The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “There is skin of truth on’t, yes,” the Laureate granted; “but ’tis like the mask of sense on a madman or a film of ice on a skaters’ pond—it only makes what lies beneath more sinister.”

  Just then the bell was rung for the gentlemen and ladies to come to supper.

  “ ’Tis our goose that’s cooked,” Ebenezer said gloomily. “You’ll see this hour Miss Robotham marked your ignorance.”

  “Haply so,” said Bertrand with his smile, “but I’d stake your last farthing she thinks I’m a bloody Solomon. We’ll know soon enough who’s right.”

  It was, in fact, closer to four hours before the Laureate was able to speak privately with his man again, for long after the servants had themselves finished eating, the fine folk lingered at cards and brandy in the main cabin. Their very merriment, of course—the sounds of which Ebenezer heard clearly where he stood by the foremast, brooding on the moonlit ocean—seemed to indicate that nothing was seriously amiss; nevertheless his exasperation was tempered by relief when finally he saw Bertrand emerge on the quarter-deck with Captain Meech himself, still laughing at some private joke, and fire up his pipe at the smoking-lamp. The poet felt a pang of envy, yet it was not Bertrand’s manner alone that disturbed him; the truth was, he found the man’s cynical argument as attractive as his own reply and was at bottom satisfied with neither. For that reason, when he asked what had been said at supper concerning the literary wager of the afternoon, he was, if saddened, not surprised by the report.

  “ ’Twas the talk of the table, right enough, sir.” Bertrand puffed and frowned at his pipe. “The Robotham wench told what I’d said and how ye’d glossed it, word for word. To speak plainly, sir, the Colonel, her father, then asked me why I abided so brash a servant, if ye’ll pardon me, as presumes to speak for’s master. The rest took up the cry, and the young piece said at last, one could know me for a poet by the look of me, and yourself for a byo- … beo- … something or other.”

  “Boeotian,” the Laureate said glumly.

  “Aye. ’Twas another of her smutty words.”

  Ebenezer then inquired, not enthusiastically, what answer his man had made.

  “What could I say, to end their gossip? I told ’em flat that naught matters in a secretary save his penmanship. The Captain then summoned up old strumpet Fortune again, that seems their favorite bawd: he knew the passage through, he said, but had forgot just when ’twas spoke in some play or other he named.”

  “Ah.” Ebenezer closed his eyes almost hopefully. “Then ’tis over and done with us, after all.”

  “How’s that, sir? I didn’t bat an eyelash, thankee, but declared ’twas spoke on shipboard an hour past noon, when the post lost his last quid on a short day’s run.” He pulled again on his pipe and spat with satisfaction at the rolling ocean. “No more was said of’t after that.”

  13

  The Laureate, Awash in a Sea of Difficulties, Resolves to Be Laureate, Not Before Inditing Final Sea-Couplets

  AFTER THE FOREGOING conversations with Bertrand, Ebenezer’s dissatisfaction with his position was no longer confined to mealtimes; rather, he took to a general brooding and spiritual malaise. He could write no verse: even the sight of a school of great whales, which in happier times would have set his fancy spinning, now called forth not a single rhyme. At best he had got on indifferently with his messmates; now they sensed his distaste, and resentment added malice to the jokes they made at his expense. When, therefore, after perhaps a week of this solitary discontent, Bertrand confided to him with a happy leer that Lucy Robotham was about to become the Maryland Laureate’s mistress, his reaction to the news was anything but hospitable.

  “Lay a finger on her,” he threatened, “and you’ll finish your crossing in leg irons.”

  “Ah, well, ’tis a little late for that advice, sir; the quail is bagged and plucked, and wants but basting on the spit.”

  “No, I say!” Ebenezer insisted, as much impatient as appalled. “Why must I say it twice? Your gambling runs counter to my better judgment, but fornication—’tis counter to my very essence!”

  Bertrand was altogether unruffled by his master’s ire. “Not in the least,” he said. “A poet without a mistress is a judge without a wig: ’tis the badge of his office, and the Laureate should keep a staff of ’em. My sole concern is to play the poet well, sir.”

  Ebenezer remained unpersuaded. “ ’Tis an overnice concern that makes a whore of the Colonel’s daughter!”

  Here Bertrand protested that in fact his interest in Lucy Robotham was largely dispassionate: Colonel Robotham, he had learned, was one of the original conspirators with John Coode who had overthrown Lord Baltimore’s government in 1689, and, for all he was sailing presently under Governor Nicholson’s protection, he might well be still in secret league with the insurrectionists. “ ’Twould not surprise me,” he declared, “if old Robotham’s using the girl for bait. Why else would he watch us carry on so without a word? Aye, by Heav’n, I’ll hoist him with his own petard!”

  In the face of this new information and his valet’s apparent talent for intrigue, Ebenezer’s resolve began to weaken: his indignation changed to petulance. “You’ve a Sophist’s gift for painting vice in virtue’s color,” he said. “ ’Tis clear thou’rt out to make the most of my name and office.”

  “Then I have your leave, sir?”

  “I wonder you even trouble to ask it these days.”

  “Ah, thankee, sir!” Bertrand’s voice showed obvious relief. “Thou’rt a gentleman to the marrow and have twice the understanding of any wight on the boat! I knew ye for a fine soul the first I e’er laid eyes on you, when Master Andrew sent me to look to your welfare in London. In every thing—”

  “Enough; you sicken me,” the poet said. “What is’t thou’rt after now, for God’s sake? I know this flattery will cost me dear.”

  “Patience, I pray ye, sir,” Bertrand pleaded in a tone quite other than that of his earlier conversations; he was for the nonce entirely the valet again. After reaffirming at length his faith in Ebenezer’s understanding and their mutual interest in preserving their disguise, and asserting as well that they were of one mind as regarded the importance of gentlemanly wagering to that disguise, he confessed that he needed additional subsidizing to maintain appearances, and this at once.

  “Dear God!” the Laureate cried. “You’ve not lost twenty pounds so soon!”

  Bertrand nodded confirmation and explained that he’d wagered heavily in side bets on the past day’s run in order to recoup his former losses, but that despite his most careful calculations he’d lost by a paltry mile or so to Miss Robotham, who he suspected had access to private information from the Captain.

  “Half my savings! And you’ve gall enough to ask for the rest to throw after it!”

  “Far from it, sir,” Bertrand declared. “On the contrary, I mean not only to win your money and mine again, but to pay it back fivefold. ’Tis for this as much as anything I need the Robotham wench.” The Poseidon, he said, was near the end of her second week of southwestering, and the wise money placed the Azores only two or three days distant. So likely was this landfall, in fact, that the bet-covering parson Mr. Tubman demanded a pound for every shilling on those two dates, whereas any date before or afterwards fetched most lucrative odds. Bertrand’s plan, then, was to make such a conquest of Miss Robotham that she would turn to his account all her influence with Captain Meech: if his private estimate of the date or landfall was other than the prevailing opinion, Bertrand would place all his money on and around the new date; if the Captain’s guess concurred with that of the passengers. Miss Robotham would employ every art and wile to induce him to sail more slowly and raise the islands on some later date.

  “Marry, you give me little choice!” Ebenezer said bitterly when his man had finished. “First you make it seem not foolish to take the girl, then you make it downright prudent, and now you make it necessary, albeit you know as well as I at bottom ’tis naught but prurience
and luxury. Take the wench, and my money as well! Make me a name for a gambling whoremonger and have done with’t!”

  Having thus given vent to his feelings, he fetched out his last twenty pounds from the trunk and with great misgivings tendered the sum to Bertrand, appealing a final time to the man’s discretion. The servant thanked him as one gentleman might thank another for a trifling loan and went to seek out Lucy Robotham.

  Following this transaction the poet’s melancholia grew almost feverish. All day he languished in his berth or slouched ungracefully at the rail to stare at the ocean; Bertrand’s announcement, delivered next morning with a roll of the eyes, that the seduction of Miss Robotham was an accomplished fact, elicited only a sigh and a shake of his master’s head; and when in an attempt at cheerfulness the valet subsequently declared himself ready to have his way with strumpet Fortune, the Laureate’s listless reply was “Who trafficks with strumpets hath a taste for the pox.”

  He was, as he himself recognized without emotion, very near a state like that from which he’d been saved once by Burlingame and again, unintentionally, by John McEvoy. What saved him this time was an event actually in keeping with his mood: on the first of the two “wise money” days the fleet encountered its first really severe weather. The wind swung round from north to southwest, increased its velocity, and brought with it a settled storm of five days’ duration. The Poseidon pitched, yawed, and rolled in the heavy seas; passengers were confined below decks most of the day. The smell of agitated bilgewater permeated the cabins, and even the sailors grew seasick. Ebenezer fell so ill that for days he could scarcely eat at the servants’ mess; he left his berth only when nature summoned him either to the ship’s rail or to the chamberpot. Yet, though he voiced his misery along with the others, he had not, like them, any fervent wish for calm: to precipitate a cataclysm is one thing, and requires resolution at the least; but to surrender to and embrace an already existing cataclysm wants no more than despair.

  He did not see Bertrand again until late in the fifth and final day of the storm, Which was also the most severe. All through the lightless day the Poseidon had shuddered along under reefed topsails, the wind having shifted to the northeast, and at evening the gale increased. Ebenezer was on the quarter-deck, in his innocence heaving over the windward rail and in his illness oblivious to the unsavory results. Here he was joined by his valet, as usual dressed in his master’s clothes, who had come on deck for the same purpose and who set about the work with similar untidiness. For a while they labored elbow to elbow in the growing dark; presently Ebenezer managed to ask, “What odds doth the Reverend Tubman give on living through this night? I’d make no bets on’t.”

  At this Bertrand fell to a perfect fit of retching. “Better for all if the bloody boat goes under!” he replied at last. “ ’Tis not a fart to me if I live or die.”

  “Is this the Laureate I hear?” Ebenezer regarded his man’s misery with satisfaction.

  “Don’t speak the word!” Bertrand moaned and buried his face in his hands. “God curse the day I e’er left London!”

  At every new complaint, Ebenezer’s stomach grew easier. “But how is this?” he asked sarcastically. “You’d rather be a gelded servingman in London than a gentleman poet with a mistress and a fortune? I cannot fathom it!”

  “Would God Ralph Birdsall had untooled me!” Bertrand cried. “Man’s cod’s a wretched handle that woman leads him ’round with. Oh, the whore! The treacherous whore!”

  Now the poet’s satisfaction turned to real delight. “Aha, so the cock must crow Cuckoo! By Heav’n, the wench doth well to horn you, that make such a sport of horning others!”

  “Nay, God, ye must not praise the slut!”

  “Not praise her? She hath my praise and my endorsement; she hath my blessing—”

  “She hath your money too,” said Bertrand, “all forty pound of it.” And seeing his master too thunderstruck to speak, he told the tale of his deception. The Robotham girl, he said, had sworn her love for him. and on the strength of it had six days ago, by her own tearful account, mortgaged her honor to the extent of permitting Captain Meech certain liberties with her person, in return wherefore she was able to advise Bertrand to put his money on a date several days later than the favored ones: she had it straight from the Captain that, though Flores was indeed but one day off, a storm was brewing on the south horizon that could set them back a hundred miles with ease. At the same time she cautioned him not to disclose his wager but to give out that he too was betting on the popular dates; she would see to it, she vowed, that the bookmaking minister held his tongue—True love recks not the cost! Finally, should the Poseidon not raise Flores on the proper day, she had a maid with whom the lookout on the larboard watch had fallen quite in love and for whose favors he would swear to raising the jasper coasts of Heaven.

  Thus assured, Bertrand had put his money at fifteen to one on the day to follow this present day—but alas, as he saw too clearly now, the wench had worked a manifold deception! Her real lover, it appeared, was no other soul than the Reverend Tubman himself, for the sake of whose solvency she had led every poor fool in the group to think her his secret mistress and bet on the selfsame date. Then when the storm arrived on schedule, how they all had cursed and bemoaned their losses, each laughing up his sleeve at his advantage over the rest! But now, on the eve of their triumph; on this very day of our Lord which might well be their last; in short, one hour ago, the larboard lookout had sworn to sighting the mountains of Corvo from his perch in the maintop, and though no other eye save his had seen them, Captain Meech had made the landfall official.

  As though to confirm the valet’s story, Captain Meech just then appeared on the poop and ordered the ship hove to under reefed fore-topsail—a measure that the gale alone made prudent, whether Corvo lay to leeward or not. Indeed, the mate’s command to strike the main and mizzen topsails was behindhand, for while the men were still in the ratlines a gust split all three sails and sprang the mizzenmast as well. The foresail itself was raised instead, double-reefed, to keep the ship from broaching to until a new fore-topsail could be bent to its yard; then the crew hurried to clear the wildly flapping remnants of the mizzen topsail—and none too soon, for at the next strong gust on the weakened spar a mizzen shroud parted with the crack of a pistol shot.

  It was at this least fortunate of moments that Ebenezer, sickened anew by the tidings of his ruin, leaned out again over the rail: the fiddle-tight shroud lashed back and smacked him on the transom, and he was horrified to find himself, for an instant, actually in the sea beside the ship! No one saw him go by the board; the officers and crew had their hands full, and Bertrand, unable to look his master in the eye during the confession, still cowered at the rail with his face in his arms. He could not shout for coughing up sea-water, but nothing could have been done to save him even in the unlikely event that anyone heard his cries. In short, it would have been all over with him then and there had not the same wind that formerly returned his heavings to him now blown the top off the next great wave: crest, spray, and senseless poet tumbled back aboard, along with numerous tons of green Atlantic Ocean, and for better or worse the Laureate was safe.

  However, he did not regain his consciousness at once. For what could to him have been as well an hour or a year he languished in a species of euphoria, oblivious to his surroundings and to the passage of time, even to the fact that he was safe. It was a dizzy, dreamlike state, for the most part by no means unpleasant, though interrupted now and then by short periods of uncertain struggling accompanied by vague pain. Sometimes he dreamed—not nightmares at all but oddly tranquil visions. Two recurred with some frequency: the first and most mysterious was of twin alabaster mountain cones, tall and smoothly polished; old men were seated on the peaks, and around the bases surged a monstrous activity the nature of which he could not make out. The other was a recapitulation of his accident, in a strangely altered version: he was in the water beside the Poseidon, but the day was gloriously
bright instead of stormy; the tepid sea was green, glass calm, and not even wet; the ship, though every sail was full, moved not an inch away; not Bertrand, but his sister Anna and his friend Henry Burlingame watched him from the quarterdeck, smiling and waving, and instead of terror it was ecstasy that filled his poet’s breast!

  When at length he came fully to his senses, the substance of these dreams defied recall, but their tranquility came with him to the waking world. He lay peacefully for a long time with his eyes open, admitting reality a fact at a time into his consciousness. To begin with, he was alive—a certain dizziness, some weakness of the stomach, and pains in his buttocks vouched for that, though he felt them with as much detachment as if the ailing members were not his. He remembered the accident without alarm, but knew neither how it had occurred nor what had saved him. Even the memory that Bertrand had lost all his money, which followed immediately after, failed to ruffle his serenity. Gradually he understood that he was lying in a hammock in the fo’c’sle: he knew the look of the place from his earlier confinement there. The room was shadowy and full of the smells of lamp-oil and tobacco-smoke; he heard occasional short laughs and muttered curses, and the slap of playing-cards; somewhere near at hand a sleeper snored. It was night, then. Last of all he realized that the ship was riding steady as a church, at just the slightest angle of heel: the storm had passed, and also the dangerous period of high seas and no wind that often follows storms at sea: the Poseidon was making gentle way.

  Though he was loath to leave that pleasant country where his spirit had lately traveled, he presently swung his legs out of the hammock and sat up. In other hammocks all around him men were sleeping, and four sailors played at cards on a table near the center of the room.

  “Marry!” one of them cried. “There stirs our sleeping beauty!” The rest turned round with various smiles to look.

  “Good evening,” Ebenezer said. His voice was weak, and when he stood erect his legs gave way, and the pain in his buttocks recommenced. He grasped a bulkhead for support.