4. CHAPTER IV.
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 misbehavior; 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 neek 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.
