The Pulpit — Moby-Dick

The storm-pelted door flies back and Father Mapple enters, sleet melting off his tarpaulin hat and pilot cloth until the weight of the water nearly drags him down. Whalemen know him at once: a former sailor and harpooneer turned chaplain, winter in his wrinkles yet with a mild bloom beneath like spring under February snow. He sheds hat, coat, and overshoes, puts on a decent suit, and the chapel's quick regardful eyeing says this soaked man is their favourite voice before he speaks a word.

The pulpit rises too high for ordinary stairs in so small a room, so the architect built a perpendicular side ladder with red worsted man-ropes, and Mapple mounts hand over hand with sailor dexterity still reverent, as if climbing to the main-top. At the top he stuns Ishmael by dragging the ladder up step by step until he stands impregnable in his little Quebec, cut off from worldly ties. Ishmael will not call it stage trickery; Mapple's name for sincerity is too solid. The withdrawal must symbolize a stronghold replenished with the meat and wine of the word.

Marble cenotaphs flank a back wall painted with a ship beating a lee shore while an angel's face breaks through the scud; the pulpit panel mimics a bluff bow, the Bible resting on fiddle-headed scrollwork like a beak. The room preaches before the sermon: the pulpit is this earth's foremost part, the bow that meets God's quick wrath first and invokes fair winds before the rest of the voyage learns the weather. The world's a ship on its passage out, not a voyage complete, and Ishmael waits in the pews while Mapple, ladder drawn, prepares to open his mouth on Jonah. What truth requires a drawbridge when the memorial tablets still line the walls below?