The Whale (3 page)

“We've brought along something of a feast ourselves,” Eliza said. “Some wine and a smoked beaver that I prepared last night.”

“Shall we be off, then? Maybelle, did you hitch up our wagon?”

James and Eliza Fields climbed into their carriage with Sedgwick and Hawthorne, and their driver mounted the bench and snapped the reins. The group that had arrived by train clambered into Dudley's wagon, which Maybelle had supplied with picnic baskets, and they were off. Dudley sat on the bench, loosely holding the reins; and while Mathews passed his flask to Duyckinck, and Jeanie smoothed her dress over her trousers, and Holmes took another pinch of snuff from his bag, Herman sat staring fixedly forward at the small round window in the carriage in front of them, where the mysterious head of Nathaniel Hawthorne bobbed along to the rhythm of the trotting ponies.

Monument Mountain awaited three miles to the east, looming like a headless sphinx on the horizon, and Mathews, as he was always wont to do, suggested they play riddle games to pass the time. Duyckinck began.

Four wings I have, which swiftly mount on high,

On sturdy pinions, yet I never fly;

And though my body often moves around,

Upon the self-same spot I'm always found,

And, like a mother, who breaks her infant's bread,

I chew for man before he can be fed.

“Really, Evert!” said Mathews. “We all learned that one at school. It's a windmill, of course.” Then Mathews took a turn.

Sometimes I have sense, sometimes I have none;

Sometimes I offend, then you bid me begone;

Sometimes I am merry, sometimes I am sad;

Sometimes I am good, sometimes very bad;

However, to make me, I cost many brains,

Much labor, much thought, and a great deal of pains.

“Since you are a playwright,” said Jeanie immediately, “I will guess that it's a play.” Several more rounds of this game followed, each offering sometimes more and sometimes less clever and enigmatic
rhymes, until they grew bored of it and fell into silence, under the spell of the gently swaying cart. Twice, a sprinkling rain began and they thought nervously of finding shelter beneath a bower of trees; and twice the rain abated and left them rolling along somewhat damp but enjoying the drama of the storm and its unknowable progress. James and Eliza Fields and Hawthorne remained concealed inside their carriage up ahead, while Sedgwick inexplicably joined their driver on his bench, out in the rain.

By the time they reached the base of Monument Mountain, a light drizzle was falling steadily, and they took a vote to determine whether they should turn back or head up the slope. The vote was unanimous to carry on with the hike, and then they again voted unanimously to open more wine. Mathews rummaged in the picnic baskets and found a bottle of Heidsieck, the new French champagne that had come into vogue that year; and as the cork flew off into the clover at the side of the road, Dudley reported that Maybelle had failed to pack cups and that they would be obliged to pass the bottle.

Feeling more ebullient and caring less and less about the rain, they guided their horses under the eaves of some nearby elms and gave them feed bags. They then secured their beasts, divvied up the picnic baskets, and set out on foot, passing the champagne as they went.

Herman charged up the hill, pointing at the humped top of the mountain and shouting, “Thar she blows.” He crested the first little rise and sprinted toward a crevice between boulders. Mathews and Duyckinck and Sedgwick raced close behind, elbowing each other playfully into the bushes, and Hawthorne, loping along farther back, shouted, “There is an Indian behind that tree,” and “Eyes out for convicts hiding in those rocks,” and “I saw the devil's tail in that grove!” James and Eliza Fields, in their dandified city clothing and shiny leather shoes, slipped and slid on the wet grass and fell farther
and farther behind, Eliza's chignon giving out in the rain and her wet hair clinging to her cheeks.

Thunder banged at their ears, and Herman leapt out onto a spit of rock and pantomimed pulling on a ship's bowline. Holmes cut a switch with a scalpel from his bag and paraded under it, as if it were a lady's parasol; and then he cut and offered more such ineffectual parasols to the others. The rain increased steadily, and by the time they were halfway up the peak, they were forced to find shelter or be soaked through. Herman bounded and gamboled like a ram, hither and yon, first to one side and then the other of the crevice they were following up the mountain, and he soon found a massive outcropping of slate just off their path—a rocky shelf that hung over a dry, gravelly space large enough to shelter the entire party. They ducked underneath this natural ceiling and shook water from their hands and puffed and whooped; James and Eliza came straggling up behind the rest of the group, their fine frockery looking much the worse for the rain, though Fields's moustache remained as sharply and attractively curled as ever.

Fields opened a bottle of brandy and passed it around, and the picnic began in earnest. The rain fell in giant drops around them and ran off the edges of the overhang in sheets. They practically had to shout to hear one another over the torrent, and as they passed around bread and salami and cheeses and peaches and smoked beaver and brandy and more champagne, they found themselves congregating naturally into little islands of two and three, the most easily to hear one another's conversation. Herman stayed close to Hawthorne; when Dudley went to search the picnic baskets for a tin of caviar, he found himself alone with the mesmeric figure, on the fringes of the party, just at the edge of the outcropping, where the splashing of water made their speech unintelligible to the others.

He leaned toward Hawthorne, wishing urgently to communicate
something of the sorceries that had bewitched him at the moment of their meeting, but he could find no words for his feelings. In fact, he imagined that no human language could ever express what he now felt, since it seemed inspired not only by Hawthorne in his person but also by some mystical new alignment in the heavens. Hawthorne seemed the living expression of an idea so well formulated in Herman's own mind that his only response could be, “Yes, true, what an elegant solution.”

“This cheddar is excellent,” said Hawthorne. He sliced a bite from the hunk in his hand and gave the cheese and knife to Herman, who held them out in front of himself as if they were a shield and a sword. Hawthorne stared out at the downpour.

“I have been thinking all day,” Herman finally croaked out, “about the correspondence between the physical expression of a thing and the truth of the thing, and how one might infer the latter from the former.”

“A thing? Any thing? Like that cheese you're holding, for instance?”

Hawthorne was fifteen years Herman's senior, but his face seemed to Herman to defy the laws of earthly decay. So noble did Hawthorne seem that Herman conjectured that some unique mechanism had gradually been transferring his inner beauty touch by touch outward toward his external features with each passing day, so that, even long into the future, when Hawthorne would be much advanced in years, his inward nobility would compensate so fully for his outward decrepitude that his face would become almost ethereal.

“Yes,” said Herman. “Like this cheese.”

“You mean that you have been meditating on whether or not the physical expression of this cheese might imply something even more perfectly cheesy, like its Platonic form? Or do you mean that you have been contemplating the cheese's ultimate meaning in the way
that this particular block of cheese is both itself and a representative of all cheddars and also a representative of the larger class of cheese generally and of all products of man or even all material things in the universe, so that the mystery of this cheddar becomes impossible to solve, either through science or meditation; and since no starting point can be fixed for the universe, other than to propose a creator God who started everything one day on a whim, one must be content with the ambiguity of this hunk of cheddar as both concretely existing and yet having no demonstrable first cause, no matter how well known the cheese itself might be to the touch and the taste?”

“That's exactly what I meant!” Herman sliced off a hunk of the cheddar and deposited it in his mouth.

“Yes, I see your point.”

“But even more than that,” Herman said. “I have been considering the possibility that the facts that can be ascertained about this cheese fail to satisfy because the facts themselves mask a metaphysical truth that can be known only through the transcendent, poetic expression of the cheddar. That is, though the world itself can never truly be known, one might begin to know some truth
about
the world through a
metaphysical cheese
.”

Dudley returned and stood over the two authors, who were gazing intently at the cheese in Herman's hand. “Caviar?” he said.

Hawthorne ignored Dudley and responded instead to Herman, with a passion that caught Herman off guard. “Yes! In much the same way one might propose that Jesus, while offered to us by the churches as either a physical or a moral fact, should rather be seen as the
poetry
of mankind, since the facts that can be known about Him obviously matter very little and his moral authority depends solely upon belief.”

Herman said, “You're saying that Jesus came not to redeem humanity's original sin but rather to call into question the concept of
sin itself through the poetry of a grand gesture? An ultimately Romantic gesture?”

“Yes, but I would not discard the idea of original sin. It's a fruitful context for meditation, even if it is merely poetical.”

“But would you agree at least that the proper formulation of the problem is poetical first? And that asking the question matters more than finding the answer?”

“It sounds like you are saying,” Hawthorne said, “that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Dudley walked away with his caviar.

Herman said, “Unfortunately, there's one little thing wrong with that Scripture. It should have read, in the beginning was the Question, and the Question was with God, and the Question was God.” He cut a piece of cheese. Hawthorne took and ate it, and then Herman reached for a bottle of wine near him, and he gave it to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne likewise took the wine and drank.

“The cheese that can be eaten and the wine that can be drunk are not the real cheese and the real wine,” said Herman.

“Unless they are,” said Hawthorne, winking.

Herman felt an acute sensation of relief, a long spiritual exhalation. Hawthorne had a magical effect on him. For the first time in as long as he could remember, a finger of light, like the first ray of dawn, shone into the dark cavern of his soul.

“It seems the end of the brandy is also the end of the storm,” Mathews shouted drunkenly, and he spread his arms wide to indicate the slackening rain all around them. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds, creating a hundred tiny rainbows in the rivulets of water still splashing off the sides of the overhanging rock. Dr. Holmes held up a nearly empty bottle of brandy, from which he drank in a silent toast to the sun and the revelers, and then he passed
the bottle. They managed to make the brandy last until every last member of the picnic had had a final sip. Hawthorne took the next-to-last swallow, and Herman thought that he saw Hawthorne's lips linger on the bottle just a little as his eyes met Herman's; and when he passed the bottle to Herman, its mouth was still warm with Hawthorne's slightly drunken kiss.

As the rain gave way completely to mottled sunshine, they packed up their picnic and headed back down the mountain, well lubricated and telling tales. Mathews and Duyckinck cast the rest of the party in roles for a little folderol that they made up as they tramped downhill. Mathews's alter ego was “Silver Pen” and Melville became “New Neptune”; Hawthorne was “Mr. Noble Melancholy,” Jeanie “Princess Picnic,” and they went on and on making up silly names and creating absurd little nursery rhymes that told of equally absurd situations.

By the time they reached their wagons at the bottom of the mountain, they were happily weary from the walk and the talk and the rhyming, and they clambered into their conveyances, to be borne back to Stockbridge. On the return trip, Jeanie rode in the Fieldses' carriage, having developed a fondness for Eliza during the picnic, and Sedgwick once again ascended to their driver's bench, this time impertinently stealing the driver's white wig for himself. Holmes rode next to Dudley on the bench of Dudley's wagon, and Herman and Hawthorne sat across from one another in the back, next to Mathews and Duyckinck.

In no time, Mathews and Duyckinck had nodded off, under the influence of the wine and the refreshingly cool air, leaving Hawthorne and Melville to stare at one another in silence. Herman shifted his leg ever so slightly toward Hawthorne's, so that the fabric of their breeches touched; and the wagon jostled them closer still. Herman felt the warmth of the older author's calf against his, and Hawthorne neither moved away nor broke Herman's gaze.

Occasionally, Mathews or Duyckinck would awaken, and Herman would peer nonchalantly over Hawthorne's shoulder, as if he were merely taking in the rain- and sun-drenched earth; but the moment their fellow passengers nodded off again, he would look back into Hawthorne's eyes, and Hawthorne continued to stare at him unabashedly, unnervingly. Herman sometimes felt that Hawthorne was laughing at him, so full of ironic humor was his gaze; but the pressure of Hawthorne's leg against his told him otherwise.

Herman forgot all about his whale manuscript, and he forgot about his debts and even about his wife and son and mother, who were, at that very moment, having tea together in Pittsfield, waiting for him to return. He forgot about himself. The only thing he knew for certain was the radiance of Nathaniel Hawthorne.