The Sot-Weed Factor (11 page)

Your Father

Ebenezer was more numbed than stunned by the letter, for he'd anticipated some such ultimatum.

"Marry, 'tis but a week hence!" he reflected with alarm. The notion of leaving his companions just when, having determined his essence, he felt prepared to begin enjoying them, distressed him quite; whatever fugitive attraction the colonies had held for him fled before the prospect of actually going there.

He showed the letter to Bertrand.

"Ah, 'tis as I thought: thy principles have undone me. I see no summons here to my old post in St. Giles."

"Haply 'twill come yet, Bertrand, by another messenger."

But the servant appeared unconsoled. "I'faith! Back to old Twigg! I had almost rather brave the salvage Indians."

"I would not see thee suffer on my account," Ebenezer declared. "I shall pay your April's wages, and you may start today to seek another post."

The valet seemed scarcely able to believe such generosity. "Bless ye, sir! Thou'rt every inch a gentleman!"

Ebenezer dismissed him and returned to his own problem. What was he to do? During most of that day he anxiously examined various faces of himself in his looking glass; during most of the next he composed stanzas to Gloom and Melancholy, after the manner of
Il Penseroso
(though briefer and, he decided, of a different order of impact); the third he spent abed, getting up only to feed and relieve himself. He refused Bertrand's occasional proffered services. A change came over him: his beard went unshaved, his drawers unchanged, his feet unwashed. How take ship for the wild untutored colonies, now he knew himself a poet and was ready to fire London with his art? And yet how make shift unaided in London, penniless, in defiance of his father and at the expense of his inheritance?

"What am I to do?" he asked himself, lying unkempt in his bed on the fourth day. It was a misty March morning, though a warm and sunny one, and the glaring haze from outside caused his head to ache. The bedclothes were no longer clean, nor was his nightshirt. His late fire was ashed and cold. Eight o'clock passed, and nine, but he could not resolve to get up. Once only, as a mere experiment, he held his breath in order to try whether he could make himself die, for he saw no alternative; but after a half minute he drew air frantically and did not try again. His stomach rumbled, and his sphincters signaled their discomfort. He could think of no reason for rising from the bed, nor any for remaining there. Ten o'clock came and went.

Near noon, running his eyes about the room for the hundredth time that morning, he caught sight of something that had previously escaped him: a scrap of paper on the floor beside his writing-desk. Recognizing it, he climbed out of bed without thinking, fetched it up, and squinted at it in the glare.

Ebenezer Cooke, Gent., Poet & Laureate. . .

The rest of the epithet was torn off, but despite its loss, or perhaps because of it, Ebenezer was suddenly inspired with such a pleasant resolve that his spirits rose on the instant, driving three days' gloom before them as a March breeze drives away squalls. His spine thrilled; his face flushed. Lighting on a piece of letter paper, he addressed a salutation directly to Charles Calvert, Third Lord Baltimore and Second Lord Proprietary of the Province of Maryland.
Your Excellency,
he wrote, with the same sure hand of some nights before:

It is my Intention to take Ship for Maryland upon the Bark
Poseidon
a few Days hence, for the Purpose of managing my Father's Property, called Cooke's Point, in Dorchester. Y
^r
L
^dshp
will do me a great Honour, and Himself no ill Turn it may be, by granting me an Audience before I embark, in order that I might discuss certain Plans of mine, such that I venture will not altogether displease Y
^r
L
^dshp
,
and in order farther that I might learn, from Him most qualified to say, where in the Province to seek the congenial Company of Men of Breeding and Refinement, with whom to share my leisure Hours in those most civiliz'd Pursuits of Poetry, Music and Conversation, without which Life were a Salvag'ry, and scarce endurable. Respectfully therefore awaiting Y
^r
L
^dshps
Reply, I am,

Y
^r
Most H
^mble
& O
^bt
S
^vt

Ebenezer Cooke

And after but a moment's deliberation he appended boldly to his name the single word
Poet,
deeming it a pointless modesty to deny or conceal his very essence.

"By Heav'n!" he exclaimed to himself, looking back on his recent doldrums. "I had near slipped once again into the Abyss! Methinks 'tis a peril I am prone to: 'tis my Nemesis, and marks me off from other men as did the Furies poor Orestes! So be't: at least I know my dread Erinyes for what they are and will henceforth mark their approach betimes. What is more -- thank Joan Toast! I now know how to shield myself from their assault." He consulted his mirror and after some false starts, reflected this reflection: "Life! I must fling myself into Life, escape to't, as Orestes to the temple of Apollo. Action be my sanctuary; Initiative my shield! I shall smite ere I am smitten; clutch Life by his horns! Patron of poets, thy temple be the Entire Great Real World, whereto I run with arms a-stretch: may't guard me from the Pit, and may my Erinyes sink 'neath the vertigo I flee to be transformed to mild Eumenides!"

He then reread his letter.

"Aye," he said, "read and rejoice, Baltimore! 'Tis not every day your province is blessed with a poet. But faith! 'Tis already the twenty-seventh of the month! I must deliver't in person at once."

Thus resolved, Ebenezer called for Bertrand and, finding him not at home, doffed his malodorous nightshirt and proceeded to dress himself. Not bothering to trouble his skin with water, he slipped on his best linen drawers, short ones without stirrups, heavily perfumed, and a clean white day-shirt of good frieze holland, voluminous and soft, with a narrow neckband, full sleeves caught at the wrists with a black satin ribbon, and small, modestly frilled cuffs. Next he pulled on a pair of untrimmed black velvet knee breeches, close in the thighs and full in the seat, and then his knitted white silk hose, which, following the very latest fashion, he left rolled above the knee in order to display the black ribbon garters that held them up. On then with his shoes, a fortnight old, of softest black Spanish leather, square-toed, high-heeled, and buckled, their cupid-bow tongues turned down to flash a fetching red lining. Respectful of both the warmth and the fashion of the day, he left his waistcoat where it hung and donned next a coat of plum-colored serge lined with silver-gray prunella -- the great cuffs turned back to show alternate stripes of plum and silver -- collarless, tight-shouldered, and full-skirted, which he left unbuttoned from neck to hem to show off shirt and cravat. This latter was of white muslin, the long pendant ends finished in lace, and Ebenezer tied it loosely, twisted the pendants ropewise, and fetched up the ends to pass through the top left buttonhole of his open coat, Steinkirk fashion. Then came his shortsword in its beribboned scabbard, slung low on his left leg from a well-tooled belt, and after it his long, tight-curled white periwig, which he powdered generously and fitted with care on his pate, in its natural state hairless as an egg. Nothing now remained but to top the periwig with his round-crowned, broad-brimmed, feather-edged black beaver, draw on his gauntlet gloves of fawn leather stitched in gold and silver (the cuffs edged in white lace and lined with yellow silk), fetch up his long cane (looped with plum-and-white ribbons like those on his scabbard), and behold the finished product in his looking glass.

" 'Sbodikins!" he cried for very joy. "What a rascal!
En garde,
London! Look lively, Life! Have at ye!"

But there was little time to admire the spectacle: Ebenezer hurried out to the street, hired himself the services of barber and bootblack, ate a hearty meal, and took hack at once for the London house of Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore.

Ebenezer's Audience With Lord Baltimore, and

His Ingenious Proposal to That Gentleman

To
his extreme delight
and considerable surprise, in a matter of minutes after Ebenezer had presented himself at Lord Baltimore's town house and had sent his message in by a house-servant, word was sent back to him that Charles would receive the visitor in his library, and Ebenezer was ushered not long afterwards into the great man's presence.

Lord Baltimore was seated in an enormous leather chair beside the hearth, and, though he did not rise to greet his visitor, he motioned cordially for Ebenezer to take the chair opposite him. He was an old man, rather small-framed and tight-skinned despite his age, with a prominent nose, a thin white mustache, and large, unusually bright brown eyes; he looked, it occurred to Ebenezer, like an aged and ennobled Henry Burlingame. He was dressed more formally and expensively than Ebenezer, but -- as the latter observed at once -- not so fashionably: in fact, some ten years behind the times. His wig was a campaigner, full but not extremely long, its tight curls terminating before either shoulder in pendulous corkscrewed dildos; his cravat was of loosely-tied, lace-edged linen; his coat was rose brocade lined with white alamode, looser in the waist and shorter in the skirt than was the current preference, and the unflapped pockets were cut horizontally rather than vertically and set low to the hem. The sleeves reached nearly to the wrists, returned a few inches to show their white linings stitched in silver, and opened at the back with rounded hound's-ear corners. The side vents, cut hip high, were edged with silver buttons and sham buttonholes, and the right shoulder boasted a knot of looped silver ribbons. Beneath the coat were a waistcoat of indigo armozine, which he wore completely buttoned, and silk breeches to match: one saw no more of his shirt than the dainty cuffs of white cobweb lawn. What is more, his garters were hidden under the roll of his hose, and the tongues of his shoes were high and square. He held Ebenezer's letter in his hand and squinted at it in the dim light from the heavily-curtained windows as though re-examining its contents.

"Ebenezer Cooke, is't?" he said by way of commencing the conversation. "Of Cooke's Point, in Dorchester?" His voice, while still in essence forceful, had that uncertain flutter which betrays the onset of senility. Ebenezer bowed slightly in acknowledgment and took the chair indicated by his host.

"Andrew Cooke's son?" asked Charles, peering at his guest.

"The same, sir," Ebenezer replied.

"I knew Andrew Cooke in Maryland," reflected Charles. "If memory serves me rightly, 'twas in 1661, the year my father made me Governor of the Province, that I licensed Andrew Cooke to trade there. But I've not seen him for many years and haply wouldn't know him now, or he me." He sighed. "Life's a battle that scars us all, victor and vanquished alike."

"Aye," Ebenezer agreed readily, "but 'tis the stuff of living to fight it, and take't by storm, and your good soldier wears his scars with pride, win or lose, so he got 'em bravely in honest combat."

"I doubt not," murmured Charles, and retreated to the letter. "How's this now," he remarked: "
Ebenezer Cooke, Poet.
What might that mean, pray? Can it be you earn your bread by versifying? Or you're a kind of minstrel, belike, that wanders about the countryside a-begging and reciting? 'Tis a trade I know little of, I confess't."

"Poet I am," answered Ebenezer with a blush, "and no mean one it may be; but not a penny have I earned by't, nor will I ever. The muse loves him who courts, her for herself alone, and scorns the man who'd pimp her for his purse's sake."

"I daresay, I daresay," said Charles. "But is't not customary, when a man tack some bunting to his name to wave like a pendant in the public breeze, that he show thereby his calling and advertise it to the world? Now, did I read here
Ebenezer Cooke, Tinker,
I'd likely hire you to patch my pots; if
Ebenezer Cooke, Physician,
I'd send you the rounds of my household, to purge and tonic the lot; if
Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman,
or
Esquire,
I'd presume you not for hire, and ring in my man to fetch you brandy. But
Poet,
now:
Ebenezer Cooke, Poet.
What trade is that? How doth one deal with you? What work doth one put you to?"

" 'Tis that very matter I wish to speak of," said Ebenezer, unruffled by the twitting. "Know, sir, that though 'tis no man's living to woo the muse, 'tis yet some men's
calling,
and so 'twas not recklessly I tacked on my name the title
Poet:
'tis of no moment what I do; poet is what I
am
."

"As another might sign himself
Gentleman
?" asked Charles.

"Precisely."

"Then 'tis not for hire you sought me out? You crave no employment?"

"Hire I do not seek," Ebenezer declared. "For as the lover craves of his beloved naught save her favor, which to him is reward sufficient, so craves the poet no more from his muse than happy inspiration; and as the fruit of lover's labor is a bedded bride, and the sign of't a crimsoned sheet, so the poet's prize is a well-turned verse, and the sign thereof a printed page. To be sure, if haply the lass bring with her some dowry, 'twill not be scorned, nor will what pence come poetwards from his publishing. Howbeit, these are mere accidents, happy but unsought."

"Why, then," said Charles, fetching two pipes from a rack over the fireplace, "I believe we may call't established that you are not for hire. Let's have a pipe on't, and then pray state your business."

The two men filled and lit their pipes, and Ebenezer returned to his theme.

"
Hire
I care naught for," he repeated, "but as for
employment,
there's another matter quite, and the very sum and substance of my visit. You enquired a moment past, What trade is the poet's, and to what work shall he be put? For answer let me ask you, sir, by'r leave -- would the world at large know aught of Agamemnon, or fierce Achilles, or crafty Odysseus, or the cuckold Menelaus, or that entire circus of strutting Greeks and Trojans, had not great Homer rendered 'em to verse? How many battles of greater import are lost in the dust of history, d'you think, for want of a poet to sing 'em to the ages? Full many a Helen blooms one spring and goes to the worm forgot; but let a Homer paint her in the grand cosmetic of his verse, and her beauty boils the blood of twenty centuries! Where lies a Prince's greatness, I ask you? In his feats on the field of battle, or the downy field of love? Why, 'tis but a generation's work to forget 'em for good and all! Nay, I say 'tis not in the deeds his greatness lies, but in their telling. And who's to tell 'em? Not the historian, for be he ne'er so dev'lish accurate, as to how many hoplites had Epaminondas when he whipped the Spartans at Leuctra, or what was the Christian name of Charlemagne's barber, yet nobody reads him but his fellow chroniclers and his students -- the one from envy, t'other from necessity. But place deeds and doer in the poet's hands, and what comes of't? Lo, the crook'd nose grows straight, the lean shank fleshes out, French pox becomes a bedsore; shady deeds shed their tarnish, bright grow brighter; and the whole is musicked into tuneful rhyme, arresting conceit, and stirring meter, so's to stick in the head like
Greensleeves
and move the heart like Scripture!"

" 'Tis clear as day," said Charles with a smile, "that the poet is a useful member of a Prince's train."

"And what's true for a prince is true for a principality," Ebenezer went on, stirred by his own eloquence. "What were Greece without Homer, Rome without Virgil, to sing their glories? Heroes die, statues break, empires crumble; but your
Iliad
laughs at time, and a verse from Virgil still rings true as the day 'twas struck. Who renders virtue palatable like the poet, and vice abhorrent, seeing he alone provides both precept and example? Who else bends nature to suit his fancy and paints men better or worse to suit his purpose? What sings like lyric, praises like panegyric, mourns like elegiac, wounds like Hudibrastic verse?"

"Naught, that I can name," said Charles, "and you have quite persuaded me that a man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet. Prithee now, fellow, dispense with farther preamble and deliver me your business plainly."

"Very well," said Ebenezer, planting his cane between his knees and gripping its handle firmly. "Would you say, sir, that Maryland boasts a surfeit of poets?"

"A surfeit of poets?" repeated Charles, and drew thoughtfully upon his pipe. "Well, now, since you ask, I think not. Nay, in good faith I must confess,
entre nous,
there is no surfeit of poets in Maryland. Not a bit of't. Why, I'd wager one might walk the length and breadth of St. Mary's City on a May afternoon and not cross the tracks of a single poet, they're that rare."

"As I reckoned," said Ebenezer. "Would you go so far as to suppose, even, that I might be hard put to't, once I establish myself in Maryland, to find me four or five fellow-planters to match a couplet with, or trade a rhyme?"

" 'Tis not impossible," admitted Charles.

"I guessed as much. And now, sir, if I might: would't be mere gross presumption and vanity for me to suppose, that haply I shall be the absolute first, premier, unprecedented, and genuine original poet to set foot on the soil of
Terra Mariae?
First to pay court to the Maryland Muse?"

" 'Tis not in me to deny," replied Charles, "that should there breathe such a wench as this Maryland Muse, you may well have her maidenhead."

"Faith!" cried Ebenezer joyously. "Only think on't! A province, an entire people -- all unsung! What deeds forgot, what gallant men and women lost to time! 'Sblood, it dizzies me! Trees felled, towns raised, a very nation planted in the wilds! Foundings, stragglings, triumphs! Why, 'tis work for a Virgil! Think, m'lord, only think on't: the noble house of Calvert, the Barons Baltimore -- builders of nations, bringers of light, fructifiers of the wilderness! A glorious house and history still unmusicked for the world's delight! Marry, 'tis virgin territory!"

"Many's the fine thing to be said of Maryland," Charles agreed. "But to speak plainly, I fear me that virgins are rare as poets there."

"Prithee do not jest!" begged Ebenezer. " 'Twere an epic such as ne'er was penned! The
Marylandiad,
b'm'faith!"

"How's that?" For all his teasing manner, Charles had grown thoughtful in the course of Ebenezer's outburst.

"The
Marylandiad!"
repeated Ebenezer, and declaimed as from a title-page: "An epic to out-epic epics: the history of the princely house of Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore and Lord Proprietary of the Province of Maryland, relating the heroic founding of that province! The courage and perseverance of her settlers in battling barb'rous nature and fearsome salvage to wrest a territory from the wild and transform it to an earthly paradise! The majesty and enlightenment of her proprietors, who like kingly gardeners fostered the tender seeds of civilization in their rude soil, and so husbanded and cultivated them as to bring to fruit a Maryland beauteous beyond description; verdant, fertile, prosperous, and cultured; peopled with brave men and virtuous women, healthy, handsome, and refined: a Maryland, in short, splendid in her past, majestic in her present, and glorious in her future, the brightest jewel in the fair crown of England, owned and ruled to the benefit of both by a family second to none in the recorded history of the universal world -- the whole done into heroic couplets, printed on linen, bound in calf, stamped in gold" -- here Ebenezer bowed with a flourish of his beaver -- "and dedicated to Your Lordship!"

"And signed?" asked Charles.

Ebenezer rose to his feet and beamed upon his host, one hand on his cane and the other on his hip.

"Signed
Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman,"
he replied:
"Poet and Laureate of the Province of Maryland!"

"Ah," said Charles.
"Poet and Laureate,
now: 'tis a new bit of bunting you'd add to your name."

"Only think how 'twould redound to Your Lordship's credit," urged Ebenezer. "The appointment would prove at a single stroke both the authority and the grace of your rule, for 'twould give the Province the flavor of a realm and the refinement of a court to have a bona fide laureate sing her praises and record in verse her great moments; and as for the
Marylandiad
itself, 'twould immortalize the Barons Baltimore, and make Aeneases of 'em all! Moreover, 'twould paint the Province as she stands today in such glowing colors as to lure the finest families of England to settle there; 'twould spur the inhabitants to industry and virtue, to keep
the picture true as I paint it; in sum, 'twould work to the enhancement of both the quality and the value of the colony, and so proportionately ennoble, empower, and enrich him who owns and rules her! Is't not a formidable string of achievements?"

At this Charles burst into such a fit of laughing that he choked on his pipe smoke, watered at the eyes, and came near to losing his campaigner: it required the spirited back-thumping of two body servants, who stood nearby, to restore his composure.

"Oh dear!" he cried at last, daubing at his eyes with a handkerchief. "An achievement indeed, to ennoble and enrich him who rules Maryland! I'm sorry to say, Master Poet, that that fellow already maintains himself a laureate to sing him! There's no ennobling him beyond his present station, and as for enriching him, I venture I've done my share of that and more! Oh dear! Oh dear!"

"How is that?" asked Ebenezer, all bewildered.

"My good man, is't that you were born yesterday? Know you naught of the true state o' the world?"

"Surely 'tis thy province!" exclaimed Ebenezer.

"Surely
'twas
my province," corrected Charles with a wry smile, "and the Barons Baltimore were her True and Absolute Lords Proprietary, more often than not, from the day she was chartered till just three years ago. I get my quit-rents yet, and a miserable bit of port-revenue, but for the rest, 'tis King William's province these days, sir, and Queen Mary's, not mine. Why not take your proposal to the Crown?"