The Cabin-Table — Moby-Dick

It is noon; Dough-Boy's pale loaf-of-bread face announces dinner while Ahab, mutely reckoning latitude on the medallion tablet inlaid in his ivory leg, seems not to hear, then swings to deck and passes the burden down, Dinner Mr. Starbuck, each emir waiting until the rank above is seated until Flask alone on quarter-deck tips knowing winks, kicks off his shoes, and hornpipes silently over the Grand Turk's path before shipping a new face and entering King Ahab's presence in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.

Ishmael explains why officers bold on deck grow meek at the host's table, where ship-master czarship plus Ahab's mute carving makes Starbuck receive beef like alms, Stubb welcome a hold rat as relief from awful silence, and Flask stay butterless, last down and first up so promotion immortalizes hunger he never knew before the mast, while Ahab presides like a maned sea-lion and remains socially inaccessible, a winter bear in a hollow tree feeding on the sullen paws of his gloom.

Officers leave in inverted order; the cloth is cleared and harpooneers inherit the feast with almost frantic democracy, Queequeg and Tashtego and Daggoo chewing with report, demanding salt-junk, fork-harpoons at slow Dough-Boy while he quivers in his pantry: if you judged the Pequod only by the first table's terror, what fellowship would you miss in the second seating that actually feeds the hunt?