The Whale (2 page)

The rain clouds bore down upon them. “We're going to get wet, and no doubt of it,” Duyckinck called over his shoulder.

“No, we're not,” said Holmes.

“Actually, Evert,” Dudley said, adopting a lawyerly tone, “nothing is sure in the Berkshires. Those clouds may hold their rain all day, or they may drop it all in Lenox and nowhere else, possibly on a single rooftop, or the whole mountain range may be under water within the hour. In the Berkshires, as in life, one sometimes must sail with the wind and sometimes against it, but the important thing is to keep your sails full.”

“With wisdom like that, Dudley,” Duyckinck said sarcastically, “you could have followed your father into the pulpit.”

“Look over there,” Dudley said, ignoring him and pointing into the distance. “That hill is Sacrifice Mount, and beyond it you can just see our destination, Monument Mountain.”

“Sacrifice Mount sounds more fitting for this crowd,” said Mathews, taking a swig of brandy from his flask. “We could climb to the top and offer someone to the gods.”

“Don't human sacrifices have to be virgins?” Jeanie asked. “I believe virgins are favored by the gods, are they not, Mr. Melville?”

“Yes, but only by the gods,” Herman replied.

Jeanie stared unflappably back at him. He had met the young lady several times before, in New York, but he remembered her as a quiet, proper girl who wore demure, ankle-length silk skirts and said nothing even remotely provocative; now, he eyed the cuff of her trousers, which exposed the merest glimpse of bare ankles, and suspected that she had fallen in with the Young America movement, perhaps, or the suffragists.

“The sacrifice referred to is that of our
savior
,” Dudley said. “Jesus Christ has relieved us of the burden of offering any sacrifices other than our souls.”

“It's lucky that anyone still wants those,” said Holmes. “Our souls are the least virginal things about us.”

Dudley's outrage blossomed in his face; but, seeing no satisfying direction that this line of inquiry could take, he elected to change tack. “My cottage is just at the end of this lane. That's where Hawthorne and the others will meet us.”

Dudley's cottage was pitched down in a little dell below the road, beside a trickling rivulet that had been dammed to form a pool. They had a view of the entire property as they approached it: the rough-hewn cottage painted a cheery daisy yellow; the little pool behind it, around which a hog and two sheep now lay; and a round yellow barn in the Shaker style, whose main door was open to reveal mounds of hay. Dudley led the party down the path from the road, and he called out to his housekeeper as he flung open the front door. “Maybelle! Do we have a loaf that six could share?”

They entered the cottage and filed through the living room, with its well-stocked bookshelves, to the kitchen, where Dudley's housekeeper was pouring out glasses of milk. They stood around the kitchen table, as if they were already at a picnic, passing a loaf of bread around, tearing off chunks and smearing them with butter, or dunking them into their milk. Dudley's housekeeper left and brought back a jar of cool water from the little stream outside.

Everyone ate ravenously, and Mathews recited the plot of the new play he was working on, which revolved around a family's festivities at Thanksgiving. The drama was a celebration of that unique American holiday, he said, because he was unaware of any theatrical work to date that dealt with the national significance of the Thanksgiving feast. “But I am having great difficulty constraining the action so as to be staged,” he said. “The story keeps running out into the fields and barns. I am considering rewriting the whole work as a novel.”

“Not a bad idea, Cornelius,” said Herman, licking butter from his moustache. “A change of genre entirely! Perhaps that would work with my latest novel, as well.” He drank off a tall glass of milk. “I wonder how I might get a whale onto a stage?”

“The same way you would haul him into a boat, I suppose,” Cornelius answered.

“The trick would not be landing him,” said Evert. “It would be negotiating his contract.”

“One could simply suggest the whale with shadows and sounds,” said Herman thoughtfully. He felt that anything would be better than the version of the story he currently had. He imagined his old whaling boat, the
Acushnet
, on a stage, cut in half lengthwise to reveal its lower holds and inner secrets to an audience. “But there would be no way of getting the truth of the whale onto the stage. The actors would have too much to explain, and the audience could not be made to taste the salt air or imagine the horrible immensity of
the fish.” Then he suddenly yelled, at the top of his lungs, “One cannot stage a chase across the seven seas in a cabaret!” Alarmed, Dudley's housekeeper ran out the kitchen door.

“If you want to give the truth of a subject, you take it to the lecture halls,” Holmes said. The doctor's own lectures on the Lyceum Circuit had been growing in popularity, and he was constantly in demand around New England's libraries and colleges for his observations about medicine, poetry, and everyday life. “I would be happy to arrange some dates for you, Herman, in conjunction with some of my own speaking engagements. I think you would find that a lecture about such an important topic as whaling would be well received and even lucrative.”

“I don't believe a whale could fit into a lecture hall any easier than it could fit into a theater. I mean the truth of the thing, not merely the facts.”

“But where on earth
could
the truth of a whale fit, except the ocean?” said Jeanie. “Aren't the truth of the whale and the whale itself one and the same thing?”

“Of course not,” said Duyckinck. “The truth of ‘winter' is not the season of winter. Truth is a rhetorical concept and natural things just are.”

“But what is the point of representing the so-called truth of any natural thing at all?” Jeanie persisted. “Thanksgiving is one matter. It's an invented ritual. It
requires
explanation. But why not let a natural thing like a whale be exactly what it is and appreciate it as such?”

“I would agree,” Herman said. “Except that nothing is exactly what it appears to be.”

“I suppose you would be the expert on that, Mr. Melville.”

Herman could stand her insinuating banter no longer. “Have I offended you in some way, Miss Field?”

“On the contrary. I've just finished reading
Typee
, so you'll
forgive me if I seem somewhat forward—your influence is entirely to blame! I'm delighted to speak with the Man Who Lived Among the Cannibals.”

Herman hated this nickname, which his publishers had given him to promote his first book. It had been good for sales—they had been right about that—but its novelty had quickly worn off, and now it made him feel like a carnival exhibit. At least, he thought, it explained the young lady's alarming attentions:
Typee
had condemned the Christian missionaries in the South Seas and described the native islanders' hedonistic sexual practices with unusual frankness and sympathy—Herman had even winkingly suggested his own participation in various licentious revelries, marking him as a libertine in the public imagination.

“After all of your extraordinary experiences on the high seas,” Jeanie said, blushing, “I imagine it must be difficult, sometimes, to get along in quaint old New England.”

“Do you know how Melville
actually
survived the cannibals?” Mathews asked.

“Well, I've read his book,” said Jeanie.

“Ask him to show you his tattoo,” said Duyckinck.

Dudley's head wobbled like a slowly deflating balloon. “Surely you do not have blasphemous designs etched into your flesh, Mr. Melville? Or, at the very least, you will refrain from displaying them!”

“Say what you will about the Marquesans,” Herman said. “But they are not blasphemous. They truly believe what they write on their bodies—not like Duyckinck here, who reverses everything he writes in his magazine from one week to the next.”

“As you know, Melville, the advertising copy tends to leave more permanent impressions than the articles,” said Duyckinck. “In any event, the next time
Literary World
issues you a check, I'll write it in invisible ink.”

Holmes dunked a piece of bread into his milk. “Come to think of it, Melville, you should give lectures about cannibals. That's what people want. Something mysterious and frightening.”

“What could be more mysterious and frightening than a whale?” Melville asked.

Dudley said, “If there is mystery in the world, it is the profound mystery of the Creator and the human soul. As for the truth about whales or anything else, it is all just poorly understood fact. The universe is a vast machine whose secrets the Creator will reveal to us as He sees fit.”

“Are you saying that all of existence is merely mechanical but that humans beings are somehow separate?” Herman snapped. “Or that the image of God, in which we were created, is somehow too small to include both men and whales?”

“Well,” said Dudley defensively. He looked around the room for help, but no one else seemed concerned by the suggestion that a whale could reflect the image of God. “Surely you will grant the mystery of the human soul, Mr. Melville—that is why we rely on God's mercy, because the soul has no explanation or salvation but Him.”

“Honestly,” said Jeanie, “I am much more interested in Mr. Melville's cannibal tattoo than the mysteries of the soul.”

“You see, Melville,” said Holmes, brushing breadcrumbs from his sleeve. “People like cannibals. They like
people
, no matter what they eat. It is difficult to make sense of a whale.”

Thunder rumbled overhead, and a gust of wind whipped through the open kitchen door. “There is mystery in everything,” Herman whispered, almost to himself. “And so there is poetry in everything. Even something as monstrous as a whale. But how to unlock its poetry?”

Duyckinck threw a chunk of bread that hit Herman squarely in the forehead. “If you wanted to carry on with your bombastic work, my dear Yankee, why did you leave your desk?”

“Hear, hear,” said Mathews.

From outside, Maybelle yelled something indistinct just as the sounds of clopping and creaking reached their ears. “Hawthorne!” Dudley said, relieved.

They went out to see a fine covered carriage, hitched to two sleek black ponies, coming up the road. The driver was an older man wearing a red livery coat and a white wig, as if the passengers were feudal lords. The carriage stopped in front of the cottage, and the driver climbed down and opened the door.

James Fields, Hawthorne's publisher, emerged first and gave a jaunty wave: he wore a black frock coat more suitable to the opera than a picnic, and he sported a fastidiously waxed black moustache that curled at the ends. He turned and held out his hand for his child bride, Eliza, whose frilly blue dress—with white ribbons around the collar and white petticoats peeking out below the hem—made her seem like a dress-up doll. Then came Harry Sedgwick, the nephew of local novelist Catharine Sedgwick, who was the only person properly dressed for a hike, in blue dungaree trousers and a plain blue shirt, with a red kerchief tied around his neck.

Finally, Nathaniel Hawthorne poked his head out and looked up at the blackening sky. Hawthorne's features were so fine that they could have belonged to a woman: eyebrows that prettily framed his coffee brown eyes; a hawkish Roman nose; sensuous red lips, the bottom lip a wide devouring flare; and waving chestnut hair that fell in ringlets behind his ears. He stared up at the storm clouds for a very long time, as if deciding whether he would leave the carriage at all. His complete disregard of the company assembled on Dudley's porch had a mesmerizing effect on them: everyone simply waited and watched to see what he would do. At last, he put one hand on the door and the other on the driver's shoulder and launched himself out of the carriage, landing with the awkward grace of an
acrobat; and then he stood and looked at everyone as if their presence there surprised him.

Herman found this performance so strange and magnetic that he involuntarily walked directly to Hawthorne and held out his hand. Hawthorne grasped it with a look of frank bemusement.

“Forgive me,” Herman said. “I am Herman Melville.”

“I forgive you,” said Hawthorne.

Herman could not quite explain to himself the clarity that suddenly reorganized his thoughts, a new and inarticulate idea of order that possessed him, both a spiritual awe and bodily weakness. He had never touched a man's hand as soft as Hawthorne's, as if Hawthorne had never done a day of labor in his life, and his whole self condensed into the sensation of that clasping hand and the simultaneous foreignness and familiarity of those probing brown eyes. Presently, he felt the hand squirming in his grasp, and he immediately regretted his incautious and over-ardent way of clasping it, and he flung it away.

Herman turned back to the rest of the group, blushing. Only Jeanie seemed to notice his embarrassment: her eyes twinkled inscrutably.

Since Dudley was the only person who knew everyone, he made introductions all around, absurdly trumpeting the authors' book and play titles and magazine credits in turn. Everyone exchanged hearty congratulations and vigorous handshakes, as if they were being inducted into a secret society; but Herman did not even register the illustrious credits of the other gentlemen, and he barely recognized the titles of his own novels, so fascinated had he become by the exotic Mr. Hawthorne.

“What about a toast?” said Dudley, and he asked Maybelle to open a bottle of champagne. They moved inside, poured wine and clinked glasses. In an unpremeditated show of solidarity, they all
drained their champagne in one go. “And there's more where that came from,” Dudley exclaimed.