“Well, look up there now!”

Awe-inspiring clouds had spread wide, like the wings of a gliding bird.

“What is it?” she asked.

He lowered his voice: “An angel.”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

“Guardian?” she asked.

“Yes. Prison guard.” He made a wrestling motion.

“Is it beating you?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “this is something entirely different: We’re beating each other.”

“Farewell,” she said.

In his hand, he still held the warmth of hers. In the meantime, night had fallen; the only gleam that lingered lay above the sea; and far away, at right angles to the channel, the ferryboat had already reached open water.

•

Back in the United States, he declares, “I don’t have a moment to lose. I have a long-held dream. I was biding my time. Now I’m going to fulfill it.” He’s going to settle down in the Berkshires. He buys an old farm named Arrowhead. Surrounding the house, vast stretches of grassland rise and fall, undulate and flow toward a dizzying mass of elm and birch leaves. And, beyond the trees, the hills heave the earth and press it down.

He gets his house in order, rebuilds the chimney, paints the façade, secures the ivy, props up the weathervane, oils the hinges, adds new windows. “Herman,” Mistress Melville says to him, “your head is embalmed.”

It’s a wonderful region. Phenomenal flocks of birds are constantly whipping up the foliage. Everything’s singing, everything’s flowering all of the time. In the still of the night, once the nightingale has quieted down, you hear the wild does bleating, softly, as they graze on the arbor’s Virginia creeper.

“Yes,” he says, “you see, it was something I wanted and needed to accomplish quickly. There are certain urges I have to get rid of this way.”

He doesn’t go into details, but you can plainly see that he’s launching himself headfirst into a multitude of dreams; that in the twinkling of an eye he’s stood them on their feet and spanked them, like newborns, and brought them to life. But not long afterward, he abandons them. Some evenings, if you hadn’t told him it had been a beautiful day, that it was a lovely evening and was going to be a wonderful night, he wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

He’s neighbors with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he admires with a passion. They stroll along the country lanes or through the fields together.

“You see,” Herman says to him, “this situation can’t last. I’m in the grip of strange, conflicting desires. Everything’s all right, of course—everybody faces the same lot in life—but, you see, you never know exactly what you have in your heart. It’s quite possible that what’s there, in my case, might be a bit hypocritical toward my own self. I’m going to get working. Just lately, in connection with certain thoughts, I’ve remembered a strange story about a whale.

“Around 1810, this whale was to the lee of the island of Mocha, off the coast of Chile. They attacked it more than a hundred times, and more than a hundred times the whale was the victor. You could even say the whale put to flight (that’s the very term for it), that it put to flight three English whaling ships by leaping at them while they were beating a retreat. When it leapt at them, it really did come clear out of the sea, right up to the level of the guardrails. This whale quickly became famous. You couldn’t round Cape Horn without wanting to have a go at it. Because of its age, or maybe because of some freak of nature, it was as white as snow. When you saw it from a distance, you could never tell if it was the whale, or a cloud lying low at the horizon. And every time you encountered another ship on the open sea, you’d shout out, ‘Say, do you have any news of Mocha-Dick?’ And so, I remembered all of that, I don’t know why. This unattainable thing . . . do you understand?”