








CHAPTER CXII. THE BLACKSMITH


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 petulence 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 grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till
we marry thee!"

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by
fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth
went a-whaling.





