short conversation
+made the other members of the family aware that Gregor, against
+their expectations was still at home, and soon his father came
+knocking at one of the side doors, gently, but with his fist.
+"Gregor, Gregor", he called, "what's wrong?"  And after a short
+while he called again with a warning deepness in his voice: "Gregor!
+Gregor!"  At the other side door his sister came plaintively:
+"Gregor? Aren't you well? Do you need anything?"  Gregor answered to
+both sides: "I'm ready, now", making an effort to remove all the
+strangeness from his voice by enunciating very carefully and putting
+long pauses between each, individual word.  His father went back to
+his breakfast, but his sister whispered: "Gregor, open the door, I
+beg of you."  Gregor, however, had no thought of opening the door,
+and instead congratulated himself for his cautious habit, acquired
+from his travelling, of locking all doors at night even when he was
+at home.
+
+The first thing he wanted to do was to get up in peace without being
+disturbed, to get dressed, and most of all to have his breakfast.
+Only then would he consider what to do next, as he was well aware
+that he would not bring his thoughts to any sensible conclusions by
+lying in bed.  He remembered that he had often felt a slight pain in
+bed, perhaps caused by lying awkwardly, but that had always turned
+out to be pure imagination and he wondered how his imaginings would
+slowly resolve themselves today.  He did not have the slightest
+doubt that the change in his voice was nothing more than the first
+sign of a serious cold, which was an occupational hazard for
+travelling salesmen.
+
+It was a simple matter to throw off the covers; he only had to blow
+himself up a little and they fell off by themselves.  But it became
+difficult after that, especially as he was so exceptionally broad.
+He would have used his arms and his hands to push himself up; but
+instead of them he only had all those little legs continuously
+moving in different directions, and which he was moreover unable to
+control.  If he wanted to bend one of them, then that was the first
+one that would stretch itself out; and if he finally managed to do
+what he wanted with that leg, all the others seemed to be set free
+and would move about painfully.  "This is something that can't be
+done in bed", Gregor said to himself, "so don't keep trying to do
+it".
+
+The first thing he wanted to do was get the lower part of his body
+out of the bed, but he had never seen this lower part, and could not
+imagine what it looked like; it turned out to be too hard to move;
+it went so slowly; and finally, almost in a frenzy, when he
+carelessly shoved himself forwards with all the force he could
+gather, he chose the wrong direction, hit hard against the lower
+bedpost, and learned from the burning pain he felt that the lower
+part of his body might well, at present, be the most sensitive.
+
+So then he tried to get the top part of his body out of the bed
+first, carefully turning his head to the side.  This he managed
+quite easily, and despite its breadth and its weight, the bulk of
+his body eventually followed slowly in the direction of the head.
+But when he had at last got his head out of the bed and into the
+fresh air it occurred to him that if he let himself fall it would be
+a miracle if his head were not injured, so he became afraid to carry
+on pushing himself forward the same way.  And he could not knock
+himself out now at any price; better to stay in bed than lose
+consciousness.
+
+It took just as much effort to get back to where he had been
+earlier, but when he lay there sighing, and was once more watching
+his legs as they struggled against each other even harder than
+before, if that was possible, he could think of no way of bringing
+peace and order to this chaos.  He told himself once more that it
+was not possible for him to stay in bed and that the most sensible
+thing to do would be to get free of it in whatever way he could at
+whatever sacrifice.  At the same time, though, he did not forget to
+remind himself that calm consideration was much better than rushing
+to desperate conclusions.  At times like this he would direct his
+eyes to the window and look out as clearly as he could, but
+unfortunately, even the other side of the narrow street was
+enveloped in morning fog and the view had little confidence or cheer
+to offer him.  "Seven o'clock, already", he said to himself when the
+clock struck again, "seven o'clock, and there's still a fog like
+this."  And he lay there quietly a while longer, breathing lightly
+as if he perhaps expected the total stillness to bring things back
+to their real and natural state.
+
+But then he said to himself: "Before it strikes quarter past seven
+I'll definitely have to have got properly out of bed.  And by then
+somebody will have come round from work to ask what's happened to me
+as well, as they open up at work before seven o'clock."  And so he
+set himself to the task of swinging the entire length of his body
+out of the bed all at the same time.  If he succeeded in falling out
+of bed in this way and kept his head raised as he did so he could
+probably avoid injuring it.  His back seemed to be quite hard, and
+probably nothing would happen to it falling onto the carpet.  His
+main concern was for the loud noise he was bound to make, and which
+even through all the doors would probably raise concern if not
+alarm.  But it was something that had to be risked.
+
+When Gregor was already sticking half way out of the bed - the new
+method was more of a game than an effort, all he had to do was rock
+back and forth - it occurred to him how simple everything would be
+if somebody came to help him.  Two strong people - he had his father
+and the maid in mind - would have been more than enough; they would
+only have to push their arms under the dome of his back, peel him
+away from the bed, bend down with the load and then be patient and
+careful as he swang over onto the floor, where, hopefully, the
+little legs would find a use.  Should he really call for help
+though, even apart from the fact that all the doors were locked?
+Despite all the difficulty he was in, he could not suppress a smile
+at this thought.
+
+After a while he had already moved so far across that it would have
+been hard for him to keep his balance if he rocked too hard.  The
+time was now ten past seven and he would have to make a final
+decision very soon.  Then there was a ring at the door of the flat.
+"That'll be someone from work", he said to himself, and froze very
+still, although his little legs only became all the more lively as
+they danced around.  For a moment everything remained quiet.
+"They're not opening the door", Gregor said to himself, caught in
+some nonsensical hope.  But then of course, the maid's firm steps
+went to the door as ever and opened it.  Gregor only needed to hear
+the visitor's first words of greeting and he knew who it was - the
+chief clerk himself.  Why did Gregor have to be the only one
+condemned to work for a company where they immediately became highly
+suspicious at the slightest shortcoming? Were all employees, every
+one of them, louts, was there not one of them who was faithful and
+devoted who would go so mad with pangs of conscience that he
+couldn't get out of bed if he didn't spend at least a couple of
+hours in the morning on company business? Was it really not enough
+to let one of the trainees make enquiries - assuming enquiries were
+even necessary - did the chief clerk have to come himself, and did
+they have to show the whole, innocent family that this was so
+suspicious that only the chief clerk could be trusted to have the
+wisdom to investigate it? And more because these thoughts had made
+him upset than through any proper decision, he swang himself with
+all his force out of the bed.  There was a loud thump, but it wasn't
+really a loud noise.  His fall was softened a little by the carpet,
+and Gregor's back was also more elastic than he had thought, which
+made the sound muffled and not too noticeable.  He had not held his
+head carefully enough, though, and hit it as he fell; annoyed and in
+pain, he turned it and rubbed it against the carpet.
+
+"Something's fallen down in there", said the chief clerk in the room
+on the left.  Gregor tried to imagine whether something of the sort
+that had happened to him today could ever happen to the chief clerk
+too; you had to concede that it was possible.  But as if in gruff
+reply to this question, the chief clerk's firm footsteps in his
+highly polished boots could now be heard in the adjoining room.
+From the room on his right, Gregor's sister whispered to him to let
+him know: "Gregor, the chief clerk is here."  "Yes, I know", said
+Gregor to himself; but without daring to raise his voice loud enough
+for his sister to hear him.
+
+"Gregor", said his father now from the room to his left, "the chief
+clerk has come round and wants to know why you didn't leave on the
+early train.  We don't know what to say to him.  And anyway, he
+wants to speak to you personally.  So please open up this door.  I'm
+sure he'll be good enough to forgive the untidiness of your room."
+Then the chief clerk called "Good morning,  Mr. Samsa". "He isn't
+well", said his mother to the chief clerk, while his father
+continued to speak through the door.  "He isn't well, please believe
+me.  Why else would Gregor have missed a train! The lad only ever
+thinks about the business.  It nearly makes me cross the way he
+never goes out in the evenings; he's been in town for a week now but
+stayed home every evening.  He sits with us in the kitchen and just
+reads the paper or studies train timetables.  His idea of relaxation
+is working with his fretsaw.  He's made a little frame, for
+instance, it only took him two or three evenings, you'll be amazed
+how nice it is; it's hanging up in his room; you'll see it as soon
+as Gregor opens the door.  Anyway, I'm glad you're here; we wouldn't
+have been able to get Gregor to open the door by ourselves; he's so
+stubborn; and I'm sure he isn't well, he said this morning that he
+is, but he isn't."  "I'll be there in a moment", said Gregor slowly
+and thoughtfully, but without moving so that he would not miss any
+word of the conversation.  "Well I can't think of any other way of
+explaining it,  Mrs. Samsa", said the chief clerk, "I hope it's
+nothing serious.  But on the other hand, I must say that if we
+people in commerce ever become slightly unwell then, fortunately or
+unfortunately as you like, we simply have to overcome it because of
+business considerations."  "Can the chief clerk come in to see you
+now then?", asked his father impatiently, knocking at the door
+again.  "No", said Gregor.  In the room on his right there followed
+a painful silence; in the room on his left his sister began to cry.
+
+So why did his sister not go and join the others? She had probably
+only just got up and had not even begun to get dressed.  And why was
+she crying? Was it because he had not got up, and had not let the
+chief clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job and if
+that happened his boss would once more pursue their parents with the
+same demands as before? There was no need to worry about things like
+that yet.  Gregor was still there and had not the slightest
+intention of abandoning his family.  For the time being he just lay
+there on the carpet, and no-one who knew the condition he was in
+would seriously have expected him to let the chief clerk in.  It was
+only a minor discourtesy, and a suitable excuse could easily be
+found for it later on, it was not something for which Gregor could
+be sacked on the spot.  And it seemed to Gregor much more sensible
+to leave him now in peace instead of disturbing him with talking at
+him and crying.  But the others didn't know what was happening, they
+were worried, that would excuse their behaviour.
+
+The chief clerk now raised his voice, "Mr. Samsa", he called to him,
+"what is wrong? You barricade yourself in your room, give us no more
+than yes or no for an answer, you are causing serious and
+unnecessary concern to your parents and you fail - and I mention
+this just by the way - you fail to carry out your business duties in
+a way that is quite unheard of.  I'm speaking here on behalf of your
+parents and of your employer, and really must request a clear and
+immediate explanation.  I am astonished, quite astonished.  I
+thought I knew you as a calm and sensible person, and now you
+suddenly seem to be showing off with peculiar whims.  This morning,
+your employer did suggest a possible reason for your failure to
+appear, it's true - it had to do with the money that was recently
+entrusted to you - but I came near to giving him my word of honour
+that that could not be the right explanation.  But now that I see
+your incomprehensible stubbornness I no longer feel any wish
+whatsoever to intercede on your behalf.  And nor is your position
+all that secure.  I had originally intended to say all this to you
+in private, but since you cause me to waste my time here for no good
+reason I don't see why your parents should not also learn of it.
+Your turnover has been very unsatisfactory of late; I grant you that
+it's not the time of year to do especially good business, we
+recognise that; but there simply is no time of year to do no
+business at all,  Mr. Samsa, we cannot allow there to be."
+
+"But Sir", called Gregor, beside himself and forgetting all else in
+the excitement, "I'll open up immediately, just a moment.  I'm
+slightly unwell, an attack of dizziness, I haven't been able to get
+up.  I'm still in bed now.  I'm quite fresh again now, though.  I'm
+just getting out of bed.  Just a moment.  Be patient! It's not quite
+as easy as I'd thought.  I'm quite alright now, though.  It's
+shocking, what can suddenly happen to a person! I was quite alright
+last night, my parents know about it, perhaps better than me, I had
+a small symptom of it last night already.  They must have noticed
+it.  I don't know why I didn't let you know at work! But you always
+think you can get over an illness without staying at home.  Please,
+don't make my parents suffer! There's no basis for any of the
+accusations you're making; nobody's ever said a word to me about any
+of these things.  Maybe you haven't read the latest contracts I sent
+in.  I'll set off with the eight o'clock train, as well, these few
+hours of rest have given me strength.  You don't need to wait, sir;
+I'll be in the office soon after you, and please be so good as to
+tell that to the boss and recommend me to him!"
+
+And while Gregor gushed out these words, hardly knowing what he was
+saying, he made his way over to the chest of drawers - this was
+easily done, probably because of the practise he had already had in
+bed - where he now tried to get himself upright.  He really did want
+to open the door, really did want to let them see him and to speak
+with the chief clerk; the others were being so insistent, and he was
+curious to learn what they would say when they caught sight of him.
+If they were shocked then it would no longer be Gregor's
+responsibility and he could rest.  If, however, they took everything
+calmly he would still have no reason to be upset, and if he hurried
+he really could be at the station for eight o'clock.  The first few
+times he tried to climb up on the smooth chest of drawers he just
+slid down again, but he finally gave himself one last swing and
+stood there upright; the lower part of his body was in serious pain
+but he no longer gave any attention to it.  Now he let himself fall
+against the back of a nearby chair and held tightly to the edges of
+it with his little legs.  By now he had also calmed down, and kept
+quiet so that he could listen to what the chief clerk was saying.
+
+"Did you understand a word of all that?" the chief clerk asked his
+parents, "surely he's not trying to make fools of us". "Oh, God!"
+called his mother, who was already in tears, "he could be seriously
+ill and we're making him suffer.  Grete! Grete!" she then cried.
+"Mother?" his sister called from the other side.  They communicated
+across Gregor's room.  "You'll have to go for the doctor straight
+away.  Gregor is ill.  Quick, get the doctor.  Did you hear the way
+Gregor spoke just now?"  "That was the voice of an animal", said the
+chief clerk, with a calmness that was in contrast with his mother's
+screams.  "Anna! Anna!" his father called into the kitchen through
+the entrance hall, clapping his hands, "get a locksmith here, now!"
+And the two girls, their skirts swishing, immediately ran out
+through the hall, wrenching open the front door of the flat as they
+went.  How had his sister managed to get dressed so quickly? There
+was no sound of the door banging shut again; they must have left it
+open;  people often do in homes where something awful has happened.
+
+Gregor, in contrast, had become much calmer.  So they couldn't
+understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to
+him, clearer than before - perhaps his ears had become used to the
+sound.  They had realised, though, that there was something wrong
+with him, and were ready to help.  The first response to his
+situation had been confident and wise, and that made him feel
+better.  He felt that he had been drawn back in among people, and
+from the doctor and the locksmith he expected great and surprising
+achievements - although he did not really distinguish one from the
+other.  Whatever was said next would be crucial, so, in order to
+make his voice as clear as possible, he coughed a little, but taking
+care to do this not too loudly as even this might well sound
+different from the way that a human coughs and he was no longer sure
+he could judge this for himself.  Meanwhile, it had become very
+quiet in the next room.  Perhaps his parents were sat at the table
+whispering with the chief clerk, or perhaps they were all pressed
+against the door and listening.
+
+Gregor slowly pushed his way over to the door with the chair.  Once
+there he let go of it and threw himself onto the door, holding
+himself upright against it using the adhesive on the tips of his
+legs.  He rested there a little while to recover from the effort
+involved and then set himself to the task of turning the key in the
+lock with his mouth.  He seemed, unfortunately, to have no proper
+teeth - how was he, then, to grasp the key? - but the lack of teeth
+was, of course, made up for with a very strong jaw; using the jaw,
+he really was able to start the key turning, ignoring the fact that
+he must have been causing some kind of damage as a brown fluid came
+from his mouth, flowed over the key and dripped onto the floor.
+"Listen", said the chief clerk in the next room, "he's turning the
+key."  Gregor was greatly encouraged by this; but they all should
+have been calling to him, his father and his mother too: "Well done,
+Gregor", they should have cried, "keep at it, keep hold of the
+lock!"  And with the idea that they were all excitedly following his
+efforts, he bit on the key with all his strength, paying no
+attention to the pain he was causing himself.  As the key turned
+round he turned around the lock with it, only holding himself
+upright with his mouth, and hung onto the key or pushed it down
+again with the whole weight of his body as needed.  The clear sound
+of the lock as it snapped back was Gregor's sign that he could break
+his concentration, and as he regained his breath he said to himself:
+"So, I didn't need the locksmith after all". Then he lay his head on
+the handle of the door to open it completely.
+
+Because he had to open the door in this way, it was already wide
+open before he could be seen.  He had first to slowly turn himself
+around one of the double doors, and he had to do it very carefully
+if he did not want to fall flat on his back before entering the
+room.  He was still occupied with this difficult movement, unable to
+pay attention to anything else, when he heard the chief clerk
+exclaim a loud "Oh!", which sounded like the soughing of the wind.
+Now he also saw him - he was the nearest to the door - his hand
+pressed against his open mouth and slowly retreating as if driven by
+a steady and invisible force.  Gregor's mother, her hair still
+dishevelled from bed despite the chief clerk's being there, looked
+at his father.  Then she unfolded her arms, took two steps forward
+towards Gregor and sank down onto the floor into her skirts that
+spread themselves out around her as her head disappeared down onto
+her breast.  His father looked hostile, and clenched his fists as if
+wanting to knock Gregor back into his room.  Then he looked
+uncertainly round the living room, covered his eyes with his hands
+and wept so that his powerful chest shook.
+
+So Gregor did not go into the room, but leant against the inside of
+the other door which was still held bolted in place.  In this way
+only half of his body could be seen, along with his head above it
+which he leant over to one side as he peered out at the others.
+Meanwhile the day had become much lighter; part of the endless,
+grey-black building on the other side of the street - which was a
+hospital - could be seen quite clearly with the austere and regular
+line of windows piercing its facade; the rain was still
+falling, now throwing down large, individual droplets which hit the
+ground one at a time.  The washing up from breakfast lay on the
+table; there was so much of it because, for Gregor's father,
+breakfast was the most important meal of the day and he would
+stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of
+different newspapers.  On the wall exactly opposite there was
+photograph of Gregor when he was a lieutenant in the army, his sword
+in his hand and a carefree smile on his face as he called forth
+respect for his uniform and bearing.  The door to the entrance hall
+was open and as the front door of the flat was also open he could
+see onto the landing and the stairs where they began their way down
+below.
+
+"Now, then", said Gregor, well aware that he was the only one to
+have kept calm, "I'll get dressed straight away now, pack up my
+samples and set off.  Will you please just let me leave? You can
+see", he said to the chief clerk, "that I'm not stubborn and I
+like to do my job; being a commercial traveller is arduous but
+without travelling I couldn't earn my living.  So where are you
+going, in to the office? Yes? Will you report everything accurately,
+then? It's quite possible for someone to be temporarily unable to
+work, but that's just the right time to remember what's been
+achieved in the past and consider that later on, once the difficulty
+has been removed, he will certainly work with all the more diligence
+and concentration.  You're well aware that I'm seriously in debt to
+our employer as well as having to look after my parents and my
+sister, so that I'm trapped in a difficult situation, but I will
+work my way out of it again.  Please don't make things any harder
+for me than they are already, and don't take sides against me at the
+office.  I know that nobody likes the travellers.  They think we
+earn an enormous wage as well as having a soft time of it.  That's
+just prejudice but they have no particular reason to think better of
+it.  But you, sir, you have a better overview than the rest of the
+staff, in fact, if I can say this in confidence, a better overview
+than the boss himself - it's very easy for a businessman like him to
+make mistakes about his employees and judge them more harshly than
+he should.  And you're also well aware that we travellers spend
+almost the whole year away from the office, so that we can very
+easily fall victim to gossip and chance and groundless complaints,
+and it's almost impossible to defend yourself from that sort of
+thing, we don't usually even hear about them, or if at all it's when
+we arrive back home exhausted from a trip, and that's when we feel
+the harmful effects of what's been going on without even knowing
+what caused them.  Please, don't go away, at least first say
+something to show that you grant that I'm at least partly right!"
+
+But the chief clerk had turned away as soon as Gregor had started to
+speak, and, with protruding lips, only stared back at him over his
+trembling shoulders as he left.  He did not keep still for a moment
+while Gregor was speaking, but moved steadily towards the door
+without taking his eyes off him.  He moved very gradually, as if
+there had been some secret prohibition on leaving the room.  It was
+only when he had reached the entrance hall that he made a sudden
+movement, drew his foot from the living room, and rushed forward in
+a panic.  In the hall, he stretched his right hand far out towards
+the stairway as if out there, there were some supernatural force
+waiting to save him.
+
+Gregor realised that it was out of the question to let the chief
+clerk go away in this mood if his position in the firm was not to be
+put into extreme danger.  That was something his parents did not
+understand very well; over the years, they had become convinced that
+this job would provide for Gregor for his entire life, and besides,
+they had so much to worry about at present that they had lost sight
+of any thought for the future.  Gregor, though, did think about the
+future.  The chief clerk had to be held back, calmed down, convinced
+and finally won over; the future of Gregor and his family depended
+on it! If only his sister were here! She was clever; she was already
+in tears while Gregor was still lying peacefully on his back.  And
+the chief clerk was a lover of women, surely she could persuade him;
+she would close the front door in the entrance hall and talk him out
+of his shocked state.  But his sister was not there, Gregor would
+have to do the job himself.  And without considering that he still
+was not familiar with how well he could move about in his present
+state, or that his speech still might not - or probably would not -
+be understood, he let go of the door; pushed himself through the
+opening; tried to reach the chief clerk on the landing who,
+ridiculously, was holding on to the banister with both hands; but
+Gregor fell immediately over and, with a little scream as he sought
+something to hold onto, landed on his numerous little legs.  Hardly
+had that happened than, for the first time that day, he began to
+feel alright with his body; the little legs had the solid ground
+under them; to his pleasure, they did exactly as he told them; they
+were even making the effort to carry him where he wanted to go; and
+he was soon believing that all his sorrows would soon be finally at
+an end.  He held back the urge to move but swayed from side to side
+as he crouched there on the floor.  His mother was not far away in
+front of him and seemed, at first, quite engrossed in herself, but
+then she suddenly jumped up with her arms outstretched and her
+fingers spread shouting: "Help, for pity's sake, Help!"  The way she
+held her head suggested she wanted to see Gregor better, but the
+unthinking way she was hurrying backwards showed that she did not;
+she had forgotten that the table was behind her with all the
+breakfast things on it; when she reached the table she sat quickly
+down on it without knowing what she was doing; without even seeming
+to notice that the coffee pot had been knocked over and a gush of
+coffee was pouring down onto the carpet.
+
+"Mother, mother", said Gregor gently, looking up at her.  He had
+completely forgotten the chief clerk for the moment, but could not
+help himself snapping in the air with his jaws at the sight of the
+flow of coffee.  That set his mother screaming anew, she fled from
+the table and into the arms of his father as he rushed towards her.
+Gregor, though, had no time to spare for his parents now; the chief
+clerk had already reached the stairs; with his chin on the banister,
+he looked back for the last time.  Gregor made a run for him; he
+wanted to be sure of reaching him; the chief clerk must have
+expected something, as he leapt down several steps at once and
+disappeared; his shouts resounding all around the staircase.  The
+flight of the chief clerk seemed, unfortunately, to put Gregor's
+father into a panic as well.  Until then he had been relatively self
+controlled, but now, instead of running after the chief clerk
+himself, or at least not impeding Gregor as he ran after him,
+Gregor's father seized the chief clerk's stick in his right hand
+(the chief clerk had left it behind on a chair, along with his hat
+and overcoat), picked up a large newspaper from the table with his
+left, and used them to drive Gregor back into his room, stamping his
+foot at him as he went.  Gregor's appeals to his father were of no
+help, his appeals were simply not understood, however much he humbly
+turned his head his father merely stamped his foot all the harder.
+Across the room, despite the chilly weather, Gregor's mother had
+pulled open a window, leant far out of it and pressed her hands to
+her face.  A strong draught of air flew in from the street towards
+the stairway, the curtains flew up, the newspapers on the table
+fluttered and some of them were blown onto the floor.  Nothing would
+stop Gregor's father as he drove him back, making hissing noises at
+him like a wild man.  Gregor had never had any practice in moving
+backwards and was only able to go very slowly.  If Gregor had only
+been allowed to turn round he would have been back in his room
+straight away, but he was afraid that if he took the time to do that
+his father would become impatient, and there was the threat of a
+lethal blow to his back or head from the stick in his father's hand
+any moment.  Eventually, though, Gregor realised that he had no
+choice as he saw, to his disgust, that he was quite incapable of
+going backwards in a straight line; so he began, as quickly as
+possible and with frequent anxious glances at his father, to turn
+himself round.  It went very slowly, but perhaps his father was able
+to see his good intentions as he did nothing to hinder him, in fact
+now and then he used the tip of his stick to give directions from a
+distance as to which way to turn.  If only his father would stop
+that unbearable hissing! It was making Gregor quite confused.  When
+he had nearly finished turning round, still listening to that
+hissing, he made a mistake and turned himself back a little the way
+he had just come.  He was pleased when he finally had his head in
+front of the doorway, but then saw that it was too narrow, and his
+body was too broad to get through it without further difficulty.  In
+his present mood, it obviously did not occur to his father to open
+the other of the double doors so that Gregor would have enough space
+to get through.  He was merely fixed on the idea that Gregor should
+be got back into his room as quickly as possible.  Nor would he ever
+have allowed Gregor the time to get himself upright as preparation
+for getting through the doorway.  What he did, making more noise
+than ever, was to drive Gregor forwards all the harder as if there
+had been nothing in the way; it sounded to Gregor as if there was
+now more than one father behind him; it was not a pleasant
+experience, and Gregor pushed himself into the doorway without
+regard for what might happen.  One side of his body lifted itself,
+he lay at an angle in the doorway, one flank scraped on the white
+door and was painfully injured, leaving vile brown flecks on it,
+soon he was stuck fast and would not have been able to move at all
+by himself, the little legs along one side hung quivering in the air
+while those on the other side were pressed painfully against the
+ground.  Then his father gave him a hefty shove from behind which
+released him from where he was held and sent him flying, and heavily
+bleeding, deep into his room.  The door was slammed shut with the
+stick, then, finally, all was quiet.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It was not until it was getting dark that evening that Gregor awoke
+from his deep and coma-like sleep.  He would have woken soon
+afterwards anyway even if he hadn't been disturbed, as he had had
+enough sleep and felt fully rested.  But he had the impression that
+some hurried steps and the sound of the door leading into the front
+room being carefully shut had woken him.  The light from the
+electric street lamps shone palely here and there onto the ceiling
+and tops of the furniture, but down below, where Gregor was, it was
+dark.  He pushed himself over to the door, feeling his way clumsily
+with his antennae - of which he was now beginning to learn the value
+- in order to see what had been happening there.  The whole of his
+left side seemed like one, painfully stretched scar,  and he limped
+badly on his two rows of legs.  One of the legs had been badly
+injured in the events of that morning - it was nearly a miracle that
+only one of them had been - and dragged along lifelessly.
+
+It was only when he had reached the door that he realised what it
+actually was that had drawn him over to it; it was the smell of
+something to eat.  By the door there was a dish filled with
+sweetened milk with little pieces of white bread floating in it.  He
+was so pleased he almost laughed, as he was even hungrier than he
+had been that morning, and immediately dipped his head into the
+milk, nearly covering his eyes with it.  But he soon drew his head
+back again in disappointment; not only did the pain in his tender
+left side make it difficult to eat the food - he was only able to
+eat if his whole body worked together as a snuffling whole - but the
+milk did not taste at all nice.  Milk like this was normally his
+favourite drink, and his sister had certainly left it there for him
+because of that, but he turned, almost against his own will, away
+from the dish and crawled back into the centre of the room.
+
+Through the crack in the door, Gregor could see that the gas had
+been lit in the living room.  His father at this time would normally
+be sat with his evening paper, reading it out in a loud voice to
+Gregor's mother, and sometimes to his sister, but there was now not
+a sound to be heard.  Gregor's sister would often write and tell him
+about this reading, but maybe his father had lost the habit in
+recent times.  It was so quiet all around too, even though there
+must have been somebody in the flat.  "What a quiet life it is the
+family lead", said Gregor to himself, and, gazing into the darkness,
+felt a great pride that he was able to provide a life like that in
+such a nice home for his sister and parents.  But what now, if all
+this peace and wealth and comfort should come to a horrible and
+frightening end? That was something that Gregor did not want to
+think about too much, so he started to move about, crawling up and
+down the room.
+
+Once during that long evening, the door on one side of the room was
+opened very slightly and hurriedly closed again; later on the door
+on the other side did the same; it seemed that someone needed to
+enter the room but thought better of it.  Gregor went and waited
+immediately by the door, resolved either to bring the timorous
+visitor into the room in some way or at least to find out who it
+was; but the door was opened no more that night and Gregor waited in
+vain.  The previous morning while the doors were locked everyone had
+wanted to get in there to him, but now, now that he had opened up
+one of the doors and the other had clearly been unlocked some time
+during the day, no-one came, and the keys were in the other sides.
+
+It was not until late at night that the gaslight in the living room
+was put out, and now it was easy to see that his parents and sister had
+stayed awake all that time, as they all could be distinctly heard as
+they went away together on tip-toe.  It was clear that no-one would
+come into Gregor's room any more until morning; that gave him plenty
+of time to think undisturbed about how he would have to re-arrange
+his life.  For some reason, the tall, empty room where he was forced
+to remain made him feel uneasy as he lay there flat on the floor,
+even though he had been living in it for five years.  Hardly aware
+of what he was doing other than a slight feeling of shame, he
+hurried under the couch.  It pressed down on his back a little, and
+he was no longer able to lift his head, but he nonetheless felt
+immediately at ease and his only regret was that his body was too
+broad to get it all underneath.
+
+He spent the whole night there.  Some of the time he passed in a
+light sleep, although he frequently woke from it in alarm because of
+his hunger, and some of the time was spent in worries and vague
+hopes which, however, always led to the same conclusion: for the
+time being he must remain calm, he must show patience and the
+greatest consideration so that his family could bear the
+unpleasantness that he, in his present condition, was forced to
+impose on them.
+
+Gregor soon had the opportunity to test the strength of his
+decisions, as early the next morning, almost before the night had
+ended, his sister, nearly fully dressed, opened the door from the
+front room and looked anxiously in.  She did not see him straight
+away, but when she did notice him under the couch - he had to be
+somewhere, for God's sake, he couldn't have flown away - she was so
+shocked that she lost control of herself and slammed the door shut
+again from outside.  But she seemed to regret her behaviour, as she
+opened the door again straight away and came in on tip-toe as if
+entering the room of someone seriously ill or even of a stranger.
+Gregor had pushed his head forward, right to the edge of the couch,
+and watched her.  Would she notice that he had left the milk as it
+was, realise that it was not from any lack of hunger and bring him
+in some other food that was more suitable? If she didn't do it
+herself he would rather go hungry than draw her attention to it,
+although he did feel a terrible urge to rush forward from under the
+couch, throw himself at his sister's feet and beg her for something
+good to eat.  However, his sister noticed the full dish immediately
+and looked at it and the few drops of milk splashed around it with
+some surprise.  She immediately picked it up - using a rag,
+not her bare hands - and carried it out.  Gregor was extremely
+curious as to what she would bring in its place, imagining the
+wildest possibilities, but he never could have guessed what his
+sister, in her goodness, actually did bring.  In order to test his
+taste, she brought him a whole selection of things, all spread out
+on an old newspaper.  There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones
+from the evening meal, covered in white sauce that had gone hard; a
+few raisins and almonds; some cheese that Gregor had declared
+inedible two days before; a dry roll and some bread spread with
+butter and salt.  As well as all that she had poured some water into
+the dish, which had probably been permanently set aside for Gregor's
+use, and placed it beside them.  Then, out of consideration for
+Gregor's feelings, as she knew that he would not eat in front of
+her, she hurried out again and even turned the key in the lock so
+that Gregor would know he could make things as comfortable for
+himself as he liked.  Gregor's little legs whirred, at last he could
+eat.  What's more, his injuries must already have completely healed
+as he found no difficulty in moving.  This amazed him, as more than
+a month earlier he had cut his finger slightly with a knife, he
+thought of how his finger had still hurt the day before yesterday.
+"Am I less sensitive than I used to be, then?", he thought, and was
+already sucking greedily at the cheese which had immediately, almost
+compellingly, attracted him much more than the other foods on the
+newspaper.  Quickly one after another, his eyes watering with
+pleasure, he consumed the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the
+fresh foods, on the other hand, he didn't like at all, and even
+dragged the things he did want to eat a little way away from them
+because he couldn't stand the smell.  Long after he had finished
+eating and lay lethargic in the same place, his sister slowly turned
+the key in the lock as a sign to him that he should withdraw.  He
+was immediately startled, although he had been half asleep, and he
+hurried back under the couch.  But he needed great self-control to
+stay there even for the short time that his sister was in the room,
+as eating so much food had rounded out his body a little and he
+could hardly breathe in that narrow space.  Half suffocating, he
+watched with bulging eyes as his sister unselfconsciously took a
+broom and swept up the left-overs, mixing them in with the food he
+had not even touched at all as if it could not be used any more.
+She quickly dropped it all into a bin, closed it with its wooden
+lid, and carried everything out.  She had hardly turned her back
+before Gregor came out again from under the couch and stretched
+himself.
+
+This was how Gregor received his food each day now, once in the
+morning while his parents and the maid were still asleep, and the
+second time after everyone had eaten their meal at midday as his
+parents would sleep for a little while then as well, and Gregor's
+sister would send the maid away on some errand.  Gregor's father and
+mother certainly did not want him to starve either, but perhaps it
+would have been more than they could stand to have any more
+experience of his feeding than being told about it, and perhaps his
+sister wanted to spare them what distress she could as they were
+indeed suffering enough.
+
+It was impossible for Gregor to find out what they had told the
+doctor and the locksmith that first morning to get them out of the
+flat.  As nobody could understand him, nobody, not even his sister,
+thought that he could understand them, so he had to be content to
+hear his sister's sighs and appeals to the saints as she moved about
+his room.  It was only later, when she had become a little more used
+to everything - there was, of course, no question of her ever
+becoming fully used to the situation - that Gregor would sometimes
+catch a friendly comment, or at least a comment that could be
+construed as friendly.  "He's enjoyed his dinner today", she might
+say when he had diligently cleared away all the food left for him,
+or if he left most of it, which slowly became more and more
+frequent, she would often say, sadly, "now everything's just been
+left there again".
+
+Although Gregor wasn't able to hear any news directly he did listen
+to much of what was said in the next rooms, and whenever he heard
+anyone speaking he would scurry straight to the appropriate door and
+press his whole body against it.  There was seldom any conversation,
+especially at first, that was not about him in some way, even if
+only in secret.  For two whole days, all the talk at every mealtime
+was about what they should do now; but even between meals they spoke
+about the same subject as there were always at least two members of
+the family at home - nobody wanted to be at home by themselves and
+it was out of the question to leave the flat entirely empty.  And on
+the very first day the maid had fallen to her knees and begged
+Gregor's mother to let her go without delay.  It was not very clear
+how much she knew of what had happened but she left within a quarter
+of an hour, tearfully thanking Gregor's mother for her dismissal as
+if she had done her an enormous service.  She even swore
+emphatically not to tell anyone the slightest about what had
+happened, even though no-one had asked that of her.
+
+Now Gregor's sister also had to help his mother with the cooking;
+although that was not so much bother as no-one ate very much.
+Gregor often heard how one of them would unsuccessfully urge another
+to eat, and receive no more answer than "no thanks, I've had enough"
+or something similar.  No-one drank very much either.  His sister
+would sometimes ask his father whether he would like a beer, hoping
+for the chance to go and fetch it herself.  When his father then
+said nothing she would add, so that he would not feel selfish, that
+she could send the housekeeper for it, but then his father would
+close the matter with a big, loud "No", and no more would be said.
+
+Even before the first day had come to an end, his father had
+explained to Gregor's mother and sister what their finances and
+prospects were.  Now and then he stood up from the table and took
+some receipt or document from the little cash box he had saved from
+his business when it had collapsed five years earlier.  Gregor heard
+how he opened the complicated lock and then closed it again after he
+had taken the item he wanted.  What he heard his father say was some
+of the first good news that Gregor heard since he had first been
+incarcerated in his room.  He had thought that nothing at all
+remained from his father's business, at least he had never told him
+anything different, and Gregor had never asked him about it anyway.
+Their business misfortune had reduced the family to a state of total
+despair, and Gregor's only concern at that time had been to arrange
+things so that they could all forget about it as quickly as
+possible.  So then he started working especially hard, with a fiery
+vigour that raised him from a junior salesman to a travelling
+representative almost overnight, bringing with it the chance to earn
+money in quite different ways.  Gregor converted his success at work
+straight into cash that he could lay on the table at home for the
+benefit of his astonished and delighted family.  They had been good
+times and they had never come again, at least not with the same
+splendour, even though Gregor had later earned so much that he was
+in a position to bear the costs of the whole family, and did bear
+them.  They had even got used to it, both Gregor and the family,
+they took the money with gratitude and he was glad to provide it,
+although there was no longer much warm affection given in return.
+Gregor only remained close to his sister now.  Unlike him, she was
+very fond of music and a gifted and expressive violinist, it was his
+secret plan to send her to the conservatory next year even though it
+would cause great expense that would have to be made up for in some
+other way.  During Gregor's short periods in town, conversation with
+his sister would often turn to the conservatory but it was only ever
+mentioned as a lovely dream that could never be realised.  Their
+parents did not like to hear this innocent talk, but Gregor thought
+about it quite hard and decided he would let them know what he
+planned with a grand announcement of it on Christmas day.
+
+That was the sort of totally pointless thing that went through his
+mind in his present state, pressed upright against the door and
+listening.  There were times when he simply became too tired to
+continue listening, when his head would fall wearily against the
+door and he would pull it up again with a start, as even the
+slightest noise he caused would be heard next door and they would
+all go silent.  "What's that he's doing now", his father would say
+after a while, clearly having gone over to the door, and only then
+would the interrupted conversation slowly be taken up again.
+
+When explaining things, his father repeated himself several times,
+partly because it was a long time since he had been occupied with
+these matters himself and partly because Gregor's mother did not
+understand everything the first time.  From these repeated explanations
+Gregor learned, to his pleasure, that despite all their misfortunes
+there was still some money available from the old days.  It was not
+a lot, but it had not been touched in the meantime and some interest
+had accumulated.  Besides that, they had not been using up all the
+money that Gregor had been bringing home every month, keeping only a
+little for himself, so that that, too, had been accumulating.
+Behind the door, Gregor nodded with enthusiasm in his pleasure at
+this unexpected thrift and caution.  He could actually have used
+this surplus money to reduce his father's debt to his boss, and the
+day when he could have freed himself from that job would have come
+much closer, but now it was certainly better the way his father had
+done things.
+
+This money, however, was certainly not enough to enable the family
+to live off the interest; it was enough to maintain them for,
+perhaps, one or two years, no more.  That's to say, it was money
+that should not really be touched but set aside for emergencies;
+money to live on had to be earned.  His father was healthy but old,
+and lacking in self confidence.  During the five years that he had
+not been working - the first holiday in a life that had been full of
+strain and no success - he had put on a lot of weight and become
+very slow and clumsy.  Would Gregor's elderly mother now have to go
+and earn money? She suffered from asthma and it was a strain for her
+just to move about the home, every other day would be spent
+struggling for breath on the sofa by the open window.  Would his
+sister have to go and earn money? She was still a child of
+seventeen, her life up till then had been very enviable, consisting
+of wearing nice clothes, sleeping late, helping out in the business,
+joining in with a few modest pleasures and most of all playing the
+violin.  Whenever they began to talk of the need to earn money,
+Gregor would always first let go of the door and then throw himself
+onto the cool, leather sofa next to it, as he became quite hot with
+shame and regret.
+
+He would often lie there the whole night through, not sleeping a
+wink but scratching at the leather for hours on end.  Or he might go
+to all the effort of pushing a chair to the window, climbing up onto
+the sill and, propped up in the chair, leaning on the window to
+stare out of it.  He had used to feel a great sense of freedom from
+doing this, but doing it now was obviously something more remembered
+than experienced,  as what he actually saw in this way was becoming
+less distinct every day, even things that were quite near; he had
+used to curse the ever-present view of the hospital across the
+street, but now he could not see it at all, and if he had not known
+that he lived in Charlottenstrasse, which was a quiet street despite
+being in the middle of the city, he could have thought that he was
+looking out the window at a barren waste where the grey sky and the
+grey earth mingled inseparably.  His observant sister only needed to
+notice the chair twice before she would always push it back to its
+exact position by the window after she had tidied up the room, and
+even left the inner pane of the window open from then on.
+
+If Gregor had only been able to speak to his sister and thank her
+for all that she had to do for him it would have been easier for him
+to bear it; but as it was it caused him pain.  His sister,
+naturally, tried as far as possible to pretend there was nothing
+burdensome about it, and the longer it went on, of course, the
+better she was able to do so, but as time went by Gregor was also
+able to see through it all so much better.  It had even become very
+unpleasant for him, now, whenever she entered the room.  No sooner
+had she come in than she would quickly close the door as a
+precaution so that no-one would have to suffer the view into
+Gregor's room, then she would go straight to the window and pull it
+hurriedly open almost as if she were suffocating.  Even if it was
+cold, she would stay at the window breathing deeply for a little
+while.  She would alarm Gregor twice a day with this running about
+and noise making; he would stay under the couch shivering the whole
+while, knowing full well that she would certainly have liked to
+spare him this ordeal, but it was impossible for her to be in the
+same room with him with the windows closed.
+
+One day, about a month after Gregor's transformation when his sister
+no longer had any particular reason to be shocked at his appearance,
+she came into the room a little earlier than usual and found him
+still staring out the window, motionless, and just where he would be
+most horrible.  In itself, his sister's not coming into the room
+would have been no surprise for Gregor as it would have been
+difficult for her to immediately open the window while he was still
+there, but not only did she not come in, she went straight back and
+closed the door behind her, a stranger would have thought he had
+threatened her and tried to bite her.  Gregor went straight to hide
+himself under the couch, of course, but he had to wait until midday
+before his sister came back and she seemed much more uneasy than
+usual.  It made him realise that she still found his appearance
+unbearable and would continue to do so, she probably even had to
+overcome the urge to flee when she saw the little bit of him that
+protruded from under the couch.  One day, in order to spare her even
+this sight, he spent four hours carrying the bedsheet over to the
+couch on his back and arranged it so that he was completely covered
+and his sister would not be able to see him even if she bent down.
+If she did not think this sheet was necessary then all she had to do
+was take it off again, as it was clear enough that it was no
+pleasure for Gregor to cut himself off so completely.  She left the
+sheet where it was.  Gregor even thought he glimpsed a look of
+gratitude one time when he carefully looked out from under the sheet
+to see how his sister liked the new arrangement.
+
+For the first fourteen days, Gregor's parents could not bring
+themselves to come into the room to see him.  He would often hear
+them say how they appreciated all the new work his sister was doing
+even though, before, they had seen her as a girl who was somewhat
+useless and frequently been annoyed with her.  But now the two of
+them, father and mother, would often both wait outside the door of
+Gregor's room while his sister tidied up in there, and as soon as
+she went out again she would have to tell them exactly how
+everything looked, what Gregor had eaten, how he had behaved this
+time and whether, perhaps, any slight improvement could be seen.
+His mother also wanted to go in and visit Gregor relatively soon but
+his father and sister at first persuaded her against it.  Gregor
+listened very closely to all this, and approved fully.  Later,
+though, she had to be held back by force, which made her call out:
+"Let me go and see Gregor, he is my unfortunate son! Can't you
+understand I have to see him?", and Gregor would think to himself
+that maybe it would be better if his mother came in, not every day
+of course, but one day a week, perhaps; she could understand
+everything much better than his sister who, for all her courage, was
+still just a child after all, and really might not have had an
+adult's appreciation of the burdensome job she had taken on.
+
+Gregor's wish to see his mother was soon realised.  Out of
+consideration for his parents, Gregor wanted to avoid being seen at
+the window during the day, the few square meters of the floor did
+not give him much room to crawl about, it was hard to just lie
+quietly through the night, his food soon stopped giving him any
+pleasure at all, and so, to entertain himself, he got into the habit
+of crawling up and down the walls and ceiling.  He was especially
+fond of hanging from the ceiling; it was quite different from lying
+on the floor; he could breathe more freely; his body had a light
+swing to it; and up there, relaxed and almost happy, it might happen
+that he would surprise even himself by letting go of the ceiling and
+landing on the floor with a crash.  But now, of course, he had far
+better control of his body than before and, even with a fall as
+great as that, caused himself no damage.  Very soon his sister
+noticed Gregor's new way of entertaining himself - he had, after
+all, left traces of the adhesive from his feet as he crawled about -
+and got it into her head to make it as easy as possible for him by
+removing the furniture that got in his way, especially the chest of
+drawers and the desk.  Now, this was not something that she would be
+able to do by herself; she did not dare to ask for help from her
+father; the sixteen year old maid had carried on bravely since the
+cook had left but she certainly would not have helped in this, she
+had even asked to be allowed to keep the kitchen locked at all times
+and never to have to open the door unless it was especially
+important; so his sister had no choice but to choose some time when
+Gregor's father was not there and fetch his mother to help her.  As
+she approached the room, Gregor could hear his mother express her
+joy, but once at the door she went silent.  First, of course, his
+sister came in and looked round to see that everything in the room
+was alright; and only then did she let her mother enter.  Gregor had
+hurriedly pulled the sheet down lower over the couch and put more
+folds into it so that everything really looked as if it had just
+been thrown down by chance.  Gregor also refrained, this time, from
+spying out from under the sheet; he gave up the chance to see his
+mother until later and was simply glad that she had come.  "You can
+come in, he can't be seen", said his sister, obviously leading her
+in by the hand.  The old chest of drawers was too heavy for a pair
+of feeble women to be heaving about, but Gregor listened as they
+pushed it from its place, his sister always taking on the heaviest
+part of the work for herself and ignoring her mother's warnings that
+she would strain herself.  This lasted a very long time.  After
+labouring at it for fifteen minutes or more his mother said it would
+be better to leave the chest where it was, for one thing it was too
+heavy for them to get the job finished before Gregor's father got
+home and leaving it in the middle of the room it would be in his way
+even more, and for another thing it wasn't even sure that taking the
+furniture away would really be any help to him.  She thought just
+the opposite; the sight of the bare walls saddened her right to her
+heart; and why wouldn't Gregor feel the same way about it, he'd been
+used to this furniture in his room for a long time and it would make
+him feel abandoned to be in an empty room like that.  Then, quietly,
+almost whispering as if wanting Gregor (whose whereabouts she did
+not know) to hear not even the tone of her voice, as she was
+convinced that he did not understand her words, she added "and by
+taking the furniture away, won't it seem like we're showing that
+we've given up all hope of improvement and we're abandoning him to
+cope for himself? I think it'd be best to leave the room exactly the
+way it was before so that when Gregor comes back to us again he'll
+find everything unchanged and he'll be able to forget the time in
+between all the easier".
+
+Hearing these words from his mother made Gregor realise that the
+lack of any direct human communication, along with the monotonous
+life led by the family during these two months, must have made him
+confused - he could think of no other way of explaining to himself
+why he had seriously wanted his room emptied out.  Had he really
+wanted to transform his room into a cave, a warm room fitted out
+with the nice furniture he had inherited? That would have let him
+crawl around unimpeded in any direction, but it would also have let
+him quickly forget his past when he had still been human.  He had
+come very close to forgetting, and it had only been the voice of his
+mother, unheard for so long, that had shaken him out of it.  Nothing
+should be removed; everything had to stay; he could not do without
+the good influence the furniture had on his condition; and if the
+furniture made it difficult for him to crawl about mindlessly that
+was not a loss but a great advantage.
+
+His sister, unfortunately, did not agree; she had become used to the
+idea, not without reason, that she was Gregor's spokesman to his
+parents about the things that concerned him.  This meant that his
+mother's advice now was sufficient reason for her to insist on
+removing not only the chest of drawers and the desk, as she had
+thought at first, but all the furniture apart from the all-important
+couch.  It was more than childish perversity, of course, or the
+unexpected confidence she had recently acquired, that made her
+insist; she had indeed noticed that Gregor needed a lot of room to
+crawl about in, whereas the furniture, as far as anyone could see,
+was of no use to him at all.  Girls of that age, though, do become
+enthusiastic about things and feel they must get their way whenever
+they can.  Perhaps this was what tempted Grete to make Gregor's
+situation seem even more shocking than it was so that she could do
+even more for him.  Grete would probably be the only one who would
+dare enter a room dominated by Gregor crawling about the bare walls
+by himself.
+
+So she refused to let her mother dissuade her.  Gregor's mother
+already looked uneasy in his room, she soon stopped speaking and
+helped Gregor's sister to get the chest of drawers out with what
+strength she had.  The chest of drawers was something that Gregor
+could do without if he had to, but the writing desk had to stay.
+Hardly had the two women pushed the chest of drawers, groaning, out
+of the room than Gregor poked his head out from under the couch to
+see what he could do about it.  He meant to be as careful and
+considerate as he could, but, unfortunately, it was his mother who
+came back first while Grete in the next room had her arms round the
+chest, pushing and pulling at it from side to side by herself
+without, of course, moving it an inch.  His mother was not used to
+the sight of Gregor, he might have made her ill, so Gregor hurried
+backwards to the far end of the couch.  In his startlement, though,
+he was not able to prevent the sheet at its front from moving a
+little.  It was enough to attract his mother's attention.  She stood
+very still, remained there a moment, and then went back out to
+Grete.
+
+Gregor kept trying to assure himself that nothing unusual was
+happening, it was just a few pieces of furniture being moved after
+all, but he soon had to admit that the women going to and fro, their
+little calls to each other, the scraping of the furniture on the
+floor, all these things made him feel as if he were being assailed
+from all sides.  With his head and legs pulled in against him and
+his body pressed to the floor, he was forced to admit to himself
+that he could not stand all of this much longer.  They were emptying
+his room out; taking away everything that was dear to him; they had
+already taken out the chest containing his fretsaw and other tools;
+now they threatened to remove the writing desk with its place
+clearly worn into the floor, the desk where he had done his homework
+as a business trainee, at high school, even while he had been at
+infant school--he really could not wait any longer to see whether
+the two women's intentions were good.  He had nearly forgotten they
+were there anyway, as they were now too tired to say anything while
+they worked and he could only hear their feet as they stepped
+heavily on the floor.
+
+So, while the women were leant against the desk in the other room
+catching their breath, he sallied out, changed direction four times
+not knowing what he should save first before his attention was
+suddenly caught by the picture on the wall - which was already
+denuded of everything else that had been on it - of the lady dressed
+in copious fur.  He hurried up onto the picture and pressed himself
+against its glass, it held him firmly and felt good on his hot
+belly.  This picture at least, now totally covered by Gregor, would
+certainly be taken away by no-one.  He turned his head to face the
+door into the living room so that he could watch the women when they
+came back.
+
+They had not allowed themselves a long rest and came back quite
+soon; Grete had put her arm around her mother and was nearly
+carrying her.  "What shall we take now, then?", said Grete and
+looked around.  Her eyes met those of Gregor on the wall.  Perhaps
+only because her mother was there, she remained calm, bent her face
+to her so that she would not look round and said, albeit hurriedly
+and with a tremor in her voice: "Come on, let's go back in the
+living room for a while?"  Gregor could see what Grete had in mind,
+she wanted to take her mother somewhere safe and then chase him down
+from the wall.  Well, she could certainly try it! He sat unyielding
+on his picture.  He would rather jump at Grete's face.
+
+But Grete's words had made her mother quite worried, she stepped to
+one side, saw the enormous brown patch against the flowers of the
+wallpaper, and before she even realised it was Gregor that she saw
+screamed: "Oh God, oh God!"  Arms outstretched, she fell onto the
+couch as if she had given up everything and stayed there immobile.
+"Gregor!" shouted his sister, glowering at him and shaking her fist.
+ That was the first word she had spoken to him directly since his
+transformation.  She ran into the other room to fetch some kind of
+smelling salts to bring her mother out of her faint; Gregor wanted
+to help too - he could save his picture later, although he stuck
+fast to the glass and had to pull himself off by force; then he,
+too, ran into the next room as if he could advise his sister like in
+the old days; but he had to just stand behind her doing nothing; she
+was looking into various bottles, he startled her when she turned
+round; a bottle fell to the ground and broke; a splinter cut
+Gregor's face, some kind of caustic medicine splashed all over him;
+now, without delaying any longer, Grete took hold of all the bottles
+she could and ran with them in to her mother; she slammed the door
+shut with her foot.  So now Gregor was shut out from his mother,
+who, because of him, might be near to death; he could not open the
+door if he did not want to chase his sister away, and she had to
+stay with his mother; there was nothing for him to do but wait; and,
+oppressed with anxiety and self-reproach, he began to crawl about,
+he crawled over everything, walls, furniture, ceiling, and finally
+in his confusion as the whole room began to spin around him he fell
+down into the middle of the dinner table.
+
+He lay there for a while, numb and immobile, all around him it was
+quiet, maybe that was a good sign.  Then there was someone at the
+door.  The maid, of course, had locked herself in her kitchen so
+that Grete would have to go and answer it.  His father had arrived
+home.  "What's happened?" were his first words; Grete's appearance
+must have made everything clear to him.  She answered him with
+subdued voice, and openly pressed her face into his chest: "Mother's
+fainted, but she's better now.  Gregor got out."  "Just as I
+expected", said his father, "just as I always said, but you women
+wouldn't listen, would you."  It was clear to Gregor that Grete had
+not said enough and that his father took it to mean that something
+bad had happened, that he was responsible for some act of violence.
+That meant Gregor would now have to try to calm his father, as he
+did not have the time to explain things to him even if that had been
+possible.  So he fled to the door of his room and pressed himself
+against it so that his father, when he came in from the hall, could
+see straight away that Gregor had the best intentions and would go
+back into his room without delay, that it would not be necessary to
+drive him back but that they had only to open the door and he would
+disappear.
+
+His father, though, was not in the mood to notice subtleties like
+that; "Ah!", he shouted as he came in, sounding as if he were both
+angry and glad at the same time.  Gregor drew his head back from the
+door and lifted it towards his father.  He really had not imagined
+his father the way he stood there now; of late, with his new habit
+of crawling about, he had neglected to pay attention to what was
+going on the rest of the flat the way he had done before.  He really
+ought to have expected things to have changed, but still, still, was
+that really his father? The same tired man as used to be laying
+there entombed in his bed when Gregor came back from his business
+trips, who would receive him sitting in the armchair in his
+nightgown when he came back in the evenings; who was hardly even
+able to stand up but, as a sign of his pleasure, would just raise
+his arms and who, on the couple of times a year when they went for a
+walk together on a Sunday or public holiday wrapped up tightly in
+his overcoat between Gregor and his mother, would always labour his
+way forward a little more slowly than them, who were already walking
+slowly for his sake; who would place his stick down carefully and,
+if he wanted to say something would invariably stop and gather his
+companions around him.  He was standing up straight enough now;
+dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, the sort worn by
+the employees at the banking institute; above the high, stiff collar
+of the coat his strong double-chin emerged; under the bushy
+eyebrows, his piercing, dark eyes looked out fresh and alert; his
+normally unkempt white hair was combed down painfully close to his
+scalp.  He took his cap, with its gold monogram from, probably, some
+bank, and threw it in an arc right across the room onto the sofa,
+put his hands in his trouser pockets, pushing back the bottom of his
+long uniform coat, and, with look of determination, walked towards
+Gregor.  He probably did not even know himself what he had in mind,
+but nonetheless lifted his feet unusually high.  Gregor was amazed
+at the enormous size of the soles of his boots, but wasted no time
+with that - he knew full well, right from the first day of his new
+life, that his father thought it necessary to always be extremely
+strict with him.  And so he ran up to his father, stopped when his
+father stopped, scurried forwards again when he moved, even
+slightly.  In this way they went round the room several times
+without anything decisive happening, without even giving the
+impression of a chase as everything went so slowly.  Gregor remained
+all this time on the floor, largely because he feared his father
+might see it as especially provoking if he fled onto the wall or
+ceiling.  Whatever he did, Gregor had to admit that he certainly
+would not be able to keep up this running about for long, as for
+each step his father took he had to carry out countless movements.
+He became noticeably short of breath, even in his earlier life his
+lungs had not been very reliable.  Now, as he lurched about in his
+efforts to muster all the strength he could for running he could
+hardly keep his eyes open; his thoughts became too slow for him to
+think of any other way of saving himself than running; he almost
+forgot that the walls were there for him to use although, here, they
+were concealed behind carefully carved furniture full of notches and
+protrusions - then, right beside him, lightly tossed, something flew
+down and rolled in front of him.  It was an apple; then another one
+immediately flew at him; Gregor froze in shock; there was no longer
+any point in running as his father had decided to bombard him.  He
+had filled his pockets with fruit from the bowl on the sideboard and
+now, without even taking the time for careful aim, threw one apple
+after another.  These little, red apples rolled about on the floor,
+knocking into each other as if they had electric motors.  An apple
+thrown without much force glanced against Gregor's back and slid off
+without doing any harm.  Another one however, immediately following
+it, hit squarely and lodged in his back; Gregor wanted to drag
+himself away, as if he could remove the surprising, the incredible
+pain by changing his position; but he felt as if nailed to the spot
+and spread himself out, all his senses in confusion.  The last thing
+he saw was the door of his room being pulled open, his sister was
+screaming, his mother ran out in front of her in her blouse (as his
+sister had taken off some of her clothes after she had fainted to
+make it easier for her to breathe), she ran to his father, her
+skirts unfastened and sliding one after another to the ground,
+stumbling over the skirts she pushed herself to his father, her arms
+around him, uniting herself with him totally - now Gregor lost his
+ability to see anything - her hands behind his father's head begging
+him to spare Gregor's life.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor's flesh, so it
+remained there as a visible reminder of his injury.  He had suffered
+it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious
+enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current
+sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated
+as an enemy.  On the contrary, as a family there was a duty to
+swallow any revulsion for him and to be patient, just to be patient.
+
+Because of his injuries, Gregor had lost much of his mobility -
+probably permanently.  He had been reduced to the condition of an
+ancient invalid and it took him long, long minutes to crawl across
+his room - crawling over the ceiling was out of the question - but
+this deterioration in his condition was fully (in his opinion) made
+up for by the door to the living room being left open every evening.
+ He got into the habit of closely watching it for one or two hours
+before it was opened and then, lying in the darkness of his room
+where he could not be seen from the living room, he could watch the
+family in the light of the dinner table and listen to their
+conversation - with everyone's permission, in a way, and thus quite
+differently from before.
+
+They no longer held the lively conversations of earlier times, of
+course, the ones that Gregor always thought about with longing when
+he was tired and getting into the damp bed in some small hotel room.
+ All of them were usually very quiet nowadays.  Soon after dinner,
+his father would go to sleep in his chair; his mother and sister
+would urge each other to be quiet; his mother, bent deeply under the
+lamp, would sew fancy underwear for a fashion shop; his sister, who
+had taken a sales job, learned shorthand and French in the evenings
+so that she might be able to get a better position later on.
+Sometimes his father would wake up and say to Gregor's mother
+"you're doing so much sewing again today!", as if he did not know
+that he had been dozing - and then he would go back to sleep again
+while mother and sister would exchange a tired grin.
+
+With a kind of stubbornness, Gregor's father refused to take his
+uniform off even at home; while his nightgown hung unused on its peg
+Gregor's father would slumber where he was, fully dressed, as if
+always ready to serve and expecting to hear the voice of his
+superior even here.  The uniform had not been new to start with, but
+as a result of this it slowly became even shabbier despite the
+efforts of Gregor's mother and sister to look after it.  Gregor
+would often spend the whole evening looking at all the stains on
+this coat, with its gold buttons always kept polished and shiny,
+while the old man in it would sleep, highly uncomfortable but
+peaceful.
+
+As soon as it struck ten, Gregor's mother would speak gently to his
+father to wake him and try to persuade him to go to bed, as he
+couldn't sleep properly where he was and he really had to get his
+sleep if he was to be up at six to get to work.  But since he had
+been in work he had become more obstinate and would always insist on
+staying longer at the table, even though he regularly fell asleep
+and it was then harder than ever to persuade him to exchange the
+chair for his bed.  Then, however much mother and sister would
+importune him with little reproaches and warnings he would keep
+slowly shaking his head for a quarter of an hour with his eyes
+closed and refusing to get up.  Gregor's mother would tug at his
+sleeve, whisper endearments into his ear, Gregor's sister would
+leave her work to help her mother, but nothing would have any effect
+on him.  He would just sink deeper into his chair.  Only when the
+two women took him under the arms he would abruptly open his eyes,
+look at them one after the other and say: "What a life! This is what
+peace I get in my old age!"  And supported by the two women he would
+lift himself up carefully as if he were carrying the greatest load
+himself, let the women take him to the door, send them off and carry
+on by himself while Gregor's mother would throw down her needle and
+his sister her pen so that they could run after his father and
+continue being of help to him.
+
+Who, in this tired and overworked family, would have had time to
+give more attention to Gregor than was absolutely necessary? The
+household budget became even smaller; so now the maid was dismissed;
+an enormous, thick-boned charwoman with white hair that flapped
+around her head came every morning and evening to do the heaviest
+work; everything else was looked after by Gregor's mother on top of
+the large amount of sewing work she did.  Gregor even learned,
+listening to the evening conversation about what price they had
+hoped for, that several items of jewellery belonging to the family
+had been sold, even though both mother and sister had been very fond
+of wearing them at functions and celebrations.  But the loudest
+complaint was that although the flat was much too big for their
+present circumstances, they could not move out of it, there was no
+imaginable way of transferring Gregor to the new address.  He could
+see quite well, though, that there were more reasons than
+consideration for him that made it difficult for them to move, it
+would have been quite easy to transport him in any suitable crate
+with a few air holes in it; the main thing holding the family back
+from their decision to move was much more to do with their total
+despair, and the thought that they had been struck with a misfortune
+unlike anything experienced by anyone else they knew or were related
+to.  They carried out absolutely everything that the world expects
+from poor people, Gregor's father brought bank employees their
+breakfast, his mother sacrificed herself by washing clothes for
+strangers, his sister ran back and forth behind her desk at the
+behest of the customers, but they just did not have the strength to
+do any more.  And the injury in Gregor's back began to hurt as much
+as when it was new.  After they had come back from taking his father
+to bed Gregor's mother and sister would now leave their work where
+it was and sit close together, cheek to cheek; his mother would
+point to Gregor's room and say "Close that door, Grete", and then,
+when he was in the dark again, they would sit in the next room and
+their tears would mingle, or they would simply sit there staring
+dry-eyed at the table.
+
+Gregor hardly slept at all, either night or day.  Sometimes he would
+think of taking over the family's affairs, just like before, the
+next time the door was opened; he had long forgotten about his boss
+and the chief clerk, but they would appear again in his thoughts,
+the salesmen and the apprentices, that stupid teaboy, two or three
+friends from other businesses, one of the chambermaids from a
+provincial hotel, a tender memory that appeared and disappeared
+again, a cashier from a hat shop for whom his attention had been
+serious but too slow, - all of them appeared to him, mixed together
+with strangers and others he had forgotten, but instead of helping
+him and his family they were all of them inaccessible, and he was
+glad when they disappeared.  Other times he was not at all in the
+mood to look after his family, he was filled with simple rage about
+the lack of attention he was shown, and although he could think of
+nothing he would have wanted, he made plans of how he could get into
+the pantry where he could take all the things he was entitled to,
+even if he was not hungry.  Gregor's sister no longer thought about
+how she could please him but would hurriedly push some food or other
+into his room with her foot before she rushed out to work in the
+morning and at midday, and in the evening she would sweep it away
+again with the broom, indifferent as to whether it had been eaten or
+- more often than not - had been left totally untouched.  She still
+cleared up the room in the evening, but now she could not have been
+any quicker about it.  Smears of dirt were left on the walls, here
+and there were little balls of dust and filth.  At first, Gregor
+went into one of the worst of these places when his sister arrived
+as a reproach to her, but he could have stayed there for weeks
+without his sister doing anything about it; she could see the dirt
+as well as he could but she had simply decided to leave him to it.
+At the same time she became touchy in a way that was quite new for
+her and which everyone in the family understood - cleaning up
+Gregor's room was for her and her alone.  Gregor's mother did once
+thoroughly clean his room, and needed to use several bucketfuls of
+water to do it - although that much dampness also made Gregor ill
+and he lay flat on the couch, bitter and immobile.  But his mother
+was to be punished still more for what she had done, as hardly had
+his sister arrived home in the evening than she noticed the change
+in Gregor's room and, highly aggrieved, ran back into the living
+room where, despite her mothers raised and imploring hands, she
+broke into convulsive tears.  Her father, of course, was startled
+out of his chair and the two parents looked on astonished and
+helpless; then they, too, became agitated; Gregor's father, standing
+to the right of his mother, accused her of not leaving the cleaning
+of Gregor's room to his sister; from her left, Gregor's sister
+screamed at her that she was never to clean Gregor's room again;
+while his mother tried to draw his father, who was beside himself
+with anger, into the bedroom; his sister, quaking with tears,
+thumped on the table with her small fists; and Gregor hissed in
+anger that no-one had even thought of closing the door to save him
+the sight of this and all its noise.
+
+Gregor's sister was exhausted from going out to work, and looking
+after Gregor as she had done before was even more work for her, but
+even so his mother ought certainly not to have taken her place.
+Gregor, on the other hand, ought not to be neglected.  Now, though,
+the charwoman was here.  This elderly widow, with a robust bone
+structure that made her able to withstand the hardest of things in
+her long life, wasn't really repelled by Gregor.  Just by chance one
+day, rather than any real curiosity, she opened the door to Gregor's
+room and found herself face to face with him.  He was taken totally
+by surprise, no-one was chasing him but he began to rush to and fro
+while she just stood there in amazement with her hands crossed in
+front of her.  From then on she never failed to open the door
+slightly every evening and morning and look briefly in on him.  At
+first she would call to him as she did so with words that she
+probably considered friendly, such as "come on then, you old
+dung-beetle!", or "look at the old dung-beetle there!"  Gregor never
+responded to being spoken to in that way, but just remained where he
+was without moving as if the door had never even been opened.  If
+only they had told this charwoman to clean up his room every day
+instead of letting her disturb him for no reason whenever she felt
+like it! One day, early in the morning while a heavy rain struck the
+windowpanes, perhaps indicating that spring was coming, she began to
+speak to him in that way once again.  Gregor was so resentful of it
+that he started to move toward her, he was slow and infirm, but it
+was like a kind of attack.  Instead of being afraid, the charwoman
+just lifted up one of the chairs from near the door and stood there
+with her mouth open, clearly intending not to close her mouth until
+the chair in her hand had been slammed down into Gregor's back.
+"Aren't you coming any closer, then?", she asked when Gregor turned
+round again, and she calmly put the chair back in the corner.
+
+Gregor had almost entirely stopped eating.  Only if he happened to
+find himself next to the food that had been prepared for him he
+might take some of it into his mouth to play with it, leave it there
+a few hours and then, more often than not, spit it out again.  At
+first he thought it was distress at the state of his room that
+stopped him eating, but he had soon got used to the changes made
+there.  They had got into the habit of putting things into this room
+that they had no room for anywhere else, and there were now many
+such things as one of the rooms in the flat had been rented out to
+three gentlemen.  These earnest gentlemen - all three of them had
+full beards, as Gregor learned peering through the crack in the door
+one day - were painfully insistent on things' being tidy.  This
+meant not only in their own room but, since they had taken a room in
+this establishment, in the entire flat and especially in the
+kitchen.  Unnecessary clutter was something they could not tolerate,
+especially if it was dirty.  They had moreover brought most of their
+own furnishings and equipment with them.  For this reason, many
+things had become superfluous which, although they could not be
+sold, the family did not wish to discard.  All these things found
+their way into Gregor's room.  The dustbins from the kitchen found
+their way in there too.  The charwoman was always in a hurry, and
+anything she couldn't use for the time being she would just chuck in
+there.  He, fortunately, would usually see no more than the object
+and the hand that held it.  The woman most likely meant to fetch the
+things back out again when she had time and the opportunity, or to
+throw everything out in one go, but what actually happened was that
+they were left where they landed when they had first been thrown
+unless Gregor made his way through the junk and moved it somewhere
+else.  At first he moved it because, with no other room free where
+he could crawl about, he was forced to, but later on he came to
+enjoy it although moving about in that way left him sad and tired to
+death, and he would remain immobile for hours afterwards.
+
+The gentlemen who rented the room would sometimes take their evening
+meal at home in the living room that was used by everyone, and so
+the door to this room was often kept closed in the evening.  But
+Gregor found it easy to give up having the door open, he had, after
+all, often failed to make use of it when it was open and, without
+the family having noticed it, lain in his room in its darkest
+corner.  One time, though, the charwoman left the door to the living
+room slightly open, and it remained open when the gentlemen who
+rented the room came in in the evening and the light was put on.
+They sat up at the table where, formerly, Gregor had taken his meals
+with his father and mother, they unfolded the serviettes and picked
+up their knives and forks.  Gregor's mother immediately appeared in
+the doorway with a dish of meat and soon behind her came his sister
+with a dish piled high with potatoes.  The food was steaming, and
+filled the room with its smell.  The gentlemen bent over the dishes
+set in front of them as if they wanted to test the food before
+eating it, and the gentleman in the middle, who seemed to count as
+an authority for the other two, did indeed cut off a piece of meat
+while it was still in its dish, clearly wishing to establish whether
+it was sufficiently cooked or whether it should be sent back to the
+kitchen.  It was to his satisfaction, and Gregor's mother and
+sister, who had been looking on anxiously, began to breathe again
+and smiled.
+
+The family themselves ate in the kitchen.  Nonetheless, Gregor's
+father came into the living room before he went into the kitchen,
+bowed once with his cap in his hand and did his round of the table.
+The gentlemen stood as one, and mumbled something into their beards.
+ Then, once they were alone, they ate in near perfect silence.  It
+seemed remarkable to Gregor that above all the various noises of
+eating their chewing teeth could still be heard, as if they had
+wanted to show Gregor that you need teeth in order to eat and it was
+not possible to perform anything with jaws that are toothless
+however nice they might be.  "I'd like to eat something", said
+Gregor anxiously, "but not anything like they're eating.  They do
+feed themselves.  And here I am, dying!"
+
+Throughout all this time, Gregor could not remember having heard the
+violin being played, but this evening it began to be heard from the
+kitchen.  The three gentlemen had already finished their meal, the
+one in the middle had produced a newspaper, given a page to each of
+the others, and now they leant back in their chairs reading them and
+smoking.  When the violin began playing they became attentive, stood
+up and went on tip-toe over to the door of the hallway where they
+stood pressed against each other.  Someone must have heard them in
+the kitchen, as Gregor's father called out: "Is the playing perhaps
+unpleasant for the gentlemen? We can stop it straight away."  "On
+the contrary", said the middle gentleman, "would the young lady not
+like to come in and play for us here in the room, where it is, after
+all, much more cosy and comfortable?"  "Oh yes, we'd love to",
+called back Gregor's father as if he had been the violin player
+himself.  The gentlemen stepped back into the room and waited.
+Gregor's father soon appeared with the music stand, his mother with
+the music and his sister with the violin.  She calmly prepared
+everything for her to begin playing; his parents, who had never
+rented a room out before and therefore showed an exaggerated
+courtesy towards the three gentlemen, did not even dare to sit on
+their own chairs; his father leant against the door with his right
+hand pushed in between two buttons on his uniform coat; his mother,
+though, was offered a seat by one of the gentlemen and sat - leaving
+the chair where the gentleman happened to have placed it - out of
+the way in a corner.
+
+His sister began to play; father and mother paid close attention,
+one on each side, to the movements of her hands.  Drawn in by the
+playing, Gregor had dared to come forward a little and already had
+his head in the living room.  Before, he had taken great pride in
+how considerate he was but now it hardly occurred to him that he had
+become so thoughtless about the others.  What's more, there was now
+all the more reason to keep himself hidden as he was covered in the
+dust that lay everywhere in his room and flew up at the slightest
+movement; he carried threads, hairs, and remains of food about on
+his back and sides; he was much too indifferent to everything now to
+lay on his back and wipe himself on the carpet like he had used to
+do several times a day.  And despite this condition, he was not too
+shy to move forward a little onto the immaculate floor of the living
+room.
+
+No-one noticed him, though.  The family was totally preoccupied with
+the violin playing; at first, the three gentlemen had put their
+hands in their pockets and come up far too close behind the music
+stand to look at all the notes being played, and they must have
+disturbed Gregor's sister, but soon, in contrast with the family,
+they  withdrew back to the window with their heads sunk and talking
+to each other at half volume, and they stayed by the window while
+Gregor's father observed them anxiously.  It really now seemed very
+obvious that they had expected to hear some beautiful or
+entertaining violin playing but had been disappointed, that they had
+had enough of the whole performance and it was only now out of
+politeness that they allowed their peace to be disturbed.  It was
+especially unnerving, the way they all blew the smoke from their
+cigarettes upwards from their mouth and noses.  Yet Gregor's sister
+was playing so beautifully.  Her face was leant to one side,
+following the lines of music with a careful and melancholy
+expression.  Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his
+head close to the ground so that he could meet her eyes if the
+chance came.  Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It
+seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown
+nourishment he had been yearning for.  He was determined to make his
+way forward to his sister and tug at her skirt to show her she might
+come into his room with her violin, as no-one appreciated her
+playing here as much as he would.  He never wanted to let her out of
+his room, not while he lived, anyway; his shocking appearance
+should, for once, be of some use to him; he wanted to be at every
+door of his room at once to hiss and spit at the attackers; his
+sister should not be forced to stay with him, though, but stay of
+her own free will; she would sit beside him on the couch with her
+ear bent down to him while he told her how he had always intended to
+send her to the conservatory, how he would have told everyone about
+it last Christmas - had Christmas really come and gone already? - if
+this misfortune hadn't got in the way, and refuse to let anyone
+dissuade him from it.  On hearing all this, his sister would break
+out in tears of emotion, and Gregor would climb up to her shoulder
+and kiss her neck, which, since she had been going out to work, she
+had kept free without any necklace or collar.
+
+"Mr. Samsa!", shouted the middle gentleman to Gregor's father,
+pointing, without wasting any more words, with his forefinger at
+Gregor as he slowly moved forward.  The violin went silent, the
+middle of the three gentlemen first smiled at his two friends,
+shaking his head, and then looked back at Gregor.  His father seemed
+to think it more important to calm the three gentlemen before
+driving Gregor out, even though they were not at all upset and
+seemed to think Gregor was more entertaining than the violin playing
+had been.  He rushed up to them with his arms spread out and
+attempted to drive them back into their room at the same time as
+trying to block their view of Gregor with his body.  Now they did
+become a little annoyed, and it was not clear whether it was his
+father's behaviour that annoyed them or the dawning realisation that
+they had had a neighbour like Gregor in the next room without
+knowing it.  They asked Gregor's father for explanations, raised
+their arms like he had, tugged excitedly at their beards and moved
+back towards their room only very slowly.  Meanwhile Gregor's sister
+had overcome the despair she had fallen into when her playing was
+suddenly interrupted.  She had let her hands drop and let violin and
+bow hang limply for a while but continued to look at the music as if
+still playing, but then she suddenly pulled herself together, lay
+the instrument on her mother's lap who still sat laboriously
+struggling for breath where she was, and ran into the next room
+which, under pressure from her father, the three gentlemen were more
+quickly moving toward.  Under his sister's experienced hand, the
+pillows and covers on the beds flew up and were put into order and
+she had already finished making the beds and slipped out again
+before the three gentlemen had reached the room.  Gregor's father
+seemed so obsessed with what he was doing that he forgot all the
+respect he owed to his tenants.  He urged them and pressed them
+until, when he was already at the door of the room, the middle of
+the three gentlemen shouted like thunder and stamped his foot and
+thereby brought Gregor's father to a halt.  "I declare here and
+now", he said, raising his hand and glancing at Gregor's mother and
+sister to gain their attention too, "that with regard to the
+repugnant conditions that prevail in this flat and with this family"
+- here he looked briefly but decisively at the floor - "I give
+immediate notice on my room.  For the days that I have been living
+here I will, of course, pay nothing at all, on the contrary I will
+consider whether to proceed with some kind of action for damages
+from you, and believe me it would be very easy to set out the
+grounds for such an action."  He was silent and looked straight
+ahead as if waiting for something.  And indeed, his two friends
+joined in with the words: "And we also give immediate notice."  With
+that, he took hold of the door handle and slammed the door.
+
+Gregor's father staggered back to his seat, feeling his way with his
+hands, and fell into it; it looked as if he was stretching himself
+out for his usual evening nap but from the uncontrolled way his head
+kept nodding it could be seen that he was not sleeping at all.
+Throughout all this, Gregor had lain still where the three gentlemen
+had first seen him.  His disappointment at the failure of his plan,
+and perhaps also because he was weak from hunger, made it impossible
+for him to move.  He was sure that everyone would turn on him any
+moment, and he waited.  He was not even startled out of this state
+when the violin on his mother's lap fell from her trembling fingers
+and landed loudly on the floor.
+
+"Father, Mother", said his sister, hitting the table with her hand
+as introduction, "we can't carry on like this.  Maybe you can't see
+it, but I can.  I don't want to call this monster my brother, all I
+can say is: we have to try and get rid of it.  We've done all that's
+humanly possible to look after it and be patient, I don't think
+anyone could accuse us of doing anything wrong."
+
+"She's absolutely right", said Gregor's father to himself.  His
+mother, who still had not had time to catch her breath, began to
+cough dully, her hand held out in front of her and a deranged
+expression in her eyes.
+
+Gregor's sister rushed to his mother and put her hand on her
+forehead.  Her words seemed to give Gregor's father some more
+definite ideas.  He sat upright, played with his uniform cap between
+the plates left by the three gentlemen after their meal, and
+occasionally looked down at Gregor as he lay there immobile.
+
+"We have to try and get rid of it", said Gregor's sister, now
+speaking only to her father, as her mother was too occupied with
+coughing to listen, "it'll be the death of both of you, I can see it
+coming.  We can't all work as hard as we have to and then come home
+to be tortured like this, we can't endure it.  I can't endure it any
+more."  And she broke out so heavily in tears that they flowed down
+the face of her mother, and she wiped them away with mechanical hand
+movements.
+
+"My child", said her father with sympathy and obvious understanding,
+"what are we to do?"
+
+His sister just shrugged her shoulders as a sign of the helplessness
+and tears that had taken hold of her, displacing her earlier
+certainty.
+
+"If he could just understand us", said his father almost as a
+question; his sister shook her hand vigorously through her tears as
+a sign that of that there was no question.
+
+"If he could just understand us", repeated Gregor's father, closing
+his eyes in acceptance of his sister's certainty that that was quite
+impossible, "then perhaps we could come to some kind of arrangement
+with him.  But as it is ..."
+
+"It's got to go", shouted his sister, "that's the only way, Father.
+You've got to get rid of the idea that that's Gregor.  We've only
+harmed ourselves by believing it for so long.  How can that be
+Gregor? If it were Gregor he would have seen long ago that it's not
+possible for human beings to live with an animal like that and he
+would have gone of his own free will.  We wouldn't have a brother
+any more, then, but we could carry on with our lives and remember
+him with respect.  As it is this animal is persecuting us, it's
+driven out our tenants, it obviously wants to take over the whole
+flat and force us to sleep on the streets.  Father, look, just
+look", she suddenly screamed, "he's starting again!"   In her alarm,
+which was totally beyond Gregor's comprehension, his sister even
+abandoned his mother as she pushed herself vigorously out of her
+chair as if more willing to sacrifice her own mother than stay
+anywhere near Gregor.  She rushed over to behind her father, who had
+become excited merely because she was and stood up half raising his
+hands in front of Gregor's sister as if to protect her.
+
+But Gregor had had no intention of frightening anyone, least of all
+his sister.  All he had done was begin to turn round so that he
+could go back into his room, although that was in itself quite
+startling as his pain-wracked condition meant that turning round
+required a great deal of effort and he was using his head to help
+himself do it, repeatedly raising it and striking it against the
+floor.  He stopped and looked round.  They seemed to have realised
+his good intention and had only been alarmed briefly.  Now they all
+looked at him in unhappy silence.  His mother lay in her chair with
+her legs stretched out and pressed against each other, her eyes
+nearly closed with exhaustion; his sister sat next to his father
+with her arms around his neck.
+
+"Maybe now they'll let me turn round", thought Gregor and went back
+to work.  He could not help panting loudly with the effort and had
+sometimes to stop and take a rest.  No-one was making him rush any
+more, everything was left up to him.  As soon as he had finally
+finished turning round he began to move straight ahead.  He was
+amazed at the great distance that separated him from his room, and
+could not understand how he had covered that distance in his weak
+state a little while before and almost without noticing it.  He
+concentrated on crawling as fast as he could and hardly noticed that
+there was not a word, not any cry, from his family to distract him.
+He did not turn his head until he had reached the doorway.  He did
+not turn it all the way round as he felt his neck becoming stiff,
+but it was nonetheless enough to see that nothing behind him had
+changed, only his sister had stood up.  With his last glance he saw
+that his mother had now fallen completely asleep.
+
+He was hardly inside his room before the door was hurriedly shut,
+bolted and locked.  The sudden noise behind Gregor so startled him
+that his little legs collapsed under him.  It was his sister who had
+been in so much of a rush.  She had been standing there waiting and
+sprung forward lightly, Gregor had not heard her coming at all, and
+as she turned the key in the lock she said loudly to her parents "At
+last!".
+
+"What now, then?", Gregor asked himself as he looked round in the
+darkness.  He soon made the discovery that he could no longer move
+at all.  This was no surprise to him, it seemed rather that being
+able to actually move around on those spindly little legs until then
+was unnatural.  He also felt relatively comfortable.  It is true
+that his entire body was aching, but the pain seemed to be slowly
+getting weaker and weaker and would finally disappear altogether.
+He could already hardly feel the decayed apple in his back or the
+inflamed area around it, which was entirely covered in white dust.
+He thought back of his family with emotion and love.  If it was
+possible, he felt that he must go away even more strongly than his
+sister.  He remained in this state of empty and peaceful rumination
+until he heard the clock tower strike three in the morning.  He
+watched as it slowly began to get light everywhere outside the
+window too.  Then, without his willing it, his head sank down
+completely, and his last breath flowed weakly from his nostrils.
+
+When the cleaner came in early in the morning - they'd often asked
+her not to keep slamming the doors but with her strength and in her
+hurry she still did, so that everyone in the flat knew when she'd
+arrived and from then on it was impossible to sleep in peace - she
+made her usual brief look in on Gregor and at first found nothing
+special.  She thought he was laying there so still on purpose,
+playing the martyr; she attributed all possible understanding to
+him.  She happened to be holding the long broom in her hand, so she
+tried to tickle Gregor with it from the doorway.  When she had no
+success with that she tried to make a nuisance of herself and poked
+at him a little, and only when she found she could shove him across
+the floor with no resistance at all did she start to pay attention.
+She soon realised what had really happened, opened her eyes wide,
+whistled to herself, but did not waste time to yank open the bedroom
+doors and shout loudly into the darkness of the bedrooms: "Come and
+'ave a look at this, it's dead, just lying there, stone dead!"
+
+Mr. and  Mrs. Samsa sat upright there in their marriage bed and had
+to make an effort to get over the shock caused by the cleaner before
+they could grasp what she was saying.  But then, each from his own
+side, they hurried out of bed.  Mr. Samsa threw the blanket over his
+shoulders,  Mrs. Samsa just came out in her nightdress; and that is
+how they went into Gregor's room.  On the way they opened the door
+to the living room where Grete had been sleeping since the three
+gentlemen had moved in; she was fully dressed as if she had never
+been asleep, and the paleness of her face seemed to confirm this.
+"Dead?", asked  Mrs. Samsa, looking at the charwoman enquiringly,
+even though she could have checked for herself and could have known
+it even without checking.  "That's what I said",  replied the
+cleaner, and to prove it she gave Gregor's body another shove with
+the broom, sending it sideways across the floor.  Mrs. Samsa made a
+movement as if she wanted to hold back the broom, but did not
+complete it.  "Now then", said  Mr. Samsa, "let's give thanks to God
+for that". He crossed himself, and the three women followed his
+example.  Grete, who had not taken her eyes from the corpse, said:
+"Just look how thin he was.  He didn't eat anything for so long.
+The food came out again just the same as when it went in". Gregor's
+body was indeed completely dried up and flat, they had not seen it
+until then, but now he was not lifted up on his little legs, nor did
+he do anything to make them look away.
+
+"Grete, come with us in here for a little while", said  Mrs. Samsa
+with a pained smile, and Grete followed her parents into the bedroom
+but not without looking back at the body.  The cleaner shut the door
+and opened the window wide.  Although it was still early in the
+morning the fresh air had something of warmth mixed in with it.  It
+was already the end of March, after all.
+
+The three gentlemen stepped out of their room and looked round in
+amazement for their breakfasts;  they had been forgotten about.
+"Where is our breakfast?", the middle gentleman asked the cleaner
+irritably.  She just put her finger on her lips and made a quick and
+silent sign to the men that they might like to come into Gregor's
+room.  They did so, and stood around Gregor's corpse with their
+hands in the pockets of their well-worn coats. It was now quite
+light in the room.
+
+Then the door of the bedroom opened and  Mr. Samsa appeared in his
+uniform with his wife on one arm and his daughter on the other.  All
+of them had been crying a little; Grete now and then pressed her
+face against her father's arm.
+
+"Leave my home.  Now!", said  Mr. Samsa, indicating the door and
+without letting the women from him.  "What do you mean?", asked the
+middle of the three gentlemen somewhat disconcerted, and he smiled
+sweetly.  The other two held their hands behind their backs and
+continually rubbed them together in gleeful anticipation of a loud
+quarrel which could only end in their favour.  "I mean just what I
+said", answered  Mr. Samsa, and, with his two companions, went in a
+straight line towards the man.  At first, he stood there still,
+looking at the ground as if the contents of his head were
+rearranging themselves into new positions.  "Alright, we'll go
+then", he said, and looked up at  Mr. Samsa as if he had been
+suddenly overcome with humility and wanted permission again from
+Mr. Samsa for his decision.  Mr. Samsa merely opened his eyes wide
+and briefly nodded to him several times.  At that, and without
+delay, the man actually did take long strides into the front
+hallway; his two friends had stopped rubbing their hands some time
+before and had been listening to what was being said.  Now they
+jumped off after their friend as if taken with a sudden fear that
+Mr. Samsa might go into the hallway in front of them and break the
+connection with their leader.  Once there, all three took their hats
+from the stand, took their sticks from the holder, bowed without a
+word and left the premises.  Mr. Samsa and the two women followed
+them out onto the landing; but they had had no reason to mistrust
+the men's intentions and as they leaned over the landing they saw how
+the three gentlemen made slow but steady progress down the many
+steps.  As they turned the corner on each floor they disappeared and
+would reappear a few moments later; the further down they went, the
+more that the Samsa family lost interest in them; when a butcher's
+boy, proud of posture with his tray on his head, passed them on his
+way up and came nearer than they were,  Mr. Samsa and the women came
+away from the landing and went, as if relieved, back into the flat.
+
+They decided the best way to make use of that day was for relaxation
+and to go for a walk; not only had they earned a break from work but
+they were in serious need of it.  So they sat at the table and wrote
+three letters of excusal,  Mr. Samsa to his employers,  Mrs. Samsa
+to her contractor and Grete to her principal.  The cleaner came in
+while they were writing to tell them she was going, she'd finished
+her work for that morning.  The three of them at first just nodded
+without looking up from what they were writing, and it was only when
+the cleaner still did not seem to want to leave that they looked up
+in irritation.  "Well?", asked  Mr. Samsa.  The charwoman stood in
+the doorway with a smile on her face as if she had some tremendous
+good news to report, but would only do it if she was clearly asked
+to.  The almost vertical little ostrich feather on her hat, which
+had been a source of irritation to  Mr. Samsa all the time she had
+been working for them, swayed gently in all directions.  "What is it
+you want then?", asked  Mrs. Samsa, whom the cleaner had the most
+respect for.  "Yes", she answered, and broke into a friendly laugh
+that made her unable to speak straight away, "well then, that thing
+in there, you needn't worry about how you're going to get rid of it.
+ That's all been sorted out."   Mrs. Samsa and Grete bent down over
+their letters as if intent on continuing with what they were
+writing;  Mr. Samsa saw that the cleaner wanted to start describing
+everything in detail but, with outstretched hand, he made it quite
+clear that she was not to.  So, as she was prevented from telling
+them all about it, she suddenly remembered what a hurry she was in
+and, clearly peeved, called out "Cheerio then, everyone", turned
+round sharply and left, slamming the door terribly as she went.
+
+"Tonight she gets sacked", said  Mr. Samsa, but he received no reply
+from either his wife or his daughter as the charwoman seemed to have
+destroyed the peace they had only just gained.  They got up and went
+over to the window where they remained with their arms around each
+other.  Mr. Samsa twisted round in his chair to look at them and sat
+there watching for a while.  Then he called out: "Come here, then.
+Let's forget about all that old stuff, shall we.  Come and give me a
+bit of attention". The two women immediately did as he said,
+hurrying over to him where they kissed him and hugged him and then
+they quickly finished their letters.
+
+After that, the three of them left the flat together, which was
+something they had not done for months, and took the tram out to the
+open country outside the town.  They had the tram, filled with warm
+sunshine, all to themselves.  Leant back comfortably on their seats,
+they discussed their prospects and found that on closer examination
+they were not at all bad - until then they had never asked each
+other about their work but all three had jobs which were very good
+and held particularly good promise for the future.  The greatest
+improvement for the time being, of course, would be achieved quite
+easily by moving house; what they needed now was a flat that was
+smaller and cheaper than the current one which had been chosen by
+Gregor, one that was in a better location and, most of all, more
+practical.  All the time, Grete was becoming livelier.  With all the
+worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but,
+while they were talking,  Mr. and  Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost
+simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was
+blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady.  They became
+quieter.  Just from each other's glance and almost without knowing
+it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for
+her.  And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good
+intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the
+first to get up and stretch out her young body.
diff --git a/Moby Dick by Melville.txt b/Moby Dick by Melville.txt
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+CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
+
+Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having
+little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
+shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
+the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating
+the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
+whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
+myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up
+the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get
+such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
+prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
+knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to
+sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With
+a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
+take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew
+it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very
+nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
+
+There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
+wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with
+her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme
+downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and
+cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
+Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
+
+Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
+Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What
+do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
+thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
+leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some
+looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the
+rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these
+are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to
+counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are
+the green fields gone? What do they here?
+
+But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
+seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
+extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
+warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water
+as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of
+them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets
+and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.
+Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all
+those ships attract them thither?
+
+Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
+almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a
+dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic
+in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
+reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he
+will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
+Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
+experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
+professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for
+ever.
+
+But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
+quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
+the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
+each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
+here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
+cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a
+mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their
+hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though
+this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s
+head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the
+magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
+on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the
+one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were
+Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to
+see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
+handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly
+needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why
+is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at
+some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a
+passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first
+told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the
+old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
+deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
+And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because
+he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,
+plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see
+in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of
+life; and this is the key to it all.
+
+Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin
+to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,
+I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.
+For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is
+but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get
+sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy
+themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger;
+nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
+Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction
+of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all
+honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
+whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
+without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
+And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory
+in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow,
+I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously
+buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
+will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
+fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
+Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
+mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
+
+No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
+plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
+True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
+spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
+of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour,
+particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the
+Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all,
+if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
+lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand
+in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a
+schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and
+the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in
+time.
+
+What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
+and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,
+I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
+Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
+respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who
+ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains
+may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have
+the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is
+one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical
+or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
+passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades,
+and be content.
+
+Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
+paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
+penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
+pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying
+and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable
+infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being
+paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man
+receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
+believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account
+can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
+to perdition!
+
+Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
+exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,
+head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,
+if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
+Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
+the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not
+so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
+other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.
+But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
+merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling
+voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the
+constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in
+some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And,
+doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand
+programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as
+a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.
+I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
+
+“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
+“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
+
+Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
+Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
+were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and
+easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though
+I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the
+circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives
+which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced
+me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the
+delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill
+and discriminating judgment.
+
+Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
+whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my
+curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island
+bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all
+the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
+to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not
+have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting
+itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
+barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a
+horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since
+it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place
+one lodges in.
+
+By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
+great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
+conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
+my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them
+all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
+
+I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,
+and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of
+old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
+December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet
+for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place
+would offer, till the following Monday.
+
+As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
+this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well
+be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
+made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a
+fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
+old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has
+of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though
+in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket
+was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place
+where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from
+Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out
+in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket,
+too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden
+with imported cobblestones—so goes the story—to throw at the whales,
+in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from
+the bowsprit?
+
+Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me
+in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a
+matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a
+very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold
+and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I 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 3. 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
+oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
+unequal crosslights 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 icebound 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
+fireplaces 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.”
+
+I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
+ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
+that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
+harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
+further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
+the half of any decent man’s blanket.
+
+“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper?
+Supper’ll be ready directly.”
+
+I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
+Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
+his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
+between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but
+he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
+
+At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
+adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord
+said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
+each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets,
+and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers.
+But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and
+potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young
+fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a
+most direful manner.
+
+“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a
+dead sartainty.”
+
+“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
+
+“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the
+harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he
+don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes ‘em rare.”
+
+“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he
+here?”
+
+“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
+
+I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark
+complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
+turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into
+bed before I did.
+
+Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
+what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening
+as a looker on.
+
+Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
+cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the
+offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah,
+boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.”
+
+A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,
+and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
+watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
+bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
+eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat,
+and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they
+made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the
+wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out
+brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which
+Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore
+was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind
+of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on
+the weather side of an ice-island.
+
+The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
+with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering
+about most obstreperously.
+
+I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
+he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
+sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise
+as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods
+had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a
+sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will
+here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet
+in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have
+seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
+making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep
+shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give
+him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner,
+and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
+mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry
+of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away
+unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the
+sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and
+being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised
+a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted
+out of the house in pursuit of him.
+
+It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost
+supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself
+upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance
+of the seamen.
+
+No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
+rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but
+people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to
+sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
+town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely
+multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should
+sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep
+two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
+all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and
+cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
+
+The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
+thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
+harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of
+the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
+Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be
+home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at
+midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?
+
+“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t
+sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”
+
+“Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a
+mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots
+and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s
+plane there in the bar—wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.”
+So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief
+first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the
+while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till
+at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The
+landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s
+sake to quit—the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know
+how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank.
+So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into
+the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business,
+and left me in a brown study.
+
+I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
+short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too
+narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
+than the planed one—so there was no yoking them. I then placed the
+first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
+leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I
+soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under
+the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially
+as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,
+and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate
+vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
+
+The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal
+a march on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
+wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
+second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
+morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
+standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!
+
+Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending
+a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think
+that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against
+this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be
+dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and
+perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no
+telling.
+
+But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
+and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
+
+“Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always
+keep such late hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
+
+The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
+mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he
+answered, “generally he’s an early bird—airley to bed and airley
+to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he
+went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him
+so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
+
+“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this
+you are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend
+to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed
+Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around
+this town?”
+
+“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he
+couldn’t sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”
+
+“With what?” shouted I.
+
+“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
+
+“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d
+better stop spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
+
+“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I
+rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a
+slanderin’ his head.”
+
+“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again
+at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
+
+“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
+
+“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
+
+“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
+
+“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
+snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one
+another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a
+bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
+belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I
+have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
+exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
+towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of connexion,
+landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
+degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
+harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the
+night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay
+that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good
+evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of
+sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir,
+by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself
+liable to a criminal prosecution.”
+
+“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a
+purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be
+easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has
+just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of ‘balmed
+New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on
+‘em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause
+to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads
+about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last
+Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with
+four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of
+inions.”
+
+This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
+that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at
+the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
+Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
+business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
+
+“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
+
+“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting
+dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed; Sal
+and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty
+of room for two to kick about in that bed; it’s an almighty big bed
+that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little
+Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one
+night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking
+his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll
+give ye a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held
+it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute;
+when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s
+Sunday—you won’t see that harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor
+somewhere—come along then; do come; won’t ye come?”
+
+I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
+ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,
+with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers
+to sleep abreast.
+
+“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
+chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there,
+make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.” I turned round
+from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
+
+Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
+most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
+round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see
+no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four
+walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of
+things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed
+up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s
+bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land
+trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the
+shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of
+the bed.
+
+But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
+light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
+at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to
+nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little
+tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an
+Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat,
+as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible
+that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the
+streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try
+it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
+thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer
+had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass
+stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore
+myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
+
+I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
+head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
+the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in
+the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought
+a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now,
+half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about
+the harpooneer’s not coming home at all that night, it being so very
+late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and
+then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the
+care of heaven.
+
+Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
+there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep
+for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty
+nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy
+footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room
+from under the door.
+
+Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
+head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word
+till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New
+Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
+looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the
+floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords
+of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all
+eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while
+employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he
+turned round—when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
+a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
+blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a
+terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here
+he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn
+his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be
+sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were
+stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this;
+but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story
+of a white man—a whaleman too—who, falling among the cannibals, had
+been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course
+of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And
+what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can
+be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly
+complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely
+independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing
+but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s
+tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never
+been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these
+extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were
+passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me
+at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced
+fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a
+seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the
+middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly thing
+enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat—a
+new beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There
+was no hair on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing but a
+small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now
+looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger
+stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker
+than ever I bolted a dinner.
+
+Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but
+it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of
+this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.
+Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
+confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him
+as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at
+the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not
+game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer
+concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
+
+Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed
+his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered
+with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same
+dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just
+escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very
+legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up
+the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some
+abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
+Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
+A peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might
+take a fancy to mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
+
+But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
+something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
+he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
+dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
+pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a
+hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days’ old Congo
+baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that
+this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But
+seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal
+like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden
+idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the
+empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this
+little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The
+chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I
+thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel
+for his Congo idol.
+
+I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
+ill at ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes
+about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
+them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on
+top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into
+a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire,
+and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
+scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;
+then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of
+it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
+dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange
+antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the
+devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some
+pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the
+most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol
+up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
+carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
+
+All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
+seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
+operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
+now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which
+I had so long been bound.
+
+But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
+Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an
+instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,
+he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light
+was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth,
+sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving
+a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.
+
+Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
+against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
+be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his
+guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my
+meaning.
+
+“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I
+kill-e.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me
+in the dark.
+
+“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord!
+Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!”
+
+“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled
+the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered
+the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on
+fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room
+light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
+
+“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here
+wouldn’t harm a hair of your head.”
+
+“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me
+that that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?”
+
+“I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’
+heads around town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg,
+look here—you sabbee me, I sabbee—you this man sleepe you—you
+sabbee?”
+
+“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
+sitting up in bed.
+
+“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
+throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil
+but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment.
+For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking
+cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I
+to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much
+reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a
+sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
+
+“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or
+pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and
+I will turn in with him. But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed
+with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
+
+This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
+motioned me to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to
+say—“I won’t touch a leg of ye.”
+
+“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
+
+I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
+
+Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown
+over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost
+thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of
+odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his
+tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no
+two parts of which were of one precise shade—owing I suppose to
+his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
+sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this same arm of his, I
+say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
+Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could
+hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and
+it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that
+Queequeg was hugging me.
+
+My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
+child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
+whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The
+circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other—I
+think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
+sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
+was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—my
+mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to
+bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
+the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But
+there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the
+third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time,
+and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
+
+I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
+before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the
+small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the
+sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
+streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse
+and worse—at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my
+stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
+at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good
+slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie
+abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most
+conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For
+several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I
+have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At
+last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly
+waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened my eyes, and the
+before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I
+felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and
+nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.
+My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent
+form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my
+bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with
+the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking
+that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be
+broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;
+but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for
+days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding
+attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle
+myself with it.
+
+Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
+supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
+those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan
+arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly
+recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to
+the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his
+bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly,
+as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse
+him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled
+over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt
+a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk
+sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.
+A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the
+broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the name of
+goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling, and
+loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
+hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
+extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself
+all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,
+stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he
+did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
+consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over
+him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings
+now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at
+last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow,
+and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon
+the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,
+if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress
+afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
+under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the
+truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what
+you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this
+particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much
+civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
+staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for
+the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless,
+a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways were well
+worth unusual regarding.
+
+He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,
+by the by, and then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his
+boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
+movement was to crush himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under the
+bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he
+was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that
+I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on
+his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition
+stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
+to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His
+education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not
+been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled
+himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage,
+he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
+last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
+eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not
+being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide
+ones—probably not made to order either—rather pinched and tormented
+him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
+
+Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
+street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view
+into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
+Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;
+I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat,
+and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He
+complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the
+morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to
+my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his
+chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a
+piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water
+and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept
+his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,
+slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little
+on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,
+begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks
+I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery with a vengeance.
+Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of
+what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp
+the long straight edges are always kept.
+
+The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of
+the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his
+harpoon like a marshal’s baton.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
+
+I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
+grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
+though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
+bedfellow.
+
+However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
+good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own
+proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be
+backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in
+that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,
+be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
+
+The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
+night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
+nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and
+sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers,
+and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an
+unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.
+
+You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
+young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and
+would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days
+landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades
+lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the
+complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
+withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show
+a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like
+the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting
+climates, zone by zone.
+
+“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we
+went to breakfast.
+
+They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease
+in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard,
+the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all
+men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
+mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or
+the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart
+of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo’s performances—this kind
+of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high
+social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
+anywhere.
+
+These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
+after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some
+good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every
+man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
+embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
+slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire
+strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
+they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of
+kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though
+they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
+Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior
+whalemen!
+
+But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head
+of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I
+cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have
+cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him,
+and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it,
+to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks
+towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every
+one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is
+to do it genteelly.
+
+We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he
+eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to
+beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew
+like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was
+sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on,
+when I sallied out for a stroll.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6. The Street.
+
+If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
+an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
+civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
+daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
+
+In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
+frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign
+parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners
+will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not
+unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
+Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
+Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;
+but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
+savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It
+makes a stranger stare.
+
+But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
+and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
+which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
+more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
+scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain
+and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;
+fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch
+the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
+came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
+there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
+swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here
+comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
+
+No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a
+downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
+two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
+country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
+reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the
+comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his
+sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his
+canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps
+in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
+all, down the throat of the tempest.
+
+But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
+bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer
+place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this
+day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.
+As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they
+look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live
+in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like
+Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with
+milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in
+spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
+houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came
+they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
+
+Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
+mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
+and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
+One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom
+of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
+
+In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
+daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
+You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,
+they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly
+burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
+
+In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long
+avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
+bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
+tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;
+which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
+of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s
+final day.
+
+And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
+roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks
+is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that
+bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young
+girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off
+shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of
+the Puritanic sands.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
+
+In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are
+the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who
+fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
+
+Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
+special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
+sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
+bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found
+a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and
+widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks
+of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from
+the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The
+chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and
+women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,
+masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
+something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was
+lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November
+1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
+WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats’
+crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the
+Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is
+here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows
+of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August
+3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
+
+Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
+near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near
+me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze
+of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only
+person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only
+one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
+inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen
+whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;
+but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly
+did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings
+of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
+assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
+tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
+
+Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
+flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the
+desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in
+those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
+immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in
+the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to
+the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might
+those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
+
+In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
+why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
+tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is
+that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix
+so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
+he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
+Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
+eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies
+antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we
+still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
+dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all
+the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a
+whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
+
+But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
+dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
+
+It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
+Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
+light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen
+who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But
+somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine
+chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an
+immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a
+speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
+then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
+Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true
+substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too
+much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that
+thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my
+better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not
+me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and
+stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
+
+I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
+robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
+admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
+sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
+was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
+was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
+youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
+At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a
+healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
+flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
+certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure
+peeping forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously
+heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without
+the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
+peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
+he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and
+certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down
+with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to
+drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed.
+However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up
+in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,
+he quietly approached the pulpit.
+
+Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
+regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,
+seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect,
+it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the
+pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like
+those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling
+captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted
+man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and
+stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what
+manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for
+an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the
+ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards,
+and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand
+over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
+
+The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
+swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
+so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
+pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,
+these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
+prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn
+round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
+step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
+impregnable in his little Quebec.
+
+I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
+Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
+that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks
+of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this
+thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be,
+then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual
+withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
+Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful
+man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a
+lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.
+
+But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
+borrowed from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble
+cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back
+was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating
+against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
+breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there
+floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s
+face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
+ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into
+the Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel
+seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy
+helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
+off—serenest azure is at hand.”
+
+Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
+had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in
+the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on
+a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s
+fiddle-headed beak.
+
+What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this
+earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit
+leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is
+first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence
+it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable
+winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage
+complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
+
+Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
+the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away
+to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
+
+There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
+still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again,
+and every eye on the preacher.
+
+He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his
+large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and
+offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at
+the bottom of the sea.
+
+This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
+a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he
+commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
+the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
+
+     “The ribs and terrors in the whale,
+     Arched over me a dismal gloom,
+     While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,
+     And lift me deepening down to doom.
+
+     “I saw the opening maw of hell,
+     With endless pains and sorrows there;
+     Which none but they that feel can tell—
+     Oh, I was plunging to despair.
+
+     “In black distress, I called my God,
+     When I could scarce believe him mine,
+     He bowed his ear to my complaints—
+     No more the whale did me confine.
+
+     “With speed he flew to my relief,
+     As on a radiant dolphin borne;
+     Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
+     The face of my Deliverer God.
+
+     “My song for ever shall record
+     That terrible, that joyful hour;
+     I give the glory to my God,
+     His all the mercy and the power.”
+
+
+Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
+howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
+over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon
+the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of
+the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to
+swallow up Jonah.’”
+
+“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is
+one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.
+Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what
+a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that
+canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand!
+We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy
+bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us!
+But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is
+a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson
+to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to
+us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly
+awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally
+the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin
+of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of
+God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he
+found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are
+hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands
+us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey
+ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness
+of obeying God consists.
+
+“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
+God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will
+carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains
+of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship
+that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
+meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city
+than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men. And where
+is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa,
+as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
+Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa,
+shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the
+Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the
+westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye
+not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
+Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
+slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
+shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,
+self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those
+days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested
+ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, not a
+hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him to the wharf
+with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
+Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on
+board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment
+desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil eye.
+Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;
+in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure
+the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious
+way, one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or,
+“Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess
+he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one
+of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill
+that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is
+moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a
+parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and
+looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now
+crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah
+trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so
+much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that
+itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the
+sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him
+pass, and he descends into the cabin.
+
+“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly
+making out his papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how
+that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns
+to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to
+Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not
+looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner
+does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.
+‘We sail with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered,
+still intently eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for
+any honest man that goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another
+stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll
+sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how much is
+that?—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as
+if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid
+the fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context,
+this is full of meaning.
+
+“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
+crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In
+this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and
+without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all
+frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s
+purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and
+it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive;
+but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with
+gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions
+still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not
+a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his
+passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m
+travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou lookest like it,’ says the
+Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock the
+door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
+there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about
+the doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within.
+All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and
+finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The
+air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too,
+beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment
+of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of
+his bowels’ wards.
+
+“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
+oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the
+wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and
+all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
+reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it
+but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp
+alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes
+roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no
+refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more
+and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
+‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards,
+so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’
+
+“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
+reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
+Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
+one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,
+praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid
+the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the
+man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s
+naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s
+prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
+
+“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
+from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
+glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded
+smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not
+bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to
+break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;
+when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind
+is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
+trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult,
+Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea,
+feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far
+rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the
+seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of
+the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep.
+But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear,
+‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy
+by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the
+deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he
+is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after
+wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring
+fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
+And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep
+gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
+bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
+tormented deep.
+
+“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his
+cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The
+sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,
+and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter
+to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this
+great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered,
+then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine
+occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now,
+my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him
+who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to
+those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by
+them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand
+of God that is upon him.
+
+“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God
+of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah?
+Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes
+on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more
+and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet
+supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of
+his deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and
+cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great
+tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by
+other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls
+louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other
+they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
+
+“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
+when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
+is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
+water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless
+commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
+the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory
+teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto
+the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn
+a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for
+direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He
+leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that
+spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy
+temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not
+clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to
+God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of
+him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before
+you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model
+for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
+Jonah.”
+
+While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
+slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
+when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
+His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the
+warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his
+swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple
+hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
+
+There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
+of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed
+eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
+
+But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
+with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
+words:
+
+“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
+upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that
+Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me,
+for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down
+from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and
+listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more
+awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God.
+How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and
+bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
+wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled
+from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking
+ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we
+have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to
+living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into
+the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten
+thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’
+and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond
+the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the
+whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard
+the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the
+fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the
+whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all
+the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry
+land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and
+Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still
+multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s
+bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face
+of Falsehood! That was it!
+
+“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
+the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
+Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
+has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
+to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
+to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would
+not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
+who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
+himself a castaway!”
+
+He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
+face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with
+a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
+every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
+than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than
+the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward
+delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
+stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
+arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
+gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
+truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out
+from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant
+delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
+God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
+waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
+from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness
+will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
+breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or
+immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this
+world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee;
+for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
+
+He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
+his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
+and he was left alone in the place.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
+
+Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
+quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.
+He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove
+hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little
+negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife
+gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his
+heathenish way.
+
+But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going
+to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap
+began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
+page—as I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him,
+and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment.
+He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at
+number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and
+it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that
+his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
+
+With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and
+hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance
+yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot
+hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw
+the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
+fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
+thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing
+about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.
+He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
+Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn
+out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
+otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was
+his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,
+but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the
+popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating
+slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting,
+like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George
+Washington cannibalistically developed.
+
+Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
+looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
+never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
+wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
+Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night
+previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
+thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
+of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not
+know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm
+self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
+also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
+other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have
+no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
+me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something
+almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from
+home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only way he could
+get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in
+the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving
+the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
+himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he
+had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
+true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or
+so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself
+out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he
+must have “broken his digester.”
+
+As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
+mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
+only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
+round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain;
+the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
+strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart
+and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
+savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
+nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.
+Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
+mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
+repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me.
+I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has
+proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some
+friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At
+first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring
+to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we
+were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked
+pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
+
+We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
+him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
+that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went
+to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
+in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing
+his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat
+exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly
+passing between us.
+
+If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s
+breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left
+us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as
+I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against
+mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were
+married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends;
+he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this
+sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing
+to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would
+not apply.
+
+After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
+together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
+enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out
+some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
+mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them
+towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
+silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them
+stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and
+removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he
+seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow,
+I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
+otherwise.
+
+I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
+Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
+worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do
+you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
+earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an
+insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to
+do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to
+do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that
+is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish
+that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
+Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him
+in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
+prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
+Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
+done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
+and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
+
+How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
+disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very
+bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and
+chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’
+honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
+
+We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
+Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
+over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
+and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
+little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
+getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
+
+Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
+began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
+sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
+head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
+noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt
+very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
+indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the
+room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
+small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world
+that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If
+you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so
+a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if,
+like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown
+of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
+consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this
+reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which
+is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this
+sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
+your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the
+one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
+
+We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
+once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
+by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
+keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness
+of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright
+except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element
+of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon
+opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created
+darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
+twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor
+did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best
+to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he
+felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it
+said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in
+the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow
+when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than
+to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be
+full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned
+for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
+condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket
+with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders,
+we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew
+over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the
+new-lit lamp.
+
+Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far
+distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
+eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly
+complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
+words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
+his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as
+it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
+
+Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
+South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
+
+When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in
+a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
+sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong
+desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or
+two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest;
+and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of
+unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
+stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he
+nourished in his untutored youth.
+
+A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a
+passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of
+seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s influence
+could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
+off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when
+she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low
+tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
+water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its
+prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the
+ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with
+one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up
+the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled
+a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
+
+In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
+cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
+Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild
+desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him
+he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this sea
+Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin. They put him down
+among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter
+content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained
+no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of
+enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told
+me—he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians,
+the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and
+more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of
+whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable
+and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens.
+Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did
+there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their
+wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he,
+it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
+
+And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
+wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
+ways about him, though now some time from home.
+
+By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having
+a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he
+being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet;
+and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had
+unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan
+Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as soon as
+he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to
+sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
+harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
+
+I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
+movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
+this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
+intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
+an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany
+me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,
+the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap;
+with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
+To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt
+for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not
+fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant
+of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
+known to merchant seamen.
+
+His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg
+embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the
+light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon
+were sleeping.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
+
+Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
+for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however,
+my comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders,
+seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up
+between me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull
+stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very
+person whom I now companied with.
+
+We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
+poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went
+down to “the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at
+the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg
+so much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
+streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
+heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
+now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked
+him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
+whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
+substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
+he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
+assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
+with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and
+mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows armed with their own
+scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so, Queequeg,
+for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
+
+Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
+the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
+of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his
+heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the
+thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way
+in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it;
+lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf.
+“Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that,
+one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
+
+Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of
+Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water
+of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
+this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided
+mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once
+touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very
+stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this
+commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a
+pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding
+guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain
+marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over
+against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
+King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people have
+their grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who
+at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary,
+copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all
+feasts—Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by
+the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated
+and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage
+circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the
+ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having
+plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s
+own house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the
+punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,”
+said Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
+
+At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
+Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New
+Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all
+glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
+casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering
+whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others
+came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and
+forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the
+start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a
+second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
+and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all
+earthly effort.
+
+Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
+Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
+snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike
+earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish
+heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea
+which will permit no records.
+
+At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
+His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.
+On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the
+blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways
+leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the
+two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of
+this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that
+for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a
+lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
+companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a
+whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
+by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of
+all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking
+him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come.
+Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by
+an almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily
+into the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the
+fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning
+his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a
+puff.
+
+“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that
+officer; “Capting, Capting, here’s the devil.”
+
+“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea,
+stalking up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t
+you know you might have killed that chap?”
+
+“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
+
+“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,”
+pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.
+
+“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an
+unearthly expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e;
+Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
+
+“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you, you cannibal,
+if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
+
+But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
+mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
+the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to
+side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor
+fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all
+hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,
+seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost
+in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of
+snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of
+being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the
+boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the
+midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and
+crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one
+end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it
+round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar
+was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the
+wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg,
+stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of
+a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
+throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing
+his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand
+and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone
+down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now
+took an instant’s glance around him, and seeming to see just how
+matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he
+rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging
+a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was
+restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his
+pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till
+poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
+
+Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
+all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
+asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that
+done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
+bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to
+himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
+cannibals must help these Christians.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
+
+Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
+fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
+
+Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
+the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
+than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of
+sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
+you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
+gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
+don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they
+have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask;
+that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
+cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
+to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes
+an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear
+quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so
+shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter
+island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams
+will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But
+these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
+
+Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
+settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
+swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant
+Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne
+out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same
+direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they
+discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,—the
+poor little Indian’s skeleton.
+
+What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
+to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in
+the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
+experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
+launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
+put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at
+Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
+everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
+flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea
+Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that
+his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and
+malicious assaults!
+
+And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
+their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like
+so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
+Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
+Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm
+all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of
+this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he
+owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of
+way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but
+floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea
+as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of
+the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the
+bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on
+the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and
+fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there
+lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it
+overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie
+cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as
+chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so
+that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more
+strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull,
+that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows;
+so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
+and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of
+walruses and whales.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
+
+It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
+to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
+business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of
+the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
+Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept
+hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
+Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
+plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at
+the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
+warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the
+larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
+corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
+man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very
+much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
+insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of departure—must
+be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to
+say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little
+in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant
+to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
+mistaking.
+
+Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears,
+swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
+old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
+side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
+Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
+could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of
+crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two
+of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A
+Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones
+staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair
+of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
+touching Tophet?
+
+I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
+with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
+under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
+eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
+shirt.
+
+“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing
+ye!”
+
+“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
+
+And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
+Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
+making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing
+further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and
+seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded
+repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
+
+“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
+
+“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
+
+“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs.
+Hussey?” says I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in
+the winter time, ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey?”
+
+But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
+Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
+but the word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door
+leading to the kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper
+for us both on one clam?”
+
+However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
+apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
+came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
+hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
+hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into
+little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
+with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty
+voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food
+before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched
+it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me
+of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try
+a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word
+“cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the
+savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good
+time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
+
+We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks
+I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?
+What’s that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But
+look, Queequeg, ain’t that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your
+harpoon?”
+
+Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
+its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
+breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you
+began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area
+before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished
+necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books
+bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk,
+too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening
+to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw
+Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along
+the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking very
+slip-shod, I assure ye.
+
+Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
+concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
+me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
+harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not?” said
+I; “every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?”
+“Because it’s dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs
+coming from that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four
+years and a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my
+first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow
+no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So,
+Mr. Queequeg” (for she had learned his name), “I will just take this
+here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or
+cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?”
+
+“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by
+way of variety.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
+
+In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and
+no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
+diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and
+Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
+everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
+harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
+earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly
+with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to
+do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,
+Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it
+had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship
+myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
+
+I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed
+great confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising
+forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a
+rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole,
+but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
+
+Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the
+selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a
+little relied upon Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler
+best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my
+remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to
+acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
+determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle
+that trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut
+up with Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that it was some
+sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer
+with Queequeg and Yojo that day; how it was I never could find out, for,
+though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his
+liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his
+tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of
+shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged
+sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three
+ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and
+the Pequod. Devil-Dam, I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is obvious;
+Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe
+of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered
+and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and
+finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and
+then decided that this was the very ship for us.
+
+You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
+know;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
+galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
+rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
+school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look
+about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms
+of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a
+French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
+venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
+Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts
+stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.
+Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
+flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
+her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining
+to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.
+Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
+another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the
+principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his
+chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
+it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched
+by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or bedstead.
+She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy
+with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal
+of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.
+All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one
+continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted
+there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those
+thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled
+over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend
+helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass,
+curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.
+The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the
+Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble
+craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with
+that.
+
+Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
+in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
+nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or
+rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only
+a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten
+feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken
+from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.
+Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced
+together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in
+a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the
+top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A triangular opening
+faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a
+complete view forward.
+
+And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who
+by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the
+ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
+command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
+over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
+stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
+constructed.
+
+There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
+the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
+and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
+only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
+wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from
+his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
+windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
+together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
+
+“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door
+of the tent.
+
+“Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
+him?” he demanded.
+
+“I was thinking of shipping.”
+
+“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a
+stove boat?”
+
+“No, Sir, I never have.”
+
+“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
+
+“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been
+several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—”
+
+“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that
+leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of
+the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now
+ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships.
+But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks
+a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast
+thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of
+murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
+
+I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask
+of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
+Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
+distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
+Vineyard.
+
+“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
+shipping ye.”
+
+“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
+
+“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain
+Ahab?”
+
+“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
+
+“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
+
+“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain
+himself.”
+
+“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to,
+young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
+out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
+are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest
+to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
+finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap
+eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one
+leg.”
+
+“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
+
+“Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
+chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a
+boat!—ah, ah!”
+
+I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
+the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as
+I could, “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I
+know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though
+indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the
+accident.”
+
+“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see;
+thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure, ye’ve been to sea before now;
+sure of that?”
+
+“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages
+in the merchant—”
+
+“Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant
+service—don’t aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us
+understand each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is;
+do ye yet feel inclined for it?”
+
+“I do, sir.”
+
+“Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live
+whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
+
+“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to
+be got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
+
+“Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find
+out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to
+see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
+step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back
+to me and tell me what ye see there.”
+
+For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
+knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest.
+But concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg
+started me on the errand.
+
+Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
+ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
+pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
+exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
+could see.
+
+“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what
+did ye see?”
+
+“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon
+though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
+
+“Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to
+go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world
+where you stand?”
+
+I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
+Pequod was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all this
+I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his
+willingness to ship me.
+
+“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he
+added—“come along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below
+deck into the cabin.
+
+Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
+surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
+Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other
+shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd
+of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each
+owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail
+or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling
+vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks
+bringing in good interest.
+
+Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
+Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
+this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
+peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
+by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
+Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
+are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
+
+So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
+names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood
+naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker
+idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
+of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
+peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
+Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
+unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
+and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion
+of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath
+constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
+untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or
+savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
+breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
+advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes
+one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed
+for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
+regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
+a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all
+men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure
+of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But,
+as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and
+still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another
+phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
+
+Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
+But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called
+serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
+veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally
+educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
+his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
+creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native born
+Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his
+vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
+common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from
+conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
+had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
+to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns
+upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his
+days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
+not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he
+had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s
+religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This
+world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes
+of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat;
+from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a
+ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous
+career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of
+sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
+well-earned income.
+
+Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
+incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
+task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
+curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
+upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore
+exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was
+certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
+though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
+quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a
+chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made
+you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something—a hammer
+or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other,
+never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own
+person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
+long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard,
+his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his
+broad-brimmed hat.
+
+Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
+followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
+was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,
+and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was
+placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was
+buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in
+reading from a ponderous volume.
+
+“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have
+been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my
+certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?”
+
+As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
+Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and
+seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
+
+“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to
+ship.”
+
+“Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
+
+“I dost,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
+
+“What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
+
+“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away
+at his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
+
+I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,
+his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said
+nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,
+and drawing forth the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him,
+and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time
+to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the
+voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no
+wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of
+the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the
+degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s
+company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own
+lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea,
+could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that
+from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that
+is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever
+that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they
+call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a
+lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out
+on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board, for which I
+would not have to pay one stiver.
+
+It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
+fortune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
+that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
+world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim
+sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
+would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
+been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.
+
+But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
+receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
+something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
+how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
+the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the
+whole management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And I did not
+know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say
+about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,
+quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his
+own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
+jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was
+such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded
+us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, “Lay not up for
+yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—”
+
+“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what
+lay shall we give this young man?”
+
+“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred
+and seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth
+and rust do corrupt, but lay—‘”
+
+Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
+shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt.
+It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the
+magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
+the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
+seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make
+a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven
+hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
+
+“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want
+to swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”
+
+“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without
+lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure
+is, there will your heart be also.”
+
+“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg,
+“do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
+
+Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
+“Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
+duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans,
+many of them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of
+this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
+orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
+cabin. “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in
+these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that
+would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round
+Cape Horn.”
+
+“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be
+drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as
+thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
+conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering
+down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
+insult me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
+he’s bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me,
+and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a
+live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
+drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!”
+
+As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
+oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
+
+Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
+responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up
+all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
+commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who,
+I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened
+wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
+transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of
+withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As
+for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more
+left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched
+a little as if still nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled at
+last—“the squall’s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used
+to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife
+here needs the grindstone. That’s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my
+young man, Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t ye say? Well then, down ye go
+here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay.”
+
+“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to
+ship too—shall I bring him down to-morrow?”
+
+“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at
+him.”
+
+“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book
+in which he had again been burying himself.
+
+“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever
+whaled it any?” turning to me.
+
+“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Well, bring him along then.”
+
+And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I
+had done a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical
+ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
+
+But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
+with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in
+many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all
+her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving
+to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the
+shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have
+a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble
+himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till
+all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at
+him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back
+I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
+
+“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough;
+thou art shipped.”
+
+“Yes, but I should like to see him.”
+
+“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know
+exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the
+house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t
+sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t
+always see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man,
+Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him
+well enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man,
+Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you
+may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common;
+Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used
+to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier,
+stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest
+that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he
+ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest,
+was a crowned king!”
+
+“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
+they not lick his blood?”
+
+“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a
+significance in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never
+say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did
+not name himself. ‘Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed
+mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the
+old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove
+prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I
+wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed
+with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a
+pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like
+me—only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he
+was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a
+little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains
+in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I
+know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed
+whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage
+sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell
+thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good
+captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not
+Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy,
+he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think
+of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then
+there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken,
+blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!”
+
+As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
+incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
+wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,
+I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what,
+unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange
+awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was
+not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did
+not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed
+like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However,
+my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the
+present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
+
+As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue
+all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for
+I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious
+obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart
+to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or
+those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree
+of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before
+the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the
+inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
+
+I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
+things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
+pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
+subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
+absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg
+thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
+and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
+him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and
+Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head,
+and sadly need mending.
+
+Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
+rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;
+but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.
+“Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I
+say, Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all
+remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him
+such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I
+looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of
+the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I
+could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall,
+but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall
+the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the
+evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber.
+That’s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands
+yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must
+be inside here, and no possible mistake.
+
+“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened.
+Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
+Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first
+person I met—the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought
+something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast,
+and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been
+just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone
+off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la,
+ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these
+cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
+
+Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
+vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation
+of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.
+
+“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and
+fetch something to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a
+stroke; depend upon it!”—and so saying I was unmethodically
+rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the
+mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
+
+“What’s the matter with you, young man?”
+
+“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I
+pry it open!”
+
+“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the
+vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; “look here; are you
+talking about prying open any of my doors?”—and with that she seized
+my arm. “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you,
+shipmate?”
+
+In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
+whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her
+nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t
+seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little closet under the
+landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that
+Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she
+cried. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again—there goes
+another counterpane—God pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin
+of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where’s that girl?—there,
+Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a
+sign, with—“no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the
+parlor;”—might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be
+merciful to his ghost! What’s that noise there? You, young man, avast
+there!”
+
+And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
+open the door.
+
+“I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the
+locksmith, there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting
+her hand in her side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess;
+let’s see.” And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas!
+Queequeg’s supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
+
+“Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a
+little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing
+I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
+sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
+
+With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming
+against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good
+heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right
+in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on
+top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat
+like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the
+matter with you?”
+
+“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the
+landlady.
+
+But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
+like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
+intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
+especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
+eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
+
+“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us,
+if you please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.”
+
+Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon
+Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could
+do—for all my polite arts and blandishments—he would not move a peg,
+nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
+the slightest way.
+
+I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
+they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
+yes, it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest;
+he’ll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever,
+thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe
+it’s very punctual then.
+
+I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
+stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
+they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
+confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after
+listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I went
+up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
+certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he
+was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to
+grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be
+sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,
+holding a piece of wood on his head.
+
+“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and
+have some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.”
+But not a word did he reply.
+
+Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
+and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
+turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as
+it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary
+round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into
+the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of
+Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy position,
+stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of
+it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his
+hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
+
+But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
+day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he
+had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of
+sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,
+but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his
+forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
+
+Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion,
+be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
+other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But
+when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive
+torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable
+inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside
+and argue the point with him.
+
+And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into
+bed now, and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with
+the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the
+various religions of the present time, during which time I labored
+to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged
+ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the
+health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of
+Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things
+such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very
+badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this
+ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body
+cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast
+must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
+religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In
+one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first
+born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through
+the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
+
+I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
+dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
+in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great
+feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle
+wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the
+afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
+
+“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for
+I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a
+sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the
+custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the
+slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they
+were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau,
+with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths,
+were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, just
+as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
+
+After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
+impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
+dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his
+own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one
+third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he
+no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than
+I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
+compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible
+young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
+
+At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
+breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
+make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
+Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
+
+As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
+carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
+from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
+and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
+unless they previously produced their papers.
+
+“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on
+the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
+
+“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
+
+“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head
+from behind Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s
+converted. Son of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art
+thou at present in communion with any Christian church?”
+
+“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational
+Church.” Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in
+Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
+
+“First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships
+in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying,
+taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana
+handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
+wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at
+Queequeg.
+
+“How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me;
+“not very long, I rather guess, young man.”
+
+“No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or
+it would have washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
+
+“Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member
+of Deacon Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I
+pass it every Lord’s day.”
+
+“I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,”
+said I; “all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the
+First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
+
+“Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with
+me—explain thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean?
+answer me.”
+
+Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same
+ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and
+Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of
+us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
+worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
+queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join
+hands.”
+
+“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer.
+“Young man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a
+fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why
+Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something.
+Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell
+Quohog there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By
+the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff
+that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your
+name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever
+strike a fish?”
+
+Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
+the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
+hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
+harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
+
+“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him?
+well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it,
+he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across
+the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
+
+“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him
+whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.”
+
+“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
+vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
+“Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have
+Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog,
+we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given
+a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
+
+So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
+enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
+
+When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
+signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know
+how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name
+or make thy mark?”
+
+But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
+part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
+offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact
+counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm;
+so that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his
+appellative, it stood something like this:—
+
+Quohog. his X mark.
+
+Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
+and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
+broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one
+entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in
+Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
+looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do
+my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for
+the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways,
+which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial
+bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the
+wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear
+of the fiery pit!”
+
+Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language,
+heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
+
+“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our
+harpooneer,” cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good
+voyagers—it takes the shark out of ‘em; no harpooneer is worth a
+straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the
+bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the
+meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy
+soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of
+after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
+
+“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou
+thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest,
+Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou
+prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell
+me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that
+typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain
+Ahab, did’st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”
+
+“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin,
+and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all
+of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink!
+Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an
+everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us,
+fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think
+about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of;
+and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the
+nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
+
+Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,
+where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
+sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then
+he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
+otherwise might have been wasted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
+
+“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
+
+Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
+the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when
+the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
+levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
+shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
+black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
+directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
+bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
+
+“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
+
+“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a
+little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
+
+“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole
+arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
+bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
+
+“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
+
+“Anything down there about your souls?”
+
+“About what?”
+
+“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter
+though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to
+‘em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a
+fifth wheel to a wagon.”
+
+“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
+
+“He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that
+sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous
+emphasis upon the word he.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose
+from somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t
+know.”
+
+“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen
+Old Thunder yet, have ye?”
+
+“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane
+earnestness of his manner.
+
+“Captain Ahab.”
+
+“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
+
+“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye
+hav’n’t seen him yet, have ye?”
+
+“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and
+will be all right again before long.”
+
+“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
+derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
+this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”
+
+“What do you know about him?”
+
+“What did they tell you about him? Say that!”
+
+“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that
+he’s a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
+
+“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must
+jump when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the
+word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to
+him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and
+nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the
+altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver
+calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,
+according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters
+and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who
+knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve
+heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of
+that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a’most—I mean they
+know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
+
+“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
+don’t know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must
+be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain
+Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know
+all about the loss of his leg.”
+
+“All about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
+
+“Pretty sure.”
+
+With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
+stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
+little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on
+the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to
+be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow,
+it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must
+go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity ‘em!
+Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m
+sorry I stopped ye.”
+
+“Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to
+tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you
+are mistaken in your game; that’s all I have to say.”
+
+“And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that
+way; you are just the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye,
+shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell ‘em I’ve concluded
+not to make one of ‘em.”
+
+“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool
+us. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had
+a great secret in him.”
+
+“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
+
+“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this
+crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?”
+
+“Elijah.”
+
+Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
+other’s fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he
+was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone
+perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
+looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
+though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
+said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
+comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner
+that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging
+us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This
+circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,
+shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments
+and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain
+Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver
+calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship
+the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage
+we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
+
+I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
+dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
+and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
+seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
+seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
+
+A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
+Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on
+board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
+betokened that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close.
+Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping
+a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and
+providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the
+rigging were working till long after night-fall.
+
+On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given
+at all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their
+chests must be on board before night, for there was no telling how
+soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
+resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they
+always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail
+for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
+there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
+was fully equipped.
+
+Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives
+and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
+indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
+which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean,
+far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
+though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
+to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the
+whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the
+fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors
+usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling
+vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially
+to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of
+the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare
+lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain
+and duplicate ship.
+
+At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
+Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,
+fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
+there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
+ends of things, both large and small.
+
+Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
+Bildad’s sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and
+indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved
+that, if she could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the
+Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come
+on board with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time
+with a bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his
+log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s
+rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was
+Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister
+of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and
+thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to
+yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which
+her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned
+a score or two of well-saved dollars.
+
+But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
+board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
+a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
+Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
+a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
+went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a
+while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
+down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then
+concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
+
+During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
+craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when
+he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would
+answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard
+every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend
+to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been
+downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart
+that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage,
+without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute
+dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
+But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
+already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
+suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
+nothing, and tried to think nothing.
+
+At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
+certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
+
+It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
+drew nigh the wharf.
+
+“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I
+to Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess;
+come on!”
+
+“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close
+behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating
+himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain
+twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
+
+“Going aboard?”
+
+“Hands off, will you,” said I.
+
+“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ‘way!”
+
+“Ain’t going aboard, then?”
+
+“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you
+know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”
+
+“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and
+wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
+glances.
+
+“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by
+withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would
+prefer not to be detained.”
+
+“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
+
+“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
+
+“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a
+few paces.
+
+“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
+
+But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
+shoulder, said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards
+that ship a while ago?”
+
+Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying,
+“Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be
+sure.”
+
+“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
+
+Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
+touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ‘em now, will
+ye?
+
+“Find who?”
+
+“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving
+off. “Oh! I was going to warn ye against—but never mind, never
+mind—it’s all one, all in the family too;—sharp frost this
+morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon,
+I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked
+words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small
+wonderment at his frantic impudence.
+
+At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
+quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
+hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward
+to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a
+light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
+tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his
+face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber
+slept upon him.
+
+“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said
+I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the
+wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence
+I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that
+matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. But
+I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted
+to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him
+to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s
+rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more
+ado, sat quietly down there.
+
+“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
+
+“Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t
+hurt him face.”
+
+“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance
+then; but how hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off,
+Queequeg, you are heavy, it’s grinding the face of the poor. Get
+off, Queequeg! Look, he’ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t
+wake.”
+
+Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
+lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
+over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
+in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his
+land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,
+chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some
+of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in
+that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay
+them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on
+an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible
+into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and
+desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
+in some damp marshy place.
+
+While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
+from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
+
+“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
+
+“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
+
+He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
+which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
+his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
+strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began
+to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
+troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
+rubbed his eyes.
+
+“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
+
+“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
+
+“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
+came aboard last night.”
+
+“What Captain?—Ahab?”
+
+“Who but him indeed?”
+
+I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
+heard a noise on deck.
+
+“Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively
+chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn
+to.” And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.
+
+It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and
+threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
+engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various
+last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
+enshrined within his cabin.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
+
+At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s
+riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and
+after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her
+last gift—a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law,
+and a spare Bible for the steward—after all this, the two Captains,
+Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate,
+Peleg said:
+
+“Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is
+all ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
+Well, call all hands, then. Muster ‘em aft here—blast ‘em!”
+
+“No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said
+Bildad, “but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
+
+How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
+Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
+quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as
+well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of
+him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then,
+the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the
+ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was
+not at all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he was not
+yet completely recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab stayed
+below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant
+service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable
+time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table,
+having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they
+quit the ship for good with the pilot.
+
+But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
+Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
+commanding, and not Bildad.
+
+“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered
+at the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive’em aft.”
+
+“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before,
+this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board
+the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well
+known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
+
+“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next
+command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.
+
+Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot
+is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
+known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots
+of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
+order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
+in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might now
+be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching
+anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,
+to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of
+a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.
+Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no
+profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
+getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice
+copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
+
+Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
+and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would
+sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused
+on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the
+perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a
+pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious
+Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and
+turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the
+act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first
+kick.
+
+“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared.
+“Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t
+ye spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with
+the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants.
+Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying,
+he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely,
+while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
+Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
+
+At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It
+was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into
+night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose
+freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of
+teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white
+ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from
+the bows.
+
+Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the
+old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost
+all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady
+notes were heard,—
+
+“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living
+green. So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between.”
+
+Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They
+were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
+boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was
+yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads
+and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
+untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
+
+At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed
+no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
+alongside.
+
+It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
+this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet;
+very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a
+voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of
+his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate
+sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to
+encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to
+a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad
+lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the
+cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and
+looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
+bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards
+the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere
+and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,
+convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern,
+for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,
+“Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
+
+As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
+his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the
+lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to
+deck—now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
+
+But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about
+him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the
+main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!
+Careful, careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye,
+Starbuck—luck to ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye and
+good luck to ye all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper
+smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
+
+“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old
+Bildad, almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so
+that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all
+he needs, and ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.
+Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly,
+ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
+within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind
+that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
+the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but
+don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good
+gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little
+leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of
+fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long
+down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be careful with the
+butter—twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if—”
+
+“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with
+that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
+
+Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
+screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave
+three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
+Atlantic.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
+
+Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
+mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
+
+When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her
+vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see
+standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and
+fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four
+years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for
+still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.
+Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no
+epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.
+Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship,
+that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain
+give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort,
+hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our
+mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s
+direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though
+it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through.
+With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights
+‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all
+the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly
+rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
+
+Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
+intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
+effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while
+the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
+treacherous, slavish shore?
+
+But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
+indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
+than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
+For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of
+the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart,
+O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
+ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
+
+As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
+and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
+landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
+am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done
+to us hunters of whales.
+
+In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
+the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
+accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a
+stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
+it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
+he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
+of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm
+Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
+pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
+
+Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
+whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
+butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
+are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
+true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
+all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And
+as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
+soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,
+and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship
+at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even
+granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery
+decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of
+those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in
+all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the
+popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure ye that
+many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly
+recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning into
+eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of
+man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
+
+But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
+unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
+adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round
+the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
+
+But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
+scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
+
+Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling
+fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
+out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some
+score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
+Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties
+upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
+America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;
+sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
+thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
+at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
+harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if
+there be not something puissant in whaling?
+
+But this is not the half; look again.
+
+I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
+point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty
+years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in
+one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
+and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
+continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
+well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
+pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
+catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
+the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
+least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
+which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
+American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
+harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the
+whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
+between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes
+of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that
+scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
+as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
+succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
+and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
+wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
+not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old
+South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of
+our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates
+three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the
+ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!
+
+Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
+scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
+the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
+It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the
+Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it
+might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the
+liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and
+the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
+
+That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
+to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
+discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores
+as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The
+whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover,
+in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were
+several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the
+whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted
+isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage
+to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the
+merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their
+first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become
+hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due;
+for already she is on the threshold.
+
+But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
+aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
+shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
+every time.
+
+The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
+will say.
+
+The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote
+the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
+the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
+Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
+Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
+glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
+
+True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
+good blood in their veins.
+
+No good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal
+blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
+afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers
+of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
+harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the
+barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
+
+Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
+respectable.
+
+Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
+law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” *
+
+Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
+grand imposing way.
+
+The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty
+triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s
+capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
+coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
+
+*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
+
+Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
+dignity in whaling.
+
+No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens
+attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
+hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
+know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
+whales. I account that man more honourable than that great captain of
+antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
+
+And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
+prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
+but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
+hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
+have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or
+more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here
+I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a
+whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
+
+In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
+substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
+should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might
+tell eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
+blameworthy?
+
+It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
+ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
+gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may
+be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows?
+Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his
+coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they
+anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint
+machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
+dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but
+meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably
+smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,
+unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him
+somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality.
+
+But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is
+used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,
+nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What
+then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
+state, the sweetest of all oils?
+
+Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
+queens with coronation stuff!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
+
+The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
+Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
+coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
+as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
+not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of
+general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
+his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
+summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
+thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and
+cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely
+the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the
+contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped
+up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified
+Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come,
+and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like
+a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well
+in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet
+lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted
+through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
+telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for
+all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities
+in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to
+overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
+endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his
+life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that
+sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to
+spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents
+and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
+welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
+of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the
+original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those
+latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush
+of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous
+vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man in my boat,” said
+Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to
+mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which
+arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
+utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
+
+“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as
+careful a man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall
+ere long see what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a
+man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
+
+Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
+sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all
+mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this
+business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of
+the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
+Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
+for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
+him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill
+whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
+hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his
+own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn
+limbs of his brother?
+
+With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
+superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
+could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But
+it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
+terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
+that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in
+him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
+confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
+was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
+while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
+whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
+cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
+which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and
+mighty man.
+
+But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
+abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
+to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
+the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
+stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
+men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
+and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
+ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
+costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves,
+so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
+seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of
+a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
+completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
+august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but
+that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it
+shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic
+dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The
+great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His
+omnipresence, our divine equality!
+
+If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
+hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
+graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
+all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
+touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a
+rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics
+bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
+royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
+democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
+pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves
+of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who
+didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
+war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
+Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
+the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
+
+Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
+according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
+neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
+indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
+chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
+for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
+whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
+crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
+arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the
+snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of
+the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
+a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes
+while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,
+for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he
+thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of
+it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his
+mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,
+he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
+themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed
+the order, and not sooner.
+
+What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
+unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
+world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
+what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
+thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
+little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
+almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
+nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
+loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he
+turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
+the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
+readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
+legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
+
+I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
+peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
+ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of
+the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
+cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their
+mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco
+smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.
+
+The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
+short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
+who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
+and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
+honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
+was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
+bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
+any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
+the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
+water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
+application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
+ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
+the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
+three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
+that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought
+nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
+was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
+called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
+be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
+whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted
+into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
+battering seas.
+
+Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
+men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
+Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
+Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
+these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
+their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;
+even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
+
+And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
+Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
+who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when
+the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
+moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
+and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
+down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
+them belonged.
+
+First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
+for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
+
+Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
+promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last
+remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
+island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In
+the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers.
+Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black
+rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but
+Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently
+proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud
+warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
+scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
+snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
+hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon
+of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at
+the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited
+the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half-believed
+this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.
+Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
+
+Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
+negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
+from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
+them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
+them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
+lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
+anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
+most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
+life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
+manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
+and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
+feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
+him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
+beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
+Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
+beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s company, be it said,
+that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before
+the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born,
+though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with
+the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and
+merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction
+of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all
+these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest
+of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of
+these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
+Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy
+peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers
+sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to
+receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards,
+they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
+Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders
+in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
+continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his
+own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!
+An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
+the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
+world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them
+ever come back. Black Little Pip—he never did—oh, no! he went
+before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall
+ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time,
+when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in
+with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here,
+hailed a hero there!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
+
+For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
+of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
+and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
+only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
+with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they
+but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was
+there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate
+into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
+
+Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
+gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
+disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
+sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at
+times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
+recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
+of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
+almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
+prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
+uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
+about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
+emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
+were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
+tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
+acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to
+the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian
+vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially
+the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which
+was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and
+induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.
+Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
+different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of
+them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being
+Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had
+biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
+southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,
+gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather
+behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy
+enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship
+was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
+melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the
+forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,
+foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain
+Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
+
+There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
+recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
+the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
+or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
+whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
+unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out
+from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
+tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
+you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
+perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
+a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
+without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top
+to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly
+alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it
+was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.
+By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was
+made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego’s senior, an
+old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not
+till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
+then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in
+an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
+negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
+who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
+laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
+immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
+preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
+contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
+be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he
+muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would
+find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
+
+So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
+brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
+that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
+white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
+this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the
+sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said the
+old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped
+another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ‘em.”
+
+I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side
+of the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,
+there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank.
+His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by
+a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the
+ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude,
+a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
+forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
+officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures
+and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
+consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that,
+but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
+face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
+
+Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
+But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either
+standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or
+heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
+grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as
+if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
+bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it
+came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
+for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck,
+he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was
+only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
+preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
+that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
+Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that
+layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the
+loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
+
+Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
+pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from
+his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May,
+trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest,
+most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
+sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the
+end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More
+than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any
+other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
+
+Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now
+went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
+perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.
+The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days,
+were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with
+rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
+jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
+absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man,
+‘twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing
+nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely
+lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned
+upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on;
+then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless
+twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on
+Ahab’s texture.
+
+Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
+man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
+the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
+night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
+seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
+were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It
+feels like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to
+himself—“for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow
+scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.”
+
+So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
+set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
+and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
+flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
+it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
+this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
+silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man
+would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
+Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,
+he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
+wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
+would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that
+their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,
+the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,
+lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast,
+Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain
+unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was
+pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might
+be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and
+hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the
+ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
+
+“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me
+that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
+where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at
+last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”
+
+Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
+scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,
+“I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half
+like it, sir.”
+
+“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
+as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
+
+“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be
+called a dog, sir.”
+
+“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and
+begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee!”
+
+As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
+his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
+
+“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,”
+muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.
+“It’s very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know
+whether to go back and strike him, or—what’s that?—down here on my
+knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but
+it would be the first time I ever did pray. It’s queer; very queer;
+and he’s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about the
+queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his
+eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there’s something on his
+mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
+He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the
+twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the
+steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s
+hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the
+foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of
+frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I
+guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind
+of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t
+know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of
+riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night,
+as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like
+to know? Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that
+queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes
+for a snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into
+the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it,
+that’s about the first thing babies do, and that’s a sort of queer,
+too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ‘em. But
+that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment;
+and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again. But how’s
+that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a
+donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well
+have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn’t
+observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed
+like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I don’t
+stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of
+turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming,
+though—How? how? how?—but the only way’s to stash it; so here
+goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey
+juggling thinks over by daylight.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
+
+When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
+bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor
+of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.
+Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the
+weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
+
+In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
+fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one
+look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking
+him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of
+the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
+
+Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth
+in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How
+now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking
+no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
+gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and
+ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
+such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the
+strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
+This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours
+among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll
+smoke no more—”
+
+He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
+waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
+made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
+
+Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
+
+“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s
+ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick
+back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then,
+presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking
+at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all
+dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
+thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
+kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not a
+real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between
+a living thump and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the
+hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.
+The living member—that makes the living insult, my little man. And
+thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly
+toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it
+all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg
+now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a
+playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not
+a base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of
+it—the foot part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad
+footed farmer kicked me, there’s a devilish broad insult. But this
+insult is whittled down to a point only.’ But now comes the greatest
+joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a
+sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by
+the shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ‘bout?’ says he.
+Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment
+I was over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And
+what business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do
+you want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than
+he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of
+seaweed he had for a clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder
+alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points
+out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old
+fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’ said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept
+muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a
+chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop saying over his ‘wise
+Stubb, wise Stubb,’ I thought I might as well fall to kicking the
+pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared
+out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I, ‘what’s the
+matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s argue
+the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’
+says I—‘right here it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he
+used his ivory leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well
+then,’ says he, ‘wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t
+he kick with right good will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he
+kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a
+beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s an honour; I consider it an honour.
+Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great
+glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your
+boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of.
+Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honours; and on
+no account kick back; for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t
+you see that pyramid?’ With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow,
+in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over;
+and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream,
+Flask?”
+
+“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
+
+“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see
+Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best
+thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to
+him, whatever he says. Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
+
+“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
+
+“If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
+
+“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of
+something queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man?
+Look ye—there’s something special in the wind. Stand by for it,
+Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes
+this way.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
+
+Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost
+in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
+Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of
+the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
+indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more
+special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
+follow.
+
+It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
+that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
+classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
+essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
+
+“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
+Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
+
+“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the
+inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups
+and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this
+animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
+
+“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.”
+“Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A
+field strewn with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but
+serve to torture us naturalists.”
+
+Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
+those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
+knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
+some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
+the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at
+large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors
+of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
+Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
+Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
+John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the
+Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
+ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited
+extracts will show.
+
+Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
+ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
+harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
+subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
+authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
+sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
+mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
+upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
+of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
+profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
+then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
+this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
+and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
+to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,
+will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
+them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new
+proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the
+Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
+
+There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living
+sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
+succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s; both
+in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact
+and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be
+found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes,
+it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific
+description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic,
+lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales,
+his is an unwritten life.
+
+Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
+comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
+present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
+laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
+hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;
+because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
+reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
+description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to
+much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught
+of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
+
+But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office
+is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them;
+to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very
+pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should
+essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job
+might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee?
+Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
+sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible
+hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to
+settle.
+
+First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
+is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
+still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of
+Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales
+from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the
+year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s
+express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas
+with the Leviathan.
+
+The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from
+the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular
+heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
+intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturae
+jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey
+and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain
+voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were
+altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
+
+Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
+ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
+This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
+respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given
+you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
+whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
+
+Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
+conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
+whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have
+him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
+meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a
+fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is
+still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
+noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
+vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,
+though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
+position.
+
+By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
+from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
+with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
+hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.*
+Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be
+included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand
+divisions of the entire whale host.
+
+*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
+Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
+by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,
+contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
+wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials
+as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the
+Kingdom of Cetology.
+
+First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
+BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,
+both small and large.
+
+I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
+
+As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the
+Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.
+
+FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The
+Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin-Back Whale; IV. the
+Hump-backed Whale; V. the Razor-Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur-Bottom
+Whale.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).—This whale, among the
+English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
+whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
+French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
+Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
+the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
+aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
+the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
+obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
+upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
+considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
+almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
+was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
+spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
+creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
+or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that
+quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of
+the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
+exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
+and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays
+buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the
+true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still
+retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so
+strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at
+last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti
+was really derived.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right Whale).—In one respect this is the
+most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
+by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen;
+and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article in
+commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all
+the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale;
+the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of
+obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously
+baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species
+of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the
+Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the
+French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale
+which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and
+English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen
+have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the
+Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by
+them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
+
+Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
+English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
+in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
+determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
+endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
+some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
+right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference
+to elucidating the sperm whale.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. (Fin-Back).—Under this head I reckon
+a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
+Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
+whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
+Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and
+in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
+portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
+present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
+of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which
+he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some
+three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the
+back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if
+not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated
+fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When
+the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples,
+and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled
+surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it
+somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on
+it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not
+gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very
+shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
+remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet
+rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with
+such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present
+pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable
+Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From
+having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with
+the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated Whalebone Whales,
+that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there
+would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little
+known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
+whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s
+names for a few sorts.
+
+In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is
+of great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be
+convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
+in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon
+either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those
+marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford
+the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached
+bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How
+then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
+peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
+without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other
+and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked
+whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same
+humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;
+but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the
+other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such
+irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached,
+such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general
+methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the
+whale-naturalists has split.
+
+But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
+whale, in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the
+right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
+Greenland whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
+seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
+Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
+leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as
+available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
+What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in
+their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is
+the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can
+possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. (Hump-Back).—This whale is often seen on
+the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
+towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you
+might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular
+name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm
+whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very
+valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of
+all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
+other of them.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. (Razor-Back).—Of this whale little is
+known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of
+a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no
+coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises
+in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does
+anybody else.
+
+BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur-Bottom).—Another retiring
+gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
+Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
+at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
+and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
+never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are
+told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true
+of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
+
+Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).
+
+OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
+present may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III.,
+the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
+
+*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
+Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of
+the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
+in figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form
+does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume
+does.
+
+BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).—Though this fish, whose
+loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb
+to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not
+popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive
+features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.
+He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet
+in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in
+herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in
+quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
+regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
+
+BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).—I give the popular
+fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
+Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,
+and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,
+because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the
+Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
+circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
+carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
+averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
+all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin
+in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
+profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
+whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment—as
+some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
+themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
+blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
+thirty gallons of oil.
+
+BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril
+whale.—Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose
+from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The
+creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five
+feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly
+speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw
+in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only
+found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
+something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What
+precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to
+say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and
+bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
+a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin
+said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
+surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his
+horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
+surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided
+horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would
+certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
+The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and
+the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
+to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
+cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s
+horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison,
+and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
+distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
+horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it
+was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells
+me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when
+Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of
+Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when Sir
+Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended
+knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the
+Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at
+Windsor.” An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended
+knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to
+a land beast of the unicorn nature.
+
+The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
+milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
+His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and
+he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
+
+BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).—Of this whale little is
+precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
+naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
+that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort
+of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip,
+and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.
+The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has.
+Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the
+ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on
+sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
+
+BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).—This gentleman is famous for
+his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
+the Folio whale’s back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
+flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
+process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both
+are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
+
+Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III. (Duodecimo).
+
+DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
+II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
+
+To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
+possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
+feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, in the popular
+sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set
+down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
+definition of what a whale is—i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal
+tail.
+
+BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. (Huzza Porpoise).—This is the
+common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
+bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
+must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always
+swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
+themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
+appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine
+spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They
+are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a
+lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding
+these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
+gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will
+yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
+extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
+jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise
+meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that
+a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
+readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
+you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
+
+BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. (Algerine Porpoise).—A pirate. Very
+savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger
+than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him,
+and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
+never yet saw him captured.
+
+BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).—The
+largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
+known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated,
+is that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance
+that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he
+differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund
+and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like
+figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has
+a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his
+mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is
+of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship’s
+hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from stem to
+stern, with two separate colours, black above and white below. The white
+comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him
+look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag.
+A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common
+porpoise.
+
+Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as
+the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
+Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
+half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
+reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
+fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
+future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
+any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
+he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio,
+Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale;
+the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon
+Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the
+Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,
+Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
+uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit
+them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for
+mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
+
+Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
+here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have
+kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
+unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
+crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small
+erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true
+ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
+completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the
+draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
+
+Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place
+as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising
+from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown
+of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
+
+The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced
+by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
+and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in
+the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
+officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;
+usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those
+days, the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation
+and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting
+department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer
+reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
+title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
+his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as
+senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more
+inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
+harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
+in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,
+but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the
+command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political
+maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from
+the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
+professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
+their social equal.
+
+Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is
+this—the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and
+merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
+so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
+the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the
+captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with
+it.
+
+Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
+of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and
+the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
+or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
+common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
+hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less
+rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
+how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
+primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
+externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,
+and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
+which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
+grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost
+as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
+shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
+
+And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
+given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
+he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
+required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon
+the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
+circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
+addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in
+terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
+unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
+
+Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
+forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
+making use of them for other and more private ends than they were
+legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
+which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through
+those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
+dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will,
+it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,
+without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,
+in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever
+keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings;
+and leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men
+who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the
+choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted
+superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks
+in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,
+that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted
+potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown
+of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
+herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the
+tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest
+sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in
+his art, as the one now alluded to.
+
+But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
+grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
+Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
+whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
+and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
+must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
+featured in the unbodied air!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
+
+It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
+face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and
+master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an
+observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the
+smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on
+the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
+tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
+presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
+the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr.
+Starbuck,” disappears into the cabin.
+
+When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck,
+the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then
+Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks,
+and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of
+pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The
+second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking
+the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important
+rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner,
+Mr. Flask,” follows after his predecessors.
+
+But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
+seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
+sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his
+shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right
+over the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
+his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
+far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
+processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into
+the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,
+then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence,
+in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
+
+It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
+artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
+some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
+defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
+very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
+same commander’s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
+deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of
+the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
+difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
+Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
+therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
+who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
+private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power
+and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty
+of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest.
+Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.
+It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding.
+Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of
+a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
+peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
+
+Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned
+sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
+deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be
+served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
+there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,
+their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved
+the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they
+would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
+upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
+knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby
+motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate received his meat as
+though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started
+if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it
+noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like
+the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
+dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
+somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
+forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was
+to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And
+poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary
+family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have
+been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this
+must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had
+he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have
+been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
+strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,
+the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did
+Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners
+of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
+sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
+marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for
+him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
+
+Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask
+is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly
+jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;
+and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb
+even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small
+appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask
+must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;
+for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.
+Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he
+had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never
+known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what
+he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
+Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from
+my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of
+old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before
+the mast. There’s the fruits of promotion now; there’s the vanity of
+glory: there’s the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that
+any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask’s
+official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample
+vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through
+the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
+
+Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table
+in the Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted
+order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was
+restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three
+harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.
+They made a sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and mighty
+cabin.
+
+In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
+invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire
+care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those
+inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed
+afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers
+chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They
+dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all
+day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and
+Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast,
+often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of
+salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not
+lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then
+Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork
+at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor,
+assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting
+his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in
+hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He
+was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this
+bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital
+nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific
+Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,
+Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after
+seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he
+would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and
+fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was
+over.
+
+It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
+his filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on
+the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to
+the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low
+cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in
+a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
+not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
+small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
+baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed
+strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
+dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
+beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
+mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so
+much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether
+any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
+Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
+picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
+round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
+whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their
+lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they
+would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at
+all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
+Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
+murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the
+white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on
+his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,
+the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,
+fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every
+step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
+
+But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
+there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
+scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
+when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
+
+In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
+captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights
+the ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone
+that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real
+truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be
+said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter
+it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards
+for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
+residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
+was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
+included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He
+lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
+Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of
+the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter
+there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,
+Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon
+the sullen paws of its gloom!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
+
+It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
+other seamen my first mast-head came round.
+
+In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
+simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may
+have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
+cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage
+she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial
+even—then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not
+till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she
+altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
+
+Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
+ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.
+I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
+Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
+For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
+their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
+or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
+stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread
+gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders
+priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
+mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
+archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical
+purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like
+formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious
+long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount
+to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a
+modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In
+Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him
+a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
+his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a
+tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless
+stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs
+or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to
+the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads
+we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who,
+though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely
+incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange
+sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome,
+stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air;
+careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis
+Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft
+on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’
+pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few
+mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands
+his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that
+London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for
+where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor
+Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however
+madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks
+upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits
+penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals
+and what rocks must be shunned.
+
+It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head
+standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is
+not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
+historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
+that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly
+launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty
+spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means
+of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few
+years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand,
+who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh
+the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the
+one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads
+are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their
+regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two
+hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant
+the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There
+you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the
+deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and
+between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even
+as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old
+Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with
+nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the
+drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the
+most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests
+you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts
+of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear
+of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are
+never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for
+all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and
+your bill of fare is immutable.
+
+In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’
+voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the
+mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
+deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion
+of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute
+of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
+comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
+a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small
+and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
+most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where
+you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen)
+called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the
+beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns.
+To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in
+the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat
+is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued
+inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor
+even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an
+ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat
+is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin
+encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body,
+and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
+
+Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
+southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
+pulpits, called crow’s-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
+whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
+the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among
+the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
+re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in
+this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with
+a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
+crow’s-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s
+good craft. He called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in honour of
+himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all
+ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children
+after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and
+patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any
+other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is
+something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where
+it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your
+head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend
+into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side,
+or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
+underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather
+rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other
+nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head
+in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle
+with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and
+shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea
+unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at
+them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot
+down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of
+love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
+conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many
+of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his
+experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there
+for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is
+called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error
+ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s
+planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having been so
+many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the
+Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned
+“binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and
+“approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was
+not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to
+fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little
+case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s nest,
+within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire
+and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take
+it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle,
+seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while
+with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics
+aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the
+pole.
+
+But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
+Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
+greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
+seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used
+to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a
+chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
+then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
+top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at
+last mount to my ultimate destination.
+
+Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but
+sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
+could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering
+altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
+whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing
+out every time.”
+
+And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
+Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
+lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
+offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
+of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
+killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
+round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
+are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
+furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
+young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
+sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
+himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and
+in moody phrase ejaculates:—
+
+“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
+blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
+
+Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded
+young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
+“interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly
+lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they
+would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those
+young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
+short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
+left their opera-glasses at home.
+
+“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads,
+“we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not
+raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art
+up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been
+shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like
+listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth
+by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses
+his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image
+of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and
+every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
+every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems
+to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the
+soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy
+spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and
+space; like Crammer’s (Thomas Cranmer) sprinkled Pantheistic ashes,
+forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
+
+There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
+gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
+the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,
+move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity
+comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps,
+at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you
+drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise
+for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
+
+(Enter Ahab: Then, all)
+
+It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one
+morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
+cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
+hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the
+garden.
+
+Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
+rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
+dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
+you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
+you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
+unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
+
+But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as
+his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
+thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
+main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
+turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
+possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every
+outer movement.
+
+“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in
+him pecks the shell. ‘Twill soon be out.”
+
+The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
+deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
+
+It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
+bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with
+one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
+
+“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given
+on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
+
+“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come
+down!”
+
+When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and
+not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not
+unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after
+rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the
+crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were
+nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and
+half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering
+whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask,
+that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing
+a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he
+cried:—
+
+“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
+
+“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of
+clubbed voices.
+
+“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
+hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
+thrown them.
+
+“And what do ye next, men?”
+
+“Lower away, and after him!”
+
+“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
+
+“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
+
+More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
+countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began
+to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
+themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
+
+But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
+pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
+convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
+
+“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about
+a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of
+gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a
+sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon
+top-maul.”
+
+While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was
+slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if
+to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile
+lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and
+inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
+vitality in him.
+
+Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
+with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
+other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye
+raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
+whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
+punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
+that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
+
+“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
+hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
+
+“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
+topmaul: “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for
+white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
+
+All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even
+more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention
+of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
+separately touched by some specific recollection.
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same
+that some call Moby Dick.”
+
+“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then,
+Tash?”
+
+“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said
+the Gay-Header deliberately.
+
+“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even
+for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
+
+“And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
+Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk,
+like him—him—” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand
+round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
+
+“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all
+twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like
+a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after
+the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like
+a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have
+seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus
+far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last
+seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder.
+“Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick
+that took off thy leg?”
+
+“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck;
+aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby
+Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he
+shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken
+moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed me; made
+a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both
+arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and
+I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the
+Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.
+And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on
+both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black
+blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it,
+now? I think ye do look brave.”
+
+“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to
+the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance
+for Moby Dick!”
+
+“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless
+ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this
+long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art
+not game for Moby Dick?”
+
+“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
+Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but
+I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many
+barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain
+Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
+
+“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest
+a little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the
+accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
+girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
+me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”
+
+“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for?
+methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.”
+
+“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote
+thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
+Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
+
+“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
+are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act,
+the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts
+forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
+If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach
+outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
+that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.
+But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous
+strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing
+is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white
+whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of
+blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the
+sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of
+fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my
+master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no
+confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings
+is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has
+melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,
+that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small
+indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder
+Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by
+the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things,
+that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel!
+The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this
+matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he
+snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost
+sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ‘Tis but to help
+strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this
+one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will
+not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah!
+constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but
+speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside)
+Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs.
+Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”
+
+“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
+
+But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab
+did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the
+hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage;
+nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
+their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up
+with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the
+winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as
+before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come?
+But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so
+much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing
+things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
+necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
+
+“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
+
+Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
+ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near
+the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates
+stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s
+company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant
+searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met
+his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their
+leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but,
+alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
+
+“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
+nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
+draughts—long swallows, men; ‘tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so;
+it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
+serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
+way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
+brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
+
+“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan;
+and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there
+with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some
+sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men,
+you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner.
+Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were’t not
+thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
+
+“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let
+me touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
+three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
+suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
+Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
+nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
+same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic
+life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic
+aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of
+Starbuck fell downright.
+
+“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ‘tis well. For did ye three
+but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that
+had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped
+ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
+appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three
+most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
+the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
+his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that
+shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings
+and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”
+
+Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
+detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
+up, before him.
+
+“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know
+ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
+advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith,
+slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
+sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
+
+“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
+them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
+Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
+it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
+whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not
+hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were
+lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the
+spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled,
+and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter
+went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to
+them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
+
+The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
+
+I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er
+I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
+but first I pass.
+
+Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like
+wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from
+noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill.
+Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy.
+Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far
+flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds.
+‘Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ‘Tis split, too—that I feel;
+the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid
+metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most
+brain-battering fight!
+
+Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred
+me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me;
+all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with
+the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly
+and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good
+night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
+
+‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the
+least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and
+they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they
+all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others,
+the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve
+willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck
+does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness
+that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should
+be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will
+dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller
+one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot
+at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded
+Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of
+your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am
+up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton
+bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye;
+come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else
+ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed
+purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
+Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under
+torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s
+an angle to the iron way!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
+
+By the mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.
+
+My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!
+Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
+he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see
+his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I,
+the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no
+knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he
+would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!
+Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse
+yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe
+would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow
+wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
+small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God
+may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole
+clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key
+to lift again.
+
+[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]
+
+Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
+mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale
+is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!
+mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost
+through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering
+bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his
+sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further
+on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through!
+Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ‘tis in an hour like
+this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored
+things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ‘tis now that I do feel the
+latent horror in thee! but ‘tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and
+with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye,
+ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed
+influences!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch. Fore-Top.
+
+(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)
+
+Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it
+ever since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because
+a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come
+what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is,
+it’s all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to
+my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt.
+Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had
+the gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my
+eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my
+title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know
+not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it
+laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel
+funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home
+doing now? Crying its eyes out?—Giving a party to the last arrived
+harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa,
+la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
+
+We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and
+fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the
+lips while meeting.
+
+A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(Aside)
+he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye,
+sir, just through with this job—coming.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle. HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
+
+(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and
+lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
+
+     Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
+     Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
+     Our captain’s commanded.—
+
+1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for
+the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! (Sings, and all follow)
+
+    Our captain stood upon the deck,
+    A spy-glass in his hand,
+    A viewing of those gallant whales
+    That blew at every strand.
+    Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
+    And by your braces stand,
+    And we’ll have one of those fine whales,
+    Hand, boys, over hand!
+    So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
+    While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
+
+MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
+
+2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear,
+bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me
+call the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth.
+So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
+Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
+
+DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark
+this in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as
+filliping to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like
+ground-tier butts. At ‘em again! There, take this copper-pump, and
+hail ‘em through it. Tell ‘em to avast dreaming of their lasses.
+Tell ‘em it’s the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come
+to judgment. That’s the way—that’s it; thy throat ain’t spoiled
+with eating Amsterdam butter.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to
+anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand
+by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
+
+PIP. (Sulky and sleepy) Don’t know where it is.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I
+say; merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now,
+Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!
+legs!
+
+ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to
+my taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on
+the subject; but excuse me.
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take
+his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners!
+I must have partners!
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea,
+turn grasshopper!
+
+LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of
+us. Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here
+comes the music; now for it!
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.)
+Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,
+boys! (The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some
+sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (Dancing) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,
+stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
+
+PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it
+so.
+
+CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
+thyself.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
+Split jibs! tear yourselves!
+
+TASHTEGO. (Quietly smoking) That’s a white man; he calls that fun:
+humph! I save my sweat.
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
+they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s
+the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round
+corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
+crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars
+have it; and so ‘tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads,
+you’re young; I was once.
+
+3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after
+whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
+
+(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky
+darkens—the wind rises.)
+
+LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The
+sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow,
+Seeva!
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. (Reclining and shaking his cap.) It’s the waves—the
+snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon.
+Now would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee
+with them evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not
+match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance,
+when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. (Reclining.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet
+interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip!
+heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
+else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
+
+TAHITAN SAILOR. (Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
+dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
+still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
+in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
+and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How
+then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
+Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown
+the villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps to
+his feet.)
+
+PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ‘gainst the side! Stand
+by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
+they’ll go lunging presently.
+
+DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
+holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no
+more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the
+Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
+
+4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old
+Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
+waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the
+lads to hunt him up his whale!
+
+ALL. Aye! aye!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
+of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none
+but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
+of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.
+Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in
+the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.
+
+DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m
+quarried out of it!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. (Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes
+me touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
+side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
+
+DAGGOO (grimly). None.
+
+ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t
+be, or else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat
+long in working.
+
+5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
+
+DAGGOO (springing). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR (meeting him). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
+spirit!
+
+ALL. A row! a row! a row!
+
+TASHTEGO (with a whiff). A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and
+men—both brawlers! Humph!
+
+BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
+in with ye!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a
+ring!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
+Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st
+thou the ring?
+
+MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in
+top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
+
+ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)
+
+PIP (shrinking under the windlass). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
+Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower,
+Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled
+woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts
+now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects
+to ‘em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what
+a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white
+squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I
+heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but
+spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like
+my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore ‘em in to hunt him!
+Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy
+on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have
+no bowels to feel fear!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
+
+I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
+my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
+did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
+wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless
+feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that
+murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths
+of violence and revenge.
+
+For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
+secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
+frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
+existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;
+while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to
+him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers;
+the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
+circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
+solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or
+more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort;
+the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the
+times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct
+and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
+whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
+Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
+encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
+a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after
+doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to
+some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in
+question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the
+Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent
+instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
+attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
+battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
+content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to
+the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual
+cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
+the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
+
+And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
+caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
+them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
+whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
+assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,
+or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
+those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their
+terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude
+of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had
+eventually come.
+
+Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
+horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
+fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
+terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
+maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound,
+wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the
+sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses
+every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness
+of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen
+as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
+to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
+directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing
+in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,
+hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
+though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you
+would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
+that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
+such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
+tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
+
+No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
+the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did
+in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
+and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
+eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything
+that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
+strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
+Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his
+jaw.
+
+But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
+Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
+Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
+leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are
+those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous
+enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
+perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
+timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are
+plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing
+under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
+Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to
+the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
+hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest
+and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
+pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more
+feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
+
+And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
+legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
+naturalists—Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only
+to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to
+be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.
+Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost
+similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron
+himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks
+included) are “struck with the most lively terrors,” and “often in
+the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks
+with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the
+general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet
+in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson,
+the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
+vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
+
+So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
+the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
+of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
+practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
+warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
+hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
+as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would
+be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are
+some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
+
+Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
+were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,
+chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
+specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
+accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
+offered.
+
+One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
+with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,
+was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
+actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
+instant of time.
+
+Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
+without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
+of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to
+the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale
+when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his
+pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and
+contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the
+mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports
+himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
+
+It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
+as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,
+that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
+bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
+seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
+been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could
+not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
+believed by some whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a
+problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
+real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times
+of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there
+was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
+surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain
+near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy
+Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost
+fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
+
+Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
+that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped
+alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should
+go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only
+ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that
+though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still
+swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
+blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in
+unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would
+once more be seen.
+
+But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
+the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike
+the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his
+uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
+but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled
+forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
+features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
+revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
+
+The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
+the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
+appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
+his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
+sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
+gleamings.
+
+Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
+deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,
+as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
+accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
+all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught
+else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every
+apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
+round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
+splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
+
+Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
+disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in
+the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s
+infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death
+that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
+unintelligent agent.
+
+Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
+his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed
+boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
+white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
+sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
+
+His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
+eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
+dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
+with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.
+That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
+sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s
+leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no
+hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.
+Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
+encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,
+all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came
+to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
+intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
+him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
+some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
+half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been
+from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe
+one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced
+in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like
+them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale,
+he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
+torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
+in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
+demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
+personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
+the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt
+by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
+mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
+
+It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at
+the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the
+monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,
+corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
+probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.
+Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long
+months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one
+hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;
+then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another;
+and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
+voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
+all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
+he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
+strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified
+by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even
+there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung
+to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable
+latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails spread, floated across the
+tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man’s delirium
+seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from
+his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore
+that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders
+once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now
+gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is
+oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it
+may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab’s
+full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated
+Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably
+through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not
+one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad
+madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That
+before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious
+trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and
+carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark;
+so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did
+now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought
+to bear upon any one reasonable object.
+
+This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.
+But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding
+far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where
+we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take
+your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
+where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root
+of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique
+buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
+throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
+patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
+ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud,
+sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled
+royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
+
+Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means
+are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or
+change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long
+dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling
+was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
+Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
+with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
+otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
+terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
+
+The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
+ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
+always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the
+present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,
+that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on
+account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent
+isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he
+was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
+of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and
+scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
+idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart
+his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.
+Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
+yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on
+his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,
+that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in
+him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only
+and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his
+old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
+then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the
+ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the
+profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an
+audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.
+
+Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a
+Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly
+made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally
+enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or
+right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference
+and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a
+crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal
+fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so
+aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their
+souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the
+White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came
+to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious
+understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed
+the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain,
+would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that
+works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever
+shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible
+arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one,
+I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while
+yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute
+but the deadliest ill.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.
+
+What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
+was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
+
+Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
+could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there
+was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
+which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and
+yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of
+putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale
+that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself
+here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
+these chapters might be naught.
+
+Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
+if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas,
+and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a
+certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old
+kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above
+all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern
+kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal
+standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white
+charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording
+Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though
+this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the
+white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides,
+all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for
+among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other
+mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of
+many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of
+age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt
+of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,
+whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
+and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
+milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
+august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
+and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being
+held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
+himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
+noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
+by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
+creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit
+with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
+the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of
+one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
+cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
+specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though
+in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
+the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
+throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
+these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,
+and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
+of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
+which affrights in blood.
+
+This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
+divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
+terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
+Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
+what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent
+horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an
+abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb
+gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his
+heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or
+shark.*
+
+*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him
+who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not
+the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
+hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
+it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
+irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
+fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
+two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us
+with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;
+yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified
+terror.
+
+As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
+creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
+same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly
+hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish
+mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest),
+whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral
+music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in
+this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him
+Requin.
+
+Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
+wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
+imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,
+unflattering laureate, Nature.*
+
+*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
+gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
+below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
+main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
+with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth
+its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous
+flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
+cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its
+inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took
+hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
+thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
+waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
+towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
+hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
+turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
+never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious
+thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
+learned that goney was some seaman’s name for albatross. So that by
+no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had aught to do with
+those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon
+our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be
+an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little
+brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
+
+I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
+chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,
+that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;
+and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I
+beheld the Antarctic fowl.
+
+But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
+tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.
+At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern
+tally round its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting
+it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was
+taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,
+the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
+
+Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
+the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
+large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
+thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
+elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
+days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
+their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
+every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
+mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
+resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
+most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
+world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
+glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
+bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
+his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
+streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
+circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
+Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
+cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the
+bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor
+can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
+horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him
+with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
+commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
+
+But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
+accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
+Albatross.
+
+What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
+the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It
+is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he
+bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive
+deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes
+him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be
+so?
+
+Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but
+not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces
+this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
+gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
+Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
+omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
+that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
+faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
+market-place!
+
+Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
+mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
+cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
+the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
+there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
+consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
+from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud
+in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to
+throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in
+a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that
+even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on
+his pallid horse.
+
+Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
+thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
+idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
+
+But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
+account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then,
+by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
+whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
+of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
+but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
+modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct
+us to the hidden cause we seek?
+
+Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
+and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
+though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
+to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
+entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
+recall them now.
+
+Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
+acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention
+of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
+processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with
+new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the
+Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or
+a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
+
+Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
+kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White
+Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of
+an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
+neighbors—the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
+towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,
+comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of
+that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a
+soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes
+and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness
+over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal
+thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by
+the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
+unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
+the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does “the tall pale man” of
+the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through
+the green of the groves—why is this phantom more terrible than all the
+whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
+
+Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
+earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
+tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
+field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
+(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
+house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it
+is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
+saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
+there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
+this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
+greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
+pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
+
+I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
+is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
+objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught
+of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost
+solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under
+any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean
+by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the
+following examples.
+
+First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by
+night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
+enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
+similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his
+ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from
+encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round
+him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom
+of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the
+lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go
+down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is
+the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much the fear of
+striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so
+stirred me?”
+
+Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
+snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
+mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
+altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be
+to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
+backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
+unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
+to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
+scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick
+of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
+shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
+views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
+ice monuments and splintered crosses.
+
+But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but
+a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
+Ishmael.
+
+Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
+Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the
+sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
+he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why
+will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies
+of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
+creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
+smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
+former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
+bisons of distant Oregon?
+
+No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
+knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
+Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
+herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which
+this instant they may be trampling into dust.
+
+Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings
+of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
+windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
+of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
+
+Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
+sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
+those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
+world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
+
+But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
+learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
+and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the
+most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
+Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
+in things the most appalling to mankind.
+
+Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
+and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
+thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
+way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as
+the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
+colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
+full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour
+of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
+of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately
+or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
+and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
+young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
+in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
+absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
+the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
+the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
+principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and
+if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
+tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the
+palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
+Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their
+eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
+white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
+things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
+hunt?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 43. Hark!
+
+“HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+
+It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
+cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
+scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets
+to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed
+precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
+their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,
+only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
+unceasingly advancing keel.
+
+It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose
+post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
+words above.
+
+“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+
+“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
+
+“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a
+cough—it sounded like a cough.”
+
+“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
+
+“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers
+turning over, now!”
+
+“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked
+biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else.
+Look to the bucket!”
+
+“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
+
+“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old
+Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket;
+you’re the chap.”
+
+“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is
+somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and
+I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell
+Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the
+wind.”
+
+“Tish! the bucket!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
+
+Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
+took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose
+with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom,
+and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread
+them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before
+it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and
+shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace
+additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he
+would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down
+the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various
+ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
+
+While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
+head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
+shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
+almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses
+on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and
+courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
+
+But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
+cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
+brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and
+others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
+him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to
+the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
+
+Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
+it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
+creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it
+seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
+calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also,
+calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in
+particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost
+approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this
+or that ground in search of his prey.
+
+So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
+sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe
+that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;
+were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
+collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
+correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the
+flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct
+elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
+
+     *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
+     out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
+     the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
+     that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
+     course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
+     the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts
+     of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
+     perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
+     columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
+     of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
+     of days that have been spent in each month in every
+     district, and the two others to show the number of days in
+     which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.”
+
+
+Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
+sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret
+intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called;
+continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
+exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with
+one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
+direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s
+parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its
+own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these
+times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
+(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but
+never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads,
+when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
+particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
+whales may with great confidence be looked for.
+
+And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
+feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
+the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
+art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
+without prospect of a meeting.
+
+There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
+delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
+perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
+for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
+herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
+say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
+there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
+instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
+same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
+and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
+Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
+Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese
+Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of
+those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
+encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
+he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
+stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
+abode. And where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing his object have
+hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
+way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
+set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
+probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
+thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
+in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and
+then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically
+descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its
+annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the
+Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with
+the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his
+deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man
+had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious
+comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his
+brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to
+rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however
+flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of
+his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all
+intervening quest.
+
+Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
+Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
+to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
+down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
+to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
+Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been
+correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of
+things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days
+and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently
+enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance
+the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
+periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the
+Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
+waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers,
+Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow
+Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod’s
+circumnavigating wake.
+
+But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
+but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
+whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
+recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the
+thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar
+snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but
+be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter
+to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he
+would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape?
+His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s
+ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a
+weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air
+of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances
+of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved
+revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own
+bloody nails in his palms.
+
+Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
+dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
+the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
+round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
+of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes
+the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its
+base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
+lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among
+them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
+heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his
+state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these,
+perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
+weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens
+of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
+unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had
+gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from
+it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or
+soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the
+characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
+vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
+contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no
+longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
+the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding
+up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that
+purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods
+and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.
+Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it
+was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered
+birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes,
+when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a
+vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light,
+to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness
+in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature
+in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
+vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
+he creates.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
+
+So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
+indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars
+in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier
+part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the
+leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly
+enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to
+take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire
+subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main
+points of this affair.
+
+I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall
+be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
+items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
+citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of
+itself.
+
+First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
+receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
+interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by
+the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
+private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
+three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I
+think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
+them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
+Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
+into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,
+often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas,
+with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of
+unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have
+been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
+brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
+This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
+other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that
+is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack,
+saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
+taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out
+that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time
+distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s
+eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years,
+but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances,
+then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many
+other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
+good ground to impeach.
+
+Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
+the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
+historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
+distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
+thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
+peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar
+in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
+peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
+valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences
+of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about
+such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that
+most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
+tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
+without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
+poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
+make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
+pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for
+their presumption.
+
+But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
+celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
+famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,
+but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of
+a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,
+O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
+did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft
+seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!
+thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of
+the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty
+jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross
+against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked
+like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain
+prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean
+History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
+
+But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
+times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
+finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
+by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with
+that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the
+Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
+that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
+Indian King Philip.
+
+I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
+mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
+printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
+whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
+this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
+as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
+the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without
+some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
+fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
+worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
+
+First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
+perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
+conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
+One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
+deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
+however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose
+that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
+whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the
+bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that that
+poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read
+to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
+between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
+called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
+that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
+others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a
+death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each
+lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps
+and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s
+blood was spilled for it.
+
+Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is
+an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
+narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,
+they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
+declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
+when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
+
+But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
+testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
+Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
+malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
+sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it.
+
+First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,
+was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her
+boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of
+the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping
+from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the
+ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that
+in less than “ten minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not a
+surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure,
+part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home
+at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of
+another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and
+breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
+forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain
+Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was
+chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his
+plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all
+this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*
+
+*The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact
+seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which
+directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at
+a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
+direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made
+ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock;
+to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His
+aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He
+came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in
+which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with
+revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the whole
+circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and
+producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating
+mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I
+cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my
+opinion.”
+
+Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a
+black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
+hospitable shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing;
+the fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed
+upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful
+contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the
+dismal looking wreck, and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale,
+wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.”
+
+In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “the mysterious and mortal
+attack of the animal.”
+
+Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807
+totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic
+particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
+though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions
+to it.
+
+Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J—-, then
+commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
+dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in
+the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
+the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
+ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
+denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
+as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there
+is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this
+impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a
+portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business
+with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore’s craft
+such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the
+nearest port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I
+consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale as providential.
+Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I
+tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
+
+I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance
+in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff,
+you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral
+Krusenstern’s famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the
+present century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
+
+“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day
+we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
+clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
+our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not
+till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An
+uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself,
+lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any
+one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail,
+was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking
+against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this
+gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at
+least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,
+while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding
+that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster
+sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf
+applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
+had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily
+it had escaped entirely uninjured.”
+
+Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship
+in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
+adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
+Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I
+have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
+He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
+one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
+uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
+
+In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full,
+too, of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient
+Dampier’s old chums—I found a little matter set down so like that
+just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for
+a corroborative example, if such be needed.
+
+Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls
+the modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about
+four o’clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty
+leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which
+put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they
+were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And,
+indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted
+the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little
+over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground..... The
+suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
+several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who
+lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!” Lionel then
+goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate
+the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
+that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But
+I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the
+morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically
+bumping the hull from beneath.
+
+I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
+me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
+than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
+boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
+withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
+Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength,
+let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
+running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
+secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
+horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
+the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
+not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
+destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
+indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently
+open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several
+consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a
+concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one, by which
+you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in
+this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these
+marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
+the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing
+new under the sun.
+
+In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
+of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
+general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work
+every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
+considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in
+some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently
+to be mentioned.
+
+Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
+of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured
+in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
+vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
+years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be
+gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
+this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
+well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly
+inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long
+time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
+Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
+certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
+present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious
+resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
+modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
+sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that
+on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
+the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
+through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
+pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
+
+In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance
+called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have
+every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or
+cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures,
+but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its
+surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
+reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to
+all human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a century
+stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a
+sperm whale.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
+
+Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
+thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
+though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one
+passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
+habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether to
+abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
+this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
+influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
+considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
+White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
+sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
+multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
+prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed
+exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though
+not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet
+were by no means incapable of swaying him.
+
+To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
+the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,
+for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
+over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
+man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
+mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in
+a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced
+will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s
+brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his
+soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully
+disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that
+a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that
+long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses
+of rebellion against his captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary,
+prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him.
+Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was
+noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
+shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some
+way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally
+invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn
+into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against
+protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their
+long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to
+think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage
+crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all
+sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the
+varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when
+retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however
+promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things
+requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and
+hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.
+
+Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
+mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
+The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
+Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
+hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
+breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
+love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
+for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
+chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
+thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
+committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
+perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
+and romantic object—that final and romantic object, too many would
+have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,
+of all hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some
+months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this
+same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would
+soon cashier Ahab.
+
+Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related
+to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
+somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
+Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
+he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
+usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew
+if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
+obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
+even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
+consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must
+of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
+could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,
+backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
+atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected
+to.
+
+For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be
+verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good
+degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s
+voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force
+himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general
+pursuit of his profession.
+
+Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
+mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
+reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
+
+It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
+about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.
+Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
+for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
+somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
+lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
+invisible self.
+
+I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
+kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between
+the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as
+Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
+between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and
+unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did
+there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by
+the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were
+the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
+and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp
+subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and
+that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending
+of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here,
+thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
+destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s
+impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
+or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this
+difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in
+the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought
+I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
+easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and
+necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together.
+The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate
+course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
+free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and
+chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
+necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
+thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
+last featuring blow at events.
+
+Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
+strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball
+of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
+whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was
+that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,
+his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he
+continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment
+perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s
+look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
+that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from
+Tashtego the Indian’s.
+
+As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
+eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some
+prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries
+announcing their coming.
+
+“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
+
+“Where-away?”
+
+“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
+
+Instantly all was commotion.
+
+The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
+reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from
+other tribes of his genus.
+
+“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
+disappeared.
+
+“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
+
+Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
+minute to Ahab.
+
+The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
+before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
+leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
+our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
+when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
+concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
+opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action;
+for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had
+been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of
+the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to
+the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The
+sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed
+in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed,
+and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over
+high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand
+clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.
+So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on
+board an enemy’s ship.
+
+But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
+every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
+surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
+
+The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
+of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the
+tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always
+been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the
+captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The
+figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
+tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
+jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
+of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
+glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled
+round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of
+this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to
+some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a race notorious for
+a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners
+supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the
+water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be
+elsewhere.
+
+While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these
+strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,
+“All ready there, Fedallah?”
+
+“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
+
+“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower
+away there, I say.”
+
+Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men
+sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
+wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,
+off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors,
+goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed boats
+below.
+
+Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth
+keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and
+showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern,
+loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,
+so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again
+riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other
+boats obeyed not the command.
+
+“Captain Ahab?—” said Starbuck.
+
+“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou,
+Flask, pull out more to leeward!”
+
+“Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round
+his great steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew.
+“There!—there!—there again! There she blows right ahead,
+boys!—lay back!”
+
+“Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t mind’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it all before
+now. Didn’t I hear ‘em in the hold? And didn’t I tell Cabaco here
+of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
+
+“Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
+ones,” drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of
+whom still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your
+backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat?
+Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us—never mind from
+where—the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the
+brimstone—devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now;
+that’s the stroke for a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep
+the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes!
+Three cheers, men—all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don’t be in a
+hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you snap your oars, you
+rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:—softly, softly!
+That’s it—that’s it! long and strong. Give way there, give way!
+The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop
+snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull,
+won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t
+ye pull?—pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!
+Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; “every
+mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his
+teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like
+it, my steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her,
+marling-spikes!”
+
+Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had
+rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
+inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
+specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
+with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
+peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
+tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
+calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such
+queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for
+the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and
+indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
+gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning
+commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.
+Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
+is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their
+guard in the matter of obeying them.
+
+In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
+across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
+pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
+
+“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
+please!”
+
+“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he
+spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set
+like a flint from Stubb’s.
+
+“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
+
+“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
+boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A
+sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never
+mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come
+what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm
+ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm,
+sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in
+hand.”
+
+“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
+diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ‘em, I thought so. Aye, and
+that’s what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy
+long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the
+bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give
+way, men! It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
+
+Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant
+as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
+awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s
+company; but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got
+abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
+small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
+of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s confident way
+of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
+superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for
+all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the
+matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious
+shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket
+dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
+
+Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
+furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
+circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
+yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five
+trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
+periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst
+boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
+pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
+displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
+gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
+horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
+fencer’s, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance
+any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar
+as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All
+at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained
+fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously peaked.
+Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread
+boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly
+settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible
+token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed
+it.
+
+“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou,
+Queequeg, stand up!”
+
+Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
+stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
+spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
+stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with
+the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing
+himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently
+eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
+
+Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still;
+its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a
+stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above
+the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with
+the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s
+hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the
+mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
+King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was
+full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point
+of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
+
+“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on
+to that.”
+
+Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his
+way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
+shoulders for a pedestal.
+
+“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
+
+“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
+fifty feet taller.”
+
+Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
+boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm
+to Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed
+head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one
+dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And
+here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him
+with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
+
+At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
+habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
+posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
+perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
+perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
+sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
+for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
+barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously
+rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed
+a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly
+vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then
+stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to
+the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping
+the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and
+her seasons for that.
+
+Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing
+solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
+not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
+Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
+languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
+where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
+home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match
+across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
+whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
+dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in
+a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down all, and give way!—there they
+are!”
+
+To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
+visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
+water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
+suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
+rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
+were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
+atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
+water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
+indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning
+couriers and detached flying outriders.
+
+All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
+water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on,
+as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
+hills.
+
+“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible
+but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed
+glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as
+two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say
+much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
+silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
+peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
+
+How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something,
+my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
+black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my
+Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.
+Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!
+See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his hat from
+his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it
+far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the
+boat’s stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
+
+“Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with
+his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at
+a short distance, followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has.
+Fits? yes, give him fits—that’s the very word—pitch fits
+into ‘em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you
+know;—merry’s the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all.
+But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily,
+my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your
+backbones, and bite your knives in two—that’s all. Take it
+easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and
+lungs!”
+
+But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
+his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
+light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
+seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
+red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
+
+Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of
+Flask to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which
+he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its
+tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
+they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
+over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen
+must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
+pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
+arms, in these critical moments.
+
+It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
+omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along
+the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
+the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on
+the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
+to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and
+hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
+hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these,
+with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps
+of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing
+down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
+screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.
+
+Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
+heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the
+first unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel
+stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first
+time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
+hunted sperm whale.
+
+The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
+visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
+flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted
+everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
+The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
+running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
+rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
+the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
+escape being torn from the row-locks.
+
+Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
+nor boat to be seen.
+
+“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the
+sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall
+comes. There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
+
+Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
+that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
+with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!”
+and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
+
+Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
+so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
+of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
+instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
+fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
+booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
+the erected crests of enraged serpents.
+
+“That’s his hump. There, there, give it to him!” whispered
+Starbuck.
+
+A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
+Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
+astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
+collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;
+something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
+crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
+white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
+blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
+
+Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
+it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
+tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the
+water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
+the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom
+of the ocean.
+
+The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
+the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
+fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
+in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
+to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
+boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
+darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
+The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
+useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
+So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures
+Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching
+it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this
+forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in
+the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign
+and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the
+midst of despair.
+
+Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
+we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
+the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
+Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
+We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
+the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly
+parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as
+the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a
+distance of not much more than its length.
+
+Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
+tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a
+cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no
+more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
+against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
+board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
+their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
+up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of
+our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
+
+There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
+we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
+joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than
+suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However,
+nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts
+down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard
+things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of
+potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small
+difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of
+life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,
+good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
+and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking
+of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes
+in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might
+have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the
+general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this
+free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now
+regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its
+object.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to
+the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off
+the water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
+happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
+gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
+
+“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
+oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
+think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
+mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
+then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
+squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
+
+“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off
+Cape Horn.”
+
+“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
+close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you
+tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
+for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into
+death’s jaws?”
+
+“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the
+law. I should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale
+face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
+that!”
+
+Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
+of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
+in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
+of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
+superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign
+my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a
+fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of
+scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the
+particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed
+to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
+and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his
+great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this
+uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what a
+devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all
+things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a
+rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall
+be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
+
+It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
+last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more
+fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life
+that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon
+the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away
+from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good
+as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
+clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived
+myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked
+round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean
+conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
+
+Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
+here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
+devil fetch the hindmost.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+
+“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one
+leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
+with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
+
+“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said
+Flask. “If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different
+thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the
+other left, you know.”
+
+“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
+
+Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
+the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is
+right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils
+of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their
+eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the
+thickest of the fight.
+
+But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering
+that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
+considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
+extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
+comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any
+maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
+joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
+
+Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
+his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
+the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
+his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
+apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for
+Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s
+crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
+of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s
+crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
+Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that
+matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little
+foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out
+of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
+whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
+found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
+own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
+solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
+running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
+observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
+coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
+withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
+he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
+sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing
+the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
+observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed
+in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s
+chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all
+these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the
+time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative
+heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of
+Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal
+monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the
+remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.
+
+Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
+away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
+unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
+nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
+whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
+creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
+oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
+Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
+to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
+excitement in the forecastle.
+
+But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
+phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
+somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained
+a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
+this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be
+linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
+of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
+authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain
+an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as
+civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
+dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
+among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
+to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
+countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
+ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the
+memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his
+descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms,
+and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end;
+when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the
+daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged
+in mundane amours.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
+
+Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
+swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the
+Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the
+Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
+southerly from St. Helena.
+
+It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
+moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
+and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
+silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen
+far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it
+looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
+the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight
+nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
+look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
+though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred
+would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,
+then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual
+hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after
+spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
+without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his
+unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every
+reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had
+lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she
+blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered
+more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was
+a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously
+exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
+lowering.
+
+Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
+t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The
+best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head
+manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,
+upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
+of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
+beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
+influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the
+other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
+Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
+different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes
+along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.
+On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly
+sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot,
+yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he
+saw it once, but not a second time.
+
+This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
+after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it
+was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
+disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
+night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously
+jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
+disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow
+seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and
+further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
+
+Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
+with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
+the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
+whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
+far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast
+by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there
+reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition,
+as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the
+monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
+and most savage seas.
+
+These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
+potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
+all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as
+for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely
+mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed
+vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.
+
+But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
+around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
+there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and
+gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips,
+the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity
+of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
+
+Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
+before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
+every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
+spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
+as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
+appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
+homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the
+black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane
+soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
+bred.
+
+Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
+of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
+attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea,
+where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
+condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
+that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;
+still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us
+on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.
+
+During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
+time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
+manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed
+his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and
+aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await
+the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
+So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one
+hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand
+gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow
+would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew
+driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that
+burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in
+the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man
+had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which
+he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the
+silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore
+on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.
+By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the
+ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still
+wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed
+demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never
+could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down
+into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with
+closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
+and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before
+emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the
+table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
+which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly
+clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so
+that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale
+that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
+
+*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
+compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
+course of the ship.
+
+Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
+gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
+
+South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
+ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
+by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
+fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
+in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
+
+As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
+skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
+appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
+spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
+with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to
+see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed
+clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
+survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to
+the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when
+the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air
+came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
+mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
+fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
+look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
+
+“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
+
+But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
+act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
+into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
+himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
+distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
+were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first
+mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for a
+moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat
+to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking
+advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
+knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and
+shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the
+Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters
+to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home,
+tell them to address them to—”
+
+At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
+in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,
+that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted
+away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and
+aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his continual
+voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to
+any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.
+
+“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the
+water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed
+more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before
+evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the
+ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion
+voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”
+
+Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
+but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
+numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
+we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
+
+Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
+ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
+than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
+in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
+tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
+before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
+either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
+
+The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
+spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had
+this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
+her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so
+it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative
+answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he
+cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
+except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
+sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
+something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when
+meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common
+cruising-ground.
+
+If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
+equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
+each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of
+them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
+to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while
+and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
+illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling
+vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone
+Fanning’s Island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more
+natural, I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not
+only interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and
+sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
+course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains,
+officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other;
+and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.
+
+For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
+board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
+date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn
+files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would
+receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to
+which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And
+in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing
+each other’s track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they
+are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a
+transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and
+some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.
+Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable
+chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors,
+but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common
+pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.
+
+Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
+that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
+with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
+English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
+do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
+Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
+sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
+sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
+whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
+provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority
+in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
+seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than
+all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless
+little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does
+not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few
+foibles himself.
+
+So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
+whalers have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some
+merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
+oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
+mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in
+Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
+each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea,
+they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such
+a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down
+hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching
+Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run
+away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they
+chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How
+many skulls?”—the same way that whalers hail—“How many
+barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer
+apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to
+see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.
+
+But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
+free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
+whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “Gam,” a thing so
+utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name
+even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and
+repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,”
+and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen,
+and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors,
+cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question
+it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I
+should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar
+glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but
+only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd
+fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence,
+I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman,
+in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
+
+But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
+down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
+never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it.
+Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
+constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly,
+it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With
+that view, let me learnedly define it.
+
+GAM. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on
+a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits
+by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of
+one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.
+
+There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
+here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
+has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when
+the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
+sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
+steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with
+gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of
+that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling
+captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen
+in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of
+any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s
+crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is
+of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and
+the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit
+all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being
+conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from
+the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
+importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is
+this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
+steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the
+after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
+completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
+sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
+pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of
+foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a
+spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
+it would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it
+would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
+himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with
+his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
+generally carries his hands in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps
+being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for
+ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated
+ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical
+moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest
+oarsman’s hair, and hold on there like grim death.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
+
+(As told at the Golden Inn)
+
+The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
+much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
+more travellers than in any other part.
+
+It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
+homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
+almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave
+us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
+Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s
+story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
+wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God
+which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance,
+with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the
+secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears
+of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was
+unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private
+property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it
+seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,
+but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
+so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well
+withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing
+have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
+it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in
+this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
+transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
+place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the
+ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting
+record.
+
+*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
+still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
+
+For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
+narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one
+saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
+Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were
+on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they
+occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
+
+“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
+rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
+was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward
+from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
+northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
+daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
+common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
+captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck
+awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit
+them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
+indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down
+as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
+cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;
+but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
+undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking
+some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest
+harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.
+
+“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
+favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
+because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
+them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
+never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the
+whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
+Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
+without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
+brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
+provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
+
+“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is
+Buffalo?’ said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
+
+“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
+courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
+gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
+large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
+Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
+been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
+connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
+those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron,
+and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with
+many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties
+of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic
+isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by
+two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
+maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the
+East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by
+batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have
+heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield
+their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out
+their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient
+and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines
+of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric
+beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes
+to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
+Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
+full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
+and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
+direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
+for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many
+a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
+an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured;
+as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his
+infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse
+at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our
+austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as
+vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh
+from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this
+Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
+mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
+firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition
+which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
+long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved
+so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but,
+gentlemen, you shall hear.
+
+“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing
+her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again
+increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
+every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
+Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole
+way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of
+the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability
+would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
+account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the
+solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it
+altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in
+full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie
+along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat
+is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of
+the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her
+captain begins to feel a little anxious.
+
+“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak
+was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern
+manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate.
+He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and
+every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was
+as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous
+apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking
+creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen.
+Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship,
+some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a
+part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps,
+there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them,
+as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling
+clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen—that bubbling
+from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady
+spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
+
+“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
+world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in
+command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly
+his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man
+he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have
+a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and
+make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
+gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
+head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
+of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and
+a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he
+been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly
+as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love
+Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
+
+“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
+rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
+his gay banterings.
+
+“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a
+cannikin, one of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth
+bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it!
+he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is,
+boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a
+gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the
+whole posse of ‘em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the
+bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d
+tell him to jump overboard and scatter ‘em. They’re playing
+the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old
+soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property
+is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil
+like me the model of his nose.’
+
+“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
+pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at
+it!’
+
+“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively,
+boys, lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty
+fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that
+peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest
+tension of life’s utmost energies.
+
+“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman
+went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
+fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
+brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
+to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
+not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
+commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
+shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig
+to run at large.
+
+“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of
+household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended
+to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships
+actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility
+of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of
+whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But
+in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the
+boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the
+Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and
+being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly
+assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have
+been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical
+duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these
+particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
+between the two men.
+
+“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost
+as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had
+spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
+understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
+comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for
+a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s malignant
+eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the
+slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively
+saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the
+deeper passionateness in any already ireful being—a repugnance most
+felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved—this
+nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
+
+“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
+exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
+the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without
+at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary
+sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or
+nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
+domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
+command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an
+uplifted cooper’s club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near
+by.
+
+“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps,
+for all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
+could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
+smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
+doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
+hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
+his bidding.
+
+“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
+followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his
+intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not
+the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his
+twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to
+no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
+when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
+now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
+the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
+
+“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look
+to yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him,
+where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch
+of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
+Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
+with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching
+his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
+persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
+murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
+by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
+the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
+spouting blood like a whale.
+
+“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
+leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
+mastheads. They were both Canallers.
+
+“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships
+in our harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what
+are they?’
+
+“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal.
+You must have heard of it.’
+
+“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and
+hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.’
+
+“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and
+ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
+information may throw side-light upon my story.’
+
+“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
+breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
+most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
+affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
+and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
+arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
+broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
+counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
+stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
+corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
+there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
+under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.
+For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
+freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
+sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
+
+“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into
+the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
+
+“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes
+in Lima,’ laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
+
+“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name
+of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we
+have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present
+Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and
+look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast—“Corrupt
+as Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful
+than billiard-tables, and for ever open—and “Corrupt as Lima.” So,
+too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist,
+St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now,
+you pour out again.’
+
+“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would
+make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is
+he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed,
+flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked
+Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore,
+all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller
+so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand
+features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through
+which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned
+in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns
+from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not
+ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your
+man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor
+stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen,
+what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by
+this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished
+graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are
+so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish
+the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys
+and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand
+Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a
+Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most
+barbaric seas.
+
+“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
+chicha upon his silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one
+Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations
+were cold and holy as the hills.—But the story.’
+
+“I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
+had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the
+four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the
+ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and
+sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the
+sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued;
+while standing out of harm’s way, the valiant captain danced up and
+down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that
+atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At
+intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion,
+and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the
+object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too
+much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where,
+hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line with
+the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the
+barricade.
+
+“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing
+them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward.
+‘Come out of that, ye cut-throats!’
+
+“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down
+there, defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain
+to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the
+signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his
+heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted,
+but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
+
+“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their
+ringleader.
+
+“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want
+to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and
+he once more raised a pistol.
+
+“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man
+of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us.
+What say ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their
+response.
+
+“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his
+eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s
+not our fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer away;
+it was boy’s business; he might have known me before this; I told him
+not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against
+his cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle
+there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God,
+look to yourself; say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we
+are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we
+won’t be flogged.’
+
+“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
+
+“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards
+him, ‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have
+shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can
+claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a
+row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to
+work, but we won’t be flogged.’
+
+“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
+
+“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you
+what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a
+shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack
+us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don’t do a
+hand’s turn.’
+
+“‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there
+till ye’re sick of it. Down ye go.’
+
+“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were
+against it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him
+down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a
+cave.
+
+“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the
+Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the
+slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly
+called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
+companionway.
+
+“Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
+down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in
+number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
+neutral.
+
+“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward
+and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway;
+at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after
+breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed
+in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the
+pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night
+dismally resounded through the ship.
+
+“At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
+summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water
+was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were
+tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it,
+the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days
+this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and
+then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and
+suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready
+to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united
+perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to
+surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his
+demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to
+stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth
+morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the
+desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
+
+“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
+
+“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
+
+“‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
+
+“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
+seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
+last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black
+as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the
+two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of
+their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their
+keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle
+at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
+devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he
+would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the
+last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
+opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for
+that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender.
+And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck,
+when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as
+fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as
+his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter;
+and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one
+man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants
+must come out.
+
+“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
+separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece
+of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be
+the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and
+thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit.
+But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to
+the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed
+their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader
+fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three
+sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;
+and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
+
+“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he
+and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a
+few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
+struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious
+allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been
+fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
+the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
+mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till
+morning. ‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before
+them, ‘the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!’
+
+“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had
+rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the
+former that he had a good mind to flog them all round—thought, upon
+the whole, he would do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; but for
+the present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go
+with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
+
+“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men
+in the rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’
+and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of
+the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their
+heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
+
+“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there
+is still rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give
+up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for
+himself.’
+
+“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
+cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort
+of hiss, ‘What I say is this—and mind it well—if you flog me, I
+murder you!’
+
+“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew
+off with the rope to strike.
+
+“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
+
+“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the
+stroke.
+
+“Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the
+Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the
+deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his
+rope, said, ‘I won’t do it—let him go—cut him down: d’ye
+hear?’
+
+“But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale
+man, with a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever
+since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the
+tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
+scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak;
+but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the
+captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his
+pinioned foe.
+
+“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
+
+“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of
+striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and
+then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat,
+whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all
+hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron
+pumps clanged as before.
+
+“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
+was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
+besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
+Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
+instance they were put down in the ship’s run for salvation. Still,
+no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,
+that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had resolved to maintain
+the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the
+ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the
+speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely,
+not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,
+spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still
+maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to
+lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
+cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his
+berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the
+vital jaw of the whale.
+
+“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
+passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
+was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who
+had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
+mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than
+half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted,
+against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head
+of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances,
+Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
+
+“During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
+bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
+the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side.
+In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
+considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between
+this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next
+trick at the helm would come round at two o’clock, in the morning of
+the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure,
+he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his
+watches below.
+
+“‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
+
+“‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
+
+“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to
+me.’
+
+“‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s
+length before him; ‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t
+enough twine,—have you any?’
+
+“But there was none in the forecastle.
+
+“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
+
+“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him!’ said a sailor.
+
+“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help
+himself in the end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him
+quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given
+him—neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night
+an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the
+Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his
+hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent
+helm—nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready
+dug to the seaman’s hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in
+the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
+stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
+
+“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
+deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
+avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in
+to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
+done.
+
+“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
+day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,
+drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she
+rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
+
+“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but
+do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
+
+“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster,
+Don;—but that would be too long a story.’
+
+“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
+
+“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get
+more into the air, Sirs.’
+
+“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend
+looks faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
+
+“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen,
+so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
+ship—forgetful of the compact among the crew—in the excitement of
+the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
+his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
+plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
+‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain,
+mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all
+anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew
+eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky
+mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened
+like a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange
+fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped
+out before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman
+of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him,
+while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken
+the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were
+lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none howled more fiercely with
+delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff
+pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to
+the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his
+bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing
+loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that
+blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as
+against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing
+mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat
+righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over
+into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through
+the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly
+seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale
+rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws;
+and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.
+
+“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had
+slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
+looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
+downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He
+cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose
+again, with some tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the
+teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the
+whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
+
+“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary
+place—where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
+Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
+among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double
+war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
+
+“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain
+called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of
+heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance
+over their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated,
+both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they
+underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in
+such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with
+them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he
+anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his
+two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning
+the Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man
+with him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
+before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
+reinforcement to his crew.
+
+“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which
+seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it;
+but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt
+hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain
+presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes,
+the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so
+much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.
+
+“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
+
+“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded
+Steelkilt; ‘no lies.’
+
+“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
+
+“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With
+that he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the
+gunwale, stood face to face with the captain.
+
+“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me.
+As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
+island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike
+me!’
+
+“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and
+leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
+
+“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
+roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time
+arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended
+him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially
+in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They
+embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he
+been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
+
+“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
+and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
+Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
+native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
+right there, again resumed his cruisings.
+
+“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
+Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses
+to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
+destroyed him.
+
+“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
+
+“‘I am, Don.’
+
+“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own
+convictions, this your story is in substance really true? It is so
+passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear
+with me if I seem to press.’
+
+“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don
+Sebastian’s suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest.
+
+“‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn,
+gentlemen?’
+
+“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near
+by, who will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well
+advised? this may grow too serious.’
+
+“‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
+
+“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fe’s in Lima now,’ said one of
+the company to another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the
+archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no
+need of this.’
+
+“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
+that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists
+you can.’
+
+“‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don
+Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
+
+“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the
+light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
+
+“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
+gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
+true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have
+seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
+
+I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
+something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the
+eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
+alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
+It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those
+curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
+confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the
+world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
+wrong.
+
+It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
+be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
+ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
+panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
+medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of
+chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s;
+ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,
+not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
+presentations of him.
+
+Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting
+to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of
+Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless
+sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every
+conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them
+actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble
+profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The
+Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
+depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly
+known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and
+half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small
+section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an
+anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.
+
+But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian
+painter’s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than
+the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing
+Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model
+of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting
+the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit
+better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the
+surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah
+on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are
+rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames
+by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old
+Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the prints of old
+Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for
+the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of
+a descending anchor—as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages
+of many books both old and new—that is a very picturesque but purely
+fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique
+vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call
+this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so
+intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by
+an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the
+Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively
+late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the
+Leviathan.
+
+In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
+at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner
+of spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,
+come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
+original edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you will find some
+curious whales.
+
+But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
+pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
+by those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are
+some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
+entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
+Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates
+the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among
+ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another
+plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with
+perpendicular flukes.
+
+Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,
+a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn
+into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
+Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to be a “Picture
+of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the
+coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I doubt not the
+captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.
+To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which
+applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm
+whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet
+long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out
+of that eye!
+
+Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for
+the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
+mistake. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.”
+In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged
+“whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but
+this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for
+the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this
+nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon
+any intelligent public of schoolboys.
+
+Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
+naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
+several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
+are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
+whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long
+experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
+counterpart in nature.
+
+But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
+reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
+Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
+gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that
+picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary
+retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is
+not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit
+of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
+picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
+in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that
+is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil
+those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
+
+As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the
+shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
+Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting
+on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners:
+their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
+
+But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
+surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
+been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a
+drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent
+the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
+Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan
+has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale,
+in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
+unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
+like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
+thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the
+air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not
+to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young
+sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the
+case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck,
+such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him,
+that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.
+
+But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
+whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all.
+For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that
+his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy
+Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of
+one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed
+utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal
+characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any
+leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
+mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested
+and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly
+envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as
+in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very
+curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly
+answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin
+has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little
+finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering,
+as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However recklessly
+the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one day, “he
+can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.”
+
+For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
+conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
+which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit
+the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very
+considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
+out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in
+which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is
+by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of
+being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had
+best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
+Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
+
+In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
+tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of
+them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
+especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
+that matter by.
+
+I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
+Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the
+previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s
+is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best.
+All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle
+figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his
+second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though
+no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men,
+is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the
+Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour;
+but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
+
+Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
+are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
+but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
+it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
+anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living
+hunters.
+
+But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
+not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to
+be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,
+and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
+attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble
+Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
+the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air
+upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
+the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the
+monster’s spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
+incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
+incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
+from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
+true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
+poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
+swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
+of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
+upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
+of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not
+draw so good a one.
+
+In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
+the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black
+weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
+cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so
+abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
+supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the
+small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the
+Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while
+the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
+tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock
+in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean
+steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in
+admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the
+drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of
+a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily
+hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
+
+Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
+was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
+tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for
+painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and
+where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion
+on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder
+fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
+France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the
+successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned
+centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea
+battle-pieces of Garnery.
+
+The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
+things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
+they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
+experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
+Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
+finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of
+the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale
+draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline
+of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as
+picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching
+the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
+whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
+and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats
+us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives,
+and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck
+submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of
+magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent
+voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it
+was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a
+sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.
+
+In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
+French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself
+“H. Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our
+present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It
+is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler
+anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the
+loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the
+background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is
+very fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy
+fishermen under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other
+engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open
+sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale
+alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the
+monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this
+scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The
+harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting
+the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little
+craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the
+ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like
+the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud,
+rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the
+activity of the excited seamen.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
+Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
+
+On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
+crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board
+before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.
+There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed
+to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
+crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years,
+they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that
+stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has
+now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in
+Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you
+will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on
+that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with
+downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
+
+Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and
+Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
+whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth,
+or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other
+like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
+ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,
+in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes
+of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
+skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
+jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
+they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s
+fancy.
+
+Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
+to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
+Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
+savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
+at any moment to rebel against him.
+
+Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
+hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
+war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
+carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
+For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that
+miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
+cost steady years of steady application.
+
+As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
+same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of
+his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
+quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as
+the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
+suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
+Durer.
+
+Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
+the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles
+of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.
+
+At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
+by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
+sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking
+whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
+old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
+weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
+intents and purposes so labelled with “Hands off!” you cannot
+examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
+
+In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
+cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
+plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
+Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
+them in a surf of green surges.
+
+Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
+girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky
+point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of
+whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
+whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish
+to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact
+intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else
+so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
+previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
+Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed
+Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
+
+Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
+great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
+when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
+locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased
+Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright
+points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic
+skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the
+starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying
+Fish.
+
+With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons
+for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to
+see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
+encamped beyond my mortal sight!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 58. Brit.
+
+Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
+of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale
+largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we
+seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
+
+On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
+the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
+swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
+wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
+from the water that escaped at the lip.
+
+As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance
+their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these
+monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving
+behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
+
+*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks”
+does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of
+there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
+meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
+floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
+
+But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
+reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
+paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
+more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the
+great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will
+sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
+to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even
+so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the
+leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense
+magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses
+of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort
+of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
+
+Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
+deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
+some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
+of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of
+the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
+example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to
+the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
+generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
+
+But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the
+seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
+repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,
+so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his
+one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific
+of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
+tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
+though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man
+may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
+future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
+to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize
+the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the
+continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense
+of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
+
+The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
+vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
+That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships
+of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
+two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
+
+Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
+miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
+when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened
+and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
+precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
+
+But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
+is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
+murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
+spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
+own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks,
+and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No
+mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad
+battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the
+globe.
+
+Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
+under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden
+beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
+brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
+dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
+the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
+other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
+
+Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
+earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
+strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
+surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
+Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
+half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
+never return!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 59. Squid.
+
+Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
+way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
+her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
+masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
+plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
+alluring jet would be seen.
+
+But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
+spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
+the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
+across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered
+together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
+sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
+
+In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
+higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
+our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening
+for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
+and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
+thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
+more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod,
+the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right
+ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
+
+Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
+bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on
+the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave
+his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction
+indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
+
+Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
+gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
+ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
+whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
+him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
+perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
+orders for lowering.
+
+The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all
+swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
+oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same
+spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for
+the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
+phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.
+A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
+cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
+from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
+if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible
+face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
+instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
+chance-like apparition of life.
+
+As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
+gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
+exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than
+to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
+
+“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
+
+“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,
+and returned to their ports to tell of it.”
+
+But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
+the rest as silently following.
+
+Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
+the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being
+so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
+portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
+declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
+of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
+form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale
+his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
+water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
+whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and
+only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that
+food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what
+are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus
+exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
+the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to
+the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is
+supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
+
+There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
+Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
+which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
+some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond.
+But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
+assigns it.
+
+By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
+creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,
+to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
+but only as the Anak of the tribe.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 60. The Line.
+
+With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
+for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
+I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
+
+The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
+vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
+ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
+the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
+sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity
+too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must
+be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general
+by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however much it
+may give it compactness and gloss.
+
+Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
+entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not
+so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
+I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more
+handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark
+fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
+to behold.
+
+The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first
+sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment
+its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and
+twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal
+to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something
+over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally
+coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but
+so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded
+“sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any
+hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis
+of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in
+running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body
+off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some
+harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business,
+carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a
+block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all
+possible wrinkles and twists.
+
+In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line
+being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this;
+because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the
+boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly
+three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky
+freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for
+the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up
+a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated
+one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub,
+the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great
+wedding-cake to present to the whales.
+
+Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
+eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the
+tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.
+This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First:
+In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a
+neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as
+to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the
+harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug
+of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the
+first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This
+arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for were the
+lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the
+whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking
+minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed
+boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
+the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.
+
+Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is
+taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again
+carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon
+the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his
+wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately
+sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the
+extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
+of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it
+hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside
+the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being
+coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale
+still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the
+rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to
+that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too
+tedious to detail.
+
+Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
+twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
+oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
+eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
+snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal
+woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies,
+and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
+unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
+contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
+circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones
+to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what
+cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better
+jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than
+you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when
+thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais
+before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of
+death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
+
+Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for
+those repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually
+chronicled—of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the
+line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in
+the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings
+of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
+wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the
+heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and
+you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;
+and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of
+volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run
+away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.
+
+Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and
+prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
+for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
+contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
+powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
+line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
+into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror
+than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All
+men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
+necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,
+that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
+And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would
+not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before
+your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
+
+If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
+Queequeg it was quite a different object.
+
+“When you see him ‘quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in
+the bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ‘parm whale.”
+
+The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
+to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of
+sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean
+through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively
+ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins,
+flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than
+those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
+
+It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
+leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
+what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
+dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my
+body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long
+after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
+
+Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
+at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last
+all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing
+that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.
+The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance
+of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
+
+Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
+hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;
+with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty
+fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
+capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
+glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in
+the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury
+jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
+afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
+enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
+started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
+of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
+forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted
+the sparkling brine into the air.
+
+“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order,
+he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
+
+The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere
+the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
+but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he
+swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave
+orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in
+whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
+we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the
+noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the
+monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and
+then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
+
+“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed
+by Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a
+respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had
+elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the
+smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb
+counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now, that
+the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of
+cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and
+oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered
+on his crew to the assault.
+
+Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,
+he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad
+yeast which he brewed.*
+
+*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the
+entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though
+apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about
+him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does
+so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the
+upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water
+formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
+thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
+galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
+
+“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty
+of time—but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,”
+cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now;
+give ‘em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash,
+my boy—start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the
+word—easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning
+devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves,
+boys—that’s all. Start her!”
+
+“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some
+old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
+involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke
+which the eager Indian gave.
+
+But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee!
+Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
+like a pacing tiger in his cage.
+
+“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
+mouthful of Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels
+cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still
+encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from
+his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
+welcome cry was heard—“Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to him!” The
+harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen backed water; the same
+moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.
+It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two
+additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its
+increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled
+with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and
+round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
+blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from
+which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
+these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s
+sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving
+to wrest it out of your clutch.
+
+“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him
+seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into
+it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place.
+The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.
+Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering
+business truly in that rocking commotion.
+
+*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be
+stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the
+running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
+bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most
+convenient.
+
+From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of
+the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
+have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the other
+the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once.
+A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in
+her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little
+finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale
+into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging
+to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of
+Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring
+down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed
+as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened
+his flight.
+
+“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
+towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet
+the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
+planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the
+flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out
+of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for
+another fling.
+
+The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
+hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
+and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing
+upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every
+face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all
+the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the
+spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of
+the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
+lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and
+again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again
+sent it into the whale.
+
+“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning
+whale relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat
+ranged along the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb
+slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there,
+carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after
+some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was
+fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he
+sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck;
+for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his
+“flurry,” the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped
+himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled
+craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out
+from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
+
+And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;
+surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
+spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush
+after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
+wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
+down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
+
+“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
+
+“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his
+mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment,
+stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
+
+A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
+
+According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
+off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
+steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
+oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous
+arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called
+a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of
+twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,
+the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;
+indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the
+rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
+exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of
+one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half
+started—what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one,
+I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same
+time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish,
+all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand
+up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn
+round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and
+with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into
+the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that
+out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder
+that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no
+wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the
+boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four
+barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing
+concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take
+the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most
+wanted!
+
+Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
+that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
+likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
+themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and
+the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
+station in the bows of the boat.
+
+Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
+and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to
+last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing
+whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious
+to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss
+of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more
+than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures
+in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the
+whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has
+caused them.
+
+To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
+world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
+toil.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
+
+Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
+productive subjects, grow the chapters.
+
+The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
+It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which
+is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow,
+for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the
+harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow.
+Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it
+up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from
+the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch,
+respectively called the first and second irons.
+
+But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
+the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
+instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming
+drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a
+doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the
+instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving
+the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however
+lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him.
+Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line,
+and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
+anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the
+most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
+it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned
+in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently
+practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the
+saddest and most fatal casualties.
+
+Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
+overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
+skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
+or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.
+Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
+fairly captured and a corpse.
+
+Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
+one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
+qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
+such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
+simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied
+with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one
+be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
+faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several
+most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
+painted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
+
+Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was
+a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow
+business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men
+with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers,
+slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the
+sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals;
+good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we
+moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call
+it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky
+freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we
+towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.
+
+Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s
+main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
+dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
+the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing
+it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way
+into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
+
+Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
+evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature
+was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed
+working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that
+Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were
+brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,
+monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on
+the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in
+the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust
+rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast
+corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the
+stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black
+hull close to the vessel’s and seen through the darkness of the night,
+which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale,
+seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while
+the other remains standing.*
+
+*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
+reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,
+is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part
+is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
+flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so
+that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
+put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a
+small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and
+a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By
+adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side
+of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily
+made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked
+fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with
+its broad flukes or lobes.
+
+If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known
+on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an
+unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was
+he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned
+to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping
+cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.
+Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale
+as a flavorish thing to his palate.
+
+“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut
+me one from his small!”
+
+Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
+thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
+the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds
+of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
+who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
+designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
+
+About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two
+lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper
+at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was
+Stubb the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their
+mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks,
+swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness.
+The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp
+slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the
+sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them
+(as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and
+turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of
+the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the
+shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable
+surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains
+a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave
+on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in
+countersinking for a screw.
+
+Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
+will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs
+round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
+every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
+butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s
+live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
+also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
+under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole
+affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that
+is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and
+though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
+crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in
+case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
+buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
+touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most
+socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
+conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
+numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
+whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never
+seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
+devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
+
+But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was
+going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his
+own epicurean lips.
+
+“Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length,
+widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for
+his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if
+stabbing with his lance; “cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!”
+
+The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
+roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling
+along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something
+the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like
+his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and
+limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy
+fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered
+along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on
+the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both hands folded
+before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back
+still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as
+to bring his best ear into play.
+
+“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
+mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been
+beating this steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always
+say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
+now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a
+shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ‘em; tell ‘em they
+are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they
+must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
+deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his
+sideboard; “now then, go and preach to ‘em!”
+
+Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck
+to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the
+sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand
+he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a
+mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling
+behind, overheard all that was said.
+
+“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam
+noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lips! Massa Stubb
+say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor!
+you must stop dat dam racket!”
+
+“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden
+slap on the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t
+swear that way when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert
+sinners, cook!”
+
+“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
+
+“No, cook; go on, go on.”
+
+“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
+
+“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ‘em to it; try
+that,” and Fleece continued.
+
+“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
+fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—‘top dat dam slappin’ ob de
+tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and
+bitin’ dare?”
+
+“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing.
+Talk to ‘em gentlemanly.”
+
+Once more the sermon proceeded.
+
+“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for;
+dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat
+is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you,
+why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well
+goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a
+helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out
+your neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to
+dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat
+whale belong to some one else. I know some o’ you has berry brig mout,
+brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies;
+so dat de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de
+blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de scrouge to
+help demselves.”
+
+“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go
+on.”
+
+“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scougin’ and
+slappin’ each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use
+a-preaching to such dam g’uttons as you call ‘em, till dare bellies
+is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get ‘em full,
+dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on
+de coral, and can’t hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
+
+“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the
+benediction, Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”
+
+Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
+shrill voice, and cried—
+
+“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
+your dam bellies ‘till dey bust—and den die.”
+
+“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan;
+“stand just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay
+particular attention.”
+
+“All ‘dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in
+the desired position.
+
+“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now
+go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are
+you, cook?”
+
+“What dat do wid de ‘teak,” said the old black, testily.
+
+“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
+
+“‘Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
+
+“And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,
+and don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting
+another mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation
+of the question. “Where were you born, cook?”
+
+“‘Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
+
+“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what
+country you were born in, cook!”
+
+“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
+
+“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to,
+cook. You must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to
+cook a whale-steak yet.”
+
+“Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning
+round to depart.
+
+“Come back here, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that
+bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it
+should be? Take it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take
+it, and taste it.”
+
+Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
+muttered, “Best cooked ‘teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
+
+“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to
+the church?”
+
+“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
+
+“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town,
+where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as
+his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here,
+and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb.
+“Where do you expect to go to, cook?”
+
+“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
+
+“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question.
+Now what’s your answer?”
+
+“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing
+his whole air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some
+bressed angel will come and fetch him.”
+
+“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And
+fetch him where?”
+
+“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head,
+and keeping it there very solemnly.
+
+“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when
+you are dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it
+gets? Main-top, eh?”
+
+“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
+
+“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where
+your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven
+by crawling through the lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you
+don’t get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging.
+It’s a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But
+none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders.
+Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of
+your heart, when I’m giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart,
+there?—that’s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you
+have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention.”
+
+“All ‘dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as
+desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in
+front at one and the same time.
+
+“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
+that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that,
+don’t you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for
+my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not
+to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live
+coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now
+to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by
+to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of
+the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”
+
+But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
+
+“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.
+D’ye hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before
+you go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t
+forget.”
+
+“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ‘stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed
+if he ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old
+man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
+
+That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
+like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
+outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
+philosophy of it.
+
+It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
+Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
+prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the
+court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
+eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
+whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The
+meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well
+seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
+The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
+porpoise grant from the crown.
+
+The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
+hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but
+when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet
+long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
+like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not
+so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
+old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
+doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
+juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
+long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that
+these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
+whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
+the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called “fritters”; which,
+indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling
+something like old Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks,
+when fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying
+stranger can hardly keep his hands off.
+
+But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
+exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
+delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the
+buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
+pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
+is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
+third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
+butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
+some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try
+watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
+ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many
+a good supper have I thus made.
+
+In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
+The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,
+whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),
+they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,
+in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish
+among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the
+epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to
+have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a
+calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon
+discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an
+intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the
+saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at
+him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
+
+It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
+unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence;
+that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before
+mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,
+and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever
+murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if
+he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and
+he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market
+of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the
+long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of
+the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it
+will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary
+in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for
+that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee,
+civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and
+feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
+
+But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is
+adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my
+civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
+that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
+you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
+that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did
+the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
+formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two
+that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel
+pens.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
+
+When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and
+weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
+thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
+him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very
+soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the
+common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then
+send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation
+that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and
+two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck
+to see that all goes well.
+
+But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will
+not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
+round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a
+stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.
+In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so
+largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
+diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,
+a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
+tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
+present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man
+unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
+would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and
+those sharks the maggots in it.
+
+Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
+concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman
+came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
+immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
+three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid
+sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
+incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
+into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
+confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
+always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
+incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each
+other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit
+their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by
+the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
+this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
+creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
+their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
+life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,
+one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he
+tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
+
+*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
+is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape,
+corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
+sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than
+the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when
+being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
+stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
+
+“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage,
+agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or
+Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
+
+It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
+professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
+turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
+have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
+
+In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
+things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
+no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed
+up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the
+strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the
+hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted
+to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung
+over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one
+hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the
+side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began
+cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the
+nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is
+cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew
+striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at
+the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side;
+every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty
+weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to
+the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping
+heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows;
+till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the
+ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant
+tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular
+end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the
+whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from
+the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.
+For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps
+the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in
+one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,”
+simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates;
+and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act
+itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till
+its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease
+heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass
+sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must
+take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and
+pitch him headlong overboard.
+
+One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
+called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
+out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this
+hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked
+so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what
+follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to
+stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few
+sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain;
+so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,
+called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.
+The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is
+peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly
+slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway
+right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into
+this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
+blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.
+And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
+simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,
+the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship
+straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
+general friction.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
+
+I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
+the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
+afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
+unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
+
+The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you
+know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
+of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
+ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
+
+Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any
+creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness,
+yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption;
+because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the
+whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer
+of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True,
+from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your
+hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the
+thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as
+satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and
+thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried
+bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as
+I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes
+pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any
+rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles,
+as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same
+infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire
+body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the
+creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply
+ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is
+thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more
+of this.
+
+Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
+as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
+hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
+rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,
+and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had
+of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere
+integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels
+to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters
+of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
+
+In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
+the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
+crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
+something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
+marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
+mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved
+upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
+observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but
+afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical;
+that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
+hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
+connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
+Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
+Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on
+the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
+mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
+rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
+the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the
+back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the
+regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
+altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
+England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks
+of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say,
+that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this
+particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are
+probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most
+remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.
+
+A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of
+the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
+pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
+happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
+as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
+slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this
+cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself
+comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
+become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
+North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are
+found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it
+observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies
+are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of
+an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire;
+whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood,
+and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that
+this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it
+is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed
+to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
+overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly
+frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued
+in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
+experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a
+Borneo negro in summer.
+
+It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
+individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
+virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
+the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in
+this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood
+fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the
+great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
+
+But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
+how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
+whale!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
+
+Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!
+
+The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
+beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
+it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
+Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
+splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
+flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
+poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further
+and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
+square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous
+din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous
+sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair
+face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass
+of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
+
+There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures
+all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
+speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween,
+if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
+they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from
+which not the mightiest whale is free.
+
+Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
+survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or
+blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
+swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
+the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
+whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
+log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years
+afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
+sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
+when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your
+utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival
+of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
+the air! There’s orthodoxy!
+
+Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror
+to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
+world.
+
+Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
+the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in
+them.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
+
+It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
+the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
+Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
+whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
+
+Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;
+on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
+very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the
+surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
+between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a
+discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear
+in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
+feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
+much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
+made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts,
+and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion
+into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he
+demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
+
+When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
+till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale
+it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a
+full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head
+embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend
+such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this
+were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’
+scales.
+
+The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head
+was hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea,
+so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element.
+And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason
+of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every
+yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there,
+that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant
+Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
+
+When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
+below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but
+now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow
+lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon
+the sea.
+
+A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
+from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to
+gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took
+Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s
+Decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
+mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood
+leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
+
+It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
+intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou
+vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished
+with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak,
+mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all
+divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun
+now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded
+names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her
+murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions
+of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most
+familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept
+by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their
+lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping
+from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting
+wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou
+saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight
+deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw;
+and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings
+shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband
+to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split
+the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is
+thine!”
+
+“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
+
+“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
+himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.
+“That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
+man.—Where away?”
+
+“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze
+to us!
+
+“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,
+and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!
+how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest
+atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
+
+Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
+the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
+
+By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned
+mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward,
+and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the
+Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what
+response would be made.
+
+Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
+the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals
+being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
+attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
+commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
+considerable distances and with no small facility.
+
+The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s
+setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket.
+Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s
+lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was
+being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain,
+the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token
+of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that
+the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
+captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though
+himself and boat’s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was
+half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and
+flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of
+the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the
+Pequod.
+
+But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
+interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s
+boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
+Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew
+very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by
+the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some
+way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings
+again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
+conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
+without still another interruption of a very different sort.
+
+Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular
+appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities
+make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled
+all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A
+long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped
+him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A
+deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
+
+So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had
+exclaimed—“That’s he! that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch
+the Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange
+story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time
+previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account
+and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
+question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
+Jeroboam. His story was this:
+
+He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
+Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
+meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
+trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
+carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
+was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim
+having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with
+that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense
+exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the
+Jeroboam’s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon
+the ship’s getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
+freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded
+the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
+he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and
+vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he
+declared these things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited
+imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united
+to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant
+crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of
+him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship,
+especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous
+captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that
+individual’s intention was to land him in the first convenient port,
+the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials—devoting the
+ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention
+was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
+crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if
+Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was
+therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel
+to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to
+pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence
+of all this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the
+captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a
+higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was
+at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good
+pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them
+fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering
+him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but,
+however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half
+so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic
+himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many
+others. But it is time to return to the Pequod.
+
+“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to
+Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
+
+But now Gabriel started to his feet.
+
+“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the
+horrible plague!”
+
+“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—”
+But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its
+seethings drowned all speech.
+
+“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat
+drifted back.
+
+“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the
+horrible tail!”
+
+“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead
+as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a
+succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional
+caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the
+hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel
+was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel
+nature seemed to warrant.
+
+When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
+concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from
+Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed
+leagued with him.
+
+It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking
+a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
+Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
+Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White
+Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,
+pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God
+incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two
+afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
+chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself
+being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all
+the archangel’s denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in
+persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after
+much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
+succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to
+the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and
+hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants
+of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his
+boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting
+his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance
+for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its
+quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies
+of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious
+life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his
+descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
+chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the
+mate for ever sank.
+
+It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
+Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
+Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated;
+oftener the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which
+the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body.
+But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than
+one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
+discernible; the man being stark dead.
+
+The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
+from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!”
+Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting
+of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added
+influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had
+specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general
+prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one
+of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to
+the ship.
+
+Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to
+him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
+intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which
+Ahab answered—“Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started
+to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
+downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and
+down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
+
+Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have
+just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy
+officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”
+
+Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
+whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends
+upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus,
+most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after
+attaining an age of two or three years or more.
+
+Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
+damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence
+of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death
+himself might well have been the post-boy.
+
+“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye,
+it’s but a dim scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out,
+Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly
+split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to
+the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship.
+
+Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes,
+Mr. Harry—(a woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll
+wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and
+he’s dead!”
+
+“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but
+let me have it.”
+
+“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon
+going that way.”
+
+“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now
+to receive it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands,
+he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the
+boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing;
+the boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by
+magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand.
+He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling
+the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at
+Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way
+with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away
+from the Pequod.
+
+As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket
+of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
+affair.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
+
+In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there
+is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
+wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying
+in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done
+everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description
+of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned
+that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook
+was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the
+mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook
+get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend
+Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the
+monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many
+cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the
+whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The
+whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the
+immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the
+level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the
+whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill
+beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the
+Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least,
+he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to
+observe him, as will presently be seen.
+
+Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
+in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
+attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
+whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape
+by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold
+Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the
+fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round
+his waist.
+
+It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
+proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both
+ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow
+leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were
+wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage
+and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag
+me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.
+Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get
+rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.
+
+So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
+while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive
+that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of
+two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s
+mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster
+and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in
+Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an
+injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now
+and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam
+him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine
+was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
+cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality
+of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
+mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say
+that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the
+multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s
+monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
+very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I
+would, I only had the management of one end of it.*
+
+*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
+that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
+upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb,
+in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
+guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
+
+I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between
+the whale and the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the
+incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming
+jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them
+during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by
+the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid
+creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
+
+And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them
+aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were
+it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise
+miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
+
+Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a
+ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
+Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked
+the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed
+a peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another
+protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego
+and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen
+whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
+reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
+benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but
+in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both
+he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water,
+those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg
+than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there
+with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his
+Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
+
+Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in
+and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters
+it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men
+in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
+sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks
+and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
+
+But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
+with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs
+up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over
+the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory
+glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands
+him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
+
+“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.
+“Yes, this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup.
+Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards
+the astonished steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you
+have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of
+ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle
+a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is ginger?
+Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what
+the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg
+here.”
+
+“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this
+business,” he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
+come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of
+it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added,
+“The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and
+jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an
+apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
+which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”
+
+“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
+
+“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug
+a harpooneer; none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to
+poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to
+murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?”
+
+“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that
+brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any
+spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”
+
+“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye
+to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
+Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a
+whale.”
+
+“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
+
+“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something
+of that sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying,
+sir?”
+
+“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
+
+When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
+of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
+handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was
+freely given to the waves.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
+
+Over Him.
+
+It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s
+prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it
+continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.
+For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the
+head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
+
+Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
+drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
+gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
+Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
+anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
+those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
+cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
+the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale
+had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
+announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if
+opportunity offered.
+
+Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
+boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling
+further and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the
+men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great
+heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that
+one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats
+were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship
+by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at
+first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
+maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
+view, as if diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the
+ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
+brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having
+plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly,
+they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with
+all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the
+struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the
+tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another,
+the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a
+few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did
+gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning
+along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship,
+suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so
+flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken
+glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once
+more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed,
+and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing
+the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
+
+Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
+flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for
+lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
+multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s
+body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking
+at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting
+fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
+
+At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
+turned upon his back a corpse.
+
+While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
+and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
+conversation ensued between them.
+
+“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said
+Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
+ignoble a leviathan.
+
+“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s
+bow, “did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm
+Whale’s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a
+Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that
+ship can never afterwards capsize?”
+
+“Why not?
+
+“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying
+so, and he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes
+think he’ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like
+that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of
+carved into a snake’s head, Stubb?”
+
+“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of
+a dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look
+down there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of
+both hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil
+in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having
+been stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why
+you don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he
+carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I
+think of it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his
+boots.”
+
+“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but
+I’ve seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
+
+“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do
+ye see, in the eye of the rigging.”
+
+“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
+
+“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
+
+“Bargain?—about what?”
+
+“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
+the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
+his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then
+he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
+
+“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
+
+“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
+one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
+old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
+gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he
+was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
+his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old
+governor. ‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil, getting
+mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor—and
+by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera
+before he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful.
+But look sharp—ain’t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead,
+and let’s get the whale alongside.”
+
+“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said
+Flask, when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their
+burden towards the ship, “but I can’t remember where.”
+
+“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soladoes?
+Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
+
+“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
+Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
+the same you say is now on board the Pequod?”
+
+“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil
+live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever
+see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
+latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can
+crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
+
+“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
+
+“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well,
+that’s the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold,
+and string along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well,
+that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in
+creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts enough.”
+
+“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that
+you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if
+he’s so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going
+to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me
+that?
+
+“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
+
+“But he’d crawl back.”
+
+“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
+
+“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes,
+and drown you—what then?”
+
+“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black
+eyes that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin
+again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he
+lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn
+the devil, Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s
+afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put
+him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping
+people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil
+kidnapped, he’d roast for him? There’s a governor!”
+
+“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
+
+“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am
+going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very
+suspicious going on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and
+say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss,
+by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to
+the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail
+will come short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess
+when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off
+without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
+
+“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
+
+“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
+
+“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along,
+Stubb?”
+
+“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
+
+The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
+fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing
+him.
+
+“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this
+right whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”
+
+In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod
+steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the
+counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely
+strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in
+Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist
+in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus,
+some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these
+thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.
+
+In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
+ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the
+case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off
+whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and
+hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is
+called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case,
+had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and
+the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of
+overburdening panniers.
+
+Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever
+and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
+hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow;
+while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only to
+blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
+speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
+things.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+
+Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us
+join them, and lay together our own.
+
+Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
+Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
+hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all
+the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between
+them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this
+moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we may freely go from
+one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:—where, I
+should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical
+cetology than here?
+
+In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
+heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
+mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s
+sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head. As you
+behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in
+point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity
+is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit,
+giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what
+the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
+
+Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the
+two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of
+the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you
+narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
+fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
+magnitude of the head.
+
+Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is
+plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more
+than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s
+eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for
+yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects
+through your ears. You would find that you could only command some
+thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;
+and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
+straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not
+be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
+behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the
+same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the
+front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?
+
+Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
+are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
+produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of
+the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic
+feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain
+separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate
+the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale,
+therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another
+distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound
+darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out
+on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window.
+But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
+distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the
+whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and
+to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
+
+A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
+visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
+hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of
+seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
+whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience
+will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of
+things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively,
+and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however
+small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side
+by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two
+objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in
+order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
+bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
+consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes,
+in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
+comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the
+same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on
+one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If
+he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
+simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems
+in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this
+comparison.
+
+It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
+extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
+beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
+frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
+proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
+divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
+
+But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
+entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads
+for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
+whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
+wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
+respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
+between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has
+an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
+over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
+
+Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
+world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which
+is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
+Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches
+of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
+hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
+Subtilize it.
+
+Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand,
+cant over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then,
+ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and
+were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a
+lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his
+stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where
+we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor
+to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane,
+glossy as bridal satins.
+
+But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems
+like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one
+end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,
+and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
+alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
+spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold,
+when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
+suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
+straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a
+ship’s jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
+sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his
+jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
+reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon
+him.
+
+In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised
+artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
+the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
+with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
+including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
+
+With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
+anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other
+work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
+are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances
+the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
+rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
+stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two
+teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
+after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
+piled away like joists for building houses.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+
+Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right
+Whale’s head.
+
+As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
+Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
+so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant
+resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an
+old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And
+in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with
+the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
+progeny.
+
+But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
+aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
+look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head
+for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
+sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
+crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,
+barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the
+Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes
+solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
+with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those
+live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
+sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
+technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will
+take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
+diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for
+him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very
+sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip!
+what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s
+measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout
+that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
+
+A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
+The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an
+important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes
+caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold,
+we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should
+take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the
+road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a
+pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while
+these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half
+vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a
+side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown
+bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
+mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,
+through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose
+intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through
+the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they
+stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,
+hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature’s
+age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty
+of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of
+analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant
+a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem
+reasonable.
+
+In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
+concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
+“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’
+bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following
+elegant language: “There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing
+on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side
+of his mouth.”
+
+*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
+rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
+upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these
+tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
+countenance.
+
+As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,”
+“whiskers,” “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the
+ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this
+particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen
+Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then
+all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though
+in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with
+the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for
+protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.
+
+But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
+in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
+colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think
+you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
+thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
+Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
+mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
+it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
+should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
+amount of oil.
+
+Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
+with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
+different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no
+great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of
+a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there
+any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of
+a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm
+Whale only one.
+
+Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
+together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will
+not be very long in following.
+
+Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the
+same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead
+seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
+placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark
+the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
+accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the
+jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical
+resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a
+Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in
+his latter years.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
+
+Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have
+you, as a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front
+aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
+it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
+intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged
+there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle
+this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
+the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be
+found in all recorded history.
+
+You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
+the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
+water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
+backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
+receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
+under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth
+were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has
+no external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on the
+top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides
+of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
+Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
+Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender
+prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider
+that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of
+the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you
+get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial
+development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad.
+Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
+the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of
+the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.
+In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the
+body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head;
+but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so
+thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not
+handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by
+the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though
+the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses’ hoofs. I do
+not think that any sensation lurks in it.
+
+Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
+chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
+sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
+contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
+there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest
+and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which
+would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By
+itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But
+supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
+as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
+capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale,
+as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too,
+the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head
+altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out
+of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope;
+considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically
+occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there
+may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with
+the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and
+contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
+which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.
+
+Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
+wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a
+mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood
+is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest
+insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
+specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
+expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
+braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant
+incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale
+stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic
+with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For
+unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist
+in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
+encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell
+the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Lais?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
+
+Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
+know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
+upon.
+
+Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
+inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
+is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
+unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
+expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
+forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
+almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
+wall of a thick tendinous substance.
+
+*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
+mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
+solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
+steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
+sides.
+
+The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb
+of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand
+infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
+extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great
+Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is
+mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead
+forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
+wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished
+with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun
+of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;
+namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,
+and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
+in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly
+fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to
+concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first
+thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale’s case
+generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from
+unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
+dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business
+of securing what you can.
+
+I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun
+was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not
+possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like
+the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm
+Whale’s case.
+
+It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
+embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as
+has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces one third of the whole
+length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for
+a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of
+the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship’s
+side.
+
+As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought
+close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the
+spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a
+careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let
+out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head,
+also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that
+position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on
+one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.
+
+Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous
+and—in this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the
+Sperm Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
+
+Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
+posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the
+part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried
+with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts,
+travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that
+it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it
+is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down
+the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he
+lands on the summit of the head. There—still high elevated above
+the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some
+Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a
+tower. A short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently
+searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this
+business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old
+house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the
+time this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely
+like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while
+the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or
+three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of
+the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole.
+Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket
+into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to
+the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a
+dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height,
+the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly
+emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through
+the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the
+end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and
+deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.
+
+Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
+several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
+queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
+was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
+hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the
+place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil
+One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
+reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,
+as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor
+Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
+dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with
+a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
+
+“Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation
+first came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting
+one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on
+the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head,
+almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
+there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
+lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,
+as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
+the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
+depth to which he had sunk.
+
+At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing
+the whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a
+sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,
+one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with
+a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship
+reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,
+upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be
+on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
+motions of the head.
+
+“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one
+hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop,
+he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,
+rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
+buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
+
+“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home
+a cartridge there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that
+iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!”
+
+“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a
+rocket.
+
+Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
+dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool;
+the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her
+glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging—now
+over the sailors’ heads, and now over the water—Daggoo, through a
+thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles,
+while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom
+of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a
+naked figure with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment
+seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that
+my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to
+the side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment,
+and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands
+now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
+
+“Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging
+perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm
+thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm
+thrust forth from the grass over a grave.
+
+“Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful
+shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one
+hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn
+into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but
+Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
+
+Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after
+the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made
+side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then
+dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards,
+and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first
+thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that
+was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had
+thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a
+somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in
+the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was
+doing as well as could be expected.
+
+And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,
+the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully
+accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
+hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
+Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,
+riding and rowing.
+
+I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to
+seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either
+seen or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident
+which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the
+Indian’s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the
+Sperm Whale’s well.
+
+But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
+the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
+most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of
+a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at
+all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been
+nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense
+tendinous wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance, as I
+have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which
+sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this
+substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the
+other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
+very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance
+for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it
+was a running delivery, so it was.
+
+Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
+perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
+spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
+and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily
+be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking
+honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it,
+that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.
+How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and
+sweetly perished there?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
+
+To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
+Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
+yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
+Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
+or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the
+Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats
+of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces
+of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
+modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and
+his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
+phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,
+though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these
+two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;
+I achieve what I can.
+
+Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.
+He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
+conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
+finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its
+entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
+the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
+cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
+to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
+keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose
+from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless,
+Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so
+stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were
+hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A
+nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical
+voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble
+conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a
+nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon
+obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.
+
+In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
+be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
+aspect is sublime.
+
+In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
+morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a
+touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the
+elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as
+that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees.
+It signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most
+creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip
+of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which
+like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low,
+that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes;
+and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the
+antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters
+track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this
+high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely
+amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the
+Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other
+object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one
+distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
+he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead,
+pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships,
+and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that
+way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you
+plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the
+forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.
+
+But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written
+a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
+doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
+pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
+been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
+their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
+because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no
+tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
+protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure
+back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
+enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted
+hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale
+shall lord it.
+
+Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there
+is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every
+being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a
+passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages,
+could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and
+more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful
+Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you.
+Read it if you can.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
+
+If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
+brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
+
+In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
+in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
+the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
+base. But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is
+angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
+mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater
+to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this
+crater—in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as
+many in depth—reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The
+brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is
+hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within
+the amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
+secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
+that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance
+of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange
+folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more
+in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part
+of him as the seat of his intelligence.
+
+It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
+the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
+true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
+whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
+world.
+
+If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
+of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its
+resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from
+the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down
+to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would
+involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on
+one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This
+man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
+considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
+power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
+exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
+
+But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain,
+you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another
+idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine,
+you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung
+necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
+skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
+undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it
+the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
+pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
+the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
+beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
+omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from
+the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of
+a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would
+rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of
+a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine,
+as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to
+the world.
+
+Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
+cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
+the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
+eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
+it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but
+for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of
+course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous
+substance—the spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates
+with the brain. And what is still more, for many feet after emerging
+from the brain’s cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing
+girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances,
+would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine
+phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative
+smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful
+comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.
+
+But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
+would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the
+Sperm Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over
+one of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer
+convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this
+high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.
+And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to
+know.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
+
+The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick
+De Deer, master, of Bremen.
+
+At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
+Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
+intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
+their flag in the Pacific.
+
+For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
+While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
+boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
+bows instead of the stern.
+
+“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing
+to something wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a
+lamp-feeder!”
+
+“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr.
+Starbuck; he’s coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman;
+don’t you see that big tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his
+boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is the Yarman.”
+
+“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an
+oil-can. He’s out of oil, and has come a-begging.”
+
+However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
+whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
+proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
+really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
+indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
+
+As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
+heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
+soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
+turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
+remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
+profound darkness—his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
+single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding
+by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
+called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of
+Jungfrau or the Virgin.
+
+His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
+ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
+mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
+without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
+round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
+
+Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German
+boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the
+Pequod’s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of
+their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight
+before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of
+horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually
+unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.
+
+Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
+humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
+by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
+with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged
+to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for
+such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck
+to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,
+because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one,
+like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was
+short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush,
+and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean
+commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried
+extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.
+
+“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the
+stomach-ache, I’m afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of
+stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.
+It’s the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look,
+did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.”
+
+As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
+load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
+way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
+turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
+wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
+that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
+
+“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that
+wounded arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
+
+“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way,
+or the German will have him.”
+
+With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
+one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
+valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
+going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for
+the time. At this juncture the Pequod’s keels had shot by the
+three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had,
+Derick’s boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his
+foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already
+so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they
+could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite
+confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding
+gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
+
+“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks
+and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes
+ago!”—then in his old intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog
+to it!”
+
+“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s
+against my religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous
+Yarman—Pull—won’t ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do
+ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why
+don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s that been dropping an
+anchor overboard—we don’t budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo,
+here’s grass growing in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the
+mast there’s budding. This won’t do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The
+short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?”
+
+“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and
+down—“What a hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh!
+my lads, do spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my
+lads—baked clams and muffins—oh, do, do, spring,—he’s a hundred
+barreller—don’t lose him now—don’t oh, don’t!—see that
+Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such
+a sogger! Don’t ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars,
+men!—a bank!—a whole bank! The bank of England!—Oh, do, do,
+do!—What’s that Yarman about now?”
+
+At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
+advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view
+of retarding his rivals’ way, and at the same time economically
+accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
+
+“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like
+fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils.
+What d’ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in
+two-and-twenty pieces for the honour of old Gayhead? What d’ye say?”
+
+“I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
+
+Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s
+three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
+momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of
+the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
+proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry
+of, “There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with
+the Yarman! Sail over him!”
+
+But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all
+their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not
+a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade
+of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free
+his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick’s boat was nigh to
+capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;—that
+was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took
+a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German’s
+quarter. An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the
+whale’s immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was
+the foaming swell that he made.
+
+It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was
+now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual
+tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of
+fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight,
+and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the
+sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I
+seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the
+air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a
+voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear
+of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him;
+he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle,
+and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his
+amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to
+appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
+
+Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s
+boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick
+chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart,
+ere the last chance would for ever escape.
+
+But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
+tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their
+feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
+barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their
+three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and
+white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
+rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and
+his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three
+flying keels.
+
+“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing
+glance upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all
+right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you
+know—relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail
+now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles
+at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an
+elephant in a tilbury on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys,
+when you fasten to him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched
+out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels
+when he’s going to Davy Jones—all a rush down an endless inclined
+plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!”
+
+But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
+tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round
+the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;
+while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would
+soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they
+caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
+last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
+the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the
+gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three
+sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound,
+for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more
+line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have
+been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,”
+as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh
+from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon
+rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak
+of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is
+always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer
+the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because,
+owing to the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm whale
+something less than 2000 square feet—the pressure of the water is
+immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves
+stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the
+burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms
+of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One
+whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships,
+with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
+
+As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
+into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
+sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
+what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
+placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
+agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
+Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
+was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
+to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
+once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed
+irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him
+cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron
+as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
+he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he?
+Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength
+of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
+mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
+
+In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
+sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
+enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the
+wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
+
+“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines
+suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them,
+as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that
+every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great
+part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden
+bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white
+bears are scared from it into the sea.
+
+“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
+
+The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth
+could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
+dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
+ship’s lengths of the hunters.
+
+His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
+there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
+when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
+certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities
+it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so
+that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
+drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
+heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance
+below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant
+streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant
+and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
+bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will
+flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible
+hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously
+drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,
+they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept
+continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only
+at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the
+air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him
+had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was
+untouched.
+
+As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of
+his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
+revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
+beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
+noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes
+had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
+But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
+blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the
+gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the
+solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
+Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
+discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the
+flank.
+
+“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
+
+“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
+
+But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
+ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than
+sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury
+blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews
+all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the
+bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by
+loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
+made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
+then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up
+the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
+piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water
+is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled
+melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
+ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
+
+Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
+showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
+by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
+that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a
+few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when
+the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was
+strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain
+that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the
+bottom.
+
+It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
+the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,
+on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
+harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,
+with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any
+kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been
+some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
+the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
+lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
+the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
+when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before
+America was discovered.
+
+What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
+cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
+discoveries, by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
+to the sea, owing to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink.
+However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the
+last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship
+would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the
+body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was
+the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
+cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
+everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the
+deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship
+groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and
+cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.
+In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
+fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
+had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all
+approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to
+the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
+
+“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t
+be in such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do
+something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your
+handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut
+the big chains.”
+
+“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s
+heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began
+slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks,
+were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
+snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
+
+Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
+Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
+accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great
+buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
+surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
+broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
+bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
+this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so
+sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it
+is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
+noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of
+life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant
+heroes do sometimes sink.
+
+Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
+accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
+Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in
+no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;
+his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
+incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances
+where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale
+again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this
+is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
+magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could
+hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
+the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they
+fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone
+down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.
+
+It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard
+from the Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was
+again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a
+Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of
+its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout
+is so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is
+often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now
+in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail,
+made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to
+leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
+
+Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
+
+There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
+method.
+
+The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
+to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its
+great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
+great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
+have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
+that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
+fraternity.
+
+The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and
+to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale
+attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those
+were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to
+succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one
+knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,
+the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as
+Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince
+of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
+and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
+achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
+Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this
+Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
+in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
+of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants asserted
+to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the
+Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph.
+What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is
+this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
+
+Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some
+supposed to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St.
+George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale;
+for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled
+together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the
+waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly
+meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word
+itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit
+had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead
+of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill
+a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in
+them to march boldly up to a whale.
+
+Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
+the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
+represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
+on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
+of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
+and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might
+have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that
+the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal,
+or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether
+incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the
+scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan
+himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this
+whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the
+Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel,
+his horse’s head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him,
+and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our
+own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England;
+and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in
+the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights
+of that honourable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever
+had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a
+Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred
+trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than
+they.
+
+Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
+remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
+antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good
+deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether
+that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
+appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,
+from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
+whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
+claim him for one of our clan.
+
+But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
+Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
+ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly
+they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?
+
+Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
+roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal
+kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing
+short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now
+to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one
+of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
+Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
+earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
+When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
+the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to
+Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books,
+whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before
+beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
+something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these
+Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became
+incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,
+rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even
+as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
+
+Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a
+member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like
+that?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
+
+Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
+preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
+story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
+and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
+equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the
+dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those
+traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
+
+One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
+story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
+embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
+Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true
+with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
+varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
+saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very
+small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is
+not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
+whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.
+And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the
+Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables,
+and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
+ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
+Whale is toothless.
+
+Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
+want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
+reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But
+this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
+supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
+dead whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
+their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
+been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
+thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape
+to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;
+and, I would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are
+nowadays christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.”
+Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the
+whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an
+inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was
+saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all
+round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was
+this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the
+Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere
+within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much
+more than three days’ journey across from the nearest point of the
+Mediterranean coast. How is that?
+
+But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
+short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the
+way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through
+the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the
+Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
+circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris
+waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to
+swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of Good
+Hope at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that
+great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so
+make modern history a liar.
+
+But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his
+foolish pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him,
+seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from
+the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride,
+and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
+Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh
+via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
+the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
+enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.
+And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s
+Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which
+Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
+
+To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
+anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
+analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
+to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
+be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
+hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
+make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
+his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
+disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling
+under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the
+unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from
+the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some
+particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.
+
+Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
+them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,
+as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
+
+Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great
+exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
+stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
+flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
+planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
+imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But
+to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
+furious. What then remained?
+
+Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
+countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
+none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
+sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It
+is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand
+fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
+accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme
+headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve
+feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon,
+and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope
+called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
+the hand after darting.
+
+But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though
+the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it
+is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful,
+on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
+compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a
+general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
+pitchpoling comes into play.
+
+Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
+equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
+in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
+flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
+Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its
+length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up
+the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
+grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
+his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering
+him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby
+elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his
+palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
+balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless
+impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming
+distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of
+sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
+
+“That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “‘Tis July’s
+immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were
+old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,
+Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink
+round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the
+spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the
+living stuff.”
+
+Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,
+the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful
+leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
+slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and
+mutely watches the monster die.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
+
+That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages
+before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea,
+and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
+many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
+thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the
+whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should
+be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
+minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
+1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are,
+after all, really water, or nothing but vapour—this is surely a
+noteworthy thing.
+
+Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
+contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
+gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is
+combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod
+might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface.
+But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
+lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the
+disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for
+his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree
+breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm
+Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and
+what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he
+breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.
+
+If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function
+indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
+certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
+blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
+shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
+Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
+aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
+fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
+live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
+case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
+hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
+so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
+no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
+he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
+vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are
+completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more,
+a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in
+him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus
+supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs.
+The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the
+supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more
+cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of
+that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen phrase
+it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the
+Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform
+with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and
+jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he
+rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to
+a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that
+he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular
+allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
+finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that
+in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one
+they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
+spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
+descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
+whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For
+not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing
+a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O
+hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
+
+In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving
+for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
+attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
+Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
+
+It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
+it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then
+I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell
+seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all
+answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
+with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of
+smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or
+whether it be vapour—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on
+this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
+olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
+Cologne-water in the sea.
+
+Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
+canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished
+with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
+air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
+unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles,
+he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?
+Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
+this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
+living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
+
+Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it
+is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
+horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
+to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
+in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this
+gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the
+Sperm Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that
+exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
+discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
+communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this
+is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because
+the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
+accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale’s food is far beneath
+the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if
+you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find
+that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods
+of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
+
+But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
+You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
+tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
+settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
+knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in
+it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
+
+The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
+it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
+when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view
+of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading
+all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
+perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
+not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they
+are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
+fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For
+even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with
+his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then,
+the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under
+a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with
+rain.
+
+Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
+precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
+into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
+this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
+slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will
+often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
+the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer
+contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view,
+or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
+Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
+evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
+it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
+The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let
+this deadly spout alone.
+
+Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
+hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides
+other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations
+touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale;
+I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
+fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
+whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am
+convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
+Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
+up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
+thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
+curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
+a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
+head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
+after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;
+this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.
+
+And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
+behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
+head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable
+contemplations, and that vapour—as you will sometimes see
+it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon
+his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they
+only irradiate vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim
+doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my
+fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts;
+many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions.
+Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly;
+this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
+regards them both with equal eye.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
+
+Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
+and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
+celebrate a tail.
+
+Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point
+of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
+upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
+compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms
+or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
+At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways
+recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In
+no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in
+the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the
+full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
+
+The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
+into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper,
+middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are
+long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running
+crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as
+anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
+walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
+course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
+relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
+great strength of the masonry.
+
+But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
+the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
+muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
+and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
+largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
+measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
+Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
+
+Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the
+graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates
+through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their
+most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty
+or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly
+beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied
+tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved
+Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the
+linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the
+massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When
+Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is
+there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the
+soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has
+been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they
+are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative,
+feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is
+conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
+
+Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
+wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
+be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
+fairy’s arm can transcend it.
+
+Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
+progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
+Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
+
+First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in
+a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
+wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
+whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
+forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this
+which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
+furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
+
+Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
+fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
+conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
+striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
+blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
+air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
+irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only
+salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
+opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale
+boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed
+plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most
+serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the
+fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. Some one strips
+off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
+
+Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale
+the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect
+there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the
+elephant’s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of
+sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
+slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of
+the sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor,
+whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!
+Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of
+Darmonodes’ elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with
+low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
+zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
+possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet
+another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk
+and extracted the dart.
+
+Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
+middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence
+of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
+hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of
+his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
+thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
+gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour
+from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
+the smoke from the touch-hole.
+
+Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
+lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely
+out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into
+the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
+tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
+downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach—somewhere
+else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps
+the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the
+bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching
+at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan
+thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of
+Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you
+are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of
+Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a
+sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales
+in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in
+concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand
+embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia,
+the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of
+the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him
+the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military
+elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks
+uplifted in the profoundest silence.
+
+The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
+elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
+of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two
+opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
+respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to
+Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the
+stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were
+as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush
+and crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated
+instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all their
+oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his
+balls.*
+
+*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale
+and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
+elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to
+the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
+similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant
+will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it,
+jet it forth in a stream.
+
+The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
+to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
+would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an
+extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures,
+that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason
+signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
+intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other
+motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and
+unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may,
+then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know
+not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more,
+how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back
+parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I
+cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about
+his face, I say again he has no face.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
+
+The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
+the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
+In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
+Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a
+vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,
+and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
+oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
+for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the
+straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels
+bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
+
+Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
+midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
+promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond
+to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
+considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
+and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental
+sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
+treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the
+appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
+western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied
+with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
+Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
+Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from
+the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
+past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
+and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
+they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
+their claim to more solid tribute.
+
+Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among
+the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
+vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
+point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
+have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
+corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present
+day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
+those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
+
+With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
+straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and
+thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and
+there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and
+gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.
+By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
+known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending
+upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled
+in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the
+sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most
+reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
+
+But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
+drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now,
+the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no
+sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the
+whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be
+transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
+no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
+whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted
+with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She
+carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
+when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
+drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from
+the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may
+have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score
+of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted
+one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like
+themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had
+come; they would only answer—“Well, boys, here’s the ark!”
+
+Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
+Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
+the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
+excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more
+and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
+admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
+land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils
+the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was
+descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
+hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the
+customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
+singular magnificence saluted us.
+
+But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
+of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,
+instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in
+former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
+embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if
+numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual
+assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into
+such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the
+best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
+together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly
+saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
+
+Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
+forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon,
+a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
+noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
+Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft
+drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
+Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
+rising and falling away to leeward.
+
+Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of
+the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the
+air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
+like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
+of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
+
+As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
+accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
+their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;
+even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through
+the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
+swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
+
+Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
+handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their
+yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that
+chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
+into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
+number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
+Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
+white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
+stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
+before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly
+directing attention to something in our wake.
+
+Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
+It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling something
+like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
+go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
+his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,
+crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
+sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!”
+
+As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should
+fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot
+pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift
+Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very
+kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her
+own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they
+were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
+forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the
+bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed
+his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in
+which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that
+gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that
+same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end;
+and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and
+inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their
+curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab’s
+brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some
+stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm
+thing from its place.
+
+But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
+when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
+Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
+side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
+harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining
+upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained
+upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at
+length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them;
+and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But
+no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm
+Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,—though
+as yet a mile in their rear,—than they rallied again, and forming
+in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
+flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.
+
+Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
+after several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the
+chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
+token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
+perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive
+it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns
+in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
+broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus’ elephants
+in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with
+consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles,
+and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick
+spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was
+still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely
+paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled
+ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep,
+pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly
+have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is
+characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together
+in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled
+before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when
+herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the
+slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
+trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
+therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales
+before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
+infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
+
+Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
+yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
+retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
+those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone
+whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time,
+Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray
+in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight
+for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the
+whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and
+indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present
+one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift
+monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid
+adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.
+
+As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
+speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
+thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
+the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
+like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
+through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
+moment it may be locked in and crushed.
+
+But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
+from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
+from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
+time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our
+way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time
+to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
+duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the
+shouting part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried
+one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,
+and for an instant threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail,
+there!” cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
+calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
+
+All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented
+by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood
+of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
+other’s grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then
+attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
+being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
+among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales
+are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm
+whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must
+kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing
+them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it
+is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat
+was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully
+darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the
+enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like
+malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the
+act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one
+of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it
+away, dropping the oarsman in the boat’s bottom as the seat slid from
+under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we
+stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for
+the time.
+
+It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were
+it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly
+diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the
+circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that
+when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways
+vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we
+glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if
+from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here
+the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard
+but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth
+satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture
+thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now
+in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
+commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of
+the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight
+or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of
+horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
+circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have
+gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing
+whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no
+possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for
+a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only
+admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake,
+we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women
+and children of this routed host.
+
+Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
+outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
+any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
+the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square
+miles. At any rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
+deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
+seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
+circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
+locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the
+herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
+stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
+innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
+whales—now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
+lake—evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
+becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household
+dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and
+touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
+domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
+their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
+time refrained from darting it.
+
+But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
+stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
+in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
+whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to
+become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
+exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
+and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different
+lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
+spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the
+young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
+we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their
+sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little
+infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
+have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in
+girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
+recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
+maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final
+spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate
+side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the
+plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from
+foreign parts.
+
+“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him
+fast! him fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one
+little!”
+
+“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
+
+“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
+
+As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
+fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
+the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
+air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
+Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
+seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with
+the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that
+the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
+seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
+amours in the deep.*
+
+*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
+most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
+which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a
+time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
+Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously
+situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves
+extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a
+nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring
+milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is
+very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with
+strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute
+more hominum.
+
+And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations
+and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
+fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled
+in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of
+my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
+while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
+deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
+
+Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
+spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
+still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
+possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of
+room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight
+of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
+across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is
+sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful
+and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
+maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
+cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again.
+A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not
+effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along
+with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of
+the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone
+mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay
+wherever he went.
+
+But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
+enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to
+inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the
+intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that
+by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had
+become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run
+away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope
+attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
+harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose
+from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning
+through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
+tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own
+comrades.
+
+This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their
+stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
+began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted
+by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to
+heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;
+in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central
+circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
+departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the
+tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in
+Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre,
+as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck
+and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
+
+“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe
+your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove
+him off, you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand
+up—stand up, and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind their
+backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
+
+The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
+narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
+we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly,
+and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many
+similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had
+just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,
+all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply
+purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in the
+bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head
+by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes
+close by.
+
+Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
+resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
+clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their
+onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but
+the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales
+might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had
+killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which
+are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,
+are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to
+mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should
+the boats of any other ship draw near.
+
+The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
+saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the
+drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for
+the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other
+craft than the Pequod.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
+
+The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
+Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
+vast aggregations.
+
+Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
+have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
+occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
+Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
+composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
+vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
+
+In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
+male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
+his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
+ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
+over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces
+and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and
+his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
+leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not
+more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
+comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
+yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
+whole they are hereditarily entitled to embonpoint.
+
+It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
+ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely
+search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower
+of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
+spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
+unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and
+down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental
+waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other
+excessive temperature of the year.
+
+When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
+suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
+interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming
+that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies,
+with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!
+High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be
+permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the
+Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed;
+for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the
+most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,
+who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with
+their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
+for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not
+a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed
+heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and
+dislocated mouths.
+
+But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
+the first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to
+watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
+revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,
+like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
+Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give
+chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
+of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
+sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
+take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
+like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord
+Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so,
+being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the
+world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour
+of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
+her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated
+Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our
+Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,
+forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old
+soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
+prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
+
+Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so
+is the lord and master of that school technically known as the
+schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably
+satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad
+inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title,
+schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed
+upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first
+thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of
+Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that
+famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of
+those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
+
+The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
+betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
+Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan
+is called—proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel
+Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he
+takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is,
+though she keeps so many moody secrets.
+
+The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
+mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
+those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
+forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious
+of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
+excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
+and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
+
+The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like
+a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
+tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
+prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
+lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,
+and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in
+quest of settlements, that is, harems.
+
+Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
+still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
+Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike
+a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with
+every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
+themselves to fall a prey.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
+
+The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
+necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
+fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
+
+It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
+a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed
+and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised
+many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For
+example,—after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,
+the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and
+drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
+calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus
+the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between
+the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,
+undisputed law applicable to all cases.
+
+Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
+enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in
+A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling
+law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and
+lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse
+comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws
+of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other
+People’s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen
+Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so
+small are they.
+
+I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
+
+II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
+
+But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
+brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
+expound it.
+
+First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,
+when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
+controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch
+cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
+Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
+recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly
+evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their
+intention so to do.
+
+These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
+themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
+Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
+honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,
+where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
+possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
+others are by no means so scrupulous.
+
+Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
+in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
+a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
+succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
+their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
+itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
+with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
+before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants
+were remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the
+plaintiffs’ teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the
+deed he had done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat,
+which had remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure.
+Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their
+whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
+
+Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was
+the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on
+to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case,
+wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s
+viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
+the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
+recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
+then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
+harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the
+great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet
+abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore
+when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
+subsequent gentleman’s property, along with whatever harpoon might
+have been found sticking in her.
+
+Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale
+and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
+
+These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
+learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he
+awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it
+to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,
+harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because
+it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons
+and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
+acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards
+took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
+the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.
+
+A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
+possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
+matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws
+previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in
+the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,
+I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human
+jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture,
+the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two
+props to stand on.
+
+Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the
+law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But
+often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls
+of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession
+is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s
+last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble
+mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish?
+What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor
+Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from
+starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the
+Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of L100,000 seized from the scant
+bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all
+sure of heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular
+L100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary
+towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John
+Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer,
+Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is
+not Possession the whole of the law?
+
+But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable,
+the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
+internationally and universally applicable.
+
+What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
+Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
+What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India
+to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All
+Loose-Fish.
+
+What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
+Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
+the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to
+the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
+Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
+are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
+
+“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.”
+Bracton, l. 3, c. 3.
+
+Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
+context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
+that land, the King, as Honourary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
+and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
+in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
+remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in
+force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
+touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of
+in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts
+the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
+reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in
+curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in
+force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within
+the last two years.
+
+It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
+of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
+beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
+the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
+jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
+Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
+emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
+his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
+Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
+perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
+them.
+
+Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
+trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
+fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the precious
+oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good
+ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up
+steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a
+copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale’s head,
+he says—“Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize
+it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their
+respectful consternation—so truly English—knowing not what to say,
+fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully
+glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the
+matter, or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with
+the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching
+about for his ideas, made bold to speak,
+
+“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
+
+“The Duke.”
+
+“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is
+all that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for
+our pains but our blisters?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
+getting a livelihood?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
+this whale.”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
+Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
+lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
+deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
+of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
+take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
+which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
+that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
+obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend
+gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is
+this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
+kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
+
+It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the
+Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
+inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with
+that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives
+us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the
+King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the
+soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
+matters.
+
+But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
+for that, ye lawyers!
+
+In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s
+Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is
+ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye
+whalebone.” Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone
+of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices.
+But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad
+mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid,
+to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
+
+There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the
+whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations,
+and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary
+revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but
+by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the
+same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic
+head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly
+be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
+seems a reason in all things, even in law.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
+
+“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this
+Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” Sir T. Browne,
+V.E.
+
+It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
+were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many
+noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the
+three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was
+smelt in the sea.
+
+“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts
+are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought
+they would keel up before long.”
+
+Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
+lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be
+alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from
+his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
+hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
+must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that
+has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
+It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must
+exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are
+incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded
+by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
+Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that
+the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and
+by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.
+
+Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
+had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more
+of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of
+those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort
+of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies
+almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
+proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn
+up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted
+whales in general.
+
+The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed
+he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were
+knotted round the tail of one of these whales.
+
+“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing
+in the ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know
+that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery;
+sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm
+Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold
+full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that
+all the oil they will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick
+into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that
+is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and
+is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish
+he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s
+make him a present of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what
+oil he’ll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn
+in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why,
+I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three
+masts of ours, than he’ll get from that bundle of bones; though, now
+that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than
+oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that.
+It’s worth trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he started for
+the quarter-deck.
+
+By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether
+or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
+escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
+now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing
+across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
+taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a
+huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper
+spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a
+symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards,
+in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or
+Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
+
+Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet
+the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently
+explained the whole to him.
+
+“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that
+will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!”
+
+Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he
+had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to
+the blasted whale; and so talk over it.
+
+Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
+bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses
+that speak English?”
+
+“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to
+be the chief-mate.
+
+“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
+
+“What whale?”
+
+“The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
+
+“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
+
+“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
+
+Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
+over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands
+into a trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired,
+and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
+
+He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the
+chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of
+bag.
+
+“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke
+it?”
+
+“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!”
+answered the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at
+very much. “But what are you holding yours for?”
+
+“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day,
+ain’t it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of
+posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”
+
+“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the
+Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion.
+
+“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack
+those whales in ice while you’re working at ‘em? But joking aside,
+though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get
+any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t
+a gill in his whole carcase.”
+
+“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t
+believe it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer
+before. But come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t
+me; and so I’ll get out of this dirty scrape.”
+
+“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined
+Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene
+presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were
+getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked
+rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good
+humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many
+jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up
+to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch
+the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
+nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short
+off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
+constantly filled their olfactories.
+
+Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
+the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
+fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within.
+This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against
+the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s
+round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could
+not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
+
+Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
+Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
+expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,
+who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
+Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
+had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
+held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and
+confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan
+for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
+dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
+of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office,
+was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and
+as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in
+him during the interview.
+
+By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
+small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
+large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest
+with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
+introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the
+aspect of interpreting between them.
+
+“What shall I say to him first?” said he.
+
+“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals,
+“you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish
+to me, though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning
+to his captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose
+captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught
+from a blasted whale they had brought alongside.”
+
+Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
+
+“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
+
+“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
+carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a
+whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a
+baboon.”
+
+“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one,
+is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures
+us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
+
+Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
+crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose
+the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
+
+“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
+them.
+
+“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in
+fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps
+somebody else.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service
+to us.”
+
+Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
+(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
+cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
+
+“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the
+interpreter.
+
+“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to
+drink with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking;
+but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur
+had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales,
+for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
+
+By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
+the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his
+boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
+whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats,
+then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed
+away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most
+unusually long tow-line.
+
+Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
+hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the
+Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly
+pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of
+his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
+cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the
+body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was
+digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck
+against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and
+pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high
+excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
+gold-hunters.
+
+And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
+screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
+to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when
+suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint
+stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without
+being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with
+another, without at all blending with it for a time.
+
+“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking
+something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
+
+Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
+of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
+cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
+your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good
+friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
+Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the
+sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for
+impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board,
+else the ship would bid them good bye.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
+
+Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as
+an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
+Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
+subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,
+the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem
+to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for
+grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though
+at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland
+soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides,
+amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for
+mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft,
+waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in
+perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.
+The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same
+purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine
+merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
+
+Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
+themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick
+whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and
+by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such
+a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four
+boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way,
+as laborers do in blasting rocks.
+
+I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris,
+certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be
+sailors’ trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were
+nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
+
+Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be
+found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that
+saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;
+how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise
+call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh
+the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
+ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the
+worst.
+
+I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
+owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen,
+and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be
+considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the
+Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous
+aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout
+a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They
+hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma
+originate?
+
+I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
+Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
+those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as
+the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in
+small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry
+it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas,
+and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding
+any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold,
+and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a
+savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
+old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital.
+
+I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
+likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
+times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
+latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
+work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,
+fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a
+place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without
+being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of
+furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full
+operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
+quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four
+years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not,
+perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the
+state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that
+living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by
+no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the
+people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by
+the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,
+when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance
+of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the
+open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water
+dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a
+warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance,
+considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with
+jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian
+town to do honour to Alexander the Great?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
+
+It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
+significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew;
+an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
+madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
+prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
+
+Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
+few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
+the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
+these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the
+boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy,
+or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a
+ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by
+nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him
+before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so
+gloomy-jolly.
+
+In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
+white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
+one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
+torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
+very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to
+his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities
+with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s
+calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth
+of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this
+little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy;
+behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved
+life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking
+business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had
+most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen,
+what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be
+luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him
+off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland
+County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic
+on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned
+the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the
+clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered
+diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would
+show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against
+a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some
+unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally
+superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the
+crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.
+But let us to the story.
+
+It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman
+chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;
+and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
+
+The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
+but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
+therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
+him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness
+to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
+
+Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
+the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
+happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The
+involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
+hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale
+line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as
+to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That
+instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly
+straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks
+of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken
+several turns around his chest and neck.
+
+Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He
+hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,
+he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
+exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face
+plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less
+than half a minute, this entire thing happened.
+
+“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
+saved.
+
+So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed
+by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
+irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,
+but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,
+unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never
+jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the
+soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your
+true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from
+the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he
+should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving
+him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped
+all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the
+boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that.
+We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell
+for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and
+don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
+though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
+propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
+
+But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
+under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
+he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to
+run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk.
+Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,
+blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away,
+all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to
+the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed
+like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly
+astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was
+winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between
+Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his
+crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though
+the loftiest and the brightest.
+
+Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
+practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
+lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
+middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark,
+how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely
+they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
+
+But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
+did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake,
+and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
+quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
+oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
+by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
+unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
+called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
+military navies and armies.
+
+But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
+spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
+Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
+upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him
+miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but
+from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at
+least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
+up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
+Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
+the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
+and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
+joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
+God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
+heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the
+loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So
+man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal
+reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason,
+is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,
+indifferent as his God.
+
+For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
+fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
+like abandonment befell myself.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
+
+That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to
+the Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
+previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
+the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
+
+While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
+in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
+when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
+ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
+
+It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
+others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found
+it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the
+liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.
+A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was
+such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a
+softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for
+only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to
+serpentine and spiralise.
+
+As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
+exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
+indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among
+those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
+the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
+opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
+uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring
+violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
+meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible
+sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit
+the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying
+the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from
+all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
+
+Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
+till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
+strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
+squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for
+the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
+feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
+squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally;
+as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer
+cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!
+Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves
+into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk
+and sperm of kindness.
+
+Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
+many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
+man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
+felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
+the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
+country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
+eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
+angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
+
+Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things
+akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the
+try-works.
+
+First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
+part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It
+is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains
+some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first
+cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like
+blocks of Berkshire marble.
+
+Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
+whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
+often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is
+a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
+imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
+snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
+purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,
+it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
+behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive
+a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,
+supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
+season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an
+unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
+
+There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in
+the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
+adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation
+original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.
+It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the
+tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.
+I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,
+coalescing.
+
+Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
+sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
+dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland
+or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior
+souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
+
+Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s
+vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s
+nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering
+part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for
+the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved
+along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and
+by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all
+impurities.
+
+But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
+to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
+This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
+blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
+time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
+terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
+lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally
+go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is
+similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is
+something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
+sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship
+pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet
+itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This
+spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless;
+the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from
+him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his
+assistants’, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among
+veteran blubber-room men.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
+
+Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
+post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
+windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
+curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
+there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
+cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged
+lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would
+so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer
+than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and
+jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it
+is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as
+that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for
+worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the
+idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set
+forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.
+
+Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
+by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,
+and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
+carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
+deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an
+African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside
+out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to
+double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,
+to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it,
+towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes
+at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer
+now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
+Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately
+protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
+
+That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
+pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted
+endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into
+which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s
+desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent
+on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a
+Pope were this mincer!*
+
+*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates
+to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as
+thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of
+boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably
+increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
+
+Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
+by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
+masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.
+It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her
+planks.
+
+The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
+roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
+fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and
+mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The
+foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly
+secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all
+sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
+with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
+hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in
+number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they
+are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
+and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the
+night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil
+themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one
+man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications
+are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound
+mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,
+with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first
+indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies
+gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from
+any point in precisely the same time.
+
+Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
+masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of
+the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted
+with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented
+from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
+extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
+inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
+fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
+from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
+
+It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were
+first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee
+the business.
+
+“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
+works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting
+his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said
+that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed
+for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of
+quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the
+crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains
+considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
+Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
+ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
+Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to
+inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in
+it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such
+as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left
+wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
+
+By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
+carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
+darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
+flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
+illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
+fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
+some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
+bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
+sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
+folded them in conflagrations.
+
+The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
+in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the
+pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged
+poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or
+stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out
+of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen
+heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil,
+which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth
+of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the
+windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
+otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their
+eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
+begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting
+barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in
+the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other
+their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;
+as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the
+flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers
+wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the
+wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and
+yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness
+of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in
+her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
+Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning
+a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
+material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
+
+So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
+guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,
+in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
+ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before
+me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
+visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
+drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
+
+But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
+thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
+horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote
+my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails,
+just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I
+was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically
+stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see
+no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I
+had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
+Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by
+flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
+rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
+rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of
+death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with
+the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,
+inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief
+sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern,
+with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back,
+just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and
+very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from
+this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of
+being brought by the lee!
+
+Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
+hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
+hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
+redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
+the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
+flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
+glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
+
+Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
+accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
+deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
+which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
+earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
+in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With
+books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and
+the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine
+hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath
+not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges
+hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would
+rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau,
+poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears
+by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is
+fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with
+unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
+
+But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way
+of understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the
+congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
+invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
+that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill
+eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,
+and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
+And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
+mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
+higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
+
+Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s
+forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single
+moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
+illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
+in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
+score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
+
+In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
+queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
+darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
+seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
+Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest
+night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.
+
+See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
+lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler
+at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat.
+He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and,
+therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
+contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
+goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
+genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
+supper of game.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
+
+Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
+descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
+slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside
+and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of
+old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
+surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he
+is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his
+spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it
+remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by
+rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting
+off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where
+once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along
+beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
+
+While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
+six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
+this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
+round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
+across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
+man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,
+rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio,
+every sailor is a cooper.
+
+At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
+hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down
+go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are
+replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
+
+In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
+incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with
+freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of
+the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about,
+as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the
+bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire
+ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is
+deafening.
+
+But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
+self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
+you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a
+most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses
+a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never
+look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides,
+from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is
+readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale
+remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands
+go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags
+restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower
+rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise
+faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed
+upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of
+sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined
+and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship’s company, the
+whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew
+themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to
+toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as
+bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.
+
+Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
+humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
+propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not
+to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to
+such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short
+of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
+bring us napkins!
+
+But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
+on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
+soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
+somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
+uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through
+for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their
+wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to
+carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
+and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined
+fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the
+heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the
+ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor
+fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled
+by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another
+whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but
+this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by
+long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but
+valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from
+its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of
+the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is
+spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through
+young life’s old routine again.
+
+Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
+thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
+thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught
+thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
+
+Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
+taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but
+in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
+added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
+he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely
+eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
+binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,
+that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his
+purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast,
+then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin
+there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed
+with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
+
+But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
+attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
+though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
+some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
+certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
+worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by
+the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in
+the Milky Way.
+
+Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
+heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the
+head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all
+the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
+untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
+glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed
+by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
+darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
+sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was
+set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton
+in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white
+whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by
+night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever
+live to spend it.
+
+Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
+and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s
+disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving,
+are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems
+almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing
+through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
+
+It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
+of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
+ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
+middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
+and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that
+knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three
+Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a
+crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
+zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the
+keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
+
+Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
+pausing.
+
+“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
+all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as
+Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
+courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
+are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
+which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but
+mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those
+who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now
+this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign
+of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a
+former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in
+throes, ‘tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be
+it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
+
+“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must
+have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck
+to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read
+Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
+He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,
+heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
+earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over
+all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
+hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
+but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.
+Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain
+snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
+speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it,
+lest Truth shake me falsely.”
+
+“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works,
+“he’s been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same,
+and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine
+fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have
+it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very
+long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard
+this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your
+doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili,
+your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of
+gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes.
+What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so
+killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s
+signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome
+calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get
+the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s
+arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer
+curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book.
+Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among
+‘em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries,
+or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or
+the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ‘em. Aye, here on the coin
+he’s just crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms
+all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know
+your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we
+come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as
+the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s
+arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful
+in signs, and significant in wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait
+a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac
+here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it
+off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s
+Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the
+Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is,
+Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab,
+and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion,
+lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his
+paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s our first love;
+we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the
+Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad
+about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion,
+stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the
+arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As
+we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering-ram,
+Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
+we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole
+deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we
+sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes
+through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.
+Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow
+here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon!
+But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now,
+and let’s hear what he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it;
+he’ll out with something presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”
+
+“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever
+raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s
+all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true;
+and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I
+won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s
+nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ‘em
+out.”
+
+“Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
+foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort
+of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old
+hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
+luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side
+of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now
+he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice
+like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
+
+“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
+the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and
+know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the
+old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The
+horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s
+the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and
+devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
+
+“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men
+in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all
+tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
+Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
+thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels,
+I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back
+country. And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of
+his thigh—I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t
+know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off
+some king’s trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil,
+Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his
+pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes
+a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire
+worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor
+boy! would he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has
+been watching all of these interpreters—myself included—and look
+now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again
+and hear him. Hark!”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his
+mind, poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Well, that’s funny.”
+
+“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a
+crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw!
+caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow?
+There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two
+more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”
+
+“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang
+myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can
+stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for
+my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
+
+“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all
+on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the
+consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when
+aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate.
+Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree.
+My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a
+silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did
+it get there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come
+to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded
+oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold!
+the green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ‘mong the
+worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey,
+hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel
+Enderby, of London.
+
+“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
+down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
+hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
+captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was
+a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
+thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
+festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
+behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale!”
+
+“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden
+it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden
+head like a mallet.
+
+“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars
+near him—“Stand by to lower!”
+
+In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
+crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
+But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
+moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
+once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
+always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
+the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other
+vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very easy matter
+for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
+whalemen—to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea;
+for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and
+then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived
+of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied
+with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a
+clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height
+he could hardly hope to attain.
+
+It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
+circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
+luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
+in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
+two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
+perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
+pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
+to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
+use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
+because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
+cried out, “I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
+over the cutting-tackle.”
+
+As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
+previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
+blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This
+was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
+solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the
+fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the
+word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his
+own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of
+the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and
+gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust
+forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his
+ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades)
+cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones
+together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye
+see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see the White
+Whale?—how long ago?”
+
+“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm
+towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been
+a telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
+
+“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down
+from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did
+so.
+
+“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
+
+“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
+
+“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,”
+began the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
+Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
+fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
+milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim
+dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up
+breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a
+milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
+
+“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his
+suspended breath.
+
+“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
+
+“Aye, aye—they were mine—my irons,” cried Ahab,
+exultingly—“but on!”
+
+“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly.
+“Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs
+all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
+
+“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old
+trick—I know him.”
+
+“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do
+not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
+somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled
+on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other
+whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters
+stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest
+I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
+boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would
+get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil
+of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say,
+I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the
+way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying,
+I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and
+gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
+great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls
+alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both
+eyes out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s
+tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like
+a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at
+midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say,
+after the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a
+Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
+flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
+all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized
+hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that
+like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same
+instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a
+flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me
+caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes,
+caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was
+thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript
+its way along the flesh—clear along the whole length of my arm—came
+out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there will
+tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:
+Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the
+yarn.”
+
+The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
+time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his
+gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
+one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
+trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
+marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
+occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
+crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to
+Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s
+bidding.
+
+“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and,
+taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
+
+“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
+captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
+
+“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing
+hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could;
+sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of
+diet—”
+
+“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
+altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night,
+till he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed,
+half seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars!
+he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great
+watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog,
+laugh out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.)
+But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by
+any other man.”
+
+“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said
+the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is
+apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that
+sort. But I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I
+myself—that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a
+strict total abstinence man; I never drink—”
+
+“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of
+fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go
+on with the arm story.”
+
+“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about
+observing, sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that
+spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse
+and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon
+ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with
+the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and
+off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there;
+that thing is against all rule”—pointing at it with the
+marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the
+carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to
+knock some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once.
+He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent,
+sir”—removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a
+bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry
+trace, or any token of ever having been a wound—“Well, the captain
+there will tell you how that came here; he knows.”
+
+“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was
+born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever
+such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought
+to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you
+rascal.”
+
+“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had
+been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
+
+“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he
+sounded, we didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before
+hinted, I didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such a
+trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard
+about Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was he.”
+
+“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
+
+“Twice.”
+
+“But could not fasten?”
+
+“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do
+without this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so
+much as he swallows.”
+
+“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for
+bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and
+mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know,
+gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably
+constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to
+completely digest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what
+you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For
+he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by
+feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a
+patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once
+upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed
+for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it
+up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible way for him to digest that
+jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system.
+Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind
+to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial
+to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have
+another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
+
+“No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome
+to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then;
+but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered
+for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in
+killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm
+in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so,
+Captain?”—glancing at the ivory leg.
+
+“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let
+alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all
+a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
+
+“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger,
+stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing;
+“this man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling
+point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet
+from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab’s arm.
+
+“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the
+boat! Which way heading?”
+
+“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
+“What’s the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain
+crazy?” whispering Fedallah.
+
+But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to
+take the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
+towards him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
+
+In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men
+were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
+With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,
+Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
+
+Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that
+she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
+merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
+Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not
+far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
+of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our
+Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
+fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
+out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;
+though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant
+Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
+pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not
+elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
+the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
+Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
+whole globe who so harpooned him.
+
+In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
+and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
+Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any
+sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one;
+and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm,
+the Amelia’s example was soon followed by other ships, English and
+American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were
+thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable
+house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons—how many, their
+mother only knows—and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I
+think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send the
+sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South
+Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling
+voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this
+is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of
+their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That
+ship—well called the “Syren”—made a noble experimental cruise;
+and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became
+generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a
+Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
+
+All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
+the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
+slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
+
+The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
+sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
+somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
+forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
+soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
+gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
+ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
+ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
+lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at
+the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
+squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
+called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
+other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
+jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
+howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
+did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we
+had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down
+the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
+taste.
+
+The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was
+bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
+certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
+symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
+could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.
+If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of
+you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be helped;
+besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the
+only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it
+was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all
+in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of
+the cook’s boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore
+and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and
+plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot
+heels to hat-band.
+
+But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
+English whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous,
+hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the
+can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and
+laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English
+whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all
+sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
+
+The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
+Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
+in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
+touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
+merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in
+the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural,
+but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special
+origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.
+
+During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
+ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
+must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I
+concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
+cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was
+reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one
+“Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man,
+professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and
+St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a
+box of sperm candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon
+as he spied the book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean
+“The Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short, this ancient and
+learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among
+other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale
+fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,”
+that I found a long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and
+cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by
+Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
+
+400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
+fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins
+of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
+(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
+beer.
+
+Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
+the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
+barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
+
+At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
+this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
+incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
+application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
+own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
+every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
+whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
+Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
+naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the
+nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game
+in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
+where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
+
+The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
+polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
+climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
+including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
+exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet
+of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,
+we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’
+allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
+Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
+fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in
+a boat’s head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
+somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But
+this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with
+the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would
+be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his
+boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
+
+But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
+of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
+whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when
+cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the
+world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
+decanter.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
+
+Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
+dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
+upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
+sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
+further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
+and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
+bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
+unconditional skeleton.
+
+But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
+fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
+whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures
+on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a
+specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land
+a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
+roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
+Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
+the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
+ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
+leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
+cheeseries in his bowels.
+
+I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
+beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
+with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
+to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
+poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
+heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
+boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
+contents of that young cub?
+
+And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
+gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
+to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
+For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
+of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
+the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
+glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
+capital.
+
+Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
+with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
+together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
+people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
+chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;
+and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
+wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
+
+Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
+unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
+head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
+seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
+its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
+then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a
+grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
+
+The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
+Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
+kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head
+again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
+terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
+sword that so affrighted Damocles.
+
+It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
+Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
+industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous
+carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof,
+and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden
+branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
+air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the
+leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied
+verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither
+flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless
+toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with
+thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom;
+the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he
+weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal
+voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;
+and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak
+through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken
+words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words
+are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements.
+Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for
+so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings
+may be overheard afar.
+
+Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
+great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet,
+as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
+him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven
+over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
+himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
+god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
+
+Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
+skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real
+jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as
+an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests
+should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced
+before this skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke through the
+ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
+its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was
+out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.
+I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.
+
+Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
+From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
+altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou
+measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how
+long do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among
+them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces
+with their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky
+chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
+
+These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be
+it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
+measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
+refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
+me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
+they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I
+have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have
+what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or
+River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire,
+England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has
+in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size,
+by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.
+
+In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
+belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
+grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
+Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
+Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
+great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
+cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day
+upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
+shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
+keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at
+the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo
+in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view
+from his forehead.
+
+The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
+verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
+wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
+such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
+the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
+composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not
+trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
+enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
+
+In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
+statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
+are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
+
+According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
+upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
+sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
+calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
+eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
+feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
+ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
+considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
+thousand one hundred inhabitants.
+
+Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
+leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
+
+Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
+jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
+simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
+unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large
+a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
+most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in
+this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your
+arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the
+general structure we are about to view.
+
+In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
+Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
+been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
+fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet,
+his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of
+plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a
+third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
+enclosed his vitals.
+
+To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
+extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
+the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty
+of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the
+time, but a long, disconnected timber.
+
+The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck,
+was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
+successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
+of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From
+that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only
+spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
+a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most
+arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
+footpath bridges over small streams.
+
+In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
+circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
+the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of
+the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
+which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
+invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
+feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
+feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the
+living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw
+but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of
+added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the
+ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the
+weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
+
+How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
+to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
+attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
+heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
+flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
+be truly and livingly found out.
+
+But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
+crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now
+it’s done, it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.
+
+There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
+not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on
+a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest,
+a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth
+more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
+tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
+billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they
+had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children,
+who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
+spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple
+child’s play.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
+
+From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
+to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
+compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
+folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail,
+and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
+involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great
+cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
+line-of-battle-ship.
+
+Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
+to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
+overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
+out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him
+in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it
+now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and
+antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
+Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be
+deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text,
+the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the
+weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that
+whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these
+dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of
+Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous
+lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a
+lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.
+
+One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
+though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing
+of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
+capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for
+an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
+thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
+outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
+circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
+mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
+of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its
+suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal
+theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose
+a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the
+flea, though many there be who have tried it.
+
+Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
+as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been
+a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
+wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
+preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
+geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
+completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
+the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
+links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
+posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales
+hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
+preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
+precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
+sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
+rank as Cetacean fossils.
+
+Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
+and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
+found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
+Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
+Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
+year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street
+opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
+disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s
+time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly
+unknown Leviathanic species.
+
+But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
+complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
+the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
+slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen
+angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed
+upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
+taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out
+that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A
+significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this
+book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the
+shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
+Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,
+pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures
+which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.
+
+When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
+jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to
+the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
+the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
+Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
+to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for
+time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I
+obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged
+bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all
+the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable
+hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
+whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present
+lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like
+Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s.
+Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem.
+I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
+unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
+must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
+
+But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
+stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
+ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
+for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
+print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
+some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
+sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and
+dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the
+moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there
+swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
+
+Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
+of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
+the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
+
+“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
+of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
+oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
+by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it
+without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
+side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea,
+and wound the Whales when they light upon ‘em. They keep a Whale’s
+Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground
+with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot
+be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo)
+is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their
+Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from
+this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was
+cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.”
+
+In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
+Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
+
+Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
+the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
+in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
+original bulk of his sires.
+
+But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
+present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
+found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
+prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
+belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
+ones.
+
+Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
+Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
+seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
+that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large
+sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority, that
+Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
+capture.
+
+But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
+advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
+it not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
+
+Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
+gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny
+tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus
+of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and
+Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander,
+Cooke’s naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of
+Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled
+Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and
+sixty feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate
+history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down
+the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight
+feet. And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
+
+But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
+as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny
+is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.
+Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
+that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not
+measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
+and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian
+and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are
+drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle
+of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest
+of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that
+of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
+
+But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
+recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
+at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through
+Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers
+of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all
+continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure
+so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last
+be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man,
+smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
+
+Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
+which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
+of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
+their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
+where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such
+a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that
+the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
+
+But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
+period ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois
+exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
+not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
+cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
+different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
+end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for
+forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God,
+if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days
+of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when
+the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and
+a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of
+months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
+not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need
+were, could be statistically stated.
+
+Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
+gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years
+(the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
+small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
+consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more
+remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
+influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense
+caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and
+pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
+separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems
+the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer
+haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that
+species also is declining. For they are only being driven from
+promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with
+their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very
+recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
+
+Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
+firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
+impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
+have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and
+glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to
+their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
+walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle
+of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
+
+But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
+cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
+positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
+But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less
+than 13,000, have been annually slain on the nor’-west coast by the
+Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this
+circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this
+matter.
+
+Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
+of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
+Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the
+King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are
+numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no
+reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for
+thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the
+successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in great
+numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he
+has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all
+Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles
+of the sea combined.
+
+Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
+of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
+therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations
+must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea
+of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of
+creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children
+who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to
+the present human population of the globe.
+
+Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
+species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
+before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
+Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he
+despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded,
+like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will
+still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial
+flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
+
+The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
+Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
+his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
+boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And
+when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
+vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
+was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,
+the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,
+that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
+Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
+
+And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
+pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
+condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
+been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he
+had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;
+by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
+ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise
+smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
+difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
+
+Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
+the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
+former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
+reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
+songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
+events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
+Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
+ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is
+an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
+enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,
+but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of
+all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still
+fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs
+beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an
+inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while
+even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying
+pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic
+significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
+diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
+genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the
+sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the
+glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must
+needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.
+The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of
+sorrow in the signers.
+
+Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
+properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
+particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,
+why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing
+of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like
+exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as
+it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg’s bruited
+reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,
+as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of
+significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all
+came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at
+the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that
+ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed
+the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the
+above hinted casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for
+by Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the
+land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they
+had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of
+this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
+interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
+
+But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
+or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
+with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain
+practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
+
+And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
+set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied
+with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus
+far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection
+of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
+carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
+provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to the
+distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was ordered to be
+hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate
+the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the
+forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
+
+Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
+abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
+from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
+seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
+But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
+the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;
+hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
+
+Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
+to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
+alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;
+the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of
+all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood
+as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the
+generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly
+efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually
+recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in
+uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in
+ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the
+shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or
+new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters
+more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
+unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both
+useful and capricious.
+
+The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
+was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
+vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
+except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
+athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
+
+A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
+the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway
+files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board,
+and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
+cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
+cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
+soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon
+the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood,
+the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes
+a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.
+Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
+one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
+unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
+handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in
+that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
+
+Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
+and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
+deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
+while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such
+liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some
+uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was
+this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as
+it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding
+infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity
+discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active
+in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
+though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible
+stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
+heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
+crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
+and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served
+to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle
+of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long
+wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
+but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings
+might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an
+unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without
+premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost
+say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of
+unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
+much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to
+it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by
+a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure
+manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early
+oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of
+those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield
+contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of a
+common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
+but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
+nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
+carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part
+of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the
+legs, and there they were.
+
+Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
+was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
+common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
+did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
+drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it
+had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
+unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept
+him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning
+wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a
+sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the
+time to keep himself awake.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. The Deck—First Night Watch.
+
+(Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two
+lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is
+firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws,
+and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red
+flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work.)
+
+Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
+and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
+shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye, now, this works better (sneezes).
+Halloa, this bone dust is (sneezes)—why it’s (sneezes)—yes it’s
+(sneezes)—bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what an old
+fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you
+don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get it
+(sneezes). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s
+have that ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently.
+Lucky now (sneezes) there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a
+little; but a mere shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only
+I should like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the
+time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (sneezes) scraped
+to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I’ve
+seen in shop windows wouldn’t compare at all. They soak water, they
+do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (sneezes) with
+washes and lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off,
+now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be
+all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that’s the heel; we
+are in luck; here he comes, or it’s somebody else, that’s certain.
+
+AHAB (advancing). (During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues
+sneezing at times.)
+
+Well, manmaker!
+
+Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.
+Let me measure, sir.
+
+Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it!
+There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here,
+carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
+
+Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
+
+No fear; 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 about?
+
+He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
+
+Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a
+fierce red flame there!
+
+Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
+
+Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that
+old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been 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 through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel
+shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
+
+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 ‘em, to
+stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at
+all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and
+let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but 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, I should
+like to know? Shall I keep standing here? (aside).
+
+‘Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one.
+No, 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, that you spoke to carpenter.
+
+Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say,
+an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,
+carpenter;—or would’st thou rather work in clay?
+
+Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
+
+The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?
+
+Bone is rather dusty, sir.
+
+Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
+living people’s noses.
+
+Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—dear!
+
+Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
+workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well
+for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
+nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that
+is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst
+thou not drive that old Adam away?
+
+Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
+something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
+entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
+pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
+
+It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
+was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, 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; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
+solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t
+speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now
+so 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 (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here
+I am, proud as 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 given bid for bid with
+the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was
+the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with.
+By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down
+to one small, compendious vertebra. So.
+
+CARPENTER (resuming his work).
+
+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; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning
+it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very
+queer. 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! And this is his
+leg; he’ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in
+three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was
+that? 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, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her
+roly-poly old 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 there
+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!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+
+According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
+inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
+sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
+the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
+
+*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
+is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench
+the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is
+removed by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept
+damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the
+mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
+
+Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
+the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from
+the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with
+a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;
+and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
+Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
+ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
+pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his
+back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
+courses again.
+
+“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning
+round to it. “On deck! Begone!”
+
+“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.
+We must up Burtons and break out.”
+
+“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to
+here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
+
+“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make
+good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth
+saving, sir.”
+
+“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
+
+“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
+
+“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it
+leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of
+leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a
+far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my
+leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug
+it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not
+have the Burtons hoisted.”
+
+“What will the owners say, sir?”
+
+“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons.
+What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me,
+Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my
+conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its
+commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On
+deck!”
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the
+cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it
+almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest
+outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half
+distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might well pass over in
+thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a
+happier, Captain Ahab.”
+
+“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of
+me?—On deck!”
+
+“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be
+forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto,
+Captain Ahab?”
+
+Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
+South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
+exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
+Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
+
+For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
+you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
+the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and
+as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast
+outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of
+Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
+thyself, old man.”
+
+“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
+murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
+beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using
+the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the
+little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed,
+and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
+
+“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the
+mate; then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails,
+and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up
+Burton, and break out in the main-hold.”
+
+It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
+Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;
+or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
+forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
+in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders
+were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
+
+Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
+were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
+being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
+slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
+sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
+go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
+puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask
+containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
+vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after
+tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and
+iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks
+were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if
+you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea
+like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless
+student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons
+did not visit them then.
+
+Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
+bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
+to his endless end.
+
+Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
+dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
+higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who,
+as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale,
+but—as we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea;
+and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating
+all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
+clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
+the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
+
+Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
+have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
+stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about
+amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom
+of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor
+pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
+caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after
+some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very
+sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
+long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
+frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones
+grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;
+they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply
+looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that
+immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like
+circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes
+seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that
+cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this
+waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who
+were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and
+fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing
+near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last
+revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
+So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher
+and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping
+over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying
+hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final
+rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
+higher towards his destined heaven.
+
+Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
+what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he
+asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was
+just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he
+had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
+war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
+whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
+and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not
+unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior,
+stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to
+the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
+are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
+uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the
+white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at
+the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual
+sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.
+No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
+to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes
+were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
+much lee-way adown the dim ages.
+
+Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
+was at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might
+include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard,
+which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal
+groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin
+was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of
+the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
+promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and
+took Queequeg’s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking
+Queequeg’s person as he shifted the rule.
+
+“Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long
+Island sailor.
+
+Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
+reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
+was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches
+at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools,
+and to work.
+
+When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted,
+he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring
+whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.
+
+Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people
+on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s
+consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
+him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
+dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will
+shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
+indulged.
+
+Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with
+an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
+drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along
+with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also,
+biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water
+was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in
+the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a
+pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he
+might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving
+a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little
+god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he
+called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him.
+The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg
+in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view.
+“Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed
+to be replaced in his hammock.
+
+But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
+while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him
+by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
+
+“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where
+go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where
+the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little
+errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think
+he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he
+must be very sad; for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found
+it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your
+dying march.”
+
+“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that
+in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues;
+and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their
+wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken
+in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip,
+in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all
+our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he speaks
+again: but more wildly now.”
+
+“Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his
+harpoon? Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game
+cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye
+that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies
+game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward;
+died all a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all
+the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them
+he jumped from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base
+Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no!
+shame upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ‘em go drown like Pip,
+that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
+
+During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
+was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
+
+But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
+that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
+there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some
+expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
+cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he
+had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
+and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
+he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of
+his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word,
+it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live,
+mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or
+some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
+
+Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
+that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
+generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
+So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
+sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
+vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
+and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
+springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
+pronounced himself fit for a fight.
+
+With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
+emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
+Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
+grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
+striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
+his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and
+seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
+his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical
+treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
+proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but
+whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart
+beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in
+the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
+inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must
+have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when
+one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh, devilish
+tantalization of the gods!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
+
+When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South
+Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
+with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
+answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues
+of blue.
+
+There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
+awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
+fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
+John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
+prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should
+rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed
+shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that
+we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
+slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
+restlessness.
+
+To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
+ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
+the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
+waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
+planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
+gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
+float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
+Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine
+Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay
+to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal
+swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
+
+But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an
+iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
+nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
+(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
+consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
+which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
+length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
+cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm
+lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins
+swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran
+through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick
+blood!”
+
+
+
+
+
+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, pike-heads,
+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. Come hither! put
+up thy gravestone, 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
+
+With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
+mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter
+placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the
+coals, and with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came
+along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While
+yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,
+Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
+anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
+some of which flew close to Ahab.
+
+“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always
+flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look
+here, they burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a
+scorch.”
+
+“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth,
+resting for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily
+can’st thou scorch a scar.”
+
+“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely
+woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in
+others that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why
+dost thou not go mad? How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the
+heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?—What wert thou
+making there?”
+
+“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
+
+“And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such
+hard usage as it had?”
+
+“I think so, sir.”
+
+“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
+mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?”
+
+“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
+
+“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing,
+and leaning with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye
+here—here—can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,”
+sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; “if thou could’st,
+blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel
+thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this
+seam?”
+
+“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
+
+“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for
+though thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into
+the bone of my skull—that is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s
+play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the
+leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a
+harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth;
+something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There’s
+the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith,
+these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing
+horses.”
+
+“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the
+best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”
+
+“I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from
+the melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
+first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these
+twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I’ll
+blow the fire.”
+
+When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
+spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A
+flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”
+
+This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when
+Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,
+with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to
+him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge
+shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and
+bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or
+some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.
+
+“What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered
+Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a
+fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”
+
+At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
+Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
+by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.
+
+“Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the
+pain; “have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”
+
+“Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
+harpoon for the White Whale?”
+
+“For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
+thyself, man. Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the
+barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”
+
+For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
+not use them.
+
+“Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave,
+sup, nor pray till—but here—to work!”
+
+Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the
+shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith
+was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he
+cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
+
+“No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
+there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me
+as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster
+of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen
+flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
+
+“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”
+deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
+baptismal blood.
+
+Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,
+with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of
+the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of
+it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing
+his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly
+bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and
+now for the seizings.”
+
+At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
+were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
+was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was
+traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with
+intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
+Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
+the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory
+pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his
+cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was
+heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy
+strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
+melancholy ship, and mocked it!
+
+
+
+
+
+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 earthy 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
+eye!—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 scales, 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!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+
+And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
+before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
+
+It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
+last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
+holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
+round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to
+pointing her prow for home.
+
+The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
+at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
+and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
+last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
+were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of
+her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
+top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious
+fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.
+
+As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
+success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same
+seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a
+single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to
+make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental
+casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these
+were stowed along the deck, and in the captain’s and officers’
+state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into
+kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an
+oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle,
+the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled
+them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his
+largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare
+coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets
+of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with
+sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved
+to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire
+satisfaction.
+
+As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
+barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
+still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
+try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of
+the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
+hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
+dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
+Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
+aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
+glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
+jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s company were tumultuously busy at
+the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been
+removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed
+Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and
+mortar were being hurled into the sea.
+
+Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
+ship’s elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
+full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
+diversion.
+
+And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
+with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s
+wakes—one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
+as to things to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the
+whole striking contrast of the scene.
+
+“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander,
+lifting a glass and a bottle in the air.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
+
+“No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the
+other good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”
+
+“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
+
+“Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come
+aboard, old hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that black from
+your brow. Come along, will ye (merry’s the play); a full ship and
+homeward-bound.”
+
+“How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud,
+“Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call
+me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine.
+Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!”
+
+And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
+stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew
+of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
+Bachelor; but the Bachelor’s men never heeding their gaze for the
+lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail,
+eyed the homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial
+of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby
+bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was filled with
+Nantucket soundings.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
+
+Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites
+sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
+rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed
+it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor,
+whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
+
+It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson
+fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun
+and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
+plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that
+it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of
+the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had
+gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
+
+Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
+off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
+tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales
+dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that strange
+spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a
+wondrousness unknown before.
+
+“He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
+homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
+worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh
+that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights.
+Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;
+in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
+furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
+rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the
+Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith;
+but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
+heads some other way.
+
+“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast
+builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured
+seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in
+the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.
+Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone
+round again, without a lesson to me.
+
+“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring,
+rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In
+vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening
+sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost
+thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy
+unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of
+once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
+
+“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild
+fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though
+hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
+
+The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
+windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These
+last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one
+could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay
+by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.
+
+The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and
+the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare
+upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
+gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
+
+Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who
+crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played
+round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails.
+A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven
+ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
+
+Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
+hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a
+flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
+
+“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
+coffin can be thine?”
+
+“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
+
+“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
+hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
+mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
+America.”
+
+“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes
+floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
+sight we shall not soon see.”
+
+“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
+
+“And what was that saying about thyself?”
+
+“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy
+pilot.”
+
+“And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I
+can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it
+not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here
+two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
+
+“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted
+up like fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
+
+“The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,”
+cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on
+sea!”
+
+Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
+slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead
+whale was brought to the ship.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
+
+The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
+coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
+ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
+the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on
+the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s prow
+for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high
+noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was
+about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his
+latitude.
+
+Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
+effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
+focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks
+lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness
+of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s
+throne. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses,
+through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his
+seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking
+instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some
+moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its
+precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the
+Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s deck, and with face
+thrown up like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids
+of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an
+earthly passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken;
+and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his
+latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment’s
+revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself:
+“Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly
+where I am—but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or
+canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living?
+Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes
+of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye,
+and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the
+unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!”
+
+Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
+numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
+“Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores,
+and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but
+what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where
+thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that
+holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop
+of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy
+impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy;
+and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that
+heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes
+are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this
+earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the
+crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament.
+Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will
+I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the
+level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and
+show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck,
+“thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on
+high; thus I split and destroy thee!”
+
+As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live
+and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
+fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the
+mute, motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
+while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
+together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
+shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
+
+In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
+her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon
+her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
+sufficient steed.
+
+Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s
+tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
+
+“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full
+of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down,
+down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of
+thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”
+
+“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr.
+Starbuck—sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
+mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of
+mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab,
+but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
+
+Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
+crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent
+but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes
+that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these
+resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
+storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless
+sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
+
+Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
+bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
+ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
+thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
+fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
+tempest had left for its after sport.
+
+Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
+flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
+might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask
+were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the
+boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top
+of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A
+great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high
+teetering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it
+again, all dripping through like a sieve.
+
+“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
+“but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You
+see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps,
+all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me,
+all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never
+mind; it’s all in fun: so the old song says;”—(sings.)
+
+  Oh! jolly is the gale,
+  And a joker is the whale,
+  A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+  The scud all a flyin’,
+  That’s his flip only foamin’;
+  When he stirs in the spicin’,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+  Thunder splits the ships,
+  But he only smacks his lips,
+  A tastin’ of this flip,—
+  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
+
+“Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike
+his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold
+thy peace.”
+
+“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a
+coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
+Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut
+my throat. And when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for
+a wind-up.”
+
+“Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”
+
+“What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
+mind how foolish?”
+
+“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing
+his hand towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale
+comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick?
+the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there;
+where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to
+stand—his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing
+away, if thou must!
+
+“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”
+
+“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
+Nantucket,” soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s
+question. “The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
+into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
+all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens
+up there; but not with the lightning.”
+
+At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
+the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
+instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
+
+“Who’s there?”
+
+“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
+pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
+lances of fire.
+
+Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
+the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some
+ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But
+as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may
+avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly
+towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering
+not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the
+vessel’s way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a
+ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
+in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
+chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
+
+“The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly
+admonished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been
+darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard?
+drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!”
+
+“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be
+the weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs
+and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let
+them be, sir.”
+
+“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
+
+All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
+tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
+the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
+three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
+
+“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a
+swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale
+violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast
+it!”—but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the
+flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants
+have mercy on us all!”
+
+To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
+the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
+from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething
+sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when
+God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene,
+Mene, Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
+
+While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
+enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
+all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
+constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
+jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed
+the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of
+Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as
+if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the
+preternatural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue
+flames on his body.
+
+The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more
+the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment
+or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It
+was Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not
+the same in the song.”
+
+“No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all;
+and I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on
+long faces?—have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr.
+Starbuck—but it’s too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that
+mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are
+rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a’ block with sperm-oil,
+d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like
+sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
+candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”
+
+At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning
+to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!”
+and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed
+redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
+
+“The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
+
+At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
+the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away
+from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where
+they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
+arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a
+knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted
+attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in
+Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes
+upcast.
+
+“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well;
+the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those
+mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat
+against it; blood against fire! So.”
+
+Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
+upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he
+stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
+
+“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
+once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to
+this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now
+know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence
+wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all
+are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
+placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
+dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the
+personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point
+at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly
+live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.
+But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and
+I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal
+power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds,
+there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear
+spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I
+breathe it back to thee.”
+
+[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise
+to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes,
+his right hand pressed hard upon them.]
+
+“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it
+wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I
+can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the
+homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The
+lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my
+whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning
+ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though
+thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of
+light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or
+not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my
+genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know
+not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but
+thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself
+unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself
+unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou
+omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear
+spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness
+mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly
+see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast
+thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
+haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap
+with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I
+worship thee!”
+
+“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old
+man!”
+
+Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly
+lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his
+whale-boat’s bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the
+loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now
+came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon
+burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the
+arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ‘tis an ill
+voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may,
+old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage
+than this.”
+
+Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
+braces—though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast
+mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But
+dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the
+burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to
+transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.
+Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
+that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
+
+“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
+heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
+may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
+the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the
+flame.
+
+As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
+some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
+much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;
+so at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him
+in a terror of dismay.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch. Ahab
+standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.
+
+“We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working
+loose and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
+
+“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up
+now.”
+
+“Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
+
+“Well.”
+
+“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
+
+“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind
+rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to
+it.—By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of
+some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots!
+Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of
+mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but
+cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh
+aloft there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the
+colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
+
+Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over
+the anchors there hanging.
+
+“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but
+you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long
+ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say that
+whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its
+insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft
+and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you say so?”
+
+“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since
+that time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we are loaded with powder
+barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
+afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
+red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; you’re
+Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat
+collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
+Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But
+hark, again, and I’ll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg
+off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope;
+now listen. What’s the mighty difference between holding a mast’s
+lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that
+hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don’t you see, you
+timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the
+mast is first struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in
+a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all of us,—were
+in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten
+thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I
+suppose you would have every man in the world go about with a small
+lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia
+officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why
+don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t
+ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
+
+“I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
+
+“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible,
+that’s a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind;
+catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these
+anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these
+two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands behind him.
+And what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron
+fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the
+world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long
+cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next
+to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just
+wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs
+so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed coat ought always to be worn
+in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to
+carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form
+gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for
+me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa!
+whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that
+come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
+
+The main-top-sail yard.—Tashtego passing new lashings around it.
+
+“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here.
+What’s the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we
+want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
+
+During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s
+jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
+its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached
+to it—for they were slack—because some play to the tiller was
+indispensable.
+
+In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock
+to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the
+compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the
+Pequod’s; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice
+the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is
+a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted
+emotion.
+
+Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
+strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the
+other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails
+were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
+the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when
+that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
+
+The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
+storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through
+the water with some precision again; and the course—for the present,
+East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
+given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
+steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the
+ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!
+a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze
+became fair!
+
+Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! the
+fair wind! oh-ye-ho, cheerly men!” the crew singing for joy, that
+so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents
+preceding it.
+
+In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report
+immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change
+in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards
+to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he mechanically
+went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
+
+Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a
+moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was
+burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s
+bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of
+upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain
+humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the
+roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly
+revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck
+was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that
+instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil
+thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for
+the instant he hardly knew it for itself.
+
+“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the
+very musket that he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock;
+let me touch it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many
+deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must
+see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill
+it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly
+while I think.—I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair
+for death and doom,—that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind
+that’s only fair for that accursed fish.—The very tube he pointed at
+me!—the very one; this one—I hold it here; he would have killed me
+with the very thing I handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his
+crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has
+he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas,
+gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding
+log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no
+lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag
+a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make
+him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any
+deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will,
+if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that
+crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just
+there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive,
+and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not
+reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this
+thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou
+breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st
+all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no
+lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest
+this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool
+would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes
+and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
+be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the
+sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself,
+inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What,
+then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan
+the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a
+whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ‘tis so.—Is heaven
+a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,
+tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then,
+if”—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the
+loaded musket’s end against the door.
+
+“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A
+touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh
+Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
+who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week
+may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall
+I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails
+are reefed and set; she heads her course.”
+
+“Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
+
+Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s
+tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream
+to speak.
+
+The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel;
+Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
+placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
+
+“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and
+tell him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
+
+Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
+mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed
+her on like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze
+abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole
+world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the
+invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;
+where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned
+Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a
+crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
+
+Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
+the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
+the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled
+by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and
+how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.
+
+“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot
+of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to
+ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
+
+But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
+helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
+
+“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
+
+“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at
+this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
+
+Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
+observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
+blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
+
+Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
+of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
+seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
+compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
+
+But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the
+old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has
+happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our
+compasses—that’s all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I
+take it.”
+
+“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale
+mate, gloomily.
+
+Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
+one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
+developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially
+one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much
+marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning
+has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars
+and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
+fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
+magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle.
+But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the
+original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be
+affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship;
+even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.
+
+Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
+compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took
+the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were
+exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be
+changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod
+thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair
+one had only been juggling her.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,
+but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who
+in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise
+unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
+rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
+ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;
+or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
+congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
+
+For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But
+chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper
+sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
+
+“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked
+thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so.
+But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance
+without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s
+needles. Quick!”
+
+Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
+to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
+revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
+matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old
+man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
+practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
+without some shudderings and evil portents.
+
+“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed
+him the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old
+Ahab’s needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his
+own, that will point as true as any.”
+
+Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
+was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
+follow. But Starbuck looked away.
+
+With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
+lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade
+him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul,
+after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
+blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered
+that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then
+going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable
+to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe
+of the crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread; and moving
+to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and
+horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the
+compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and
+vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab,
+who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly
+back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
+exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the
+level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
+
+One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
+persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk
+away.
+
+In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his
+fatal pride.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
+
+While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
+and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
+upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen,
+and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the
+log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake
+than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate
+the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate
+of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
+reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
+railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
+wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
+hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
+happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,
+and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic
+oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly;
+astern the billows rolled in riots.
+
+“Forward, there! Heave the log!”
+
+Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.
+“Take the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
+
+They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the
+deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into
+the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
+
+The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
+handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
+stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
+
+Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
+turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
+Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
+speak.
+
+“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
+spoiled it.”
+
+“‘Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled
+thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not
+thou it.”
+
+“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey
+hairs of mine ‘tis not worth while disputing, ‘specially with a
+superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”
+
+“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s
+granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert
+thou born?”
+
+“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
+
+“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
+
+“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
+
+“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s
+a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned
+of Man; which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind
+wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”
+
+The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
+dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
+turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
+resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
+
+“Hold hard!”
+
+Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging
+log was gone.
+
+“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
+sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
+reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and
+mend thou the line. See to it.”
+
+“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the
+skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,
+Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and
+dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”
+
+“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s
+missing. Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman.
+It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him
+off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking
+water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here.
+Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
+
+“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
+“Away from the quarter-deck!”
+
+“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab,
+advancing. “Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was,
+boy?
+
+“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
+
+“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils
+of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to
+sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”
+
+“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip!
+One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks
+cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip
+the coward?”
+
+“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens!
+look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned
+him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s
+home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy;
+thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s
+down.”
+
+“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at
+Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind
+a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me,
+sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let
+old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one
+with the white, for I will not let this go.”
+
+“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
+horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
+gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
+oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
+what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
+I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
+Emperor’s!”
+
+“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft
+with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the
+rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a
+new line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
+
+Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress
+solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on
+her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
+unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
+by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
+the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.
+
+At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
+Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
+dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then
+headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
+unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all
+Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their
+reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
+transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild
+cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew
+said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained
+unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared
+that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly
+drowned men in the sea.
+
+Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when
+he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
+unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
+explained the wonder.
+
+Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
+of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams
+that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company
+with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this
+only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a
+very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their
+peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their
+round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from
+the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have
+more than once been mistaken for men.
+
+But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
+confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
+sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
+and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
+sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
+with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he
+had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a
+rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
+looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the
+sea.
+
+The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where
+it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize
+it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that
+it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore;
+and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if
+to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
+
+And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
+for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that
+man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at
+the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at
+least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil
+in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They
+declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had
+heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
+
+The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see
+to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as
+in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
+the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
+connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;
+therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a
+buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint
+concerning his coffin.
+
+“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
+
+“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
+
+“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here
+can arrange it easily.”
+
+“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after
+a melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the
+coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”
+
+“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a
+hammer.
+
+“Aye.”
+
+“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a
+caulking-iron.
+
+“Aye.”
+
+“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his
+hand as with a pitch-pot.
+
+“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin,
+and no more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
+
+“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he
+baulks. Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he
+wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he
+won’t put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with
+that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s
+like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side
+now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of business—I don’t like it
+at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do
+tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean,
+virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly
+begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to
+an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in
+the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s
+tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women
+have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away with
+a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would
+work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
+Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run
+off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps.
+Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with
+pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the
+ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
+superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere
+they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I
+don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard
+tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and
+card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or
+by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of
+our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if
+we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s
+see—how many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten.
+Any way, I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines,
+each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the
+hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for
+one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer,
+caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
+
+The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open
+hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum
+slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his
+frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
+following him.
+
+“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
+complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a
+church! What’s here?”
+
+“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
+hatchway!”
+
+“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
+
+“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
+
+“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
+shop?”
+
+“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
+
+“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
+
+“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
+they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”
+
+“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
+monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
+next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
+same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
+jack-of-all-trades.”
+
+“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
+
+“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
+coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
+craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in
+hand. Dost thou never?”
+
+“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that;
+but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because
+there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it.
+Hark to it.”
+
+“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and
+what in all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught
+beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same,
+Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin
+knock against the churchyard gate, going in?
+
+“Faith, sir, I’ve—”
+
+“Faith? What’s that?”
+
+“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s
+all, sir.”
+
+“Um, um; go on.”
+
+“I was about to say, sir, that—”
+
+“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
+Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
+
+“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in
+hot latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the
+Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me
+some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s
+always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this
+way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the
+cork, and I’m the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
+
+(Ahab to himself.)
+
+“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker
+tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See!
+that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious
+wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial
+are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable
+thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere
+hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered
+life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that
+in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an
+immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in
+the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
+seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter,
+with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here
+when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck
+most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the
+unknown worlds must empty into thee!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
+
+Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
+upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the
+time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
+broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
+fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
+the smitten hull.
+
+“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere
+her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he
+could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
+
+Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;
+and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain
+himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her
+side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s
+main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by
+Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.
+
+“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely
+advancing. “How was it?”
+
+It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
+three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales,
+which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they
+were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby
+Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward;
+whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been instantly
+lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth
+boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in
+fastening—at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell
+anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat;
+and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing
+more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have
+indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was
+some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals
+were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her
+three far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one
+in the precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been
+necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but,
+for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her
+crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on
+stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for
+a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she
+had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the
+absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare
+boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again
+dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus
+continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing
+keel had been seen.
+
+The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
+object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his
+own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles
+apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
+
+“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some
+one in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap,
+his watch—he’s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard
+of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in
+the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he
+looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the
+coat—it must have been the—”
+
+“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I
+conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far
+had but icily received his petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let
+me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for
+it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only
+that—you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”
+
+“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take
+back the coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
+
+“He’s drowned with the rest on ‘em, last night,” said the old
+Manx sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their
+spirits.”
+
+Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s
+the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of
+the Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but
+among the number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on
+the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes
+of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the
+wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity;
+which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively
+adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies,
+that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always
+to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown
+constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and
+not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet
+missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the
+earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love,
+had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a
+vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it
+unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such
+tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’
+voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge
+of a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of
+a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness
+and concern.
+
+Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
+and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
+the least quivering of his own.
+
+“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to
+me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have
+a boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at
+home now—a child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see
+it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
+
+“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice
+that prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not
+do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and
+may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle
+watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all
+strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
+
+Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
+leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
+rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
+Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
+boat, and returned to his ship.
+
+Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
+was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
+however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;
+starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a
+head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her
+masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry
+trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
+
+But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
+that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.
+She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
+
+(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.)
+
+“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is
+coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee
+by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my
+malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most
+desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee,
+as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
+screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
+
+“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
+your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a
+part of ye.”
+
+“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the
+fadeless fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks
+like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
+
+“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
+drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
+But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
+ye.”
+
+“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in
+him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.”
+
+“Oh good master, master, master!
+
+“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
+Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
+know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art
+thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
+thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will
+befall.”
+
+(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)
+
+“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone.
+Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip!
+Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try
+the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no
+opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told
+me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the
+transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts
+before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great
+admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
+lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all
+come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up,
+monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white
+men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one
+Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly!
+Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill up again,
+captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no
+names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all
+cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am
+indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though
+this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to
+join me.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
+
+And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
+preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to
+have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
+there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
+longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
+vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
+encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with
+various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference
+with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned
+against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s
+eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the
+unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’
+night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose
+now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew.
+It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
+fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
+single spear or leaf.
+
+In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
+vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
+to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground
+to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of
+Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck,
+ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
+
+But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
+he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
+even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s
+glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times
+affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin
+Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked
+dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a
+mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
+unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For
+not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber,
+or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned;
+his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
+
+Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
+deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole,
+or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the
+main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the
+cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step;
+his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he
+stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
+in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never
+tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
+times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though
+he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the
+unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat
+and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine
+dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no
+more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he
+sent for.
+
+He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast
+and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly
+grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still
+grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But
+though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the
+Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these
+two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long
+intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such
+a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the
+awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced
+to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned
+the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without
+a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his
+scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
+other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
+Parsee his abandoned substance.
+
+And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
+and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab
+seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
+seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
+siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel
+was solid Ahab.
+
+At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
+from aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till
+after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at
+the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye
+see?—sharp! sharp!”
+
+But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
+children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
+old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly
+all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
+Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
+these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
+expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
+
+“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said.
+“Aye! Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged
+a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single
+sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends
+of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared
+a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done,
+with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked
+round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance
+long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then
+settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the
+rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his
+person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to
+his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and
+afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the
+royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead,
+astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded
+at so great a height.
+
+When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
+the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is
+hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
+circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge
+to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a
+wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
+cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the
+deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes
+cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
+unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
+carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the
+sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only
+strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one
+only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the
+slightest degree approaching to decision—one of those too, whose
+faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;—it was
+strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;
+freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted
+person’s hands.
+
+Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
+minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
+incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
+latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
+in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
+straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
+again round his head.
+
+But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
+not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked
+it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
+heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
+sight.
+
+“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
+being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
+somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
+them.
+
+But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long
+hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
+his prize.
+
+An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace
+it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would
+be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
+accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on
+and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared;
+while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was
+dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
+
+The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
+life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
+misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
+fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships,
+cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to
+carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
+
+Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
+some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
+now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
+half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and
+with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
+
+“Hast killed him?”
+
+“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the
+other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
+sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
+
+“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch,
+Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this
+hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are
+these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind
+the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
+
+“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to
+the hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
+yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were
+buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning to
+his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and
+lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock
+with uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life—”
+
+“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
+
+But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound
+of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so
+quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
+her hull with their ghostly baptism.
+
+As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
+hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
+
+“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her
+wake. “In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn
+us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
+
+It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
+hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
+transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
+man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s
+chest in his sleep.
+
+Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
+unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
+but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
+mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
+troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
+
+But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
+shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
+that distinguished them.
+
+Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
+air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
+girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen
+here at the Equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
+alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
+
+Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
+and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
+ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
+morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s
+forehead of heaven.
+
+Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
+creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
+oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
+little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
+their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
+the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
+
+Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
+watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
+and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
+aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment,
+the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome
+sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long
+cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
+neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
+however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save
+and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the
+sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
+
+Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
+and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
+stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch
+him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
+
+Ahab turned.
+
+“Starbuck!”
+
+“Sir.”
+
+“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On
+such a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first
+whale—a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years
+ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation,
+and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty
+years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war
+on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty
+years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have
+led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town
+of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any
+sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness!
+Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this;
+only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for
+forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry
+nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit
+to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy
+crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded
+past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent
+in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband
+alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and
+then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow,
+with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly
+chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty
+years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of
+the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and
+the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck!
+is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should
+have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it
+blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from
+out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I
+feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering
+beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my
+heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of
+grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus
+intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into
+a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to
+gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is
+the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
+stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives
+chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the
+far away home I see in that eye!”
+
+“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!
+why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let
+us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are
+Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
+youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
+longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me
+alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we
+bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some
+such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
+
+“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
+morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy
+vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
+cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back
+to dance him again.”
+
+“‘Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every
+morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his
+father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket!
+Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the
+boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
+
+But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook,
+and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
+
+“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it;
+what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
+commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
+pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
+making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not
+so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
+arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
+in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power;
+how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
+thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
+living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in
+this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
+the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon
+Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where
+do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
+to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and
+the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been
+making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the
+mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how
+we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid
+greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
+swaths—Starbuck!”
+
+But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
+
+Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
+two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
+leaning over the same rail.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
+
+That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
+intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
+to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
+up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to
+some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
+peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
+living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
+surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and
+then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible,
+Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the
+sail to be shortened.
+
+The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
+at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
+lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
+wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
+tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
+
+“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
+
+Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
+deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
+seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
+with their clothes in their hands.
+
+“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
+
+“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
+
+“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
+
+All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
+swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
+hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft,
+and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
+main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
+air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It
+is Moby Dick!”
+
+Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
+look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
+whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
+perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
+beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s
+head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the
+whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea
+revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent
+spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent
+spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian
+Oceans.
+
+“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched
+men all around him.
+
+“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
+cried out,” said Tashtego.
+
+“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
+reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised
+the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there
+she blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn,
+lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the
+whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
+top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay
+on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady,
+man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready
+the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower,
+lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
+
+“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away
+from us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
+
+“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
+Shiver her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
+
+Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails
+set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
+leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
+Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
+
+Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
+but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
+still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
+noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
+so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump
+was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing,
+and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish
+foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head
+beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went
+the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical
+rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters
+interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
+and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But
+these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly
+feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
+some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall
+but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale’s
+back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and
+to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and
+rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.
+
+A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
+the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
+ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
+eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
+rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
+great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
+divinely swam.
+
+On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
+leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
+shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
+namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
+to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
+tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
+who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
+thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
+
+And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
+waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
+Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
+submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
+But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant
+his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural
+Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the
+grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly
+halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered
+over the agitated pool that he left.
+
+With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
+three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
+
+“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he
+gazed beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide
+wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes
+seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The
+breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.
+
+“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
+
+In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were
+now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
+fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
+expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could
+discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down
+into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than
+a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as
+it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two
+long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
+undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw;
+his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.
+The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble
+tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled
+the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
+Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
+seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
+stand by to stern.
+
+Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,
+its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet
+under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
+malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself,
+as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath
+the boat.
+
+Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
+an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of
+a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
+mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
+the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish
+pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s
+head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
+now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
+unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
+tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the
+uttermost stern.
+
+And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
+whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
+body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
+the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
+while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
+impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
+this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
+helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
+the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
+its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
+frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
+enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain,
+and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two
+floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew
+at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast
+to the oars to lash them across.
+
+At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
+to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
+movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand
+had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
+slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as
+it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out
+of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.
+
+Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
+distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
+billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
+so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more
+feet out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent
+waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered
+spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled
+Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly
+to overleap its summit with their scud.
+
+*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
+(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down
+poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
+described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
+view whatever objects may be encircling him.
+
+But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
+and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
+wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
+The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
+grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the book
+of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale’s
+insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could
+still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that;
+helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least
+chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah
+incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other
+drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to
+look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s
+aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made,
+that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other
+boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into
+the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant
+destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case
+could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they
+remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now
+become the old man’s head.
+
+Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the
+ship’s mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the
+scene; and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail
+on the”—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby
+Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again,
+and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the
+whale!—Drive him off!”
+
+The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle,
+she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly
+swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
+
+Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white
+brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily
+strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom:
+for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one
+trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails
+came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
+
+But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the
+more abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes
+condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly
+diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts,
+though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it,
+in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of
+instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those
+noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
+
+“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on
+one bended arm—“is it safe?”
+
+“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing
+it.
+
+“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
+
+“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here
+are five men.”
+
+“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him!
+there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off
+from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail;
+out oars; the helm!”
+
+It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
+up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
+continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But
+the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale,
+for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a
+velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,
+pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a
+hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an
+unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable
+only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it
+sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
+overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and
+were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat
+having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything to
+her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching
+it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the
+Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,
+methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was regularly
+announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported
+as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck,
+binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour
+expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye see
+him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to
+lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and
+motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
+
+As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
+or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
+greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
+every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon
+the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.
+At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
+troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s
+face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
+
+Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
+evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place
+in his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck
+exclaimed—“The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too
+keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
+
+“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
+I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear
+thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
+
+“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “‘tis a solemn sight; an
+omen, and an ill one.”
+
+“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright
+to man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
+give an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite
+poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck;
+and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions
+of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I
+shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every
+spout, though he spout ten times a second!”
+
+The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
+Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
+
+“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from
+the air.
+
+“How heading when last seen?”
+
+“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
+
+“Good! he will travel slower now ‘tis night. Down royals and
+top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
+morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm
+there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr.
+Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned
+till morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the
+main-mast—“Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let
+it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye
+first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that
+man’s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times
+its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine,
+sir!”
+
+And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
+slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
+rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
+
+At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
+
+“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the
+light to spread.
+
+“See nothing, sir.”
+
+“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
+for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her
+all night. But no matter—‘tis but resting for the rush.”
+
+Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
+continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
+by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the
+wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
+acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
+that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they
+will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both
+the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of
+sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.
+And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of
+a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires
+shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this
+pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the
+cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright
+the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the
+fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and
+diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night
+obscures the fish, the creature’s future wake through the darkness
+is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
+pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous skill,
+the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all
+desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the
+mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in
+its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as
+doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or
+the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour;
+even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that
+other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his
+speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have
+gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of
+latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful
+in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for
+of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill
+that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from
+his port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile
+matters touching the chase of whales.
+
+The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
+cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
+field.
+
+“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the
+deck creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I
+are two brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me,
+spine-wise, on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha!
+we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!”
+
+“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now
+the mast-head cry.
+
+“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on
+and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow
+your trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a
+miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
+
+And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies
+of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine
+worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might
+have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the
+growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
+as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand
+of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of
+the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed,
+unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging
+towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
+along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
+vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of
+that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
+
+They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
+though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple,
+and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each
+other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
+directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of
+the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness,
+all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that
+fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
+
+The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
+outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
+hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,
+shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking
+yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for
+their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
+seek out the thing that might destroy them!
+
+“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when,
+after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been
+heard. “Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts
+one odd jet that way, and then disappears.”
+
+It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
+other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
+hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
+pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
+air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
+halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship
+than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick
+bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
+by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
+Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon
+of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
+the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of
+air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the
+distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged
+waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his
+act of defiance.
+
+“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his
+immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
+Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
+against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
+the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
+stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
+intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
+
+“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy
+hour and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at
+the fore. The boats!—stand by!”
+
+Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
+shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
+halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from
+his perch.
+
+“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a
+spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is
+thine—keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
+
+As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
+assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the
+three crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told
+them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight
+up to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain
+limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s
+sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all
+three boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White
+Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as
+it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail,
+offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted
+at him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each
+separate plank of which those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred,
+incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for
+a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while
+all the time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to
+shreds.
+
+But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
+and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
+lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
+warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
+for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
+tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
+line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping
+that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more
+savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!
+
+Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose
+harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came
+flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat.
+Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically
+reached within—through—and then, without—the rays of steel;
+dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and
+then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted
+fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the
+White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other
+lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of
+Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two
+rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the
+sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the
+odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the
+grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.
+
+While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
+the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
+aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his
+legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
+singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s
+line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to
+rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand
+concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards
+Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
+from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its
+bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
+again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from
+under it, like seals from a sea-side cave.
+
+The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as
+he struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little
+distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his
+back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from
+side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip
+or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
+came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work
+for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the
+ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
+leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.
+
+As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again
+came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the
+floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and
+safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and
+ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable
+intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there;
+but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As
+with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to
+his boat’s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor
+did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap.
+
+But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
+instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
+Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory
+leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
+
+“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ‘tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who
+he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
+
+“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up;
+“I put good work into that leg.”
+
+“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
+
+“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even
+with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone
+of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white
+whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own
+proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast
+scrape yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
+
+“Dead to leeward, sir.”
+
+“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest
+of the spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the
+boat’s crews.”
+
+“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
+
+“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
+unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that
+shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.
+By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
+
+The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
+Parsee was not there.
+
+“The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in—”
+
+“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
+forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”
+
+But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
+nowhere to be found.
+
+“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your
+line—I thought I saw him dragging under.”
+
+“My line! my line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What
+death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
+The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the
+forged iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered fool!
+this hand did dart it!—‘tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him
+nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the
+oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a
+pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life!
+I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight
+through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”
+
+“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried
+Starbuck; “never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’
+name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days
+chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from
+under thee; thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with
+warnings:—
+
+“What more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous
+fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the
+bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,
+oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”
+
+“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since
+that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes.
+But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the
+palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab,
+man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee
+and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’
+lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest
+mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump;
+leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis
+Ahab—his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves
+upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that
+tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break,
+ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser
+tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then
+laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will
+twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So
+with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow will be the third.
+Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D’ye
+feel brave men, brave?”
+
+“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
+
+“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
+muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same
+to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I
+seek to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast
+in mine!—The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go
+before:—but still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s
+that?—There’s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by
+the ghosts of the whole line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks
+my brain. I’ll, I’ll solve it, though!”
+
+When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
+
+So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as
+on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
+grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
+in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
+their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of
+Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still
+as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle;
+his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat
+due eastward for the earliest sun.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
+
+The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
+solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
+daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
+
+“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
+
+“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all.
+Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely
+day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to
+the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
+fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought,
+had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels,
+feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity.
+God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a
+coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains
+beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was
+very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in
+which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is
+growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s
+like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the
+earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds
+blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash
+the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere
+this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and
+ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.
+Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on
+such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and
+slink there. And yet, ‘tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who
+ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.
+Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
+strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
+Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the
+wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage
+mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects,
+not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most
+malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that
+there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm
+Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in
+strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark,
+however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest
+Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go
+at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly
+blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something
+so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it!
+Aloft there! What d’ye see?”
+
+“Nothing, sir.”
+
+“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!
+Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,
+he’s chasing me now; not I, him—that’s bad; I might have known it,
+too. Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run
+him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular
+look outs! Man the braces!”
+
+Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s
+quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
+ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
+white wake.
+
+“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck
+to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God
+keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside
+wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
+
+“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen
+basket. “We should meet him soon.”
+
+“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and
+once more Ahab swung on high.
+
+A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
+long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
+weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three
+mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced
+it.
+
+“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
+there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too
+far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that
+helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But
+let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s
+time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and
+not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of
+Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s
+a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead
+somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the
+palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward,
+then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
+mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped
+cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the
+difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye, old
+mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not,
+my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood has
+the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and
+I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men
+made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he said?
+he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But
+where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend
+those endless stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him,
+wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful
+truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell
+short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep a good eye upon the whale, the while
+I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale
+lies down there, tied by head and tail.”
+
+He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
+through the cloven blue air to the deck.
+
+In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
+stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
+mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.
+
+“Starbuck!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage,
+Starbuck.”
+
+“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
+
+“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
+Starbuck!”
+
+“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
+
+“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
+flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
+Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
+
+Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
+
+“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see,
+it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion
+then!”
+
+“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him.
+“Stand by the crew!”
+
+In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
+
+“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window
+there; “O master, my master, come back!”
+
+But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
+boat leaped on.
+
+Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
+numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
+the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they
+dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
+bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in
+those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in
+the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching
+regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been
+observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried;
+and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such tiger-yellow
+barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the
+sharks—a matter sometimes well known to affect them,—however it was,
+they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.
+
+“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side,
+and following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring
+boldly to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and
+followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical
+third day?—For when three days flow together in one continuous intense
+pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the
+third the evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may.
+Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly
+calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim
+before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow
+grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I
+seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life
+seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming?
+My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy
+heart,—beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move,
+move! speak aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the
+hill?—Crazed;—aloft there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—
+
+“Mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he
+pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the
+main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man now?
+see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!”
+
+The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the
+mast-heads—a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had
+sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his
+way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining
+the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered
+against the opposing bow.
+
+“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
+drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no
+hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
+
+Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
+quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of
+ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
+subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
+trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
+but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
+hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
+into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
+an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
+flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
+marble trunk of the whale.
+
+“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward
+to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded
+in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that
+fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his
+broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted
+together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and
+once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the
+two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their
+bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
+
+While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
+whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
+shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and
+round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
+during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines
+around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
+frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
+
+The harpoon dropped from his hand.
+
+“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye,
+Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this
+then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last
+letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the
+ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and
+return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing
+that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I
+harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey
+me.—Where’s the whale? gone down again?”
+
+But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
+corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had
+been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
+swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had
+been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
+her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost
+velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the
+sea.
+
+“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the
+third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou,
+that madly seekest him!”
+
+Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
+leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by
+the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he
+leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow
+him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he
+saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three
+mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
+which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in
+repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
+he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves
+on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he
+heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving
+a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or
+flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had
+just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer
+and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
+
+Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance
+to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
+latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
+Whale’s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
+nearing him once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not
+been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves
+the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the
+boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
+jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost
+every dip.
+
+“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.
+Pull on! ‘tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding
+water.”
+
+“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
+
+“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he
+muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
+Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm! take
+the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him
+forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
+
+At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along
+with the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
+advance—as the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the
+smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled
+round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
+with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
+poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
+hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
+into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh
+flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly
+canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the
+gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
+into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen—who foreknew not the
+precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its
+effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of
+them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing
+wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly
+dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
+
+Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
+instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
+sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with
+the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their
+seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
+felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
+
+“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—‘tis whole again; oars!
+oars! Burst in upon him!”
+
+Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
+round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
+catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing
+in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a
+larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
+prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
+
+Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands!
+stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
+
+“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
+
+“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for
+ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see:
+the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
+
+But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
+sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
+burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat
+lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying
+hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
+
+Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer
+remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
+with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
+forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
+bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon
+as he.
+
+“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers
+of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a
+woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is
+this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
+Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up
+helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on
+towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me
+now!”
+
+“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now
+help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning
+whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own
+unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is
+all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou
+grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of
+as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet
+ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou
+grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
+not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in
+his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries!
+cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
+
+“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
+my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
+now come to her, for the voyage is up.”
+
+From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
+hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in
+their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments;
+all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to
+side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of
+overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution,
+swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of
+all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
+smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some
+fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the
+harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach,
+they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
+
+“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the
+boat; “its wood could only be American!”
+
+Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
+keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
+off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a
+time, he lay quiescent.
+
+“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
+hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked
+keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm,
+and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and
+without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked
+captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost
+greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest
+bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life,
+and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou
+all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee;
+from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last
+breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
+and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
+chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up
+the spear!”
+
+The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
+velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped
+to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the
+neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
+shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
+heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty
+tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
+depths.
+
+For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned.
+“The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim,
+bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous
+Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by
+infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the
+pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
+And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its
+crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate
+and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest
+chip of the Pequod out of sight.
+
+But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
+sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
+erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,
+which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
+billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
+hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing
+the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
+tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home
+among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;
+this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
+hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill,
+the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen
+there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his
+imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the
+flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
+to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and
+helmeted herself with it.
+
+Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
+surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
+shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
+
+
+
+
+
+Epilogue “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE” Job.
+
+The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one
+did survive the wreck.
+
+It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom
+the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that
+bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the
+three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern.
+So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of
+it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then,
+but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had
+subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
+towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
+circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
+centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of
+its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
+force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and
+floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day
+and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks,
+they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks
+sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer,
+and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in
+her retracing search after her missing children, only found another
+orphan.
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+THE INTRODUCTION
+
+THE Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of
+the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them.  There are nearer
+approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist;
+the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of
+the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the
+Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence.  But no other
+Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same
+perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or
+contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not
+of one age only but of all.  Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony
+or a greater wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power.  Nor
+in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life and
+speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy.  The Republic is
+the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here
+philosophy reaches the highest point to which ancient thinkers ever
+attained.  Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns, was
+the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although neither of them
+always distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of
+truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of
+science which was not yet realized.  He was the greatest metaphysical
+genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any other
+ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained.  The
+sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many
+instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of
+Socrates and Plato.  The principles of definition, the law of
+contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction
+between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means
+and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind
+into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of
+pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary--these and other
+great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and
+were probably first invented by Plato.  The greatest of all logical
+truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose
+sight, the difference between words and things, has been most
+strenuously insisted on by him, although he has not always avoided the
+confusion of them in his own writings.  But he does not bind up truth
+in logical formulae,--logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the
+science which he imagines to "contemplate all truth and all existence"
+is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to
+have discovered.
+
+Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a
+still larger design which was to have included an ideal history of
+Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy.  The fragment
+of the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only
+in importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said
+as a fact to have inspired some of the early navigators of the
+sixteenth century.  This mythical tale, of which the subject was a
+history of the wars of the Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is
+supposed to be founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it
+would have stood in the same relation as the writings of the
+logographers to the poems of Homer.  It would have told of a struggle
+for Liberty, intended to represent the conflict of Persia and Hellas.
+We may judge from the noble commencement of the Timaeus, from the
+fragment of the Critias itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in
+what manner Plato would have treated this high argument.  We can only
+guess why the great design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became
+sensible of some incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he had
+lost his interest in it, or because advancing years forbade the
+completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that had
+this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato
+himself sympathizing with the struggle for Hellenic independence,
+singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, perhaps making the
+reflection of Herodotus where he contemplates the growth of the
+Athenian empire--"How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has
+made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in
+greatness!" or, more probably, attributing the victory to the ancient
+good order of Athens and to the favor of Apollo and Athene.
+
+Again, Plato may be regarded as the "captain" ('arhchegoz') or leader
+of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the
+original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of
+the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary
+States which are framed upon the same model.  The extent to which
+Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the
+Politics has been little recognized, and the recognition is the more
+necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself.  The two
+philosophers had more in common than they were conscious of; and
+probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle.
+In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in
+the works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original writers
+like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas.  That there is a
+truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to
+herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has been
+enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground.  Of the Greek
+authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato
+has had the greatest influence.  The Republic of Plato is also the
+first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and
+Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants.
+Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon,
+he is profoundly impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early
+Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of
+Literature on politics.  Even the fragments of his words when "repeated
+at second-hand" have in all ages ravished the hearts of men, who have
+seen reflected in them their own higher nature.  He is the father of
+idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature.  And many of the
+latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity
+of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the sexes, have
+been anticipated in a dream by him.
+
+
+
+ARGUMENT
+
+The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature of
+which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just and blameless old
+man--then discussed on the basis of proverbial morality by Socrates and
+Polemarchus--then caricatured by Thrasymachus and partially explained
+by Socrates--reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and
+having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the
+ideal State which is constructed by Socrates.  The first care of the
+rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old
+Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality,
+and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier strain of poetry,
+and greater harmony of the individual and the State.  We are thus led
+on to the conception of a higher State, in which "no man calls anything
+his own," and in which there is neither "marrying nor giving in
+marriage," and "kings are philosophers" and "philosophers are kings;"
+and there is another and higher education, intellectual as well as
+moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth
+only but of the whole of life.  Such a State is hardly to be realized
+in this world and would quickly degenerate.  To the perfect ideal
+succeeds the government of the soldier and the lover of honor, this
+again declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an
+imaginary but regular order having not much resemblance to the actual
+facts.  When "the wheel has come full circle" we do not begin again
+with a new period of human life; but we have passed from the best to
+the worst, and there we end.  The subject is then changed and the old
+quarrel of poetry and philosophy which had been more lightly treated in
+the earlier books of the Republic is now resumed and fought out to a
+conclusion.  Poetry is discovered to be an imitation thrice removed
+from the truth, and Homer, as well as the dramatic poets, having been
+condemned as an imitator, is sent into banishment along with them.  And
+the idea of the State is supplemented by the revelation of a future
+life.
+
+The division into books, like all similar divisions, is probably later
+than the age of Plato.  The natural divisions are five in number;--(1)
+Book I and the first half of Book II down to the paragraph beginning,
+"I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus," which is
+introductory; the first book containing a refutation of the popular and
+sophistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the
+earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any definite result.  To this is
+appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common
+opinion, and an answer is demanded to the question--What is justice,
+stripped of appearances?  The second division (2) includes the
+remainder of the second and the whole of the third and fourth books,
+which are mainly occupied with the construction of the first State and
+the first education.  The third division (3) consists of the fifth,
+sixth, and seventh books, in which philosophy rather than justice is
+the subject of inquiry, and the second State is constructed on
+principles of communism and ruled by philosophers, and the
+contemplation of the idea of good takes the place of the social and
+political virtues.  In the eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions
+of States and of the individuals who correspond to them are reviewed in
+succession; and the nature of pleasure and the principle of tyranny are
+further analyzed in the individual man.  The tenth book (5) is the
+conclusion of the whole, in which the relations of philosophy to poetry
+are finally determined, and the happiness of the citizens in this life,
+which has now been assured, is crowned by the vision of another.
+
+Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted; the first
+(Books I-IV) containing the description of a State framed generally in
+accordance with Hellenic notions of religion and morality, while in the
+second (Books V-X) the Hellenic State is transformed into an ideal
+kingdom of philosophy, of which all other governments are the
+perversions.  These two points of view are really opposed, and the
+opposition is only veiled by the genius of Plato.  The Republic, like
+the Phaedrus, is an imperfect whole; the higher light of philosophy
+breaks through the regularity of the Hellenic temple, which at last
+fades away into the heavens.  Whether this imperfection of structure
+arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect
+reconcilement in the writer's own mind of the struggling elements of
+thought which are now first brought together by him; or, perhaps, from
+the composition of the work at different times--are questions, like the
+similar question about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are worth
+asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer.  In the age of Plato
+there was no regular mode of publication, and an author would have the
+less scruple in altering or adding to a work which was known only to a
+few of his friends.  There is no absurdity in supposing that he may
+have laid his labors aside for a time, or turned from one work to
+another; and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the
+case of a long than of a short writing.  In all attempts to determine
+the chronological he order of the Platonic writings on internal
+evidence, this uncertainty about any single Dialogue being composed at
+one time is a disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect
+longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter
+ones.  But, on the other hand, the seeming discrepancies of the
+Republic may only arise out of the discordant elements which the
+philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole, perhaps without
+being himself able to recognize the inconsistency which is obvious to
+us.  For there is a judgment of after ages which few great writers have
+ever been able to anticipate for themselves.  They do not perceive the
+want of connection in their own writings, or the gaps in their systems
+which are visible enough to those who come after them.  In the
+beginnings of literature and philosophy, amid the first efforts of
+thought and language, more inconsistencies occur than now, when the
+paths of speculation are well worn and the meaning of words precisely
+defined.  For consistency, too, is the growth of time; and some of the
+greatest creations of the human mind have been wanting in unity.  Tried
+by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, according to our
+modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the deficiency is no proof
+that they were composed at different times or by different hands.  And
+the supposition that the Republic was written uninterruptedly and by a
+continuous effort is in some degree confirmed by the numerous
+references from one part of the work to another.
+
+The second title, "Concerning Justice," is not the one by which the
+Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity, and,
+like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore
+be assumed to be of later date.  Morgenstern and others have asked
+whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the
+construction of the State is the principal argument of the work.  The
+answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same
+truth; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the
+visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
+The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of
+the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body.  In
+Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice is the
+ideal.  Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God is
+within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom; "the house
+not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," is reduced to the
+proportions of an earthly building.  Or, to use a Platonic image,
+justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the
+whole texture.  And when the constitution of the State is completed,
+the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the
+same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of
+the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and
+punishments in another life.  The virtues are based on justice, of
+which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice
+is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is
+reflected both in the institutions of States and in motions of the
+heavenly bodies.  The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than
+the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with
+hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications
+that the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature, and
+over man.
+
+Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and
+in modern times.  There is a stage of criticism in which all works,
+whether of nature or of art, are referred to design.  Now in ancient
+writings, and indeed in literature generally, there remains often a
+large element which was not comprehended in the original design.  For
+the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in
+the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end
+before he begins.  The reader who seeks to find some one idea under
+which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest
+and most general.  Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the
+ordinary explanations of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself
+to have found the true argument "in the representation of human life in
+a State perfected by justice and governed according to the idea of
+good." There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can
+hardly be said to express the design of the writer.  The truth is, that
+we may as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need anything be
+excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally
+led by the association of ideas, and which does not interfere with the
+general purpose.  What kind or degree of unity is to be sought after in
+a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem
+which has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato
+himself, the inquiry "what was the intention of the writer," or "what
+was the principal argument of the Republic" would have been hardly
+intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed.
+
+Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to
+Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the
+State?  Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or "the
+day of the Lord," or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the
+"Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings" only convey, to us at
+least, their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato
+reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the
+idea of good--like the sun in the visible world;--about human
+perfection, which is justice--about education beginning in youth and
+continuing in later years--about poets and sophists and tyrants who are
+the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind--about "the world" which
+is the embodiment of them--about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon
+earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human
+life.  No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more than
+the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them.  Every shade of
+light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is
+allowable in a work of philosophical imagination.  It is not all on the
+same plane; it easily passes from ideas to myths and fancies, from
+facts to figures of speech.  It is not prose but poetry, at least a
+great part of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or
+the probabilities of history.  The writer is not fashioning his ideas
+into an artistic whole; they take possession of him and are too much
+for him.  We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as
+Plato has conceived is practicable or not, or whether the outward form
+or the inward life came first into the mind of the writer.  For the
+practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth; and the
+highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the
+greatest "marks of design"--justice more than the external frame-work
+of the State, the idea of good more than justice.  The great science of
+dialectic or the organization of ideas has no real content; but is only
+a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be
+pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence.  It is in the
+fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches the "summit of
+speculation," and these, although they fail to satisfy the requirements
+of a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded as the most important,
+as they are also the most original, portions of the work.
+
+It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has
+been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the
+conversation was held (the year 411 B. C. which is proposed by him will
+do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and especially a
+writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology, only
+aims at general probability.  Whether all the persons mentioned in the
+Republic could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which
+would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years later,
+or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more than to
+Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and need not greatly
+trouble us now.  Yet this may be a question having no answer "which is
+still worth asking," because the investigation shows that we can not
+argue historically from the dates in Plato; it would be useless
+therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements of them
+in order avoid chronological difficulties, such, for example, as the
+conjecture of C. F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the
+brothers but the uncles of Plato, or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato
+intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which some of
+his Dialogues were written.
+
+
+
+CHARACTERS
+
+The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus,
+Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus.  Cephalus appears in
+the introduction only, Polemarchus drops at the end of the first
+argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence at the close of the
+first book.  The main discussion is carried on by Socrates, Glaucon,
+and Adeimantus.  Among the company are Lysias (the orator) and
+Euthydemus, the sons of Cephalus and brothers of Polemarchus, an
+unknown Charmantides--these are mute auditors; also there is
+Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the Dialogue which bears
+his name, he appears as the friend and ally of Thrasymachus.
+
+Cephalus, the patriarch of house, has been appropriately engaged in
+offering a sacrifice.  He is the pattern of an old man who has almost
+done with life, and is at peace with himself and with all mankind.  He
+feels that he is drawing nearer to the world below, and seems to linger
+around the memory of the past.  He is eager that Socrates should come
+to visit him, fond of the poetry of the last generation, happy in the
+consciousness of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the
+tyranny of youthful lusts.  His love of conversation, his affection,
+his indifference to riches, even his garrulity, are interesting traits
+of character.  He is not one of those who have nothing to say, because
+their whole mind has been absorbed in making money.  Yet he
+acknowledges that riches have the advantage of placing men above the
+temptation to dishonesty or falsehood.  The respectful attention shown
+to him by Socrates, whose love of conversation, no less than the
+mission imposed upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of
+all men, young and old alike, should also be noted.  Who better suited
+to raise the question of justice than Cephalus, whose life might seem
+to be the expression of it?  The moderation with which old age is
+pictured by Cephalus as a very tolerable portion of existence is
+characteristic, not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally, and
+contrasts with the exaggeration of Cicero in the De Senectute.  The
+evening of life is described by Plato in the most expressive manner,
+yet with the fewest possible touches.  As Cicero remarks (Ep. ad Attic.
+iv. 16), the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in the
+discussion which follows, and which he could neither have understood
+nor taken part in without a violation of dramatic propriety.
+
+His "son and heir" Polemarchus has the frankness and impetuousness of
+youth; he is for detaining Socrates by force in the opening scene, and
+will not "let him off" on the subject of women and children.  Like
+Cephalus, he is limited in his point of view, and represents the
+proverbial stage of morality which has rules of life rather than
+principles; and he quotes Simonides as his father had quoted Pindar.
+But after this he has no more to say; the answers which he makes are
+only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates.  He has not yet
+experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus,
+nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the
+pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age.  He is incapable of arguing, and
+is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what
+he is saying.  He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that
+the virtues follow the analogy of the arts.  From his brother Lysias we
+learn that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion is
+here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his
+family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii to Athens.
+
+The "Chalcedonian giant," Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard
+in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to
+Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics.  He
+is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse unless he is paid, fond
+of making an oration, and hoping thereby to escape the inevitable
+Socrates; but a mere child in argument, and unable to foresee that the
+next "move" (to use a Platonic expression) will "shut him up."  He has
+reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this respect is in
+advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus.  But he is incapable of defending
+them in a discussion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion in banter
+and insolence.  Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by
+Plato were really held either by him or by any other Sophist is
+uncertain; in the infancy of philosophy serious errors about morality
+might easily grow up--they are certainly put into the mouths of
+speakers in Thucydides; but we are concerned at present with Plato's
+description of him, and not with the historical reality.  The
+inequality of the contest adds greatly to the humor of the scene.  The
+pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of the great
+master of dialectic, who knows how to touch all the springs of vanity
+and weakness in him.  He is greatly irritated by the irony of Socrates,
+but his noisy and imbecile rage only lays him more and more open to the
+thrusts of his assailant.  His determination to cram down their
+throats, or put "bodily into their souls" his own words, elicits a cry
+of horror from Socrates.  The state of his temper is quite as worthy of
+remark as the process of the argument.  Nothing is more amusing than
+his complete submission when he has been once thoroughly beaten.  At
+first he seems to continue the discussion with reluctance, but soon
+with apparent good-will, and he even testifies his interest at a later
+stage by one or two occasional remarks.  When attacked by Glaucon he is
+humorously protected by Socrates "as one who has never been his enemy
+and is now his friend." From Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle's
+Rhetoric we learn that the Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous
+was a man of note whose writings were preserved in later ages.  The
+play on his name which was made by his contemporary Herodicus, "thou
+wast ever bold in battle," seems to show that the description of him is
+not devoid of verisimilitude.
+
+When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respondents,
+Glaucon and Adeimantus, appear on the scene:  here, as in Greek
+tragedy, three actors are introduced.  At first sight the two sons of
+Ariston may seem to wear a family likeness, like the two friends
+Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo.  But on a nearer examination of them
+the similarity vanishes, and they are seen to be distinct characters.
+Glaucon is the impetuous youth who can "just never have enough of
+fechting" (cf. the character of him in Xen. Mem. iii. 6); the man of
+pleasure who is acquainted with the mysteries of love; the "juvenis qui
+gaudet canibus," and who improves the breed of animals; the lover of
+art and music who has all the experiences of youthful life.  He is full
+of quickness and penetration, piercing easily below the clumsy
+platitudes of Thrasymachus to the real difficulty; he turns out to the
+light the seamy side of human life, and yet does not lose faith in the
+just and true.  It is Glaucon who seizes what may be termed the
+ludicrous relation of the philosopher to the world, to whom a state of
+simplicity is "a city of pigs," who is always prepared with a jest when
+the argument offers him an opportunity, and who is ever ready to second
+the humor of Socrates and to appreciate the ridiculous, whether in the
+connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers of theatricals, or in the
+fantastic behavior of the citizens of democracy.  His weaknesses are
+several times alluded to by Socrates, who, however, will not allow him
+to be attacked by his brother Adeimantus.  He is a soldier, and, like
+Adeimantus, has been distinguished at the battle of Megara.
+
+The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the profounder
+objections are commonly put into his mouth.  Glaucon is more
+demonstrative, and generally opens the game.  Adeimantus pursues the
+argument further.  Glaucon has more of the liveliness and quick
+sympathy of youth; Adeimantus has the maturer judgment of a grown-up
+man of the world.  In the second book, when Glaucon insists that
+justice and injustice shall be considered without regard to their
+consequences, Adeimantus remarks that they are regarded by mankind in
+general only for the sake of their consequences; and in a similar vein
+of reflection he urges at the beginning of the fourth book that
+Socrates falls in making his citizens happy, and is answered that
+happiness is not the first but the second thing, not the direct aim but
+the indirect consequence of the good government of a State.  In the
+discussion about religion and mythology, Adeimantus is the respondent,
+but Glaucon breaks in with a slight jest, and carries on the
+conversation in a lighter tone about music and gymnastic to the end of
+the book.  It is Adeimantus again who volunteers the criticism of
+common sense on the Socratic method of argument, and who refuses to let
+Socrates pass lightly over the question of women and children.  It is
+Adeimantus who is the respondent in the more argumentative, as Glaucon
+in the lighter and more imaginative portions of the Dialogue.  For
+example, throughout the greater part of the sixth book, the causes of
+the corruption of philosophy and the conception of the idea of good are
+discussed with Adeimantus.  Then Glaucon resumes his place of principal
+respondent; but he has a difficulty in apprehending the higher
+education of Socrates, and makes some false hits in the course of the
+discussion.  Once more Adeimantus returns with the allusion to his
+brother Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious State; in the next
+book he is again superseded, and Glaucon continues to the end.
+
+Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the successive
+stages of morality, beginning with the Athenian gentleman of the olden
+time, who is followed by the practical man of that day regulating his
+life by proverbs and saws; to him succeeds the wild generalization of
+the Sophists, and lastly come the young disciples of the great teacher,
+who know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by them,
+and desire to go deeper into the nature of things.  These too, like
+Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are clearly distinguished from one
+another.  Neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato,
+is a single character repeated.
+
+The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly consistent.
+In the first book we have more of the real Socrates, such as he is
+depicted in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, in the earliest Dialogues of
+Plato, and in the Apology.  He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the
+old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well
+as to argue seriously.  But in the sixth book his enmity towards the
+Sophists abates; he acknowledges that they are the representatives
+rather than the corrupters of the world.  He also becomes more dogmatic
+and constructive, passing beyond the range either of the political or
+the speculative ideas of the real Socrates.  In one passage Plato
+himself seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who
+had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and
+not to be always repeating the notions of other men.  There is no
+evidence that either the idea of good or the conception of a perfect
+State were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he certainly
+dwelt on the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen.
+Mem. i. 4; Phaedo 97); and a deep thinker like him in his thirty or
+forty years of public teaching, could hardly have falled to touch on
+the nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive
+evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem. i. 2, 51 foll.) The Socratic method
+is nominally retained; and every inference is either put into the mouth
+of the respondent or represented as the common discovery of him and
+Socrates.  But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the
+affectation grows wearisome as the work advances.  The method of
+inquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of
+interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view.
+
+The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when he
+describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an
+investigation, but can see what he is shown, and may, perhaps, give the
+answer to a question more fluently than another.
+
+Neither can we be absolutely certain that, Socrates himself taught the
+immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in
+the Republic; nor is there any reason to suppose that he used myths or
+revelations of another world as a vehicle of instruction, or that he
+would have banished poetry or have denounced the Greek mythology.  His
+favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made of the
+daemonium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a
+phenomenon peculiar to himself.  A real element of Socratic teaching,
+which is more prominent in the Republic than in any of the other
+Dialogues of Plato, is the use of example and illustration
+('taphorhtika auto prhospherhontez'): "Let us apply the test of common
+instances." "You," says Adeimantus, ironically, in the sixth book, "are
+so unaccustomed to speak in images."  And this use of examples or
+images, though truly Socratic in origin, is enlarged by the genius of
+Plato into the form of an allegory or parable, which embodies in the
+concrete what has been already described, or is about to be described,
+in the abstract.  Thus the figure of the cave in Book VII is a
+recapitulation of the divisions of knowledge in Book VI.  The composite
+animal in Book IX is an allegory of the parts of the soul.  The noble
+captain and the ship and the true pilot in Book VI are a figure of the
+relation of the people to the philosophers in the State which has been
+described.  Other figures, such as the dog in the second, third, and
+fourth books, or the marriage of the portionless maiden in the sixth
+book, or the drones and wasps in the eighth and ninth books, also form
+links of connection in long passages, or are used to recall previous
+discussions.
+
+Plato is most true to the character of his master when he describes him
+as "not of this world."  And with this representation of him the ideal
+State and the other paradoxes of the Republic are quite in accordance,
+though they can not be shown to have been speculations of Socrates.  To
+him, as to other great teachers both philosophical and religious, when
+they looked upward, the world seemed to be the embodiment of error and
+evil.  The common sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or
+has only partially admitted it.  And even in Socrates himself the
+sterner judgment of the multitude at times passes into a sort of
+ironical pity or love.  Men in general are incapable of philosophy, and
+are therefore at enmity with the philosopher; but their
+misunderstanding of him is unavoidable: for they have never seen him as
+he truly is in his own image; they are only acquainted with artificial
+systems possessing no native force of truth--words which admit of many
+applications.  Their leaders have nothing to measure with, and are
+therefore ignorant of their own stature.  But they are to be pitied or
+laughed at, not to be quarrelled with; they mean well with their
+nostrums, if they could only learn that they are cutting off a Hydra's
+head.  This moderation towards those who are in error is one of the
+most characteristic features of Socrates in the Republic.  In all the
+different representations of Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato,
+and the differences of the earlier or later Dialogues, he always
+retains the character of the unwearied and disinterested seeker after
+truth, without which he would have ceased to be Socrates.
+
+Leaving the characters we may now analyze the contents of the Republic,
+and then proceed to consider (1) The general aspects of this Hellenic
+ideal of the State, (2) The modern lights in which the thoughts of
+Plato may be read.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston,
+that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I
+wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which
+was a new thing.  I was delighted with the procession of the
+inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more,
+beautiful.  When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle,
+we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus
+the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we
+were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us
+wait for him.  The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and
+said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
+
+I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
+
+There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
+
+Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus
+appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son
+of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.
+
+SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
+
+Polemarchus said to me:  I perceive, Socrates, that you and our
+companion are already on your way to the city.
+
+You are not far wrong, I said.
+
+But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
+
+Of course.
+
+And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to
+remain where you are.
+
+May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to
+let us go?
+
+But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
+
+Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
+
+Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
+
+Adeimantus added:  Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback
+in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
+
+With horses!  I replied:  That is a novelty.  Will horsemen carry
+torches and pass them one to another during the race?
+
+Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will he
+celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see.  Let us rise
+soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of
+young men, and we will have a good talk.  Stay then, and do not be
+perverse.
+
+Glaucon said:  I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
+
+Very good, I replied.
+
+GLAUCON - CEPHALUS - SOCRATES
+
+Accordingly we went with Polemarchus to his house; and there we found
+his brothers Lysias and Euthydemus, and with them Thrasymachus the
+Chalcedonian, Charmantides the Paeanian, and Cleitophon the son of
+Aristonymus.  There too was Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, whom I
+had not seen for a long time, and I thought him very much aged.  He was
+seated on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he had
+been sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the
+room arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him.  He
+saluted me eagerly, and then he said:--
+
+You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were
+still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me.  But at
+my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come
+oftener to the Piraeus.  For let me tell you, that the more the
+pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and
+charm of conversation.  Do not then deny my request, but make our house
+your resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends,
+and you will be quite at home with us.
+
+I replied:  There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus,
+than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have
+gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to
+enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.
+And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have
+arrived at that time which the poets call the 'threshold of old
+age'--Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?
+
+I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is.  Men of my
+age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says;
+and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is--I cannot
+eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away:
+there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer
+life.  Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by
+relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age
+is the cause.  But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame
+that which is not really in fault.  For if old age were the cause, I
+too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do.
+But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have
+known.  How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to
+the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,--are you still
+the man you were?  Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the
+thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and
+furious master.  His words have often occurred to my mind since, and
+they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them.  For
+certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the
+passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from
+the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.  The truth is,
+Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations,
+are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's
+characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will
+hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite
+disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
+
+I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go
+on--Yes, Cephalus, I said:  but I rather suspect that people in general
+are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age
+sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but
+because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
+
+You are right, he replied; they are not convinced:  and there is
+something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine.  I
+might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was
+abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but
+because he was an Athenian:  'If you had been a native of my country or
+I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.' And to those who are
+not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for
+to the good poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad
+rich man ever have peace with himself.
+
+May I ask, Cephalus, whether your fortune was for the most part
+inherited or acquired by you?
+
+Acquired!  Socrates; do you want to know how much I acquired?  In the
+art of making money I have been midway between my father and
+grandfather: for my grandfather, whose name I bear, doubled and trebled
+the value of his patrimony, that which he inherited being much what I
+possess now; but my father Lysanias reduced the property below what it
+is at present: and I shall be satisfied if I leave to these my sons not
+less but a little more than I received.
+
+That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that
+you are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of
+those who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired
+them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation
+of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems,
+or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for
+the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men.  And
+hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but
+the praises of wealth.  That is true, he said.
+
+Yes, that is very true, but may I ask another question?  What do you
+consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your
+wealth?
+
+One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others.
+For let me tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be
+near death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had
+before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted
+there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he
+is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the
+weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other
+place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms
+crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what
+wrongs he has done to others.  And when he finds that the sum of his
+transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in
+his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings.  But to him
+who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is
+the kind nurse of his age:
+
+    Hope, he says, cherishes the soul of him who lives in
+    justice and holiness and is the nurse of his age and the
+    companion of his journey;--hope which is mightiest to sway
+    the restless soul of man.
+
+How admirable are his words!  And the great blessing of riches, I do
+not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no
+occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or
+unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in
+any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes
+to men.  Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly
+contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against
+another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of
+sense this is in my opinion the greatest.
+
+Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is
+it?--to speak the truth and to pay your debts--no more than this?  And
+even to this are there not exceptions?  Suppose that a friend when in
+his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he
+is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him?  No one
+would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more
+than they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who
+is in his condition.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a
+correct definition of justice.
+
+CEPHALUS - SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS
+
+Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said
+Polemarchus interposing.
+
+I fear, said Cephalus, that I must go now, for I have to look after the
+sacrifices, and I hand over the argument to Polemarchus and the company.
+
+Is not Polemarchus your heir?  I said.
+
+To be sure, he answered, and went away laughing to the sacrifices.
+
+SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS
+
+Tell me then, O thou heir of the argument, what did Simonides say, and
+according to you truly say, about justice?
+
+He said that the repayment of a debt is just, and in saying so he
+appears to me to be right.
+
+I should be sorry to doubt the word of such a wise and inspired man,
+but his meaning, though probably clear to you, is the reverse of clear
+to me.  For he certainly does not mean, as we were now saying that I
+ought to return a return a deposit of arms or of anything else to one
+who asks for it when he is not in his right senses; and yet a deposit
+cannot be denied to be a debt.
+
+True.
+
+Then when the person who asks me is not in his right mind I am by no
+means to make the return?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+When Simonides said that the repayment of a debt was justice, he did
+not mean to include that case?
+
+Certainly not; for he thinks that a friend ought always to do good to a
+friend and never evil.
+
+You mean that the return of a deposit of gold which is to the injury of
+the receiver, if the two parties are friends, is not the repayment of a
+debt,--that is what you would imagine him to say?
+
+Yes.
+
+And are enemies also to receive what we owe to them?
+
+To be sure, he said, they are to receive what we owe them, and an
+enemy, as I take it, owes to an enemy that which is due or proper to
+him--that is to say, evil.
+
+Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken
+darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that
+justice is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he
+termed a debt.
+
+That must have been his meaning, he said.
+
+By heaven!  I replied; and if we asked him what due or proper thing is
+given by medicine, and to whom, what answer do you think that he would
+make to us?
+
+He would surely reply that medicine gives drugs and meat and drink to
+human bodies.
+
+And what due or proper thing is given by cookery, and to what?
+
+Seasoning to food.
+
+And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?
+
+If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the
+preceding instances, then justice is the art which gives good to
+friends and evil to enemies.
+
+That is his meaning then?
+
+I think so.
+
+And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies
+in time of sickness?
+
+The physician.
+
+Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?
+
+The pilot.
+
+And in what sort of actions or with a view to what result is the just
+man most able to do harm to his enemy and good to his friends?
+
+In going to war against the one and in making alliances with the other.
+
+But when a man is well, my dear Polemarchus, there is no need of a
+physician?
+
+No.
+
+And he who is not on a voyage has no need of a pilot?
+
+No.
+
+Then in time of peace justice will be of no use?
+
+I am very far from thinking so.
+
+You think that justice may be of use in peace as well as in war?
+
+Yes.
+
+Like husbandry for the acquisition of corn?
+
+Yes.
+
+Or like shoemaking for the acquisition of shoes,--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+And what similar use or power of acquisition has justice in time of
+peace?
+
+In contracts, Socrates, justice is of use.
+
+And by contracts you mean partnerships?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But is the just man or the skilful player a more useful and better
+partner at a game of draughts?
+
+The skilful player.
+
+And in the laying of bricks and stones is the just man a more useful or
+better partner than the builder?
+
+Quite the reverse.
+
+Then in what sort of partnership is the just man a better partner than
+the harp-player, as in playing the harp the harp-player is certainly a
+better partner than the just man?
+
+In a money partnership.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus, but surely not in the use of money; for you do not
+want a just man to be your counsellor the purchase or sale of a horse;
+a man who is knowing about horses would be better for that, would he
+not?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And when you want to buy a ship, the shipwright or the pilot would be
+better?
+
+True.
+
+Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is
+to be preferred?
+
+When you want a deposit to be kept safely.
+
+You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie?
+
+Precisely.
+
+That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And when you want to keep a pruning-hook safe, then justice is useful
+to the individual and to the state; but when you want to use it, then
+the art of the vine-dresser?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And when you want to keep a shield or a lyre, and not to use them, you
+would say that justice is useful; but when you want to use them, then
+the art of the soldier or of the musician?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And so of all the other things;--justice is useful when they are
+useless, and useless when they are useful?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Then justice is not good for much.  But let us consider this further
+point:  Is not he who can best strike a blow in a boxing match or in
+any kind of fighting best able to ward off a blow?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And he who is most skilful in preventing or escaping from a disease is
+best able to create one?
+
+True.
+
+And he is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march
+upon the enemy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?
+
+That, I suppose, is to be inferred.
+
+Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing
+it.
+
+That is implied in the argument.
+
+Then after all the just man has turned out to be a thief.  And this is
+a lesson which I suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he,
+speaking of Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, who is a
+favourite of his, affirms that
+
+    He was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.
+
+And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art
+of theft; to be practised however 'for the good of friends and for the
+harm of enemies,'--that was what you were saying?
+
+No, certainly not that, though I do not now know what I did say; but I
+still stand by the latter words.
+
+Well, there is another question:  By friends and enemies do we mean
+those who are so really, or only in seeming?
+
+Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks
+good, and to hate those whom he thinks evil.
+
+Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not
+good seem to be so, and conversely?
+
+That is true.
+
+Then to them the good will be enemies and the evil will be their
+friends?  True.
+
+And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil
+to the good?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But the good are just and would not do an injustice?
+
+True.
+
+Then according to your argument it is just to injure those who do no
+wrong?
+
+Nay, Socrates; the doctrine is immoral.
+
+Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the
+unjust?
+
+I like that better.
+
+But see the consequence:--Many a man who is ignorant of human nature
+has friends who are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm
+to them; and he has good enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so,
+we shall be saying the very opposite of that which we affirmed to be
+the meaning of Simonides.
+
+Very true, he said:  and I think that we had better correct an error
+into which we seem to have fallen in the use of the words 'friend' and
+'enemy.'
+
+What was the error, Polemarchus?  I asked.
+
+We assumed that he is a friend who seems to be or who is thought good.
+
+And how is the error to be corrected?
+
+We should rather say that he is a friend who is, as well as seems,
+good; and that he who seems only, and is not good, only seems to be and
+is not a friend; and of an enemy the same may be said.
+
+You would argue that the good are our friends and the bad our enemies?
+
+Yes.
+
+And instead of saying simply as we did at first, that it is just to do
+good to our friends and harm to our enemies, we should further say: It
+is just to do good to our friends when they are good and harm to our
+enemies when they are evil?
+
+Yes, that appears to me to be the truth.
+
+But ought the just to injure any one at all?
+
+Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his
+enemies.
+
+When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?
+
+The latter.
+
+Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of
+dogs?
+
+Yes, of horses.
+
+And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of
+horses?
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the
+proper virtue of man?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that human virtue is justice?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?
+
+That is the result.
+
+But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking general can
+the good by virtue make them bad?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Any more than heat can produce cold?
+
+It cannot.
+
+Or drought moisture?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+Nor can the good harm any one?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the just is the good?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man,
+but of the opposite, who is the unjust?
+
+I think that what you say is quite true, Socrates.
+
+Then if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and
+that good is the debt which a man owes to his friends, and evil the
+debt which he owes to his enemies,--to say this is not wise; for it is
+not true, if, as has been clearly shown, the injuring of another can be
+in no case just.
+
+I agree with you, said Polemarchus.
+
+Then you and I are prepared to take up arms against any one who
+attributes such a saying to Simonides or Bias or Pittacus, or any other
+wise man or seer?
+
+I am quite ready to do battle at your side, he said.
+
+Shall I tell you whose I believe the saying to be?
+
+Whose?
+
+I believe that Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban,
+or some other rich and mighty man, who had a great opinion of his own
+power, was the first to say that justice is 'doing good to your friends
+and harm to your enemies.'
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Yes, I said; but if this definition of justice also breaks down, what
+other can be offered?
+
+Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an
+attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down
+by the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end.  But when
+Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no
+longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a
+wild beast, seeking to devour us.  We were quite panic-stricken at the
+sight of him.
+
+SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - THRASYMACHUS
+
+He roared out to the whole company:  What folly.  Socrates, has taken
+possession of you all?  And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to
+one another?  I say that if you want really to know what justice is,
+you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to
+yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer;
+for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer.  And now I will
+not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or
+interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have
+clearness and accuracy.
+
+I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without
+trembling.  Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I
+should have been struck dumb:  but when I saw his fury rising, I looked
+at him first, and was therefore able to reply to him.
+
+Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us.
+Polemarchus and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the
+argument, but I can assure you that the error was not intentional.  If
+we were seeking for a piece of gold, you would not imagine that we were
+'knocking under to one another,' and so losing our chance of finding
+it.  And why, when we are seeking for justice, a thing more precious
+than many pieces of gold, do you say that we are weakly yielding to one
+another and not doing our utmost to get at the truth?  Nay, my good
+friend, we are most willing and anxious to do so, but the fact is that
+we cannot.  And if so, you people who know all things should pity us
+and not be angry with us.
+
+How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter
+laugh;--that's your ironical style!  Did I not foresee--have I not
+already told you, that whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer,
+and try irony or any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid
+answering?
+
+You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if
+you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit
+him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six
+times two, or four times three, 'for this sort of nonsense will not do
+for me,'--then obviously, that is your way of putting the question, no
+one can answer you.  But suppose that he were to retort, 'Thrasymachus,
+what do you mean?  If one of these numbers which you interdict be the
+true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number
+which is not the right one?--is that your meaning?'--How would you
+answer him?
+
+Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said.
+
+Why should they not be?  I replied; and even if they are not, but only
+appear to be so to the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he
+thinks, whether you and I forbid him or not?
+
+I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted
+answers?
+
+I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I
+approve of any of them.
+
+But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he
+said, than any of these?  What do you deserve to have done to you?
+
+Done to me!--as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise--that
+is what I deserve to have done to me.
+
+What, and no payment! a pleasant notion!
+
+I will pay when I have the money, I replied.
+
+SOCRATES - THRASYMACHUS - GLAUCON
+
+But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon:  and you, Thrasymachus, need be
+under no anxiety about money, for we will all make a contribution for
+Socrates.
+
+Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does--refuse to
+answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of some one else.
+
+Why, my good friend, I said, how can any one answer who knows, and says
+that he knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions
+of his own, is told by a man of authority not to utter them?  The
+natural thing is, that the speaker should be some one like yourself who
+professes to know and can tell what he knows.  Will you then kindly
+answer, for the edification of the company and of myself?
+
+Glaucon and the rest of the company joined in my request and
+Thrasymachus, as any one might see, was in reality eager to speak; for
+he thought that he had an excellent answer, and would distinguish
+himself.  But at first he to insist on my answering; at length he
+consented to begin.  Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he
+refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he
+never even says thank you.
+
+That I learn of others, I replied, is quite true; but that I am
+ungrateful I wholly deny.  Money I have none, and therefore I pay in
+praise, which is all I have:  and how ready I am to praise any one who
+appears to me to speak well you will very soon find out when you
+answer; for I expect that you will answer well.
+
+Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the
+interest of the stronger.  And now why do you not me?  But of course
+you won't.
+
+Let me first understand you, I replied.  Justice, as you say, is the
+interest of the stronger.  What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this?
+You cannot mean to say that because Polydamas, the pancratiast, is
+stronger than we are, and finds the eating of beef conducive to his
+bodily strength, that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who
+are weaker than he is, and right and just for us?
+
+That's abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense
+which is most damaging to the argument.
+
+Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I
+wish that you would be a little clearer.
+
+Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ;
+there are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are
+aristocracies?
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+And the government is the ruling power in each state?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the different forms of government make laws democratical,
+aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and
+these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the
+justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses
+them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust.  And that is what
+I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of
+justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government
+must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that
+everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of
+the stronger.
+
+Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will
+try to discover.  But let me remark, that in defining justice you have
+yourself used the word 'interest' which you forbade me to use.  It is
+true, however, that in your definition the words 'of the stronger' are
+added.
+
+A small addition, you must allow, he said.
+
+Great or small, never mind about that:  we must first enquire whether
+what you are saying is the truth.  Now we are both agreed that justice
+is interest of some sort, but you go on to say 'of the stronger'; about
+this addition I am not so sure, and must therefore consider further.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will; and first tell me, Do you admit that it is just or subjects to
+obey their rulers?
+
+I do.
+
+But are the rulers of states absolutely infallible, or are they
+sometimes liable to err?
+
+To be sure, he replied, they are liable to err.
+
+Then in making their laws they may sometimes make them rightly, and
+sometimes not?
+
+True.
+
+When they make them rightly, they make them agreeably to their
+interest; when they are mistaken, contrary to their interest; you admit
+that?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the laws which they make must be obeyed by their subjects,--and
+that is what you call justice?
+
+Doubtless.
+
+Then justice, according to your argument, is not only obedience to the
+interest of the stronger but the reverse?
+
+What is that you are saying? he asked.
+
+I am only repeating what you are saying, I believe.  But let us
+consider: Have we not admitted that the rulers may be mistaken about
+their own interest in what they command, and also that to obey them is
+justice?  Has not that been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you must also have acknowledged justice not to be for the interest
+of the stronger, when the rulers unintentionally command things to be
+done which are to their own injury.  For if, as you say, justice is the
+obedience which the subject renders to their commands, in that case, O
+wisest of men, is there any escape from the conclusion that the weaker
+are commanded to do, not what is for the interest, but what is for the
+injury of the stronger?
+
+Nothing can be clearer, Socrates, said Polemarchus.
+
+SOCRATES - CLEITOPHON - POLEMARCHUS - THRASYMACHUS
+
+Yes, said Cleitophon, interposing, if you are allowed to be his witness.
+
+But there is no need of any witness, said Polemarchus, for Thrasymachus
+himself acknowledges that rulers may sometimes command what is not for
+their own interest, and that for subjects to obey them is justice.
+
+Yes, Polemarchus,--Thrasymachus said that for subjects to do what was
+commanded by their rulers is just.
+
+Yes, Cleitophon, but he also said that justice is the interest of the
+stronger, and, while admitting both these propositions, he further
+acknowledged that the stronger may command the weaker who are his
+subjects to do what is not for his own interest; whence follows that
+justice is the injury quite as much as the interest of the stronger.
+
+But, said Cleitophon, he meant by the interest of the stronger what the
+stronger thought to be his interest,--this was what the weaker had to
+do; and this was affirmed by him to be justice.
+
+Those were not his words, rejoined Polemarchus.
+
+SOCRATES - THRASYMACHUS
+
+Never mind, I replied, if he now says that they are, let us accept his
+statement.  Tell me, Thrasymachus, I said, did you mean by justice what
+the stronger thought to be his interest, whether really so or not?
+
+Certainly not, he said.  Do you suppose that I call him who is mistaken
+the stronger at the time when he is mistaken?
+
+Yes, I said, my impression was that you did so, when you admitted that
+the ruler was not infallible but might be sometimes mistaken.
+
+You argue like an informer, Socrates.  Do you mean, for example, that
+he who is mistaken about the sick is a physician in that he is
+mistaken? or that he who errs in arithmetic or grammar is an
+arithmetician or grammarian at the me when he is making the mistake, in
+respect of the mistake?  True, we say that the physician or
+arithmetician or grammarian has made a mistake, but this is only a way
+of speaking; for the fact is that neither the grammarian nor any other
+person of skill ever makes a mistake in so far as he is what his name
+implies; they none of them err unless their skill fails them, and then
+they cease to be skilled artists.  No artist or sage or ruler errs at
+the time when he is what his name implies; though he is commonly said
+to err, and I adopted the common mode of speaking.  But to be perfectly
+accurate, since you are such a lover of accuracy, we should say that
+the ruler, in so far as he is the ruler, is unerring, and, being
+unerring, always commands that which is for his own interest; and the
+subject is required to execute his commands; and therefore, as I said
+at first and now repeat, justice is the interest of the stronger.
+
+Indeed, Thrasymachus, and do I really appear to you to argue like an
+informer?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring
+you in the argument?
+
+Nay, he replied, 'suppose' is not the word--I know it; but you will be
+found out, and by sheer force of argument you will never prevail.
+
+I shall not make the attempt, my dear man; but to avoid any
+misunderstanding occurring between us in future, let me ask, in what
+sense do you speak of a ruler or stronger whose interest, as you were
+saying, he being the superior, it is just that the inferior should
+execute--is he a ruler in the popular or in the strict sense of the
+term?
+
+In the strictest of all senses, he said.  And now cheat and play the
+informer if you can; I ask no quarter at your hands.  But you never
+will be able, never.
+
+And do you imagine, I said, that I am such a madman as to try and
+cheat, Thrasymachus?  I might as well shave a lion.
+
+Why, he said, you made the attempt a minute ago, and you failed.
+
+Enough, I said, of these civilities.  It will be better that I should
+ask you a question:  Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of
+which you are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money?  And
+remember that I am now speaking of the true physician.
+
+A healer of the sick, he replied.
+
+And the pilot--that is to say, the true pilot--is he a captain of
+sailors or a mere sailor?
+
+A captain of sailors.
+
+The circumstance that he sails in the ship is not to be taken into
+account; neither is he to be called a sailor; the name pilot by which
+he is distinguished has nothing to do with sailing, but is significant
+of his skill and of his authority over the sailors.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now, I said, every art has an interest?
+
+Certainly.
+
+For which the art has to consider and provide?
+
+Yes, that is the aim of art.
+
+And the interest of any art is the perfection of it--this and nothing
+else?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean what I may illustrate negatively by the example of the body.
+Suppose you were to ask me whether the body is self-sufficing or has
+wants, I should reply:  Certainly the body has wants; for the body may
+be ill and require to be cured, and has therefore interests to which
+the art of medicine ministers; and this is the origin and intention of
+medicine, as you will acknowledge.  Am I not right?
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+But is the art of medicine or any other art faulty or deficient in any
+quality in the same way that the eye may be deficient in sight or the
+ear fail of hearing, and therefore requires another art to provide for
+the interests of seeing and hearing--has art in itself, I say, any
+similar liability to fault or defect, and does every art require
+another supplementary art to provide for its interests, and that
+another and another without end?  Or have the arts to look only after
+their own interests?  Or have they no need either of themselves or of
+another?--having no faults or defects, they have no need to correct
+them, either by the exercise of their own art or of any other; they
+have only to consider the interest of their subject-matter. For every
+art remains pure and faultless while remaining true--that is to say,
+while perfect and unimpaired.  Take the words in your precise sense,
+and tell me whether I am not right."
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+Then medicine does not consider the interest of medicine, but the
+interest of the body?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Nor does the art of horsemanship consider the interests of the art of
+horsemanship, but the interests of the horse; neither do any other arts
+care for themselves, for they have no needs; they care only for that
+which is the subject of their art?
+
+True, he said.
+
+But surely, Thrasymachus, the arts are the superiors and rulers of
+their own subjects?
+
+To this he assented with a good deal of reluctance.
+
+Then, I said, no science or art considers or enjoins the interest of
+the stronger or superior, but only the interest of the subject and
+weaker?
+
+He made an attempt to contest this proposition also, but finally
+acquiesced.
+
+Then, I continued, no physician, in so far as he is a physician,
+considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of his
+patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body
+as a subject, and is not a mere money-maker; that has been admitted?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the pilot likewise, in the strict sense of the term, is a ruler of
+sailors and not a mere sailor?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+And such a pilot and ruler will provide and prescribe for the interest
+of the sailor who is under him, and not for his own or the ruler's
+interest?
+
+He gave a reluctant 'Yes.'
+
+Then, I said, Thrasymachus, there is no one in any rule who, in so far
+as he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest,
+but always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his
+art; to that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which
+he says and does.
+
+When we had got to this point in the argument, and every one saw that
+the definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus,
+instead of replying to me, said:  Tell me, Socrates, have you got a
+nurse?
+
+Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be
+answering?
+
+Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has
+not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.
+
+What makes you say that?  I replied.
+
+Because you fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens of tends the
+sheep or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of
+himself or his master; and you further imagine that the rulers of
+states, if they are true rulers, never think of their subjects as
+sheep, and that they are not studying their own advantage day and
+night.  Oh, no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about the
+just and unjust as not even to know that justice and the just are in
+reality another's good; that is to say, the interest of the ruler and
+stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the
+opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is
+the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his interest, and
+minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own.
+Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a
+loser in comparison with the unjust.  First of all, in private
+contracts: wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find
+that, when the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more
+and the just less.  Secondly, in their dealings with the State: when
+there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less
+on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be received
+the one gains nothing and the other much.  Observe also what happens
+when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting his affairs
+and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out of the
+public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and
+acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways.  But all this
+is reversed in the case of the unjust man.  I am speaking, as before,
+of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is
+more apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to
+that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of
+men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most
+miserable--that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away
+the property of others, not little by little but wholesale;
+comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and
+public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any
+one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace--they
+who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples,
+and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves.  But when a
+man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of
+them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and
+blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having
+achieved the consummation of injustice.  For mankind censure injustice,
+fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink
+from committing it.  And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice,
+when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery
+than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the
+stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest.
+
+Thrasymachus, when he had thus spoken, having, like a bathman, deluged
+our ears with his words, had a mind to go away.  But the company would
+not let him; they insisted that he should remain and defend his
+position; and I myself added my own humble request that he would not
+leave us.  Thrasymachus, I said to him, excellent man, how suggestive
+are your remarks!  And are you going to run away before you have fairly
+taught or learned whether they are true or not?  Is the attempt to
+determine the way of man's life so small a matter in your eyes--to
+determine how life may be passed by each one of us to the greatest
+advantage?
+
+And do I differ from you, he said, as to the importance of the enquiry?
+
+You appear rather, I replied, to have no care or thought about us,
+Thrasymachus--whether we live better or worse from not knowing what you
+say you know, is to you a matter of indifference.  Prithee, friend, do
+not keep your knowledge to yourself; we are a large party; and any
+benefit which you confer upon us will be amply rewarded.  For my own
+part I openly declare that I am not convinced, and that I do not
+believe injustice to be more gainful than justice, even if uncontrolled
+and allowed to have free play.  For, granting that there may be an
+unjust man who is able to commit injustice either by fraud or force,
+still this does not convince me of the superior advantage of injustice,
+and there may be others who are in the same predicament with myself.
+Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us
+that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice.
+
+And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced
+by what I have just said; what more can I do for you?  Would you have
+me put the proof bodily into your souls?
+
+Heaven forbid!  I said; I would only ask you to be consistent; or, if
+you change, change openly and let there be no deception.  For I must
+remark, Thrasymachus, if you will recall what was previously said, that
+although you began by defining the true physician in an exact sense,
+you did not observe a like exactness when speaking of the shepherd; you
+thought that the shepherd as a shepherd tends the sheep not with a view
+to their own good, but like a mere diner or banqueter with a view to
+the pleasures of the table; or, again, as a trader for sale in the
+market, and not as a shepherd.  Yet surely the art of the shepherd is
+concerned only with the good of his subjects; he has only to provide
+the best for them, since the perfection of the art is already ensured
+whenever all the requirements of it are satisfied.  And that was what I
+was saying just now about the ruler.  I conceived that the art of the
+ruler, considered as ruler, whether in a state or in private life,
+could only regard the good of his flock or subjects; whereas you seem
+to think that the rulers in states, that is to say, the true rulers,
+like being in authority.
+
+Think!  Nay, I am sure of it.
+
+Then why in the case of lesser offices do men never take them willingly
+without payment, unless under the idea that they govern for the
+advantage not of themselves but of others?  Let me ask you a question:
+Are not the several arts different, by reason of their each having a
+separate function?  And, my dear illustrious friend, do say what you
+think, that we may make a little progress.
+
+Yes, that is the difference, he replied.
+
+And each art gives us a particular good and not merely a general
+one--medicine, for example, gives us health; navigation, safety at sea,
+and so on?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the art of payment has the special function of giving pay: but we
+do not confuse this with other arts, any more than the art of the pilot
+is to be confused with the art of medicine, because the health of the
+pilot may be improved by a sea voyage.  You would not be inclined to
+say, would you, that navigation is the art of medicine, at least if we
+are to adopt your exact use of language?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or because a man is in good health when he receives pay you would not
+say that the art of payment is medicine?
+
+I should say not.
+
+Nor would you say that medicine is the art of receiving pay because a
+man takes fees when he is engaged in healing?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And we have admitted, I said, that the good of each art is specially
+confined to the art?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then, if there be any good which all artists have in common, that is to
+be attributed to something of which they all have the common use?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And when the artist is benefited by receiving pay the advantage is
+gained by an additional use of the art of pay, which is not the art
+professed by him?
+
+He gave a reluctant assent to this.
+
+Then the pay is not derived by the several artists from their
+respective arts.  But the truth is, that while the art of medicine
+gives health, and the art of the builder builds a house, another art
+attends them which is the art of pay.  The various arts may be doing
+their own business and benefiting that over which they preside, but
+would the artist receive any benefit from his art unless he were paid
+as well?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+But does he therefore confer no benefit when he works for nothing?
+
+Certainly, he confers a benefit.
+
+Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts
+nor governments provide for their own interests; but, as we were before
+saying, they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who
+are the weaker and not the stronger--to their good they attend and not
+to the good of the superior.
+
+And this is the reason, my dear Thrasymachus, why, as I was just now
+saying, no one is willing to govern; because no one likes to take in
+hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without
+remuneration.  For, in the execution of his work, and in giving his
+orders to another, the true artist does not regard his own interest,
+but always that of his subjects; and therefore in order that rulers may
+be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment:
+money, or honour, or a penalty for refusing.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+What do you mean, Socrates? said Glaucon.  The first two modes of
+payment are intelligible enough, but what the penalty is I do not
+understand, or how a penalty can be a payment.
+
+You mean that you do not understand the nature of this payment which to
+the best men is the great inducement to rule?  Of course you know that
+ambition and avarice are held to be, as indeed they are, a disgrace?
+
+Very true.
+
+And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for
+them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing
+and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves
+out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves.  And not being
+ambitious they do not care about honour.  Wherefore necessity must be
+laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of
+punishment.  And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness
+to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed
+dishonourable.  Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who
+refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.
+And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office,
+not because they would, but because they cannot help--not under the
+idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves,
+but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of
+ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good.
+For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of
+good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention
+as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that
+the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but
+that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather
+to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of
+conferring one.  So far am I from agreeing with Thrasymachus that
+justice is the interest of the stronger.  This latter question need not
+be further discussed at present; but when Thrasymachus says that the
+life of the unjust is more advantageous than that of the just, his new
+statement appears to me to be of a far more serious character.  Which
+of us has spoken truly?  And which sort of life, Glaucon, do you prefer?
+
+I for my part deem the life of the just to be the more advantageous, he
+answered.
+
+Did you hear all the advantages of the unjust which Thrasymachus was
+rehearsing?
+
+Yes, I heard him, he replied, but he has not convinced me.
+
+Then shall we try to find some way of convincing him, if we can, that
+he is saying what is not true?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+If, I said, he makes a set speech and we make another recounting all
+the advantages of being just, and he answers and we rejoin, there must
+be a numbering and measuring of the goods which are claimed on either
+side, and in the end we shall want judges to decide; but if we proceed
+in our enquiry as we lately did, by making admissions to one another,
+we shall unite the offices of judge and advocate in our own persons.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And which method do I understand you to prefer?  I said.
+
+That which you propose.
+
+Well, then, Thrasymachus, I said, suppose you begin at the beginning
+and answer me.  You say that perfect injustice is more gainful than
+perfect justice?
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON - THRASYMACHUS
+
+Yes, that is what I say, and I have given you my reasons.
+
+And what is your view about them?  Would you call one of them virtue
+and the other vice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice?
+
+What a charming notion!  So likely too, seeing that I affirm injustice
+to be profitable and justice not.
+
+What else then would you say?
+
+The opposite, he replied.
+
+And would you call justice vice?
+
+No, I would rather say sublime simplicity.
+
+Then would you call injustice malignity?
+
+No; I would rather say discretion.
+
+And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly
+unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations; but
+perhaps you imagine me to be talking of cutpurses.
+
+Even this profession if undetected has advantages, though they are not
+to be compared with those of which I was just now speaking.
+
+I do not think that I misapprehend your meaning, Thrasymachus, I
+replied; but still I cannot hear without amazement that you class
+injustice with wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite.
+
+Certainly I do so class them.
+
+Now, I said, you are on more substantial and almost unanswerable
+ground; for if the injustice which you were maintaining to be
+profitable had been admitted by you as by others to be vice and
+deformity, an answer might have been given to you on received
+principles; but now I perceive that you will call injustice honourable
+and strong, and to the unjust you will attribute all the qualities
+which were attributed by us before to the just, seeing that you do not
+hesitate to rank injustice with wisdom and virtue.
+
+You have guessed most infallibly, he replied.
+
+Then I certainly ought not to shrink from going through with the
+argument so long as I have reason to think that you, Thrasymachus, are
+speaking your real mind; for I do believe that you are now in earnest
+and are not amusing yourself at our expense.
+
+I may be in earnest or not, but what is that to you?--to refute the
+argument is your business.
+
+Very true, I said; that is what I have to do:  But will you be so good
+as answer yet one more question?  Does the just man try to gain any
+advantage over the just?
+
+Far otherwise; if he did would not be the simple, amusing creature
+which he is.
+
+And would he try to go beyond just action?
+
+He would not.
+
+And how would he regard the attempt to gain an advantage over the
+unjust; would that be considered by him as just or unjust?
+
+He would think it just, and would try to gain the advantage; but he
+would not be able.
+
+Whether he would or would not be able, I said, is not to the point.  My
+question is only whether the just man, while refusing to have more than
+another just man, would wish and claim to have more than the unjust?
+
+Yes, he would.
+
+And what of the unjust--does he claim to have more than the just man
+and to do more than is just.
+
+Of course, he said, for he claims to have more than all men.
+
+And the unjust man will strive and struggle to obtain more than the
+unjust man or action, in order that he may have more than all?
+
+True.
+
+We may put the matter thus, I said--the just does not desire more than
+his like but more than his unlike, whereas the unjust desires more than
+both his like and his unlike?
+
+Nothing, he said, can be better than that statement.
+
+And the unjust is good and wise, and the just is neither?
+
+Good again, he said.
+
+And is not the unjust like the wise and good and the just unlike them?
+
+Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who
+are of a certain nature; he who is not, not.
+
+Each of them, I said, is such as his like is?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+Very good, Thrasymachus, I said; and now to take the case of the arts:
+you would admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And which is wise and which is foolish?
+
+Clearly the musician is wise, and he who is not a musician is foolish.
+
+And he is good in as far as he is wise, and bad in as far as he is
+foolish?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would say the same sort of thing of the physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do you think, my excellent friend, that a musician when he adjusts
+the lyre would desire or claim to exceed or go beyond a musician in the
+tightening and loosening the strings?
+
+I do not think that he would.
+
+But he would claim to exceed the non-musician?
+
+Of course.
+
+And what would you say of the physician?  In prescribing meats and
+drinks would he wish to go beyond another physician or beyond the
+practice of medicine?
+
+He would not.
+
+But he would wish to go beyond the non-physician?
+
+Yes.
+
+And about knowledge and ignorance in general; see whether you think
+that any man who has knowledge ever would wish to have the choice of
+saying or doing more than another man who has knowledge.  Would he not
+rather say or do the same as his like in the same case?
+
+That, I suppose, can hardly be denied.
+
+And what of the ignorant? would he not desire to have more than either
+the knowing or the ignorant?
+
+I dare say.
+
+And the knowing is wise?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the wise is good?
+
+True.
+
+Then the wise and good will not desire to gain more than his like, but
+more than his unlike and opposite?
+
+I suppose so.
+
+Whereas the bad and ignorant will desire to gain more than both?
+
+Yes.
+
+But did we not say, Thrasymachus, that the unjust goes beyond both his
+like and unlike?  Were not these your words?  They were.
+
+They were.
+
+And you also said that the lust will not go beyond his like but his
+unlike?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil
+and ignorant?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+And each of them is such as his like is?
+
+That was admitted.
+
+Then the just has turned out to be wise and good and the unjust evil
+and ignorant.
+
+Thrasymachus made all these admissions, not fluently, as I repeat them,
+but with extreme reluctance; it was a hot summer's day, and the
+perspiration poured from him in torrents; and then I saw what I had
+never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing.  As we were now agreed that
+justice was virtue and wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance, I
+proceeded to another point:
+
+Well, I said, Thrasymachus, that matter is now settled; but were we not
+also saying that injustice had strength; do you remember?
+
+Yes, I remember, he said, but do not suppose that I approve of what you
+are saying or have no answer; if however I were to answer, you would be
+quite certain to accuse me of haranguing; therefore either permit me to
+have my say out, or if you would rather ask, do so, and I will answer
+'Very good,' as they say to story-telling old women, and will nod 'Yes'
+and 'No.'
+
+Certainly not, I said, if contrary to your real opinion.
+
+Yes, he said, I will, to please you, since you will not let me speak.
+What else would you have?
+
+Nothing in the world, I said; and if you are so disposed I will ask and
+you shall answer.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Then I will repeat the question which I asked before, in order that our
+examination of the relative nature of justice and injustice may be
+carried on regularly.  A statement was made that injustice is stronger
+and more powerful than justice, but now justice, having been identified
+with wisdom and virtue, is easily shown to be stronger than injustice,
+if injustice is ignorance; this can no longer be questioned by any one.
+But I want to view the matter, Thrasymachus, in a different way: You
+would not deny that a state may be unjust and may be unjustly
+attempting to enslave other states, or may have already enslaved them,
+and may be holding many of them in subjection?
+
+True, he replied; and I will add the best and perfectly unjust state
+will be most likely to do so.
+
+I know, I said, that such was your position; but what I would further
+consider is, whether this power which is possessed by the superior
+state can exist or be exercised without justice.
+
+If you are right in you view, and justice is wisdom, then only with
+justice; but if I am right, then without justice.
+
+I am delighted, Thrasymachus, to see you not only nodding assent and
+dissent, but making answers which are quite excellent.
+
+That is out of civility to you, he replied.
+
+You are very kind, I said; and would you have the goodness also to
+inform me, whether you think that a state, or an army, or a band of
+robbers and thieves, or any other gang of evil-doers could act at all
+if they injured one another?
+
+No indeed, he said, they could not.
+
+But if they abstained from injuring one another, then they might act
+together better?
+
+Yes.
+
+And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and
+fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true,
+Thrasymachus?
+
+I agree, he said, because I do not wish to quarrel with you.
+
+How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether
+injustice, having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing,
+among slaves or among freemen, will not make them hate one another and
+set them at variance and render them incapable of common action?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And even if injustice be found in two only, will they not quarrel and
+fight, and become enemies to one another and to the just.
+
+They will.
+
+And suppose injustice abiding in a single person, would your wisdom say
+that she loses or that she retains her natural power?
+
+Let us assume that she retains her power.
+
+Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that
+wherever she takes up her abode, whether in a city, in an army, in a
+family, or in any other body, that body is, to begin with, rendered
+incapable of united action by reason of sedition and distraction; and
+does it not become its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes
+it, and with the just?  Is not this the case?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in
+the first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not at
+unity with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to
+himself and the just?  Is not that true, Thrasymachus?
+
+Yes.
+
+And O my friend, I said, surely the gods are just?
+
+Granted that they are.
+
+But if so, the unjust will be the enemy of the gods, and the just will
+be their friend?
+
+Feast away in triumph, and take your fill of the argument; I will not
+oppose you, lest I should displease the company.
+
+Well then, proceed with your answers, and let me have the remainder of
+my repast.  For we have already shown that the just are clearly wiser
+and better and abler than the unjust, and that the unjust are incapable
+of common action; nay ing at more, that to speak as we did of men who
+are evil acting at any time vigorously together, is not strictly true,
+for if they had been perfectly evil, they would have laid hands upon
+one another; but it is evident that there must have been some remnant
+of justice in them, which enabled them to combine; if there had not
+been they would have injured one another as well as their victims; they
+were but half--villains in their enterprises; for had they been whole
+villains, and utterly unjust, they would have been utterly incapable of
+action.  That, as I believe, is the truth of the matter, and not what
+you said at first.  But whether the just have a better and happier life
+than the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to
+consider.  I think that they have, and for the reasons which to have
+given; but still I should like to examine further, for no light matter
+is at stake, nothing less than the rule of human life.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I will proceed by asking a question:  Would you not say that a horse
+has some end?
+
+I should.
+
+And the end or use of a horse or of anything would be that which could
+not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?
+
+I do not understand, he said.
+
+Let me explain:  Can you see, except with the eye?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or hear, except with the ear?
+
+No.
+
+These then may be truly said to be the ends of these organs?
+
+They may.
+
+But you can cut off a vine-branch with a dagger or with a chisel, and
+in many other ways?
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet not so well as with a pruning-hook made for the purpose?
+
+True.
+
+May we not say that this is the end of a pruning-hook?
+
+We may.
+
+Then now I think you will have no difficulty in understanding my
+meaning when I asked the question whether the end of anything would be
+that which could not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by
+any other thing?
+
+I understand your meaning, he said, and assent.
+
+And that to which an end is appointed has also an excellence?  Need I
+ask again whether the eye has an end?
+
+It has.
+
+And has not the eye an excellence?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the ear has an end and an excellence also?
+
+True.
+
+And the same is true of all other things; they have each of them an end
+and a special excellence?
+
+That is so.
+
+Well, and can the eyes fulfil their end if they are wanting in their
+own proper excellence and have a defect instead?
+
+How can they, he said, if they are blind and cannot see?
+
+You mean to say, if they have lost their proper excellence, which is
+sight; but I have not arrived at that point yet.  I would rather ask
+the question more generally, and only enquire whether the things which
+fulfil their ends fulfil them by their own proper excellence, and fall
+of fulfilling them by their own defect?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I might say the same of the ears; when deprived of their own proper
+excellence they cannot fulfil their end?
+
+True.
+
+And the same observation will apply to all other things?
+
+I agree.
+
+Well; and has not the soul an end which nothing else can fulfil?  for
+example, to superintend and command and deliberate and the like.  Are
+not these functions proper to the soul, and can they rightly be
+assigned to any other?
+
+To no other.
+
+And is not life to be reckoned among the ends of the soul?
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+And has not the soul an excellence also?
+
+Yes.
+
+And can she or can she not fulfil her own ends when deprived of that
+excellence?
+
+She cannot.
+
+Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler and superintendent,
+and the good soul a good ruler?
+
+Yes, necessarily.
+
+And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and
+injustice the defect of the soul?
+
+That has been admitted.
+
+Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man
+will live ill?
+
+That is what your argument proves.
+
+And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the
+reverse of happy?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?
+
+So be it.
+
+But happiness and not misery is profitable.
+
+Of course.
+
+Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable
+than justice.
+
+Let this, Socrates, he said, be your entertainment at the Bendidea.
+
+For which I am indebted to you, I said, now that you have grown gentle
+towards me and have left off scolding.  Nevertheless, I have not been
+well entertained; but that was my own fault and not yours.  As an
+epicure snatches a taste of every dish which is successively brought to
+table, he not having allowed himself time to enjoy the one before, so
+have I gone from one subject to another without having discovered what
+I sought at first, the nature of justice.  I left that enquiry and
+turned away to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil
+and folly; and when there arose a further question about the
+comparative advantages of justice and injustice, I could not refrain
+from passing on to that.  And the result of the whole discussion has
+been that I know nothing at all.  For I know not what justice is, and
+therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor
+can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+WITH these words I was thinking that I had made an end of the
+discussion; but the end, in truth, proved to be only a beginning.  For
+Glaucon, who is always the most pugnacious of men, was dissatisfied at
+Thrasymachus' retirement; he wanted to have the battle out.  So he said
+to me:  Socrates, do you wish really to persuade us, or only to seem to
+have persuaded us, that to be just is always better than to be unjust?
+
+I should wish really to persuade you, I replied, if I could.
+
+Then you certainly have not succeeded.  Let me ask you now:--How would
+you arrange goods--are there not some which we welcome for their own
+sakes, and independently of their consequences, as, for example,
+harmless pleasures and enjoyments, which delight us at the time,
+although nothing follows from them?
+
+I agree in thinking that there is such a class, I replied.
+
+Is there not also a second class of goods, such as knowledge, sight,
+health, which are desirable not only in themselves, but also for their
+results?
+
+Certainly, I said.
+
+And would you not recognize a third class, such as gymnastic, and the
+care of the sick, and the physician's art; also the various ways of
+money-making--these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable; and
+no one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of
+some reward or result which flows from them?
+
+There is, I said, this third class also.  But why do you ask?
+
+Because I want to know in which of the three classes you would place
+justice?
+
+In the highest class, I replied,--among those goods which he who would
+be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their
+results.
+
+Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be
+reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued
+for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are
+disagreeable and rather to be avoided.
+
+I know, I said, that this is their manner of thinking, and that this
+was the thesis which Thrasymachus was maintaining just now, when he
+censured justice and praised injustice.  But I am too stupid to be
+convinced by him.
+
+I wish, he said, that you would hear me as well as him, and then I
+shall see whether you and I agree.  For Thrasymachus seems to me, like
+a snake, to have been charmed by your voice sooner than he ought to
+have been; but to my mind the nature of justice and injustice have not
+yet been made clear.  Setting aside their rewards and results, I want
+to know what they are in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the
+soul.  If you, please, then, I will revive the argument of
+Thrasymachus.  And first I will speak of the nature and origin of
+justice according to the common view of them.  Secondly, I will show
+that all men who practise justice do so against their will, of
+necessity, but not as a good.  And thirdly, I will argue that there is
+reason in this view, for the life of the unjust is after all better far
+than the life of the just--if what they say is true, Socrates, since I
+myself am not of their opinion.  But still I acknowledge that I am
+perplexed when I hear the voices of Thrasymachus and myriads of others
+dinning in my ears; and, on the other hand, I have never yet heard the
+superiority of justice to injustice maintained by any one in a
+satisfactory way.  I want to hear justice praised in respect of itself;
+then I shall be satisfied, and you are the person from whom I think
+that I am most likely to hear this; and therefore I will praise the
+unjust life to the utmost of my power, and my manner of speaking will
+indicate the manner in which I desire to hear you too praising justice
+and censuring injustice.  Will you say whether you approve of my
+proposal?
+
+Indeed I do; nor can I imagine any theme about which a man of sense
+would oftener wish to converse.
+
+I am delighted, he replied, to hear you say so, and shall begin by
+speaking, as I proposed, of the nature and origin of justice.
+
+GLAUCON
+
+They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice,
+evil; but that the evil is greater than the good.  And so when men have
+both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not
+being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they
+had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise
+laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed
+by them lawful and just.  This they affirm to be the origin and nature
+of justice;--it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which
+is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is
+to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice,
+being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good,
+but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men
+to do injustice.  For no man who is worthy to be called a man would
+ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be
+mad if he did.  Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature
+and origin of justice.
+
+Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because
+they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine
+something of this kind:  having given both to the just and the unjust
+power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will
+lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust
+man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest,
+which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the
+path of justice by the force of law.  The liberty which we are
+supposing may be most completely given to them in the form of such a
+power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges the ancestor of
+Croesus the Lydian.  According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd
+in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an
+earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was
+feeding his flock.  Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening,
+where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having
+doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature,
+as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold
+ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.  Now the
+shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their
+monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he
+came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he
+chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly
+he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak
+of him as if he were no longer present.  He was astonished at this, and
+again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared;
+he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same
+result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when
+outwards he reappeared.  Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the
+messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he
+seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and
+slew him, and took the kingdom.  Suppose now that there were two such
+magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;
+no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand
+fast in justice.  No man would keep his hands off what was not his own
+when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into
+houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from
+prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.
+Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust;
+they would both come at last to the same point.  And this we may truly
+affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because
+he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of
+necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust,
+there he is unjust.  For all men believe in their hearts that injustice
+is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who
+argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right.  If you
+could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and
+never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be
+thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they
+would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with
+one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.  Enough
+of this.
+
+Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and
+unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the
+isolation to be effected?  I answer:  Let the unjust man be entirely
+unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away
+from either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the
+work of their respective lives.  First, let the unjust be like other
+distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician,
+who knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and
+who, if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself.  So let the
+unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he
+means to be great in his injustice (he who is found out is nobody): for
+the highest reach of injustice is: to be deemed just when you are not.
+Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the
+most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow
+him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest
+reputation for justice.  If he have taken a false step he must be able
+to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of
+his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is
+required his courage and strength, and command of money and friends.
+And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and
+simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good.
+There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured
+and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the
+sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let
+him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must
+be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former.  Let him be
+the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have
+been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by
+the fear of infamy and its consequences.  And let him continue thus to
+the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust.  When both have
+reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of
+injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the
+two.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up
+for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two
+statues.
+
+I do my best, he said.  And now that we know what they are like there
+is no difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either of
+them.  This I will proceed to describe; but as you may think the
+description a little too coarse, I ask you to suppose, Socrates, that
+the words which follow are not mine.-- Let me put them into the mouths
+of the eulogists of injustice: They will tell you that the just man who
+is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound--will have his eyes
+burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be
+impaled:  Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not
+to be, just; the words of Aeschylus may be more truly spoken of the
+unjust than of the just.  For the unjust is pursuing a reality; he does
+not live with a view to appearances--he wants to be really unjust and
+not to seem only:--
+
+    His mind has a soil deep and fertile,
+    Out of which spring his prudent counsels.
+
+In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the
+city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he will;
+also he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own
+advantage, because he has no misgivings about injustice and at every
+contest, whether in public or private, he gets the better of his
+antagonists, and gains at their expense, and is rich, and out of his
+gains he can benefit his friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he
+can offer sacrifices, and dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and
+magnificently, and can honour the gods or any man whom he wants to
+honour in a far better style than the just, and therefore he is likely
+to be dearer than they are to the gods.  And thus, Socrates, gods and
+men are said to unite in making the life of the unjust better than the
+life of the just.
+
+ADEIMANTUS - SOCRATES
+
+I was going to say something in answer to Glaucon, when Adeimantus, his
+brother, interposed:  Socrates, he said, you do not suppose that there
+is nothing more to be urged?
+
+Why, what else is there?  I answered.
+
+The strongest point of all has not been even mentioned, he replied.
+
+Well, then, according to the proverb, 'Let brother help brother'--if he
+fails in any part do you assist him; although I must confess that
+Glaucon has already said quite enough to lay me in the dust, and take
+from me the power of helping justice.
+
+ADEIMANTUS
+
+Nonsense, he replied.  But let me add something more:  There is another
+side to Glaucon's argument about the praise and censure of justice and
+injustice, which is equally required in order to bring out what I
+believe to be his meaning.  Parents and tutors are always telling their
+sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the
+sake of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the
+hope of obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices,
+marriages, and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the
+advantages accruing to the unjust from the reputation of justice.
+More, however, is made of appearances by this class of persons than by
+the others; for they throw in the good opinion of the gods, and will
+tell you of a shower of benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain
+upon the pious; and this accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod
+and Homer, the first of whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the
+just--
+
+    To hear acorns at their summit, and bees I the middle;
+    And the sheep the bowed down bowed the with the their fleeces.
+
+and many other blessings of a like kind are provided for them.  And
+Homer has a very similar strain; for he speaks of one whose fame is--
+
+    As the fame of some blameless king who, like a god,
+    Maintains justice to whom the black earth brings forth
+    Wheat and barley, whose trees are bowed with fruit,
+    And his sheep never fail to bear, and the sea gives him fish.
+
+Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son
+vouchsafe to the just; they take them down into the world below, where
+they have the saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk,
+crowned with garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of
+drunkenness is the highest meed of virtue.  Some extend their rewards
+yet further; the posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall
+survive to the third and fourth generation.  This is the style in which
+they praise justice.  But about the wicked there is another strain;
+they bury them in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a
+sieve; also while they are yet living they bring them to infamy, and
+inflict upon them the punishments which Glaucon described as the
+portion of the just who are reputed to be unjust; nothing else does
+their invention supply.  Such is their manner of praising the one and
+censuring the other.
+
+Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking
+about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but is
+found in prose writers.  The universal voice of mankind is always
+declaring that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and
+toilsome; and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of
+attainment, and are only censured by law and opinion.  They say also
+that honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty; and
+they are quite ready to call wicked men happy, and to honour them both
+in public and private when they are rich or in any other way
+influential, while they despise and overlook those who may be weak and
+poor, even though acknowledging them to be better than the others.  But
+most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and
+the gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many
+good men, and good and happiness to the wicked.  And mendicant prophets
+go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have a power
+committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man's own or
+his ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and
+feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a
+small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they
+say, to execute their will.  And the poets are the authorities to whom
+they appeal, now smoothing the path of vice with the words of Hesiod;--
+
+    Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth
+    and her dwelling-place is near. But before virtue the gods have
+    set toil,
+
+and a tedious and uphill road:  then citing Homer as a witness that the
+gods may be influenced by men; for he also says:
+
+    The gods, too, may he turned from their purpose; and men pray to
+    them and avert their wrath by sacrifices and soothing entreaties,
+    and by libations and the odour of fat, when they have sinned and
+    transgressed.
+
+And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who
+were children of the Moon and the Muses--that is what they
+say--according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not
+only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for
+sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour,
+and are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter
+sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell,
+but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.
+
+He proceeded:  And now when the young hear all this said about virtue
+and vice, and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their
+minds likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,--those of them, I mean,
+who are quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower,
+and from all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what
+manner of persons they should be and in what way they should walk if
+they would make the best of life?  Probably the youth will say to
+himself in the words of Pindar--
+
+    Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier
+    tower which may he a fortress to me all my days?
+
+For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought
+just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are
+unmistakable.  But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of
+justice, a heavenly life is promised to me.  Since then, as
+philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of
+happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.  I will describe around
+me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of
+my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox, as
+Archilochus, greatest of sages, recommends.  But I hear some one
+exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to
+which I answer, Nothing great is easy.  Nevertheless, the argument
+indicates this, if we would be happy, to be the path along which we
+should proceed.  With a view to concealment we will establish secret
+brotherhoods and political clubs.  And there are professors of rhetoric
+who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly
+by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not
+be punished.  Still I hear a voice saying that the gods cannot be
+deceived, neither can they be compelled.  But what if there are no
+gods? or, suppose them to have no care of human things--why in either
+case should we mind about concealment?  And even if there are gods, and
+they do care about us, yet we know of them only from tradition and the
+genealogies of the poets; and these are the very persons who say that
+they may be influenced and turned by 'sacrifices and soothing
+entreaties and by offerings.' Let us be consistent then, and believe
+both or neither.  If the poets speak truly, why then we had better be
+unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are just,
+although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall lose the gains
+of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the gains, and by
+our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods will be
+propitiated, and we shall not be punished.  'But there is a world below
+in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds.'
+Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries and
+atoning deities, and these have great power.  That is what mighty
+cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and
+prophets, bear a like testimony.
+
+On what principle, then, shall we any longer choose justice rather than
+the worst injustice? when, if we only unite the latter with a deceitful
+regard to appearances, we shall fare to our mind both with gods and
+men, in life and after death, as the most numerous and the highest
+authorities tell us.  Knowing all this, Socrates, how can a man who has
+any superiority of mind or person or rank or wealth, be willing to
+honour justice; or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears
+justice praised?  And even if there should be some one who is able to
+disprove the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice is
+best, still he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready to
+forgive them, because he also knows that men are not just of their own
+free will; unless, peradventure, there be some one whom the divinity
+within him may have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or who has
+attained knowledge of the truth--but no other man.  He only blames
+injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the
+power of being unjust.  And this is proved by the fact that when he
+obtains the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.
+
+The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning
+of the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were
+to find that of all the professing panegyrists of justice--beginning
+with the ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us,
+and ending with the men of our own time--no one has ever blamed
+injustice or praised justice except with a view to the glories,
+honours, and benefits which flow from them.  No one has ever adequately
+described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either
+of them abiding in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye;
+or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has within
+him, justice is the greatest good, and injustice the greatest evil.
+Had this been the universal strain, had you sought to persuade us of
+this from our youth upwards, we should not have been on the watch to
+keep one another from doing wrong, but every one would have been his
+own watchman, because afraid, if he did wrong, of harbouring in himself
+the greatest of evils.  I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would
+seriously hold the language which I have been merely repeating, and
+words even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as
+I conceive, perverting their true nature.  But I speak in this vehement
+manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from
+you the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the
+superiority which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have
+on the possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other
+an evil to him.  And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude
+reputations; for unless you take away from each of them his true
+reputation and add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise
+justice, but the appearance of it; we shall think that you are only
+exhorting us to keep injustice dark, and that you really agree with
+Thrasymachus in thinking that justice is another's good and the
+interest of the stronger, and that injustice is a man's own profit and
+interest, though injurious to the weaker.  Now as you have admitted
+that justice is one of that highest class of goods which are desired
+indeed for their results, but in a far greater degree for their own
+sakes--like sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real
+and natural and not merely conventional good--I would ask you in your
+praise of justice to regard one point only: I mean the essential good
+and evil which justice and injustice work in the possessors of them.
+Let others praise justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards
+and honours of the one and abusing the other; that is a manner of
+arguing which, coming from them, I am ready to tolerate, but from you
+who have spent your whole life in the consideration of this question,
+unless I hear the contrary from your own lips, I expect something
+better.  And therefore, I say, not only prove to us that justice is
+better than injustice, but show what they either of them do to the
+possessor of them, which makes the one to be a good and the other an
+evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but on
+hearing these words I was quite delighted, and said: Sons of an
+illustrious father, that was not a bad beginning of the Elegiac verses
+which the admirer of Glaucon made in honour of you after you had
+distinguished yourselves at the battle of Megara:--
+
+    'Sons of Ariston,' he sang, 'divine offspring of an
+    illustrious hero.'
+
+The epithet is very appropriate, for there is something truly divine in
+being able to argue as you have done for the superiority of injustice,
+and remaining unconvinced by your own arguments.  And I do believe that
+you are not convinced--this I infer from your general character, for
+had I judged only from your speeches I should have mistrusted you.  But
+now, the greater my confidence in you, the greater is my difficulty in
+knowing what to say.  For I am in a strait between two; on the one hand
+I feel that I am unequal to the task; and my inability is brought home
+to me by the fact that you were not satisfied with the answer which I
+made to Thrasymachus, proving, as I thought, the superiority which
+justice has over injustice.  And yet I cannot refuse to help, while
+breath and speech remain to me; I am afraid that there would be an
+impiety in being present when justice is evil spoken of and not lifting
+up a hand in her defence.  And therefore I had best give such help as I
+can.
+
+Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question
+drop, but to proceed in the investigation.  They wanted to arrive at
+the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and
+secondly, about their relative advantages.  I told them, what I really
+thought, that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would
+require very good eyes.  Seeing then, I said, that we are no great
+wits, I think that we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate
+thus; suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to
+read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else
+that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which
+the letters were larger--if they were the same and he could read the
+larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser--this would have
+been thought a rare piece of good fortune.
+
+Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our
+enquiry?
+
+I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our
+enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an
+individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And is not a State larger than an individual?
+
+It is.
+
+Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and
+more easily discernible.  I propose therefore that we enquire into the
+nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and
+secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser
+and comparing them.
+
+That, he said, is an excellent proposal.
+
+And if we imagine the State in process of creation, we shall see the
+justice and injustice of the State in process of creation also.
+
+I dare say.
+
+When the State is completed there may be a hope that the object of our
+search will be more easily discovered.
+
+Yes, far more easily.
+
+But ought we to attempt to construct one?  I said; for to do so, as I
+am inclined to think, will be a very serious task.  Reflect therefore.
+
+I have reflected, said Adeimantus, and am anxious that you should
+proceed.
+
+A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no
+one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.  Can any other
+origin of a State be imagined?
+
+There can I be no other.
+
+Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply
+them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and
+when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation
+the body of inhabitants is termed a State.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another
+receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true
+creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.
+
+Of course, he replied.
+
+Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the
+condition of life and existence.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.
+
+True.
+
+And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great
+demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder,
+some one else a weaver--shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps
+some other purveyor to our bodily wants?
+
+Quite right.
+
+The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And how will they proceed?  Will each bring the result of his labours
+into a common stock?--the individual husbandman, for example, producing
+for four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need in
+the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself;
+or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of
+producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food
+in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three-fourths of his time
+be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no
+partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?
+
+Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at
+producing everything.
+
+Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you
+say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are
+diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different
+occupations.
+
+Very true.
+
+And will you have a work better done when the workman has many
+occupations, or when he has only one?
+
+When he has only one.
+
+Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at
+the right time?
+
+No doubt.
+
+For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is
+at leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the
+business his first object.
+
+He must.
+
+And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully
+and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is
+natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.
+
+Undoubtedly..
+
+Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will
+not make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture,
+if they are to be good for anything.  Neither will the builder make his
+tools--and he too needs many; and in like manner the weaver and
+shoemaker.
+
+True.
+
+Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers
+in our little State, which is already beginning to grow?
+
+True.
+
+Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, in order
+that our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well
+as husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces
+and hides,--still our State will not be very large.
+
+That is true; yet neither will it be a very small State which contains
+all these.
+
+Then, again, there is the situation of the city--to find a place where
+nothing need be imported is well-nigh impossible.
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the
+required supply from another city?
+
+There must.
+
+But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which they require
+who would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And therefore what they produce at home must be not only enough for
+themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate
+those from whom their wants are supplied.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?
+
+They will.
+
+Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called merchants?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we shall want merchants?
+
+We shall.
+
+And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skilful sailors will
+also be needed, and in considerable numbers?
+
+Yes, in considerable numbers.
+
+Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their productions?
+To secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our
+principal objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a
+State.
+
+Clearly they will buy and sell.
+
+Then they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of
+exchange.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to
+market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with
+him,--is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?
+
+Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake
+the office of salesmen.  In well-ordered States they are commonly those
+who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for
+any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money
+in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money
+from those who desire to buy.
+
+This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our State.  Is
+not 'retailer' the term which is applied to those who sit in the
+market-place engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from
+one city to another are called merchants?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And there is another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly
+on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily
+strength for labour, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I
+do not mistake, hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the
+price of their labour.
+
+True.
+
+Then hirelings will help to make up our population?
+
+Yes.
+
+And now, Adeimantus, is our State matured and perfected?
+
+I think so.
+
+Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of
+the State did they spring up?
+
+Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another.  cannot
+imagine that they are more likely to be found anywhere else.
+
+I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better
+think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.
+
+Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now
+that we have thus established them.  Will they not produce corn, and
+wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves?  And
+when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and
+barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod.  They will feed
+on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making
+noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or
+on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with
+yew or myrtle.  And they and their children will feast, drinking of the
+wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning
+the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another.  And they
+will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an
+eye to poverty or war.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to
+their meal.
+
+True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a
+relish-salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs
+such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs,
+and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at
+the fire, drinking in moderation.  And with such a diet they may be
+expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a
+similar life to their children after them.
+
+Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs,
+how else would you feed the beasts?
+
+But what would you have, Glaucon?  I replied.
+
+Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life.
+People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and
+dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern
+style.
+
+Yes, I said, now I understand:  the question which you would have me
+consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is
+created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we
+shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate.  In my
+opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which
+I have described.  But if you wish also to see a State at fever heat, I
+have no objection.  For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with
+the simpler way of way They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and
+other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and
+courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every
+variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first
+speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the
+painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and
+ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no
+longer sufficient.  Now will the city have to fill and swell with a
+multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such
+as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have
+to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of
+music--poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players,
+dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles,
+including women's dresses.  And we shall want more servants.  Will not
+tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and
+barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who
+were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our
+State, but are needed now?  They must not be forgotten:  and there will
+be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians
+than before?
+
+Much greater.
+
+And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants
+will be too small now, and not enough?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture
+and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves,
+they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the
+unlimited accumulation of wealth?
+
+That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
+
+And so we shall go to war, Glaucon.  Shall we not?
+
+Most certainly, he replied.
+
+Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus
+much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from
+causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States,
+private as well as public.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And our State must once more enlarge; and this time the will be nothing
+short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the
+invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons
+whom we were describing above.
+
+Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?
+
+No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was
+acknowledged by all of us when we were framing the State: the
+principle, as you will remember, was that one man cannot practise many
+arts with success.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But is not war an art?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And the shoemaker was not allowed by us to be husbandman, or a weaver,
+a builder--in order that we might have our shoes well made; but to him
+and to every other worker was assigned one work for which he was by
+nature fitted, and at that he was to continue working all his life long
+and at no other; he was not to let opportunities slip, and then he
+would become a good workman.  Now nothing can be more important than
+that the work of a soldier should be well done.  But is war an art so
+easily acquired that a man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman,
+or shoemaker, or other artisan; although no one in the world would be a
+good dice or draught player who merely took up the game as a
+recreation, and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to this
+and nothing else?
+
+No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor
+be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has
+never bestowed any attention upon them.  How then will he who takes up
+a shield or other implement of war become a good fighter all in a day,
+whether with heavy-armed or any other kind of troops?
+
+Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be
+beyond price.
+
+And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and
+skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?
+
+No doubt, he replied.
+
+Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted
+for the task of guarding the city?
+
+It will.
+
+And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave
+and do our best.
+
+We must.
+
+Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding
+and watching?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to
+overtake the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have
+caught him, they have to fight with him.
+
+All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.
+
+Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or
+any other animal?  Have you never observed how invincible and
+unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of
+any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?
+
+I have.
+
+Then now we have a clear notion of the bodily qualities which are
+required in the guardian.
+
+True.
+
+And also of the mental ones; his soul is to be full of spirit?
+
+Yes.
+
+But are not these spirited natures apt to be savage with one another,
+and with everybody else?
+
+A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.
+
+Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and
+gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without
+waiting for their enemies to destroy them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+What is to be done then?  I said; how shall we find a gentle nature
+which has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the
+other?
+
+True.
+
+He will not be a good guardian who is wanting in either of these two
+qualities; and yet the combination of them appears to be impossible;
+and hence we must infer that to be a good guardian is impossible.
+
+I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.
+
+Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.  My
+friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost
+sight of the image which we had before us.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean to say that there do exist natures gifted with those opposite
+qualities.
+
+And where do you find them?
+
+Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog
+is a very good one:  you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle
+to their familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.
+
+Yes, I know.
+
+Then there is nothing impossible or out of the order of nature in our
+finding a guardian who has a similar combination of qualities?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited
+nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
+
+I do not apprehend your meaning.
+
+The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the
+dog, and is remarkable in the animal.
+
+What trait?
+
+Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an
+acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any
+harm, nor the other any good.  Did this never strike you as curious?
+
+The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of
+your remark.
+
+And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;--your dog is a
+true philosopher.
+
+Why?
+
+Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only
+by the criterion of knowing and not knowing.  And must not an animal be
+a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the
+test of knowledge and ignorance?
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?
+
+They are the same, he replied.
+
+And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be
+gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of
+wisdom and knowledge?
+
+That we may safely affirm.
+
+Then he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the State will
+require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and
+strength?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found
+them, how are they to be reared and educated?  Is not this enquiry
+which may be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry which is
+our final end--How do justice and injustice grow up in States? for we
+do not want either to omit what is to the point or to draw out the
+argument to an inconvenient length.
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if
+somewhat long.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our
+story shall be the education of our heroes.
+
+By all means.
+
+And what shall be their education?  Can we find a better than the
+traditional sort?--and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body,
+and music for the soul.
+
+True.
+
+Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?
+
+By all means.
+
+And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?
+
+I do.
+
+And literature may be either true or false?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the
+false?
+
+I do not understand your meaning, he said.
+
+You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which,
+though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and
+these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn
+gymnastics.
+
+Very true.
+
+That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before
+gymnastics.
+
+Quite right, he said.
+
+You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any
+work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is
+the time at which the character is being formed and the desired
+impression is more readily taken.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales
+which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds
+ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish
+them to have when they are grown up?
+
+We cannot.
+
+Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers
+of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is
+good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell
+their children the authorised ones only.  Let them fashion the mind
+with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their
+hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.
+
+Of what tales are you speaking? he said.
+
+You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are
+necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of
+them.
+
+Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term
+the greater.
+
+Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of
+the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.
+
+But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with
+them?
+
+A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and,
+what is more, a bad lie.
+
+But when is this fault committed?
+
+Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and
+heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a
+likeness to the original.
+
+Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blamable; but what
+are the stories which you mean?
+
+First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies, in high
+places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie
+too,--I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus
+retaliated on him.  The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in
+turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought
+certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if
+possible, they had better be buried in silence.  But if there is an
+absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a
+mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common [Eleusinian] pig, but
+some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers
+will be very few indeed.
+
+Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.
+
+Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the
+young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he
+is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises
+his father when does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be
+following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.
+
+I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are
+quite unfit to be repeated.
+
+Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of
+quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any
+word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and
+fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true.  No,
+we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be
+embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable
+other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.  If
+they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling is
+unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any, quarrel
+between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by
+telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told
+to compose for them in a similar spirit.  But the narrative of
+Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus
+sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all
+the battles of the gods in Homer--these tales must not be admitted into
+our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or
+not.  For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is
+literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely
+to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important
+that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous
+thoughts.
+
+There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such
+models to be found and of what tales are you speaking--how shall we
+answer him?
+
+I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but
+founders of a State:  now the founders of a State ought to know the
+general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits
+which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their
+business.
+
+Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?
+
+Something of this kind, I replied:--God is always to be represented as
+he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in
+which the representation is given.
+
+Right.
+
+And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And no good thing is hurtful?
+
+No, indeed.
+
+And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And that which hurts not does no evil?
+
+No.
+
+And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the good is advantageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And therefore the cause of well-being?
+
+Yes.
+
+It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but
+of the good only?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many
+assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most
+things that occur to men.  For few are the goods of human life, and
+many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of
+the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
+
+That appears to me to be most true, he said.
+
+Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of
+the folly of saying that two casks
+
+    Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good,
+    the other of evil lots,
+
+and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two
+
+    Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;
+
+but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,
+
+    Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.
+
+And again
+
+    Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.
+
+And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which
+was really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus,
+or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis
+and Zeus, he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our
+young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that
+
+    God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to
+    destroy a house.
+
+And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe--the subject of the
+tragedy in which these iambic verses occur--or of the house of Pelops,
+or of the Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit
+him to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he
+must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must
+say that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for
+being punished; but that those who are punished are miserable, and that
+God is the author of their misery--the poet is not to be permitted to
+say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they
+require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from
+God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be
+strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or
+prose by any one whether old or young in any well-ordered commonwealth.
+Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.
+
+I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.
+
+Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods,
+to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform--that God
+is not the author of all things, but of good only.
+
+That will do, he said.
+
+And what do you think of a second principle?  Shall I ask you whether
+God is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one
+shape, and now in another--sometimes himself changing and passing into
+many forms, sometimes deceiving us with the semblance of such
+transformations; or is he one and the same immutably fixed in his own
+proper image?
+
+I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.
+
+Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must
+be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered
+or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human
+frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant
+which is in the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the
+heat of the sun or any similar causes.
+
+Of course.
+
+And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged
+by any external influence?
+
+True.
+
+And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite
+things--furniture, houses, garments; when good and well made, they are
+least altered by time and circumstances.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both,
+is least liable to suffer change from without?
+
+True.
+
+But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?
+
+Of course they are.
+
+Then he can hardly be compelled by external influence to take many
+shapes?
+
+He cannot.
+
+But may he not change and transform himself?
+
+Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.
+
+And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the
+worse and more unsightly?
+
+If he change at all he can only change for the worse, for we cannot
+suppose him to be deficient either in virtue or beauty.
+
+Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man,
+desire to make himself worse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being,
+as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every god
+remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.
+
+That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.
+
+Then, I said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that
+
+    The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands,
+    walk up and down cities in all sorts of forms;
+
+and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either
+in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in
+the likeness of a priestess asking an alms
+
+    For the life-giving daughters of Inachus the river of Argos;
+
+--let us have no more lies of that sort.  Neither must we have mothers
+under the influence of the poets scaring their children with a bad
+version of these myths--telling how certain gods, as they say, 'Go
+about by night in the likeness of so many strangers and in divers
+forms'; but let them take heed lest they make cowards of their
+children, and at the same time speak blasphemy against the gods.
+
+Heaven forbid, he said.
+
+But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by witchcraft
+and deception they may make us think that they appear in various forms?
+
+Perhaps, he replied.
+
+Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in
+word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?
+
+I cannot say, he replied.
+
+Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an expression may
+be allowed, is hated of gods and men?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest
+and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters;
+there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.
+
+Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.
+
+The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound meaning to
+my words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived or
+uninformed about the highest realities in the highest part of
+themselves, which is the soul, and in that part of them to have and to
+hold the lie, is what mankind least like;--that, I say, is what they
+utterly detest.
+
+There is nothing more hateful to them.
+
+And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who
+is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a
+kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the
+soul, not pure unadulterated falsehood.  Am I not right?
+
+Perfectly right.
+
+The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in
+dealing with enemies--that would be an instance; or again, when those
+whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to
+do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or
+preventive; also in the tales of mythology, of which we were just now
+speaking--because we do not know the truth about ancient times, we make
+falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so turn it to account.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But can any of these reasons apply to God?  Can we suppose that he is
+ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?
+
+That would be ridiculous, he said.
+
+Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?
+
+I should say not.
+
+Or perhaps he may tell a lie because he is afraid of enemies?
+
+That is inconceivable.
+
+But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?
+
+But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.
+
+Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes
+not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.
+
+Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.
+
+You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in
+which we should write and speak about divine things.  The gods are not
+magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in
+any way.
+
+I grant that.
+
+Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying
+dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses
+of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials
+
+    Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were
+    to be long, and to know no sickness. And when he had
+    spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he
+    raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul. And I
+    thought that the word of Phoebus being divine and full
+    of prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who
+    uttered the strain, he who was present at the banquet,
+    and who said this--he it is who has slain my son.
+
+These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our
+anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall
+we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young,
+meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be
+true worshippers of the gods and like them.
+
+I entirely agree, be said, in these principles, and promise to make
+them my laws.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+SUCH then, I said, are our principles of theology--some tales are to be
+told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth
+upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to
+value friendship with one another.
+
+Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
+
+But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons
+besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of
+death?  Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle
+rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real
+and terrible?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales
+as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to but rather to
+commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are
+untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
+
+That will be our duty, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages,
+beginning with the verses,
+
+    I would rather he a serf on the land of a poor and portionless
+    man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.
+
+We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
+
+    Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should
+    be seen both of mortals and immortals.
+
+And again:
+
+    O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and
+    ghostly form but no mind at all!
+
+Again of Tiresias:--
+
+    [To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he
+    alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.
+
+Again:--
+
+    The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamentng her
+    fate, leaving manhood and youth.
+
+Again:--
+
+    And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the
+    earth.
+
+And,--
+
+    As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of the has
+    dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling
+    and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold
+    together as they moved.
+
+And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike
+out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or
+unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical
+charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who
+are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names
+describe the world below--Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and
+sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes
+a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them.  I do
+not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind;
+but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered
+too excitable and effeminate by them.
+
+There is a real danger, he said.
+
+Then we must have no more of them.
+
+True.
+
+Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous
+men?
+
+They will go with the rest.
+
+But shall we be right in getting rid of them?  Reflect:  our principle
+is that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good
+man who is his comrade.
+
+Yes; that is our principle.
+
+And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he
+had suffered anything terrible?
+
+He will not.
+
+Such an one, as we further maintain, is sufficient for himself and his
+own happiness, and therefore is least in need of other men.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of
+fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the
+greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.
+
+Yes, he will feel such a misfortune far less than another.
+
+Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous
+men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good
+for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being
+educated by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the
+like.
+
+That will be very right.
+
+Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not to depict
+Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then on
+his back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a
+frenzy along the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes
+in both his hands and pouring them over his head, or weeping and
+wailing in the various modes which Homer has delineated.  Nor should he
+describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,
+
+    Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.
+
+Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce
+the gods lamenting and saying,
+
+    Alas! my misery! Alas! that I bore the harvest to my sorrow.
+
+But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so
+completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him
+say--
+
+    O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine
+    chased round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.
+
+Or again:--
+
+    Woe is me that I am fated to have Sarpedon, dearest of men to
+    me, subdued at the hands of Patroclus the son of Menoetius.
+
+For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen to such
+unworthy representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as
+they ought, hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a
+man, can be dishonoured by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any
+inclination which may arise in his mind to say and do the like.  And
+instead of having any shame or self-control, he will be always whining
+and lamenting on slight occasions.
+
+Yes, he said, that is most true.
+
+Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the
+argument has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until
+it is disproved by a better.
+
+It ought not to be.
+
+Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter.  For a fit of
+laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a
+violent reaction.
+
+So I believe.
+
+Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented
+as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of
+the gods be allowed.
+
+Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.
+
+Then we shall not suffer such an expression to be used about the gods
+as that of Homer when he describes how
+
+    Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when
+    they saw Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.
+
+On your views, we must not admit them.
+
+On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit
+them is certain.
+
+Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is
+useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use
+of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private
+individuals have no business with them.
+
+Clearly not, he said.
+
+Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of
+the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either
+with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the
+public good.  But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind;
+and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie
+to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the
+patient or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his
+own bodily illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a
+sailor not to tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the
+rest of the crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow
+sailors.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
+
+    Any of the craftsmen, whether he priest or physician or
+    carpenter.
+
+he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally
+subversive and destructive of ship or State.
+
+Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.
+
+In the next place our youth must be temperate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Are not the chief elements of temperance, speaking generally, obedience
+to commanders and self-control in sensual pleasures?
+
+True.
+
+Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,
+
+    Friend, sit still and obey my word,
+
+and the verses which follow,
+
+    The Greeks marched breathing prowess,
+    ...in silent awe of their leaders,
+
+and other sentiments of the same kind.
+
+We shall.
+
+What of this line,
+
+    O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog and the heart of a
+    stag,
+
+and of the words which follow?  Would you say that these, or any
+similar impertinences which private individuals are supposed to address
+to their rulers, whether in verse or prose, are well or ill spoken?
+
+They are ill spoken.
+
+They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce
+to temperance.  And therefore they are likely to do harm to our young
+men--you would agree with me there?
+
+Yes.
+
+And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his
+opinion is more glorious than
+
+    When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup-bearer
+    carries round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into
+    the cups,
+
+is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such
+words?  Or the verse
+
+    The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?
+
+What would you say again to the tale of Zeus, who, while other gods and
+men were asleep and he the only person awake, lay devising plans, but
+forgot them all in a moment through his lust, and was so completely
+overcome at the sight of Here that he would not even go into the hut,
+but wanted to lie with her on the ground, declaring that he had never
+been in such a state of rapture before, even when they first met one
+another
+
+    Without the knowledge of their parents;
+
+or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on,
+cast a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?
+
+Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear
+that sort of thing.
+
+But any deeds of endurance which are done or told by famous men, these
+they ought to see and hear; as, for example, what is said in the verses,
+
+    He smote his breast, and thus reproached his heart,
+    Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers
+of money.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither must we sing to them of
+
+    Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.
+
+Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to
+have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take
+the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he
+should not lay aside his anger.  Neither will we believe or acknowledge
+Achilles himself to have been such a lover of money that he took
+Agamemnon's or that when he had received payment he restored the dead
+body of Hector, but that without payment he was unwilling to do so.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.
+
+Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these
+feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly to him, he is
+guilty of downright impiety.  As little can I believe the narrative of
+his insolence to Apollo, where he says,
+
+    Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of deities.
+    Verily I would he even with thee, if I had only the power,
+
+or his insubordination to the river-god, on whose divinity he is ready
+to lay hands; or his offering to the dead Patroclus of his own hair,
+which had been previously dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius,
+and that he actually performed this vow; or that he dragged Hector
+round the tomb of Patroclus, and slaughtered the captives at the pyre;
+of all this I cannot believe that he was guilty, any more than I can
+allow our citizens to believe that he, the wise Cheiron's pupil, the
+son of a goddess and of Peleus who was the gentlest of men and third in
+descent from Zeus, was so disordered in his wits as to be at one time
+the slave of two seemingly inconsistent passions, meanness, not
+untainted by avarice, combined with overweening contempt of gods and
+men.
+
+You are quite right, he replied.
+
+And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated, the tale
+of Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus, going forth
+as they did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or son of
+a god daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely
+ascribe to them in our day: and let us further compel the poets to
+declare either that these acts were not done by them, or that they were
+not the sons of gods;--both in the same breath they shall not be
+permitted to affirm.  We will not have them trying to persuade our
+youth that the gods are the authors of evil, and that heroes are no
+better than men-sentiments which, as we were saying, are neither pious
+nor true, for we have already proved that evil cannot come from the
+gods.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear
+them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is
+convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by--
+
+    The kindred of the gods, the relatives of Zeus, whose ancestral
+    altar, the attar of Zeus, is aloft in air on the peak of Ida,
+
+and who have
+
+    the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.
+
+And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender
+laxity of morals among the young.
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+But now that we are determining what classes of subjects are or are not
+to be spoken of, let us see whether any have been omitted by us.  The
+manner in which gods and demigods and heroes and the world below should
+be treated has been already laid down.
+
+Very true.
+
+And what shall we say about men?  That is clearly the remaining portion
+of our subject.
+
+Clearly so.
+
+But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my
+friend.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about men
+poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements
+when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good
+miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that
+justice is a man's own loss and another's gain--these things we shall
+forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.
+
+To be sure we shall, he replied.
+
+But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall maintain that
+you have implied the principle for which we have been all along
+contending.
+
+I grant the truth of your inference.
+
+That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question
+which we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and
+how naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seems to be
+just or not.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Enough of the subjects of poetry:  let us now speak of the style; and
+when this has been considered, both matter and manner will have been
+completely treated.
+
+I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more intelligible
+if I put the matter in this way.  You are aware, I suppose, that all
+mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or
+to come?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union
+of the two?
+
+That again, he said, I do not quite understand.
+
+I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so much
+difficulty in making myself apprehended.  Like a bad speaker,
+therefore, I will not take the whole of the subject, but will break a
+piece off in illustration of my meaning.  You know the first lines of
+the Iliad, in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to
+release his daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him;
+whereupon Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God
+against the Achaeans.  Now as far as these lines,
+
+    And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus,
+    the chiefs of the people,
+
+the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose
+that he is any one else.  But in what follows he takes the person of
+Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the
+speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself.  And in this double
+form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at
+Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.
+
+Yes.
+
+And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the poet recites
+from time to time and in the intermediate passages?
+
+Quite true.
+
+But when the poet speaks in the person of another, may we not say that
+he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you,
+is going to speak?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice
+or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes?
+
+Of course.
+
+Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by
+way of imitation?
+
+Very true.
+
+Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then
+again the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple
+narration.  However, in order that I may make my meaning quite clear,
+and that you may no more say, I don't understand,' I will show how the
+change might be effected.  If Homer had said, 'The priest came, having
+his daughter's ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and
+above all the kings;' and then if, instead of speaking in the person of
+Chryses, he had continued in his own person, the words would have been,
+not imitation, but simple narration.  The passage would have run as
+follows (I am no poet, and therefore I drop the metre), 'The priest
+came and prayed the gods on behalf of the Greeks that they might
+capture Troy and return safely home, but begged that they would give
+him back his daughter, and take the ransom which he brought, and
+respect the God.  Thus he spoke, and the other Greeks revered the
+priest and assented.  But Agamemnon was wroth, and bade him depart and
+not come again, lest the staff and chaplets of the God should be of no
+avail to him--the daughter of Chryses should not be released, he
+said--she should grow old with him in Argos.  And then he told him to
+go away and not to provoke him, if he intended to get home unscathed.
+And the old man went away in fear and silence, and, when he had left
+the camp, he called upon Apollo by his many names, reminding him of
+everything which he had done pleasing to him, whether in building his
+temples, or in offering sacrifice, and praying that his good deeds
+might be returned to him, and that the Achaeans might expiate his tears
+by the arrows of the god,'--and so on.  In this way the whole becomes
+simple narrative.
+
+I understand, he said.
+
+Or you may suppose the opposite case--that the intermediate passages
+are omitted, and the dialogue only left.
+
+That also, he said, I understand; you mean, for example, as in tragedy.
+
+You have conceived my meaning perfectly; and if I mistake not, what you
+failed to apprehend before is now made clear to you, that poetry and
+mythology are, in some cases, wholly imitative--instances of this are
+supplied by tragedy and comedy; there is likewise the opposite style,
+in which the my poet is the only speaker--of this the dithyramb affords
+the best example; and the combination of both is found in epic, and in
+several other styles of poetry.  Do I take you with me?
+
+Yes, he said; I see now what you meant.
+
+I will ask you to remember also what I began by saying, that we had
+done with the subject and might proceed to the style.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+In saying this, I intended to imply that we must come to an
+understanding about the mimetic art,--whether the poets, in narrating
+their stories, are to be allowed by us to imitate, and if so, whether
+in whole or in part, and if the latter, in what parts; or should all
+imitation be prohibited?
+
+You mean, I suspect, to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall be
+admitted into our State?
+
+Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question: I really do
+not know as yet, but whither the argument may blow, thither we go.
+
+And go we will, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, let me ask you whether our guardians ought to be
+imitators; or rather, has not this question been decided by the rule
+already laid down that one man can only do one thing well, and not
+many; and that if he attempt many, he will altogether fall of gaining
+much reputation in any?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this is equally true of imitation; no one man can imitate many
+things as well as he would imitate a single one?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in
+life, and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other
+parts as well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly
+allied, the same persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the
+writers of tragedy and comedy--did you not just now call them
+imitations?
+
+Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same persons cannot
+succeed in both.
+
+Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?
+
+True.
+
+Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are
+but imitations.
+
+They are so.
+
+And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined into yet
+smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well,
+as of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+If then we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that our
+guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate
+themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making
+this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this
+end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they
+imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those
+characters which are suitable to their profession--the courageous,
+temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be
+skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from
+imitation they should come to be what they imitate.  Did you never
+observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far
+into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature,
+affecting body, voice, and mind?
+
+Yes, certainly, he said.
+
+Then, I said, we will not allow those for whom we profess a care and of
+whom we say that they ought to be good men, to imitate a woman, whether
+young or old, quarrelling with her husband, or striving and vaunting
+against the gods in conceit of her happiness, or when she is in
+affliction, or sorrow, or weeping; and certainly not one who is in
+sickness, love, or labour.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither must they represent slaves, male or female, performing the
+offices of slaves?
+
+They must not.
+
+And surely not bad men, whether cowards or any others, who do the
+reverse of what we have just been prescribing, who scold or mock or
+revile one another in drink or out of in drink or, or who in any other
+manner sin against themselves and their neighbours in word or deed, as
+the manner of such is.  Neither should they be trained to imitate the
+action or speech of men or women who are mad or bad; for madness, like
+vice, is to be known but not to be practised or imitated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, or
+boatswains, or the like?
+
+How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply their minds
+to the callings of any of these?
+
+Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls,
+the murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort
+of thing?
+
+Nay, he said, if madness be forbidden, neither may they copy the
+behaviour of madmen.
+
+You mean, I said, if I understand you aright, that there is one sort of
+narrative style which may be employed by a truly good man when he has
+anything to say, and that another sort will be used by a man of an
+opposite character and education.
+
+And which are these two sorts? he asked.
+
+Suppose, I answered, that a just and good man in the course of a
+narration comes on some saying or action of another good man,--I should
+imagine that he will like to personate him, and will not be ashamed of
+this sort of imitation:  he will be most ready to play the part of the
+good man when he is acting firmly and wisely; in a less degree when he
+is overtaken by illness or love or drink, or has met with any other
+disaster.  But when he comes to a character which is unworthy of him,
+he will not make a study of that; he will disdain such a person, and
+will assume his likeness, if at all, for a moment only when he is
+performing some good action; at other times he will be ashamed to play
+a part which he has never practised, nor will he like to fashion and
+frame himself after the baser models; he feels the employment of such
+an art, unless in jest, to be beneath him, and his mind revolts at it.
+
+So I should expect, he replied.
+
+Then he will adopt a mode of narration such as we have illustrated out
+of Homer, that is to say, his style will be both imitative and
+narrative; but there will be very little of the former, and a great
+deal of the latter.  Do you agree?
+
+Certainly, he said; that is the model which such a speaker must
+necessarily take.
+
+But there is another sort of character who will narrate anything, and,
+the worse lie is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too
+bad for him:  and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke,
+but in right good earnest, and before a large company.  As I was just
+now saying, he will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise
+of wind and hall, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the
+various sounds of flutes; pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of
+instruments:  he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like
+a cock; his entire art will consist in imitation of voice and gesture,
+and there will be very little narration.
+
+That, he said, will be his mode of speaking.
+
+These, then, are the two kinds of style?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is simple and
+has but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also chosen
+for their simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks
+correctly, is always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep
+within the limits of a single harmony (for the changes are not great),
+and in like manner he will make use of nearly the same rhythm?
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Whereas the other requires all sorts of harmonies and all sorts of
+rhythms, if the music and the style are to correspond, because the
+style has all sorts of changes.
+
+That is also perfectly true, he replied.
+
+And do not the two styles, or the mixture of the two, comprehend all
+poetry, and every form of expression in words?  No one can say anything
+except in one or other of them or in both together.
+
+They include all, he said.
+
+And shall we receive into our State all the three styles, or one only
+of the two unmixed styles? or would you include the mixed?
+
+I should prefer only to admit the pure imitator of virtue.
+
+Yes, I said, Adeimantus, but the mixed style is also very charming: and
+indeed the pantomimic, which is the opposite of the one chosen by you,
+is the most popular style with children and their attendants, and with
+the world in general.
+
+I do not deny it.
+
+But I suppose you would argue that such a style is unsuitable to our
+State, in which human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man
+plays one part only?
+
+Yes; quite unsuitable.
+
+And this is the reason why in our State, and in our State only, we
+shall find a shoemaker to be a shoemaker and not a pilot also, and a
+husbandman to be a husbandman and not a dicast also, and a soldier a
+soldier and not a trader also, and the same throughout?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so
+clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a
+proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and
+worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also
+inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the
+law will not allow them.  And so when we have anointed him with myrrh,
+and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to
+another city.  For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher
+and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the
+virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at
+first when we began the education of our soldiers.
+
+We certainly will, he said, if we have the power.
+
+Then now, my friend, I said, that part of music or literary education
+which relates to the story or myth may be considered to be finished;
+for the matter and manner have both been discussed.
+
+I think so too, he said.
+
+Next in order will follow melody and song.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+Every one can see already what we ought to say about them, if we are to
+be consistent with ourselves.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+I fear, said Glaucon, laughing, that the words 'every one' hardly
+includes me, for I cannot at the moment say what they should be; though
+I may guess.
+
+At any rate you can tell that a song or ode has three parts--the words,
+the melody, and the rhythm; that degree of knowledge I may presuppose?
+
+Yes, he said; so much as that you may.
+
+And as for the words, there surely be no difference words between words
+which are and which are not set to music; both will conform to the same
+laws, and these have been already determined by us?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words?
+
+Certainly.
+
+We were saying, when we spoke of the subject-matter, that we had no
+need of lamentations and strains of sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow?  You are musical, and
+can tell me.
+
+The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the
+full-toned or bass Lydian, and such like.
+
+These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a
+character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.
+Certainly.
+
+In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly
+unbecoming the character of our guardians.
+
+Utterly unbecoming.
+
+And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?
+
+The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.'
+
+Well, and are these of any military use?
+
+Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian
+are the only ones which you have left.
+
+I answered:  Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one
+warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the
+hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he
+is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at
+every such crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a
+determination to endure; and another to be used by him in times of
+peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity,
+and he is seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and
+admonition, or on the other hand, when he is expressing his willingness
+to yield to persuasion or entreaty or admonition, and which represents
+him when by prudent conduct he has attained his end, not carried away
+by his success, but acting moderately and wisely under the
+circumstances, and acquiescing in the event.  These two harmonies I ask
+you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the
+strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain
+of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.
+
+And these, he replied, are the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies of which I
+was just now speaking.
+
+Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and
+melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic
+scale?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three corners
+and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed
+curiously-harmonised instruments?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players? Would you admit
+them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of
+harmony the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put
+together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?
+
+Clearly not.
+
+There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and
+the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.
+
+That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.
+
+The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his
+instruments is not at all strange, I said.
+
+Not at all, he replied.
+
+And so, by the dog of Egypt, we have been unconsciously purging the
+State, which not long ago we termed luxurious.
+
+And we have done wisely, he replied.
+
+Then let us now finish the purgation, I said.  Next in order to
+harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow, and they should be subject to
+the same rules, for we ought not to seek out complex systems of metre,
+or metres of every kind, but rather to discover what rhythms are the
+expressions of a courageous and harmonious life; and when we have found
+them, we shall adapt the foot and the melody to words having a like
+spirit, not the words to the foot and melody.  To say what these
+rhythms are will be your duty--you must teach me them, as you have
+already taught me the harmonies.
+
+But, indeed, he replied, I cannot tell you.  I only know that there are
+some three principles of rhythm out of which metrical systems are
+framed, just as in sounds there are four notes out of which all the
+harmonies are composed; that is an observation which I have made.  But
+of what sort of lives they are severally the imitations I am unable to
+say.
+
+Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he will tell us
+what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or insolence, or fury, or
+other unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of
+opposite feelings.  And I think that I have an indistinct recollection
+of his mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic,
+and he arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand,
+making the rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and
+short alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as
+well as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long
+quantities.  Also in some cases he appeared to praise or censure the
+movement of the foot quite as much as the rhythm; or perhaps a
+combination of the two; for I am not certain what he meant.  These
+matters, however, as I was saying, had better be referred to Damon
+himself, for the analysis of the subject would be difficult, you know.
+
+Rather so, I should say.
+
+But there is no difficulty in seeing that grace or the absence of grace
+is an effect of good or bad rhythm.
+
+None at all.
+
+And also that good and bad rhythm naturally assimilate to a good and
+bad style; and that harmony and discord in like manner follow style;
+for our principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the
+words, and not the words by them.
+
+Just so, he said, they should follow the words.
+
+And will not the words and the character of the style depend on the
+temper of the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+And everything else on the style?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on
+simplicity,--I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered
+mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an
+euphemism for folly?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And if our youth are to do their work in life, must they not make these
+graces and harmonies their perpetual aim?
+
+They must.
+
+And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and
+constructive art are full of them,--weaving, embroidery, architecture,
+and every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable,--in
+all of them there is grace or the absence of grace.  And ugliness and
+discord and inharmonious motion are nearly allied to ill words and ill
+nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and
+virtue and bear their likeness.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to
+be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on
+pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State?  Or is the
+same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be
+prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance
+and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other
+creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be
+prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our
+citizens be corrupted by him?  We would not have our guardians grow up
+amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there
+browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little
+by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in
+their own soul.  Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to
+discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our
+youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and
+receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair
+works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze
+from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years
+into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.
+
+There can be no nobler training than that, he replied.
+
+And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent
+instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way
+into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten,
+imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated
+graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he
+who has received this true education of the inner being will most
+shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a
+true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his
+soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and
+hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to
+know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute
+the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you in thinking that our youth should
+be trained in music and on the grounds which you mention.
+
+Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the
+letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring
+sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they
+occupy a space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out;
+and not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we
+recognise them wherever they are found:
+
+True--
+
+Or, as we recognise the reflection of letters in the water, or in a
+mirror, only when we know the letters themselves; the same art and
+study giving us the knowledge of both:
+
+Exactly--
+
+Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to
+educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the essential
+forms, in all their combinations, and can recognise them and their
+images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in small
+things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of one
+art and study.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+And when a beautiful soul harmonises with a beautiful form, and the two
+are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who
+has an eye to see it?
+
+The fairest indeed.
+
+And the fairest is also the loveliest?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in love with the
+loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious soul?
+
+That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul; but if
+there be any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it,
+and will love all the same.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you have or have had experiences of this sort,
+and I agree.  But let me ask you another question: Has excess of
+pleasure any affinity to temperance?
+
+How can that be? he replied; pleasure deprives a man of the use of his
+faculties quite as much as pain.
+
+Or any affinity to virtue in general?
+
+None whatever.
+
+Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?
+
+Yes, the greatest.
+
+And is there any greater or keener pleasure than that of sensual love?
+
+No, nor a madder.
+
+Whereas true love is a love of beauty and order--temperate and
+harmonious?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then mad or intemperate pleasure must never be allowed to come near the
+lover and his beloved; neither of them can have any part in it if their
+love is of the right sort?
+
+No, indeed, Socrates, it must never come near them.
+
+Then I suppose that in the city which we are founding you would make a
+law to the effect that a friend should use no other familiarity to his
+love than a father would use to his son, and then only for a noble
+purpose, and he must first have the other's consent; and this rule is
+to limit him in all his intercourse, and he is never to be seen going
+further, or, if he exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and
+bad taste.
+
+I quite agree, he said.
+
+Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the
+end of music if not the love of beauty?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+After music comes gymnastic, in which our youth are next to be trained.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the training in
+it should be careful and should continue through life.  Now my belief
+is,--and this is a matter upon which I should like to have your opinion
+in confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,--not that the good
+body by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary,
+that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as
+this may be possible.  What do you say?
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+Then, to the mind when adequately trained, we shall be right in handing
+over the more particular care of the body; and in order to avoid
+prolixity we will now only give the general outlines of the subject.
+
+Very good.
+
+That they must abstain from intoxication has been already remarked by
+us; for of all persons a guardian should be the last to get drunk and
+not know where in the world he is.
+
+Yes, he said; that a guardian should require another guardian to take
+care of him is ridiculous indeed.
+
+But next, what shall we say of their food; for the men are in training
+for the great contest of all--are they not?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And will the habit of body of our ordinary athletes be suited to them?
+
+Why not?
+
+I am afraid, I said, that a habit of body such as they have is but a
+sleepy sort of thing, and rather perilous to health.  Do you not
+observe that these athletes sleep away their lives, and are liable to
+most dangerous illnesses if they depart, in ever so slight a degree,
+from their customary regimen?
+
+Yes, I do.
+
+Then, I said, a finer sort of training will be required for our warrior
+athletes, who are to be like wakeful dogs, and to see and hear with the
+utmost keenness; amid the many changes of water and also of food, of
+summer heat and winter cold, which they will have to endure when on a
+campaign, they must not be liable to break down in health.
+
+That is my view.
+
+The really excellent gymnastic is twin sister of that simple music
+which we were just now describing.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I conceive that there is a gymnastic which, like our music, is
+simple and good; and especially the military gymnastic.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds his heroes at
+their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers' fare; they have
+no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they
+are not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is the food most
+convenient for soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire,
+and not involving the trouble of carrying about pots and pans.
+
+True.
+
+And I can hardly be mistaken in saying that sweet sauces are nowhere
+mentioned in Homer.  In proscribing them, however, he is not singular;
+all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in
+good condition should take nothing of the kind.
+
+Yes, he said; and knowing this, they are quite right in not taking them.
+
+Then you would not approve of Syracusan dinners, and the refinements of
+Sicilian cookery?
+
+I think not.
+
+Nor, if a man is to be in condition, would you allow him to have a
+Corinthian girl as his fair friend?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are thought, of
+Athenian confectionery?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to melody and
+song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms.
+Exactly.
+
+There complexity engendered license, and here disease; whereas
+simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and
+simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when intemperance and disease multiply in a State, halls of justice
+and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and
+the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which
+not only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them.
+
+Of course.
+
+And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state
+of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of
+people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also
+those who would profess to have had a liberal education?  Is it not
+disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man
+should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of
+his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of
+other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?
+
+Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.
+
+Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a
+further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long
+litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or
+defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his
+litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to
+take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole,
+bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for
+what?--in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not
+knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping
+judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing.  Is not that still more
+disgraceful?
+
+Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.
+
+Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound has
+to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by
+indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill
+themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh,
+compelling the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for
+diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?
+
+Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names
+to diseases.
+
+Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in
+the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the
+hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of
+Pramnian wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese,
+which are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who
+were at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink,
+or rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case.
+
+Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a
+person in his condition.
+
+Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in former
+days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of
+Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be
+said to educate diseases.  But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself
+of a sickly constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring
+found out a way of torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly
+the rest of the world.
+
+How was that? he said.
+
+By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which
+he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he
+passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but
+attend upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he
+departed in anything from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the
+help of science he struggled on to old age.
+
+A rare reward of his skill!
+
+Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never
+understood that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants in
+valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from ignorance or
+inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew that in
+all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he
+must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being
+ill.  This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously
+enough, do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean this:  When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough
+and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,--these
+are his remedies.  And if some one prescribes for him a course of
+dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and
+all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be
+ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his
+disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore
+bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary
+habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if
+his constitution falls, he dies and has no more trouble.
+
+Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art
+of medicine thus far only.
+
+Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in
+his life if he were deprived of his occupation?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he
+has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would
+live.
+
+He is generally supposed to have nothing to do.
+
+Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man
+has a livelihood he should practise virtue?
+
+Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.
+
+Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but rather ask
+ourselves:  Is the practice of virtue obligatory on the rich man, or
+can he live without it?  And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a
+further question, whether this dieting of disorders which is an
+impediment to the application of the mind t in carpentering and the
+mechanical arts, does not equally stand in the way of the sentiment of
+Phocylides?
+
+Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive care of the
+body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical to
+the practice of virtue.
+
+Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the management of
+a house, an army, or an office of state; and, what is most important of
+all, irreconcilable with any kind of study or thought or
+self-reflection--there is a constant suspicion that headache and
+giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or
+making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a
+man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant
+anxiety about the state of his body.
+
+Yes, likely enough.
+
+And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited
+the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy
+constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these
+he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein
+consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had
+penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by
+gradual processes of evacuation and infusion:  he did not want to
+lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting
+weaker sons;--if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had
+no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use
+either to himself, or to the State.
+
+Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman.
+
+Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his sons.  Note
+that they were heroes in the days of old and practised the medicines of
+which I am speaking at the siege of Troy:  You will remember how, when
+Pandarus wounded Menelaus, they
+
+    Sucked the blood out of the wound, and sprinkled soothing remedies,
+
+but they never prescribed what the patient was afterwards to eat or
+drink in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the case of Eurypylus;
+the remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man who before
+he was wounded was healthy and regular in habits; and even though he
+did happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all
+the same.  But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and
+intemperate subjects, whose lives were of no use either to themselves
+or others; the art of medicine was not designed for their good, and
+though they were as rich as Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have
+declined to attend them.
+
+They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius.
+
+Naturally so, I replied.  Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar
+disobeying our behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was
+the son of Apollo, say also that he was bribed into healing a rich man
+who was at the point of death, and for this reason he was struck by
+lightning.  But we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed
+by us, will not believe them when they tell us both;--if he was the son
+of a god, we maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was
+avaricious he was not the son of a god.
+
+All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a question
+to you:  Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not
+the best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions
+good and bad? and are not the best judges in like manner those who are
+acquainted with all sorts of moral natures?
+
+Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good physicians.  But do
+you know whom I think good?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+I will, if I can.  Let me however note that in the same question you
+join two things which are not the same.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, you join physicians and judges.  Now the most skilful
+physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with
+the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had
+better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of
+diseases in their own persons.  For the body, as I conceive, is not the
+instrument with which they cure the body; in that case we could not
+allow them ever to be or to have been sickly; but they cure the body
+with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure
+nothing.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+But with the judge it is otherwise; since he governs mind by mind; he
+ought not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to
+have associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through
+the whole calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer
+the crimes of others as he might their bodily diseases from his own
+self-consciousness; the honourable mind which is to form a healthy
+judgment should have had no experience or contamination of evil habits
+when young.  And this is the reason why in youth good men often appear
+to be simple, and are easily practised upon by the dishonest, because
+they have no examples of what evil is in their own souls.
+
+Yes, he said, they are far too apt to be deceived.
+
+Therefore, I said, the judge should not be young; he should have
+learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long
+observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his
+guide, not personal experience.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the ideal of a judge.
+
+Yes, I replied, and he will be a good man (which is my answer to your
+question); for he is good who has a good soul.  But the cunning and
+suspicious nature of which we spoke,--he who has committed many crimes,
+and fancies himself to be a master in wickedness, when he is amongst
+his fellows, is wonderful in the precautions which he takes, because he
+judges of them by himself:  but when he gets into the company of men of
+virtue, who have the experience of age, he appears to be a fool again,
+owing to his unseasonable suspicions; he cannot recognise an honest
+man, because he has no pattern of honesty in himself; at the same time,
+as the bad are more numerous than the good, and he meets with them
+oftener, he thinks himself, and is by others thought to be, rather wise
+than foolish.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this man, but
+the other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature,
+educated by time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice: the
+virtuous, and not the vicious, man has wisdom--in my opinion.
+
+And in mine also.
+
+This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you
+sanction in your State.  They will minister to better natures, giving
+health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their
+bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they
+will put an end to themselves.
+
+That is clearly the best thing both for the patients and for the State.
+
+And thus our youth, having been educated only in that simple music
+which, as we said, inspires temperance, will be reluctant to go to law.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to
+practise the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine
+unless in some extreme case.
+
+That I quite believe.
+
+The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to
+stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his
+strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen
+to develop his muscles.
+
+Very right, he said.
+
+Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is
+often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other fir the
+training of the body.
+
+What then is the real object of them?
+
+I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the
+improvement of the soul.
+
+How can that be? he asked.
+
+Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself of
+exclusive devotion to gymnastic, or the opposite effect of an exclusive
+devotion to music?
+
+In what way shown? he said.
+
+The one producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the other of
+softness and effeminacy, I replied.
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes too much
+of a savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond
+what is good for him.
+
+Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if
+rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is
+liable to become hard and brutal.
+
+That I quite think.
+
+On the other hand the philosopher will have the quality of gentleness.
+And this also, when too much indulged, will turn to softness, but, if
+educated rightly, will be gentle and moderate.
+
+True.
+
+And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these qualities?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And both should be in harmony?
+
+Beyond question.
+
+And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the inharmonious is cowardly and boorish?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, when a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul
+through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs
+of which we were just now speaking, and his whole life is passed in
+warbling and the delights of song; in the first stage of the process
+the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made
+useful, instead of brittle and useless.  But, if he carries on the
+softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and
+waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of
+his soul; and he becomes a feeble warrior.
+
+Very true.
+
+If the element of spirit is naturally weak in him the change is
+speedily accomplished, but if he have a good deal, then the power of
+music weakening the spirit renders him excitable;--on the least
+provocation he flames up at once, and is speedily extinguished; instead
+of having spirit he grows irritable and passionate and is quite
+impracticable.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And so in gymnastics, if a man takes violent exercise and is a great
+feeder, and the reverse of a great student of music and philosophy, at
+first the high condition of his body fills him with pride and spirit,
+and lie becomes twice the man that he was.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what happens? if he do nothing else, and holds no con-a verse with
+the Muses, does not even that intelligence which there may be in him,
+having no taste of any sort of learning or enquiry or thought or
+culture, grow feeble and dull and blind, his mind never waking up or
+receiving nourishment, and his senses not being purged of their mists?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And he ends by becoming a hater of philosophy, uncivilized, never using
+the weapon of persuasion,--he is like a wild beast, all violence and
+fierceness, and knows no other way of dealing; and he lives in all
+ignorance and evil conditions, and has no sense of propriety and grace.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited and
+the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given
+mankind two arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul and
+body), in order that these two principles (like the strings of an
+instrument) may be relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly
+harmonised.
+
+That appears to be the intention.
+
+And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and
+best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true
+musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the
+strings.
+
+You are quite right, Socrates.
+
+And such a presiding genius will be always required in our State if the
+government is to last.
+
+Yes, he will be absolutely necessary.
+
+Such, then, are our principles of nurture and education: Where would be
+the use of going into further details about the dances of our citizens,
+or about their hunting and coursing, their gymnastic and equestrian
+contests?  For these all follow the general principle, and having found
+that, we shall have no difficulty in discovering them.
+
+I dare say that there will be no difficulty.
+
+Very good, I said; then what is the next question?  Must we not ask who
+are to be rulers and who subjects?
+
+Certainly.
+
+There can be no doubt that the elder must rule the younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And that the best of these must rule.
+
+That is also clear.
+
+Now, are not the best husbandmen those who are most devoted to
+husbandry?
+
+Yes.
+
+And as we are to have the best of guardians for our city, must they not
+be those who have most the character of guardians?
+
+Yes.
+
+And to this end they ought to be wise and efficient, and to have a
+special care of the State?
+
+True.
+
+And a man will be most likely to care about that which he loves?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And he will be most likely to love that which he regards as having the
+same interests with himself, and that of which the good or evil fortune
+is supposed by him at any time most to affect his own?
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then there must be a selection.  Let us note among the guardians those
+who in their whole life show the greatest eagerness to do what is for
+the good of their country, and the greatest repugnance to do what is
+against her interests.
+
+Those are the right men.
+
+And they will have to be watched at every age, in order that we may see
+whether they preserve their resolution, and never, under the influence
+either of force or enchantment, forget or cast off their sense of duty
+to the State.
+
+How cast off? he said.
+
+I will explain to you, I replied.  A resolution may go out of a man's
+mind either with his will or against his will; with his will when he
+gets rid of a falsehood and learns better, against his will whenever he
+is deprived of a truth.
+
+I understand, he said, the willing loss of a resolution; the meaning of
+the unwilling I have yet to learn.
+
+Why, I said, do you not see that men are unwillingly deprived of good,
+and willingly of evil?  Is not to have lost the truth an evil, and to
+possess the truth a good? and you would agree that to conceive things
+as they are is to possess the truth?
+
+Yes, he replied; I agree with you in thinking that mankind are deprived
+of truth against their will.
+
+And is not this involuntary deprivation caused either by theft, or
+force, or enchantment?
+
+Still, he replied, I do not understand you.
+
+I fear that I must have been talking darkly, like the tragedians.  I
+only mean that some men are changed by persuasion and that others
+forget; argument steals away the hearts of one class, and time of the
+other; and this I call theft.  Now you understand me?
+
+Yes.
+
+Those again who are forced are those whom the violence of some pain or
+grief compels to change their opinion.
+
+I understand, he said, and you are quite right.
+
+And you would also acknowledge that the enchanted are those who change
+their minds either under the softer influence of pleasure, or the
+sterner influence of fear?
+
+Yes, he said; everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
+
+Therefore, as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best
+guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest of
+the State is to be the rule of their lives.  We must watch them from
+their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are
+most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is
+not deceived is to be selected, and he who falls in the trial is to be
+rejected.  That will be the way?
+
+Yes.
+
+And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for
+them, in which they will be made to give further proof of the same
+qualities.
+
+Very right, he replied.
+
+And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments that is the third
+sort of test--and see what will be their behaviour: like those who take
+colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so
+must we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them
+into pleasures, and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in
+the furnace, that we may discover whether they are armed against all
+enchantments, and of a noble bearing always, good guardians of
+themselves and of the music which they have learned, and retaining
+under all circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious nature, such as
+will be most serviceable to the individual and to the State.  And he
+who at every age, as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of
+the trial victorious and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian
+of the State; he shall be honoured in life and death, and shall receive
+sepulture and other memorials of honour, the greatest that we have to
+give.  But him who fails, we must reject.  I am inclined to think that
+this is the sort of way in which our rulers and guardians should be
+chosen and appointed.  I speak generally, and not with any pretension
+to exactness.
+
+And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.
+
+And perhaps the word 'guardian' in the fullest sense ought to be
+applied to this higher class only who preserve us against foreign
+enemies and maintain peace among our citizens at home, that the one may
+not have the will, or the others the power, to harm us.  The young men
+whom we before called guardians may be more properly designated
+auxiliaries and supporters of the principles of the rulers.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we
+lately spoke--just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that
+be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?
+
+What sort of lie? he said.
+
+Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale of what has often
+occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have made
+the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know whether
+such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made
+probable, if it did.
+
+How your words seem to hesitate on your lips!
+
+You will not wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard.
+
+Speak, he said, and fear not.
+
+Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in
+the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I
+propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the
+soldiers, and lastly to the people.  They are to be told that their
+youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received
+from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were
+being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves
+and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were
+completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country
+being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for
+her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are
+to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.
+
+You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were
+going to tell.
+
+True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half.
+Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God
+has framed you differently.  Some of you have the power of command, and
+in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they
+have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be
+auxillaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has
+composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved
+in the children.  But as all are of the same original stock, a golden
+parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden
+son.  And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above
+all else, that there is nothing which should so anxiously guard, or of
+which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race.
+They should observe what elements mingle in their off spring; for if
+the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and
+iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the
+ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend
+in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be
+sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are
+raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries.  For an oracle
+says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be
+destroyed.  Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our
+citizens believe in it?
+
+Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of
+accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale,
+and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.
+
+I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief
+will make them care more for the city and for one another.  Enough,
+however, of the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of
+rumour, while we arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under
+the command of their rulers.  Let them look round and select a spot
+whence they can best suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory
+within, and also defend themselves against enemies, who like wolves may
+come down on the fold from without; there let them encamp, and when
+they have encamped, let them sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare
+their dwellings.
+
+Just so, he said.
+
+And their dwellings must be such as will shield them against the cold
+of winter and the heat of summer.
+
+I suppose that you mean houses, he replied.
+
+Yes, I said; but they must be the houses of soldiers, and not of
+shop-keepers.
+
+What is the difference? he said.
+
+That I will endeavour to explain, I replied.  To keep watchdogs, who,
+from want of discipline or hunger, or some evil habit, or evil habit or
+other, would turn upon the sheep and worry them, and behave not like
+dogs but wolves, would be a foul and monstrous thing in a shepherd?
+
+Truly monstrous, he said.
+
+And therefore every care must be taken that our auxiliaries, being
+stronger than our citizens, may not grow to be too much for them and
+become savage tyrants instead of friends and allies?
+
+Yes, great care should be taken.
+
+And would not a really good education furnish the best safeguard?
+
+But they are well-educated already, he replied.
+
+I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much certain
+that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that may be,
+will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them in their
+relations to one another, and to those who are under their protection.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And not only their education, but their habitations, and all that
+belongs to them, should be such as will neither impair their virtue as
+guardians, nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens.  Any man of
+sense must acknowledge that.
+
+He must.
+
+Then let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to
+realize our idea of them.  In the first place, none of them should have
+any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither
+should they have a private house or store closed against any one who
+has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are
+required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage;
+they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay,
+enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go
+and live together like soldiers in a camp.  Gold and silver we will
+tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them,
+and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among
+men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture;
+for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but
+their own is undefiled.  And they alone of all the citizens may not
+touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or
+wear them, or drink from them.  And this will be their salvation, and
+they will be the saviours of the State.  But should they ever acquire
+homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers
+and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of
+allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and
+being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater
+terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both
+to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand.  For all
+which reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and
+that these shall be the regulations appointed by us for guardians
+concerning their houses and all other matters?  other
+
+Yes, said Glaucon.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+ADEIMANTUS - SOCRATES
+
+HERE Adeimantus interposed a question:  How would you answer, Socrates,
+said he, if a person were to say that you are making these people
+miserable, and that they are the cause of their own unhappiness; the
+city in fact belongs to them, but they are none the better for it;
+whereas other men acquire lands, and build large and handsome houses,
+and have everything handsome about them, offering sacrifices to the
+gods on their own account, and practising hospitality; moreover, as you
+were saying just now, they have gold and silver, and all that is usual
+among the favourites of fortune; but our poor citizens are no better
+than mercenaries who are quartered in the city and are always mounting
+guard?
+
+Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in
+addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if
+they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on
+a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is
+thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature
+might be added.
+
+But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.
+
+You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
+
+Yes.
+
+If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall
+find the answer.  And our answer will be that, even as they are, our
+guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in
+founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one
+class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a
+State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should
+be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice:
+and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the
+happier.  At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not
+piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a
+whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of
+State.  Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to
+us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most
+beautiful parts of the body--the eyes ought to be purple, but you have
+made them black--to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not
+surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no
+longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other
+features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful.  And so I
+say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of
+happiness which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can
+clothe our husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their
+heads, and bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more.
+Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by
+the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is
+conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like;
+in this way we might make every class happy-and then, as you imagine,
+the whole State would be happy.  But do not put this idea into our
+heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a
+husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have
+the character of any distinct class in the State.  Now this is not of
+much consequence where the corruption of society, and pretension to be
+what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of
+the laws and of the government are only seemingly and not real
+guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down; and on the
+other hand they alone have the power of giving order and happiness to
+the State.  We mean our guardians to be true saviours and not the
+destroyers of the State, whereas our opponent is thinking of peasants
+at a festival, who are enjoying a life of revelry, not of citizens who
+are doing their duty to the State.  But, if so, we mean different
+things, and he is speaking of something which is not a State.  And
+therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would
+look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this
+principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole.
+But the latter be the truth, then the guardians and auxillaries, and
+all others equally with them, must be compelled or induced to do their
+own work in the best way.  And thus the whole State will grow up in a
+noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of
+happiness which nature assigns to them.
+
+I think that you are quite right.
+
+I wonder whether you will agree with another remark which occurs to me.
+
+What may that be?
+
+There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.
+
+What are they?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty.
+
+How do they act?
+
+The process is as follows:  When a potter becomes rich, will he, think
+you, any longer take the same pains with his art?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+He will grow more and more indolent and careless?
+
+Very true.
+
+And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?
+
+Yes; he greatly deteriorates.
+
+But, on the other hand, if he has no money, and cannot provide himself
+tools or instruments, he will not work equally well himself, nor will
+he teach his sons or apprentices to work equally well.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then, under the influence either of poverty or of wealth, workmen and
+their work are equally liable to degenerate?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the
+guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city
+unobserved.
+
+What evils?
+
+Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and
+indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of
+discontent.
+
+That is very true, he replied; but still I should like to know,
+Socrates, how our city will be able to go to war, especially against an
+enemy who is rich and powerful, if deprived of the sinews of war.
+
+There would certainly be a difficulty, I replied, in going to war with
+one such enemy; but there is no difficulty where there are two of them.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+In the first place, I said, if we have to fight, our side will be
+trained warriors fighting against an army of rich men.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect
+in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do
+gentlemen who were not boxers?
+
+Hardly, if they came upon him at once.
+
+What, not, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike
+at the one who first came up?  And supposing he were to do this several
+times under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert,
+overturn more than one stout personage?
+
+Certainly, he said, there would be nothing wonderful in that.
+
+And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and
+practice of boxing than they have in military qualities.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+Then we may assume that our athletes will be able to fight with two or
+three times their own number?
+
+I agree with you, for I think you right.
+
+And suppose that, before engaging, our citizens send an embassy to one
+of the two cities, telling them what is the truth: Silver and gold we
+neither have nor are permitted to have, but you may; do you therefore
+come and help us in war, of and take the spoils of the other city:
+Who, on hearing these words, would choose to fight against lean wiry
+dogs, rather than, with the dogs on their side, against fat and tender
+sheep?
+
+That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State
+if the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.
+
+But how simple of you to use the term State at all of any but our own!
+
+Why so?
+
+You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of
+them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game.  For indeed
+any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of
+the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and
+in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether
+beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State.  But if you
+deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the
+one to the others, you will always have a great many friends and not
+many enemies.  And your State, while the wise order which has now been
+prescribed continues to prevail in her, will be the greatest of States,
+I do not mean to say in reputation or appearance, but in deed and
+truth, though she number not more than a thousand defenders.  A single
+State which is her equal you will hardly find, either among Hellenes or
+barbarians, though many that appear to be as great and many times
+greater.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when
+they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory
+which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?
+
+What limit would you propose?
+
+I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity;
+that, I think, is the proper limit.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to
+our guardians:  Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but
+one and self-sufficing.
+
+And surely, said he, this is not a very severe order which we impose
+upon them.
+
+And the other, said I, of which we were speaking before is lighter
+still, I mean the duty of degrading the offspring of the guardians
+when inferior, and of elevating into the rank of guardians the
+offspring of the lower classes, when naturally superior.  The intention
+was, that, in the case of the citizens generally, each individual
+should be put to the use for which nature which nature intended him,
+one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be
+one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many.
+
+Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.
+
+The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not,
+as might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all, if
+care be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,--a thing,
+however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our
+purpose.
+
+What may that be? he asked.
+
+Education, I said, and nurture:  If our citizens are well educated, and
+grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all
+these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as
+marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children,
+which will all follow the general principle that friends have all
+things in common, as the proverb says.
+
+That will be the best way of settling them.
+
+Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating
+force like a wheel.  For good nurture and education implant good
+constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good
+education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed
+in man as in other animals.
+
+Very possibly, he said.
+
+Then to sum up:  This is the point to which, above all, the attention
+of our rulers should be directed,--that music and gymnastic be
+preserved in their original form, and no innovation made.  They must do
+their utmost to maintain them intact.  And when any one says that
+mankind most regard
+
+    The newest song which the singers have,
+
+they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new
+kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the
+meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to
+the whole State, and ought to be prohibited.  So Damon tells me, and I
+can quite believe him;-he says that when modes of music change, of the
+State always change with them.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus; and you may add my suffrage to Damon's and your
+own.
+
+Then, I said, our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress
+in music?
+
+Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
+
+Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears
+harmless.
+
+Why, yes, he said, and there is no harm; were it not that little by
+little this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates
+into manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it
+invades contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to
+laws and constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last,
+Socrates, by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.
+
+Is that true?  I said.
+
+That is my belief, he replied.
+
+Then, as I was saying, our youth should be trained from the first in a
+stricter system, for if amusements become lawless, and the youths
+themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into well-conducted
+and virtuous citizens.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of
+music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in
+a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them
+in all their actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there
+be any fallen places a principle in the State will raise them up again.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Thus educated, they will invent for themselves any lesser rules which
+their predecessors have altogether neglected.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean such things as these:--when the young are to be silent before
+their elders; how they are to show respect to them by standing and
+making them sit; what honour is due to parents; what garments or shoes
+are to be worn; the mode of dressing the hair; deportment and manners
+in general.  You would agree with me?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there is, I think, small wisdom in legislating about such
+matters,--I doubt if it is ever done; nor are any precise written
+enactments about them likely to be lasting.
+
+Impossible.
+
+It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts
+a man, will determine his future life.  Does not like always attract
+like?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Until some one rare and grand result is reached which may be good, and
+may be the reverse of good?
+
+That is not to be denied.
+
+And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further
+about them.
+
+Naturally enough, he replied.
+
+Well, and about the business of the agora, dealings and the ordinary
+dealings between man and man, or again about agreements with the
+commencement with artisans; about insult and injury, of the
+commencement of actions, and the appointment of juries, what would you
+say? there may also arise questions about any impositions and
+extractions of market and harbour dues which may be required, and in
+general about the regulations of markets, police, harbours, and the
+like.  But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to legislate on any of
+these particulars?
+
+I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on
+good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough
+for themselves.
+
+Yes, I said, my friend, if God will only preserve to them the laws
+which we have given them.
+
+And without divine help, said Adeimantus, they will go on for ever
+making and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining
+perfection.
+
+You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no
+self-restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Yes, I said; and what a delightful life they lead! they are always
+doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always
+fancying that they will be cured by any nostrum which anybody advises
+them to try.
+
+Such cases are very common, he said, with invalids of this sort.
+
+Yes, I replied; and the charming thing is that they deem him their
+worst enemy who tells them the truth, which is simply that, unless they
+give up eating and drinking and wenching and idling, neither drug nor
+cautery nor spell nor amulet nor any other remedy will avail.
+
+Charming! he replied.  I see nothing charming in going into a passion
+with a man who tells you what is right.
+
+These gentlemen, I said, do not seem to be in your good graces.
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+Nor would you praise the behaviour of States which act like the men
+whom I was just now describing.  For are there not ill-ordered States
+in which the citizens are forbidden under pain of death to alter the
+constitution; and yet he who most sweetly courts those who live under
+this regime and indulges them and fawns upon them and is skilful in
+anticipating and gratifying their humours is held to be a great and
+good statesman--do not these States resemble the persons whom I was
+describing?
+
+Yes, he said; the States are as bad as the men; and I am very far from
+praising them.
+
+But do you not admire, I said, the coolness and dexterity of these
+ready ministers of political corruption?
+
+Yes, he said, I do; but not of all of them, for there are some whom the
+applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are
+really statesmen, and these are not much to be admired.
+
+What do you mean?  I said; you should have more feeling for them.  When
+a man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure
+declare that he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they
+say?
+
+Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.
+
+Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a
+play, trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing;
+they are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of
+frauds in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning,
+not knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?
+
+Yes, he said; that is just what they are doing.
+
+I conceive, I said, that the true legislator will not trouble himself
+with this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the
+constitution either in an ill-ordered or in a well-ordered State; for
+in the former they are quite useless, and in the latter there will be
+no difficulty in devising them; and many of them will naturally flow
+out of our previous regulations.
+
+What, then, he said, is still remaining to us of the work of
+legislation?
+
+Nothing to us, I replied; but to Apollo, the God of Delphi, there
+remains the ordering of the greatest and noblest and chiefest things of
+all.
+
+Which are they? he said.
+
+The institution of temples and sacrifices, and the entire service of
+gods, demigods, and heroes; also the ordering of the repositories of
+the dead, and the rites which have to be observed by him who would
+propitiate the inhabitants of the world below.  These are matters of
+which we are ignorant ourselves, and as founders of a city we should be
+unwise in trusting them to any interpreter but our ancestral deity.  He
+is the god who sits in the center, on the navel of the earth, and he is
+the interpreter of religion to all mankind.
+
+You are right, and we will do as you propose.
+
+But where, amid all this, is justice? son of Ariston, tell me where.
+Now that our city has been made habitable, light a candle and search,
+and get your brother and Polemarchus and the rest of our friends to
+help, and let us see where in it we can discover justice and where
+injustice, and in what they differ from one another, and which of them
+the man who would be happy should have for his portion, whether seen or
+unseen by gods and men.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+Nonsense, said Glaucon:  did you not promise to search yourself, saying
+that for you not to help justice in her need would be an impiety?
+
+I do not deny that I said so, and as you remind me, I will be as good
+as my word; but you must join.
+
+We will, he replied.
+
+Well, then, I hope to make the discovery in this way:  I mean to begin
+with the assumption that our State, if rightly ordered, is perfect.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+And being perfect, is therefore wise and valiant and temperate and just.
+
+That is likewise clear.
+
+And whichever of these qualities we find in the State, the one which is
+not found will be the residue?
+
+Very good.
+
+If there were four things, and we were searching for one of them,
+wherever it might be, the one sought for might be known to us from the
+first, and there would be no further trouble; or we might know the
+other three first, and then the fourth would clearly be the one left.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And is not a similar method to be pursued about the virtues, which are
+also four in number?
+
+Clearly.
+
+First among the virtues found in the State, wisdom comes into view, and
+in this I detect a certain peculiarity.
+
+What is that?
+
+The State which we have been describing is said to be wise as being
+good in counsel?
+
+Very true.
+
+And good counsel is clearly a kind of knowledge, for not by ignorance,
+but by knowledge, do men counsel well?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the kinds of knowledge in a State are many and diverse?
+
+Of course.
+
+There is the knowledge of the carpenter; but is that the sort of
+knowledge which gives a city the title of wise and good in counsel?
+
+Certainly not; that would only give a city the reputation of skill in
+carpentering.
+
+Then a city is not to be called wise because possessing a knowledge
+which counsels for the best about wooden implements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Nor by reason of a knowledge which advises about brazen pots, I said,
+nor as possessing any other similar knowledge?
+
+Not by reason of any of them, he said.
+
+Nor yet by reason of a knowledge which cultivates the earth; that would
+give the city the name of agricultural?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, and is there any knowledge in our recently founded State
+among any of the citizens which advises, not about any particular thing
+in the State, but about the whole, and considers how a State can best
+deal with itself and with other States?
+
+There certainly is.
+
+And what is knowledge, and among whom is it found?  I asked.
+
+It is the knowledge of the guardians, he replied, and found among those
+whom we were just now describing as perfect guardians.
+
+And what is the name which the city derives from the possession of this
+sort of knowledge?
+
+The name of good in counsel and truly wise.
+
+And will there be in our city more of these true guardians or more
+smiths?
+
+The smiths, he replied, will be far more numerous.
+
+Will not the guardians be the smallest of all the classes who receive a
+name from the profession of some kind of knowledge?
+
+Much the smallest.
+
+And so by reason of the smallest part or class, and of the knowledge
+which resides in this presiding and ruling part of itself, the whole
+State, being thus constituted according to nature, will be wise; and
+this, which has the only knowledge worthy to be called wisdom, has been
+ordained by nature to be of all classes the least.
+
+Most true.
+
+Thus, then, I said, the nature and place in the State of one of the
+four virtues has somehow or other been discovered.
+
+And, in my humble opinion, very satisfactorily discovered, he replied.
+
+Again, I said, there is no difficulty in seeing the nature of courage;
+and in what part that quality resides which gives the name of
+courageous to the State.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Why, I said, every one who calls any State courageous or cowardly, will
+be thinking of the part which fights and goes out to war on the State's
+behalf.
+
+No one, he replied, would ever think of any other.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The rest of the citizens may be courageous or may be cowardly but their
+courage or cowardice will not, as I conceive, have the effect of making
+the city either the one or the other.
+
+The city will be courageous in virtue of a portion of herself which
+preserves under all circumstances that opinion about the nature of
+things to be feared and not to be feared in which our legislator
+educated them; and this is what you term courage.
+
+I should like to hear what you are saying once more, for I do not think
+that I perfectly understand you.
+
+I mean that courage is a kind of salvation.
+
+Salvation of what?
+
+Of the opinion respecting things to be feared, what they are and of
+what nature, which the law implants through education; and I mean by
+the words 'under all circumstances' to intimate that in pleasure or in
+pain, or under the influence of desire or fear, a man preserves, and
+does not lose this opinion.  Shall I give you an illustration?
+
+If you please.
+
+You know, I said, that dyers, when they want to dye wool for making the
+true sea-purple, begin by selecting their white colour first; this they
+prepare and dress with much care and pains, in order that the white
+ground may take the purple hue in full perfection.  The dyeing then
+proceeds; and whatever is dyed in this manner becomes a fast colour,
+and no washing either with lyes or without them can take away the
+bloom.  But, when the ground has not been duly prepared, you will have
+noticed how poor is the look either of purple or of any other colour.
+
+Yes, he said; I know that they have a washed-out and ridiculous
+appearance.
+
+Then now, I said, you will understand what our object was in selecting
+our soldiers, and educating them in music and gymnastic; we were
+contriving influences which would prepare them to take the dye of the
+laws in perfection, and the colour of their opinion about dangers and
+of every other opinion was to be indelibly fixed by their nurture and
+training, not to be washed away by such potent lyes as
+pleasure--mightier agent far in washing the soul than any soda or lye;
+or by sorrow, fear, and desire, the mightiest of all other solvents.
+And this sort of universal saving power of true opinion in conformity
+with law about real and false dangers I call and maintain to be
+courage, unless you disagree.
+
+But I agree, he replied; for I suppose that you mean to exclude mere
+uninstructed courage, such as that of a wild beast or of a slave--this,
+in your opinion, is not the courage which the law ordains, and ought to
+have another name.
+
+Most certainly.
+
+Then I may infer courage to be such as you describe?
+
+Why, yes, said I, you may, and if you add the words 'of a citizen,' you
+will not be far wrong;--hereafter, if you like, we will carry the
+examination further, but at present we are we w seeking not for courage
+but justice; and for the purpose of our enquiry we have said enough.
+
+You are right, he replied.
+
+Two virtues remain to be discovered in the State-first temperance, and
+then justice which is the end of our search.
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, can we find justice without troubling ourselves about temperance?
+
+I do not know how that can be accomplished, he said, nor do I desire
+that justice should be brought to light and temperance lost sight of;
+and therefore I wish that you would do me the favour of considering
+temperance first.
+
+Certainly, I replied, I should not be justified in refusing your
+request.
+
+Then consider, he said.
+
+Yes, I replied; I will; and as far as I can at present see, the virtue
+of temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the
+preceding.
+
+How so? he asked.
+
+Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain
+pleasures and desires; this is curiously enough implied in the saying
+of 'a man being his own master' and other traces of the same notion may
+be found in language.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+There is something ridiculous in the expression 'master of himself';
+for the master is also the servant and the servant the master; and in
+all these modes of speaking the same person is denoted.
+
+Certainly.
+
+The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and
+also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under
+control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term
+of praise:  but when, owing to evil education or association, the
+better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the
+greater mass of the worse--in this case he is blamed and is called the
+slave of self and unprincipled.
+
+Yes, there is reason in that.
+
+And now, I said, look at our newly created State, and there you will
+find one of these two conditions realised; for the State, as you will
+acknowledge, may be justly called master of itself, if the words
+'temperance' and 'self-mastery' truly express the rule of the better
+part over the worse.
+
+Yes, he said, I see that what you say is true.
+
+Let me further note that the manifold and complex pleasures and desires
+and pains are generally found in children and women and servants, and
+in the freemen so called who are of the lowest and more numerous class.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Whereas the simple and moderate desires which follow reason, and are
+under the guidance of mind and true opinion, are to be found only in a
+few, and those the best born and best educated.
+
+Very true.  These two, as you may perceive, have a place in our State;
+and the meaner desires of the are held down by the virtuous desires and
+wisdom of the few.
+
+That I perceive, he said.
+
+Then if there be any city which may be described as master of its own
+pleasures and desires, and master of itself, ours may claim such a
+designation?
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+It may also be called temperate, and for the same reasons?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there be any State in which rulers and subjects will be agreed
+as to the question who are to rule, that again will be our State?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And the citizens being thus agreed among themselves, in which class
+will temperance be found--in the rulers or in the subjects?
+
+In both, as I should imagine, he replied.
+
+Do you observe that we were not far wrong in our guess that temperance
+was a sort of harmony?
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because temperance is unlike courage and wisdom, each of which
+resides in a part only, the one making the State wise and the other
+valiant; not so temperance, which extends to the whole, and runs
+through all the notes of the scale, and produces a harmony of the
+weaker and the stronger and the middle class, whether you suppose them
+to be stronger or weaker in wisdom or power or numbers or wealth, or
+anything else.  Most truly then may we deem temperance to be the
+agreement of the naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to
+rule of either, both in states and individuals.
+
+I entirely agree with you.
+
+And so, I said, we may consider three out of the four virtues to have
+been discovered in our State.  The last of those qualities which make a
+state virtuous must be justice, if we only knew what that was.
+
+The inference is obvious.
+
+The time then has arrived, Glaucon, when, like huntsmen, we should
+surround the cover, and look sharp that justice does not steal away,
+and pass out of sight and escape us; for beyond a doubt she is
+somewhere in this country:  watch therefore and strive to catch a sight
+of her, and if you see her first, let me know.
+
+Would that I could! but you should regard me rather as a follower who
+has just eyes enough to, see what you show him--that is about as much
+as I am good for.
+
+Offer up a prayer with me and follow.
+
+I will, but you must show me the way.
+
+Here is no path, I said, and the wood is dark and perplexing; still we
+must push on.
+
+Let us push on.
+
+Here I saw something:  Halloo!  I said, I begin to perceive a track,
+and I believe that the quarry will not escape.
+
+Good news, he said.
+
+Truly, I said, we are stupid fellows.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, my good sir, at the beginning of our enquiry, ages ago, there was
+justice tumbling out at our feet, and we never saw her; nothing could
+be more ridiculous.  Like people who go about looking for what they
+have in their hands--that was the way with us--we looked not at what we
+were seeking, but at what was far off in the distance; and therefore, I
+suppose, we missed her.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean to say that in reality for a long time past we have been talking
+of justice, and have failed to recognise her.
+
+I grow impatient at the length of your exordium.
+
+Well then, tell me, I said, whether I am right or not: You remember the
+original principle which we were always laying down at the foundation
+of the State, that one man should practise one thing only, the thing to
+which his nature was best adapted;--now justice is this principle or a
+part of it.
+
+Yes, we often said that one man should do one thing only.
+
+Further, we affirmed that justice was doing one's own business, and not
+being a busybody; we said so again and again, and many others have said
+the same to us.
+
+Yes, we said so.
+
+Then to do one's own business in a certain way may be assumed to be
+justice.  Can you tell me whence I derive this inference?
+
+I cannot, but I should like to be told.
+
+Because I think that this is the only virtue which remains in the State
+when the other virtues of temperance and courage and wisdom are
+abstracted; and, that this is the ultimate cause and condition of the
+existence of all of them, and while remaining in them is also their
+preservative; and we were saying that if the three were discovered by
+us, justice would be the fourth or remaining one.
+
+That follows of necessity.
+
+If we are asked to determine which of these four qualities by its
+presence contributes most to the excellence of the State, whether the
+agreement of rulers and subjects, or the preservation in the soldiers
+of the opinion which the law ordains about the true nature of dangers,
+or wisdom and watchfulness in the rulers, or whether this other which I
+am mentioning, and which is found in children and women, slave and
+freeman, artisan, ruler, subject,--the quality, I mean, of every one
+doing his own work, and not being a busybody, would claim the palm--the
+question is not so easily answered.
+
+Certainly, he replied, there would be a difficulty in saying which.
+
+Then the power of each individual in the State to do his own work
+appears to compete with the other political virtues, wisdom,
+temperance, courage.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And the virtue which enters into this competition is justice?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Let us look at the question from another point of view: Are not the
+rulers in a State those to whom you would entrust the office of
+determining suits at law?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And are suits decided on any other ground but that a man may neither
+take what is another's, nor be deprived of what is his own?
+
+Yes; that is their principle.
+
+Which is a just principle?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then on this view also justice will be admitted to be the having and
+doing what is a man's own, and belongs to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not.  Suppose a
+carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a
+carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their
+duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be
+the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?
+
+Not much.
+
+But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a
+trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number
+of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into
+the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and
+guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements
+or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and
+warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that
+this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of
+the State.
+
+Most true.
+
+Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any
+meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the
+greatest harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?
+
+Precisely.
+
+And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed
+by you injustice?
+
+Certainly.
+
+This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the
+auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is
+justice, and will make the city just.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+We will not, I said, be over-positive as yet; but if, on trial, this
+conception of justice be verified in the individual as well as in the
+State, there will be no longer any room for doubt; if it be not
+verified, we must have a fresh enquiry.  First let us complete the old
+investigation, which we began, as you remember, under the impression
+that, if we could previously examine justice on the larger scale, there
+would be less difficulty in discerning her in the individual.  That
+larger example appeared to be the State, and accordingly we constructed
+as good a one as we could, knowing well that in the good State justice
+would be found.  Let the discovery which we made be now applied to the
+individual--if they agree, we shall be satisfied; or, if there be a
+difference in the individual, we will come back to the State and have
+another trial of the theory.  The friction of the two when rubbed
+together may possibly strike a light in which justice will shine forth,
+and the vision which is then revealed we will fix in our souls.
+
+That will be in regular course; let us do as you say.
+
+I proceeded to ask:  When two things, a greater and less, are called by
+the same name, are they like or unlike in so far as they are called the
+same?
+
+Like, he replied.
+
+The just man then, if we regard the idea of justice only, will be like
+the just State?
+
+He will.
+
+And a State was thought by us to be just when the three classes in the
+State severally did their own business; and also thought to be
+temperate and valiant and wise by reason of certain other affections
+and qualities of these same classes?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And so of the individual; we may assume that he has the same three
+principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be
+rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same
+manner?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Once more then, O my friend, we have alighted upon an easy
+question--whether the soul has these three principles or not?
+
+An easy question!  Nay, rather, Socrates, the proverb holds that hard
+is the good.
+
+Very true, I said; and I do not think that the method which we are
+employing is at all adequate to the accurate solution of this question;
+the true method is another and a longer one.  Still we may arrive at a
+solution not below the level of the previous enquiry.
+
+May we not be satisfied with that? he said;--under the circumstances, I
+am quite content.
+
+I too, I replied, shall be extremely well satisfied.
+
+Then faint not in pursuing the speculation, he said.
+
+Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same
+principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the
+individual they pass into the State?--how else can they come there?
+Take the quality of passion or spirit;--it would be ridiculous to
+imagine that this quality, when found in States, is not derived from
+the individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g. the Thracians,
+Scythians, and in general the northern nations; and the same may be
+said of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic of
+our part of the world, or of the love of money, which may, with equal
+truth, be attributed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians.
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+There is no difficulty in understanding this.
+
+None whatever.
+
+But the question is not quite so easy when we proceed to ask whether
+these principles are three or one; whether, that is to say, we learn
+with one part of our nature, are angry with another, and with a third
+part desire the satisfaction of our natural appetites; or whether the
+whole soul comes into play in each sort of action--to determine that is
+the difficulty.
+
+Yes, he said; there lies the difficulty.
+
+Then let us now try and determine whether they are the same or
+different.
+
+How can we? he asked.
+
+I replied as follows:  The same thing clearly cannot act or be acted
+upon in the same part or in relation to the same thing at the same
+time, in contrary ways; and therefore whenever this contradiction
+occurs in things apparently the same, we know that they are really not
+the same, but different.
+
+Good.
+
+For example, I said, can the same thing be at rest and in motion at the
+same time in the same part?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Still, I said, let us have a more precise statement of terms, lest we
+should hereafter fall out by the way.  Imagine the case of a man who is
+standing and also moving his hands and his head, and suppose a person
+to say that one and the same person is in motion and at rest at the
+same moment-to such a mode of speech we should object, and should
+rather say that one part of him is in motion while another is at rest.
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose the objector to refine still further, and to draw the nice
+distinction that not only parts of tops, but whole tops, when they spin
+round with their pegs fixed on the spot, are at rest and in motion at
+the same time (and he may say the same of anything which revolves in
+the same spot), his objection would not be admitted by us, because in
+such cases things are not at rest and in motion in the same parts of
+themselves; we should rather say that they have both an axis and a
+circumference, and that the axis stands still, for there is no
+deviation from the perpendicular; and that the circumference goes
+round.  But if, while revolving, the axis inclines either to the right
+or left, forwards or backwards, then in no point of view can they be at
+rest.
+
+That is the correct mode of describing them, he replied.
+
+Then none of these objections will confuse us, or incline us to believe
+that the same thing at the same time, in the same part or in relation
+to the same thing, can act or be acted upon in contrary ways.
+
+Certainly not, according to my way of thinking.
+
+Yet, I said, that we may not be compelled to examine all such
+objections, and prove at length that they are untrue, let us assume
+their absurdity, and go forward on the understanding that hereafter, if
+this assumption turn out to be untrue, all the consequences which
+follow shall be withdrawn.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the best way.
+
+Well, I said, would you not allow that assent and dissent, desire and
+aversion, attraction and repulsion, are all of them opposites, whether
+they are regarded as active or passive (for that makes no difference in
+the fact of their opposition)?
+
+Yes, he said, they are opposites.
+
+Well, I said, and hunger and thirst, and the desires in general, and
+again willing and wishing,--all these you would refer to the classes
+already mentioned.  You would say--would you not?--that the soul of him
+who desires is seeking after the object of his desires; or that he is
+drawing to himself the thing which he wishes to possess: or again, when
+a person wants anything to be given him, his mind, longing for the
+realisation of his desires, intimates his wish to have it by a nod of
+assent, as if he had been asked a question?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what would you say of unwillingness and dislike and the absence of
+desire; should not these be referred to the opposite class of repulsion
+and rejection?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Admitting this to be true of desire generally, let us suppose a
+particular class of desires, and out of these we will select hunger and
+thirst, as they are termed, which are the most obvious of them?
+
+Let us take that class, he said.
+
+The object of one is food, and of the other drink?
+
+Yes.
+
+And here comes the point:  is not thirst the desire which the soul has
+of drink, and of drink only; not of drink qualified by anything else;
+for example, warm or cold, or much or little, or, in a word, drink of
+any particular sort:  but if the thirst be accompanied by heat, then
+the desire is of cold drink; or, if accompanied by cold, then of warm
+drink; or, if the thirst be excessive, then the drink which is desired
+will be excessive; or, if not great, the quantity of drink will also be
+small:  but thirst pure and simple will desire drink pure and simple,
+which is the natural satisfaction of thirst, as food is of hunger?
+
+Yes, he said; the simple desire is, as you say, in every case of the
+simple object, and the qualified desire of the qualified object.
+
+But here a confusion may arise; and I should wish to guard against an
+opponent starting up and saying that no man desires drink only, but
+good drink, or food only, but good food; for good is the universal
+object of desire, and thirst being a desire, will necessarily be thirst
+after good drink; and the same is true of every other desire.
+
+Yes, he replied, the opponent might have something to say.
+
+Nevertheless I should still maintain, that of relatives some have a
+quality attached to either term of the relation; others are simple and
+have their correlatives simple.
+
+I do not know what you mean.
+
+Well, you know of course that the greater is relative to the less?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the much greater to the much less?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the sometime greater to the sometime less, and the greater that is
+to be to the less that is to be?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And so of more and less, and of other correlative terms, such as the
+double and the half, or again, the heavier and the lighter, the swifter
+and the slower; and of hot and cold, and of any other relatives;--is
+not this true of all of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And does not the same principle hold in the sciences?  The object of
+science is knowledge (assuming that to be the true definition), but the
+object of a particular science is a particular kind of knowledge; I
+mean, for example, that the science of house-building is a kind of
+knowledge which is defined and distinguished from other kinds and is
+therefore termed architecture.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Because it has a particular quality which no other has?
+
+Yes.
+
+And it has this particular quality because it has an object of a
+particular kind; and this is true of the other arts and sciences?
+
+Yes.
+
+Now, then, if I have made myself clear, you will understand my original
+meaning in what I said about relatives.  My meaning was, that if one
+term of a relation is taken alone, the other is taken alone; if one
+term is qualified, the other is also qualified.  I do not mean to say
+that relatives may not be disparate, or that the science of health is
+healthy, or of disease necessarily diseased, or that the sciences of
+good and evil are therefore good and evil; but only that, when the term
+science is no longer used absolutely, but has a qualified object which
+in this case is the nature of health and disease, it becomes defined,
+and is hence called not merely science, but the science of medicine.
+
+I quite understand, and I think as you do.
+
+Would you not say that thirst is one of these essentially relative
+terms, having clearly a relation--
+
+Yes, thirst is relative to drink.
+
+And a certain kind of thirst is relative to a certain kind of drink;
+but thirst taken alone is neither of much nor little, nor of good nor
+bad, nor of any particular kind of drink, but of drink only?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the soul of the thirsty one, in so far as he is thirsty, desires
+only drink; for this he yearns and tries to obtain it?
+
+That is plain.
+
+And if you suppose something which pulls a thirsty soul away from
+drink, that must be different from the thirsty principle which draws
+him like a beast to drink; for, as we were saying, the same thing
+cannot at the same time with the same part of itself act in contrary
+ways about the same.
+
+Impossible.
+
+No more than you can say that the hands of the archer push and pull the
+bow at the same time, but what you say is that one hand pushes and the
+other pulls.
+
+Exactly so, he replied.
+
+And might a man be thirsty, and yet unwilling to drink?
+
+Yes, he said, it constantly happens.
+
+And in such a case what is one to say?  Would you not say that there
+was something in the soul bidding a man to drink, and something else
+forbidding him, which is other and stronger than the principle which
+bids him?
+
+I should say so.
+
+And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which
+bids and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from
+one another; the one with which man reasons, we may call the rational
+principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and
+thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed
+the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and
+satisfactions?
+
+Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
+
+Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in
+the soul.  And what of passion, or spirit?  Is it a third, or akin to
+one of the preceding?
+
+I should be inclined to say--akin to desire.
+
+Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in
+which I put faith.  The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion,
+coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the
+outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of
+execution.  He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and
+abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but
+at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he
+ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of
+the fair sight.
+
+I have heard the story myself, he said.
+
+The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire,
+as though they were two distinct things.
+
+Yes; that is the meaning, he said.
+
+And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a
+man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself,
+and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle,
+which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the
+side of his reason;--but for the passionate or spirited element to take
+part with the desires when reason that she should not be opposed, is a
+sort of thing which thing which I believe that you never observed
+occurring in yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Suppose that a man thinks he has done a wrong to another, the nobler he
+is the less able is he to feel indignant at any suffering, such as
+hunger, or cold, or any other pain which the injured person may inflict
+upon him--these he deems to be just, and, as I say, his anger refuses
+to be excited by them.
+
+True, he said.
+
+But when he thinks that he is the sufferer of the wrong, then he boils
+and chafes, and is on the side of what he believes to be justice; and
+because he suffers hunger or cold or other pain he is only the more
+determined to persevere and conquer.  His noble spirit will not be
+quelled until he either slays or is slain; or until he hears the voice
+of the shepherd, that is, reason, bidding his dog bark no more.
+
+The illustration is perfect, he replied; and in our State, as we were
+saying, the auxiliaries were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the
+rulers, who are their shepherds.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you quite understand me; there is, however, a
+further point which I wish you to consider.
+
+What point?
+
+You remember that passion or spirit appeared at first sight to be a
+kind of desire, but now we should say quite the contrary; for in the
+conflict of the soul spirit is arrayed on the side of the rational
+principle.
+
+Most assuredly.
+
+But a further question arises:  Is passion different from reason also,
+or only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three
+principles in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the
+concupiscent; or rather, as the State was composed of three classes,
+traders, auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the
+individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when
+not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason
+
+Yes, he said, there must be a third.
+
+Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be
+different from desire, turn out also to be different from reason.
+
+But that is easily proved:--We may observe even in young children that
+they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some
+of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them
+late enough.
+
+Excellent, I said, and you may see passion equally in brute animals,
+which is a further proof of the truth of what you are saying.  And we
+may once more appeal to the words of Homer, which have been already
+quoted by us,
+
+    He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul,
+
+for in this verse Homer has clearly supposed the power which reasons
+about the better and worse to be different from the unreasoning anger
+which is rebuked by it.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And so, after much tossing, we have reached land, and are fairly agreed
+that the same principles which exist in the State exist also in the
+individual, and that they are three in number.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Must we not then infer that the individual is wise in the same way, and
+in virtue of the same quality which makes the State wise?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also that the same quality which constitutes courage in the State
+constitutes courage in the individual, and that both the State and the
+individual bear the same relation to all the other virtues?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And the individual will be acknowledged by us to be just in the same
+way in which the State is just?
+
+That follows, of course.
+
+We cannot but remember that the justice of the State consisted in each
+of the three classes doing the work of its own class?
+
+We are not very likely to have forgotten, he said.
+
+We must recollect that the individual in whom the several qualities of
+his nature do their own work will be just, and will do his own work?
+
+Yes, he said, we must remember that too.
+
+And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care
+of the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to
+be the subject and ally?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And, as we were saying, the united influence of music and gymnastic
+will bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with
+noble words and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the
+wildness of passion by harmony and rhythm?
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And these two, thus nurtured and educated, and having learned truly to
+know their own functions, will rule over the concupiscent, which in
+each of us is the largest part of the soul and by nature most
+insatiable of gain; over this they will keep guard, lest, waxing great
+and strong with the fulness of bodily pleasures, as they are termed,
+the concupiscent soul, no longer confined to her own sphere, should
+attempt to enslave and rule those who are not her natural-born
+subjects, and overturn the whole life of man?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Both together will they not be the best defenders of the whole soul and
+the whole body against attacks from without; the one counselling, and
+the other fighting under his leader, and courageously executing his
+commands and counsels?
+
+True.
+
+And he is to be deemed courageous whose spirit retains in pleasure and
+in pain the commands of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear?
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+And him we call wise who has in him that little part which rules, and
+which proclaims these commands; that part too being supposed to have a
+knowledge of what is for the interest of each of the three parts and of
+the whole?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+And would you not say that he is temperate who has these same elements
+in friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason, and
+the two subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that
+reason ought to rule, and do not rebel?
+
+Certainly, he said, that is the true account of temperance whether in
+the State or individual.
+
+And surely, I said, we have explained again and again how and by virtue
+of what quality a man will be just.
+
+That is very certain.
+
+And is justice dimmer in the individual, and is her form different, or
+is she the same which we found her to be in the State?
+
+There is no difference in my opinion, he said.
+
+Because, if any doubt is still lingering in our minds, a few
+commonplace instances will satisfy us of the truth of what I am saying.
+
+What sort of instances do you mean?
+
+If the case is put to us, must we not admit that the just State, or the
+man who is trained in the principles of such a State, will be less
+likely than the unjust to make away with a deposit of gold or silver?
+Would any one deny this?
+
+No one, he replied.
+
+Will the just man or citizen ever be guilty of sacrilege or theft, or
+treachery either to his friends or to his country?
+
+Never.
+
+Neither will he ever break faith where there have been oaths or
+agreements?
+
+Impossible.
+
+No one will be less likely to commit adultery, or to dishonour his
+father and mother, or to fall in his religious duties?
+
+No one.
+
+And the reason is that each part of him is doing its own business,
+whether in ruling or being ruled?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Are you satisfied then that the quality which makes such men and such
+states is justice, or do you hope to discover some other?
+
+Not I, indeed.
+
+Then our dream has been realised; and the suspicion which we
+entertained at the beginning of our work of construction, that some
+divine power must have conducted us to a primary form of justice, has
+now been verified?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the
+shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own
+business, and not another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that
+reason it was of use?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned
+however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the
+true self and concernment of man:  for the just man does not permit the
+several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of
+them to do the work of others,--he sets in order his own inner life,
+and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and
+when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may
+be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and
+the intermediate intervals--when he has bound all these together, and
+is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly
+adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in
+a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some
+affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling
+that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition,
+just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom,
+and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust
+action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.
+
+You have said the exact truth, Socrates.
+
+Very good; and if we were to affirm that we had discovered the just man
+and the just State, and the nature of justice in each of them, we
+should not be telling a falsehood?
+
+Most certainly not.
+
+May we say so, then?
+
+Let us say so.
+
+And now, I said, injustice has to be considered.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three
+principles--a meddlesomeness, and interference, and rising up of a part
+of the soul against the whole, an assertion of unlawful authority,
+which is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he
+is the natural vassal,--what is all this confusion and delusion but
+injustice, and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form
+of vice?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And if the nature of justice and injustice be known, then the meaning
+of acting unjustly and being unjust, or, again, of acting justly, will
+also be perfectly clear?
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+Why, I said, they are like disease and health; being in the soul just
+what disease and health are in the body.
+
+How so? he said.
+
+Why, I said, that which is healthy causes health, and that which is
+unhealthy causes disease.
+
+Yes.
+
+And just actions cause justice, and unjust actions cause injustice?
+
+That is certain.
+
+And the creation of health is the institution of a natural order and
+government of one by another in the parts of the body; and the creation
+of disease is the production of a state of things at variance with this
+natural order?
+
+True.
+
+And is not the creation of justice the institution of a natural order
+and government of one by another in the parts of the soul, and the
+creation of injustice the production of a state of things at variance
+with the natural order?
+
+Exactly so, he said.
+
+Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and
+vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the same?
+
+True.
+
+And do not good practices lead to virtue, and evil practices to vice?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Still our old question of the comparative advantage of justice and
+injustice has not been answered:  Which is the more profitable, to be
+just and act justly and practise virtue, whether seen or unseen of gods
+and men, or to be unjust and act unjustly, if only unpunished and
+unreformed?
+
+In my judgment, Socrates, the question has now become ridiculous.  We
+know that, when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer
+endurable, though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and
+having all wealth and all power; and shall we be told that when the
+very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, life
+is still worth having to a man, if only he be allowed to do whatever he
+likes with the single exception that he is not to acquire justice and
+virtue, or to escape from injustice and vice; assuming them both to be
+such as we have described?
+
+Yes, I said, the question is, as you say, ridiculous.  Still, as we are
+near the spot at which we may see the truth in the clearest manner with
+our own eyes, let us not faint by the way.
+
+Certainly not, he replied.
+
+Come up hither, I said, and behold the various forms of vice, those of
+them, I mean, which are worth looking at.
+
+I am following you, he replied:  proceed.
+
+I said, The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from
+some tower of speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue is
+one, but that the forms of vice are innumerable; there being four
+special ones which are deserving of note.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean, I replied, that there appear to be as many forms of the soul as
+there are distinct forms of the State.
+
+How many?
+
+There are five of the State, and five of the soul, I said.
+
+What are they?
+
+The first, I said, is that which we have been describing, and which may
+be said to have two names, monarchy and aristocracy, accordingly as
+rule is exercised by one distinguished man or by many.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+But I regard the two names as describing one form only; for whether the
+government is in the hands of one or many, if the governors have been
+trained in the manner which we have supposed, the fundamental laws of
+the State will be maintained.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
+
+SUCH is the good and true City or State, and the good and man is of the
+same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil
+is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the
+regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms.
+
+What are they? he said.
+
+I was proceeding to tell the order in which the four evil forms
+appeared to me to succeed one another, when Pole marchus, who was
+sitting a little way off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to
+him: stretching forth his hand, he took hold of the upper part of his
+coat by the shoulder, and drew him towards him, leaning forward himself
+so as to be quite close and saying something in his ear, of which I
+only caught the words, 'Shall we let him off, or what shall we do?'
+
+Certainly not, said Adeimantus, raising his voice.
+
+Who is it, I said, whom you are refusing to let off?
+
+You, he said.
+
+I repeated, Why am I especially not to be let off?
+
+Why, he said, we think that you are lazy, and mean to cheat us out of a
+whole chapter which is a very important part of the story; and you
+fancy that we shall not notice your airy way of proceeding; as if it
+were self-evident to everybody, that in the matter of women and
+children 'friends have all things in common.'
+
+And was I not right, Adeimantus?
+
+Yes, he said; but what is right in this particular case, like
+everything else, requires to be explained; for community may be of many
+kinds.  Please, therefore, to say what sort of community you mean.  We
+have been long expecting that you would tell us something about the
+family life of your citizens--how they will bring children into the
+world, and rear them when they have arrived, and, in general, what is
+the nature of this community of women and children-for we are of
+opinion that the right or wrong management of such matters will have a
+great and paramount influence on the State for good or for evil.  And
+now, since the question is still undetermined, and you are taking in
+hand another State, we have resolved, as you heard, not to let you go
+until you give an account of all this.
+
+To that resolution, said Glaucon, you may regard me as saying Agreed.
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS - GLAUCON - THRASYMACHUS
+
+And without more ado, said Thrasymachus, you may consider us all to be
+equally agreed.
+
+I said, You know not what you are doing in thus assailing me: What an
+argument are you raising about the State!  Just as I thought that I had
+finished, and was only too glad that I had laid this question to sleep,
+and was reflecting how fortunate I was in your acceptance of what I
+then said, you ask me to begin again at the very foundation, ignorant
+of what a hornet's nest of words you are stirring.  Now I foresaw this
+gathering trouble, and avoided it.
+
+For what purpose do you conceive that we have come here, said
+Thrasymachus,--to look for gold, or to hear discourse?
+
+Yes, but discourse should have a limit.
+
+Yes, Socrates, said Glaucon, and the whole of life is the only limit
+which wise men assign to the hearing of such discourses.  But never
+mind about us; take heart yourself and answer the question in your own
+way: What sort of community of women and children is this which is to
+prevail among our guardians? and how shall we manage the period between
+birth and education, which seems to require the greatest care?  Tell us
+how these things will be.
+
+Yes, my simple friend, but the answer is the reverse of easy; many more
+doubts arise about this than about our previous conclusions.  For the
+practicability of what is said may be doubted; and looked at in another
+point of view, whether the scheme, if ever so practicable, would be for
+the best, is also doubtful.  Hence I feel a reluctance to approach the
+subject, lest our aspiration, my dear friend, should turn out to be a
+dream only.
+
+Fear not, he replied, for your audience will not be hard upon you; they
+are not sceptical or hostile.
+
+I said:  My good friend, I suppose that you mean to encourage me by
+these words.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+Then let me tell you that you are doing just the reverse; the
+encouragement which you offer would have been all very well had I
+myself believed that I knew what I was talking about: to declare the
+truth about matters of high interest which a man honours and loves
+among wise men who love him need occasion no fear or faltering in his
+mind; but to carry on an argument when you are yourself only a
+hesitating enquirer, which is my condition, is a dangerous and slippery
+thing; and the danger is not that I shall be laughed at (of which the
+fear would be childish), but that I shall miss the truth where I have
+most need to be sure of my footing, and drag my friends after me in my
+fall.  And I pray Nemesis not to visit upon me the words which I am
+going to utter.  For I do indeed believe that to be an involuntary
+homicide is a less crime than to be a deceiver about beauty or goodness
+or justice in the matter of laws.  And that is a risk which I would
+rather run among enemies than among friends, and therefore you do well
+to encourage me.
+
+Glaucon laughed and said:  Well then, Socrates, in case you and your
+argument do us any serious injury you shall be acquitted beforehand of
+the and shall not be held to be a deceiver; take courage then and speak.
+
+Well, I said, the law says that when a man is acquitted he is free from
+guilt, and what holds at law may hold in argument.
+
+Then why should you mind?
+
+Well, I replied, I suppose that I must retrace my steps and say what I
+perhaps ought to have said before in the proper place.  The part of the
+men has been played out, and now properly enough comes the turn of the
+women.  Of them I will proceed to speak, and the more readily since I
+am invited by you.
+
+For men born and educated like our citizens, the only way, in my
+opinion, of arriving at a right conclusion about the possession and use
+of women and children is to follow the path on which we originally
+started, when we said that the men were to be the guardians and
+watchdogs of the herd.
+
+True.
+
+Let us further suppose the birth and education of our women to be
+subject to similar or nearly similar regulations; then we shall see
+whether the result accords with our design.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+What I mean may be put into the form of a question, I said: Are dogs
+divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and
+in keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? or do we entrust to
+the males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave
+the females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling their
+puppies is labour enough for them?
+
+No, he said, they share alike; the only difference between them is that
+the males are stronger and the females weaker.
+
+But can you use different animals for the same purpose, unless they are
+bred and fed in the same way?
+
+You cannot.
+
+Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the
+same nurture and education?
+
+Yes.
+
+The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic.
+Yes.
+
+Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war,
+which they must practise like the men?
+
+That is the inference, I suppose.
+
+I should rather expect, I said, that several of our proposals, if they
+are carried out, being unusual, may appear ridiculous.
+
+No doubt of it.
+
+Yes, and the most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women
+naked in the palaestra, exercising with the men, especially when they
+are no longer young; they certainly will not be a vision of beauty, any
+more than the enthusiastic old men who in spite of wrinkles and
+ugliness continue to frequent the gymnasia.
+
+Yes, indeed, he said:  according to present notions the proposal would
+be thought ridiculous.
+
+But then, I said, as we have determined to speak our minds, we must not
+fear the jests of the wits which will be directed against this sort of
+innovation; how they will talk of women's attainments both in music and
+gymnastic, and above all about their wearing armour and riding upon
+horseback!
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Yet having begun we must go forward to the rough places of the law; at
+the same time begging of these gentlemen for once in their life to be
+serious.  Not long ago, as we shall remind them, the Hellenes were of
+the opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians,
+that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper; and when
+first the Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians introduced the custom,
+the wits of that day might equally have ridiculed the innovation.
+
+No doubt.
+
+But when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far
+better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward
+eye vanished before the better principle which reason asserted, then
+the man was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his
+ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously
+inclines to weigh the beautiful by any other standard but that of the
+good.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+First, then, whether the question is to be put in jest or in earnest,
+let us come to an understanding about the nature of woman:  Is she
+capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or
+not at all?  And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can
+or can not share?  That will be the best way of commencing the enquiry,
+and will probably lead to the fairest conclusion.
+
+That will be much the best way.
+
+Shall we take the other side first and begin by arguing against
+ourselves; in this manner the adversary's position will not be
+undefended.
+
+Why not? he said.
+
+Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents.  They will
+say: 'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you
+yourselves, at the first foundation of the State, admitted the
+principle that everybody was to do the one work suited to his own
+nature.' And certainly, if I am not mistaken, such an admission was
+made by us.  'And do not the natures of men and women differ very much
+indeed?' And we shall reply:  Of course they do.  Then we shall be
+asked, 'Whether the tasks assigned to men and to women should not be
+different, and such as are agreeable to their different natures?'
+Certainly they should.  'But if so, have you not fallen into a serious
+inconsistency in saying that men and women, whose natures are so
+entirely different, ought to perform the same actions?'-- What defence
+will you make for us, my good Sir, against any one who offers these
+objections?
+
+That is not an easy question to answer when asked suddenly; and I shall
+and I do beg of you to draw out the case on our side.
+
+These are the objections, Glaucon, and there are many others of a like
+kind, which I foresaw long ago; they made me afraid and reluctant to
+take in hand any law about the possession and nurture of women and
+children.
+
+By Zeus, he said, the problem to be solved is anything but easy.
+
+Why yes, I said, but the fact is that when a man is out of his depth,
+whether he has fallen into a little swimming bath or into mid-ocean, he
+has to swim all the same.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must not we swim and try to reach the shore:  we will hope that
+Arion's dolphin or some other miraculous help may save us?
+
+I suppose so, he said.
+
+Well then, let us see if any way of escape can be found.  We
+acknowledged--did we not? that different natures ought to have
+different pursuits, and that men's and women's natures are different.
+And now what are we saying?--that different natures ought to have the
+same pursuits,--this is the inconsistency which is charged upon us.
+
+Precisely.
+
+Verily, Glaucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of
+contradiction!
+
+Why do you say so?
+
+Because I think that many a man falls into the practice against his
+will.  When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just
+because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is
+speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit
+of contention and not of fair discussion.
+
+Yes, he replied, such is very often the case; but what has that to do
+with us and our argument?
+
+A great deal; for there is certainly a danger of our getting
+unintentionally into a verbal opposition.
+
+In what way?
+
+Why, we valiantly and pugnaciously insist upon the verbal truth, that
+different natures ought to have different pursuits, but we never
+considered at all what was the meaning of sameness or difference of
+nature, or why we distinguished them when we assigned different
+pursuits to different natures and the same to the same natures.
+
+Why, no, he said, that was never considered by us.
+
+I said:  Suppose that by way of illustration we were to ask the
+question whether there is not an opposition in nature between bald men
+and hairy men; and if this is admitted by us, then, if bald men are
+cobblers, we should forbid the hairy men to be cobblers, and conversely?
+
+That would be a jest, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, a jest; and why? because we never meant when we
+constructed the State, that the opposition of natures should extend to
+every difference, but only to those differences which affected the
+pursuit in which the individual is engaged; we should have argued, for
+example, that a physician and one who is in mind a physician may be
+said to have the same nature.
+
+True.
+
+Whereas the physician and the carpenter have different natures?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if, I said, the male and female sex appear to differ in their
+fitness for any art or pursuit, we should say that such pursuit or art
+ought to be assigned to one or the other of them; but if the difference
+consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does
+not amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the
+sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue
+to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same
+pursuits.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Next, we shall ask our opponent how, in reference to any of the
+pursuits or arts of civic life, the nature of a woman differs from that
+of a man?
+
+That will be quite fair.
+
+And perhaps he, like yourself, will reply that to give a sufficient
+answer on the instant is not easy; but after a little reflection there
+is no difficulty.
+
+Yes, perhaps.
+
+Suppose then that we invite him to accompany us in the argument, and
+then we may hope to show him that there is nothing peculiar in the
+constitution of women which would affect them in the administration of
+the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let us say to him:  Come now, and we will ask you a question:--when you
+spoke of a nature gifted or not gifted in any respect, did you mean to
+say that one man will acquire a thing easily, another with difficulty;
+a little learning will lead the one to discover a great deal; whereas
+the other, after much study and application, no sooner learns than he
+forgets; or again, did you mean, that the one has a body which is a
+good servant to his mind, while the body of the other is a hindrance to
+him?-would not these be the sort of differences which distinguish the
+man gifted by nature from the one who is ungifted?
+
+No one will deny that.
+
+And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has
+not all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female?
+Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management
+of pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be
+great, and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the
+most absurd?
+
+You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority
+of the female sex:  although many women are in many things superior to
+many men, yet on the whole what you say is true.
+
+And if so, my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of
+administration in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or
+which a man has by virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike
+diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women
+also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none of them on
+women?
+
+That will never do.
+
+One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, and
+another has no music in her nature?
+
+Very true.
+
+And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, and
+another is unwarlike and hates gymnastics?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy;
+one has spirit, and another is without spirit?
+
+That is also true.
+
+Then one woman will have the temper of a guardian, and another not.
+Was not the selection of the male guardians determined by differences
+of this sort?
+
+Yes.
+
+Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they
+differ only in their comparative strength or weakness.
+
+Obviously.
+
+And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the
+companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom
+they resemble in capacity and in character?
+
+Very true.
+
+And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits?
+
+They ought.
+
+Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning
+music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians--to that point we
+come round again.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore
+not an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice,
+which prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature.
+
+That appears to be true.
+
+We had to consider, first, whether our proposals were possible, and
+secondly whether they were the most beneficial?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the possibility has been acknowledged?
+
+Yes.
+
+The very great benefit has next to be established?
+
+Quite so.
+
+You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good
+guardian will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature
+is the same?
+
+Yes.
+
+I should like to ask you a question.
+
+What is it?
+
+Would you say that all men are equal in excellence, or is one man
+better than another?
+
+The latter.
+
+And in the commonwealth which we were founding do you conceive the
+guardians who have been brought up on our model system to be more
+perfect men, or the cobblers whose education has been cobbling?
+
+What a ridiculous question!
+
+You have answered me, I replied:  Well, and may we not further say that
+our guardians are the best of our citizens?
+
+By far the best.
+
+And will not their wives be the best women?
+
+Yes, by far the best.
+
+And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than
+that the men and women of a State should be as good as possible?
+
+There can be nothing better.
+
+And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such
+manner as we have described, will accomplish?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest
+degree beneficial to the State?
+
+True.
+
+Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be
+their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of
+their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to
+be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other
+respects their duties are to be the same.  And as for the man who
+laughs at naked women exercising their bodies from the best of motives,
+in his laughter he is plucking
+
+    A fruit of unripe wisdom,
+
+and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is
+about;--for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the
+useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base.
+
+Very true.
+
+Here, then, is one difficulty in our law about women, which we may say
+that we have now escaped; the wave has not swallowed us up alive for
+enacting that the guardians of either sex should have all their
+pursuits in common; to the utility and also to the possibility of this
+arrangement the consistency of the argument with itself bears witness.
+
+Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped.
+
+Yes, I said, but a greater is coming; you will of this when you see the
+next.
+
+Go on; let me see.
+
+The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has
+preceded, is to the following effect,--'that the wives of our guardians
+are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is
+to know his own child, nor any child his parent.'
+
+Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and the
+possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more
+questionable.
+
+I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very
+great utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility
+is quite another matter, and will be very much disputed.
+
+I think that a good many doubts may be raised about both.
+
+You imply that the two questions must be combined, I replied.  Now I
+meant that you should admit the utility; and in this way, as I thought;
+I should escape from one of them, and then there would remain only the
+possibility.
+
+But that little attempt is detected, and therefore you will please to
+give a defence of both.
+
+Well, I said, I submit to my fate.  Yet grant me a little favour: let
+me feast my mind with the dream as day dreamers are in the habit of
+feasting themselves when they are walking alone; for before they have
+discovered any means of effecting their wishes--that is a matter which
+never troubles them--they would rather not tire themselves by thinking
+about possibilities; but assuming that what they desire is already
+granted to them, they proceed with their plan, and delight in detailing
+what they mean to do when their wish has come true--that is a way which
+they have of not doing much good to a capacity which was never good for
+much.  Now I myself am beginning to lose heart, and I should like, with
+your permission, to pass over the question of possibility at present.
+Assuming therefore the possibility of the proposal, I shall now proceed
+to enquire how the rulers will carry out these arrangements, and I
+shall demonstrate that our plan, if executed, will be of the greatest
+benefit to the State and to the guardians.  First of all, then, if you
+have no objection, I will endeavour with your help to consider the
+advantages of the measure; and hereafter the question of possibility.
+
+I have no objection; proceed.
+
+First, I think that if our rulers and their auxiliaries are to be
+worthy of the name which they bear, there must be willingness to obey
+in the one and the power of command in the other; the guardians must
+themselves obey the laws, and they must also imitate the spirit of them
+in any details which are entrusted to their care.
+
+That is right, he said.
+
+You, I said, who are their legislator, having selected the men, will
+now select the women and give them to them;--they must be as far as
+possible of like natures with them; and they must live in common houses
+and meet at common meals, None of them will have anything specially his
+or her own; they will be together, and will be brought up together, and
+will associate at gymnastic exercises.  And so they will be drawn by a
+necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each
+other--necessity is not too strong a word, I think?
+
+Yes, he said;--necessity, not geometrical, but another sort of
+necessity which lovers know, and which is far more convincing and
+constraining to the mass of mankind.
+
+True, I said; and this, Glaucon, like all the rest, must proceed after
+an orderly fashion; in a city of the blessed, licentiousness is an
+unholy thing which the rulers will forbid.
+
+Yes, he said, and it ought not to be permitted.
+
+Then clearly the next thing will be to make matrimony sacred in the
+highest degree, and what is most beneficial will be deemed sacred?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And how can marriages be made most beneficial?--that is a question
+which I put to you, because I see in your house dogs for hunting, and
+of the nobler sort of birds not a few.  Now, I beseech you, do tell me,
+have you ever attended to their pairing and breeding?
+
+In what particulars?
+
+Why, in the first place, although they are all of a good sort, are not
+some better than others?
+
+True.
+
+And do you breed from them all indifferently, or do you take care to
+breed from the best only?
+
+From the best.
+
+And do you take the oldest or the youngest, or only those of ripe age?
+
+I choose only those of ripe age.
+
+And if care was not taken in the breeding, your dogs and birds would
+greatly deteriorate?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the same of horses and animals in general?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+Good heavens! my dear friend, I said, what consummate skill will our
+rulers need if the same principle holds of the human species!
+
+Certainly, the same principle holds; but why does this involve any
+particular skill?
+
+Because, I said, our rulers will often have to practise upon the body
+corporate with medicines.  Now you know that when patients do not
+require medicines, but have only to be put under a regimen, the
+inferior sort of practitioner is deemed to be good enough; but when
+medicine has to be given, then the doctor should be more of a man.
+
+That is quite true, he said; but to what are you alluding?
+
+I mean, I replied, that our rulers will find a considerable dose of
+falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects: we were
+saying that the use of all these things regarded as medicines might be
+of advantage.
+
+And we were very right.
+
+And this lawful use of them seems likely to be often needed in the
+regulations of marriages and births.
+
+How so?
+
+Why, I said, the principle has been already laid down that the best of
+either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior
+with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the
+offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock
+is to be maintained in first-rate condition.  Now these goings on must
+be a secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further
+danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into
+rebellion.
+
+Very true.
+
+Had we not better appoint certain festivals at which we will bring
+together the brides and bridegrooms, and sacrifices will be offered and
+suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets:  the number of weddings
+is a matter which must be left to the discretion of the rulers, whose
+aim will be to preserve the average of population?  There are many
+other things which they will have to consider, such as the effects of
+wars and diseases and any similar agencies, in order as far as this is
+possible to prevent the State from becoming either too large or too
+small.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+We shall have to invent some ingenious kind of lots which the less
+worthy may draw on each occasion of our bringing them together, and
+then they will accuse their own ill-luck and not the rulers.
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And I think that our braver and better youth, besides their other
+honours and rewards, might have greater facilities of intercourse with
+women given them; their bravery will be a reason, and such fathers
+ought to have as many sons as possible.
+
+True.
+
+And the proper officers, whether male or female or both, for offices
+are to be held by women as well as by men--
+
+Yes--
+
+The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the
+pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who
+dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of
+the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some
+mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.
+
+Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be
+kept pure.
+
+They will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the
+fold when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that
+no mother recognizes her own child; and other wet-nurses may be engaged
+if more are required.  Care will also be taken that the process of
+suckling shall not be protracted too long; and the mothers will have no
+getting up at night or other trouble, but will hand over all this sort
+of thing to the nurses and attendants.
+
+You suppose the wives of our guardians to have a fine easy time of it
+when they are having children.
+
+Why, said I, and so they ought.  Let us, however, proceed with our
+scheme.  We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life?
+
+Very true.
+
+And what is the prime of life?  May it not be defined as a period of
+about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
+
+Which years do you mean to include?
+
+A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to
+the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at
+five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of
+life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be
+fifty-five.
+
+Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of
+physical as well as of intellectual vigour.
+
+Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public
+hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing;
+the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have
+been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers,
+which at each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will
+offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their
+good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of
+darkness and strange lust.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed
+age who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without
+the sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a
+bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age:
+after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not
+marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his
+mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from
+marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so
+on in either direction.  And we grant all this, accompanying the
+permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into
+being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the
+parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be
+maintained, and arrange accordingly.
+
+That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition.  But how will they
+know who are fathers and daughters, and so on?
+
+They will never know.  The way will be this:--dating from the day of
+the hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the
+male children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards
+his sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him
+father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they
+will call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers.  All who
+were begotten at the time when their fathers and mothers came together
+will be called their brothers and sisters, and these, as I was saying,
+will be forbidden to inter-marry. This, however, is not to be
+understood as an absolute prohibition of the marriage of brothers and
+sisters; if the lot favours them, and they receive the sanction of the
+Pythian oracle, the law will allow them.
+
+Quite right, he replied.
+
+Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our
+State are to have their wives and families in common.  And now you
+would have the argument show that this community is consistent with the
+rest of our polity, and also that nothing can be better--would you not?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Shall we try to find a common basis by asking of ourselves what ought
+to be the chief aim of the legislator in making laws and in the
+organization of a State,--what is the greatest I good, and what is the
+greatest evil, and then consider whether our previous description has
+the stamp of the good or of the evil?
+
+By all means.
+
+Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and
+plurality where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond
+of unity?
+
+There cannot.
+
+And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and
+pains--where all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions
+of joy and sorrow?
+
+No doubt.
+
+Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is
+disorganized--when you have one half of the world triumphing and the
+other plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the
+citizens?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of
+the terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
+persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the
+same thing?
+
+Quite true.
+
+Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the
+individual--as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the
+whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a center and forming one kingdom
+under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all
+together with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in
+his finger; and the same expression is used about any other part of the
+body, which has a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the
+alleviation of suffering.
+
+Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered
+State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you
+describe.
+
+Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the
+whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or
+sorrow with him?
+
+Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.
+
+It will now be time, I said, for us to return to our State and see
+whether this or some other form is most in accordance with these
+fundamental principles.
+
+Very good.
+
+Our State like every other has rulers and subjects?
+
+True.
+
+All of whom will call one another citizens?
+
+Of course.
+
+But is there not another name which people give to their rulers in
+other States?
+
+Generally they call them masters, but in democratic States they simply
+call them rulers.
+
+And in our State what other name besides that of citizens do the people
+give the rulers?
+
+They are called saviours and helpers, he replied.
+
+And what do the rulers call the people?
+
+Their maintainers and foster-fathers.
+
+And what do they call them in other States?
+
+Slaves.
+
+And what do the rulers call one another in other States?
+
+Fellow-rulers.
+
+And what in ours?
+
+Fellow-guardians.
+
+Did you ever know an example in any other State of a ruler who would
+speak of one of his colleagues as his friend and of another as not
+being his friend?
+
+Yes, very often.
+
+And the friend he regards and describes as one in whom he has an
+interest, and the other as a stranger in whom he has no interest?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But would any of your guardians think or speak of any other guardian as
+a stranger?
+
+Certainly he would not; for every one whom they meet will be regarded
+by them either as a brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or
+daughter, or as the child or parent of those who are thus connected
+with him.
+
+Capital, I said; but let me ask you once more:  Shall they be a family
+in name only; or shall they in all their actions be true to the name?
+For example, in the use of the word 'father,' would the care of a
+father be implied and the filial reverence and duty and obedience to
+him which the law commands; and is the violator of these duties to be
+regarded as an impious and unrighteous person who is not likely to
+receive much good either at the hands of God or of man?  Are these to
+be or not to be the strains which the children will hear repeated in
+their ears by all the citizens about those who are intimated to them to
+be their parents and the rest of their kinsfolk?
+
+These, he said, and none other; for what can be more ridiculous than
+for them to utter the names of family ties with the lips only and not
+to act in the spirit of them?
+
+Then in our city the language of harmony and concord will be more often
+beard than in any other.  As I was describing before, when any one is
+well or ill, the universal word will be with me 'it is well' or 'it is
+ill.'
+
+Most true.
+
+And agreeably to this mode of thinking and speaking, were we not saying
+that they will have their pleasures and pains in common?
+
+Yes, and so they will.
+
+And they will have a common interest in the same thing which they will
+alike call 'my own,' and having this common interest they will have a
+common feeling of pleasure and pain?
+
+Yes, far more so than in other States.
+
+And the reason of this, over and above the general constitution of the
+State, will be that the guardians will have a community of women and
+children?
+
+That will be the chief reason.
+
+And this unity of feeling we admitted to be the greatest good, as was
+implied in our own comparison of a well-ordered State to the relation
+of the body and the members, when affected by pleasure or pain?
+
+That we acknowledged, and very rightly.
+
+Then the community of wives and children among our citizens is clearly
+the source of the greatest good to the State?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And this agrees with the other principle which we were affirming,--that
+the guardians were not to have houses or lands or any other property;
+their pay was to be their food, which they were to receive from the
+other citizens, and they were to have no private expenses; for we
+intended them to preserve their true character of guardians.
+
+Right, he replied.
+
+Both the community of property and the community of families, as I am
+saying, tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the
+city in pieces by differing about 'mine' and 'not mine;' each man
+dragging any acquisition which he has made into a separate house of his
+own, where he has a separate wife and children and private pleasures
+and pains; but all will be affected as far as may be by the same
+pleasures and pains because they are all of one opinion about what is
+near and dear to them, and therefore they all tend towards a common end.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+And as they have nothing but their persons which they can call their
+own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will
+be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or
+relations are the occasion.
+
+Of course they will.
+
+Neither will trials for assault or insult ever be likely to occur among
+them.  For that equals should defend themselves against equals we shall
+maintain to be honourable and right; we shall make the protection of
+the person a matter of necessity.
+
+That is good, he said.
+
+Yes; and there is a further good in the law; viz.  that if a man has a
+quarrel with another he will satisfy his resentment then and there, and
+not proceed to more dangerous lengths.
+
+Certainly.
+
+To the elder shall be assigned the duty of ruling and chastising the
+younger.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Nor can there be a doubt that the younger will not strike or do any
+other violence to an elder, unless the magistrates command him; nor
+will he slight him in any way.  For there are two guardians, shame and
+fear, mighty to prevent him:  shame, which makes men refrain from
+laying hands on those who are to them in the relation of parents; fear,
+that the injured one will be succoured by the others who are his
+brothers, sons, one wi fathers.
+
+That is true, he replied.
+
+Then in every way the laws will help the citizens to keep the peace
+with one another?
+
+Yes, there will be no want of peace.
+
+And as the guardians will never quarrel among themselves there will be
+no danger of the rest of the city being divided either against them or
+against one another.
+
+None whatever.
+
+I hardly like even to mention the little meannesses of which they will
+be rid, for they are beneath notice:  such, for example, as the
+flattery of the rich by the poor, and all the pains and pangs which men
+experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy
+necessaries for their household, borrowing and then repudiating,
+getting how they can, and giving the money into the hands of women and
+slaves to keep--the many evils of so many kinds which people suffer in
+this way are mean enough and obvious enough, and not worth speaking of.
+
+Yes, he said, a man has no need of eyes in order to perceive that.
+
+And from all these evils they will be delivered, and their life will be
+blessed as the life of Olympic victors and yet more blessed.
+
+How so?
+
+The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of
+the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more
+glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public
+cost.  For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the
+whole State; and the crown with which they and their children are
+crowned is the fulness of all that life needs; they receive rewards
+from the hands of their country while living, and after death have an
+honourable burial.
+
+Yes, he said, and glorious rewards they are.
+
+Do you remember, I said, how in the course of the previous discussion
+some one who shall be nameless accused us of making our guardians
+unhappy--they had nothing and might have possessed all things-to whom
+we replied that, if an occasion offered, we might perhaps hereafter
+consider this question, but that, as at present advised, we would make
+our guardians truly guardians, and that we were fashioning the State
+with a view to the greatest happiness, not of any particular class, but
+of the whole?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+And what do you say, now that the life of our protectors is made out to
+be far better and nobler than that of Olympic victors--is the life of
+shoemakers, or any other artisans, or of husbandmen, to be compared
+with it?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+At the same time I ought here to repeat what I have said elsewhere,
+that if any of our guardians shall try to be happy in such a manner
+that he will cease to be a guardian, and is not content with this safe
+and harmonious life, which, in our judgment, is of all lives the best,
+but infatuated by some youthful conceit of happiness which gets up into
+his head shall seek to appropriate the whole State to himself, then he
+will have to learn how wisely Hesiod spoke, when he said, 'half is more
+than the whole.'
+
+If he were to consult me, I should say to him:  Stay where you are,
+when you have the offer of such a life.
+
+You agree then, I said, that men and women are to have a common way of
+life such as we have described--common education, common children; and
+they are to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the
+city or going out to war; they are to keep watch together, and to hunt
+together like dogs; and always and in all things, as far as they are
+able, women are to share with the men?  And in so doing they will do
+what is best, and will not violate, but preserve the natural relation
+of the sexes.
+
+I agree with you, he replied.
+
+The enquiry, I said, has yet to be made, whether such a community be
+found possible--as among other animals, so also among men--and if
+possible, in what way possible?
+
+You have anticipated the question which I was about to suggest.
+
+There is no difficulty, I said, in seeing how war will be carried on by
+them.
+
+How?
+
+Why, of course they will go on expeditions together; and will take with
+them any of their children who are strong enough, that, after the
+manner of the artisan's child, they may look on at the work which they
+will have to do when they are grown up; and besides looking on they
+will have to help and be of use in war, and to wait upon their fathers
+and mothers.  Did you never observe in the arts how the potters' boys
+look on and help, long before they touch the wheel?
+
+Yes, I have.
+
+And shall potters be more careful in educating their children and in
+giving them the opportunity of seeing and practising their duties than
+our guardians will be?
+
+The idea is ridiculous, he said.
+
+There is also the effect on the parents, with whom, as with other
+animals, the presence of their young ones will be the greatest
+incentive to valour.
+
+That is quite true, Socrates; and yet if they are defeated, which may
+often happen in war, how great the danger is! the children will be lost
+as well as their parents, and the State will never recover.
+
+True, I said; but would you never allow them to run any risk?
+
+I am far from saying that.
+
+Well, but if they are ever to run a risk should they not do so on some
+occasion when, if they escape disaster, they will be the better for it?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Whether the future soldiers do or do not see war in the days of their
+youth is a very important matter, for the sake of which some risk may
+fairly be incurred.
+
+Yes, very important.
+
+This then must be our first step,--to make our children spectators of
+war; but we must also contrive that they shall be secured against
+danger; then all will be well.
+
+True.
+
+Their parents may be supposed not to be blind to the risks of war, but
+to know, as far as human foresight can, what expeditions are safe and
+what dangerous?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+And they will take them on the safe expeditions and be cautious about
+the dangerous ones?
+
+True.
+
+And they will place them under the command of experienced veterans who
+will be their leaders and teachers?
+
+Very properly.
+
+Still, the dangers of war cannot be always foreseen; there is a good
+deal of chance about them?
+
+True.
+
+Then against such chances the children must be at once furnished with
+wings, in order that in the hour of need they may fly away and escape.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+I mean that we must mount them on horses in their earliest youth, and
+when they have learnt to ride, take them on horseback to see war: the
+horses must be spirited and warlike, but the most tractable and yet the
+swiftest that can be had.  In this way they will get an excellent view
+of what is hereafter to be their own business; and if there is danger
+they have only to follow their elder leaders and escape.
+
+I believe that you are right, he said.
+
+Next, as to war; what are to be the relations of your soldiers to one
+another and to their enemies?  I should be inclined to propose that the
+soldier who leaves his rank or throws away his arms, or is guilty of
+any other act of cowardice, should be degraded into the rank of a
+husbandman or artisan.  What do you think?
+
+By all means, I should say.
+
+And he who allows himself to be taken prisoner may as well be made a
+present of to his enemies; he is their lawful prey, and let them do
+what they like with him.
+
+Certainly.
+
+But the hero who has distinguished himself, what shall be done to him?
+In the first place, he shall receive honour in the army from his
+youthful comrades; every one of them in succession shall crown him.
+What do you say?
+
+I approve.
+
+And what do you say to his receiving the right hand of fellowship?
+
+To that too, I agree.
+
+But you will hardly agree to my next proposal.
+
+What is your proposal?
+
+That he should kiss and be kissed by them.
+
+Most certainly, and I should be disposed to go further, and say: Let no
+one whom he has a mind to kiss refuse to be kissed by him while the
+expedition lasts.  So that if there be a lover in the army, whether his
+love be youth or maiden, he may be more eager to win the prize of
+valour.
+
+Capital, I said.  That the brave man is to have more wives than others
+has been already determined:  and he is to have first choices in such
+matters more than others, in order that he may have as many children as
+possible?
+
+Agreed.
+
+Again, there is another manner in which, according to Homer, brave
+youths should be honoured; for he tells how Ajax, after he had
+distinguished himself in battle, was rewarded with long chines, which
+seems to be a compliment appropriate to a hero in the flower of his
+age, being not only a tribute of honour but also a very strengthening
+thing.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Then in this, I said, Homer shall be our teacher; and we too, at
+sacrifices and on the like occasions, will honour the brave according
+to the measure of their valour, whether men or women, with hymns and
+those other distinctions which we were mentioning; also with
+
+    seats of precedence, and meats and full cups;
+
+and in honouring them, we shall be at the same time training them.
+
+That, he replied, is excellent.
+
+Yes, I said; and when a man dies gloriously in war shall we not say, in
+the first place, that he is of the golden race?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Nay, have we not the authority of Hesiod for affirming that when they
+are dead
+
+    They are holy angels upon the earth, authors of good,
+    averters of evil, the guardians of speech-gifted men?
+
+Yes; and we accept his authority.
+
+We must learn of the god how we are to order the sepulture of divine
+and heroic personages, and what is to be their special distinction and
+we must do as he bids?
+
+By all means.
+
+And in ages to come we will reverence them and kneel before their
+sepulchres as at the graves of heroes.  And not only they but any who
+are deemed pre-eminently good, whether they die from age, or in any
+other way, shall be admitted to the same honours.
+
+That is very right, he said.
+
+Next, how shall our soldiers treat their enemies?  What about this?
+
+In what respect do you mean?
+
+First of all, in regard to slavery?  Do you think it right that
+Hellenes should enslave Hellenic States, or allow others to enslave
+them, if they can help?  Should not their custom be to spare them,
+considering the danger which there is that the whole race may one day
+fall under the yoke of the barbarians?
+
+To spare them is infinitely better.
+
+Then no Hellene should be owned by them as a slave; that is a rule
+which they will observe and advise the other Hellenes to observe.
+
+Certainly, he said; they will in this way be united against the
+barbarians and will keep their hands off one another.
+
+Next as to the slain; ought the conquerors, I said, to take anything
+but their armour?  Does not the practice of despoiling an enemy afford
+an excuse for not facing the battle?  Cowards skulk about the dead,
+pretending that they are fulfilling a duty, and many an army before now
+has been lost from this love of plunder.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is there not illiberality and avarice in robbing a corpse, and also
+a degree of meanness and womanishness in making an enemy of the dead
+body when the real enemy has flown away and left only his fighting gear
+behind him,--is not this rather like a dog who cannot get at his
+assailant, quarrelling with the stones which strike him instead?
+
+Very like a dog, he said.
+
+Then we must abstain from spoiling the dead or hindering their burial?
+
+Yes, he replied, we most certainly must.
+
+Neither shall we offer up arms at the temples of the gods, least of all
+the arms of Hellenes, if we care to maintain good feeling with other
+Hellenes; and, indeed, we have reason to fear that the offering of
+spoils taken from kinsmen may be a pollution unless commanded by the
+god himself?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, as to the devastation of Hellenic territory or the burning of
+houses, what is to be the practice?
+
+May I have the pleasure, he said, of hearing your opinion?
+
+Both should be forbidden, in my judgment; I would take the annual
+produce and no more.  Shall I tell you why?
+
+Pray do.
+
+Why, you see, there is a difference in the names 'discord' and 'war,'
+and I imagine that there is also a difference in their natures; the one
+is expressive of what is internal and domestic, the other of what is
+external and foreign; and the first of the two is termed discord, and
+only the second, war.
+
+That is a very proper distinction, he replied.
+
+And may I not observe with equal propriety that the Hellenic race is
+all united together by ties of blood and friendship, and alien and
+strange to the barbarians?
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+And therefore when Hellenes fight with barbarians and barbarians with
+Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight,
+and by nature enemies, and this kind of antagonism should be called
+war; but when Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas
+is then in a state of disorder and discord, they being by nature
+friends and such enmity is to be called discord.
+
+I agree.
+
+Consider then, I said, when that which we have acknowledged to be
+discord occurs, and a city is divided, if both parties destroy the
+lands and burn the houses of one another, how wicked does the strife
+appear!  No true lover of his country would bring himself to tear in
+pieces his own nurse and mother:  There might be reason in the
+conqueror depriving the conquered of their harvest, but still they
+would have the idea of peace in their hearts and would not mean to go
+on fighting for ever.
+
+Yes, he said, that is a better temper than the other.
+
+And will not the city, which you are founding, be an Hellenic city?
+
+It ought to be, he replied.
+
+Then will not the citizens be good and civilized?
+
+Yes, very civilized.
+
+And will they not be lovers of Hellas, and think of Hellas as their own
+land, and share in the common temples?
+
+Most certainly.
+
+And any difference which arises among them will be regarded by them as
+discord only--a quarrel among friends, which is not to be called a war?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then they will quarrel as those who intend some day to be reconciled?
+Certainly.
+
+They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy
+their opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?
+
+Just so.
+
+And as they are Hellenes themselves they will not devastate Hellas, nor
+will they burn houses, not even suppose that the whole population of a
+city--men, women, and children--are equally their enemies, for they
+know that the guilt of war is always confined to a few persons and that
+the many are their friends.  And for all these reasons they will be
+unwilling to waste their lands and raze their houses; their enmity to
+them will only last until the many innocent sufferers have compelled
+the guilty few to give satisfaction?
+
+I agree, he said, that our citizens should thus deal with their
+Hellenic enemies; and with barbarians as the Hellenes now deal with one
+another.
+
+Then let us enact this law also for our guardians:-that they are
+neither to devastate the lands of Hellenes nor to burn their houses.
+
+Agreed; and we may agree also in thinking that these, all our previous
+enactments, are very good.
+
+But still I must say, Socrates, that if you are allowed to go on in
+this way you will entirely forget the other question which at the
+commencement of this discussion you thrust aside:--Is such an order of
+things possible, and how, if at all?  For I am quite ready to
+acknowledge that the plan which you propose, if only feasible, would do
+all sorts of good to the State.  I will add, what you have omitted,
+that your citizens will be the bravest of warriors, and will never
+leave their ranks, for they will all know one another, and each will
+call the other father, brother, son; and if you suppose the women to
+join their armies, whether in the same rank or in the rear, either as a
+terror to the enemy, or as auxiliaries in case of need, I know that
+they will then be absolutely invincible; and there are many domestic
+tic advantages which might also be mentioned and which I also fully
+acknowledge: but, as I admit all these advantages and as many more as
+you please, if only this State of yours were to come into existence, we
+need say no more about them; assuming then the existence of the State,
+let us now turn to the question of possibility and ways and means--the
+rest may be left.
+
+If I loiter for a moment, you instantly make a raid upon me, I said,
+and have no mercy; I have hardly escaped the first and second waves,
+and you seem not to be aware that you are now bringing upon me the
+third, which is the greatest and heaviest.  When you have seen and
+heard the third wave, I think you be more considerate and will
+acknowledge that some fear and hesitation was natural respecting a
+proposal so extraordinary as that which I have now to state and
+investigate.
+
+The more appeals of this sort which you make, he said, the more
+determined are we that you shall tell us how such a State is possible:
+speak out and at once.
+
+Let me begin by reminding you that we found our way hither in the
+search after justice and injustice.
+
+True, he replied; but what of that?
+
+I was only going to ask whether, if we have discovered them, we are to
+require that the just man should in nothing fail of absolute justice;
+or may we be satisfied with an approximation, and the attainment in him
+of a higher degree of justice than is to be found in other men?
+
+The approximation will be enough.
+
+We are enquiring into the nature of absolute justice and into the
+character of the perfectly just, and into injustice and the perfectly
+unjust, that we might have an ideal.  We were to look at these in order
+that we might judge of our own happiness and unhappiness according to
+the standard which they exhibited and the degree in which we resembled
+them, but not with any view of showing that they could exist in fact.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Would a painter be any the worse because, after having delineated with
+consummate art an ideal of a perfectly beautiful man, he was unable to
+show that any such man could ever have existed?
+
+He would be none the worse.
+
+Well, and were we not creating an ideal of a perfect State?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And is our theory a worse theory because we are unable to prove the
+possibility of a city being ordered in the manner described?
+
+Surely not, he replied.
+
+That is the truth, I said.  But if, at your request, I am to try and
+show how and under what conditions the possibility is highest, I must
+ask you, having this in view, to repeat your former admissions.
+
+What admissions?
+
+I want to know whether ideals are ever fully realised in language?
+Does not the word express more than the fact, and must not the actual,
+whatever a man may think, always, in the nature of things, fall short
+of the truth?  What do you say?
+
+I agree.
+
+Then you must not insist on my proving that the actual State will in
+every respect coincide with the ideal:  if we are only able to discover
+how a city may be governed nearly as we proposed, you will admit that
+we have discovered the possibility which you demand; and will be
+contented.  I am sure that I should be contented--will not you?
+
+Yes, I will.
+
+Let me next endeavour to show what is that fault in States which is the
+cause of their present maladministration, and what is the least change
+which will enable a State to pass into the truer form; and let the
+change, if possible, be of one thing only, or if not, of two; at any
+rate, let the changes be as few and slight as possible.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+I think, I said, that there might be a reform of the State if only one
+change were made, which is not a slight or easy though still a possible
+one.
+
+What is it? he said.
+
+Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to the greatest of
+the waves; yet shall the word be spoken, even though the wave break and
+drown me in laughter and dishonour; and do you mark my words.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I said:  Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this
+world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness
+and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to
+the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will
+never have rest from their evils,--nor the human race, as I
+believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life
+and behold the light of day.  Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon,
+which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant;
+for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness
+private or public is indeed a hard thing.
+
+Socrates, what do you mean?  I would have you consider that the word
+which you have uttered is one at which numerous persons, and very
+respectable persons too, in a figure pulling off their coats all in a
+moment, and seizing any weapon that comes to hand, will run at you
+might and main, before you know where you are, intending to do heaven
+knows what; and if you don't prepare an answer, and put yourself in
+motion, you will be prepared by their fine wits,' and no mistake.
+
+You got me into the scrape, I said.
+
+And I was quite right; however, I will do all I can to get you out of
+it; but I can only give you good-will and good advice, and, perhaps, I
+may be able to fit answers to your questions better than another--that
+is all.  And now, having such an auxiliary, you must do your best to
+show the unbelievers that you are right.
+
+I ought to try, I said, since you offer me such invaluable assistance.
+And I think that, if there is to be a chance of our escaping, we must
+explain to them whom we mean when we say that philosophers are to rule
+in the State; then we shall be able to defend ourselves: There will be
+discovered to be some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be
+leaders in the State; and others who are not born to be philosophers,
+and are meant to be followers rather than leaders.
+
+Then now for a definition, he said.
+
+Follow me, I said, and I hope that I may in some way or other be able
+to give you a satisfactory explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+I dare say that you remember, and therefore I need not remind you, that
+a lover, if lie is worthy of the name, ought to show his love, not to
+some one part of that which he loves, but to the whole.
+
+I really do not understand, and therefore beg of you to assist my
+memory.
+
+Another person, I said, might fairly reply as you do; but a man of
+pleasure like yourself ought to know that all who are in the flower of
+youth do somehow or other raise a pang or emotion in a lover's breast,
+and are thought by him to be worthy of his affectionate regards.  Is
+not this a way which you have with the fair:  one has a snub nose, and
+you praise his charming face; the hook-nose of another has, you say, a
+royal look; while he who is neither snub nor hooked has the grace of
+regularity:  the dark visage is manly, the fair are children of the
+gods; and as to the sweet 'honey pale,' as they are called, what is the
+very name but the invention of a lover who talks in diminutives, and is
+not adverse to paleness if appearing on the cheek of youth?  In a word,
+there is no excuse which you will not make, and nothing which you will
+not say, in order not to lose a single flower that blooms in the
+spring-time of youth.
+
+If you make me an authority in matters of love, for the sake of the
+argument, I assent.
+
+And what do you say of lovers of wine?  Do you not see them doing the
+same?  They are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine.
+
+Very good.
+
+And the same is true of ambitious men; if they cannot command an army,
+they are willing to command a file; and if they cannot be honoured by
+really great and important persons, they are glad to be honoured by
+lesser and meaner people, but honour of some kind they must have.
+
+Exactly.
+
+Once more let me ask:  Does he who desires any class of goods, desire
+the whole class or a part only?
+
+The whole.
+
+And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not of a part
+of wisdom only, but of the whole?
+
+Yes, of the whole.
+
+And he who dislikes learnings, especially in youth, when he has no
+power of judging what is good and what is not, such an one we maintain
+not to be a philosopher or a lover of knowledge, just as he who refuses
+his food is not hungry, and may be said to have a bad appetite and not
+a good one?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Whereas he who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is
+curious to learn and is never satisfied, may be justly termed a
+philosopher?  Am I not right?
+
+Glaucon said:  If curiosity makes a philosopher, you will find many a
+strange being will have a title to the name.  All the lovers of sights
+have a delight in learning, and must therefore be included.  Musical
+amateurs, too, are a folk strangely out of place among philosophers,
+for they are the last persons in the world who would come to anything
+like a philosophical discussion, if they could help, while they run
+about at the Dionysiac festivals as if they had let out their ears to
+hear every chorus; whether the performance is in town or country--that
+makes no difference--they are there.  Now are we to maintain that all
+these and any who have similar tastes, as well as the professors of
+quite minor arts, are philosophers?
+
+Certainly not, I replied; they are only an imitation.
+
+He said:  Who then are the true philosophers?
+
+Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth.
+
+That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean?
+
+To another, I replied, I might have a difficulty in explaining; but I
+am sure that you will admit a proposition which I am about to make.
+
+What is the proposition?
+
+That since beauty is the opposite of ugliness, they are two?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And inasmuch as they are two, each of them is one?
+
+True again.
+
+And of just and unjust, good and evil, and of every other class, the
+same remark holds:  taken singly, each of them one; but from the
+various combinations of them with actions and things and with one
+another, they are seen in all sorts of lights and appear many?  Very
+true.
+
+And this is the distinction which I draw between the sight-loving,
+art-loving, practical class and those of whom I am speaking, and who
+are alone worthy of the name of philosophers.
+
+How do you distinguish them? he said.
+
+The lovers of sounds and sights, I replied, are, as I conceive, fond of
+fine tones and colours and forms and all the artificial products that
+are made out of them, but their mind is incapable of seeing or loving
+absolute beauty.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Few are they who are able to attain to the sight of this.
+
+Very true.
+
+And he who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute
+beauty, or who, if another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is
+unable to follow--of such an one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream only?
+Reflect:  is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens
+dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?
+
+I should certainly say that such an one was dreaming.
+
+But take the case of the other, who recognises the existence of
+absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects
+which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place
+of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects--is he a dreamer,
+or is he awake?
+
+He is wide awake.
+
+And may we not say that the mind of the one who knows has knowledge,
+and that the mind of the other, who opines only, has opinion
+
+Certainly.
+
+But suppose that the latter should quarrel with us and dispute our
+statement, can we administer any soothing cordial or advice to him,
+without revealing to him that there is sad disorder in his wits?
+
+We must certainly offer him some good advice, he replied.
+
+Come, then, and let us think of something to say to him.  Shall we
+begin by assuring him that he is welcome to any knowledge which he may
+have, and that we are rejoiced at his having it?  But we should like to
+ask him a question:  Does he who has knowledge know something or
+nothing?  (You must answer for him.)
+
+I answer that he knows something.
+
+Something that is or is not?
+
+Something that is; for how can that which is not ever be known?
+
+And are we assured, after looking at the matter from many points of
+view, that absolute being is or may be absolutely known, but that the
+utterly non-existent is utterly unknown?
+
+Nothing can be more certain.
+
+Good.  But if there be anything which is of such a nature as to be and
+not to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and
+the absolute negation of being?
+
+Yes, between them.
+
+And, as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to
+not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has
+to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and
+knowledge, if there be such?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Do we admit the existence of opinion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+As being the same with knowledge, or another faculty?
+
+Another faculty.
+
+Then opinion and knowledge have to do with different kinds of matter
+corresponding to this difference of faculties?
+
+Yes.
+
+And knowledge is relative to being and knows being.  But before I
+proceed further I will make a division.
+
+What division?
+
+I will begin by placing faculties in a class by themselves: they are
+powers in us, and in all other things, by which we do as we do.  Sight
+and hearing, for example, I should call faculties.  Have I clearly
+explained the class which I mean?
+
+Yes, I quite understand.
+
+Then let me tell you my view about them.  I do not see them, and
+therefore the distinctions of fire, colour, and the like, which enable
+me to discern the differences of some things, do not apply to them.  In
+speaking of a faculty I think only of its sphere and its result; and
+that which has the same sphere and the same result I call the same
+faculty, but that which has another sphere and another result I call
+different.  Would that be your way of speaking?
+
+Yes.
+
+And will you be so very good as to answer one more question?  Would you
+say that knowledge is a faculty, or in what class would you place it?
+
+Certainly knowledge is a faculty, and the mightiest of all faculties.
+
+And is opinion also a faculty?
+
+Certainly, he said; for opinion is that with which we are able to form
+an opinion.
+
+And yet you were acknowledging a little while ago that knowledge is not
+the same as opinion?
+
+Why, yes, he said:  how can any reasonable being ever identify that
+which is infallible with that which errs?
+
+An excellent answer, proving, I said, that we are quite conscious of a
+distinction between them.
+
+Yes.
+
+Then knowledge and opinion having distinct powers have also distinct
+spheres or subject-matters?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to
+know the nature of being?
+
+Yes.
+
+And opinion is to have an opinion?
+
+Yes.
+
+And do we know what we opine? or is the subject-matter of opinion the
+same as the subject-matter of knowledge?
+
+Nay, he replied, that has been already disproven; if difference in
+faculty implies difference in the sphere or subject matter, and if, as
+we were saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the
+sphere of knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.
+
+Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must
+be the subject-matter of opinion?
+
+Yes, something else.
+
+Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how
+can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect: when a man has
+an opinion, has he not an opinion about something?  Can he have an
+opinion which is an opinion about nothing?
+
+Impossible.
+
+He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing?
+
+Yes.
+
+And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing?
+
+True.
+
+Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of
+being, knowledge?
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being?
+
+Not with either.
+
+And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge?
+
+That seems to be true.
+
+But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of them, in a
+greater clearness than knowledge, or in a greater darkness than
+ignorance?
+
+In neither.
+
+Then I suppose that opinion appears to you to be darker than knowledge,
+but lighter than ignorance?
+
+Both; and in no small degree.
+
+And also to be within and between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then you would infer that opinion is intermediate?
+
+No question.
+
+But were we not saying before, that if anything appeared to be of a
+sort which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would
+appear also to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute
+not-being; and that the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor
+ignorance, but will be found in the interval between them?
+
+True.
+
+And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we
+call opinion?
+
+There has.
+
+Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally
+of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed
+either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may
+truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to its proper
+faculty, the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to
+the faculty of the mean.
+
+True.
+
+This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that
+there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty--in whose opinion
+the beautiful is the manifold--he, I say, your lover of beautiful
+sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the
+just is one, or that anything is one--to him I would appeal, saying,
+Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these
+beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the
+just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not
+also be unholy?
+
+No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly;
+and the same is true of the rest.
+
+And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?--doubles, that
+is, of one thing, and halves of another?
+
+Quite true.
+
+And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will
+not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?
+
+True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of
+them.
+
+And can any one of those many things which are called by particular
+names be said to be this rather than not to be this?
+
+He replied:  They are like the punning riddles which are asked at
+feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat,
+with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat
+was sitting.  The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a
+riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind,
+either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.
+
+Then what will you do with them?  I said.  Can they have a better place
+than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater
+darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and
+existence than being.
+
+That is quite true, he said.
+
+Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the
+multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are
+tossing about in some region which is halfway between pure being and
+pure not-being?
+
+We have.
+
+Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might
+find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of
+knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by
+the intermediate faculty.
+
+Quite true.
+
+Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute
+beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see
+the many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,--such persons
+may be said to have opinion but not knowledge?
+
+That is certain.
+
+But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to
+know, and not to have opinion only?
+
+Neither can that be denied.
+
+The one loves and embraces the subjects of knowledge, the other those
+of opinion?  The latter are the same, as I dare say will remember, who
+listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colours, but would not
+tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of
+opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with
+us for thus describing them?
+
+I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is
+true.
+
+But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of
+wisdom and not lovers of opinion.
+
+Assuredly.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+AND thus, Glaucon, after the argument has gone a weary way, the true
+and the false philosophers have at length appeared in view.
+
+I do not think, he said, that the way could have been shortened.
+
+I suppose not, I said; and yet I believe that we might have had a
+better view of both of them if the discussion could have been confined
+to this one subject and if there were not many other questions awaiting
+us, which he who desires to see in what respect the life of the just
+differs from that of the unjust must consider.
+
+And what is the next question? he asked.
+
+Surely, I said, the one which follows next in order.  Inasmuch as
+philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and
+those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not
+philosophers, I must ask you which of the two classes should be the
+rulers of our State?
+
+And how can we rightly answer that question?
+
+Whichever of the two are best able to guard the laws and institutions
+of our State--let them be our guardians.
+
+Very good.
+
+Neither, I said, can there be any question that the guardian who is to
+keep anything should have eyes rather than no eyes?
+
+There can be no question of that.
+
+And are not those who are verily and indeed wanting in the knowledge of
+the true being of each thing, and who have in their souls no clear
+pattern, and are unable as with a painter's eye to look at the absolute
+truth and to that original to repair, and having perfect vision of the
+other world to order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice in this,
+if not already ordered, and to guard and preserve the order of
+them--are not such persons, I ask, simply blind?
+
+Truly, he replied, they are much in that condition.
+
+And shall they be our guardians when there are others who, besides
+being their equals in experience and falling short of them in no
+particular of virtue, also know the very truth of each thing?
+
+There can be no reason, he said, for rejecting those who have this
+greatest of all great qualities; they must always have the first place
+unless they fail in some other respect.
+
+Suppose then, I said, that we determine how far they can unite this and
+the other excellences.
+
+By all means.
+
+In the first place, as we began by observing, the nature of the
+philosopher has to be ascertained.  We must come to an understanding
+about him, and, when we have done so, then, if I am not mistaken, we
+shall also acknowledge that such an union of qualities is possible, and
+that those in whom they are united, and those only, should be rulers in
+the State.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of a sort
+which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation and
+corruption.
+
+Agreed.
+
+And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true
+being; there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less
+honourable, which they are willing to renounce; as we said before of
+the lover and the man of ambition.
+
+True.
+
+And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another
+quality which they should also possess?
+
+What quality?
+
+Truthfulness:  they will never intentionally receive into their mind
+falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.
+
+Yes, that may be safely affirmed of them.
+
+'May be,' my friend, I replied, is not the word; say rather 'must be
+affirmed:'  for he whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help
+loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.
+
+Right, he said.
+
+And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?
+
+How can there be?
+
+Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?
+
+Never.
+
+The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as
+in him lies, desire all truth?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong
+in one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a
+stream which has been drawn off into another channel.
+
+True.
+
+He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be
+absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily
+pleasure--I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one.
+
+That is most certain.
+
+Such an one is sure to be temperate and the reverse of covetous; for
+the motives which make another man desirous of having and spending,
+have no place in his character.
+
+Very true.
+
+Another criterion of the philosophical nature has also to be considered.
+
+What is that?
+
+There should be no secret corner of illiberality; nothing can more
+antagonistic than meanness to a soul which is ever longing after the
+whole of things both divine and human.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+Then how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of
+all time and all existence, think much of human life?
+
+He cannot.
+
+Or can such an one account death fearful?
+
+No indeed.
+
+Then the cowardly and mean nature has no part in true philosophy?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Or again:  can he who is harmoniously constituted, who is not covetous
+or mean, or a boaster, or a coward-can he, I say, ever be unjust or
+hard in his dealings?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then you will soon observe whether a man is just and gentle, or rude
+and unsociable; these are the signs which distinguish even in youth the
+philosophical nature from the unphilosophical.
+
+True.
+
+There is another point which should be remarked.
+
+What point?
+
+Whether he has or has not a pleasure in learning; for no one will love
+that which gives him pain, and in which after much toil he makes little
+progress.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And again, if he is forgetful and retains nothing of what he learns,
+will he not be an empty vessel?
+
+That is certain.
+
+Labouring in vain, he must end in hating himself and his fruitless
+occupation?  Yes.
+
+Then a soul which forgets cannot be ranked among genuine philosophic
+natures; we must insist that the philosopher should have a good memory?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And once more, the inharmonious and unseemly nature can only tend to
+disproportion?
+
+Undoubtedly.
+
+And do you consider truth to be akin to proportion or to disproportion?
+
+To proportion.
+
+Then, besides other qualities, we must try to find a naturally
+well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously
+towards the true being of everything.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating,
+go together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which
+is to have a full and perfect participation of being?
+
+They are absolutely necessary, he replied.
+
+And must not that be a blameless study which he only can pursue who has
+the gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn,--noble, gracious, the
+friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred?
+
+The god of jealousy himself, he said, could find no fault with such a
+study.
+
+And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and
+to these only you will entrust the State.
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+Here Adeimantus interposed and said:  To these statements, Socrates, no
+one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling
+passes over the minds of your hearers:  They fancy that they are led
+astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want
+of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate,
+and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a
+mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned
+upside down.  And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up
+by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they
+too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in
+this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time
+they are in the right.  The observation is suggested to me by what is
+now occurring.  For any one of us might say, that although in words he
+is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact
+that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only
+in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer
+years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues,
+and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless
+to the world by the very study which you extol.
+
+Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?
+
+I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your
+opinion.
+
+Hear my answer; I am of opinion that they are quite right.
+
+Then how can you be justified in saying that cities will not cease from
+evil until philosophers rule in them, when philosophers are
+acknowledged by us to be of no use to them?
+
+You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a
+parable.
+
+Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at
+all accustomed, I suppose.
+
+I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me
+into such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you
+will be still more amused at the meagreness of my imagination: for the
+manner in which the best men are treated in their own States is so
+grievous that no single thing on earth is comparable to it; and
+therefore, if I am to plead their cause, I must have recourse to
+fiction, and put together a figure made up of many things, like the
+fabulous unions of goats and stags which are found in pictures.
+Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is
+taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and
+has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is
+not much better.  The sailors are quarrelling with one another about
+the steering--every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer,
+though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who
+taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot
+be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the
+contrary.  They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to
+commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but
+others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them
+overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain's senses with
+drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the
+ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they
+proceed on their voyage in such a manner as might be expected of them.
+Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for
+getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their own whether by
+force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot,
+able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a
+good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the
+year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs
+to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a
+ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people
+like or not-the possibility of this union of authority with the
+steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been
+made part of their calling.  Now in vessels which are in a state of
+mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be
+regarded?  Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a
+good-for-nothing?
+
+Of course, said Adeimantus.
+
+Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the
+figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the
+State; for you understand already.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is
+surprised at finding that philosophers have no honour in their cities;
+explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honour
+would be far more extraordinary.
+
+I will.
+
+Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be
+useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to
+attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use
+them, and not to themselves.  The pilot should not humbly beg the
+sailors to be commanded by him--that is not the order of nature;
+neither are 'the wise to go to the doors of the rich'--the ingenious
+author of this saying told a lie--but the truth is, that, when a man is
+ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he
+who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern.  The ruler who
+is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him;
+although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp;
+they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true
+helmsmen to those who are called by them good-for-nothings and
+star-gazers.
+
+Precisely so, he said.
+
+For these reasons, and among men like these, philosophy, the noblest
+pursuit of all, is not likely to be much esteemed by those of the
+opposite faction; not that the greatest and most lasting injury is done
+to her by her opponents, but by her own professing followers, the same
+of whom you suppose the accuser to say, that the greater number of them
+are arrant rogues, and the best are useless; in which opinion I agreed.
+
+Yes.
+
+And the reason why the good are useless has now been explained?
+
+True.
+
+Then shall we proceed to show that the corruption of the majority is
+also unavoidable, and that this is not to be laid to the charge of
+philosophy any more than the other?
+
+By all means.
+
+And let us ask and answer in turn, first going back to the description
+of the gentle and noble nature.  Truth, as you will remember, was his
+leader, whom he followed always and in all things; failing in this, he
+was an impostor, and had no part or lot in true philosophy.
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Well, and is not this one quality, to mention no others, greatly at
+variance with present notions of him?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And have we not a right to say in his defence, that the true lover of
+knowledge is always striving after being--that is his nature; he will
+not rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance
+only, but will go on--the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force
+of his desire abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true
+nature of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul,
+and by that power drawing near and mingling and becoming incorporate
+with very being, having begotten mind and truth, he will have knowledge
+and will live and grow truly, and then, and not till then, will he
+cease from his travail.
+
+Nothing, he said, can be more just than such a description of him.
+
+And will the love of a lie be any part of a philosopher's nature?  Will
+he not utterly hate a lie?
+
+He will.
+
+And when truth is the captain, we cannot suspect any evil of the band
+which he leads?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Justice and health of mind will be of the company, and temperance will
+follow after?
+
+True, he replied.
+
+Neither is there any reason why I should again set in array the
+philosopher's virtues, as you will doubtless remember that courage,
+magnificence, apprehension, memory, were his natural gifts.  And you
+objected that, although no one could deny what I then said, still, if
+you leave words and look at facts, the persons who are thus described
+are some of them manifestly useless, and the greater number utterly
+depraved; we were then led to enquire into the grounds of these
+accusations, and have now arrived at the point of asking why are the
+majority bad, which question of necessity brought us back to the
+examination and definition of the true philosopher.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And we have next to consider the corruptions of the philosophic nature,
+why so many are spoiled and so few escape spoiling--I am speaking of
+those who were said to be useless but not wicked--and, when we have
+done with them, we will speak of the imitators of philosophy, what
+manner of men are they who aspire after a profession which is above
+them and of which they are unworthy, and then, by their manifold
+inconsistencies, bring upon philosophy, and upon all philosophers, that
+universal reprobation of which we speak.
+
+What are these corruptions? he said.
+
+I will see if I can explain them to you.  Every one will admit that a
+nature having in perfection all the qualities which we required in a
+philosopher, is a rare plant which is seldom seen among men.
+
+Rare indeed.
+
+And what numberless and powerful causes tend to destroy these rare
+natures!
+
+What causes?
+
+In the first place there are their own virtues, their courage,
+temperance, and the rest of them, every one of which praise worthy
+qualities (and this is a most singular circumstance) destroys and
+distracts from philosophy the soul which is the possessor of them.
+
+That is very singular, he replied.
+
+Then there are all the ordinary goods of life--beauty, wealth,
+strength, rank, and great connections in the State--you understand the
+sort of things--these also have a corrupting and distracting effect.
+
+I understand; but I should like to know more precisely what you mean
+about them.
+
+Grasp the truth as a whole, I said, and in the right way; you will then
+have no difficulty in apprehending the preceding remarks, and they will
+no longer appear strange to you.
+
+And how am I to do so? he asked.
+
+Why, I said, we know that all germs or seeds, whether vegetable or
+animal, when they fail to meet with proper nutriment or climate or
+soil, in proportion to their vigour, are all the more sensitive to the
+want of a suitable environment, for evil is a greater enemy to what is
+good than what is not.
+
+Very true.
+
+There is reason in supposing that the finest natures, when under alien
+conditions, receive more injury than the inferior, because the contrast
+is greater.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they
+are ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad?  Do not great crimes and
+the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by
+education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are
+scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?
+
+There I think that you are right.
+
+And our philosopher follows the same analogy-he is like a plant which,
+having proper nurture, must necessarily grow and mature into all
+virtue, but, if sown and planted in an alien soil, becomes the most
+noxious of all weeds, unless he be preserved by some divine power.  Do
+you really think, as people so often say, that our youth are corrupted
+by Sophists, or that private teachers of the art corrupt them in any
+degree worth speaking of?  Are not the public who say these things the
+greatest of all Sophists?  And do they not educate to perfection young
+and old, men and women alike, and fashion them after their own hearts?
+
+When is this accomplished? he said.
+
+When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in
+a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular
+resort, and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which
+are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating
+both, shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and
+the place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise
+or blame--at such a time will not a young man's heart, as they say,
+leap within him?  Will any private training enable him to stand firm
+against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be
+carried away by the stream?  Will he not have the notions of good and
+evil which the public in general have--he will do as they do, and as
+they are, such will he be?
+
+Yes, Socrates; necessity will compel him.
+
+And yet, I said, there is a still greater necessity, which has not been
+mentioned.
+
+What is that?
+
+The gentle force of attainder or confiscation or death which, as you
+are aware, these new Sophists and educators who are the public, apply
+when their words are powerless.
+
+Indeed they do; and in right good earnest.
+
+Now what opinion of any other Sophist, or of any private person, can be
+expected to overcome in such an unequal contest?
+
+None, he replied.
+
+No, indeed, I said, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly;
+there neither is, nor has been, nor is ever likely to be, any different
+type of character which has had no other training in virtue but that
+which is supplied by public opinion--I speak, my friend, of human
+virtue only; what is more than human, as the proverb says, is not
+included:  for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil
+state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by
+the power of God, as we may truly say.
+
+I quite assent, he replied.
+
+Then let me crave your assent also to a further observation.
+
+What are you going to say?
+
+Why, that all those mercenary individuals, whom the many call Sophists
+and whom they deem to be their adversaries, do, in fact, teach nothing
+but the opinion of the many, that is to say, the opinions of their
+assemblies; and this is their wisdom.  I might compare them to a man
+who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who
+is fed by him-he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at
+what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and
+what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when
+another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose
+further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become
+perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a
+system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real
+notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is
+speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or
+evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers
+of the great brute.  Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast
+delights and evil to be that which he dislikes; and he can give no
+other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary,
+having never himself seen, and having no power of explaining to others
+the nature of either, or the difference between them, which is immense.
+By heaven, would not such an one be a rare educator?
+
+Indeed, he would.
+
+And in what way does he who thinks that wisdom is the discernment of
+the tempers and tastes of the motley multitude, whether in painting or
+music, or, finally, in politics, differ from him whom I have been
+describing?  For when a man consorts with the many, and exhibits to
+them his poem or other work of art or the service which he has done the
+State, making them his judges when he is not obliged, the so-called
+necessity of Diomede will oblige him to produce whatever they praise.
+And yet the reasons are utterly ludicrous which they give in
+confirmation of their own notions about the honourable and good.  Did
+you ever hear any of them which were not?
+
+No, nor am I likely to hear.
+
+You recognise the truth of what I have been saying?  Then let me ask
+you to consider further whether the world will ever be induced to
+believe in the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many
+beautiful, or of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in
+each kind?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of
+the world?
+
+They must.
+
+And of individuals who consort with the mob and seek to please them?
+
+That is evident.
+
+Then, do you see any way in which the philosopher can be preserved in
+his calling to the end? and remember what we were saying of him, that
+he was to have quickness and memory and courage and magnificence--these
+were admitted by us to be the true philosopher's gifts.
+
+Yes.
+
+Will not such an one from his early childhood be in all things first
+among all, especially if his bodily endowments are like his mental ones?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And his friends and fellow-citizens will want to use him as he gets
+older for their own purposes?
+
+No question.
+
+Falling at his feet, they will make requests to him and do him honour
+and flatter him, because they want to get into their hands now, the
+power which he will one day possess.
+
+That often happens, he said.
+
+And what will a man such as he be likely to do under such
+circumstances, especially if he be a citizen of a great city, rich and
+noble, and a tall proper youth?  Will he not be full of boundless
+aspirations, and fancy himself able to manage the affairs of Hellenes
+and of barbarians, and having got such notions into his head will he
+not dilate and elevate himself in the fulness of vain pomp and
+senseless pride?
+
+To be sure he will.
+
+Now, when he is in this state of mind, if some one gently comes to him
+and tells him that he is a fool and must get understanding, which can
+only be got by slaving for it, do you think that, under such adverse
+circumstances, he will be easily induced to listen?
+
+Far otherwise.
+
+And even if there be some one who through inherent goodness or natural
+reasonableness has had his eyes opened a little and is humbled and
+taken captive by philosophy, how will his friends behave when they
+think that they are likely to lose the advantage which they were hoping
+to reap from his companionship?  Will they not do and say anything to
+prevent him from yielding to his better nature and to render his
+teacher powerless, using to this end private intrigues as well as
+public prosecutions?
+
+There can be no doubt of it.
+
+And how can one who is thus circumstanced ever become a philosopher?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Then were we not right in saying that even the very qualities which
+make a man a philosopher may, if he be ill-educated, divert him from
+philosophy, no less than riches and their accompaniments and the other
+so-called goods of life?
+
+We were quite right.
+
+Thus, my excellent friend, is brought about all that ruin and failure
+which I have been describing of the natures best adapted to the best of
+all pursuits; they are natures which we maintain to be rare at any
+time; this being the class out of which come the men who are the
+authors of the greatest evil to States and individuals; and also of the
+greatest good when the tide carries them in that direction; but a small
+man never was the doer of any great thing either to individuals or to
+States.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And so philosophy is left desolate, with her marriage rite incomplete:
+for her own have fallen away and forsaken her, and while they are
+leading a false and unbecoming life, other unworthy persons, seeing
+that she has no kinsmen to be her protectors, enter in and dishonour
+her; and fasten upon her the reproaches which, as you say, her
+reprovers utter, who affirm of her votaries that some are good for
+nothing, and that the greater number deserve the severest punishment.
+
+That is certainly what people say.
+
+Yes; and what else would you expect, I said, when you think of the puny
+creatures who, seeing this land open to them--a land well stocked with
+fair names and showy titles--like prisoners running out of prison into
+a sanctuary, take a leap out of their trades into philosophy; those who
+do so being probably the cleverest hands at their own miserable crafts?
+For, although philosophy be in this evil case, still there remains a
+dignity about her which is not to be found in the arts.  And many are
+thus attracted by her whose natures are imperfect and whose souls are
+maimed and disfigured by their meannesses, as their bodies are by their
+trades and crafts.  Is not this unavoidable?
+
+Yes.
+
+Are they not exactly like a bald little tinker who has just got out of
+durance and come into a fortune; he takes a bath and puts on a new
+coat, and is decked out as a bridegroom going to marry his master's
+daughter, who is left poor and desolate?
+
+A most exact parallel.
+
+What will be the issue of such marriages?  Will they not be vile and
+bastard?
+
+There can be no question of it.
+
+And when persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and
+make an alliance with her who is a rank above them what sort of ideas
+and opinions are likely to be generated?  Will they not be sophisms
+captivating to the ear, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or
+akin to true wisdom?
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disciples of philosophy will be
+but a small remnant:  perchance some noble and well-educated person,
+detained by exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting
+influences remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean
+city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be
+a gifted few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to
+her;--or peradventure there are some who are restrained by our friend
+Theages' bridle; for everything in the life of Theages conspired to
+divert him from philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from politics.
+My own case of the internal sign is hardly worth mentioning, for
+rarely, if ever, has such a monitor been given to any other man.  Those
+who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a
+possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of
+the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there
+any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved.
+Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild
+beasts--he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither
+is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore
+seeing that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and
+reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any
+good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own
+way.  He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the
+driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and
+seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only
+he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and
+depart in peace and good-will, with bright hopes.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will have done a great work before he departs.
+
+A great work--yes; but not the greatest, unless he find a State
+suitable to him; for in a State which is suitable to him, he will have
+a larger growth and be the saviour of his country, as well as of
+himself.
+
+The causes why philosophy is in such an evil name have now been
+sufficiently explained:  the injustice of the charges against her has
+been shown-is there anything more which you wish to say?
+
+Nothing more on that subject, he replied; but I should like to know
+which of the governments now existing is in your opinion the one
+adapted to her.
+
+Not any of them, I said; and that is precisely the accusation which I
+bring against them--not one of them is worthy of the philosophic
+nature, and hence that nature is warped and estranged;--as the exotic
+seed which is sown in a foreign land becomes denaturalized, and is wont
+to be overpowered and to lose itself in the new soil, even so this
+growth of philosophy, instead of persisting, degenerates and receives
+another character.  But if philosophy ever finds in the State that
+perfection which she herself is, then will be seen that she is in truth
+divine, and that all other things, whether natures of men or
+institutions, are but human;--and now, I know that you are going to
+ask, what that State is.
+
+No, he said; there you are wrong, for I was going to ask another
+question--whether it is the State of which we are the founders and
+inventors, or some other?
+
+Yes, I replied, ours in most respects; but you may remember my saying
+before, that some living authority would always be required in the
+State having the same idea of the constitution which guided you when as
+legislator you were laying down the laws.
+
+That was said, he replied.
+
+Yes, but not in a satisfactory manner; you frightened us by interposing
+objections, which certainly showed that the discussion would be long
+and difficult; and what still remains is the reverse of easy.
+
+What is there remaining?
+
+The question how the study of philosophy may be so ordered as not to be
+the ruin of the State:  All great attempts are attended with risk;
+'hard is the good,' as men say.
+
+Still, he said, let the point be cleared up, and the enquiry will then
+be complete.
+
+I shall not be hindered, I said, by any want of will, but, if at all,
+by a want of power:  my zeal you may see for yourselves; and please to
+remark in what I am about to say how boldly and unhesitatingly I
+declare that States should pursue philosophy, not as they do now, but
+in a different spirit.
+
+In what manner?
+
+At present, I said, the students of philosophy are quite young;
+beginning when they are hardly past childhood, they devote only the
+time saved from moneymaking and housekeeping to such pursuits; and even
+those of them who are reputed to have most of the philosophic spirit,
+when they come within sight of the great difficulty of the subject, I
+mean dialectic, take themselves off.  In after life when invited by
+some one else, they may, perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this
+they make much ado, for philosophy is not considered by them to be
+their proper business:  at last, when they grow old, in most cases they
+are extinguished more truly than Heracleitus' sun, inasmuch as they
+never light up again.
+
+But what ought to be their course?
+
+Just the opposite.  In childhood and youth their study, and what
+philosophy they learn, should be suited to their tender years: during
+this period while they are growing up towards manhood, the chief and
+special care should be given to their bodies that they may have them to
+use in the service of philosophy; as life advances and the intellect
+begins to mature, let them increase the gymnastics of the soul; but
+when the strength of our citizens fails and is past civil and military
+duties, then let them range at will and engage in no serious labour, as
+we intend them to live happily here, and to crown this life with a
+similar happiness in another.
+
+How truly in earnest you are, Socrates! he said; I am sure of that; and
+yet most of your hearers, if I am not mistaken, are likely to be still
+more earnest in their opposition to you, and will never be convinced;
+Thrasymachus least of all.
+
+Do not make a quarrel, I said, between Thrasymachus and me, who have
+recently become friends, although, indeed, we were never enemies; for I
+shall go on striving to the utmost until I either convert him and other
+men, or do something which may profit them against the day when they
+live again, and hold the like discourse in another state of existence.
+
+You are speaking of a time which is not very near.
+
+Rather, I replied, of a time which is as nothing in comparison with
+eternity.  Nevertheless, I do not wonder that the many refuse to
+believe; for they have never seen that of which we are now speaking
+realised; they have seen only a conventional imitation of philosophy,
+consisting of words artificially brought together, not like these of
+ours having a natural unity.  But a human being who in word and work is
+perfectly moulded, as far as he can be, into the proportion and
+likeness of virtue--such a man ruling in a city which bears the same
+image, they have never yet seen, neither one nor many of them--do you
+think that they ever did?
+
+No indeed.
+
+No, my friend, and they have seldom, if ever, heard free and noble
+sentiments; such as men utter when they are earnestly and by every
+means in their power seeking after truth for the sake of knowledge,
+while they look coldly on the subtleties of controversy, of which the
+end is opinion and strife, whether they meet with them in the courts of
+law or in society.
+
+They are strangers, he said, to the words of which you speak.
+
+And this was what we foresaw, and this was the reason why truth forced
+us to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor
+States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small
+class of philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are
+providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the
+State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or
+until kings, or if not kings, the sons of kings or princes, are
+divinely inspired with a true love of true philosophy.  That either or
+both of these alternatives are impossible, I see no reason to affirm:
+if they were so, we might indeed be justly ridiculed as dreamers and
+visionaries.  Am I not right?
+
+Quite right.
+
+If then, in the countless ages of the past, or at the present hour in
+some foreign clime which is far away and beyond our ken, the perfected
+philosopher is or has been or hereafter shall be compelled by a
+superior power to have the charge of the State, we are ready to assert
+to the death, that this our constitution has been, and is--yea, and
+will be whenever the Muse of Philosophy is queen.  There is no
+impossibility in all this; that there is a difficulty, we acknowledge
+ourselves.
+
+My opinion agrees with yours, he said.
+
+But do you mean to say that this is not the opinion of the multitude?
+
+I should imagine not, he replied.
+
+O my friend, I said, do not attack the multitude:  they will change
+their minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, but gently and with the
+view of soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you
+show them your philosophers as they really are and describe as you were
+just now doing their character and profession, and then mankind will
+see that he of whom you are speaking is not such as they supposed--if
+they view him in this new light, they will surely change their notion
+of him, and answer in another strain.  Who can be at enmity with one
+who loves them, who that is himself gentle and free from envy will be
+jealous of one in whom there is no jealousy?  Nay, let me answer for
+you, that in a few this harsh temper may be found but not in the
+majority of mankind.
+
+I quite agree with you, he said.
+
+And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which the
+many entertain towards philosophy originates in the pretenders, who
+rush in uninvited, and are always abusing them, and finding fault with
+them, who make persons instead of things the theme of their
+conversation? and nothing can be more unbecoming in philosophers than
+this.
+
+It is most unbecoming.
+
+For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no
+time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with
+malice and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed
+towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor
+injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason;
+these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform
+himself.  Can a man help imitating that with which he holds reverential
+converse?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes
+orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows; but like every
+one else, he will suffer from detraction.
+
+Of course.
+
+And if a necessity be laid upon him of fashioning, not only himself,
+but human nature generally, whether in States or individuals, into that
+which he beholds elsewhere, will he, think you, be an unskilful
+artificer of justice, temperance, and every civil virtue?
+
+Anything but unskilful.
+
+And if the world perceives that what we are saying about him is the
+truth, will they be angry with philosophy?  Will they disbelieve us,
+when we tell them that no State can be happy which is not designed by
+artists who imitate the heavenly pattern?
+
+They will not be angry if they understand, he said.  But how will they
+draw out the plan of which you are speaking?
+
+They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which,
+as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean
+surface.  This is no easy task.  But whether easy or not, herein will
+lie the difference between them and every other legislator,--they will
+have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe
+no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean
+surface.
+
+They will be very right, he said.
+
+Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the
+constitution?
+
+No doubt.
+
+And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often
+turn their eyes upwards and downwards:  I mean that they will first
+look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the
+human copy; and will mingle and temper the various elements of life
+into the image of a man; and thus they will conceive according to that
+other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and
+likeness of God.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, they
+have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of
+God?
+
+Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture.
+
+And now, I said, are we beginning to persuade those whom you described
+as rushing at us with might and main, that the painter of constitutions
+is such an one as we are praising; at whom they were so very indignant
+because to his hands we committed the State; and are they growing a
+little calmer at what they have just heard?
+
+Much calmer, if there is any sense in them.
+
+Why, where can they still find any ground for objection?  Will they
+doubt that the philosopher is a lover of truth and being?
+
+They would not be so unreasonable.
+
+Or that his nature, being such as we have delineated, is akin to the
+highest good?
+
+Neither can they doubt this.
+
+But again, will they tell us that such a nature, placed under
+favourable circumstances, will not be perfectly good and wise if any
+ever was?  Or will they prefer those whom we have rejected?
+
+Surely not.
+
+Then will they still be angry at our saying, that, until philosophers
+bear rule, States and individuals will have no rest from evil, nor will
+this our imaginary State ever be realised?
+
+I think that they will be less angry.
+
+Shall we assume that they are not only less angry but quite gentle, and
+that they have been converted and for very shame, if for no other
+reason, cannot refuse to come to terms?
+
+By all means, he said.
+
+Then let us suppose that the reconciliation has been effected.  Will
+any one deny the other point, that there may be sons of kings or
+princes who are by nature philosophers?
+
+Surely no man, he said.
+
+And when they have come into being will any one say that they must of
+necessity be destroyed; that they can hardly be saved is not denied
+even by us; but that in the whole course of ages no single one of them
+can escape--who will venture to affirm this?
+
+Who indeed!
+
+But, said I, one is enough; let there be one man who has a city
+obedient to his will, and he might bring into existence the ideal
+polity about which the world is so incredulous.
+
+Yes, one is enough.
+
+The ruler may impose the laws and institutions which we have been
+describing, and the citizens may possibly be willing to obey them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that others should approve of what we approve, is no miracle or
+impossibility?
+
+I think not.
+
+But we have sufficiently shown, in what has preceded, that all this, if
+only possible, is assuredly for the best.
+
+We have.
+
+And now we say not only that our laws, if they could be enacted, would
+be for the best, but also that the enactment of them, though difficult,
+is not impossible.
+
+Very good.
+
+And so with pain and toil we have reached the end of one subject, but
+more remains to be discussed;--how and by what studies and pursuits
+will the saviours of the constitution be created, and at what ages are
+they to apply themselves to their several studies?
+
+Certainly.
+
+I omitted the troublesome business of the possession of women, and the
+procreation of children, and the appointment of the rulers, because I
+knew that the perfect State would be eyed with jealousy and was
+difficult of attainment; but that piece of cleverness was not of much
+service to me, for I had to discuss them all the same.  The women and
+children are now disposed of, but the other question of the rulers must
+be investigated from the very beginning.  We were saying, as you will
+remember, that they were to be lovers of their country, tried by the
+test of pleasures and pains, and neither in hardships, nor in dangers,
+nor at any other critical moment were to lose their patriotism--he was
+to be rejected who failed, but he who always came forth pure, like gold
+tried in the refiner's fire, was to be made a ruler, and to receive
+honours and rewards in life and after death.  This was the sort of
+thing which was being said, and then the argument turned aside and
+veiled her face; not liking to stir the question which has now arisen.
+
+I perfectly remember, he said.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said, and I then shrank from hazarding the bold word;
+but now let me dare to say--that the perfect guardian must be a
+philosopher.
+
+Yes, he said, let that be affirmed.
+
+And do not suppose that there will be many of them; for the gifts which
+were deemed by us to be essential rarely grow together; they are mostly
+found in shreds and patches.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+You are aware, I replied, that quick intelligence, memory, sagacity,
+cleverness, and similar qualities, do not often grow together, and that
+persons who possess them and are at the same time high-spirited and
+magnanimous are not so constituted by nature as to live orderly and in
+a peaceful and settled manner; they are driven any way by their
+impulses, and all solid principle goes out of them.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+On the other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended
+upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are
+equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always
+in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to sleep over any
+intellectual toil.
+
+Quite true.
+
+And yet we were saying that both qualities were necessary in those to
+whom the higher education is to be imparted, and who are to share in
+any office or command.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And will they be a class which is rarely found?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Then the aspirant must not only be tested in those labours and dangers
+and pleasures which we mentioned before, but there is another kind of
+probation which we did not mention--he must be exercised also in many
+kinds of knowledge, to see whether the soul will be able to endure the
+highest of all, will faint under them, as in any other studies and
+exercises.
+
+Yes, he said, you are quite right in testing him.  But what do you mean
+by the highest of all knowledge?
+
+You may remember, I said, that we divided the soul into three parts;
+and distinguished the several natures of justice, temperance, courage,
+and wisdom?
+
+Indeed, he said, if I had forgotten, I should not deserve to hear more.
+
+And do you remember the word of caution which preceded the discussion
+of them?
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+We were saying, if I am not mistaken, that he who wanted to see them in
+their perfect beauty must take a longer and more circuitous way, at the
+end of which they would appear; but that we could add on a popular
+exposition of them on a level with the discussion which had preceded.
+And you replied that such an exposition would be enough for you, and so
+the enquiry was continued in what to me seemed to be a very inaccurate
+manner; whether you were satisfied or not, it is for you to say.
+
+Yes, he said, I thought and the others thought that you gave us a fair
+measure of truth.
+
+But, my friend, I said, a measure of such things Which in any degree
+falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing
+imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to
+be contented and think that they need search no further.
+
+Not an uncommon case when people are indolent.
+
+Yes, I said; and there cannot be any worse fault in a guardian of the
+State and of the laws.
+
+True.
+
+The guardian then, I said, must be required to take the longer circuit,
+and toll at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach
+the highest knowledge of all which, as we were just now saying, is his
+proper calling.
+
+What, he said, is there a knowledge still higher than this--higher than
+justice and the other virtues?
+
+Yes, I said, there is.  And of the virtues too we must behold not the
+outline merely, as at present--nothing short of the most finished
+picture should satisfy us.  When little things are elaborated with an
+infinity of pains, in order that they may appear in their full beauty
+and utmost clearness, how ridiculous that we should not think the
+highest truths worthy of attaining the highest accuracy!
+
+A right noble thought; but do you suppose that we shall refrain from
+asking you what is this highest knowledge?
+
+Nay, I said, ask if you will; but I am certain that you have heard the
+answer many times, and now you either do not understand me or, as I
+rather think, you are disposed to be troublesome; for you have of been
+told that the idea of good is the highest knowledge, and that all other
+things become useful and advantageous only by their use of this.  You
+can hardly be ignorant that of this I was about to speak, concerning
+which, as you have often heard me say, we know so little; and, without
+which, any other knowledge or possession of any kind will profit us
+nothing.  Do you think that the possession of all other things is of
+any value if we do not possess the good? or the knowledge of all other
+things if we have no knowledge of beauty and goodness?
+
+Assuredly not.
+
+You are further aware that most people affirm pleasure to be the good,
+but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge
+
+Yes.
+
+And you are aware too that the latter cannot explain what they mean by
+knowledge, but are obliged after all to say knowledge of the good?
+
+How ridiculous!
+
+Yes, I said, that they should begin by reproaching us with our
+ignorance of the good, and then presume our knowledge of it--for the
+good they define to be knowledge of the good, just as if we understood
+them when they use the term 'good'--this is of course ridiculous.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+And those who make pleasure their good are in equal perplexity; for
+they are compelled to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as
+good.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And therefore to acknowledge that bad and good are the same?
+
+True.
+
+There can be no doubt about the numerous difficulties in which this
+question is involved.
+
+There can be none.
+
+Further, do we not see that many are willing to do or to have or to
+seem to be what is just and honourable without the reality; but no one
+is satisfied with the appearance of good--the reality is what they
+seek; in the case of the good, appearance is despised by every one.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Of this then, which every soul of man pursues and makes the end of all
+his actions, having a presentiment that there is such an end, and yet
+hesitating because neither knowing the nature nor having the same
+assurance of this as of other things, and therefore losing whatever
+good there is in other things,--of a principle such and so great as
+this ought the best men in our State, to whom everything is entrusted,
+to be in the darkness of ignorance?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+I am sure, I said, that he who does not know now the beautiful and the
+just are likewise good will be but a sorry guardian of them; and I
+suspect that no one who is ignorant of the good will have a true
+knowledge of them.
+
+That, he said, is a shrewd suspicion of yours.
+
+And if we only have a guardian who has this knowledge our State will be
+perfectly ordered?
+
+Of course, he replied; but I wish that you would tell me whether you
+conceive this supreme principle of the good to be knowledge or
+pleasure, or different from either.
+
+Aye, I said, I knew all along that a fastidious gentleman like you
+would not be contented with the thoughts of other people about these
+matters.
+
+True, Socrates; but I must say that one who like you has passed a
+lifetime in the study of philosophy should not be always repeating the
+opinions of others, and never telling his own.
+
+Well, but has any one a right to say positively what he does not know?
+
+Not, he said, with the assurance of positive certainty; he has no right
+to do that:  but he may say what he thinks, as a matter of opinion.
+
+And do you not know, I said, that all mere opinions are bad, and the
+best of them blind?  You would not deny that those who have any true
+notion without intelligence are only like blind men who feel their way
+along the road?
+
+Very true.
+
+And do you wish to behold what is blind and crooked and base, when
+others will tell you of brightness and beauty?
+
+GLAUCON - SOCRATES
+
+Still, I must implore you, Socrates, said Glaucon, not to turn away
+just as you are reaching the goal; if you will only give such an
+explanation of the good as you have already given of justice and
+temperance and the other virtues, we shall be satisfied.
+
+Yes, my friend, and I shall be at least equally satisfied, but I cannot
+help fearing that I shall fall, and that my indiscreet zeal will bring
+ridicule upon me.  No, sweet sirs, let us not at present ask what is
+the actual nature of the good, for to reach what is now in my thoughts
+would be an effort too great for me.  But of the child of the good who
+is likest him, I would fain speak, if I could be sure that you wished
+to hear--otherwise, not.
+
+By all means, he said, tell us about the child, and you shall remain in
+our debt for the account of the parent.
+
+I do indeed wish, I replied, that I could pay, and you receive, the
+account of the parent, and not, as now, of the offspring only; take,
+however, this latter by way of interest, and at the same time have a
+care that i do not render a false account, although I have no intention
+of deceiving you.
+
+Yes, we will take all the care that we can:  proceed.
+
+Yes, I said, but I must first come to an understanding with you, and
+remind you of what I have mentioned in the course of this discussion,
+and at many other times.
+
+What?
+
+The old story, that there is a many beautiful and a many good, and so
+of other things which we describe and define; to all of them 'many' is
+applied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other
+things to which the term 'many' is applied there is an absolute; for
+they may be brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of
+each.
+
+Very true.
+
+The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known
+but not seen.
+
+Exactly.
+
+And what is the organ with which we see the visible things?
+
+The sight, he said.
+
+And with the hearing, I said, we hear, and with the other senses
+perceive the other objects of sense?
+
+True.
+
+But have you remarked that sight is by far the most costly and complex
+piece of workmanship which the artificer of the senses ever contrived?
+
+No, I never have, he said.
+
+Then reflect; has the ear or voice need of any third or additional
+nature in order that the one may be able to hear and the other to be
+heard?
+
+Nothing of the sort.
+
+No, indeed, I replied; and the same is true of most, if not all, the
+other senses--you would not say that any of them requires such an
+addition?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+But you see that without the addition of some other nature there is no
+seeing or being seen?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+Sight being, as I conceive, in the eyes, and he who has eyes wanting to
+see; colour being also present in them, still unless there be a third
+nature specially adapted to the purpose, the owner of the eyes will see
+nothing and the colours will be invisible.
+
+Of what nature are you speaking?
+
+Of that which you term light, I replied.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility, and
+great beyond other bonds by no small difference of nature; for light is
+their bond, and light is no ignoble thing?
+
+Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.
+
+And which, I said, of the gods in heaven would you say was the lord of
+this element?  Whose is that light which makes the eye to see perfectly
+and the visible to appear?
+
+You mean the sun, as you and all mankind say.
+
+May not the relation of sight to this deity be described as follows?
+
+How?
+
+Neither sight nor the eye in which sight resides is the sun?
+
+No.
+
+Yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most like the sun?
+
+By far the most like.
+
+And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is
+dispensed from the sun?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognised by
+sight.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good begat
+in his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight
+and the things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in
+relation to mind and the things of mind.
+
+Will you be a little more explicit? he said.
+
+Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them
+towards objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the
+moon and stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have
+no clearness of vision in them?
+
+Very true.
+
+But when they are directed towards objects on which the sun shines,
+they see clearly and there is sight in them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the soul is like the eye:  when resting upon that on which truth
+and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with
+intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and
+perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is
+first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no
+intelligence?
+
+Just so.
+
+Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to
+the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you
+will deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as the
+latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both
+truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature
+as more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light
+and sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the
+sun, so in this other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be
+like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honour yet
+higher.
+
+What a wonder of beauty that must be, he said, which is the author of
+science and truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty; for you surely
+cannot mean to say that pleasure is the good?
+
+God forbid, I replied; but may I ask you to consider the image in
+another point of view?
+
+In what point of view?
+
+You would say, would you not, that the sun is only the author of
+visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and
+growth, though he himself is not generation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of
+knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet
+the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.
+
+Glaucon said, with a ludicrous earnestness:  By the light of heaven,
+how amazing!
+
+Yes, I said, and the exaggeration may be set down to you; for you made
+me utter my fancies.
+
+And pray continue to utter them; at any rate let us hear if there is
+anything more to be said about the similitude of the sun.
+
+Yes, I said, there is a great deal more.
+
+Then omit nothing, however slight.
+
+I will do my best, I said; but I should think that a great deal will
+have to be omitted.
+
+You have to imagine, then, that there are two ruling powers, and that
+one of them is set over the intellectual world, the other over the
+visible.  I do not say heaven, lest you should fancy that I am playing
+upon the name ('ourhanoz, orhatoz'). May I suppose that you have this
+distinction of the visible and intelligible fixed in your mind?
+
+I have.
+
+Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide
+each of them again in the same proportion, and suppose the two main
+divisions to answer, one to the visible and the other to the
+intelligible, and then compare the subdivisions in respect of their
+clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first
+section in the sphere of the visible consists of images.  And by images
+I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place,
+reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the
+like:  Do you understand?
+
+Yes, I understand.
+
+Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance,
+to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is
+made.
+
+Very good.
+
+Would you not admit that both the sections of this division have
+different degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the
+sphere of opinion is to the sphere of knowledge?
+
+Most undoubtedly.
+
+Next proceed to consider the manner in which the sphere of the
+intellectual is to be divided.
+
+In what manner?
+
+Thus:--There are two subdivisions, in the lower or which the soul uses
+the figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can
+only be hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle
+descends to the other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes
+out of hypotheses, and goes up to a principle which is above
+hypotheses, making no use of images as in the former case, but
+proceeding only in and through the ideas themselves.
+
+I do not quite understand your meaning, he said.
+
+Then I will try again; you will understand me better when I have made
+some preliminary remarks.  You are aware that students of geometry,
+arithmetic, and the kindred sciences assume the odd and the even and
+the figures and three kinds of angles and the like in their several
+branches of science; these are their hypotheses, which they and
+everybody are supposed to know, and therefore they do not deign to give
+any account of them either to themselves or others; but they begin with
+them, and go on until they arrive at last, and in a consistent manner,
+at their conclusion?
+
+Yes, he said, I know.
+
+And do you not know also that although they make use of the visible
+forms and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the
+ideals which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but of
+the absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on--the forms
+which they draw or make, and which have shadows and reflections in
+water of their own, are converted by them into images, but they are
+really seeking to behold the things themselves, which can only be seen
+with the eye of the mind?
+
+That is true.
+
+And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible, although in the search
+after it the soul is compelled to use hypotheses; not ascending to a
+first principle, because she is unable to rise above the region of
+hypothesis, but employing the objects of which the shadows below are
+resemblances in their turn as images, they having in relation to the
+shadows and reflections of them a greater distinctness, and therefore a
+higher value.
+
+I understand, he said, that you are speaking of the province of
+geometry and the sister arts.
+
+And when I speak of the other division of the intelligible, you will
+understand me to speak of that other sort of knowledge which reason
+herself attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as
+first principles, but only as hypotheses--that is to say, as steps and
+points of departure into a world which is above hypotheses, in order
+that she may soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole; and
+clinging to this and then to that which depends on this, by successive
+steps she descends again without the aid of any sensible object, from
+ideas, through ideas, and in ideas she ends.
+
+I understand you, he replied; not perfectly, for you seem to me to be
+describing a task which is really tremendous; but, at any rate, I
+understand you to say that knowledge and being, which the science of
+dialectic contemplates, are clearer than the notions of the arts, as
+they are termed, which proceed from hypotheses only: these are also
+contemplated by the understanding, and not by the senses:  yet, because
+they start from hypotheses and do not ascend to a principle, those who
+contemplate them appear to you not to exercise the higher reason upon
+them, although when a first principle is added to them they are
+cognizable by the higher reason.  And the habit which is concerned with
+geometry and the cognate sciences I suppose that you would term
+understanding and not reason, as being intermediate between opinion and
+reason.
+
+You have quite conceived my meaning, I said; and now, corresponding to
+these four divisions, let there be four faculties in the soul-reason
+answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith (or
+conviction) to the third, and perception of shadows to the last-and let
+there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties
+have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth.
+
+I understand, he replied, and give my assent, and accept your
+arrangement.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+AND now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is
+enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a
+underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching
+all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have
+their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see
+before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their
+heads.  Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and
+between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will
+see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which
+marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the
+puppets.
+
+I see.
+
+And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts
+of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone
+and various materials, which appear over the wall?  Some of them are
+talking, others silent.
+
+You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
+
+Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the
+shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of
+the cave?
+
+True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were
+never allowed to move their heads?
+
+And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would
+only see the shadows?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not
+suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
+
+Very true.
+
+And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the
+other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by
+spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
+
+No question, he replied.
+
+To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows
+of the images.
+
+That is certain.
+
+And now look again, and see what will naturally follow it' the
+prisoners are released and disabused of their error.  At first, when
+any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn
+his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer
+sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see
+the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and
+then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an
+illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his
+eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,
+what will be his reply?  And you may further imagine that his
+instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to
+name them,--will he not be perplexed?  Will he not fancy that the
+shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now
+shown to him?
+
+Far truer.
+
+And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have
+a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in
+the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to
+be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
+
+True, he now
+
+And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and
+rugged ascent, and held fast until he's forced into the presence of the
+sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated?  When he
+approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able
+to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
+
+Not all in a moment, he said.
+
+He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world.
+And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and
+other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he
+will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled
+heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the
+sun or the light of the sun by day?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him
+in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in
+another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
+
+Certainly.
+
+He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and
+the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and
+in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have
+been accustomed to behold?
+
+Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
+
+And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den
+and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate
+himself on the change, and pity them?
+
+Certainly, he would.
+
+And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on
+those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark
+which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were
+together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to
+the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and
+glories, or envy the possessors of them?  Would he not say with Homer,
+
+    Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,
+
+and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after
+their manner?
+
+Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than
+entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
+
+Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun
+to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have
+his eyes full of darkness?
+
+To be sure, he said.
+
+And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the
+shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while
+his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and
+the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might
+be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous?  Men would say of him
+that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was
+better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose
+another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender,
+and they would put him to death.
+
+No question, he said.
+
+This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the
+previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of
+the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret
+the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual
+world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have
+expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows.  But, whether true or
+false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good
+appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen,
+is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and
+right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world,
+and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and
+that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either
+in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
+
+I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
+
+Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this
+beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their
+souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to
+dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be
+trusted.
+
+Yes, very natural.
+
+And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine
+contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a
+ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has
+become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight
+in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows
+of images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of
+those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
+
+Anything but surprising, he replied.
+
+Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of
+the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from
+coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of
+the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who
+remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak,
+will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of
+man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because
+unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is
+dazzled by excess of light.  And he will count the one happy in his
+condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he
+have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light,
+there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him
+who returns from above out of the light into the den.
+
+That, he said, is a very just distinction.
+
+But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong
+when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not
+there before, like sight into blind eyes.
+
+They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
+
+Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning
+exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn
+from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of
+knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the
+world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure
+the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other
+words, of the good.
+
+Very true.
+
+And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the
+easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for
+that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is
+looking away from the truth?
+
+Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.
+
+And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to
+bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can
+be implanted later by habit and exercise, the of wisdom more than
+anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by
+this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other
+hand, hurtful and useless.  Did you never observe the narrow
+intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue--how eager he
+is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the
+reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of
+evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days
+of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures,
+such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached
+to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of
+their souls upon the things that are below--if, I say, they had been
+released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction,
+the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as
+they see what their eyes are turned to now.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a
+necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated
+and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of
+their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former,
+because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their
+actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will
+not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already
+dwelling apart in the islands of the blest.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will
+be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have
+already shown to be the greatest of all-they must continue to ascend
+until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen
+enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean that they remain in the upper world:  but this must not be
+allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the
+den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth
+having or not.
+
+But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life,
+when they might have a better?
+
+You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the
+legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy
+above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held
+the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them
+benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to
+this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his
+instruments in binding up the State.
+
+True, he said, I had forgotten.
+
+Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our
+philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain
+to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to
+share in the toils of politics:  and this is reasonable, for they grow
+up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have
+them.  Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude
+for a culture which they have never received.  But we have brought you
+into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the
+other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly
+than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the
+double duty.  Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down
+to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the
+dark.  When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand
+times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what
+the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen
+the beautiful and just and good in their truth.  And thus our State
+which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will
+be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men
+fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the
+struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good.  Whereas the
+truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to
+govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in
+which they are most eager, the worst.
+
+Quite true, he replied.
+
+And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at
+the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of
+their time with one another in the heavenly light?
+
+Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which
+we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of
+them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion
+of our present rulers of State.
+
+Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point.  You must contrive
+for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler,
+and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which
+offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold,
+but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.
+Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and
+hungering after the' own private advantage, thinking that hence they
+are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will
+be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus
+arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition
+is that of true philosophy.  Do you know of any other?
+
+Indeed, I do not, he said.
+
+And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task?  For, if they
+are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.
+
+No question.
+
+Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians?  Surely they
+will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the
+State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours
+and another and a better life than that of politics?
+
+They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.
+
+And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced,
+and how they are to be brought from darkness to light,--as some are
+said to have ascended from the world below to the gods?
+
+By all means, he replied.
+
+The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but
+the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better
+than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below,
+which we affirm to be true philosophy?
+
+Quite so.
+
+And should we not enquire what sort of knowledge has the power of
+effecting such a change?
+
+Certainly.
+
+What sort of knowledge is there which would draw the soul from becoming
+to being?  And another consideration has just occurred to me: You will
+remember that our young men are to be warrior athletes
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Then this new kind of knowledge must have an additional quality?
+
+What quality?
+
+Usefulness in war.
+
+Yes, if possible.
+
+There were two parts in our former scheme of education, were there not?
+
+Just so.
+
+There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of the
+body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and
+corruption?
+
+True.
+
+Then that is not the knowledge which we are seeking to discover?  No.
+
+But what do you say of music, which also entered to a certain extent
+into our former scheme?
+
+Music, he said, as you will remember, was the counterpart of gymnastic,
+and trained the guardians by the influences of habit, by harmony making
+them harmonious, by rhythm rhythmical, but not giving them science; and
+the words, whether fabulous or possibly true, had kindred elements of
+rhythm and harmony in them.  But in music there was nothing which
+tended to that good which you are now seeking.
+
+You are most accurate, I said, in your recollection; in music there
+certainly was nothing of the kind.  But what branch of knowledge is
+there, my dear Glaucon, which is of the desired nature; since all the
+useful arts were reckoned mean by us?
+
+Undoubtedly; and yet if music and gymnastic are excluded, and the arts
+are also excluded, what remains?
+
+Well, I said, there may be nothing left of our special subjects; and
+then we shall have to take something which is not special, but of
+universal application.
+
+What may that be?
+
+A something which all arts and sciences and intelligences use in
+common, and which every one first has to learn among the elements of
+education.
+
+What is that?
+
+The little matter of distinguishing one, two, and three--in a word,
+number and calculation:--do not all arts and sciences necessarily
+partake of them?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the art of war partakes of them?
+
+To the sure.
+
+Then Palamedes, whenever he appears in tragedy, proves Agamemnon
+ridiculously unfit to be a general.  Did you never remark how he
+declares that he had invented number, and had numbered the ships and
+set in array the ranks of the army at Troy; which implies that they had
+never been numbered before, and Agamemnon must be supposed literally to
+have been incapable of counting his own feet--how could he if he was
+ignorant of number?  And if that is true, what sort of general must he
+have been?
+
+I should say a very strange one, if this was as you say.
+
+Can we deny that a warrior should have a knowledge of arithmetic?
+
+Certainly he should, if he is to have the smallest understanding of
+military tactics, or indeed, I should rather say, if he is to be a man
+at all.
+
+I should like to know whether you have the same notion which I have of
+this study?
+
+What is your notion?
+
+It appears to me to be a study of the kind which we are seeking, and
+which leads naturally to reflection, but never to have been rightly
+used; for the true use of it is simply to draw the soul towards being.
+
+Will you explain your meaning? he said.
+
+I will try, I said; and I wish you would share the enquiry with me, and
+say 'yes' or 'no' when I attempt to distinguish in my own mind what
+branches of knowledge have this attracting power, in order that we may
+have clearer proof that arithmetic is, as I suspect, one of them.
+
+Explain, he said.
+
+I mean to say that objects of sense are of two kinds; some of them do
+not invite thought because the sense is an adequate judge of them;
+while in the case of other objects sense is so untrustworthy that
+further enquiry is imperatively demanded.
+
+You are clearly referring, he said, to the manner in which the senses
+are imposed upon by distance, and by painting in light and shade.
+
+No, I said, that is not at all my meaning.
+
+Then what is your meaning?
+
+When speaking of uninviting objects, I mean those which do not pass
+from one sensation to the opposite; inviting objects are those which
+do; in this latter case the sense coming upon the object, whether at a
+distance or near, gives no more vivid idea of anything in particular
+than of its opposite.  An illustration will make my meaning
+clearer:--here are three fingers--a little finger, a second finger, and
+a middle finger.
+
+Very good.
+
+You may suppose that they are seen quite close:  And here comes the
+point.
+
+What is it?
+
+Each of them equally appears a finger, whether seen in the middle or at
+the extremity, whether white or black, or thick or thin--it makes no
+difference; a finger is a finger all the same.  In these cases a man is
+not compelled to ask of thought the question, what is a finger? for the
+sight never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger.
+
+True.
+
+And therefore, I said, as we might expect, there is nothing here which
+invites or excites intelligence.
+
+There is not, he said.
+
+But is this equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers?
+Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the
+circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at
+the extremity?  And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive
+the qualities of thickness or thinness, or softness or hardness?  And
+so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such
+matters?  Is not their mode of operation on this wise--the sense which
+is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also
+with the quality of softness, and only intimates to the soul that the
+same thing is felt to be both hard and soft?
+
+You are quite right, he said.
+
+And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense
+gives of a hard which is also soft?  What, again, is the meaning of
+light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which
+is heavy, light?
+
+Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very
+curious and require to be explained.
+
+Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to
+her aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the
+several objects announced to her are one or two.
+
+True.
+
+And if they turn out to be two, is not each of them one and different?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if each is one, and both are two, she will conceive the two as in a
+state of division, for if there were undivided they could only be
+conceived of as one?
+
+True.
+
+The eye certainly did see both small and great, but only in a confused
+manner; they were not distinguished.
+
+Yes.
+
+Whereas the thinking mind, intending to light up the chaos, was
+compelled to reverse the process, and look at small and great as
+separate and not confused.
+
+Very true.
+
+Was not this the beginning of the enquiry 'What is great?' and 'What is
+small?'
+
+Exactly so.
+
+And thus arose the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.
+
+Most true.
+
+This was what I meant when I spoke of impressions which invited the
+intellect, or the reverse--those which are simultaneous with opposite
+impressions, invite thought; those which are not simultaneous do not.
+
+I understand, he said, and agree with you.
+
+And to which class do unity and number belong?
+
+I do not know, he replied.
+
+Think a little and you will see that what has preceded will supply the
+answer; for if simple unity could be adequately perceived by the sight
+or by any other sense, then, as we were saying in the case of the
+finger, there would be nothing to attract towards being; but when there
+is some contradiction always present, and one is the reverse of one and
+involves the conception of plurality, then thought begins to be aroused
+within us, and the soul perplexed and wanting to arrive at a decision
+asks 'What is absolute unity?' This is the way in which the study of
+the one has a power of drawing and converting the mind to the
+contemplation of true being.
+
+And surely, he said, this occurs notably in the case of one; for we see
+the same thing to be both one and infinite in multitude?
+
+Yes, I said; and this being true of one must be equally true of all
+number?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And all arithmetic and calculation have to do with number?
+
+Yes.
+
+And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?
+
+Yes, in a very remarkable manner.
+
+Then this is knowledge of the kind for which we are seeking, having a
+double use, military and philosophical; for the man of war must learn
+the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the
+philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and
+lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.
+
+That is true.
+
+And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this is a kind of knowledge which legislation may fitly prescribe;
+and we must endeavour to persuade those who are prescribe to be the
+principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs,
+but they must carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers
+with the mind only; nor again, like merchants or retail-traders, with a
+view to buying or selling, but for the sake of their military use, and
+of the soul herself; and because this will be the easiest way for her
+to pass from becoming to truth and being.
+
+That is excellent, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, and now having spoken of it, I must add how charming the
+science is! and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if
+pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean, as I was saying, that arithmetic has a very great and elevating
+effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and
+rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into
+the argument.  You know how steadily the masters of the art repel and
+ridicule any one who attempts to divide absolute unity when he is
+calculating, and if you divide, they multiply, taking care that one
+shall continue one and not become lost in fractions.
+
+That is very true.
+
+Now, suppose a person were to say to them:  O my friends, what are
+these wonderful numbers about which you are reasoning, in which, as you
+say, there is a unity such as you demand, and each unit is equal,
+invariable, indivisible,--what would they answer?
+
+They would answer, as I should conceive, that they were speaking of
+those numbers which can only be realised in thought.
+
+Then you see that this knowledge may be truly called necessary,
+necessitating as it clearly does the use of the pure intelligence in
+the attainment of pure truth?
+
+Yes; that is a marked characteristic of it.
+
+And have you further observed, that those who have a natural talent for
+calculation are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge; and
+even the dull if they have had an arithmetical training, although they
+may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than
+they would otherwise have been.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And indeed, you will not easily find a more difficult study, and not
+many as difficult.
+
+You will not.
+
+And, for all these reasons, arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which
+the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.
+
+I agree.
+
+Let this then be made one of our subjects of education.  And next,
+shall we enquire whether the kindred science also concerns us?
+
+You mean geometry?
+
+Exactly so.
+
+Clearly, he said, we are concerned with that part of geometry which
+relates to war; for in pitching a camp, or taking up a position, or
+closing or extending the lines of an army, or any other military
+manoeuvre, whether in actual battle or on a march, it will make all the
+difference whether a general is or is not a geometrician.
+
+Yes, I said, but for that purpose a very little of either geometry or
+calculation will be enough; the question relates rather to the greater
+and more advanced part of geometry--whether that tends in any degree to
+make more easy the vision of the idea of good; and thither, as I was
+saying, all things tend which compel the soul to turn her gaze towards
+that place, where is the full perfection of being, which she ought, by
+all means, to behold.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then if geometry compels us to view being, it concerns us; if becoming
+only, it does not concern us?
+
+Yes, that is what we assert.
+
+Yet anybody who has the least acquaintance with geometry will not deny
+that such a conception of the science is in flat contradiction to the
+ordinary language of geometricians.
+
+How so?
+
+They have in view practice only, and are always speaking? in a narrow
+and ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the
+like--they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily
+life; whereas knowledge is the real object of the whole science.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+Then must not a further admission be made?
+
+What admission?
+
+That the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal,
+and not of aught perishing and transient.
+
+That, he replied, may be readily allowed, and is true.
+
+Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and
+create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now
+unhappily allowed to fall down.
+
+Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect.
+
+Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants
+of your fair city should by all means learn geometry.  Moreover the
+science has indirect effects, which are not small.
+
+Of what kind? he said.
+
+There are the military advantages of which you spoke, I said; and in
+all departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has
+studied geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has
+not.
+
+Yes indeed, he said, there is an infinite difference between them.
+
+Then shall we propose this as a second branch of knowledge which our
+youth will study?
+
+Let us do so, he replied.
+
+And suppose we make astronomy the third--what do you say?
+
+I am strongly inclined to it, he said; the observation of the seasons
+and of months and years is as essential to the general as it is to the
+farmer or sailor.
+
+I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard
+against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite
+admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of
+the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these
+purified and re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand
+bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.  Now there are two classes
+of persons:  one class of those who will agree with you and will take
+your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly
+unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they
+see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them.  And therefore
+you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing
+to argue.  You will very likely say with neither, and that your chief
+aim in carrying on the argument is your own improvement; at the same
+time you do not grudge to others any benefit which they may receive.
+
+I think that I should prefer to carry on the argument mainly on my own
+behalf.
+
+Then take a step backward, for we have gone wrong in the order of the
+sciences.
+
+What was the mistake? he said.
+
+After plane geometry, I said, we proceeded at once to solids in
+revolution, instead of taking solids in themselves; whereas after the
+second dimension the third, which is concerned with cubes and
+dimensions of depth, ought to have followed.
+
+That is true, Socrates; but so little seems to be known as yet about
+these subjects.
+
+Why, yes, I said, and for two reasons:--in the first place, no
+government patronises them; this leads to a want of energy in the
+pursuit of them, and they are difficult; in the second place, students
+cannot learn them unless they have a director.  But then a director can
+hardly be found, and even if he could, as matters now stand, the
+students, who are very conceited, would not attend to him.  That,
+however, would be otherwise if the whole State became the director of
+these studies and gave honour to them; then disciples would want to
+come, and there would be continuous and earnest search, and discoveries
+would be made; since even now, disregarded as they are by the world,
+and maimed of their fair proportions, and although none of their
+votaries can tell the use of them, still these studies force their way
+by their natural charm, and very likely, if they had the help of the
+State, they would some day emerge into light.
+
+Yes, he said, there is a remarkable charm in them.  But I do not
+clearly understand the change in the order.  First you began with a
+geometry of plane surfaces?
+
+Yes, I said.
+
+And you placed astronomy next, and then you made a step backward?
+
+Yes, and I have delayed you by my hurry; the ludicrous state of solid
+geometry, which, in natural order, should have followed, made me pass
+over this branch and go on to astronomy, or motion of solids.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Then assuming that the science now omitted would come into existence if
+encouraged by the State, let us go on to astronomy, which will be
+fourth.
+
+The right order, he replied.  And now, Socrates, as you rebuked the
+vulgar manner in which I praised astronomy before, my praise shall be
+given in your own spirit.  For every one, as I think, must see that
+astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world
+to another.
+
+Every one but myself, I said; to every one else this may be clear, but
+not to me.
+
+And what then would you say?
+
+I should rather say that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy
+appear to me to make us look downwards and not upwards.
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+You, I replied, have in your mind a truly sublime conception of our
+knowledge of the things above.  And I dare say that if a person were to
+throw his head back and study the fretted ceiling, you would still
+think that his mind was the percipient, and not his eyes.  And you are
+very likely right, and I may be a simpleton: but, in my opinion, that
+knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul
+look upwards, and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the
+ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he
+can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science; his soul is
+looking downwards, not upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by
+water or by land, whether he floats, or only lies on his back.
+
+I acknowledge, he said, the justice of your rebuke.  Still, I should
+like to ascertain how astronomy can be learned in any manner more
+conducive to that knowledge of which we are speaking?
+
+I will tell you, I said:  The starry heaven which we behold is wrought
+upon a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most
+perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to
+the true motions of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are
+relative to each other, and carry with them that which is contained in
+them, in the true number and in every true figure.  Now, these are to
+be apprehended by reason and intelligence, but not by sight.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to
+that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or
+pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other
+great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw
+them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he
+would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal
+or the true double, or the truth of any other proportion.
+
+No, he replied, such an idea would be ridiculous.
+
+And will not a true astronomer have the same feeling when he looks at
+the movements of the stars?  Will he not think that heaven and the
+things in heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect
+manner?  But he will never imagine that the proportions of night and
+day, or of both to the month, or of the month to the year, or of the
+stars to these and to one another, and any other things that are
+material and visible can also be eternal and subject to no
+deviation--that would be absurd; and it is equally absurd to take so
+much pains in investigating their exact truth.
+
+I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.
+
+Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems,
+and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right
+way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.
+
+That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.
+
+Yes, I said; and there are many other things which must also have a
+similar extension given to them, if our legislation is to be of any
+value.  But can you tell me of any other suitable study?
+
+No, he said, not without thinking.
+
+Motion, I said, has many forms, and not one only; two of them are
+obvious enough even to wits no better than ours; and there are others,
+as I imagine, which may be left to wiser persons.
+
+But where are the two?
+
+There is a second, I said, which is the counterpart of the one already
+named.
+
+And what may that be?
+
+The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the
+first is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to
+look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and
+these are sister sciences--as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon,
+agree with them?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+But this, I said, is a laborious study, and therefore we had better go
+and learn of them; and they will tell us whether there are any other
+applications of these sciences.  At the same time, we must not lose
+sight of our own higher object.
+
+What is that?
+
+There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our
+pupils ought also to attain, and not to fall short of, as I was saying
+that they did in astronomy.  For in the science of harmony, as you
+probably know, the same thing happens.  The teachers of harmony compare
+the sounds and consonances which are heard only, and their labour, like
+that of the astronomers, is in vain.
+
+Yes, by heaven! he said; and 'tis as good as a play to hear them
+talking about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their
+ears close alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from
+their neighbour's wall--one set of them declaring that they distinguish
+an intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be
+the unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have
+passed into the same--either party setting their ears before their
+understanding.
+
+You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and
+rack them on the pegs of the instrument:  might carry on the metaphor
+and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives, and
+make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and
+forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will
+only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the
+Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about
+harmony.  For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they
+investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they
+never attain to problems-that is to say, they never reach the natural
+harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and
+others not.
+
+That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.
+
+A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if
+sought after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in
+any other spirit, useless.  Very true, he said.
+
+Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and
+connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual
+affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them
+have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.
+
+I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.
+
+What do you mean?  I said; the prelude or what?  Do you not know that
+all this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to
+learn?  For you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a
+dialectician?
+
+Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who
+was capable of reasoning.
+
+But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason
+will have the knowledge which we require of them?
+
+Neither can this be supposed.
+
+And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of
+dialectic.  This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but
+which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for
+sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold
+the real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself.  And so
+with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute
+by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and
+perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of
+the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the
+intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.
+
+Exactly, he said.
+
+Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?
+
+True.
+
+But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation
+from the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from
+the underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly
+trying to look on animals and plants and the light of the sun, but are
+able to perceive even with their weak eyes the images in the water
+(which are divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows
+of images cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only
+an image)--this power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to
+the contemplation of that which is best in existence, with which we may
+compare the raising of that faculty which is the very light of the body
+to the sight of that which is brightest in the material and visible
+world--this power is given, as I was saying, by all that study and
+pursuit of the arts which has been described.
+
+I agree in what you are saying, he replied, which may be hard to
+believe, yet, from another point of view, is harder still to deny.
+This, however, is not a theme to be treated of in passing only, but
+will have to be discussed again and again.  And so, whether our
+conclusion be true or false, let us assume all this, and proceed at
+once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and describe
+that in like manner.  Say, then, what is the nature and what are the
+divisions of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither; for
+these paths will also lead to our final rest?
+
+Dear Glaucon, I said, you will not be able to follow me here, though I
+would do my best, and you should behold not an image only but the
+absolute truth, according to my notion.  Whether what I told you would
+or would not have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would
+have seen something like reality; of that I am confident.
+
+Doubtless, he replied.
+
+But I must also remind you, that the power of dialectic alone can
+reveal this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences.
+
+Of that assertion you may be as confident as of the last.
+
+And assuredly no one will argue that there is any other method of
+comprehending by any regular process all true existence or of
+ascertaining what each thing is in its own nature; for the arts in
+general are concerned with the desires or opinions of men, or are
+cultivated with a view to production and construction, or for the
+preservation of such productions and constructions; and as to the
+mathematical sciences which, as we were saying, have some apprehension
+of true being--geometry and the like--they only dream about being, but
+never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the
+hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account
+of them.  For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when
+the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he
+knows not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric of convention can
+ever become science?
+
+Impossible, he said.
+
+Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first
+principle and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in
+order to make her ground secure; the eye of the soul, which is
+literally buried in an outlandish slough, is by her gentle aid lifted
+upwards; and she uses as handmaids and helpers in the work of
+conversion, the sciences which we have been discussing.  Custom terms
+them sciences, but they ought to have some other name, implying greater
+clearness than opinion and less clearness than science: and this, in
+our previous sketch, was called understanding.  But why should we
+dispute about names when we have realities of such importance to
+consider?
+
+Why indeed, he said, when any name will do which expresses the thought
+of the mind with clearness?
+
+At any rate, we are satisfied, as before, to have four divisions; two
+for intellect and two for opinion, and to call the first division
+science, the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth
+perception of shadows, opinion being concerned with becoming, and
+intellect with being; and so to make a proportion:--
+
+    As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion.
+    And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and
+    understanding to the perception of shadows.
+
+But let us defer the further correlation and subdivision of the
+subjects of opinion and of intellect, for it will be a long enquiry,
+many times longer than this has been.
+
+As far as I understand, he said, I agree.
+
+And do you also agree, I said, in describing the dialectician as one
+who attains a conception of the essence of each thing?  And he who does
+not possess and is therefore unable to impart this conception, in
+whatever degree he fails, may in that degree also be said to fail in
+intelligence?  Will you admit so much?
+
+Yes, he said; how can I deny it?
+
+And you would say the same of the conception of the good?
+
+Until the person is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of
+good, and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is
+ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute
+truth, never faltering at any step of the argument--unless he can do
+all this, you would say that he knows neither the idea of good nor any
+other good; he apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is
+given by opinion and not by science;--dreaming and slumbering in this
+life, before he is well awake here, he arrives at the world below, and
+has his final quietus.
+
+In all that I should most certainly agree with you.
+
+And surely you would not have the children of your ideal State, whom
+you are nurturing and educating--if the ideal ever becomes a
+reality--you would not allow the future rulers to be like posts, having
+no reason in them, and yet to be set in authority over the highest
+matters?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will
+enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering
+questions?
+
+Yes, he said, you and I together will make it.
+
+Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the
+sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed
+higher--the nature of knowledge can no further go?
+
+I agree, he said.
+
+But to whom we are to assign these studies, and in what way they are to
+be assigned, are questions which remain to be considered?
+
+Yes, clearly.
+
+You remember, I said, how the rulers were chosen before?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+The same natures must still be chosen, and the preference again given
+to the surest and the bravest, and, if possible, to the fairest; and,
+having noble and generous tempers, they should also have the natural
+gifts which will facilitate their education.
+
+And what are these?
+
+Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition; for the mind
+more often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of
+gymnastics:  the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not
+shared with the body.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be
+an unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line; or he will
+never be able to endure the great amount of bodily exercise and to go
+through all the intellectual discipline and study which we require of
+him.
+
+Certainly, he said; he must have natural gifts.
+
+The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no
+vocation, and this, as I was before saying, is the reason why she has
+fallen into disrepute:  her true sons should take her by the hand and
+not bastards.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+In the first place, her votary should not have a lame or halting
+industry--I mean, that he should not be half industrious and half idle:
+as, for example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting, and
+all other bodily exercises, but a hater rather than a lover of the
+labour of learning or listening or enquiring.  Or the occupation to
+which he devotes himself may be of an opposite kind, and he may have
+the other sort of lameness.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And as to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and
+lame which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at
+herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary
+falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire
+of ignorance, and has no shame at being detected?
+
+To be sure.
+
+And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every
+other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son
+and the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities
+States and individuals unconsciously err and the State makes a ruler,
+and the individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part
+of virtue, is in a figure lame or a bastard.
+
+That is very true, he said.
+
+All these things, then, will have to be carefully considered by us; and
+if only those whom we introduce to this vast system of education and
+training are sound in body and mind, justice herself will have nothing
+to say against us, and we shall be the saviours of the constitution and
+of the State; but, if our pupils are men of another stamp, the reverse
+will happen, and we shall pour a still greater flood of ridicule on
+philosophy than she has to endure at present.
+
+That would not be creditable.
+
+Certainly not, I said; and yet perhaps, in thus turning jest into
+earnest I am equally ridiculous.
+
+In what respect?
+
+I had forgotten, I said, that we were not serious, and spoke with too
+much excitement.  For when I saw philosophy so undeservedly trampled
+under foot of men I could not help feeling a sort of indignation at the
+authors of her disgrace:  and my anger made me too vehement.
+
+Indeed!  I was listening, and did not think so.
+
+But I, who am the speaker, felt that I was.  And now let me remind you
+that, although in our former selection we chose old men, we must not do
+so in this.  Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he
+grows old may learn many things--for he can no more learn much than he
+can run much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.
+
+Of course.
+
+And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of
+instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented
+to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our
+system of education.
+
+Why not?
+
+Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of
+knowledge of any kind.  Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm
+to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains
+no hold on the mind.
+
+Very true.
+
+Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early
+education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find
+out the natural bent.
+
+That is a very rational notion, he said.
+
+Do you remember that the children, too, were to be taken to see the
+battle on horseback; and that if there were no danger they were to be
+brought close up and, like young hounds, have a taste of blood given
+them?
+
+Yes, I remember.
+
+The same practice may be followed, I said, in all these
+things--labours, lessons, dangers--and he who is most at home in all of
+them ought to be enrolled in a select number.
+
+At what age?
+
+At the age when the necessary gymnastics are over:  the period whether
+of two or three years which passes in this sort of training is useless
+for any other purpose; for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to
+learning; and the trial of who is first in gymnastic exercises is one
+of the most important tests to which our youth are subjected.
+
+Certainly, he replied.
+
+After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years
+old will be promoted to higher honour, and the sciences which they
+learned without any order in their early education will now be brought
+together, and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them
+to one another and to true being.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting
+root.
+
+Yes, I said; and the capacity for such knowledge is the great criterion
+of dialectical talent:  the comprehensive mind is always the
+dialectical.
+
+I agree with you, he said.
+
+These, I said, are the points which you must consider; and those who
+have most of this comprehension, and who are more steadfast in their
+learning, and in their military and other appointed duties, when they
+have arrived at the age of thirty have to be chosen by you out of the
+select class, and elevated to higher honour; and you will have to prove
+them by the help of dialectic, in order to learn which of them is able
+to give up the use of sight and the other senses, and in company with
+truth to attain absolute being: And here, my friend, great caution is
+required.
+
+Why great caution?
+
+Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has
+introduced?
+
+What evil? he said.
+
+The students of the art are filled with lawlessness.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Do you think that there is anything so very unnatural or inexcusable in
+their case? or will you make allowance for them?
+
+In what way make allowance?
+
+I want you, I said, by way of parallel, to imagine a supposititious son
+who is brought up in great wealth; he is one of a great and numerous
+family, and has many flatterers.  When he grows up to manhood, he
+learns that his alleged are not his real parents; but who the real are
+he is unable to discover.  Can you guess how he will be likely to
+behave towards his flatterers and his supposed parents, first of all
+during the period when he is ignorant of the false relation, and then
+again when he knows?  Or shall I guess for you?
+
+If you please.
+
+Then I should say, that while he is ignorant of the truth he will be
+likely to honour his father and his mother and his supposed relations
+more than the flatterers; he will be less inclined to neglect them when
+in need, or to do or say anything against them; and he will be less
+willing to disobey them in any important matter.
+
+He will.
+
+But when he has made the discovery, I should imagine that he would
+diminish his honour and regard for them, and would become more devoted
+to the flatterers; their influence over him would greatly increase; he
+would now live after their ways, and openly associate with them, and,
+unless he were of an unusually good disposition, he would trouble
+himself no more about his supposed parents or other relations.
+
+Well, all that is very probable.  But how is the image applicable to
+the disciples of philosophy?
+
+In this way:  you know that there are certain principles about justice
+and honour, which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental
+authority we have been brought up, obeying and honouring them.
+
+That is true.
+
+There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and
+attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense
+of right, and they continue to obey and honour the maxims of their
+fathers.
+
+True.
+
+Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what
+is fair or honourable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him,
+and then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is
+driven into believing that nothing is honourable any more than
+dishonourable, or just and good any more than the reverse, and so of
+all the notions which he most valued, do you think that he will still
+honour and obey them as before?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And when he ceases to think them honourable and natural as heretofore,
+and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any
+life other than that which flatters his desires?
+
+He cannot.
+
+And from being a keeper of the law he is converted into a breaker of it?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Now all this is very natural in students of philosophy such as I have
+described, and also, as I was just now saying, most excusable.
+
+Yes, he said; and, I may add, pitiable.
+
+Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our
+citizens who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in
+introducing them to dialectic.
+
+Certainly.
+
+There is a danger lest they should taste the dear delight too early;
+for youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste
+in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and
+refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs,
+they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.
+
+Yes, he said, there is nothing which they like better.
+
+And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the
+hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not
+believing anything which they believed before, and hence, not only
+they, but philosophy and all that relates to it is apt to have a bad
+name with the rest of the world.
+
+Too true, he said.
+
+But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such
+insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth,
+and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement;
+and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of
+diminishing the honour of the pursuit.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And did we not make special provision for this, when we said that the
+disciples of philosophy were to be orderly and steadfast, not, as now,
+any chance aspirant or intruder?
+
+Very true.
+
+Suppose, I said, the study of philosophy to take the place of
+gymnastics and to be continued diligently and earnestly and exclusively
+for twice the number of years which were passed in bodily
+exercise--will that be enough?
+
+Would you say six or four years? he asked.
+
+Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent
+down again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other
+office which young men are qualified to hold: in this way they will get
+their experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying
+whether, when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they
+will stand firm or flinch.
+
+And how long is this stage of their lives to last?
+
+Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of
+age, then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves
+in every action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at
+last to their consummation; the time has now arrived at which they must
+raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all
+things, and behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according
+to which they are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and
+the remainder of their own lives also; making philosophy their chief
+pursuit, but, when their turn comes, toiling also at politics and
+ruling for the public good, not as though they were performing some
+heroic action, but simply as a matter of duty; and when they have
+brought up in each generation others like themselves and left them in
+their place to be governors of the State, then they will depart to the
+Islands of the Blest and dwell there; and the city will give them
+public memorials and sacrifices and honour them, if the Pythian oracle
+consent, as demi-gods, but if not, as in any case blessed and divine.
+
+You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors
+faultless in beauty.
+
+Yes, I said, Glaucon, and of our governesses too; for you must not
+suppose that what I have been saying applies to men only and not to
+women as far as their natures can go.
+
+There you are right, he said, since we have made them to share in all
+things like the men.
+
+Well, I said, and you would agree (would you not?) that what has been
+said about the State and the government is not a mere dream, and
+although difficult not impossible, but only possible in the way which
+has been supposed; that is to say, when the true philosopher kings are
+born in a State, one or more of them, despising the honours of this
+present world which they deem mean and worthless, esteeming above all
+things right and the honour that springs from right, and regarding
+justice as the greatest and most necessary of all things, whose
+ministers they are, and whose principles will be exalted by them when
+they set in order their own city?
+
+How will they proceed?
+
+They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of
+the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of
+their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents;
+these they will train in their own habits and laws, I mean in the laws
+which we have given them:  and in this way the State and constitution
+of which we were speaking will soonest and most easily attain
+happiness, and the nation which has such a constitution will gain most.
+
+Yes, that will be the best way.  And I think, Socrates, that you have
+very well described how, if ever, such a constitution might come into
+being.
+
+Enough then of the perfect State, and of the man who bears its
+image--there is no difficulty in seeing how we shall describe him.
+
+There is no difficulty, he replied; and I agree with you in thinking
+that nothing more need be said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VIII
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+AND so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect
+State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education
+and the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best
+philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?
+
+That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.
+
+Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when
+appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses
+such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain
+nothing private, or individual; and about their property, you remember
+what we agreed?
+
+Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions
+of mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving
+from the other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their
+maintenance, and they were to take care of themselves and of the whole
+State.
+
+True, I said; and now that this division of our task is concluded, let
+us find the point at which we digressed, that we may return into the
+old path.
+
+There is no difficulty in returning; you implied, then as now, that you
+had finished the description of the State:  you said that such a State
+was good, and that the man was good who answered to it, although, as
+now appears, you had more excellent things to relate both of State and
+man.  And you said further, that if this was the true form, then the
+others were false; and of the false forms, you said, as I remember,
+that there were four principal ones, and that their defects, and the
+defects of the individuals corresponding to them, were worth examining.
+When we had seen all the individuals, and finally agreed as to who was
+the best and who was the worst of them, we were to consider whether the
+best was not also the happiest, and the worst the most miserable.  I
+asked you what were the four forms of government of which you spoke,
+and then Polemarchus and Adeimantus put in their word; and you began
+again, and have found your way to the point at which we have now
+arrived.
+
+Your recollection, I said, is most exact.
+
+Then, like a wrestler, he replied, you must put yourself again in the
+same position; and let me ask the same questions, and do you give me
+the same answer which you were about to give me then.
+
+Yes, if I can, I will, I said.
+
+I shall particularly wish to hear what were the four constitutions of
+which you were speaking.
+
+That question, I said, is easily answered:  the four governments of
+which I spoke, so far as they have distinct names, are, first, those of
+Crete and Sparta, which are generally applauded; what is termed
+oligarchy comes next; this is not equally approved, and is a form of
+government which teems with evils:  thirdly, democracy, which naturally
+follows oligarchy, although very different: and lastly comes tyranny,
+great and famous, which differs from them all, and is the fourth and
+worst disorder of a State.  I do not know, do you? of any other
+constitution which can be said to have a distinct character.  There are
+lordships and principalities which are bought and sold, and some other
+intermediate forms of government.  But these are nondescripts and may
+be found equally among Hellenes and among barbarians.
+
+Yes, he replied, we certainly hear of many curious forms of government
+which exist among them.
+
+Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men
+vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the
+other?  For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock,'
+and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a
+figure turn the scale and draw other things after them?
+
+Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human
+characters.
+
+Then if the constitutions of States are five, the dispositions of
+individual minds will also be five?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Him who answers to aristocracy, and whom we rightly call just and good,
+we have already described.
+
+We have.
+
+Then let us now proceed to describe the inferior sort of natures, being
+the contentious and ambitious, who answer to the Spartan polity; also
+the oligarchical, democratical, and tyrannical.  Let us place the most
+just by the side of the most unjust, and when we see them we shall be
+able to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of him who leads
+a life of pure justice or pure injustice.  The enquiry will then be
+completed.  And we shall know whether we ought to pursue injustice, as
+Thrasymachus advises, or in accordance with the conclusions of the
+argument to prefer justice.
+
+Certainly, he replied, we must do as you say.
+
+Shall we follow our old plan, which we adopted with a view to
+clearness, of taking the State first and then proceeding to the
+individual, and begin with the government of honour?--I know of no name
+for such a government other than timocracy, or perhaps timarchy.  We
+will compare with this the like character in the individual; and, after
+that, consider oligarchical man; and then again we will turn our
+attention to democracy and the democratical man; and lastly, we will go
+and view the city of tyranny, and once more take a look into the
+tyrant's soul, and try to arrive at a satisfactory decision.
+
+That way of viewing and judging of the matter will be very suitable.
+
+First, then, I said, let us enquire how timocracy (the government of
+honour) arises out of aristocracy (the government of the best).
+Clearly, all political changes originate in divisions of the actual
+governing power; a government which is united, however small, cannot be
+moved.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+In what way, then, will our city be moved, and in what manner the two
+classes of auxiliaries and rulers disagree among themselves or with one
+another?  Shall we, after the manner of Homer, pray the Muses to tell
+us 'how discord first arose'? Shall we imagine them in solemn mockery,
+to play and jest with us as if we were children, and to address us in a
+lofty tragic vein, making believe to be in earnest?
+
+How would they address us?
+
+After this manner:--A city which is thus constituted can hardly be
+shaken; but, seeing that everything which has a beginning has also an
+end, even a constitution such as yours will not last for ever, but will
+in time be dissolved.  And this is the dissolution:--In plants that
+grow in the earth, as well as in animals that move on the earth's
+surface, fertility and sterility of soul and body occur when the
+circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in
+short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones
+over a long space.  But to the knowledge of human fecundity and
+sterility all the wisdom and education of your rulers will not attain;
+the laws which regulate them will not be discovered by an intelligence
+which is alloyed with sense, but will escape them, and they will bring
+children into the world when they ought not.  Now that which is of
+divine birth has a period which is contained in a perfect number, but
+the period of human birth is comprehended in a number in which first
+increments by involution and evolution (or squared and cubed) obtaining
+three intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning
+numbers, make all the terms commensurable and agreeable to one another.
+The base of these (3) with a third added (4) when combined with five
+(20) and raised to the third power furnishes two harmonies; the first a
+square which is a hundred times as great (400 = 4 X 100), and the other
+a figure having one side equal to the former, but oblong, consisting of
+a hundred numbers squared upon rational diameters of a square (i. e.
+omitting fractions), the side of which is five (7 X 7 = 49 X 100 =
+4900), each of them being less by one (than the perfect square which
+includes the fractions, sc. 50) or less by two perfect squares of
+irrational diameters (of a square the side of which is five = 50 + 50 =
+100); and a hundred cubes of three (27 X 100 = 2700 + 4900 + 400 =
+8000). Now this number represents a geometrical figure which has
+control over the good and evil of births.  For when your guardians are
+ignorant of the law of births, and unite bride and bridegroom out of
+season, the children will not be goodly or fortunate.  And though only
+the best of them will be appointed by their predecessors, still they
+will be unworthy to hold their fathers' places, and when they come into
+power as guardians, they will soon be found to fall in taking care of
+us, the Muses, first by under-valuing music; which neglect will soon
+extend to gymnastic; and hence the young men of your State will be less
+cultivated.  In the succeeding generation rulers will be appointed who
+have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of your different
+races, which, like Hesiod's, are of gold and silver and brass and iron.
+And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with gold, and hence
+there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and irregularity, which
+always and in all places are causes of hatred and war.  This the Muses
+affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung, wherever arising;
+and this is their answer to us.
+
+Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly.
+
+Why, yes, I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak
+falsely?
+
+And what do the Muses say next?
+
+When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the
+iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and
+silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the
+true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the
+ancient order of things.  There was a battle between them, and at last
+they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual
+owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had
+formerly protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them
+subjects and servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in
+keeping a watch against them.
+
+I believe that you have rightly conceived the origin of the change.
+
+And the new government which thus arises will be of a form intermediate
+between oligarchy and aristocracy?
+
+Very true.
+
+Such will be the change, and after the change has been made, how will
+they proceed?  Clearly, the new State, being in a mean between
+oligarchy and the perfect State, will partly follow one and partly the
+other, and will also have some peculiarities.
+
+True, he said.
+
+In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class
+from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution
+of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military
+training--in all these respects this State will resemble the former.
+
+True.
+
+But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no
+longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements;
+and in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who
+are by nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set by
+them upon military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of
+everlasting wars--this State will be for the most part peculiar.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like
+those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing
+after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having
+magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment
+of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which
+they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they
+please.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And they are miserly because they have no means of openly acquiring the
+money which they prize; they will spend that which is another man's on
+the gratification of their desires, stealing their pleasures and
+running away like children from the law, their father: they have been
+schooled not by gentle influences but by force, for they have neglected
+her who is the true Muse, the companion of reason and philosophy, and
+have honoured gymnastic more than music.
+
+Undoubtedly, he said, the form of government which you describe is a
+mixture of good and evil.
+
+Why, there is a mixture, I said; but one thing, and one thing only, is
+predominantly seen,--the spirit of contention and ambition; and these
+are due to the prevalence of the passionate or spirited element.
+
+Assuredly, he said.
+
+Such is the origin and such the character of this State, which has been
+described in outline only; the more perfect execution was not required,
+for a sketch is enough to show the type of the most perfectly just and
+most perfectly unjust; and to go through all the States and all the
+characters of men, omitting none of them, would be an interminable
+labour.
+
+Very true, he replied.
+
+Now what man answers to this form of government-how did he come into
+being, and what is he like?
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+I think, said Adeimantus, that in the spirit of contention which
+characterises him, he is not unlike our friend Glaucon.
+
+Perhaps, I said, he may be like him in that one point; but there are
+other respects in which he is very different.
+
+In what respects?
+
+He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a
+friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker.
+Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man,
+who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen,
+and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a
+lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or
+on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has
+performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and
+of the chase.
+
+Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.
+
+Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets
+older he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a
+piece of the avaricious nature in him, and is not singleminded towards
+virtue, having lost his best guardian.
+
+Who was that? said Adeimantus.
+
+Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes her abode
+in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.
+
+Good, he said.
+
+Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the
+timocratical State.
+
+Exactly.
+
+His origin is as follows:--He is often the young son of a grave father,
+who dwells in an ill-governed city, of which he declines the honours
+and offices, and will not go to law, or exert himself in any way, but
+is ready to waive his rights in order that he may escape trouble.
+
+And how does the son come into being?
+
+The character of the son begins to develop when he hears his mother
+complaining that her husband has no place in the government, of which
+the consequence is that she has no precedence among other women.
+Further, when she sees her husband not very eager about money, and
+instead of battling and railing in the law courts or assembly, taking
+whatever happens to him quietly; and when she observes that his
+thoughts always centre in himself, while he treats her with very
+considerable indifference, she is annoyed, and says to her son that his
+father is only half a man and far too easy-going: adding all the other
+complaints about her own ill-treatment which women are so fond of
+rehearsing.
+
+Yes, said Adeimantus, they give us plenty of them, and their complaints
+are so like themselves.
+
+And you know, I said, that the old servants also, who are supposed to
+be attached to the family, from time to time talk privately in the same
+strain to the son; and if they see any one who owes money to his
+father, or is wronging him in any way, and he falls to prosecute them,
+they tell the youth that when he grows up he must retaliate upon people
+of this sort, and be more of a man than his father.  He has only to
+walk abroad and he hears and sees the same sort of thing: those who do
+their own business in the city are called simpletons, and held in no
+esteem, while the busy-bodies are honoured and applauded.  The result
+is that the young man, hearing and seeing all these thing--hearing too,
+the words of his father, and having a nearer view of his way of life,
+and making comparisons of him and others--is drawn opposite ways: while
+his father is watering and nourishing the rational principle in his
+soul, the others are encouraging the passionate and appetitive; and he
+being not originally of a bad nature, but having kept bad company, is
+at last brought by their joint influence to a middle point, and gives
+up the kingdom which is within him to the middle principle of
+contentiousness and passion, and becomes arrogant and ambitious.
+
+You seem to me to have described his origin perfectly.
+
+Then we have now, I said, the second form of government and the second
+type of character?
+
+We have.
+
+Next, let us look at another man who, as Aeschylus says,
+
+    Is set over against another State;
+
+or rather, as our plan requires, begin with the State.
+
+By all means.
+
+I believe that oligarchy follows next in order.
+
+And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?
+
+A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have
+power and the poor man is deprived of it.
+
+I understand, he replied.
+
+Ought I not to begin by describing how the change from timocracy to
+oligarchy arises?
+
+Yes.
+
+Well, I said, no eyes are required in order to see how the one passes
+into the other.
+
+How?
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is ruin
+the of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do
+they or their wives care about the law?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus
+the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
+
+Likely enough.
+
+And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a
+fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as
+the other falls.
+
+True.
+
+And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State,
+virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is
+neglected.
+
+That is obvious.
+
+And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
+lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and
+make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.
+
+They do so.
+
+They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the
+qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower
+in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow
+no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in
+the government.  These changes in the constitution they effect by force
+of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.
+
+Very true.
+
+And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is
+established.
+
+Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of
+government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
+
+First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification just
+think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their
+property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though
+he were a better pilot?
+
+You mean that they would shipwreck?
+
+Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?
+
+I should imagine so.
+
+Except a city?--or would you include a city?
+
+Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as
+the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.
+
+This, then, will be the first great defect of oligarchy?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And here is another defect which is quite as bad.
+
+What defect?
+
+The inevitable division:  such a State is not one, but two States, the
+one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same
+spot and always conspiring against one another.
+
+That, surely, is at least as bad.
+
+Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are
+incapable of carrying on any war.  Either they arm the multitude, and
+then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not
+call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to
+fight as they are few to rule.  And at the same time their fondness for
+money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.
+
+How discreditable!
+
+And, as we said before, under such a constitution the same persons have
+too many callings--they are husbandmen, tradesmen, warriors, all in
+one.  Does that look well?
+
+Anything but well.
+
+There is another evil which is, perhaps, the greatest of all, and to
+which this State first begins to be liable.
+
+What evil?
+
+A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property;
+yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a
+part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite, but
+only a poor, helpless creature.
+
+Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.
+
+The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both
+the extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.
+
+True.
+
+But think again:  In his wealthy days, while he was spending his money,
+was a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes
+of citizenship?  Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling body,
+although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a
+spendthrift?
+
+As you say, he seemed to be a ruler, but was only a spendthrift.
+
+May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the
+drone in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as
+the other is of the hive?
+
+Just so, Socrates.
+
+And God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings,
+whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but
+others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in
+their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal
+class, as they are termed.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Clearly then, whenever you see paupers in a State, somewhere in that
+neighborhood there are hidden away thieves, and cutpurses and robbers
+of temples, and all sorts of malefactors.
+
+Clearly.
+
+Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?
+
+Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.
+
+And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals
+to be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities
+are careful to restrain by force?
+
+Certainly, we may be so bold.
+
+The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education,
+ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?
+
+True.
+
+Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there
+may be many other evils.
+
+Very likely.
+
+Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are
+elected for their wealth, may now be dismissed.  Let us next proceed to
+consider the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this
+State.
+
+By all means.
+
+Does not the timocratical man change into the oligarchical on this wise?
+
+How?
+
+A time arrives when the representative of timocracy has a son: at first
+he begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but
+presently he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon
+a sunken reef, and he and all that he has is lost; he may have been a
+general or some other high officer who is brought to trial under a
+prejudice raised by informers, and either put to death, or exiled, or
+deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and all his property taken
+from him.
+
+Nothing more likely.
+
+And the son has seen and known all this--he is a ruined man, and his
+fear has taught him to knock ambition and passion head-foremost from
+his bosom's throne; humbled by poverty he takes to money-making and by
+mean and miserly savings and hard work gets a fortune together.  Is not
+such an one likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous element on the
+vacant throne and to suffer it to play the great king within him, girt
+with tiara and chain and scimitar?
+
+Most true, he replied.
+
+And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground
+obediently on either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know
+their place, he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be
+turned into larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and
+admire anything but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything
+so much as the acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.
+
+Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the
+conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one.
+
+And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth?
+
+Yes, he said; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like
+the State out of which oligarchy came.
+
+Let us then consider whether there is any likeness between them.
+
+Very good.
+
+First, then, they resemble one another in the value which they set upon
+wealth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only
+satisfies his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to
+them; his other desires he subdues, under the idea that they are
+unprofitable.
+
+True.
+
+He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes
+a purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar
+applaud.  Is he not a true image of the State which he represents?
+
+He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as
+well as by the State.
+
+You see that he is not a man of cultivation, I said.
+
+I imagine not, he said; had he been educated he would never have made a
+blind god director of his chorus, or given him chief honour.
+
+Excellent!  I said.  Yet consider:  Must we not further admit that
+owing to this want of cultivation there will be found in him dronelike
+desires as of pauper and rogue, which are forcibly kept down by his
+general habit of life?
+
+True.
+
+Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his
+rogueries?
+
+Where must I look?
+
+You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting
+dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan.
+
+Aye.
+
+It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give
+him a reputation for honesty he coerces his bad passions by an enforced
+virtue; not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by
+reason, but by necessity and fear constraining them, and because he
+trembles for his possessions.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Yes, indeed, my dear friend, but you will find that the natural desires
+of the drone commonly exist in him all the same whenever he has to
+spend what is not his own.
+
+Yes, and they will be strong in him too.
+
+The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not
+one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over
+his inferior ones.
+
+True.
+
+For these reasons such an one will be more respectable than most
+people; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will
+flee far away and never come near him.
+
+I should expect so.
+
+And surely, the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a
+State for any prize of victory, or other object of honourable ambition;
+he will not spend his money in the contest for glory; so afraid is he
+of awakening his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join
+in the struggle; in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small
+part only of his resources, and the result commonly is that he loses
+the prize and saves his money.
+
+Very true.
+
+Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and money-maker answers
+to the oligarchical State?
+
+There can be no doubt.
+
+Next comes democracy; of this the origin and nature have still to be
+considered by us; and then we will enquire into the ways of the
+democratic man, and bring him up for judgement.
+
+That, he said, is our method.
+
+Well, I said, and how does the change from oligarchy into democracy
+arise?  Is it not on this wise?--The good at which such a State alms is
+to become as rich as possible, a desire which is insatiable?
+
+What then?
+
+The rulers, being aware that their power rests upon their wealth,
+refuse to curtail by law the extravagance of the spendthrift youth
+because they gain by their ruin; they take interest from them and buy
+up their estates and thus increase their own wealth and importance?
+
+To be sure.
+
+There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of
+moderation cannot exist together in citizens of the same State to any
+considerable extent; one or the other will be disregarded.
+
+That is tolerably clear.
+
+And in oligarchical States, from the general spread of carelessness and
+extravagance, men of good family have often been reduced to beggary?
+
+Yes, often.
+
+And still they remain in the city; there they are, ready to sting and
+fully armed, and some of them owe money, some have forfeited their
+citizenship; a third class are in both predicaments; and they hate and
+conspire against those who have got their property, and against
+everybody else, and are eager for revolution.
+
+That is true.
+
+On the other hand, the men of business, stooping as they walk, and
+pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert
+their sting--that is, their money--into some one else who is not on his
+guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times over
+multiplied into a family of children:  and so they make drone and
+pauper to abound in the State.
+
+Yes, he said, there are plenty of them--that is certain.
+
+The evil blazes up like a fire; and they will not extinguish it, either
+by restricting a man's use of his own property, or by another remedy:
+
+What other?
+
+One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the
+citizens to look to their characters:--Let there be a general rule that
+every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and
+there will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of
+which we were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State.
+
+Yes, they will be greatly lessened.
+
+At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named,
+treat their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially
+the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of
+luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are
+incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain.
+
+Very true.
+
+They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as
+the pauper to the cultivation of virtue.
+
+Yes, quite as indifferent.
+
+Such is the state of affairs which prevails among them.  And often
+rulers and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a
+pilgrimage or a march, as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye, and
+they may observe the behaviour of each other in the very moment of
+danger--for where danger is, there is no fear that the poor will be
+despised by the rich--and very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be
+placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his
+complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh--when he sees such an
+one puffing and at his wit's end, how can he avoid drawing the
+conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has the
+courage to despoil them?  And when they meet in private will not people
+be saying to one another 'Our warriors are not good for much'?
+
+Yes, he said, I am quite aware that this is their way of talking.
+
+And, as in a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from
+without may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no
+external provocation a commotion may arise within-in the same way
+wherever there is weakness in the State there is also likely to be
+illness, of which the occasions may be very slight, the one party
+introducing from without their oligarchical, the other their
+democratical allies, and then the State falls sick, and is at war with
+herself; and may be at times distracted, even when there is no external
+cause.
+
+Yes, surely.
+
+And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their
+opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder
+they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of
+government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution
+has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite
+party to withdraw.
+
+And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government
+have they? for as the government is, such will be the man.
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of
+freedom and frankness--a man may say and do what he likes?
+
+'Tis said so, he replied.
+
+And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for
+himself his own life as he pleases?
+
+Clearly.
+
+Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human
+natures?
+
+There will.
+
+This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being an
+embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower.  And just
+as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things
+most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is
+spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be
+the fairest of States.
+
+Yes.
+
+Yes, my good Sir, and there will be no better in which to look for a
+government.
+
+Why?
+
+Because of the liberty which reigns there--they have a complete
+assortment of constitutions; and he who has a mind to establish a
+State, as we have been doing, must go to a democracy as he would to a
+bazaar at which they sell them, and pick out the one that suits him;
+then, when he has made his choice, he may found his State.
+
+He will be sure to have patterns enough.
+
+And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State,
+even if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or
+go to war when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are at
+peace, unless you are so disposed--there being no necessity also,
+because some law forbids you to hold office or be a dicast, that you
+should not hold office or be a dicast, if you have a fancy--is not this
+a way of life which for the moment is supremely delightful
+
+For the moment, yes.
+
+And is not their humanity to the condemned in some cases quite
+charming?  Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons,
+although they have been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where
+they are and walk about the world--the gentleman parades like a hero,
+and nobody sees or cares?
+
+Yes, he replied, many and many a one.
+
+See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't
+care' about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine
+principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the
+city--as when we said that, except in the case of some rarely gifted
+nature, there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood
+been used to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a
+study--how grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours
+under her feet, never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a
+statesman, and promoting to honour any one who professes to be the
+people's friend.
+
+Yes, she is of a noble spirit.
+
+These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which
+is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and
+dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
+
+We know her well.
+
+Consider now, I said, what manner of man the individual is, or rather
+consider, as in the case of the State, how he comes into being.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Is not this the way--he is the son of the miserly and oligarchical
+father who has trained him in his own habits?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And, like his father, he keeps under by force the pleasures which are
+of the spending and not of the getting sort, being those which are
+called unnecessary?
+
+Obviously.
+
+Would you like, for the sake of clearness, to distinguish which are the
+necessary and which are the unnecessary pleasures?
+
+I should.
+
+Are not necessary pleasures those of which we cannot get rid, and of
+which the satisfaction is a benefit to us?  And they are rightly so,
+because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial and
+what is necessary, and cannot help it.
+
+True.
+
+We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?
+
+We are not.
+
+And the desires of which a man may get rid, if he takes pains from his
+youth upwards--of which the presence, moreover, does no good, and in
+some cases the reverse of good--shall we not be right in saying that
+all these are unnecessary?
+
+Yes, certainly.
+
+Suppose we select an example of either kind, in order that we may have
+a general notion of them?
+
+Very good.
+
+Will not the desire of eating, that is, of simple food and condiments,
+in so far as they are required for health and strength, be of the
+necessary class?
+
+That is what I should suppose.
+
+The pleasure of eating is necessary in two ways; it does us good and it
+is essential to the continuance of life?
+
+Yes.
+
+But the condiments are only necessary in so far as they are good for
+health?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And the desire which goes beyond this, or more delicate food, or other
+luxuries, which might generally be got rid of, if controlled and
+trained in youth, and is hurtful to the body, and hurtful to the soul
+in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, may be rightly called unnecessary?
+
+Very true.
+
+May we not say that these desires spend, and that the others make money
+because they conduce to production?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And of the pleasures of love, and all other pleasures, the same holds
+good?
+
+True.
+
+And the drone of whom we spoke was he who was surfeited in pleasures
+and desires of this sort, and was the slave of the unnecessary desires,
+whereas he who was subject o the necessary only was miserly and
+oligarchical?
+
+Very true.
+
+Again, let us see how the democratical man grows out of the
+oligarchical: the following, as I suspect, is commonly the process.
+
+What is the process?
+
+When a young man who has been brought up as we were just now
+describing, in a vulgar and miserly way, has tasted drones' honey and
+has come to associate with fierce and crafty natures who are able to
+provide for him all sorts of refinements and varieties of
+pleasure--then, as you may imagine, the change will begin of the
+oligarchical principle within him into the democratical?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And as in the city like was helping like, and the change was effected
+by an alliance from without assisting one division of the citizens, so
+too the young man is changed by a class of desires coming from without
+to assist the desires within him, that which is and alike again helping
+that which is akin and alike?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if there be any ally which aids the oligarchical principle within
+him, whether the influence of a father or of kindred, advising or
+rebuking him, then there arises in his soul a faction and an opposite
+faction, and he goes to war with himself.
+
+It must be so.
+
+And there are times when the democratical principle gives way to the
+oligarchical, and some of his desires die, and others are banished; a
+spirit of reverence enters into the young man's soul and order is
+restored.
+
+Yes, he said, that sometimes happens.
+
+And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones
+spring up, which are akin to them, and because he, their father, does
+not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.
+
+Yes, he said, that is apt to be the way.
+
+They draw him to his old associates, and holding secret intercourse
+with them, breed and multiply in him.
+
+Very true.
+
+At length they seize upon the citadel of the young man's soul, which
+they perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and
+true words, which make their abode in the minds of men who are dear to
+the gods, and are their best guardians and sentinels.
+
+None better.
+
+False and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their
+place.
+
+They are certain to do so.
+
+And so the young man returns into the country of the lotus-eaters, and
+takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men; and if any help be
+sent by his friends to the oligarchical part of him, the aforesaid vain
+conceits shut the gate of the king's fastness; and they will neither
+allow the embassy itself to enter, private if private advisers offer
+the fatherly counsel of the aged will they listen to them or receive
+them.  There is a battle and they gain the day, and then modesty, which
+they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and
+temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire
+and cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly
+expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble
+of evil appetites, they drive them beyond the border.
+
+Yes, with a will.
+
+And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now
+in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries,
+the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy
+and waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads,
+and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them
+by sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and
+waste magnificence, and impudence courage.  And so the young man passes
+out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of
+necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary
+pleasures.
+
+Yes, he said, the change in him is visible enough.
+
+After this he lives on, spending his money and labour and time on
+unnecessary pleasures quite as much as on necessary ones; but if he be
+fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have
+elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over--supposing that he then
+re-admits into the city some part of the exiled virtues, and does not
+wholly give himself up to their successors--in that case he balances
+his pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the
+government of himself into the hands of the one which comes first and
+wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands
+of another; he despises none of them but encourages them all equally.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of
+advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the
+satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires,
+and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the
+others--whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says
+that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.
+
+Yes, he said; that is the way with him.
+
+Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the
+hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute;
+then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a
+turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then
+once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with
+politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into
+his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is
+in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that.  His life
+has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy
+and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
+
+Yes, he replied, he is all liberty and equality.
+
+Yes, I said; his life is motley and manifold and an epitome of the
+lives of many;--he answers to the State which we described as fair and
+spangled.  And many a man and many a woman will take him for their
+pattern, and many a constitution and many an example of manners is
+contained in him.
+
+Just so.
+
+Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the
+democratic man.
+
+Let that be his place, he said.
+
+Last of all comes the most beautiful of all, man and State alike,
+tyranny and the tyrant; these we have now to consider.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise?--that it has a
+democratic origin is evident.
+
+Clearly.
+
+And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as
+democracy from oligarchy--I mean, after a sort?
+
+How?
+
+The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it
+was maintained was excess of wealth--am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things
+for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?
+
+True.
+
+And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings
+her to dissolution?
+
+What good?
+
+Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the
+glory of the State--and that therefore in a democracy alone will the
+freeman of nature deign to dwell.
+
+Yes; the saying is in everybody's mouth.
+
+I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the
+neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which
+occasions a demand for tyranny.
+
+How so?
+
+When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers
+presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine
+of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a
+plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and
+says that they are cursed oligarchs.
+
+Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.
+
+Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves
+who hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are
+like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are men after her
+own heart, whom she praises and honours both in private and public.
+Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by
+getting among the animals and infecting them.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his
+sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he
+having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is
+his freedom, and metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with
+the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way.
+
+And these are not the only evils, I said--there are several lesser
+ones: In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his
+scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and
+old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is
+ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to
+the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be
+thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners
+of the young.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with
+money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser;
+nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes
+in relation to each other.
+
+Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?
+
+That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does
+not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the
+animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in
+any other State:  for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as
+good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of
+marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they
+will run at anybody who comes in their way if he does not leave the
+road clear for them:  and all things are just ready to burst with
+liberty.
+
+When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you
+describe.  You and I have dreamed the same thing.
+
+And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the
+citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority
+and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws,
+written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.
+
+Yes, he said, I know it too well.
+
+Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of
+which springs tyranny.
+
+Glorious indeed, he said.  But what is the next step?
+
+The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease
+magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the truth
+being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction
+in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons
+and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.
+
+True.
+
+The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to
+pass into excess of slavery.
+
+Yes, the natural order.
+
+And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most
+aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of
+liberty?
+
+As we might expect.
+
+That, however, was not, as I believe, your question-you rather desired
+to know what is that disorder which is generated alike in oligarchy and
+democracy, and is the ruin of both?
+
+Just so, he replied.
+
+Well, I said, I meant to refer to the class of idle spendthrifts, of
+whom the more courageous are the-leaders and the more timid the
+followers, the same whom we were comparing to drones, some stingless,
+and others having stings.
+
+A very just comparison.
+
+These two classes are the plagues of every city in which they are
+generated, being what phlegm and bile are to the body.  And the good
+physician and lawgiver of the State ought, like the wise bee-master, to
+keep them at a distance and prevent, if possible, their ever coming in;
+and if they have anyhow found a way in, then he should have them and
+their cells cut out as speedily as possible.
+
+Yes, by all means, he said.
+
+Then, in order that we may see clearly what we are doing, let us
+imagine democracy to be divided, as indeed it is, into three classes;
+for in the first place freedom creates rather more drones in the
+democratic than there were in the oligarchical State.
+
+That is true.
+
+And in the democracy they are certainly more intensified.
+
+How so?
+
+Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from
+office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in
+a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the
+keener sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do
+not suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies
+almost everything is managed by the drones.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass.
+
+What is that?
+
+They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the
+richest.
+
+Naturally so.
+
+They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of
+honey to the drones.
+
+Why, he said, there is little to be squeezed out of people who have
+little.
+
+And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.
+
+That is pretty much the case, he said.
+
+The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their
+own hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon.
+This, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a
+democracy.
+
+True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate
+unless they get a little honey.
+
+And do they not share?  I said.  Do not their leaders deprive the rich
+of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time
+taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves?
+
+Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.
+
+And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to
+defend themselves before the people as they best can?
+
+What else can they do?
+
+And then, although they may have no desire of change, the others charge
+them with plotting against the people and being friends of oligarchy?
+True.
+
+And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord,
+but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers,
+seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become
+oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the
+drones torments them and breeds revolution in them.
+
+That is exactly the truth.
+
+Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
+
+True.
+
+The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse
+into greatness.
+
+Yes, that is their way.
+
+This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he
+first appears above ground he is a protector.
+
+Yes, that is quite clear.
+
+How then does a protector begin to change into a tyrant?  Clearly when
+he does what the man is said to do in the tale of the Arcadian temple
+of Lycaean Zeus.
+
+What tale?
+
+The tale is that he who has tasted the entrails of a single human
+victim minced up with the entrails of other victims is destined to
+become a wolf.  Did you never hear it?
+
+Oh, yes.
+
+And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at
+his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen;
+by the favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court
+and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy
+tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizen; some he kills
+and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of
+debts and partition of lands:  and after this, what will be his
+destiny?  Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or
+from being a man become a wolf--that is, a tyrant?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+This, I said, is he who begins to make a party against the rich?
+
+The same.
+
+After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his
+enemies, a tyrant full grown.
+
+That is clear.
+
+And if they are unable to expel him, or to get him condemned to death
+by a public accusation, they conspire to assassinate him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is their usual way.
+
+Then comes the famous request for a bodyguard, which is the device of
+all those who have got thus far in their tyrannical career--'Let not
+the people's friend,' as they say, 'be lost to them.'
+
+Exactly.
+
+The people readily assent; all their fears are for him--they have none
+for themselves.
+
+Very true.
+
+And when a man who is wealthy and is also accused of being an enemy of
+the people sees this, then, my friend, as the oracle said to Croesus,
+
+    By pebbly Hermus' shore he flees and rests not and is not
+    ashamed to be a coward.
+
+And quite right too, said he, for if he were, he would never be ashamed
+again.
+
+But if he is caught he dies.
+
+Of course.
+
+And he, the protector of whom we spoke, is to be seen, not 'larding the
+plain' with his bulk, but himself the overthrower of many, standing up
+in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer
+protector, but tyrant absolute.
+
+No doubt, he said.
+
+And now let us consider the happiness of the man, and also of the State
+in which a creature like him is generated.
+
+Yes, he said, let us consider that.
+
+At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he
+salutes every one whom he meets;--he to be called a tyrant, who is
+making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and
+distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so
+kind and good to every one!
+
+Of course, he said.
+
+But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and
+there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some
+war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
+
+To be sure.
+
+Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished
+by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their
+daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?  Clearly.
+
+And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom,
+and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for
+destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all
+these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.
+
+He must.
+
+Now he begins to grow unpopular.
+
+A necessary result.
+
+Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power,
+speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of
+them cast in his teeth what is being done.
+
+Yes, that may be expected.
+
+And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot
+stop while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.
+
+He cannot.
+
+And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is
+high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of
+them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no,
+until he has made a purgation of the State.
+
+Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.
+
+Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the
+body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he
+does the reverse.
+
+If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.
+
+What a blessed alternative, I said:--to be compelled to dwell only with
+the many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!
+
+Yes, that is the alternative.
+
+And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more
+satellites and the greater devotion in them will he require?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?
+
+They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if lie pays them.
+
+By the dog!  I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every
+land.
+
+Yes, he said, there are.
+
+But will he not desire to get them on the spot?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free
+and enrol them in his bodyguard.
+
+To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.
+
+What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to
+death the others and has these for his trusted friends.
+
+Yes, he said; they are quite of his sort.
+
+Yes, I said, and these are the new citizens whom he has called into
+existence, who admire him and are his companions, while the good hate
+and avoid him.
+
+Of course.
+
+Verily, then, tragedy is a wise thing and Euripides a great tragedian.
+
+Why so?
+
+Why, because he is the author of the pregnant saying,
+
+    Tyrants are wise by living with the wise;
+
+and he clearly meant to say that they are the wise whom the tyrant
+makes his companions.
+
+Yes, he said, and he also praises tyranny as godlike; and many other
+things of the same kind are said by him and by the other poets.
+
+And therefore, I said, the tragic poets being wise men will forgive us
+and any others who live after our manner if we do not receive them into
+our State, because they are the eulogists of tyranny.
+
+Yes, he said, those who have the wit will doubtless forgive us.
+
+But they will continue to go to other cities and attract mobs, and hire
+voices fair and loud and persuasive, and draw the cities over to
+tyrannies and democracies.
+
+Very true.
+
+Moreover, they are paid for this and receive honour--the greatest
+honour, as might be expected, from tyrants, and the next greatest from
+democracies; but the higher they ascend our constitution hill, the more
+their reputation fails, and seems unable from shortness of breath to
+proceed further.
+
+True.
+
+But we are wandering from the subject:  Let us therefore return and
+enquire how the tyrant will maintain that fair and numerous and various
+and ever-changing army of his.
+
+If, he said, there are sacred treasures in the city, he will confiscate
+and spend them; and in so far as the fortunes of attainted persons may
+suffice, he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise
+have to impose upon the people.
+
+And when these fail?
+
+Why, clearly, he said, then he and his boon companions, whether male or
+female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.
+
+You mean to say that the people, from whom he has derived his being,
+will maintain him and his companions?
+
+Yes, he said; they cannot help themselves.
+
+But what if the people fly into a passion, and aver that a grown-up son
+ought not to be supported by his father, but that the father should be
+supported by the son?  The father did not bring him into being, or
+settle him in life, in order that when his son became a man he should
+himself be the servant of his own servants and should support him and
+his rabble of slaves and companions; but that his son should protect
+him, and that by his help he might be emancipated from the government
+of the rich and aristocratic, as they are termed.  And so he bids him
+and his companions depart, just as any other father might drive out of
+the house a riotous son and his undesirable associates.
+
+By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has
+been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he
+will find that he is weak and his son strong.
+
+Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence?  What!
+beat his father if he opposes him?
+
+Yes, he will, having first disarmed him.
+
+Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and
+this is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake: as
+the saying is, the people who would escape the smoke which is the
+slavery of freemen, has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of
+slaves.  Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into
+the harshest and bitterest form of slavery.
+
+True, he said.
+
+Very well; and may we not rightly say that we have sufficiently
+discussed the nature of tyranny, and the manner of the transition from
+democracy to tyranny?
+
+Yes, quite enough, he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IX
+
+
+SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
+
+LAST of all comes the tyrannical man; about whom we have once more to
+ask, how is he formed out of the democratical? and how does he live, in
+happiness or in misery?
+
+Yes, he said, he is the only one remaining.
+
+There is, however, I said, a previous question which remains unanswered.
+
+What question?
+
+I do not think that we have adequately determined the nature and number
+of the appetites, and until this is accomplished the enquiry will
+always be confused.
+
+Well, he said, it is not too late to supply the omission.
+
+Very true, I said; and observe the point which I want to understand:
+Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be
+unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are
+controlled by the laws and by reason, and the better desires prevail
+over them-either they are wholly banished or they become few and weak;
+while in the case of others they are stronger, and there are more of
+them.
+
+Which appetites do you mean?
+
+I mean those which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling
+power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or
+drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his
+desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime--not excepting
+incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of
+forbidden food--which at such a time, when he has parted company with
+all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and when before going
+to sleep he has awakened his rational powers, and fed them on noble
+thoughts and enquiries, collecting himself in meditation; after having
+first indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just
+enough to lay them to sleep, and prevent them and their enjoyments and
+pains from interfering with the higher principle--which he leaves in
+the solitude of pure abstraction, free to contemplate and aspire to the
+knowledge of the unknown, whether in past, present, or future:  when
+again he has allayed the passionate element, if he has a quarrel
+against any one--I say, when, after pacifying the two irrational
+principles, he rouses up the third, which is reason, before he takes
+his rest, then, as you know, he attains truth most nearly, and is least
+likely to be the sport of fantastic and lawless visions.
+
+I quite agree.
+
+In saying this I have been running into a digression; but the point
+which I desire to note is that in all of us, even in good men, there is
+a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.  Pray, consider
+whether I am right, and you agree with me.
+
+Yes, I agree.
+
+And now remember the character which we attributed to the democratic
+man.  He was supposed from his youth upwards to have been trained under
+a miserly parent, who encouraged the saving appetites in him, but
+discountenanced the unnecessary, which aim only at amusement and
+ornament?
+
+True.
+
+And then he got into the company of a more refined, licentious sort of
+people, and taking to all their wanton ways rushed into the opposite
+extreme from an abhorrence of his father's meanness.  At last, being a
+better man than his corruptors, he was drawn in both directions until
+he halted midway and led a life, not of vulgar and slavish passion, but
+of what he deemed moderate indulgence in various pleasures.  After this
+manner the democrat was generated out of the oligarch?
+
+Yes, he said; that was our view of him, and is so still.
+
+And now, I said, years will have passed away, and you must conceive
+this man, such as he is, to have a son, who is brought up in his
+father's principles.
+
+I can imagine him.
+
+Then you must further imagine the same thing to happen to the son which
+has already happened to the father:--he is drawn into a perfectly
+lawless life, which by his seducers is termed perfect liberty; and his
+father and friends take part with his moderate desires, and the
+opposite party assist the opposite ones.  As soon as these dire
+magicians and tyrant-makers find that they are losing their hold on
+him, they contrive to implant in him a master passion, to be lord over
+his idle and spendthrift lusts--a sort of monstrous winged drone--that
+is the only image which will adequately describe him.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.
+
+And when his other lusts, amid clouds of incense and perfumes and
+garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life, now let
+loose, come buzzing around him, nourishing to the utmost the sting of
+desire which they implant in his drone-like nature, then at last this
+lord of the soul, having Madness for the captain of his guard, breaks
+out into a frenzy:  and if he finds in himself any good opinions or
+appetites in process of formation, and there is in him any sense of
+shame remaining, to these better principles he puts an end, and casts
+them forth until he has purged away temperance and brought in madness
+to the full.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.
+
+And is not this the reason why of old love has been called a tyrant?
+
+I should not wonder.
+
+Further, I said, has not a drunken man also the spirit of a tyrant?
+
+He has.
+
+And you know that a man who is deranged and not right in his mind, will
+fancy that he is able to rule, not only over men, but also over the
+gods?
+
+That he will.
+
+And the tyrannical man in the true sense of the word comes into being
+when, either under the influence of nature, or habit, or both, he
+becomes drunken, lustful, passionate?  O my friend, is not that so?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Such is the man and such is his origin.  And next, how does he live?
+
+Suppose, as people facetiously say, you were to tell me.
+
+I imagine, I said, at the next step in his progress, that there will be
+feasts and carousals and revellings and courtezans, and all that sort
+of thing; Love is the lord of the house within him, and orders all the
+concerns of his soul.
+
+That is certain.
+
+Yes; and every day and every night desires grow up many and formidable,
+and their demands are many.
+
+They are indeed, he said.
+
+His revenues, if he has any, are soon spent.
+
+True.
+
+Then comes debt and the cutting down of his property.
+
+Of course.
+
+When he has nothing left, must not his desires, crowding in the nest
+like young ravens, be crying aloud for food; and he, goaded on by them,
+and especially by love himself, who is in a manner the captain of them,
+is in a frenzy, and would fain discover whom he can defraud or despoil
+of his property, in order that he may gratify them?
+
+Yes, that is sure to be the case.
+
+He must have money, no matter how, if he is to escape horrid pains and
+pangs.
+
+He must.
+
+And as in himself there was a succession of pleasures, and the new got
+the better of the old and took away their rights, so he being younger
+will claim to have more than his father and his mother, and if he has
+spent his own share of the property, he will take a slice of theirs.
+
+No doubt he will.
+
+And if his parents will not give way, then he will try first of all to
+cheat and deceive them.
+
+Very true.
+
+And if he fails, then he will use force and plunder them.
+
+Yes, probably.
+
+And if the old man and woman fight for their own, what then, my friend?
+Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?
+
+Nay, he said, I should not feel at all comfortable about his parents.
+
+But, O heavens!  Adeimantus, on account of some newfangled love of a
+harlot, who is anything but a necessary connection, can you believe
+that he would strike the mother who is his ancient friend and necessary
+to his very existence, and would place her under the authority of the
+other, when she is brought under the same roof with her; or that, under
+like circumstances, he would do the same to his withered old father,
+first and most indispensable of friends, for the sake of some newly
+found blooming youth who is the reverse of indispensable?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.
+
+Truly, then, I said, a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and
+mother.
+
+He is indeed, he replied.
+
+He first takes their property, and when that falls, and pleasures are
+beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a
+house, or steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he
+proceeds to clear a temple.  Meanwhile the old opinions which he had
+when a child, and which gave judgment about good and evil, are
+overthrown by those others which have just been emancipated, and are
+now the bodyguard of love and share his empire.  These in his
+democratic days, when he was still subject to the laws and to his
+father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep.  But now that he is
+under the dominion of love, he becomes always and in waking reality
+what he was then very rarely and in a dream only; he will commit the
+foulest murder, or eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid
+act.  Love is his tyrant, and lives lordly in him and lawlessly, and
+being himself a king, leads him on, as a tyrant leads a State, to the
+performance of any reckless deed by which he can maintain himself and
+the rabble of his associates, whether those whom evil communications
+have brought in from without, or those whom he himself has allowed to
+break loose within him by reason of a similar evil nature in himself.
+Have we not here a picture of his way of life?
+
+Yes, indeed, he said.
+
+And if there are only a few of them in the State, the rest of the
+people are well disposed, they go away and become the bodyguard or
+mercenary soldiers of some other tyrant who may probably want them for
+a war; and if there is no war, they stay at home and do many little
+pieces of mischief in the city.
+
+What sort of mischief?
+
+For example, they are the thieves, burglars, cutpurses, footpads,
+robbers of temples, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able
+to speak they turn informers, and bear false witness, and take bribes.
+
+A small catalogue of evils, even if the perpetrators of them are few in
+number.
+
+Yes, I said; but small and great are comparative terms, and all these
+things, in the misery and evil which they inflict upon a State, do not
+come within a thousand miles of the tyrant; when this noxious class and
+their followers grow numerous and become conscious of their strength,
+assisted by the infatuation of the people, they choose from among
+themselves the one who has most of the tyrant in his own soul, and him
+they create their tyrant.
+
+Yes, he said, and he will be the most fit to be a tyrant.
+
+If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began
+by beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he
+beats them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the
+Cretans say, in subjection to his young retainers whom he has
+introduced to be their rulers and masters.  This is the end of his
+passions and desires.
+
+Exactly.
+
+When such men are only private individuals and before they get power,
+this is their character; they associate entirely with their own
+flatterers or ready tools; or if they want anything from anybody, they
+in their turn are equally ready to bow down before them: they profess
+every sort of affection for them; but when they have gained their point
+they know them no more.
+
+Yes, truly.
+
+They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of
+anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And may we not rightly call such men treacherous?
+
+No question.
+
+Also they are utterly unjust, if we were right in our notion of justice?
+
+Yes, he said, and we were perfectly right.
+
+Let us then sum up in a word, I said, the character of the worst man:
+he is the waking reality of what we dreamed.
+
+Most true.
+
+And this is he who being by nature most of a tyrant bears rule, and the
+longer he lives the more of a tyrant he becomes.
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+That is certain, said Glaucon, taking his turn to answer.
+
+And will not he who has been shown to be the wickedest, be also the
+most miserable? and he who has tyrannized longest and most, most
+continually and truly miserable; although this may not be the opinion
+of men in general?
+
+Yes, he said, inevitably.
+
+And must not the tyrannical man be like the tyrannical, State, and the
+democratical man like the democratical State; and the same of the
+others?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And as State is to State in virtue and happiness, so is man in relation
+to man?
+
+To be sure.
+
+Then comparing our original city, which was under a king, and the city
+which is under a tyrant, how do they stand as to virtue?
+
+They are the opposite extremes, he said, for one is the very best and
+the other is the very worst.
+
+There can be no mistake, I said, as to which is which, and therefore I
+will at once enquire whether you would arrive at a similar decision
+about their relative happiness and misery.  And here we must not allow
+ourselves to be panic-stricken at the apparition of the tyrant, who is
+only a unit and may perhaps have a few retainers about him; but let us
+go as we ought into every corner of the city and look all about, and
+then we will give our opinion.
+
+A fair invitation, he replied; and I see, as every one must, that a
+tyranny is the wretchedest form of government, and the rule of a king
+the happiest.
+
+And in estimating the men too, may I not fairly make a like request,
+that I should have a judge whose mind can enter into and see through
+human nature?  He must not be like a child who looks at the outside and
+is dazzled at the pompous aspect which the tyrannical nature assumes to
+the beholder, but let him be one who has a clear insight.  May I
+suppose that the judgment is given in the hearing of us all by one who
+is able to judge, and has dwelt in the same place with him, and been
+present at his dally life and known him in his family relations, where
+he may be seen stripped of his tragedy attire, and again in the hour of
+public danger--he shall tell us about the happiness and misery of the
+tyrant when compared with other men?
+
+That again, he said, is a very fair proposal.
+
+Shall I assume that we ourselves are able and experienced judges and
+have before now met with such a person?  We shall then have some one
+who will answer our enquiries.
+
+By all means.
+
+Let me ask you not to forget the parallel of the individual and the
+State; bearing this in mind, and glancing in turn from one to the other
+of them, will you tell me their respective conditions?
+
+What do you mean? he asked.
+
+Beginning with the State, I replied, would you say that a city which is
+governed by a tyrant is free or enslaved?
+
+No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved.
+
+And yet, as you see, there are freemen as well as masters in such a
+State?
+
+Yes, he said, I see that there are--a few; but the people, speaking
+generally, and the best of them, are miserably degraded and enslaved.
+
+Then if the man is like the State, I said, must not the same rule
+prevail? his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity--the best elements
+in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also
+the worst and maddest.
+
+Inevitably.
+
+And would you say that the soul of such an one is the soul of a
+freeman, or of a slave?
+
+He has the soul of a slave, in my opinion.
+
+And the State which is enslaved under a tyrant is utterly incapable of
+acting voluntarily?
+
+Utterly incapable.
+
+And also the soul which is under a tyrant (I am speaking of the soul
+taken as a whole) is least capable of doing what she desires; there is
+a gadfly which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the city which is under a tyrant rich or poor?
+
+Poor.
+
+And the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable?
+
+True.
+
+And must not such a State and such a man be always full of fear?
+
+Yes, indeed.
+
+Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and
+sorrow and groaning and pain?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And is there any man in whom you will find more of this sort of misery
+than in the tyrannical man, who is in a fury of passions and desires?
+
+Impossible.
+
+Reflecting upon these and similar evils, you held the tyrannical State
+to be the most miserable of States?
+
+And I was right, he said.
+
+Certainly, I said.  And when you see the same evils in the tyrannical
+man, what do you say of him?
+
+I say that he is by far the most miserable of all men.
+
+There, I said, I think that you are beginning to go wrong.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I do not think that he has as yet reached the utmost extreme of misery.
+
+Then who is more miserable?
+
+One of whom I am about to speak.
+
+Who is that?
+
+He who is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life
+has been cursed with the further misfortune of being a public tyrant.
+
+From what has been said, I gather that you are right.
+
+Yes, I replied, but in this high argument you should be a little more
+certain, and should not conjecture only; for of all questions, this
+respecting good and evil is the greatest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Let me then offer you an illustration, which may, I think, throw a
+light upon this subject.
+
+What is your illustration?
+
+The case of rich individuals in cities who possess many slaves: from
+them you may form an idea of the tyrant's condition, for they both have
+slaves; the only difference is that he has more slaves.
+
+Yes, that is the difference.
+
+You know that they live securely and have nothing to apprehend from
+their servants?
+
+What should they fear?
+
+Nothing.  But do you observe the reason of this?
+
+Yes; the reason is, that the whole city is leagued together for the
+protection of each individual.
+
+Very true, I said.  But imagine one of these owners, the master say of
+some fifty slaves, together with his family and property and slaves,
+carried off by a god into the wilderness, where there are no freemen to
+help him--will he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and
+children should be put to death by his slaves?
+
+Yes, he said, he will be in the utmost fear.
+
+The time has arrived when he will be compelled to flatter divers of his
+slaves, and make many promises to them of freedom and other things,
+much against his will--he will have to cajole his own servants.
+
+Yes, he said, that will be the only way of saving himself.
+
+And suppose the same god, who carried him away, to surround him with
+neighbours who will not suffer one man to be the master of another, and
+who, if they could catch the offender, would take his life?
+
+His case will be still worse, if you suppose him to be everywhere
+surrounded and watched by enemies.
+
+And is not this the sort of prison in which the tyrant will be
+bound--he who being by nature such as we have described, is full of all
+sorts of fears and lusts?  His soul is dainty and greedy, and yet
+alone, of all men in the city, he is never allowed to go on a journey,
+or to see the things which other freemen desire to see, but he lives in
+his hole like a woman hidden in the house, and is jealous of any other
+citizen who goes into foreign parts and sees anything of interest.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+And amid evils such as these will not he who is ill-governed in his own
+person--the tyrannical man, I mean--whom you just now decided to be the
+most miserable of all--will not he be yet more miserable when, instead
+of leading a private life, he is constrained by fortune to be a public
+tyrant?  He has to be master of others when he is not master of
+himself: he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to
+pass his life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other
+men.
+
+Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.
+
+Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead
+a worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst?
+
+Certainly.
+
+He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave,
+and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to
+be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind.  He has desires which he is
+utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is
+truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his
+life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and
+distractions, even as the State which he resembles: and surely the
+resemblance holds?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power:
+he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more
+unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the
+purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is
+that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as
+miserable as himself.
+
+No man of any sense will dispute your words.
+
+Come then, I said, and as the general umpire in theatrical contests
+proclaims the result, do you also decide who in your opinion is first
+in the scale of happiness, and who second, and in what order the others
+follow:  there are five of them in all--they are the royal,
+timocratical, oligarchical, democratical, tyrannical.
+
+The decision will be easily given, he replied; they shall be choruses
+coming on the stage, and I must judge them in the order in which they
+enter, by the criterion of virtue and vice, happiness and misery.
+
+Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce, that the son of Ariston
+(the best) has decided that the best and justest is also the happiest,
+and that this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself;
+and that the worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and
+that this is he who being the greatest tyrant of himself is also the
+greatest tyrant of his State?
+
+Make the proclamation yourself, he said.
+
+And shall I add, 'whether seen or unseen by gods and men'?
+
+Let the words be added.
+
+Then this, I said, will be our first proof; and there is another, which
+may also have some weight.
+
+What is that?
+
+The second proof is derived from the nature of the soul: seeing that
+the individual soul, like the State, has been divided by us into three
+principles, the division may, I think, furnish a new demonstration.
+
+Of what nature?
+
+It seems to me that to these three principles three pleasures
+correspond; also three desires and governing powers.
+
+How do you mean? he said.
+
+There is one principle with which, as we were saying, a man learns,
+another with which he is angry; the third, having many forms, has no
+special name, but is denoted by the general term appetitive, from the
+extraordinary strength and vehemence of the desires of eating and
+drinking and the other sensual appetites which are the main elements of
+it; also money-loving, because such desires are generally satisfied by
+the help of money.
+
+That is true, he said.
+
+If we were to say that the loves and pleasures of this third part were
+concerned with gain, we should then be able to fall back on a single
+notion; and might truly and intelligibly describe this part of the soul
+as loving gain or money.
+
+I agree with you.
+
+Again, is not the passionate element wholly set on ruling and
+conquering and getting fame?
+
+True.
+
+Suppose we call it the contentious or ambitious--would the term be
+suitable?
+
+Extremely suitable.
+
+On the other hand, every one sees that the principle of knowledge is
+wholly directed to the truth, and cares less than either of the others
+for gain or fame.
+
+Far less.
+
+'Lover of wisdom,' 'lover of knowledge,' are titles which we may fitly
+apply to that part of the soul?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One principle prevails in the souls of one class of men, another in
+others, as may happen?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of
+men--lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, lovers of gain?
+
+Exactly.
+
+And there are three kinds of pleasure, which are their several objects?
+
+Very true.
+
+Now, if you examine the three classes of men, and ask of them in turn
+which of their lives is pleasantest, each will be found praising his
+own and depreciating that of others:  the money-maker will contrast the
+vanity of honour or of learning if they bring no money with the solid
+advantages of gold and silver?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And the lover of honour--what will be his opinion?  Will he not think
+that the pleasure of riches is vulgar, while the pleasure of learning,
+if it brings no distinction, is all smoke and nonsense to him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And are we to suppose, I said, that the philosopher sets any value on
+other pleasures in comparison with the pleasure of knowing the truth,
+and in that pursuit abiding, ever learning, not so far indeed from the
+heaven of pleasure?  Does he not call the other pleasures necessary,
+under the idea that if there were no necessity for them, he would
+rather not have them?
+
+There can be no doubt of that, he replied.
+
+Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in
+dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honourable,
+or better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless--how
+shall we know who speaks truly?
+
+I cannot myself tell, he said.
+
+Well, but what ought to be the criterion?  Is any better than
+experience and wisdom and reason?
+
+There cannot be a better, he said.
+
+Then, I said, reflect.  Of the three individuals, which has the
+greatest experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated?  Has the
+lover of gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater
+experience of the pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the
+pleasure of gain?
+
+The philosopher, he replied, has greatly the advantage; for he has of
+necessity always known the taste of the other pleasures from his
+childhood upwards:  but the lover of gain in all his experience has not
+of necessity tasted--or, I should rather say, even had he desired,
+could hardly have tasted--the sweetness of learning and knowing truth.
+
+Then the lover of wisdom has a great advantage over the lover of gain,
+for he has a double experience?
+
+Yes, very great.
+
+Again, has he greater experience of the pleasures of honour, or the
+lover of honour of the pleasures of wisdom?
+
+Nay, he said, all three are honoured in proportion as they attain their
+object; for the rich man and the brave man and the wise man alike have
+their crowd of admirers, and as they all receive honour they all have
+experience of the pleasures of honour; but the delight which is to be
+found in the knowledge of true being is known to the philosopher only.
+
+His experience, then, will enable him to judge better than any one?
+
+Far better.
+
+And he is the only one who has wisdom as well as experience?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Further, the very faculty which is the instrument of judgment is not
+possessed by the covetous or ambitious man, but only by the philosopher?
+
+What faculty?
+
+Reason, with whom, as we were saying, the decision ought to rest.
+
+Yes.
+
+And reasoning is peculiarly his instrument?
+
+Certainly.
+
+If wealth and gain were the criterion, then the praise or blame of the
+lover of gain would surely be the most trustworthy?
+
+Assuredly.
+
+Or if honour or victory or courage, in that case the judgement of the
+ambitious or pugnacious would be the truest?
+
+Clearly.
+
+But since experience and wisdom and reason are the judges--
+
+The only inference possible, he replied, is that pleasures which are
+approved by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest.
+
+And so we arrive at the result, that the pleasure of the intelligent
+part of the soul is the pleasantest of the three, and that he of us in
+whom this is the ruling principle has the pleasantest life.
+
+Unquestionably, he said, the wise man speaks with authority when he
+approves of his own life.
+
+And what does the judge affirm to be the life which is next, and the
+pleasure which is next?
+
+Clearly that of the soldier and lover of honour; who is nearer to
+himself than the money-maker.
+
+Last comes the lover of gain?
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Twice in succession, then, has the just man overthrown the unjust in
+this conflict; and now comes the third trial, which is dedicated to
+Olympian Zeus the saviour:  a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure
+except that of the wise is quite true and pure--all others are a shadow
+only; and surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of
+falls?
+
+Yes, the greatest; but will you explain yourself?
+
+I will work out the subject and you shall answer my questions.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Say, then, is not pleasure opposed to pain?
+
+True.
+
+And there is a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain?
+
+There is.
+
+A state which is intermediate, and a sort of repose of the soul about
+either--that is what you mean?
+
+Yes.
+
+You remember what people say when they are sick?
+
+What do they say?
+
+That after all nothing is pleasanter than health.  But then they never
+knew this to be the greatest of pleasures until they were ill.
+
+Yes, I know, he said.
+
+And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must.  have heard
+them say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?
+
+I have.
+
+And there are many other cases of suffering in which the mere rest and
+cessation of pain, and not any positive enjoyment, is extolled by them
+as the greatest pleasure?
+
+Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at
+rest.
+
+Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be
+painful?
+
+Doubtless, he said.
+
+Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be
+pain?
+
+So it would seem.
+
+But can that which is neither become both?
+
+I should say not.
+
+And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul, are they not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But that which is neither was just now shown to be rest and not motion,
+and in a mean between them?
+
+Yes.
+
+How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is
+pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?
+
+Impossible.
+
+This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the
+rest is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful,
+and painful in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these
+representations, when tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real
+but a sort of imposition?
+
+That is the inference.
+
+Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and
+you will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that
+pleasure is only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?
+
+There are many of them:  take as an example the pleasures, of smell,
+which are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a
+moment, and when they depart leave no pain behind them.
+
+Most true, he said.
+
+Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the
+cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
+
+No.
+
+Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul
+through the body are generally of this sort--they are reliefs of pain.
+
+That is true.
+
+And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like
+nature?
+
+Yes.
+
+Shall I give you an illustration of them?
+
+Let me hear.
+
+You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and
+middle region?
+
+I should.
+
+And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would
+he not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the
+middle and sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in
+the upper region, if he has never seen the true upper world?
+
+To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?
+
+But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine,
+that he was descending?
+
+No doubt.
+
+All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle
+and lower regions?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as
+they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong
+ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when
+they are only being drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think
+the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when
+drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly
+believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they,
+not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain,
+which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white--can you
+wonder, I say, at this?
+
+No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.
+
+Look at the matter thus:--Hunger, thirst, and the like, are inanitions
+of the bodily state?
+
+Yes.
+
+And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?
+
+True.
+
+And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that
+which has more existence the truer?
+
+Clearly, from that which has more.
+
+What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence in your
+judgment--those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of
+sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and
+knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue?  Put the
+question in this way:--Which has a more pure being--that which is
+concerned with the invariable, the immortal, and the true, and is of
+such a nature, and is found in such natures; or that which is concerned
+with and found in the variable and mortal, and is itself variable and
+mortal?
+
+Far purer, he replied, is the being of that which is concerned with the
+invariable.
+
+And does the essence of the invariable partake of knowledge in the same
+degree as of essence?
+
+Yes, of knowledge in the same degree.
+
+And of truth in the same degree?
+
+Yes.
+
+And, conversely, that which has less of truth will also have less of
+essence?
+
+Necessarily.
+
+Then, in general, those kinds of things which are in the service of the
+body have less of truth and essence than those which are in the service
+of the soul?
+
+Far less.
+
+And has not the body itself less of truth and essence than the soul?
+
+Yes.
+
+What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real
+existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less
+real existence and is less real?
+
+Of course.
+
+And if there be a pleasure in being filled with that which is according
+to nature, that which is more really filled with more real being will
+more really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which
+participates in less real being will be less truly and surely
+satisfied, and will participate in an illusory and less real pleasure?
+
+Unquestionably.
+
+Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with
+gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and
+in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass
+into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever
+find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do
+they taste of pure and abiding pleasure.  Like cattle, with their eyes
+always looking down and their heads stooping to the earth, that is, to
+the dining-table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their
+excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another
+with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another
+by reason of their insatiable lust.  For they fill themselves with that
+which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is
+also unsubstantial and incontinent.
+
+Verily, Socrates, said Glaucon, you describe the life of the many like
+an oracle.
+
+Their pleasures are mixed with pains--how can they be otherwise?  For
+they are mere shadows and pictures of the true, and are coloured by
+contrast, which exaggerates both light and shade, and so they implant
+in the minds of fools insane desires of themselves; and they are fought
+about as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of
+Helen at Troy in ignorance of the truth.
+
+Something of that sort must inevitably happen.
+
+And must not the like happen with the spirited or passionate element of
+the soul?  Will not the passionate man who carries his passion into
+action, be in the like case, whether he is envious and ambitious, or
+violent and contentious, or angry and discontented, if he be seeking to
+attain honour and victory and the satisfaction of his anger without
+reason or sense?
+
+Yes, he said, the same will happen with the spirited element also.
+
+Then may we not confidently assert that the lovers of money and honour,
+when they seek their pleasures under the guidance and in the company of
+reason and knowledge, and pursue after and win the pleasures which
+wisdom shows them, will also have the truest pleasures in the highest
+degree which is attainable to them, inasmuch as they follow truth; and
+they will have the pleasures which are natural to them, if that which
+is best for each one is also most natural to him?
+
+Yes, certainly; the best is the most natural.
+
+And when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there
+is no division, the several parts are just, and do each of them their
+own business, and enjoy severally the best and truest pleasures of
+which they are capable?
+
+Exactly.
+
+But when either of the two other principles prevails, it fails in
+attaining its own pleasure, and compels the rest to pursue after a
+pleasure which is a shadow only and which is not their own?
+
+True.
+
+And the greater the interval which separates them from philosophy and
+reason, the more strange and illusive will be the pleasure?
+
+Yes.
+
+And is not that farthest from reason which is at the greatest distance
+from law and order?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the lustful and tyrannical desires are, as we saw, at the greatest
+distance?  Yes.
+
+And the royal and orderly desires are nearest?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then the tyrant will live at the greatest distance from true or natural
+pleasure, and the king at the least?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But if so, the tyrant will live most unpleasantly, and the king most
+pleasantly?
+
+Inevitably.
+
+Would you know the measure of the interval which separates them?
+
+Will you tell me?
+
+There appear to be three pleasures, one genuine and two spurious: now
+the transgression of the tyrant reaches a point beyond the spurious; he
+has run away from the region of law and reason, and taken up his abode
+with certain slave pleasures which are his satellites, and the measure
+of his inferiority can only be expressed in a figure.
+
+How do you mean?
+
+I assume, I said, that the tyrant is in the third place from the
+oligarch; the democrat was in the middle?
+
+Yes.
+
+And if there is truth in what has preceded, he will be wedded to an
+image of pleasure which is thrice removed as to truth from the pleasure
+of the oligarch?
+
+He will.
+
+And the oligarch is third from the royal; since we count as one royal
+and aristocratical?
+
+Yes, he is third.
+
+Then the tyrant is removed from true pleasure by the space of a number
+which is three times three?
+
+Manifestly.
+
+The shadow then of tyrannical pleasure determined by the number of
+length will be a plane figure.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And if you raise the power and make the plane a solid, there is no
+difficulty in seeing how vast is the interval by which the tyrant is
+parted from the king.
+
+Yes; the arithmetician will easily do the sum.
+
+Or if some person begins at the other end and measures the interval by
+which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will
+find him, when the multiplication is complete, living 729 times more
+pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.
+
+What a wonderful calculation!  And how enormous is the distance which
+separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!
+
+Yet a true calculation, I said, and a number which nearly concerns
+human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and
+months and years.
+
+Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.
+
+Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil
+and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of
+life and in beauty and virtue?
+
+Immeasurably greater.
+
+Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we
+may revert to the words which brought us hither:  Was not some one
+saying that injustice was a gain to the perfectly unjust who was
+reputed to be just?
+
+Yes, that was said.
+
+Now then, having determined the power and quality of justice and
+injustice, let us have a little conversation with him.
+
+What shall we say to him?
+
+Let us make an image of the soul, that he may have his own words
+presented before his eyes.
+
+Of what sort?
+
+An ideal image of the soul, like the composite creations of ancient
+mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and there are
+many others in which two or more different natures are said to grow
+into one.
+
+There are said of have been such unions.
+
+Then do you now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster,
+having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he
+is able to generate and metamorphose at will.
+
+You suppose marvellous powers in the artist; but, as language is more
+pliable than wax or any similar substance, let there be such a model as
+you propose.
+
+Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a
+man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the
+second.
+
+That, he said, is an easier task; and I have made them as you say.
+
+And now join them, and let the three grow into one.
+
+That has been accomplished.
+
+Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so
+that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull,
+may believe the beast to be a single human creature.  I have done so,
+he said.
+
+And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human
+creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that,
+if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the
+multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like
+qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable
+to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is
+not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another--he
+ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.
+
+Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.
+
+To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so
+speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the
+most complete mastery over the entire human creature.
+
+He should watch over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman,
+fostering and cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild
+ones from growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in
+common care of them all should be uniting the several parts with one
+another and with himself.
+
+Yes, he said, that is quite what the maintainer of justice say.
+
+And so from every point of view, whether of pleasure, honour, or
+advantage, the approver of justice is right and speaks the truth, and
+the disapprover is wrong and false and ignorant.
+
+Yes, from every point of view.
+
+Come, now, and let us gently reason with the unjust, who is not
+intentionally in error.  'Sweet Sir,' we will say to him, what think
+you of things esteemed noble and ignoble?  Is not the noble that which
+subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man; and the
+ignoble that which subjects the man to the beast?' He can hardly avoid
+saying yes--can he now?
+
+Not if he has any regard for my opinion.
+
+But, if he agree so far, we may ask him to answer another question:
+'Then how would a man profit if he received gold and silver on the
+condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst?
+Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery
+for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil
+men, would be the gainer, however large might be the sum which he
+received?  And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who
+remorselessly sells his own divine being to that which is most godless
+and detestable?  Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her
+husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse
+ruin.'
+
+Yes, said Glaucon, far worse--I will answer for him.
+
+Has not the intemperate been censured of old, because in him the huge
+multiform monster is allowed to be too much at large?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And men are blamed for pride and bad temper when the lion and serpent
+element in them disproportionately grows and gains strength?
+
+Yes.
+
+And luxury and softness are blamed, because they relax and weaken this
+same creature, and make a coward of him?
+
+Very true.
+
+And is not a man reproached for flattery and meanness who subordinates
+the spirited animal to the unruly monster, and, for the sake of money,
+of which he can never have enough, habituates him in the days of his
+youth to be trampled in the mire, and from being a lion to become a
+monkey?
+
+True, he said.
+
+And why are mean employments and manual arts a reproach Only because
+they imply a natural weakness of the higher principle; the individual
+is unable to control the creatures within him, but has to court them,
+and his great study is how to flatter them.
+
+Such appears to be the reason.
+
+And therefore, being desirous of placing him under a rule like that of
+the best, we say that he ought to be the servant of the best, in whom
+the Divine rules; not, as Thrasymachus supposed, to the injury of the
+servant, but because every one had better be ruled by divine wisdom
+dwelling within him; or, if this be impossible, then by an external
+authority, in order that we may be all, as far as possible, under the
+same government, friends and equals.
+
+True, he said.
+
+And this is clearly seen to be the intention of the law, which is the
+ally of the whole city; and is seen also in the authority which we
+exercise over children, and the refusal to let them be free until we
+have established in them a principle analogous to the constitution of a
+state, and by cultivation of this higher element have set up in their
+hearts a guardian and ruler like our own, and when this is done they
+may go their ways.
+
+Yes, he said, the purpose of the law is manifest.
+
+From what point of view, then, and on what ground can we say that a man
+is profited by injustice or intemperance or other baseness, which will
+make him a worse man, even though he acquire money or power by his
+wickedness?
+
+From no point of view at all.
+
+What shall he profit, if his injustice be undetected and unpunished?
+He who is undetected only gets worse, whereas he who is detected and
+punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanized; the
+gentler element in him is liberated, and his whole soul is perfected
+and ennobled by the acquirement of justice and temperance and wisdom,
+more than the body ever is by receiving gifts of beauty, strength and
+health, in proportion as the soul is more honourable than the body.
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+To this nobler purpose the man of understanding will devote the
+energies of his life.  And in the first place, he will honour studies
+which impress these qualities on his soul and disregard others?
+
+Clearly, he said.
+
+In the next place, he will regulate his bodily habit and training, and
+so far will he be from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures,
+that he will regard even health as quite a secondary matter; his first
+object will be not that he may be fair or strong or well, unless he is
+likely thereby to gain temperance, but he will always desire so to
+attemper the body as to preserve the harmony of the soul?
+
+Certainly he will, if he has true music in him.
+
+And in the acquisition of wealth there is a principle of order and
+harmony which he will also observe; he will not allow himself to be
+dazzled by the foolish applause of the world, and heap up riches to his
+own infinite harm?
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+He will look at the city which is within him, and take heed that no
+disorder occur in it, such as might arise either from superfluity or
+from want; and upon this principle he will regulate his property and
+gain or spend according to his means.
+
+Very true.
+
+And, for the same reason, he will gladly accept and enjoy such honours
+as he deems likely to make him a better man; but those, whether private
+or public, which are likely to disorder his life, he will avoid?
+
+Then, if that is his motive, he will not be a statesman.
+
+By the dog of Egypt, he will! in the city which is his own he certainly
+will, though in the land of his birth perhaps not, unless he have a
+divine call.
+
+I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we
+are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe
+that there is such an one anywhere on earth?
+
+In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which
+he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in
+order.  But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is
+no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having
+nothing to do with any other.
+
+I think so, he said.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK X
+
+
+SOCRATES - GLAUCON
+
+OF THE many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State,
+there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule
+about poetry.
+
+To what do you refer?
+
+To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be
+received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have
+been distinguished.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated
+to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe--but I do not
+mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the
+understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true
+nature is the only antidote to them.
+
+Explain the purport of your remark.
+
+Well, I will tell you, although I have always from my earliest youth
+had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on
+my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that
+charming tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than
+the truth, and therefore I will speak out.
+
+Very good, he said.
+
+Listen to me then, or rather, answer me.
+
+Put your question.
+
+Can you tell me what imitation is? for I really do not know.
+
+A likely thing, then, that I should know.
+
+Why not? for the duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the
+keener.
+
+Very true, he said; but in your presence, even if I had any faint
+notion, I could not muster courage to utter it.  Will you enquire
+yourself?
+
+Well then, shall we begin the enquiry in our usual manner: Whenever a
+number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a
+corresponding idea or form.  Do you understand me?
+
+I do.
+
+Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the
+world--plenty of them, are there not?
+
+Yes.
+
+But there are only two ideas or forms of them--one the idea of a bed,
+the other of a table.
+
+True.
+
+And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our
+use, in accordance with the idea--that is our way of speaking in this
+and similar instances--but no artificer makes the ideas themselves: how
+could he?
+
+Impossible.
+
+And there is another artist,--I should like to know what you would say
+of him.
+
+Who is he?
+
+One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen.
+
+What an extraordinary man!
+
+Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so.  For
+this is he who is able to make not only vessels of every kind, but
+plants and animals, himself and all other things--the earth and heaven,
+and the things which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the
+gods also.
+
+He must be a wizard and no mistake.
+
+Oh! you are incredulous, are you?  Do you mean that there is no such
+maker or creator, or that in one sense there might be a maker of all
+these things but in another not?  Do you see that there is a way in
+which you could make them all yourself?
+
+What way?
+
+An easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat
+might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of
+turning a mirror round and round--you would soon enough make the sun
+and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and
+plants, and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in
+the mirror.
+
+Yes, he said; but they would be appearances only.
+
+Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now.  And the painter
+too is, as I conceive, just such another--a creator of appearances, is
+he not?
+
+Of course.
+
+But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is untrue.  And
+yet there is a sense in which the painter also creates a bed?
+
+Yes, he said, but not a real bed.
+
+And what of the maker of the bed?  Were you not saying that he too
+makes, not the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the
+bed, but only a particular bed?
+
+Yes, I did.
+
+Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true
+existence, but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to
+say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has
+real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.
+
+At any rate, he replied, philosophers would say that he was not
+speaking the truth.
+
+No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth.
+
+No wonder.
+
+Suppose now that by the light of the examples just offered we enquire
+who this imitator is?
+
+If you please.
+
+Well then, here are three beds:  one existing in nature, which is made
+by God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be the maker?
+
+No.
+
+There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the work of the painter is a third?
+
+Yes.
+
+Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who
+superintend them:  God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?
+
+Yes, there are three of them.
+
+God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and
+one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever
+will be made by God.
+
+Why is that?
+
+Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind
+them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be
+the ideal bed and the two others.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a
+particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed
+which is essentially and by nature one only.
+
+So we believe.
+
+Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?
+
+Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is
+the author of this and of all other things.
+
+And what shall we say of the carpenter--is not he also the maker of the
+bed?
+
+Yes.
+
+But would you call the painter a creator and maker?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?
+
+I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of
+that which the others make.
+
+Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature
+an imitator?
+
+Certainly, he said.
+
+And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other
+imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?
+
+That appears to be so.
+
+Then about the imitator we are agreed.  And what about the painter?-- I
+would like to know whether he may be thought to imitate that which
+originally exists in nature, or only the creations of artists?
+
+The latter.
+
+As they are or as they appear?  You have still to determine this.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view,
+obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will
+appear different, but there is no difference in reality.  And the same
+of all things.
+
+Yes, he said, the difference is only apparent.
+
+Now let me ask you another question:  Which is the art of painting
+designed to be--an imitation of things as they are, or as they
+appear--of appearance or of reality?
+
+Of appearance.
+
+Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all
+things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that
+part an image.  For example:  A painter will paint a cobbler,
+carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts;
+and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons,
+when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they
+will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.
+
+Certainly.
+
+And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man knows all the
+arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing
+with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man--whoever tells us
+this, I think that we can only imagine to be a simple creature who is
+likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and
+whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse
+the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
+
+Most true.
+
+And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who
+is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as
+well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot
+compose well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this
+knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also
+there may not be a similar illusion.  Perhaps they may have come across
+imitators and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when
+they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice removed from
+the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth,
+because they are appearances only and not realities?  Or, after all,
+they may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about
+which they seem to the many to speak so well?
+
+The question, he said, should by all means be considered.
+
+Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as
+well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the
+image-making branch?  Would he allow imitation to be the ruling
+principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him?
+
+I should say not.
+
+The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in
+realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials
+of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of
+encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.
+
+Yes, he said, that would be to him a source of much greater honour and
+profit.
+
+Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or
+any of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer: we are not
+going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients like
+Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the
+Asclepiads were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts
+at second hand; but we have a right to know respecting military
+tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest
+subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them.  'Friend
+Homer,' then we say to him, 'if you are only in the second remove from
+truth in what you say of virtue, and not in the third--not an image
+maker or imitator--and if you are able to discern what pursuits make
+men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was
+ever better governed by your help?  The good order of Lacedaemon is due
+to Lycurgus, and many other cities great and small have been similarly
+benefited by others; but who says that you have been a good legislator
+to them and have done them any good?  Italy and Sicily boast of
+Charondas, and there is Solon who is renowned among us; but what city
+has anything to say about you?'  Is there any city which he might name?
+
+I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend
+that he was a legislator.
+
+Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully
+by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
+
+There is not.
+
+Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human
+life, such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other
+ingenious men have conceived, which is attributed to him?
+
+There is absolutely nothing of the kind.
+
+But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or
+teacher of any?  Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate
+with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such
+as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his
+wisdom, and whose followers are to this day quite celebrated for the
+order which was named after him?
+
+Nothing of the kind is recorded of him.  For surely, Socrates,
+Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name
+always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his
+stupidity, if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and
+others in his own day when he was alive?
+
+Yes, I replied, that is the tradition.  But can you imagine, Glaucon,
+that if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind--if
+he had possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator--can you
+imagine, I say, that he would not have had many followers, and been
+honoured and loved by them?  Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of
+Ceos, and a host of others, have only to whisper to their
+contemporaries: 'You will never be able to manage either your own house
+or your own State until you appoint us to be your ministers of
+education'--and this ingenious device of theirs has such an effect in
+making them love them that their companions all but carry them about on
+their shoulders.  And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of
+Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go
+about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind
+virtuous?  Would they not have been as unwilling to part with them as
+with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with them?  Or, if
+the master would not stay, then the disciples would have followed him
+about everywhere, until they had got education enough?
+
+Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
+
+Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning
+with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the
+like, but the truth they never reach?  The poet is like a painter who,
+as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though
+he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for
+those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and
+figures.
+
+Quite so.
+
+In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay
+on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature
+only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as
+he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of
+cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and
+harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well--such is the sweet influence
+which melody and rhythm by nature have.  And I think that you must have
+observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make
+when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in
+simple prose.
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only
+blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them?
+
+Exactly.
+
+Here is another point:  The imitator or maker of the image knows
+nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only.  Am I not right?
+
+Yes.
+
+Then let us have a clear understanding, and not be satisfied with half
+an explanation.
+
+Proceed.
+
+Of the painter we say that he will paint reins, and he will paint a bit?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the worker in leather and brass will make them?
+
+Certainly.
+
+But does the painter know the right form of the bit and reins?  Nay,
+hardly even the workers in brass and leather who make them; only the
+horseman who knows how to use them--he knows their right form.
+
+Most true.
+
+And may we not say the same of all things?
+
+What?
+
+That there are three arts which are concerned with all things: one
+which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them?
+
+Yes.
+
+And the excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or
+inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which
+nature or the artist has intended them.
+
+True.
+
+Then the user of them must have the greatest experience of them, and he
+must indicate to the maker the good or bad qualities which develop
+themselves in use; for example, the flute-player will tell the
+flute-maker which of his flutes is satisfactory to the performer; he
+will tell him how he ought to make them, and the other will attend to
+his instructions?
+
+Of course.
+
+The one knows and therefore speaks with authority about the goodness
+and badness of flutes, while the other, confiding in him, will do what
+he is told by him?
+
+True.
+
+The instrument is the same, but about the excellence or badness of it
+the maker will only attain to a correct belief; and this he will gain
+from him who knows, by talking to him and being compelled to hear what
+he has to say, whereas the user will have knowledge?
+
+True.
+
+But will the imitator have either?  Will he know from use whether or no
+his drawing is correct or beautiful?  Or will he have right opinion
+from being compelled to associate with another who knows and gives him
+instructions about what he should draw?
+
+Neither.
+
+Then he will no more have true opinion than he will have knowledge
+about the goodness or badness of his imitations?
+
+I suppose not.
+
+The imitative artist will be in a brilliant state of intelligence about
+his own creations?
+
+Nay, very much the reverse.
+
+And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing
+good or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which
+appears to be good to the ignorant multitude?
+
+Just so.
+
+Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no
+knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates.  Imitation is only a
+kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in
+iambic or in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?
+
+Very true.
+
+And now tell me, I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to
+be concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I will explain:  The body which is large when seen near, appears small
+when seen at a distance?
+
+True.
+
+And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water,
+and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to
+the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable.  Thus every
+sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of
+the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light
+and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon
+us like magic.
+
+True.
+
+And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue
+of the human understanding-there is the beauty of them--and the
+apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the
+mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?
+
+Most true.
+
+And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational
+principle in the soul
+
+To be sure.
+
+And when this principle measures and certifies that some things are
+equal, or that some are greater or less than others, there occurs an
+apparent contradiction?
+
+True.
+
+But were we not saying that such a contradiction is the same faculty
+cannot have contrary opinions at the same time about the same thing?
+
+Very true.
+
+Then that part of the soul which has an opinion contrary to measure is
+not the same with that which has an opinion in accordance with measure?
+
+True.
+
+And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to
+measure and calculation?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And that which is opposed to them is one of the inferior principles of
+the soul?
+
+No doubt.
+
+This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said
+that painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their
+own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and
+friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally
+removed from reason, and that they have no true or healthy aim.
+
+Exactly.
+
+The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has
+inferior offspring.
+
+Very true.
+
+And is this confined to the sight only, or does it extend to the
+hearing also, relating in fact to what we term poetry?
+
+Probably the same would be true of poetry.
+
+Do not rely, I said, on a probability derived from the analogy of
+painting; but let us examine further and see whether the faculty with
+which poetical imitation is concerned is good or bad.
+
+By all means.
+
+We may state the question thus:--Imitation imitates the actions of men,
+whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or
+bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly.  Is
+there anything more?
+
+No, there is nothing else.
+
+But in all this variety of circumstances is the man at unity with
+himself--or rather, as in the instance of sight there was confusion and
+opposition in his opinions about the same things, so here also is there
+not strife and inconsistency in his life?  Though I need hardly raise
+the question again, for I remember that all this has been already
+admitted; and the soul has been acknowledged by us to be full of these
+and ten thousand similar oppositions occurring at the same moment?
+
+And we were right, he said.
+
+Yes, I said, thus far we were right; but there was an omission which
+must now be supplied.
+
+What was the omission?
+
+Were we not saying that a good man, who has the misfortune to lose his
+son or anything else which is most dear to him, will bear the loss with
+more equanimity than another?
+
+Yes.
+
+But will he have no sorrow, or shall we say that although he cannot
+help sorrowing, he will moderate his sorrow?
+
+The latter, he said, is the truer statement.
+
+Tell me:  will he be more likely to struggle and hold out against his
+sorrow when he is seen by his equals, or when he is alone?
+
+It will make a great difference whether he is seen or not.
+
+When he is by himself he will not mind saying or doing many things
+which he would be ashamed of any one hearing or seeing him do?
+
+True.
+
+There is a principle of law and reason in him which bids him resist, as
+well as a feeling of his misfortune which is forcing him to indulge his
+sorrow?
+
+True.
+
+But when a man is drawn in two opposite directions, to and from the
+same object, this, as we affirm, necessarily implies two distinct
+principles in him?
+
+Certainly.
+
+One of them is ready to follow the guidance of the law?
+
+How do you mean?
+
+The law would say that to be patient under suffering is best, and that
+we should not give way to impatience, as there is no knowing whether
+such things are good or evil; and nothing is gained by impatience;
+also, because no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands
+in the way of that which at the moment is most required.
+
+What is most required? he asked.
+
+That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice
+have been thrown order our affairs in the way which reason deems best;
+not, like children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck
+and wasting time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul
+forthwith to apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and
+fallen, banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.
+
+Yes, he said, that is the true way of meeting the attacks of fortune.
+
+Yes, I said; and the higher principle is ready to follow this
+suggestion of reason?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And the other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our
+troubles and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, we may
+call irrational, useless, and cowardly?
+
+Indeed, we may.
+
+And does not the latter--I mean the rebellious principle--furnish a
+great variety of materials for imitation?  Whereas the wise and calm
+temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to
+appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a
+promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theatre.  For the feeling
+represented is one to which they are strangers.
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature
+made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the principle in
+the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is
+easily imitated?
+
+Clearly.
+
+And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the
+painter, for he is like him in two ways:  first, inasmuch as his
+creations have an inferior degree of truth--in this, I say, he is like
+him; and he is also like him in being concerned with an inferior part
+of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him
+into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and
+strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason.  As in a city when the
+evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the
+way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants
+an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has
+no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one
+time great and at another small-he is a manufacturer of images and is
+very far removed from the truth.
+
+Exactly.
+
+But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our
+accusation:--the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and
+there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?
+
+Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.
+
+Hear and judge:  The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a
+passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some
+pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or
+weeping, and smiting his breast--the best of us, you know, delight in
+giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the
+poet who stirs our feelings most.
+
+Yes, of course I know.
+
+But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that
+we pride ourselves on the opposite quality--we would fain be quiet and
+patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in
+the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.
+
+Very true, he said.
+
+Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that
+which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?
+
+No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.
+
+Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of view.
+
+What point of view?
+
+If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural
+hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and
+that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is
+satisfied and delighted by the poets;-the better nature in each of us,
+not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the
+sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another's; and
+the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in
+praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he
+is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure
+is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem
+too?  Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil
+of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves.  And so
+the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the
+misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.
+
+How very true!
+
+And does not the same hold also of the ridiculous?  There are jests
+which you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic
+stage, or indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused
+by them, and are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness;--the case
+of pity is repeated;--there is a principle in human nature which is
+disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by
+reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let
+out again; and having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre,
+you are betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet
+at home.
+
+Quite true, he said.
+
+And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other
+affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be
+inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters
+the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although
+they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in
+happiness and virtue.
+
+I cannot deny it.
+
+Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists
+of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he
+is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and
+that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and
+regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those
+who say these things--they are excellent people, as far as their lights
+extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of
+poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our
+conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the
+only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.  For if you go
+beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or
+lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent
+have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in
+our State.
+
+That is most true, he said.
+
+And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our
+defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in
+sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we
+have described; for reason constrained us.  But that she may impute to
+us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is
+an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are
+many proofs, such as the saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her
+lord,' or of one 'mighty in the vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of
+sages circumventing Zeus,' and the 'subtle thinkers who are beggars
+after all'; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity
+between them.  Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and
+the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to
+exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her--we
+are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray
+the truth.  I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as
+I am, especially when she appears in Homer?
+
+Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.
+
+Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but
+upon this condition only--that she make a defence of herself in lyrical
+or some other metre?
+
+Certainly.
+
+And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of
+poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her
+behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to
+States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if
+this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers--I mean, if there is
+a use in poetry as well as a delight?
+
+Certainly, he said, we shall the gainers.
+
+If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are
+enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they
+think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we
+after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle.
+We too are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble
+States has implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at
+her best and truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her
+defence, this argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will
+repeat to ourselves while we listen to her strains; that we may not
+fall away into the childish love of her which captivates the many.  At
+all events we are well aware that poetry being such as we have
+described is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth;
+and he who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city which is
+within him, should be on his guard against her seductions and make our
+words his law.
+
+Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.
+
+Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater
+than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad.  And what will any
+one be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power,
+aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that
+any one else would have been.
+
+And yet no mention has been made of the greatest prizes and rewards
+which await virtue.
+
+What, are there any greater still?  If there are, they must be of an
+inconceivable greatness.
+
+Why, I said, what was ever great in a short time?  The whole period of
+threescore years and ten is surely but a little thing in comparison
+with eternity?
+
+Say rather 'nothing,' he replied.
+
+And should an immortal being seriously think of this little space
+rather than of the whole?
+
+Of the whole, certainly.  But why do you ask?
+
+Are you not aware, I said, that the soul of man is immortal and
+imperishable?
+
+He looked at me in astonishment, and said:  No, by heaven: And are you
+really prepared to maintain this?
+
+Yes, I said, I ought to be, and you too--there is no difficulty in
+proving it.
+
+I see a great difficulty; but I should like to hear you state this
+argument of which you make so light.
+
+Listen then.
+
+I am attending.
+
+There is a thing which you call good and another which you call evil?
+
+Yes, he replied.
+
+Would you agree with me in thinking that the corrupting and destroying
+element is the evil, and the saving and improving element the good?
+
+Yes.
+
+And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as
+ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as
+mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in
+everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and
+disease?
+
+Yes, he said.
+
+And anything which is infected by any of these evils is made evil, and
+at last wholly dissolves and dies?
+
+True.
+
+The vice and evil which is inherent in each is the destruction of each;
+and if this does not destroy them there is nothing else that will; for
+good certainly will not destroy them, nor again, that which is neither
+good nor evil.
+
+Certainly not.
+
+If, then, we find any nature which having this inherent corruption
+cannot be dissolved or destroyed, we may be certain that of such a
+nature there is no destruction?
+
+That may be assumed.
+
+Well, I said, and is there no evil which corrupts the soul?
+
+Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in
+review:  unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.
+
+But does any of these dissolve or destroy her?--and here do not let us
+fall into the error of supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when
+he is detected, perishes through his own injustice, which is an evil of
+the soul.  Take the analogy of the body: The evil of the body is a
+disease which wastes and reduces and annihilates the body; and all the
+things of which we were just now speaking come to annihilation through
+their own corruption attaching to them and inhering in them and so
+destroying them.  Is not this true?
+
+Yes.
+
+Consider the soul in like manner.  Does the injustice or other evil
+which exists in the soul waste and consume her?  Do they by attaching
+to the soul and inhering in her at last bring her to death, and so
+separate her from the body?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish
+from without through affection of external evil which could not be
+destroyed from within by a corruption of its own?
+
+It is, he replied.
+
+Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether
+staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to
+the actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the
+badness of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say
+that the body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is
+disease, brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be
+destroyed by the badness of food, which is another, and which does not
+engender any natural infection--this we shall absolutely deny?
+
+Very true.
+
+And, on the same principle, unless some bodily evil can produce an evil
+of the soul, we must not suppose that the soul, which is one thing, can
+be dissolved by any merely external evil which belongs to another?
+
+Yes, he said, there is reason in that.
+
+Either then, let us refute this conclusion, or, while it remains
+unrefuted, let us never say that fever, or any other disease, or the
+knife put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into
+the minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved
+to become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things
+being done to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not
+destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is
+not to be affirmed by any man.
+
+And surely, he replied, no one will ever prove that the souls of men
+become more unjust in consequence of death.
+
+But if some one who would rather not admit the immortality of the soul
+boldly denies this, and says that the dying do really become more evil
+and unrighteous, then, if the speaker is right, I suppose that
+injustice, like disease, must be assumed to be fatal to the unjust, and
+that those who take this disorder die by the natural inherent power of
+destruction which evil has, and which kills them sooner or later, but
+in quite another way from that in which, at present, the wicked receive
+death at the hands of others as the penalty of their deeds?
+
+Nay, he said, in that case injustice, if fatal to the unjust, will not
+be so very terrible to him, for he will be delivered from evil.  But I
+rather suspect the opposite to be the truth, and that injustice which,
+if it have the power, will murder others, keeps the murderer
+alive--aye, and well awake too; so far removed is her dwelling-place
+from being a house of death.
+
+True, I said; if the inherent natural vice or evil of the soul is
+unable to kill or destroy her, hardly will that which is appointed to
+be the destruction of some other body, destroy a soul or anything else
+except that of which it was appointed to be the destruction.
+
+Yes, that can hardly be.
+
+But the soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil, whether inherent or
+external, must exist for ever, and if existing for ever, must be
+immortal?
+
+Certainly.
+
+That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the
+souls must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not
+diminish in number.  Neither will they increase, for the increase of
+the immortal natures must come from something mortal, and all things
+would thus end in immortality.
+
+Very true.
+
+But this we cannot believe--reason will not allow us--any more than we
+can believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and
+difference and dissimilarity.
+
+What do you mean? he said.
+
+The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the
+fairest of compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements?
+
+Certainly not.
+
+Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are
+many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now
+behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you
+must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity;
+and then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all
+the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly.
+Thus far, we have spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at
+present, but we must remember also that we have seen her only in a
+condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose
+original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are
+broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways,
+and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and
+stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own
+natural form.  And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition,
+disfigured by ten thousand ills.  But not there, Glaucon, not there
+must we look.
+
+Where then?
+
+At her love of wisdom.  Let us see whom she affects, and what society
+and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal
+and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly
+following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of
+the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and
+shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up
+around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good
+things of this life as they are termed:  then you would see her as she
+is, and know whether she has one shape only or many, or what her nature
+is.  Of her affections and of the forms which she takes in this present
+life I think that we have now said enough.
+
+True, he replied.
+
+And thus, I said, we have fulfilled the conditions of the argument; we
+have not introduced the rewards and glories of justice, which, as you
+were saying, are to be found in Homer and Hesiod; but justice in her
+own nature has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature.
+Let a man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not,
+and even if in addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of
+Hades.
+
+Very true.
+
+And now, Glaucon, there will be no harm in further enumerating how many
+and how great are the rewards which justice and the other virtues
+procure to the soul from gods and men, both in life and after death.
+
+Certainly not, he said.
+
+Will you repay me, then, what you borrowed in the argument?
+
+What did I borrow?
+
+The assumption that the just man should appear unjust and the unjust
+just:  for you were of opinion that even if the true state of the case
+could not possibly escape the eyes of gods and men, still this
+admission ought to be made for the sake of the argument, in order that
+pure justice might be weighed against pure injustice.  Do you remember?
+
+I should be much to blame if I had forgotten.
+
+Then, as the cause is decided, I demand on behalf of justice that the
+estimation in which she is held by gods and men and which we
+acknowledge to be her due should now be restored to her by us; since
+she has been shown to confer reality, and not to deceive those who
+truly possess her, let what has been taken from her be given back, that
+so she may win that palm of appearance which is hers also, and which
+she gives to her own.
+
+The demand, he said, is just.
+
+In the first place, I said--and this is the first thing which you will
+have to give back--the nature both of the just and unjust is truly
+known to the gods.
+
+Granted.
+
+And if they are both known to them, one must be the friend and the
+other the enemy of the gods, as we admitted from the beginning?
+
+True.
+
+And the friend of the gods may be supposed to receive from them all
+things at their best, excepting only such evil as is the necessary
+consequence of former sins?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in
+poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will
+in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the
+gods have a care of any one whose desire is to become just and to be
+like God, as far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit
+of virtue?
+
+Yes, he said; if he is like God he will surely not be neglected by him.
+
+And of the unjust may not the opposite be supposed?
+
+Certainly.
+
+Such, then, are the palms of victory which the gods give the just?
+
+That is my conviction.
+
+And what do they receive of men?  Look at things as they really are,
+and you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners, who
+run well from the starting-place to the goal but not back again from
+the goal:  they go off at a great pace, but in the end only look
+foolish, slinking away with their ears draggling on their shoulders,
+and without a crown; but the true runner comes to the finish and
+receives the prize and is crowned.  And this is the way with the just;
+he who endures to the end of every action and occasion of his entire
+life has a good report and carries off the prize which men have to
+bestow.
+
+True.
+
+And now you must allow me to repeat of the just the blessings which you
+were attributing to the fortunate unjust.  I shall say of them, what
+you were saying of the others, that as they grow older, they become
+rulers in their own city if they care to be; they marry whom they like
+and give in marriage to whom they will; all that you said of the others
+I now say of these.  And, on the other hand, of the unjust I say that
+the greater number, even though they escape in their youth, are found
+out at last and look foolish at the end of their course, and when they
+come to be old and miserable are flouted alike by stranger and citizen;
+they are beaten and then come those things unfit for ears polite, as
+you truly term them; they will be racked and have their eyes burned
+out, as you were saying.  And you may suppose that I have repeated the
+remainder of your tale of horrors.  But will you let me assume, without
+reciting them, that these things are true?
+
+Certainly, he said, what you say is true.
+
+These, then, are the prizes and rewards and gifts which are bestowed
+upon the just by gods and men in this present life, in addition to the
+other good things which justice of herself provides.
+
+Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.
+
+And yet, I said, all these are as nothing, either in number or
+greatness in comparison with those other recompenses which await both
+just and unjust after death.  And you ought to hear them, and then both
+just and unjust will have received from us a full payment of the debt
+which the argument owes to them.
+
+Speak, he said; there are few things which I would more gladly hear.
+
+SOCRATES
+
+Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which
+Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero,
+Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth.  He was slain in battle,
+and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up
+already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by
+decay, and carried away home to be buried.  And on the twelfth day, as
+he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them
+what he had seen in the other world.  He said that when his soul left
+the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came
+to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth;
+they were near together, and over against them were two other openings
+in the heaven above.  In the intermediate space there were judges
+seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them
+and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the
+heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were
+bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also
+bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs.  He drew
+near, and they told him that he was to be the messenger who would carry
+the report of the other world to men, and they bade him hear and see
+all that was to be heard and seen in that place.  Then he beheld and
+saw on one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and
+earth when sentence had been given on them; and at the two other
+openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and worn
+with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright.  And
+arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from a long journey,
+and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where they encamped
+as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced and
+conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about
+the things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things
+beneath.  And they told one another of what had happened by the way,
+those from below weeping and sorrowing at the remembrance of the things
+which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth (now
+the journey lasted a thousand years), while those from above were
+describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty.  The
+Story, Glaucon, would take too long to tell; but the sum was this:--He
+said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered
+tenfold; or once in a hundred years--such being reckoned to be the
+length of man's life, and the penalty being thus paid ten times in a
+thousand years.  If, for example, there were any who had been the cause
+of many deaths, or had betrayed or enslaved cities or armies, or been
+guilty of any other evil behaviour, for each and all of their offences
+they received punishment ten times over, and the rewards of beneficence
+and justice and holiness were in the same proportion.  I need hardly
+repeat what he said concerning young children dying almost as soon as
+they were born.  Of piety and impiety to gods and parents, and of
+murderers, there were retributions other and greater far which he
+described.  He mentioned that he was present when one of the spirits
+asked another, 'Where is Ardiaeus the Great?' (Now this Ardiaeus lived
+a thousand years before the time of Er: he had been the tyrant of some
+city of Pamphylia, and had murdered his aged father and his elder
+brother, and was said to have committed many other abominable crimes.)
+The answer of the other spirit was: 'He comes not hither and will never
+come.  And this,' said he, 'was one of the dreadful sights which we
+ourselves witnessed.  We were at the mouth of the cavern, and, having
+completed all our experiences, were about to reascend, when of a sudden
+Ardiaeus appeared and several others, most of whom were tyrants; and
+there were also besides the tyrants private individuals who had been
+great criminals:  they were just, as they fancied, about to return into
+the upper world, but the mouth, instead of admitting them, gave a roar,
+whenever any of these incurable sinners or some one who had not been
+sufficiently punished tried to ascend; and then wild men of fiery
+aspect, who were standing by and heard the sound, seized and carried
+them off; and Ardiaeus and others they bound head and foot and hand,
+and threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and dragged them
+along the road at the side, carding them on thorns like wool, and
+declaring to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were
+being taken away to be cast into hell.' And of all the many terrors
+which they had endured, he said that there was none like the terror
+which each of them felt at that moment, lest they should hear the
+voice; and when there was silence, one by one they ascended with
+exceeding joy.  These, said Er, were the penalties and retributions,
+and there were blessings as great.
+
+Now when the spirits which were in the meadow had tarried seven days,
+on the eighth they were obliged to proceed on their journey, and, on
+the fourth day after, he said that they came to a place where they
+could see from above a line of light, straight as a column, extending
+right through the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour
+resembling the rainbow, only brighter and purer; another day's journey
+brought them to the place, and there, in the midst of the light, they
+saw the ends of the chains of heaven let down from above:  for this
+light is the belt of heaven, and holds together the circle of the
+universe, like the under-girders of a trireme.  From these ends is
+extended the spindle of Necessity, on which all the revolutions turn.
+The shaft and hook of this spindle are made of steel, and the whorl is
+made partly of steel and also partly of other materials.  Now the whorl
+is in form like the whorl used on earth; and the description of it
+implied that there is one large hollow whorl which is quite scooped
+out, and into this is fitted another lesser one, and another, and
+another, and four others, making eight in all, like vessels which fit
+into one another; the whorls show their edges on the upper side, and on
+their lower side all together form one continuous whorl.  This is
+pierced by the spindle, which is driven home through the centre of the
+eighth.  The first and outermost whorl has the rim broadest, and the
+seven inner whorls are narrower, in the following proportions--the
+sixth is next to the first in size, the fourth next to the sixth; then
+comes the eighth; the seventh is fifth, the fifth is sixth, the third
+is seventh, last and eighth comes the second.  The largest (of fixed
+stars) is spangled, and the seventh (or sun) is brightest; the eighth
+(or moon) coloured by the reflected light of the seventh; the second
+and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) are in colour like one another, and
+yellower than the preceding; the third (Venus) has the whitest light;
+the fourth (Mars) is reddish; the sixth (Jupiter) is in whiteness
+second.  Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the whole
+revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in the
+other, and of these the swiftest is the eighth; next in swiftness are
+the seventh, sixth, and fifth, which move together; third in swiftness
+appeared to move according to the law of this reversed motion the
+fourth; the third appeared fourth and the second fifth.  The spindle
+turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each
+circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or
+note.  The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal
+intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon
+her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are
+clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and
+Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the
+sirens--Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of
+the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her
+right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle,
+and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and
+Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then
+with the other.
+
+When Er and the spirits arrived, their duty was to go at once to
+Lachesis; but first of all there came a prophet who arranged them in
+order; then he took from the knees of Lachesis lots and samples of
+lives, and having mounted a high pulpit, spoke as follows: 'Hear the
+word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity.  Mortal souls, behold a
+new cycle of life and mortality.  Your genius will not be allotted to
+you, but you choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot
+have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his
+destiny.  Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he
+will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the
+chooser--God is justified.' When the Interpreter had thus spoken he
+scattered lots indifferently among them all, and each of them took up
+the lot which fell near him, all but Er himself (he was not allowed),
+and each as he took his lot perceived the number which he had obtained.
+Then the Interpreter placed on the ground before them the samples of
+lives; and there were many more lives than the souls present, and they
+were of all sorts.  There were lives of every animal and of man in
+every condition.  And there were tyrannies among them, some lasting out
+the tyrant's life, others which broke off in the middle and came to an
+end in poverty and exile and beggary; and there were lives of famous
+men, some who were famous for their form and beauty as well as for
+their strength and success in games, or, again, for their birth and the
+qualities of their ancestors; and some who were the reverse of famous
+for the opposite qualities.  And of women likewise; there was not,
+however, any definite character them, because the soul, when choosing a
+new life, must of necessity become different.  But there was every
+other quality, and the all mingled with one another, and also with
+elements of wealth and poverty, and disease and health; and there were
+mean states also.  And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of
+our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken.  Let
+each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow
+one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find
+some one who will make him able to learn and discern between good and
+evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has
+opportunity.  He should consider the bearing of all these things which
+have been mentioned severally and collectively upon virtue; he should
+know what the effect of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth
+in a particular soul, and what are the good and evil consequences of
+noble and humble birth, of private and public station, of strength and
+weakness, of cleverness and dullness, and of all the soul, and the
+operation of them when conjoined; he will then look at the nature of
+the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be
+able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; and so he
+will choose, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his
+soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more
+just; all else he will disregard.  For we have seen and know that this
+is the best choice both in life and after death.  A man must take with
+him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that
+there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other
+allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar
+villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse
+himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes
+on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all
+that which is to come.  For this is the way of happiness.
+
+And according to the report of the messenger from the other world this
+was what the prophet said at the time:  'Even for the last comer, if he
+chooses wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and
+not undesirable existence.  Let not him who chooses first be careless,
+and let not the last despair.'  And when he had spoken, he who had the
+first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny;
+his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not
+thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first
+sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own
+children.  But when he had time to reflect, and saw what was in the
+lot, he began to beat his breast and lament over his choice, forgetting
+the proclamation of the prophet; for, instead of throwing the blame of
+his misfortune on himself, he accused chance and the gods, and
+everything rather than himself.  Now he was one of those who came from
+heaven, and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered State, but his
+virtue was a matter of habit only, and he had no philosophy.  And it
+was true of others who were similarly overtaken, that the greater
+number of them came from heaven and therefore they had never been
+schooled by trial, whereas the pilgrims who came from earth, having
+themselves suffered and seen others suffer, were not in a hurry to
+choose.  And owing to this inexperience of theirs, and also because the
+lot was a chance, many of the souls exchanged a good destiny for an
+evil or an evil for a good.  For if a man had always on his arrival in
+this world dedicated himself from the first to sound philosophy, and
+had been moderately fortunate in the number of the lot, he might, as
+the messenger reported, be happy here, and also his journey to another
+life and return to this, instead of being rough and underground, would
+be smooth and heavenly.  Most curious, he said, was the spectacle--sad
+and laughable and strange; for the choice of the souls was in most
+cases based on their experience of a previous life.  There he saw the
+soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of
+enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they
+had been his murderers; he beheld also the soul of Thamyras choosing
+the life of a nightingale; birds, on the other hand, like the swan and
+other musicians, wanting to be men.  The soul which obtained the
+twentieth lot chose the life of a lion, and this was the soul of Ajax
+the son of Telamon, who would not be a man, remembering the injustice
+which was done him the judgment about the arms.  The next was
+Agamemnon, who took the life of an eagle, because, like Ajax, he hated
+human nature by reason of his sufferings.  About the middle came the
+lot of Atalanta; she, seeing the great fame of an athlete, was unable
+to resist the temptation:  and after her there followed the soul of
+Epeus the son of Panopeus passing into the nature of a woman cunning in
+the arts; and far away among the last who chose, the soul of the jester
+Thersites was putting on the form of a monkey.  There came also the
+soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to
+be the last of them all.  Now the recollection of former tolls had
+disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time
+in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some
+difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been
+neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would
+have done the had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was
+delighted to have it.  And not only did men pass into animals, but I
+must also mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed
+into one another and into corresponding human natures--the good into
+the gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.
+
+All the souls had now chosen their lives, and they went in the order of
+their choice to Lachesis, who sent with them the genius whom they had
+severally chosen, to be the guardian of their lives and the fulfiller
+of the choice:  this genius led the souls first to Clotho, and drew
+them within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand, thus
+ratifying the destiny of each; and then, when they were fastened to
+this, carried them to Atropos, who spun the threads and made them
+irreversible, whence without turning round they passed beneath the
+throne of Necessity; and when they had all passed, they marched on in a
+scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste
+destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped
+by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this
+they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were
+not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he
+drank forgot all things.  Now after they had gone to rest, about the
+middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then
+in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their
+birth, like stars shooting.  He himself was hindered from drinking the
+water.  But in what manner or by what means he returned to the body he
+could not say; only, in the morning, awaking suddenly, he found himself
+lying on the pyre.
+
+And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and
+will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass
+safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be
+defiled.  Wherefore my counsel is that we hold fast ever to the
+heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering
+that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and
+every sort of evil.  Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the
+gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games
+who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward.  And it shall be
+well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand
+years which we have been describing.
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/Project Reflection.ipynb b/Project Reflection.ipynb
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6de8e5c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Project Reflection.ipynb	
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+{
+ "cells": [
+  {
+   "attachments": {},
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "# Project Writeup and Reflection\n",
+    "\n",
+    "\n",
+    "#### Project Overview \n",
+    "What data source(s) did you use and what technique(s) did you use analyze/process them? What did you hope to learn/create?\n",
+    "\n",
+    "I used several e-books from Project Gutenberg and put them into my cosine similarity algorithm, in order to measure similarity between different books and authors. \n",
+    "\n",
+    "\n",
+    "#### Implementation\n",
+    "\n",
+    "The goal is to measure the similarity between two strings by the amount of usage of certain words. This should be implemented by measuring the cosine between two vectors. The Vector gets created by a wordcounter that returns a counter with all words and its frequencies. The comparison takes place in the cosine function. Its syntax is based on the eucledian dot product. To measure the similarity, you take the cosine of the angle between both. If both are colinear (the same) the angle is 0 degree, so the cosine is 1. if they have no similarities the angle is 90 degree, which means the cosine is 0. As result the output range goes from 0 to 1.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "\n",
+    "#### Results\n",
+    "   \n",
+    "I chose \"Great Expectations\", \"A tale of two cities\" and \"A christmas carol\"  by Charles Dickens, \"Crito\" and \"Plato's Republic\" by Plato \"Metarmophosis\" by Kafka, and Moby Dick form Melville for my analyis. \n",
+    "    \n",
+    "Dickens and Melville are really similar both, which can be caused by the fact, that both are from the same era. Plato's Crito also really similar to the mentioned Dickens and Melville. Nneither the text of Kafka nor the ones from plato were originally written in english, wherefore there's a tremendous impact by the translater of the book, what needs to be noted.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "To sum it up, you are able to get information about date the book emerged, but probably no (at least secure) information about the author. You should also be cautious with using texts that wasn't originally written in the same language as the others.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "[[1.0, 0.95, 0.93, 0.85, 0.81, 0.86, 0.9],\n",
+    " [0.95, 1.0, 0.97, 0.92, 0.86, 0.92, 0.97],\n",
+    " [0.93, 0.97, 1.0, 0.89, 0.83, 0.91, 0.94],\n",
+    " [0.85, 0.92, 0.89, 1.0, 0.93, 0.81, 0.92],\n",
+    " [0.81, 0.86, 0.83, 0.93, 1.0, 0.77, 0.84],\n",
+    " [0.86, 0.92, 0.91, 0.81, 0.77, 1.0, 0.88],\n",
+    " [0.9, 0.97, 0.94, 0.92, 0.84, 0.88, 1.0]]\n",
+    "\n",
+    "#### Reflection \n",
+    " \n",
+    "what went well?\n",
+    "\n",
+    "I structured a complex program in many functions on my own for the first time. Also the output was informative.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "What could you improve?\n",
+    "\n",
+    "I am still not 100 % familar with the process of Recursion and tried to avoid it. Because of the. \n",
+    "\n",
+    "Was your project appropriately scoped?\n",
+    "\n",
+    "It took a while to get in touch, especially because it wasn't really clear what my task was. I also did a lot of research for this topic. I also wanted to deal with the markov synthesis, but because of other homework I unfortunatel didn't have the time to do so. "
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": null,
+   "metadata": {
+    "collapsed": true
+   },
+   "outputs": [],
+   "source": []
+  }
+ ],
+ "metadata": {
+  "kernelspec": {
+   "display_name": "Python 3",
+   "language": "python",
+   "name": "python3"
+  },
+  "language_info": {
+   "codemirror_mode": {
+    "name": "ipython",
+    "version": 3
+   },
+   "file_extension": ".py",
+   "mimetype": "text/x-python",
+   "name": "python",
+   "nbconvert_exporter": "python",
+   "pygments_lexer": "ipython3",
+   "version": "3.6.1"
+  }
+ },
+ "nbformat": 4,
+ "nbformat_minor": 2
+}
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 8cce527..4afc839 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
 # TextMining
 
-This is the base repo for the text mining and analysis project for Software Design at Olin College.
+Installed libraries: imported requests, re, math, collections operator 
+
+Which file to run to get your results: run [python text_mining.py](https://github.com/flxbrhrdt/TextMining/blob/master/python%20text_mining.py) and it will analyze all .txt files in your folder
+
+Reflection: [Project Reflection.ipynb](https://github.com/flxbrhrdt/TextMining/blob/master/Platos%20Republic%20by%20Plato.txt)
+
+Also, there no all caps variable names anymore and the final function that sums it all up was implemented
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/python text_mining.py b/python text_mining.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..59df56a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/python text_mining.py	
@@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
+import requests
+import re, math
+from collections import Counter
+from operator import itemgetter
+import operator
+
+def text_preprocessing(text):
+    """Check if the the input is a string or pathfile. convert it to string
+
+    >>> text_preprocessing(4)
+
+    >>> text_preprocessing('4')
+    '4'
+    """
+    if isinstance(text, str):
+        if text.endswith('.txt'):
+            path = text
+            text = open(path,'r')
+            return text.read()
+        else:
+            return text
+    else:
+        return None
+
+def word_counter(text):
+    """return a list with word frequencies
+
+    >>>
+    """
+    word = re.compile(r'\w+')
+    text = text_preprocessing(text)
+    words = word.findall(text)
+    wordcount = Counter(words)
+    return wordcount
+
+def word_frequency(text):
+    """Take a string, count the word frequencies in it and display it in a descending order
+
+    >>> word_frequency('text text hello text python')
+    [('text', 3), ('hello', 1), ('python', 1)]
+    """
+    text = text.lower() #     Preprocessor: all lower case letters
+    word_frequency = word_counter(text) #Calling the function
+    return sorted(word_frequency.items(), key=lambda pair: pair[1], reverse=True)
+
+def cosine(vec1, vec2):
+    """ Calculate the cosine between two vectors, used as a measurment of similarity
+
+    """
+    intersection = set(vec1.keys()) & set(vec2.keys())
+    numerator = sum([vec1[x] * vec2[x] for x in intersection])
+    sum1 = sum([vec1[x]**2 for x in vec1.keys()])
+    sum2 = sum([vec2[x]**2 for x in vec2.keys()])
+    denominator = math.sqrt(sum1) * math.sqrt(sum2)
+    # Check if denominator is any kind of zero, empty container or False
+    if denominator is not None:
+        return float(numerator) / denominator
+    else:
+        return 0.0
+
+def Cosine_similarity(text_1, text_2):
+    """find similarities between two text files, by looking at the number of word usage
+
+    >>> Cosine_similarity('This is a test.', 'This is the second test.')
+    0.6708203932499369
+     """
+    # WORD = re.compile(r'\w+')
+    # transform the two input strings into a vector
+    vector_1 = word_counter(text_1)
+    vector_2 = word_counter(text_2)
+    return cosine(vector_1, vector_2)
+
+
+def listmaker(*texts):
+    """Make a list that gets iterated in the Text_similarity function
+
+    >>> listmaker('a', 'c', 'y', 'x', 'gfhj')
+    ['a', 'c', 'y', 'x', 'gfhj']
+    """
+
+    text_list=[]
+    for a in texts:
+        text_list.append(text_preprocessing(a))
+    return text_list
+
+def Text_similarity(*texts):
+    """compare an indefinite number of texts with each other
+
+    >>> Text_similarity('This is the first test', 'This is the second test, what a Test. One more Test', 'This is the firs test')
+    [[0.9999999999999998, 0.49613893835683387, 0.7999999999999998], [0.49613893835683387, 1.0000000000000002, 0.49613893835683387], [0.7999999999999998, 0.49613893835683387, 0.9999999999999998]]
+    """
+    # print(*texts)
+    # Loop through list of Texts
+    text = listmaker(*texts)
+    sims1 =[]
+    for p in range(len(text)):
+        sims2 =[]
+        for i in range(len(text)):
+            sim = Cosine_similarity(text[p], text[i])
+            sims2.append(float("{0:.2f}".format(sim)))
+        sims1.append(sims2)
+    return sims1
+
+
+
+def final_function():
+    """sum the program up and uses every .txt file in the folder """
+    from os import listdir
+    a = listdir()
+    a = tuple(f for f in a if ".txt" in f)
+    return Text_similarity(*a)
+
+
+final_function()