John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

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.

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.