John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

She hid her face, and he climbed down. A few minutes later the pirates had cast off the grapples and were doing their best to make sail. Looking back over the widening stretch of ocean. Ebenezer saw the women of the Cyprian untie their colleagues at the rail and set free the crew. Up in the mizzen-rigging he could still discern the white figure of the girl, his desire for whom, unsatisfied, began already to discommode him. The relief he felt at the accidental rescue of his essence was, though genuine, not nearly so profound a sensation as had been his possession in the rigging, which he could not begin to understand. Surely, he insisted, there was more to it than simple concupiscence: if not, why did the thought of the Moor's attack, for example, make him nearly ill with jealousy? Why had he chosen the girl in the ratlines instead of those along the rail? Why had her resemblance to Joan Toast (which for that matter he may only have fancied) inflamed rather than cooled his ardor? His whole behavior in the matter was incomprehensible to him.

He turned away and made for his cell in the rope-locker, both to assure himself of the safety of his precious manuscript and in some manner to alleviate, if he could, his growing pain. Even as he lowered himself down the fo'c'sle com-panionway a sharp, shrill female cry rang out through the darkness from the brigantine's direction, followed by another and a third.

"Their turn, now," said someone on the shallop, and a number of the pirates chuckled. The blood rushed from Ebenezer's brain; he swayed on the ladderway and found it necessary to pause a moment, his forehead pressed against an upper rung.

"She's but a whore; a simple whore," he said to himself, and was obliged to repeat the words several times before he could proceed with his descent.

Whether because he thought he had put it away for safekeeping before boarding the Cyprian or because he was too drunk on returning to notice its absence, Captain Pound did not disclose the loss of the Journal fragment until after noon of the following day, by which time Ebenezer had found an even better hiding-place for it. Thinking it imprudent to trust his valet too far, he had waited until Bertrand went on deck that morning and had then transferred his prize from under his pallet to a fold in the canvas of a brand new sail which lay at the bottom of a pile of others on a large shelf near at hand. Thus when in the afternoon he and Bertrand stripped to the skin with the rest of the crew and stood by while Boabdil and the Captain combed the ship, he was not alarmed to see them throw aside the rag-beds in his cell: for them to unfold and refold every spare sail on the shelf would have been unthinkable. After a two-hour search failed to discover the manuscript, Captain Pound concluded that someone from the Cyprian had sneaked aboard to steal it. All that day and the next the pirates raced to find the brigantine again, until the sight of Cape Henlopen and Delaware Bay put an end to the chase and forced them back to the safety of the open sea.

His loss made the Captain daily more sour and irascible. His suspicion naturally fell heaviest on Ebenezer and Bertrand: though he had no reason to believe that either had prior knowledge of the Journal's presence on the ship and no evidence that either had stolen it — both had been seen aboard the Cyprian, for example — he nevertheless confined them to their cell again, out of ill humor. At the same time he had the Moor lay ten stripes on the sailmaker's aged back as punishment for failing to see the thief: the flogging could be heard in the rope-locker, and Ebenezer had to remind himself, uncomfortably, that the manuscript was exceedingly valuable to the cause of order and justice in Maryland. To Bertrand, who had nearly swooned during the search of their quarters, he declared that he had thrown the Journal into the sea for fear of discovery, and that old Carl was after all a pirate whom any judge ashore would doubtless hang.

"Nonetheless," he added resolutely, "should I hear they mean to kill or torture anyone for't, even that loathesome beast Boabdil, I shall confess." Whether he would in fact, he did not care to wonder; he made the vow primarily for Bertrand's sake, to forestall another defection.

"Small difference whether ye do or no," the valet answered. "Our time's nigh up in either case." He was, indeed, perilously disheartened; from the first he had been skeptical of Ebenezer's plan to escape, and even that long chance was precluded by their present confinement. In vain did Ebenezer point out that it was Bertrand who, by his conduct aboard the Cyprian, had spoiled their best opportunity to escape: such truths are never consolations.

Their prospects darkened as the day of the shallop's scheduled rendezvous approached. They heard the crew in the fo'c-'sle complain of the Captain's mounting severity: three had been put on short rations for no greater crime than that Pound had overheard them comparing notes on the Cyprian women; a fourth, who as spokesman for the group had inquired how soon they would put into some port, had been threatened with keelhauling. Daily the two prisoners feared that he would take it into his head to put them to some form of torture. The one bright happenstance of the entire period, both for the crew and for Ebenezer, was the news that the Moor, whom they had come to resent for executing the Captain's orders, had been blessed by one of his victims on the brigantine with a social disease.

"Whether 'tis French pox or some other I don't know," said the man who had the news, "but he is sore as a boil of't and cannot walk to save him."

Ebenezer readily assumed that it was the girl in the mizzen-rigging who had been infected, for though Boabdil had assuredly not confined his exercise to her, none of the other pirates showed signs of the malady. The disclosure gave him a complexly qualified pleasure: in the first place he was glad to see the Moor thus repaid for the rape, yet he quite understood the oddity of this emotion in the light of his own intentions. Second, the relief he felt at so narrowly escaping contagion himself, like the relief at having his chastity preserved for him, failed to temper his disappointment as he thought it should. And third, the presence of infection suggested that the girl had not been virginal, and this likelihood occasioned in him the following additional and not altogether harmonious feelings: chagrin at having somewhat less cause to loathe the Moor and relish his affliction; disappointment at what he felt to be a depreciation of his own near-conquest; alarm at the implication of this disappointment, which seemed to be that his motives for assaulting the girl were more cruel than even the Moor's, who would not have assumed her to be virginal in the first place; awe at the double perversity that though his lust had been engendered at least partially by pity for what he took to be a deflowered maiden, yet he felt in his heart that the pity was nonetheless authentic and would have been heightened, not diminished, during his own attack on her, whereas the revelation that she had not lost her maidenhead to Boabdil materially diminished it; and finally, a sort of overarching joy commingled with relief at a suspicion that seemed more probable every time he reviewed it — the suspicion that his otherwise not easily accountable possession by desire, contingent as it had been on the assumption of her late deflowering and his consequent pity, was by the very perverseness of that contingency rendered almost innocent, an affair as it were between virgins. This mystic yearning of the pure to join his ravished sister in impurity: was it not, in fact, self-ravishment, and hence a variety of love?

"Very likely," he concluded, and chewed his index fingernail for joy.