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.