When I woke the next morning, just after daylight, I discovered that Queequeg’s arm was wrapped tightly around me.
He was holding me so affectionately that anyone seeing us might have thought we were newly married.
His tattooed arm looked almost exactly like the patchwork blanket covering the bed. The blanket was made of countless little squares and triangles in different colors, while Queequeg’s skin was covered with an equally complicated pattern of tattoos.
Because the colors of his tattoos had faded and changed from years of exposure to the sun, his arm blended so perfectly with the blanket that I could hardly tell where one ended and the other began.
The only reason I knew it was his arm was because I could feel its weight pressing against me.
The whole situation gave me a strange feeling.
It reminded me of something that had happened to me when I was a child.
To this day, I have never been completely sure whether that childhood experience was real or only a dream.
I had been doing something foolish—I believe I was trying to climb up the chimney after watching a chimney sweep do it.
My stepmother caught me and dragged me out by the legs.
She was always punishing me for something, and this time she sent me to bed without supper.
The worst part was that it was only two o’clock in the afternoon on June 21, the longest day of the year.
I felt miserable.
There was nothing I could do, so I slowly went upstairs to my little room.
I took my clothes off as slowly as possible, hoping to make the punishment shorter.
Then, with a huge sigh, I climbed into bed.
I calculated that I would have to stay there for sixteen whole hours before I could get up again.
Sixteen hours!
Just thinking about it made my back ache.
The sun was still shining through the window.
I could hear coaches rattling through the streets and people laughing and talking throughout the house.
It seemed unbearable.
Eventually, I got up, quietly walked downstairs in my socks, found my stepmother, and threw myself at her feet.
“Please,” I begged. “Just punish me properly. Give me a good beating if you want. Anything is better than making me stay in bed all day!”
But she was a good and responsible stepmother.
She refused to change the punishment.
So I had to return to my room.
For several hours, I lay there wide awake, feeling more miserable than I ever had before.
Eventually, I must have fallen into a troubled sleep.
Slowly, I began to wake.
The room that had been bright with sunlight was now completely dark.
Suddenly, I felt something terrifying.
I couldn’t see anything.
I couldn’t hear anything.
Yet it felt as though some mysterious hand had taken hold of mine.
My arm was lying outside the blanket, and the strange, invisible creature attached to that hand seemed to be sitting beside my bed.
I was frozen with fear.
I didn’t dare pull my hand away.
For what seemed like hours, I lay there terrified, thinking that if I could only move my hand an inch, the terrible spell might somehow be broken.
Then, somehow, the feeling disappeared.
When I finally woke the next morning, I remembered the experience clearly.
For days, weeks, and even months afterward, I kept trying to understand what had happened.
Even now, I sometimes wonder about it.
And when I woke that morning with Queequeg’s arm wrapped around me, the strange feeling was remarkably similar.
There was one important difference.
I wasn’t terrified this time.
As the memories of the previous night came back to me, I realized that this wasn’t some supernatural creature.
It was simply Queequeg.
Unfortunately, that didn’t solve my immediate problem.
His arm was still locked around me.
I tried to move it.
Nothing happened.
He was sleeping so deeply that he held me as tightly as if nothing in the world could separate us.
“Queequeg,” I said.
He answered with a loud snore.
I tried again.
“Queequeg!”
Nothing.
I rolled onto my other side.
My neck felt as though it had been trapped in a wooden collar.
Then I felt something scratch me.
I pulled the blanket aside.
There, lying beside Queequeg, was his tomahawk.
It looked almost like a little baby sleeping peacefully beside its father.
“This is a fine situation,” I thought.
“I’m lying in a strange inn, in broad daylight, beside a cannibal—and there’s a tomahawk right next to him!”
“Queequeg!”
I shook him.
“For heaven’s sake, wake up!”
Eventually, after a great deal of struggling and complaining about the ridiculous way he was holding another man, I finally managed to wake him.
He gave a deep grunt.
Then he pulled his arm away.
He shook his whole body like a Newfoundland dog that had just climbed out of the water.
Finally, he sat upright in bed.
He stared at me and rubbed his eyes.
For a moment, he seemed unable to remember why I was lying beside him.
Then recognition slowly returned to his face.
I watched him carefully.
I was no longer seriously afraid of him.
In fact, I was fascinated by him.
There was no ordinary man quite like Queequeg, and I wanted to observe everything he did.
Once he seemed to remember who I was and accept the fact that I was his bedmate, he jumped out of bed.
Through gestures and a few sounds, he explained that he would get dressed first.
Then he would leave the room so that I could dress privately.
I was impressed.
“Queequeg,” I thought, “that’s a remarkably civilized thing to do.”
People can say whatever they want about so-called savages, but Queequeg clearly had a natural sense of politeness.
I had not shown him nearly as much courtesy.
I was still sitting in bed, openly staring at him while he got dressed.
My curiosity had completely overcome my manners.
But a man like Queequeg wasn’t someone you saw every day.
His appearance and habits were too interesting not to watch.
He began getting dressed by putting on his tall beaver hat.
Then, still wearing no trousers, he went searching for his boots.
I had no idea why he did what he did next.
He picked up his boots, crawled underneath the bed, and disappeared.
From the grunts and heavy breathing coming from beneath it, I realized he was struggling to put his boots on.
I couldn’t understand why he thought he needed privacy for something as ordinary as putting on boots.
But Queequeg was clearly caught somewhere between two worlds.
He had become civilized enough to wear boots.
Yet he was still enough of a savage to think the best place to put them on was under the bed.
If he had been completely uncivilized, he probably wouldn’t have worn boots at all.
If he had been completely civilized, he would never have crawled under the bed to put them on.
Eventually, he came out.
His tall hat was badly crushed and pulled down over his eyes.
He began limping around the room.
His boots were made of damp, wrinkled leather and clearly weren’t designed for his feet.
He wasn’t used to wearing them, and on that freezing morning they seemed to hurt him badly.
Then I noticed something else.
There were no curtains on the window.
The street outside was narrow, and the building opposite had a clear view directly into our room.
Queequeg was walking around wearing little more than his boots and hat.
I quickly decided that this was not appropriate.
“Queequeg,” I said as politely as I could, “please hurry up and put your trousers on.”
He understood me and immediately did so.
Then he began washing himself.
At that time, any Christian man would have washed his face first.
Queequeg did not.
Instead, he washed his chest, arms, and hands.
I watched in amazement.
Then he put on his vest.
He picked up a piece of hard soap from the washstand, dipped it in water, and began making a thick lather.
I assumed he was about to shave.
I started looking around for his razor.
Then I realized he had something completely different in mind.
He reached into the corner of the room and picked up his harpoon.
He removed the long wooden shaft.
Then he pulled the sharp metal head from its sheath.
He sharpened it slightly against the sole of his boot.
Then he walked over to the little mirror on the wall.
And there, standing in front of the mirror, he began shaving his face with the harpoon.
I stared at him.
“Queequeg,” I thought, “you certainly have a strange idea of using a razor.”
The harpoon head was incredibly sharp, however.
Later, when I learned how carefully sailors kept their harpoons sharpened, I understood why it worked so well.
Queequeg soon finished shaving.
His morning routine was finally complete.
He proudly put on his enormous sailor’s coat.
Then he walked out of the room with his harpoon in his hand, carrying it like a soldier carrying a ceremonial staff.
I watched him disappear down the hallway.
After everything I had seen that morning, I was beginning to think that Queequeg might be one of the strangest—and most interesting—men I had ever met.