John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"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.