The Spouter-Inn greets you like a condemned hull: a low entry hung with clubs and broken harpoons, a bar crouching inside a whale's jaw, and on the wall an oil painting so besmoked that at first it looks like chaos bewitched. Ishmael keeps returning to that canvas until a black mass over three dim masts resolves into a whale in the act of impaling itself on a foundering ship, as if the whole voyage were already pictured before a word of Ahab is spoken. Peter Coffin sells gin in tapered glasses that cheat the eye, and when the house is full he offers the only berth left: half a harpooner's blanket. Ishmael accepts because the night is bitter, then spends the evening trying to undo the bargain in his head.
Supper is cold as Iceland, dumplings and scalding tea while the Grampus crew erupts from three years at sea, ice in their beards, straight for the whale's mouth of the bar. A tall Southerner named Bulkington slips away from the riot unnoticed; Ishmael will not see him again until the sea takes him back. Fear of the unseen roommate grows louder than the drinkers. Ishmael tries a planed bench while Coffin grins and shavings fly; draughts from window and door defeat him. Coffin's jokes about a harpooner peddling embalmed New Zealand heads on the Sabbath sound like madness until Ishmael forces plain answers and Coffin finally explains those curios, market hours, and rent paid regular. Ishmael climbs to a prodigious shared bed, tries on a shaggy poncho, flinches at his reflection, and slides under the covers first, still telling himself stories about what kind of man sells heads and carries a harpoon by the pillow.
Queequeg arrives at last with a preserved head in one hand and a tomahawk-pipe in the other, tattooed square by square, worshipping a wooden idol at the sooty fireplace before he undresses. Ishmael, who has not yet spoken to him, decides ignorance is the parent of fear and nearly bolts as the stranger puffs smoke and springs into bed with the hatchet between his teeth. Panic brings Coffin; names replace rumours. Queequeg rolls aside, civil and sober, and Ishmael hears himself say he would rather sleep with a sober man the world calls a cannibal than with the drunken Christians downstairs. He sleeps better than he ever has, and the man beside him is no longer a category but Queequeg.
The painting on the wall needed patience and a second glance; the roommate needed the same. When daylight comes and tattooed skin meets patchwork quilt, will Ishmael still trust what he learned in the dark, or will the morning bring a new reason to flinch?
Coming Up in Chapter 4
Ishmael wakes at daylight with Queequeg's tattooed arm thrown over him in a bridegroom clasp. The patchwork counterpane and the harpooneer's labyrinthine tattoos blend until Ishmael can tell the arm from the quilt only by its weight. What follows is childhood terror replayed as comedy: a tomahawk beside the pillow and a roommate who shaves with a harpoon.
