Chapter 132 127．Coffins turned into life buoys

A carpenter works around his bench. He was plugging the seams of the coffin with hemp batting, and the coffin was resting on the two rope barrels next to it. This scene looked very disturbing, as if something bad had happened to the ship. Captain Ahab came out slowly from his cabin, and Pip followed closely behind him. "You go back first, Pip, stay in the cabin and wait for me. I'll be back in a while, okay?" Captain Ahab coaxed Pip like an old man coaxing his little grandson. At this time, Captain Ahab's pleasant expression was simply surprising, because basically no one on the "Pequord" had seen such a look.

Captain Ahab came to the carpenter. "I said what are you doing? Make the deck look like the aisle in the middle of a church." "I'm making a life-buoy, sir, at the orders of the first mate." Captain Ahab played with the coffin. The carpenter hurriedly told him to be careful. "I said carpenter, besides making my bone legs, why do you still do this kind of funeral business?" There was irony in Captain Ahab's words. "Why, Captain, this thing was originally made for Queequeg, but Queequeg is useless. Now there is no life buoy on board, and there is nothing else suitable, so it has to be used instead."

The carpenter spoke eloquently. "Then carpenter, you make bone legs, coffins, and life buoys, you can do anything?" Still sarcastic. "That's not a dare, just ask me to do, I will do." "Look how helpless you are, but I ask you, while you are making the coffin, do you keep humming a little tune? Like some gravediggers I have seen , talking and laughing happily while digging graves for the dead.” "But I don't, sir, really, I'm not at all interested in singing, and I don't know how to." "Then where did the sound I heard come from?"

"It was the hammer that came out." The carpenter tried to prove that he was not in a happy mood when facing the coffin. He took the hammer and knocked on the coffin. "Listen, this voice still resonates!" "Yeah, it's like the sound of a coffin being knocked on the door of the cemetery when it's being carried into the cemetery, isn't it?" "Yes, sir, but..." "But what?" "Well……" "Don't say anything more. Hurry up and put away your hemp and other things. You look like a silkworm that weaves mourning clothes for itself."

Captain Ahab left the carpenter and went away.As he walked, he said: "This carpenter is not as good as that kid Pip, who can make me a little smoother." "The carpenter must be a clown, and a clown with a bad conscience. He's beating that thing. He's not making a lifebuoy, he's making mourning clothes for the whole ship." "How can that thing be a life buoy? If it is really a life buoy, can it be effective when the whole ship is in danger? No, absolutely not." "Actually, why do I think of people so darkly? Even if he is making an ominous thing for the whole ship, it is something that can comfort everyone!"

"In the sense of eternity, isn't this coffin the most immortal destination and end of human beings? No matter where we come from, we must lie in this coffin in the end. It is the last storage for each of us! " "But even if I knew this, I still couldn't stand the sound of the carpenter beating on the empty coffin." "Let me go down there, back to Pip's, where I can forget about this depressing thing for a while." "Looking at it now, poor Pip, I have learned a lot of wonderful things from you. You look weak, timid, and pitiful, but you contain countless worldly wisdom in you."

Captain Ahab muttered, and went back to his cabin to find Pip. The carpenter's hammer struck the empty coffin like a woodpecker pecking at the hollow trunk of a tree.