The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “Dear God in Heaven!” his thoughts cried out, and he tingled to the marrow. The connection he’d not seen till then suffused him with remorse and consternation: had Joan Toast somehow got aboard the Cyprian? Was it she whom he had stalked with prurient cries, and whom the horrid Moor… ? His features waxed so rampant at this unspeakable possibility that his host at once inquired about his health.

  “Nay, sir, I beg pardon,” Ebenezer managed to say. “ ’Tis but fatigue, I swear’t!”

  “To bed, then, ere ye die here in the parlor,” Captain Mitchell laughed. “I’ll show ye where to sleep.”

  “Nay, prithee—” begged the poet, afraid lest he miss his scheduled assignation.

  “Fie on your London manners, Mister Cooke!” the host insisted. “In Maryland when a man is tired, he sleeps. Susan! Susan, ye lazy trollop, get thee hither!”

  “Ah, well, sir, if ’tis no affront to you or your gracious guests—” The swine-maiden appeared in the doorway of the parlor, answered Ebenezer’s glance with a little nod, and turned a sullen glare upon the planters, who greeted her appearance with horny salutations.

  “Show Mister Cooke here to a bedchamber,” Mitchell ordered, and bade his guest good night.

  “D’ye think she’ll lay for a sonnet,” Jim Keech called after him, “like that Spanish whore ye spoke of?”

  “Nay, Keech,” another answered. “What use hath Susie of a laureate poet? She hath Bill Mitchell’s red boar to sport with!”

  If these comments mortified Ebenezer they titillated him as well, and revived the vague ardor that his late conjecture had not entirely douched. The swine-maiden had donned her flogging-dress, which if scarcely more elegant than the other, was at least clean, and to judge by the smell of her she had washed herself as well. As soon as they were on the stairs he caught her arm and whispered “Where is Joan Toast? I cannot wait to see her!”

  The woman’s imperfect teeth glinted in the light of her candle. “Thou’rt passing ardent for a virgin, Master Laureate! I fear for your vows when ye see her in your chamber…”

  “My chamber? Ah, God, Mrs. Warren, ’twas in my chamber I saw her last, as pink and naked as a lover’s dream! You’d not believe how fine her fair skin feels, or how tight and sprightly is her whole small body—ah, stay, not all, at that: how could I forget the fat of her little buttocks, o’ertop the hard young muscle? Or the softness of her breasts, that gently flattened when she lay supine, but hung like apples of Heav’n when she bent o’er me? I shiver at the memory!”

  “Marry, thou’rt afire, sir!” Susan said, leading the way down an upstairs hall. “I dare not leave the poor girl in your clutches: ye sound more like a rapist than a priest!”

  She said this drily, without any real concern, but the mention of rape was enough to calm the poet’s fever. “I beg your pardon for speaking thus, madam: ’tis rum, fatigue, and joy that work my tongue. Prithee recall I never swived this girl, albeit she’s everything I say and more. I’ve no mind to break my vows.”

  Susan paused outside a door and turned toward him so that the candlelight flickered on her ruined face. “How can ye know she still hath all her beauty?” she said. “I too was pretty once, and not long since. My husband wept with joy to see my body, and did I place his hand just so, his knees would fail him. Today ’twould make him retch.”

  “Thou’rt too severe,” the poet protested.

  “D’ye think I cannot see what’s in your mind? Ye wish I’d get me gone posthaste, so ye might have appetite for that heavenly fruit ye long for. But life leaves its scars on all of us, the pure as well as the wicked, and a pretty girl gets the worst of’t. Ye’ve changed as well, I’ll wager, since she saw ye last.”

  Ebenezer rubbed his matted beard. “I am no courtier, at that,” he admitted, “and I stink of dirt and wood smoke. Is there a pail hereabouts to wash in? Ah, fie on it! Let her receive me as she will, I cannot wait to see her! Good night to you, Mrs. Warren, and good luck. A thousand thanks for aiding my dear Joan! Adieu, now, and bon voyage!” He moved to pass beside her to the door.

  “Nay, wait!” she pleaded.

  “Not a moment more!” He pushed past her and stepped into the chamber, which, since it looked out on the river, received some small light from the moon but was otherwise entirely dark. “Joan Toast!” he called softly. “Precious girl, where are you? ’Tis Eben Cooke the poet, come to save you!”

  The moonlight showed no other person in the chamber, nor was there answer from the shadows roundabout; when the swine-maiden came in tearfully from the hall, her candlelight confirmed his apprehension.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, and when she hung her head he shook her roughly by the shoulders. “Have you deceived me too, thankless trollop? Take me to Joan Toast this instant!”

  “She is not here,” the swine-girl sobbed. She set the candle down and bolted for the hall, but Ebenezer pulled her back and closed the door.

  “By Heav’n, I’ll have it from thy horrid hide,” he said, holding her tightly from behind. “If any harm befalls Joan Toast I’ll kill you!” For all his great alarm, he could not but be conscious of Susan Warren’s corsetless hips under the cotton, and the breasts that were mashed beneath his arm. His righteous anger thrilled him: his breath came short and he squeezed her until she paused in her struggling to cry aloud. He wrestled her to the bed, possessed with the urge to punish. Not having prior experience at such sport, he first laid awkward thumps about her back, at the same time gruffly crying “Where is Joan Toast?” A moment later he held her flat with one knee in the small of her back and commenced to spank her smartly with the flat of his hand as though she were an errant daughter.

  “She’s safe!” squalled Susan. “Leave off!”

  Ebenezer paused between blows, but held her fast with his knee. “Where is she?”

  “She’s on her way across the Chesapeake to Dorset County, to wait for ye at Malden,” Susan said. “The boatman said he knows the manor well.”

  “How’s that?” Ebenezer released his hold at once and sprang to his feet, but the swine-girl, her face pressed woefully into the quilt, made no move to rise. “Where did she get the fare, and how is it thou’rt not with her?”

  “She was penniless,” Susan said. “I caught her on her way to borrow money from Captain Mitchell, which had been the end o’her; but devil the bit she’d take the ring for fare, till I told her who had giv’n it me and whither she was to flee. Then she took it right enough, and would see you on the instant, but I bade her make haste to find the boatman ere he sailed.”

  Tears sprang to Ebenezer’s eyes; with one knee on the bed he hugged the girl’s back. “God’s body, and I struck you for betraying me! Forgive me, Susan, or I shall perish of remorse! We’ll find some way to save you yet, I swear’t!”

  She shook her head. “The girl ye love is a fresh and comely piece, sir, for all she hath played the whore in London; she said she had got her fill o’ men that behaved like goats, and had put by her profession ere it ruined her. She scorned ye once when ye would not hire her, and more when ye resolved to stay a virgin; but the farther she reflected on’t the nobler ye appeared, and when she learned her pimp had got ye sent to Maryland, she left him straight and followed ye for very love.”

  “I’God! I’God! For very love!” the Laureate whispered. “But thou’rt a saint to sacrifice thyself for her!”

  “Joan Toast was worth the saving,” Susan answered. “There’s naught o’ Susan Warren to preserve, or I’d look to’t myself. Let the poor wretch die.”

  “I shan’t allow it!” Ebenezer cried. He sprang to his feet. “Thou’rt too fine!”

  Susan sat up on the bed. “ ’Tis not long since ye called me a horrid trollop, and methinks ye took some joy in beating me.”

  “I was a beast to touch you!” Ebenezer said. “Would God you’d give me back my blows tenfold!”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I am so ugly!”

  “Not so!” the poet lied. “Thou’
rt still uncommon fair, I swear’t!” He kneeled before her, embarrassed and contrite, yet still aroused, despite himself, from the recent tussle. “I shall confess somewhat to you for proof,” he said. “My beating you was doubly wicked, for not only was it undeserved but—ah God, how sinful!—I took pleasure in’t, as you charged. Nor was’t a righteous pleasure, but a lustful one! The feel and sight of your—of what I felt and saw—it fired my veins with lust. Doth that not prove you have not lost your beauty, Susan?”

  The boldness of his speech excited him further, but Susan was not consoled. “It proves my backside’s fairer than my face. That’s not the praise a woman longs to hear.”

  The Laureate pressed his forehead against her legs. His own knees ached a little on the floor, and he remembered, with a shiver, that the last time he had knelt beside a bed it was the legs of Joan Toast that he had clung to. “What can I do to show you my esteem?”

  “ ’Tis not esteem you feel; ’tis simple gratitude.”

  But Ebenezer ignored this sullen reply, for even while Susan was making it he found an answer as if by inspiration.

  “Call’t what you will, ’tis great,” he said. “You have sacrificed your self-respect to save the girl I love. Very well, then: I shall sacrifice my essence to save your self-respect!”

  The swine-maiden looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Do you understand?” Ebenezer rose to his feet, breathing so hard that his speech came with difficulty. “So great is my esteem—that though I’ve vowed to keep my innocence forever—’tis thine in token of my gratitude. ’Twill prove you have not lost your power to please a gentleman!” Trembling all over, he laid his hands on her shoulders.

  Susan looked up at his flushed face with alarm. “Ye wish to swive me, sir? What will Joan Toast think, that loves ye for a virgin?”

  “My chastity means more than life to me,” the poet vowed, “else I’d not presume to match it against your sacrifice. My loss is great, but subtle, and leaves no broken hymen as its symbol. No one shall know but thee and me, and I shall never tell. Come, girl,” he croaked, waxing hot, “tarry no longer! I itch for the combat!”

  But Susan wriggled free and stepped away from him. “Ye’d deceive her, that hath come so far for love! Haply thou’rt already not a virgin, then!”

  “ ’Fore God I am till now,” he said, “and if you call this deed deceit, then grant at least ’tis done for noble cause!”

  She turned away in tears, but when, summoning every particle of his courage, Ebenezer embraced her from behind, she offered no more protest than to cry, “What shall I think?”

  “That thou’rt yet a comely piece!” Astonished at his own temerity, he caressed her. When even then she did not resist, her passivity fired him with encouragement.

  “Ho, here,” he cried, “to the bed with you!” Dizzy with success, he gave his tongue free rein. “I shall cleave thee with the rhymer’s blade, cure thee with the smoke of love, stuff thee with the lardoon of Parnassus, baste and infuse thee with the muse’s nectar, and devour thee while thou’rt yet aquiver!”

  “Nay, prithee,” Susan said, “ye’ve proved your point!”

  “And now shall press and ply it like St. Thomas,” Ebenezer said, “till my virgin quill hath writ a very Summa!”

  “ ’Twere cruel to feign such passion out of gratitude, and wicked to cheat Joan Toast!” She offered resistance now, but Ebenezer would not release her.

  “Then call me cruel and wicked when thou’rt swived!” He pushed her onto the bed.

  “ ’Twill be common rape!” she squealed.

  “So be’t!”

  “Not here, then! ’Sheart, not here!”

  “Why not, pray?” asked the poet; he paused with his innocence at the ready.

  “Some women take a man without a sound,” the swine-girl said, averting her eyes, “but I cannot; whether ’tis a wooing or what have ye, I must hollow like a rutting cat, and flail about.”

  “So much the better,” Ebenezer said.

  “ ’Twill bring the household running—Stop, I warn ye!”

  “They are no canting Puritans, methinks—hold still, there!”

  “Then swive me, damn your eyes!” Susan cried, and gave up struggling altogether. “Break your vow, cheat Joan Toast, let Captain Mitchell come a-running when I scream! He’ll laugh to see’t, and beat me later for’t, and tell the tale all up and down the Province!”

  This possibility gave the Laureate pause. He released his grip on the woman’s arms, and she took the opportunity to move aside and sit up.

  “I’ll throttle you if I must,” he said, but the threat was more surly than sincere.

  “Ye needn’t,” Susan grumbled. “Slack off, now, ere ye take a lover’s pain, and meet me in the barn anon.”

  “Get on with’t. I’m not so gullible. We’ll go together.”

  But Susan explained that they were sure to be seen leaving the house, and the scandal would be the same.

  “I’ll go there now,” she said, “and you come half an hour behind. Then ye may play the two-backed beast to your heart’s content, with none save my swine to hear me.”

  And on this ambiguous pledge she left, before the poet could catch her.

  21

  The Laureate Yet Further Attends the Swine-Maiden

  A VERY FEW MINUTES after Susan Warren’s departure Bertrand entered the Laureate’s chamber and found his master pacing furiously about, sighing and smacking his fist into his hand.

  “ ’Sbody, how these scoundrels eat!” the valet said. His voice was thick and his stance unsteady. “ ’Tis coarse, I’ll grant, but copious.”

  “Methinks you more than quenched your thirst as well,” Ebenezer observed uncordially. “What is’t you want?”

  “Why, nothing that I know of, sir. What I mean, they said I was to sleep here.”

  “Sleep, then, and be damned to you. There’s the bed.”

  “Ah, sir ’tis thine, not mine. Only let me have that quilt; I’ll want no more.”

  Ebenezer shrugged and went to the window; unfortunately he could not see the barn from there. His valet spread the quilt on the floor, flopped heavily upon it, and sighed a mighty sigh. “ ’Tis not the same as being god in a golden town,” he declared, patting his stomach, “but ’twill do for the nonce, i’faith! I wonder how our Drakepecker fares?” When he saw no answer was forthcoming he sighed once more, turned on his side, and in a trice fell fast asleep.

  His master, less tranquil, cracked his knuckles and clucked his tongue, debating what to do. At Susan Warren’s first distraction his mad impulse had faltered, and upon her departure from the room it had foundered altogether. He was at sixes and sevens. Twice now he had come within an ace of fornication—worse, of meaningless rape—and his integrity had been preserved by chance, through outside agencies. The girl in the Cyprian’s rigging had been assaulted and was helpless; the Warren woman had been assaulted and was coarse and ugly in the face; both were objects not for passion but for pity, and what resemblance they bore to Joan Toast, so far from serving as an excuse for his inexcusable behavior, was further indictment of it. All this he saw clearly, and remembered, as well the relief and shame he had felt a fortnight since, after fate had fetched him from the mizzen ratlines. To go now to the barn would be to cheat the girl who, incredibly, had come half around the world for love of a man never smiled on thitherto by any woman save his sister, and to sacrifice besides a good moiety of his essence to a ruined tart between him and whom no love was lost, and who would contemn the deed as much as he. Yet he also saw, and could not fathom, that in his heart the question still lay open.

  “ ’Tis too absurd!” he thought, and flung himself angrily upon the bed where they had grappled. “I shall think of it no more.” He regarded Bertrand with envy, but sleep, for him, was out of the question: his fancy burned with images of the swine-maiden suffering his punishments and molestations, confessing with averted eyes how noisily she wooed, and waiting for him at that moment
in the barn. On the scales of Prudence one pan lay empty, while Reason’s entire weight tipped down the other; what dark force, then, on the scales of Choice, effected counterbalance?

  While thus he lay debating, his valet, though asleep, was by no means at rest. His innards commenced to growl and snarl like beagles at a grounded fox; the hominy and cider in him foamed and effervesced; anon there came salutes to the rising moon, and the bedchamber filled with the perfume of ferment. The author of these snored roundly, but his master was not so fortunate; indeed, he had at length to flee the room, ears ringing, head a-spin, and the smart of bumbolts in his eyes. The guests were still carousing in the parlor; Ebenezer gathered from what he could hear that the host’s son Timothy had returned and was regaling them with indelicate verses. He slipped out to the front porch unobserved to breathe the cool air moving off the river, and from the way-station soon enough strolled barnwards, deaf to the judgment of his conscience.

  The moon shed light to walk by in the yard, but the inside of the barn was black as Chaos. He thought of calling Susan, but decided not to.

  “I shall approach in silence, and clip her like a brigand in the dark!”

  This was a thrilling fancy: he pricked up at every rustle in the barn, and the cramps of love like hatching chicks bid fair to burst their prisons. What’s more, six stealthy paces in the dark were enough to stir his bladder past ignoring; he was obliged to relieve himself then and there before going farther.

  “God aideth those that aid themselves,” he reflected.

  But unlike Onan, who hit no noisier target than the ground, the hapless Laureate chanced to strike a cat, a half-grown tom not three feet distant that had looked like a gray rock in the dark. And like the finger-flick of Descartes’ God, which Burlingame once spoke of, this small shot in the dark set an entire universe in motion! The mouser woke with a hiss and flew with splayed claws at the nearest animal—fortunately not Ebenezer but one of Susan’s shoats. The young pig squealed, and soon the barn was bleating with the cries of frightened animals. Ebenezer himself was terrified, at first by the animals, whose number and variety he had not suspected, and then lest the din, now amplified by barking dogs outside, arouse the household. When he jumped back, holding up his breeches in one hand, he happened upon a stick leaning against the wall—possibly Susan’s staff. He snatched it up, at the same time crying “Susan! Susan!” and laid about him vigorously until the combatants ran off—the shoat into the cow stalls and the cat into a corner whence had come some sound of poultry. A moment later the respite ended: the barn was filled with quacks and squawks; ducks, geese, and chickens beat the air wildly in their effort to flee the cat, and Ebenezer suffered pecks about the head and legs as bird after bird encountered him. This new commotion was too much for the dogs, a pair of raucous spaniels: they bounded in from the yard in pursuit of what they took to be a fox or weasel preying on the poultry, and for all the Laureate thrashed around him with his stick, they ran him from the barn and treed him in a poplar near the closest tobacco-shed. There they held him at bay for some fifteen minutes before trotting off to sleep, their native lack of enthusiasm overcoming their brief ambition.