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-colored 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 favor 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 sunlit 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 state--
neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner.
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.
