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“And do ye then, Mr. Starbuck? And do ye then, side with the Whale?” Ahab had in his eyes the flinty flashings with which the entire crew, by the point of this particular encounter, was entirely familiar.
“I tell thee again, that no two sides exist, upon either to stand,” Starbuck said to the deck below his feet.
The ice in the mate’s voice was mirrored then in his captain’s eye. The lightning gaze restrained; frozen sparks fell short of shocking.
“And do ye side…” the old man’s lips silently moved in the phrase, repeating, windless. He at last found his breath; “And do ye side against me?”
Starbuck looked grim Ahab dead in the face this time, and Ahab almost stepped his dead limb back, though perhaps his dignity, perhaps pride, did catch him. “A mate cannot side against his captain; in faith, none but thee have their hand so clenched in the strings of my—and the crew’s fates.”
Ahab shook himself; unsoothed and unsettled, coat ruffling like such an omen bird’s black feathers. “But do ye;—Mr. Starbuck;--but do ye side—“
“Have I not told thee, old man, that there art none?” Starbuck cried. It was an Ahab’s fire which burned in the mate, and the glacier disposition bestowed upon the captain; the old man flinched back as if in an icy wind.
“Starbuck!—I cannot”—his barrel chest heaved ere he could speak. “What captain is mateless who be respected in his position? Speak ye either for me, or do not speak at all; I entreat thee, I would not sail into thine wind.”
“Yet thou wouldst sail into the fiercest gale of God!” Starbuck continued; his fire not yet fading, yet the flames burned bitter-cold: “The Lord’s most unsubtle storm. Yet thou wouldst not sail against Starbuck, whose wind is only mortal man’s? Hear thyself! Upon what ground—nay, deck, for nothing grounds thee;—dost rest thine claim, that no wind but mine assails thee? Thy arrogance waxes illogical. I had thought I had witnessed the extent of thine madness; here I see it is unfathomable.”
“Madness, Starbuck? To mine own face, thou cry madness; mine own sea-weathered brow? Ye know not madness. For who, my Starbuck, who alone but Ahab can deepest sniff that scent? Ahab’s nose alone curls from his mind-rot. Hear me,” he pled his case.
Starbuck wheeled about and did not take but two steps before spinning towards his captain yet again, even as the compass needle flies due-northward from the accidental tap or turn. “Thine stench is but thine,” –here lowering his head briefly, his concession; “but I fear it rots more than the mind, but these weary planks, upon which we are all a-staked, the pegs drove deep. We are none of us free men.”
Ahab’s sturdy spine did now produce a timid shiver, then a Vulcan tremor subduing him; his mouth yet snapped back from its slack. “Ahab is only at the mercy of his madness. Hear me, virtuous Starbuck,” he muttered, brow clenching as if he willed it stabilize his base.
“And what a mercy it is,” proclaimed the mate, upon which Ahab once more shuddered, this time jerking one hand before his chest as if to shield from some invisible assailant. To this Starbuck himself did flinch, and soon did the ice return to him, just as the fire seemed breathed back into Ahab; each element returned to its bearer, the two did but regard each other a moment further, before each turning opposite and departing. The balance not yet struck, the ship seemed to yaw with its leaders, and us, the dependent crew with it. As two sides of a scale the two highest authorities stood at furthest end, and as the center we were made to feel each sway and lean. So the venditores weep.