The Likeness

by Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The week before he shipped, Barzillai Luce paid three dollars to have his wife made permanent.

The thing was done in the rooms of a Mr. Hathaway, up two pair of stairs on Union Street in New Bedford, under a skylight of ground glass that Mr. Hathaway had cut into his roof at his own charge and against the advice of his landlord. There was a chair, and behind the chair an iron stand like a music-rest, with a crook at the top of it that took the sitter by the back of the skull and held her there. There was the camera, a box of mahogany on a tripod, with a brass eye. There was a smell in the rooms, which Luce could never afterward put a name to, of hot iron and something sweetish, like rum spilt on a stove, which came from the little closet where Mr. Hathaway did his chemistry and into which no customer was let. Mercy Luce sat down in the chair in her good brown silk with the lace collar her mother had made, and Mr. Hathaway fitted the crook to her head, and stooped under his black cloth, and came out again, and said that she must on no account move, nor smile, nor wink, until he told her; and he took the cap off the brass eye and stood beside the camera with his watch in his hand.

It took the better part of a minute. Luce stood by the door with his hat. He had been to sea twice, and seen men killed, and once stood a whole night in the chains of a sinking brig, pumping; but he said afterward that he had never in his life watched anything so hard as he watched his wife hold still under that skylight, and that the minute was longer than the night.

What came out of the closet an hour later was a plate of silvered copper, a little under three inches by a little under three, laid behind a gilt mat and a square of glass, and the whole sealed round its edges with a strip of gummed paper and set into a case of pressed brown leather lined with plum velvet, with a brass hook to shut it. It is what the trade calls a sixth-plate. He shut the hook, and put it inside his shirt, and on the third of May sailed out by Clark's Point in the ship Lydia Coggeshall of Fairhaven, for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm-whale fishery, on a voyage of four years.

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It will be necessary to say something here of the sperm whale's tooth, for the whole of this matter turns on one.

The sperm whale has his teeth in his lower jaw only. In the upper he has none to speak of, but a row of sockets into which the lower teeth fit when he shuts his mouth, as the pegs of a cribbage-board fit their holes. Of these lower teeth there are some twenty or more on a side, set in a jaw that is long and narrow and very like the boom of a small sloop, and they are conical, a little curved, and in a bull whale of the first size will run to seven or eight inches and a pound and a half apiece. They are not of a whiteness like the ivory of the elephant. They are of a yellower and closer grain, and at the root they are hollow, and in section they show rings, like a tree's; from which some old whalemen hold that a whale's age may be read in his teeth, as a tree's in its stump, though I never knew one who had done it.

When the whale is cut in, the jaw is hoisted aboard entire and the teeth are got out of it with a cutting-spade or by letting the gums rot, which in the tropics is not long. They belong to the ship. The captain keeps them in a cask in his cabin, and gives them out as he sees fit; to a boatsteerer who has done well, to a boy for his birthday, to a man who asks. What is done with them then, in the long idle weeks of a cruise on the line when no whale has been raised for a month and the decks are scrubbed white and there is nothing left to tar, is called scrimshaw; and the man who does it is a scrimshander; and I have seen it done in every forecastle I ever slept in.

The tooth is soaked first a day or two in brine, to soften it. Then the ridges are scraped off with a jack-knife and the whole of it is filed smooth; and then it is polished, for which a strip of the dried skin of a shark is the best thing known, being as rough as sand-paper and not wearing out, and after the sharkskin a rubbing with wood-ash on a wet palm. When it is done it is as smooth as a knee. Then the scrimshander takes a sail-needle, or the point of his knife, or a gimlet ground down fine, and he pricks the picture into the ivory, dot by dot and line by line, very shallow; and when he has pricked a little, he rubs lampblack and whale-oil into it, or India ink if the steward will part with any, or the soot off the try-works, and wipes the face clean; and where he has pricked, the black stays in, and where he has not, the tooth is white. Thus by degrees the picture comes up out of the ivory, as a coast comes up out of a fog, black lines on yellow-white. It is very slow. A whaleman in his second year has seldom anything to do but be slow.

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Luce got his tooth in the eleventh month of the voyage, out of a large bull taken on the Offshore Ground, westward of Peru; and it was a fine one, seven inches round the curve, with a little hook at the point where the whale had worn it. He asked the captain for it particularly, and the captain, who liked him, let him have it. He soaked it and scraped it and sharkskinned it and wood-ashed it over a fortnight of calms, and then one evening in the dog-watch he took the leather case out of his shirt, and opened it, and stood it on the sea-chest before him, and took up his needle.

Now the daguerreotype has a property which no painted likeness has, and which every one who has owned one knows, and which nobody explains. It is a mirror. The face is in the silver, and the silver is polished like a looking-glass, so that the picture is only to be seen at a certain slant; hold it otherwise, and the face goes negative, black where it should be pale and pale where it should be black, like a corpse's ghost; and hold it straight before you, and the face goes altogether, and you see your own. In the forecastle of the Lydia Coggeshall, by the light of a slush-lamp swinging from the beam, Luce could never get the slant right for long. The ship rolled; the lamp went with her; and every few minutes, as he bent to the ivory and looked up again at the plate, his wife was gone out of it and there was a brown face with a beard in her place, looking at him over a sail-needle.

He learned to wedge the case in the angle of the chest-lid with a twist of oakum, and to hang his lamp from a particular nail. He learned that it went best in the first hour after sunrise, on deck, with the light coming low over the bulwarks. He learned her face. I do not mean that he knew it already, though he did, as a man knows his wife. I mean that he learned it as the scrimshander must, in lines and distances: that the parting of her hair was a little to the left of the middle of her head; that her left eyebrow lay higher than her right by the thickness of a needle; that her lip, the lower one, was fuller at its right corner, where she had a way of catching it in her teeth; that her chin was nearer her mouth than he had supposed. He pricked the outline of the face in the first week and the hair in the second. Then he came to the eyes, and stopped there for some time.

For the eyes in the plate were grave. That was the minute under the skylight, the iron crook, the brass eye, the watch in Mr. Hathaway's hand. Mercy Luce was not a grave woman; she was a quick, short, laughing woman, given to catching her lip in her teeth; and Luce had seen her look as she looked in the plate perhaps three times in five years of marriage. Once was at her father's burying. And it began to seem to him, as he bent over the ivory in the dog-watches and the long light of the morning and the weeks went by without a gam or a letter, that there was something in her eyes he had not seen when he stood by Mr. Hathaway's door, and could not now lay his needle on; and he went back to the eyes, and back, and pricked them deeper.

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The men of the forecastle took a lively interest in the tooth, as the men of a forecastle will in anything that is not salt pork, and each of them, as it came up out of the ivory, made it out to be somebody.

The cooper, an old Stonington man, said she favoured his sister, who had gone to Ohio. The second mate, coming forward on some errand and stopping to look, said she had the look of a woman whose man owed money. Dennis, the Irish boy, said she was like the Blessed Virgin in a chapel at Cove, and crossed himself, and was laughed at. Kalama, the Owhyhee boatsteerer, who had been longest in the ship of any and said least, looked at the tooth a long while and at the plate a long while, and said that the tooth was a better likeness than the silver, because the silver was a dead thing and the tooth had been part of a live one; and nobody knew what he meant by it, and he did not tell them. And a Portuguese from Fayal, whose name I have forgot, said she was a woman who was waiting, and Luce looked up at him sharply, and then went on pricking.

I set down these readings because Luce remembered every one of them, and repeated them, many years after, word for word, as a man repeats the bearings of a dangerous shoal. I do not say that any of them was right. I say only that the tooth received them all, and the plate received them all, and neither gave a sign.

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In the twenty-sixth month of the voyage, the Lydia Coggeshall was blown off the Japan Ground in a typhoon, and lay three days hove-to under a goose-winged main-topsail, and shipped a sea over her bows on the second night that stove the forecastle scuttle and filled the forecastle two feet deep. Luce's chest was lashed, but the lid was not tight, and the sea got in. When it was over and he could get at his things, the tooth was no worse; ivory does not mind the sea, having come from it. But the daguerreotype case was swimming in a pint of salt water in the bottom of his chest, and when he opened it, the paper seal at the edge of the glass had lifted along one side, like a bandage coming off.

He dried it as well as he could, and stuck the paper down again with a little pitch. But a daguerreotype, I have since been told, is a very tender thing, and the silver of it will not bear the air, nor damp, nor the touch of a finger; and in a few weeks a bloom began to come in on the plate from that edge where the seal had lifted. It came in very slowly, and it was of all colours, which was the strange part of it: blue first, a peacock blue like the neck of a mallard; and behind the blue a rose; and behind the rose a brown like old tobacco; and behind the brown, nothing, a dull smoke on the silver where the picture had been. It came in like a tide over a flat, a quarter of an inch in a month, perhaps; and it did not go back.

He did not leave off the tooth. He went at it faster, if a thing so slow can be said to go faster. He was at work on it in every watch below, and on deck in every calm, so that the mate complained of it; and when the bloom came over her shoulder he hurried on the lace of her collar, every thread of her mother's work, and pricked it in, and blacked it, before it went. When it reached her ear he did the ear. When it began upon her cheek he sat with the plate in the morning light and did not prick at all for a week, but only looked, holding the case to the slant, as a man in a boat watches the land go down astern.

In the thirty-fourth month it was over her eyes.

There was nothing left of her then but a little of her mouth, and her chin, and a corner of the brown silk. And then, before the ship was round the Horn on the passage home, there was nothing. The bloom had closed over the whole plate, edge to edge, in its colours; and in the middle, where the colours were thinnest, there was only the bright silver, which, held straight before the eye, gave back the face of whoever held it.

But the tooth was done. He had finished it off Staten Land, in a hard south-west wind, with the last of the India ink, and rubbed it over with his palm, and wrapped it in a bit of flannel, and laid it in his chest beside the case.

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The Lydia Coggeshall came up the Acushnet River on a morning in June, four years and some weeks out, with eighteen hundred barrels of sperm oil under hatches; and Barzillai Luce, whose lay was the one hundred and fortieth, which is to say that he was owed one barrel in every hundred and forty, stood at the rail while she warped in to the wharf at Fairhaven and looked for his wife among the people on the stringpiece, and did not see her, and for one long moment, longer than any minute under any skylight, knew that she was dead. Then he saw her. She was at the back of the crowd, by a pile of staves, shading her eyes. She was not wearing the brown silk. She had grown stouter, and had a new way of standing, with one hand on her hip, and she was talking to the woman beside her; and as he looked she laughed at something the woman said, and caught her lip in her teeth.

I will pass over the meeting, which was like other such meetings, and the walk home up Main Street, and the dinner. It was in the evening, in the front room of the house on Water Street, with the window open on the harbour and the light going, that he took the flannel out of his jacket and unwrapped it and gave her the tooth.

She took it to the window. She held it a long time, turning it in the light, as she might have turned a piece of cloth to see the weave; and she looked at the lace collar a long time, and touched it with her finger, and said that it was her mother's exactly, every stitch, she did not know how he had done it. Then she looked at the face.

He waited. He had waited above three years to see what she would see. I do not think he knew, until then, that he had been waiting for anything.

"Oh," said Mercy Luce. "Oh, Zillai. Was I holding my breath like that?"

He said that he did not understand her.

"He told me not to breathe," she said. "Mr. Hathaway. Don't you remember? He said I was not to breathe nor wink till he told me, and I didn't, I held it the whole time, and I thought I should burst. That's all that is." She laughed, and touched the ivory eyes with her finger, the eyes he had gone back to and back to and pricked deeper, in the forecastle and the morning light and the Japan typhoon. "I look as if I was going to my own hanging. I was only thinking how long it was."

He did not say anything for a while. Then she went to her work-box and brought him out of it a case of pressed brown leather with a brass hook, the twin of his own. Mr. Hathaway had taken two plates that afternoon, she said, the second while Luce was gone down to the street to see about a cart; she had paid for it out of her own egg-money, and held her breath twice over for it, and meant to give it him on the wharf and then thought better of it, for he had one already. It had lain four years in a dry drawer on Water Street. Its seal had never lifted. He opened it and held it at the slant against the last of the window.

There she was, in her brown silk, in her mother's collar, with the iron crook hidden behind her head, holding her breath.

He held it there a long time. Then he took the other case out of his jacket, the one that had gone round the Horn twice and through the typhoon, and opened it, and stood the two of them side by side on the mantel-shelf, a little apart; and set the tooth between them, on its flat side, with the face turned to the room. Mercy came and stood by him, and put her hand on his arm, and they looked at the three things together.

In one there was a grave young woman who had held her breath, and in the tooth there was the same woman, pricked out in lampblack and ink and three years of the Pacific Ocean, looking as she had looked to a Fayal man and an Owhyhee boatsteerer and a boy from Cove; and in the third there was nothing, a bloom of peacock and rose and smoke with a little silver at the heart of it. From where they stood, the silver showed the window, and the harbour, and the masts of the Lydia Coggeshall at the wharf, discharging.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Hermannō Melvillō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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