John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

" 'Tis a most — interesting point of view," he said.

"I was sure 'twould please ye," Timothy said. " 'Tis the only way for a poet to look at the world."

"Ah, well, I did not say I share your catholic tastes!"

"Come now, sir!" Timothy laughed. " 'Twas not in your sleep ye came here calling Susie!"

Ebenezer made a small mumble of protest; he did not, on the one hand, care to let Timothy believe that the Laureate of Maryland shared his vicious lust for livestock, but on the other hand he was not prepared to reveal the true reason for his presence in the barn.

"Thou'rt too much the gentleman to molest her now," Tim went on. Ebenezer heard him moving closer and retreated another step.

" 'Twas all an error of judgment!" he cried, tingling with shame. "I can explain it all!"

"Wherefore? D'ye think I mean to ruin your name, when ye have spared my Portia? Susan Warren told me all, and I bade her wait for ye; I'll lead ye straight to her, and ye may sport the night away." He caught up before Ebenezer could run and grasped his upper arm.

" 'Tis more than kind," the Laureate said apprehensively, "but I've no wish to go at all. I really am a virgin, I swear't, for all my ill designs on Susan Warren; 'twas some sudden monstrous passion overcame me, that I am most ashamed of now." Again, and bitterly, he remembered his own ill treatment on the Poseidon. "Thank Heav'n I was delayed till prudence cooled my ardor, else I'd done myself and her an equal wrong!"

"Then you really are a virgin yet?" Tim asked softly, tightening his grip on the poet's arm. "And ye still mean to remain one, come what may?"

He spoke in a voice altogether different from the one he'd used until then; it raised the Laureate's hackles, and so drained him with surprise that he could not speak.

" 'Twas not easy to believe," the new voice added. "That's why I said I'd take you to the swine-girl."

"I cannot believe my ears!" the poet gasped.

"Nor could I mine, when Mitchell told me of his dinner guest. Shall we trust our eyes any better?"

He removed the lantern shade completely: in the yellow flare, which drew the slow attention of the swine, Ebenezer saw not the bearded, black-haired "Peter Sayer" Burlingame of Plymouth — though this had been incredible enough! — but the well-dressed, smooth-shaven, periwigged tutor of St. Giles in the Fields and London.

"Is't once, or twice, or thrice I am deceived?" the poet exclaimed. "Is't Burlingame that stands before me now, or was't Burlingame I left in Plymouth? Or are the twain of you impostors?"

"The world's a happy climate for imposture," Burlingame admitted with a smile.

"You were so much altered when I saw you last, and now you've altered back to what you were!"

" 'Tis but to say what of't I've said to you ere now, Eben: your true and constant Burlingame lives only in your fancy, as doth the pointed order of the world. In fact you see a Heraclitean flux: whether 'tis we who shift and alter and dissolve; or you whose lens changes color, field, and focus; or both together. The upshot is the same, and you may take it or reject it."

Ebenezer shook his head. "In sooth you are the man I knew in London. Yet I cannot believe Peter Sayer was a fraud!"

Burlingame shrugged, still holding the lantern. "Then say he hath shaved his hair and beard since then, as doth my version of the case, and no longer affects a tone of voice like this." He spoke these last words in the voice Ebenezer remembered from Plymouth. "If you'd live in the world, my friend, you must dance to some other fellow's tune or call your own and try to make the whole world step to't."

"That's why I'm loath to strike out on the floor" — Ebenezer laughed — "though I came very near to't this night."

Henry laid his hand on the poet's shoulder, "I know the story, friend, and the whore hath fleeced you for the nonce. But I'll get your two pounds from her by and by."

"No matter," the poet smiled ruefully. " 'Twas but a worthless ring I gave her, and I bless the hour she foiled my lecherous plan." The mention of it recalled his friend's recent discourse in the dark, and he blushed and laughed again. " 'Twas for a tease you feigned that passion for a pig, and the rest!"

"Not a bit of't," Henry declared. "That is to say, I have no special love for her, but she is in sooth a tasty flitch, despite her age, and many's the time — "

"Stay, you tease me yet!"

"Think what you will," said Burlingame. "The fact is, Eben, I share your views on innocence."

So surprised and pleased was Ebenezer to hear this confession that he embraced his friend with both arms; but Burlingame's response was a movement so meaningful that the poet cried out in alarm and retreated at once, shocked and hurt.

"What I mean to say," Henry continued pleasantly, "is that I too once clung to my virginity, and for the selfsame cause you speak of in your poem. Yet anon I lost it, and so committed me to the world; 'twas then I vowed, since I was fallen from grace, I would worship the Serpent that betrayed me, and ere I died would know the taste of every fruit the garden grows! How is't, d'you think, I made a conquest of a saint like Henry More? And splendid Newton, that I drove near mad with love? How did I get my post with Baltimore, and wrap good Francis Nicholson around my finger?"

" 'Sheart, you cannot mean they all are — "

"Nay," said Henry, anticipating the objection. "That is, they scarcely think so. But ere I was twenty I knew more of the world's passions than did Newton of its path in space. No end of experimenta lay behind me; I could have writ my own Principia of the flesh! When Newton set his weights and wires a-swing, did they know what forces moved them as he chose? No more than Newton knew, and Portia here — to name no others — what wires of nerve and amorous springs I triggered, to cause whate'er reaction I pleased."

The Laureate was sufficiently astonished by these revelations so that before he could assimilate them Henry changed the subject to one more apparently relevant: their separate crossings from Plymouth and their present positions. He had, he declared, successfully deceived Captains Slye and Scurry into believing that he was John Coode, and in that role had accompanied them to Maryland, confirming in the process Coode's leadership of a sizable two-way smuggling operation: under the rebel's direction, numerous shipmasters ran Maryland tobacco duty-free to New York, for example, whence Dutch confederates marketed it illegally in Curaçao, Surinam, or Newfoundland; or they would export it to the Barbados, where it was transferred from hogsheads to innocent-looking boxes and smuggled into England; or they would run it directly to Scotland. On return trips they imported cargoes from foreign ports directly into Maryland by the simpler device of bribing the local collectors with barrels of rum and crates of scarce manufactured goods.

" 'Tis in this wise," he said, "Coode earns a large part of the money for his grand seditious plots, though he doubtless hath other revenues as well." He went on to assert that from all indications the conspirator planned a coup d' état, perhaps within a year, various of Slye's and Scurry's remarks left little doubt of that, though they gave no hint of the agency through which the overthrow was to be effected.

"Then how is it thou'rt here and not on Nicholson's doorstep?" asked the Laureate. "We must inform him!"

Burlingame shook his head. "We are not that certain of his own fidelity, Eben, for all his apparent honesty. In any case 'twould scarcely make him more alert for trouble than he is already. But let me finish." He told how he had surreptitiously disembarked from Slye and Scurry's ship at Kecoughtan, in Virginia, lest the real Coode be present at their landing in St. Mary's, and had crossed to Maryland in his present disguise — or guise, if Ebenezer preferred — only a few weeks ago. Inquiring after the Poseidon in St. Mary's, he had learned, to his horror, of the Laureate's abduction by pirates.