“Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone: he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.”
The savage harpooner, seemingly inspired to his own religious observations, was carving a nose on his little black idol. He then, when Ishmael interrupted him, put up the idol and took up a large book, counting the pages, and looking around at intervals, as he continued to count, astonished by how many pages there were. Ishmael observed this impromptu ritual of bewilderment:
“You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooing, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils…he looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.”
Ishmael continues to appraise the character of the savage, who is not mindful of his presence or the storm outside.
“Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by way of Cape Horn…thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself...”
“…No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.”
Ishmael then devoted himself to helping Queequeg read and afterward:
“…he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me about the waist, and said that henceforth he was married; meaning in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need be. In a countryman this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply…”
“…He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them toward me, and said it was mine.”
“I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolater in worshipping his piece of wood?...But what is worship?—to do the will of God. And what is the will of God?—to do my fellow-man what I would have my fellow-man to do me.
After sharing in Queequeg’s spiritual observances as Queequeg had his own Christian rites back at the Chapel, Ishmael and his new companion lay back in their huge rented bed and spoke to each other of the things that mattered most to them.
