Queequeg's Ramadan, or fasting and humiliation with Yojo, was to continue all day, and Ishmael cherishes respect for everybody's religious obligations, however comical, insisting Presbyterians and pagans alike are dreadfully cracked about the head and need mending; let Queequeg be, he says, until towards evening when he knocks and hears only silence behind a door fastened inside, the harpoon that should travel with him leaning in the hall like a clue that turns wrong.
Apoplexy! he cries, fetching Mrs. Hussey with mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet; she remembers Stiggs, missing harpoon, suicide, counterpane ruin, and a sign for Snarles the Painter while forbidding broken premises until Ishmael tears free and body-slams the supplemental bolt; plaster rains, and there sits Queequeg cool and self-collected, squatting on his hams with Yojo on his head like a carved image through eight or ten hours without meals. Ishmael dismisses the landlady, sups with plum-pudding voyage sailors, returns to find him still screwed to the floor, throws his bearskin over the cold vigil, and sleeps wretchedly beside a wide awake pagan in this dreary Ramadan.
At sunrise Queequeg presses forehead to forehead and says his Ramadan is over; Ishmael, who tolerates religion until it torments the inn, launches a hygiene sermon from primitive religions to hell born on an undigested apple-dumpling, and Queequeg answers with a victory feast where fifty enemies were cooked by evening, leaving Ishmael shuddering while Queequeg pities him as hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.
They dress and Queequeg takes a prodigiously hearty chowder breakfast so Mrs. Hussey shall not profit much from his fast, then saunter toward the Pequod picking teeth with halibut bones. What will Ishmael do when respect that lasted all day collapses the moment the next locked ritual looks like Stiggs again?
Coming Up in Chapter 18
On the wharf below the Pequod, Queequeg still has his harpoon when Peleg hails them from the wigwam. Peleg lets no cannibals aboard unless they produce papers. Bildad puts his head out and asks whether this son of darkness is in communion with any Christian church. Ishmael says Queequeg belongs to the first Congregational Church.
