The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “How should it be otherwise?”

  “ ’Tis plain, sir,” Bertrand explained, “there’s more to this post of yours than meets the eye. I know not what passed ’twixt you and Lord Baltimore, nor is’t my business to enquire what secret cause ye’ve sworn to further—” Here Ebenezer let forth such a torrent of abuse that his valet had need to pause before continuing. “All in the world I mean, sir, is that your common garden laureate is not set upon by knaves and murtherers at every corner as I have been, nor is’t a mere distaste for rhyme, methinks, that drives this villain Coode to seek ye out. For aught we know he may be on this ship; certain he’s aboard the fleet, and Slye and Scurry as well—”

  “Nay, not they,” Ebenezer said, “but haply Coode.” He described Burlingame’s stratagem briefly. “ ’Twas Henry bought a passage in your name,” he explained, “and left the scoundrel stranded with the fleet.”

  “ ’Twill but inflame him more,” said Bertrand, “and who knows what confederates might be with him? Belike he hath a spy on every boat!”

  “ ’Twere not impossible, from what I’ve heard of him,” Ebenezer admitted. “But what’s the aim of all this talk? Think you to persuade me into skulking caution and not to tell my office to the world? Is’t to weasel out of penance and confession?”

  Bertrand protested vigorously against such misconstruction of his motives. “Confess I shall,” he declared, “right readily, and mark it light penance for my imposture—which pray recall I practiced for no vicious ends, but to save that part which makes man man. Yet penance ne’er healed wound, sir.” He went on to praise the bounteous and forgiving nature of his master and to upbraid himself for repaying kindness with deceit—not forgetting to justify once more his imposture and to review, apropros of nothing, sundry evidences of the high esteem and confidence in which old Andrew held him. At length he concluded by maintaining that what he sought was not mere penance but restitution; some means wherewith to atone for what humiliation and discomfort his wholly innocent imposture had occasioned the noblest master poor serv-ingman ever served.

  “And what means is’t you have in mind?” the poet asked warily.

  “Only to risk my life for yours,” the valet said. “Whate’er the cause you serve—”

  “Enough, damn you! I serve the cause of Poetry, and no other.”

  “What I meant, sir, is that whate’er Lord Baltimore—That is to say—”

  “ ’Sblood, then say it!”

  “Since I have played ye to your hurt,” said Bertrand, “let me play ye to your profit. Let me dare the rascal Coode in your name, sir. If he do me in, ’twill be my just desert and your salvation; if not, there’s always time for clean confession when we land. What say ye?”

  The plan so astonished Ebenezer that he could not at once find language strong enough to scourge the planner for his effrontery, and—alas!—the moment till he found his tongue discovered the scheme’s unquestionable merits. The Laureateship was in truth a perilous post—of that he’d proof enough by now, though why he’d still small notion; John Coode was undeniably aboard the fleet and doubtless wroth at having been duped; Burlingame, despite his fanciful last assurances, was not on hand to protect him. Finally and most persuasively, the poet still shuddered at his morning’s escape from Slye and Scurry at the King o’ the Seas; only the appearance of Bertrand in the street had saved his life.

  “If ’twill ease your conscience,” he said at last, “I cannot say ye nay, at least for the nonce—’twill give me time to write some verse below. But Coode or no Coode, Bertrand, I swear you this: ’tis the last time I’ll be any man whate’er save Eben Cooke. D’you hear?”

  “Very good, sir,” Bertrand nodded. “Shall I send word to the Captain?”

  “Word? Ah, yes—that I’m thy Bertrand, a fop that makes pretense to glory. Aye, spread the word!”

  12

  The Laureate Discourses on Games of Chance and Debates the Relative Gentility of Valets and Poets Laureate. Bertrand Sets Forth the Anatomy of Sophistication and Demonstrates His Thesis

  WHEN THE POSEIDON, running before a fresh breeze from the northeast, left Lizard Point behind and in company with the rest of the fleet set her course southwest to the Azores, life on shipboard settled into its wonted order. The passengers had little or nothing to do: aside from the three daily messes and, for those who had the ingredients with them, the intervening teas, the only other event of the normal day was the announcement of the estimated distance traveled during the past twenty-four hours. Among the gentlemen a good deal of money changed hands on this announcement, and since servants, when idle, can become every bit as bored as their masters, they too made bets whenever they could afford to.

  The wagering, as a rule, was done at the second mess, since the runs were computed from noon to noon. Upon arising in the morning, every man sought out some member of the crew, to inquire about the progress of the night past; all morning the company watched the wind, and finally made their estimations. At midday the Captain himself mounted the poop, quadrant in hand, and on notice from the first mate that it was twelve o’clock sharp, made the traditional “noon sight” for longitude; retiring then to his quarters he computed latitude by dead reckoning from the compass course and the estimated distance run since the last measured elevation of the polestar before dawn—which crucial figure was itself reckoned from data in the ship’s log concerning the direction and velocity of the wind, the height and direction of the seas, and the making, taking in, and setting of the sails, together with the Captain’s own knowledge of the direction and velocity of ocean currents in the general area at that particular time of year, and of the ability of each of his officers to get the most out of the men on his watch and the ship itself. Since even under full sail the Poseidon rarely made more than six miles per hour and never more than eight—in other words, a fast walk—the daily run could be anything from zero, given a calm (or, given stormy headwinds, even a negative quantity), up to one hundred ninety-two miles—which theoretical maximum, however, she never managed to attain. Having computed latitude and longitude, the Captain was able to plot the Poseidon’s estimated position on his chart with parallel rule and dividers and, again allowing for winds, currents, the leeway characteristics of his vessel, and compass variation, he could give the helmsman a corrected course to steer until further notice. Finally he would enter the main cabin for his midday meal with the ladies and gentlemen among his passengers, who in the meantime had pooled their wagers and their estimates and, after announcing the official figure, he would bid the mate search out the closest approximation from among the folded bits of paper and identify the winner of the day.

  The basic gamble was the pool—five to ten shillings a head, usually, for the gentlemen and ladies; a shilling or less for the servants—but the more ambitious speculators soon contrived a variety of side bets: a maximum or minimum figure, for example, could be adjusted for virtually any odds desired, or one could gamble on a maximum or minimum differential between each day’s run and the next one. As the five days passed and boredom increased, the sport grew more elaborate, the stakes higher: one really imaginative young minister named George Tubman, suspected by the other passengers of being a professional gambler in disguise, devised a sliding odds system for accepting daily bets on the date of raising Flores and Corvo—the westerly islands of the Azores—a system whereby the announcement of each day’s run altered the standing odds against each projected date-of-landfall according to principles best known to the clever young man who computed them, and one could in the light of each day’s progress make new wagers to reinforce or compensate for the heightened or diminished probability of one’s previous wagers on the same event. This system had the advantages of cumulative interest and a tendency towards geometrically increasing stakes, for when a man saw his whole previous speculative investment imperiled by an unusually long or short day’s run, he was naturally inclined to cover himself by betting, on what now seemed a more promising date, an amoun
t equal to or exceeding the sum of his prior wagers; and since, of course, each day brought the Poseidon closer to a landfall and narrowed the range of speculation, the odds on the most likely dates lowered sharply, with the result that a man might invest five pounds at the going odds on a currently popular date in order to cover ten shillings previously wagered on a now unlikely one, only to find two or three days later that a third, much larger, bet was required to make good the second, or the first and second combined, and so forth. The excitement grew proportionately; even the Captain, though he shook his head at the ruinous size of the stakes, followed the betting with unconcealed interest, and the crew members themselves, who, of course, would not have been permitted to join in the game even if they could have afforded it, adopted favorites among the bettors, gave, or when possible sold, “confidential” information on the ship’s progress to interested parties, made private little wagers of their own on which of the passengers would win the most money, and ultimately, in order to protect their own bets, volunteered or accepted bribes to convey false information to bettors other than the one on whom their money was riding.

  For his part, Ebenezer wasted little interest at the outset on this activity, to which his attention had been called early in the first week of the voyage. One sparkling April morning Bertrand had approached him where he stood happily in the bow watching seagulls dive for fish, and had asked, in a respectful tone, his general opinion of gambling. In good spirits because of the weather and a commendable breakfast, and pleased to be thus consulted, Ebenezer had explored the subject cheerfully and at length.

  “To ask a man what he thinks of gambling is as much as to ask him what he thinks of life,” was one of the positions he experimented with. “Doth not the mackerel gamble, each time he rises, that yonder gulls won’t snatch him up, and the gulls make wager that they will? Are we not gamblers all, that match wits with the ocean on this ship of wood? Nay, life itself is but a lifelong gamble, is’t not? From the moment of conception our life is on the line; every meal, every step, every turning is a dare to death; all men are the fools of chance save the suicide, and even he must wager that there is no Hell to fry in. Who loves life, then, perforce loves gambling, for he is Dame Chance’s conquest. Moreover, every gambler is an optimist, for no man wagers who thinks to lose.”

  Bertrand beamed. “Then ye favor games of chance?”

  “Ah, ah,” the Laureate cautioned. He cocked his head, waggled a forefinger, and quoted a proverb which unaccountably made him blush: “There are more ways to the woods than one. It could as well be argued that the gambler is a pessimistic atheist, inasmuch as he counts man’s will as naught. To wager is to allow the sovereignty of chance in all events, which is as much as to say, God hath no hand in things.”

  “Then ye don’t look kindly on’t after all?”

  “Stay, not so fast: one could as readily say the contrary—that your Hobbesian materialist should never be a gambler, for no man gambles that doth not believe in luck, and to believe in luck is to deny blind chance and cold determinism, as well as the materialist order of things. Who says Yea to Luck, in short, had as well say Yea to God, and conversely.”

  “In Heav’n’s name, then!” Bertrand cried, rather less respectfully than at first. “What do ye think of gambling—yea or nay?”

  But Ebenezer would not be pressed. “ ’Tis one of those questions that have many sides,” he said blithely, and turned his attention again to the gulls. Contrary to his expectations, his position aboard the Poseidon was turning out to be by no means altogether unpleasant. He had contrived to establish himself as being not another common servant but a kind of amanuensis to the Laureate, in which capacity, he was permitted access to the quarter-deck at Bertrand’s side and limited converse with the gentlemen; there was no need to conceal his education, since positions of the sort he pretended to were frequently filled by destitute scholars, and by making Bertrand out to be the lofty, taciturn variety of genius, he hoped to be able to speak for him more often than not and thus protect their disguise. Moreover, he could devote as much time as he chose to his notebook and even borrow books from the gentlemen passengers without arousing suspicion; an amanuensis was expected to busy himself with ink, paper, and books, especially when his employer was a poet laureate. In short, it became ever more clear to him as the voyage progressed that his role offered most of the privileges of his true identity and none of the dangers, and he counted the disguise among his happiest inspirations. While the servants relieved their ennui with gambling and gossip about their masters and mistresses, and the ladies and gentlemen with gambling and gossip about one another, Ebenezer passed the hours agreeably in the company of his own work or that of celebrated authors of the past, with whom, since his commission, he felt a strong spiritual kinship.

  Indeed, the only thing he really found objectionable, once his initial embarrassment was forgotten and he had grown accustomed to his position, was mealtimes. For one thing, the food was not what he had imagined: the last entry in his notebook, made just before he fell asleep in the stable of the King o’ the Seas, had been:

  Ye ask, What eat our merry Band

  En Route to lovely MARYLAND?

  I answer: Ne’er were such Delights

  As met our Sea-sharp’d Appetites

  E’er serv’d to Jove and Junos Breed

  By Vulcan and by Ganymede.

  To which, during his very first day as Bertrand’s amanuensis, he had appended:

  The Finest from two Hemispheres,

  From roasted Beef to Quarter’d Deers;

  The Best of new and antick Worlds,

  Fine curry’d Lamb and basted Squirrels.

  We wash’d all down with liquid cheer—

  Barbados Rum and English Beer.

  ’Twere vain to seek a nobler Feast

  In legend’d West or story’d East,

  Than this our plenteous Shipboard Store

  Provided by LORD BALTIMORE.

  This even though he had in fact seen nothing at either breakfast or dinner more exotic than eggs, fresh veal, and a few indifferently prepared vegetables. But three days sufficed to exhaust the Poseidon’s store of every perishable foodstuff; on the fourth appeared instead, to Ebenezer’s unhappy surprise, the usual fare of sailors and sea-travelers: a weekly ration of seven pounds of bread or ship biscuit for master and man alike, with butter scarce enough to disguise its tastelessness; half a pound of salt pork and dried peas per man each mess for five days out of the week, and on the other two salt beef instead of pork—except when the weather was too foul for the cook to boil the kettle, in which case every soul aboard made do for the day with a pound of English cheese and dreams of home.

  All this, however, was mere disillusionment, the fault not of Lord Baltimore, the captain of the Poseidon, or the social order, but merely of Ebenezer’s own naïveté or, as he himself felt mildly, not troubling to put it into words, of the nature of Reality, which had failed to measure up to his expectations. In any case, though the food grew no more palatable, he soon became sufficiently inured to it not to feel disappointed between meals. A more considerable objection—which led him one afternoon to profess his discontent to Bertrand—was that he had to eat with the servants after the ladies and gentlemen were finished.

  “Think not ’tis the mere ignominy of’t,” he assured his valet hastily, “though in truth they are an uncouth lot and are forever making sport of me. ’Tis you I fear for; that you’ll be drawn into talk at the Captain’s table and discover yourself for an ass. Thrice daily I wait for news of your disgrace, and despair of carrying the fraud to Maryland!”

  “Ah, now, sir, have no fear.” They were in the ship’s waist, and Bertrand seemed less concerned with Ebenezer’s complaint than with watching a young lady who stood with the Captain by the taffrail. “There’s no great trick to this gentleman business, that I can see; any man could play the part that hath a ready wit and keeps his eyes and ears open.”

  “Indeed! I’d say
so much for my disguise, perhaps; they are no fools you dine with, though, but men of means and breeding.”

  But so far from being chastened by this remark, the valet actually challenged it, still watching the maid more than his master while he talked.

  “Marry, sir, none knows better than your servant the merits of wealth and birth,” he declared benignly. “Yet, may I hang for’t if any man was e’er more bright or virtuous for either.” He went on to swear by all his experience with fine ladies and gentlemen, both as their servant and as their peer, that no poor scullery maid among Ebenezer’s messmates was more a hussy than yonder maiden on the poop, for example, whom he identified as one Miss Lucy Robotham. “For all her fine clothes and fancy speech, sir, she blushed not a blush this noontime when the Captain pinched her ’neath the table, but smartly pinched him back! And not a half hour later, what time I took her hand to help her up the stairway, what did she do if not make a scratching in my palm? A whore’s a whore whate’er her station,” he concluded, “and a fool a fool whate’er his wealth.”

  Ebenezer did not question the verity of this democratic notion, but he denied its relevance to the problem. “ ’Tis not character and mother wit that make your gentleman, Bertrand,” he said, adding the name in order to draw his eyes from Miss Robotham. “ ’Tis manners and education. By a thousand signs the gentleman knows his peer—a turn of phrase, a choice of wine, a flourish of the quill—and by as many spies the fraud or parvenu. Be you never so practiced at aping ’em, ’tis but a matter of time till they find you out. A slip of the tongue, a slip of the fork: any trifle might betray you.”

  “Aye,” laughed the other, “but for what, prithee?”

  “Why, for not a gentleman ‘to the manner born,’ as’t were!” Ebenezer was disturbed by the increasing arrogance of his servant, who had not wanted presumption to begin with. “How shall you answer them book for book, that have no books to your credit? How shall you hold forth on the new plays in London or the state of things on the Continent, that have not been through a university? Your true authentic gentleman is gallant but not a fop, witty but no buffoon, grave but not an owl, informed but not a pedant—in sum, he hath of every quality neither excess nor defect, but the very Golden Mean.”