The Sot-Weed Factor (3 page)

Here, in his difficulty with this question, the profoundest effects of Burlingame's amiable pedagogy become discernible: Ebenezer's imagination was excited by every person he met either in or out of books who could do with skill and understanding anything whatever; he was moved to ready admiration by expert falconers, scholars, masons, chimneysweeps, prostitutes, admirals, cutpurses, sailmakers, barmaids, apothecaries, and cannoneers alike.

Ah, God,
he wrote in a letter to Anna about this time,
it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Bookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground!

He was, that is to say, temperamentally disinclined to no career, and, what is worse (as were this not predicament enough), he seemed consistently no special sort of person: the variety of temperaments and characters that he observed at Cambridge and in literature was as enchanting to him as the variety of life-works, and as hard to choose from among. He admired equally the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic, the splenetic, and the balanced man, the fool and the sage, the enthusiast and the stick-in-the-mud, the talkative and the taciturn, and, most dilemmal of all, the consistent and the inconsistent. Similarly, it seemed to him as fine a thing to be fat as to be lean, to be short as tall, homely as handsome. To complete his quandary -- what is probably an effect of the foregoing -- Ebenezer could be persuaded, at least notionally, by any philosophy of the world, even by any strongly held opinion, which was either poetically conceived or attractively stated, since he appeared to be emotionally predisposed in favor of none. It was as pretty a notion to him that the world was made of water, as Thales declared, as that it was air,
à
la
Anaximines, or fire,
à
la
Heraclitus, or all three and dirt to boot, as swore Empedocles; that all was matter, as Hobbes maintained, or that all was mind, as some of Locke's followers were avowing, seemed equally likely to our poet, and as for ethics, could he have been all three and not just one he'd have enjoyed dying once a saint, once a frightful sinner, and once lukewarm between the two.

The man (in short), thanks both to Burlingame and to his natural proclivities, was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled, he threw up his hands at choice, and like ungainly flotsam rode half-content the tide of chance. Though the term was done he stayed on at Cambridge. For a week he simply languished in his rooms, reading distractedly and smoking pipe after pipe of tobacco, to which he'd become addicted. At length reading became impossible; smoking too great a bother: he prowled restlessly about the room. His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

Finally one day he did not deign even to dress himself or eat, but sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one.

Ebenezer Is Rescued, and Hears a Diverting

Tale Involving Isaac Newton and Other

Notables

Luckily for him
(else he might have mossed over where he sat), Ebenezer was roused from his remarkable trance shortly after dinnertime by a sudden great commotion at his door.

"Eben! Eben! Prithee admit me quickly!"

"Who is it?" called Ebenezer, and jumped up in alarm: he had no friends at the College who might be calling on him.

"Open and see," the visitor laughed. "Only hurry, I beg of thee!"

"Do but wait a minute. I must dress."

"What? Not dressed? 'Swounds, what an idle fellow! No matter, boy; let me in at once!"

Ebenezer recognized the voice, which he'd not heard for three years. "Henry!" he cried, and threw open the door.

" 'Tis no other," laughed Burlingame, giving him a squeeze. "Marry, what a lout thou'rt grown to! A good six feet! And abed at this hour!" He felt the young man's forehead. "Yet you've no fever. What ails thee, lad? Ah well, no matter. One moment --" He ran to the window and peered cautiously below. "Ah, there's the rascal! Hither, Eben!"

Ebenezer hurried to the window. "Whatever is't?"

"Yonder, yonder!" Burlingame pointed up the street. "Coming by the little dram-shop! Know you that gentleman with the hickory-stick?"

Ebenezer saw a long-faced man of middle age, gowned as a don, making his way down the street.

"Nay, 'tis no Magdalene Fellow. The face is strange."

"Shame on thee, then, and mark it well. 'Tis Isaac himself, from Trinity."

"Newton!" Ebenezer looked with sharper interest. "I've not seen him before, but word hath it the Royal Society is bringing out a book of his within the month that will explain the workings of the entire universe! I'faith, I thank you for your haste! But did I hear you call him
rascal?"

Burlingame laughed again. "You mistake the reason for my haste, Eben. I pray God my face hath altered these fifteen years, for I'm certain Brother Isaac caught sight of me ere I reached your entryway."

"Is't possible you
know
him?" asked Ebenezer, much impressed.

"Know him? I was once near raped by him. Stay!" He drew back from the window. "Keep an eye on him, and tell me how I might escape should he turn in at your door."

"No difficulty: the door of this chamber lets onto an open stairway in the rear. What in Heav'n's afoot, Henry?"

"Don't be alarmed," Burlingame said. " 'Tis a pretty story, and I'll tell it all presently. Is he coming?"

"One moment -- he's just across from us. There. Nay, wait now -- he is saluting another don. Old Bagley, the Latinist. There, now, he's moving on."

Burlingame came to the window, and the two of them watched the great man continue up the street.

"Not another moment, Henry," Ebenezer declared. "Tell me at once what mystery is behind this hide-and-seek, and behind thy cruel haste to leave us three years past, or watch me perish of curiosity!"

"Aye and I shall," Burlingame replied, "directly you dress yourself, lead us to food and drink, and give full account of yourself. 'Tis not I alone who have excuses to find."

"How! Then you know of my failure?"

"Aye, and came to see what's what, and perchance to birch some sense into you."

"But how can that be? I told none but Anna."

"Stay, you'll hear all, I swear't. But not a word till I've a spread of sack and mutton. Let not excitement twist thy values, lad -- come on with you!"

"Ah, bless you, thou'rt an Iliad Greek, Henry," Ebenezer said, and commenced dressing.

They went to an inn nearby, where over small beer after dinner Ebenezer explained, as best he could, his failure at the College and subsequent indecisions. "The heart of't seems to be," he concluded, "that in no matter of import can I make up my mind. Marry, Henry, how I've needed thy counsel! What agonies you might have saved me!"

"Nay," Burlingame protested. "You well know I love you, Eben, and feel your afflictions as my own. But advice, I swear't, is the wrong medicine for your malady, for two reasons: first, the logic of the problem is such that at some remove or other you'd have still to choose, inasmuch as should I counsel you to come with me to London, you yet must choose whether to follow my counsel; and should I farther counsel you to follow my first counsel, you must yet choose to follow my second -- the regress is infinite and goes nowhere. Second, e'en could you choose to follow my counsel, 'tis no cure at all, but a mere crutch to lean upon. The object is to put you on your feet, not to take you off them. 'Tis a serious affair, Eben; it troubles me. What are your own sentiments about your failure?"

"I must own I have none," Ebenezer said, "though I can fancy many."

"And this indecision: how do you feel about yourself?"

"Marry, I know not! I suppose I'm merely curious."

Burlingame frowned and called for a pipe of tobacco from a winedrawer working near at hand. "You were indeed the picture of apathy when I found you. Doth it not gall or grieve you to lose the baccalaureate, when you'd approached so near it?"

"In a manner, I suppose," Ebenezer smiled. "And yet the man I most respect hath got on without it, hath he not?"

Burlingame laughed. "My dear fellow, I see 'tis time I told you many things. Will it comfort you to learn that I, too, suffer from your disease, and have since childhood?"

"Nay, that cannot be," Ebenezer said. "Ne'er have I seen thee falter, Henry: thou'rt the very antithesis of indecision! 'Tis to you I look in envy, and despair of e'er attaining such assurance."

"Let me be your hope, not your despair, for just as a mild siege of smallpox, though it scar a man's face, leaves him safe forever from dying of that ailment, so inconstancy, fickleness, a periodic shifting of enthusiasms, though a vice, may preserve a man from crippling indecision."

"
Fickleness,
Henry?" Ebenezer asked in wonderment. "Is't fickleness explains your leaving us?"

"Not in the sense you take it," Burlingame said. He fetched out a shilling and called for two more tankards of beer. "I say, did you know I was an orphan child?"

"Why, yes," Ebenezer said, surprised. "Now you mention it, I believe I did, though I can't recall your ever telling us. Haply we just assumed it. I'faith, Henry, all the years we've known you, and yet in sooth we know naught of you, do we? I've no idea when you were born, or where reared, or by whom."

"Or why I left you so discourteously, or how I learned of your failure, or why I fled the great Mister Newton," Burlingame added. "Very well then, take a draught with me, and I shall uncloak the mystery. There's a good fellow!"

They drank deeply, and Burlingame began his story.

"I've not the faintest notion where I was born, or even when -- though it must have been about 1654. Much less do I know what woman bore me, or what man got me on her. I was raised by a Bristol sea-captain and his wife, who were childless, and 'tis my suspicion I was born in either America or the West Indies, for my earliest memories are of an ocean passage when I was no more than three years old. Their name was Salmon -- Avery and Melissa Salmon."

"I am astonished!" Ebenezer declared. "I ne'er dreamed aught so extraordinary of your beginnings! How came you to be called Burlingame, then?"

Burlingame sighed. "Ah, Eben, just as till now you've been incurious about my origin, so till too late was I. Burlingame I've been since earliest memory, and, as is the way of children, it ne'er occurred to me to wonder at it, albeit to this day I've met no other of that surname."

"It must be that whomever Captain Salmon received you from was your parent!" Ebenezer said. "Or haply 'twas some kin of yours, that knew your name."

"Dear Eben, think you I've not racked myself upon that chance? Think you I'd not forfeit a hand for five minutes' converse with my poor Captain, or gentle Melissa? But I must put by my curiosity till Judgment Day, for they both are in their graves."

"Unlucky fellow!"

"All through my childhood," Burlingame went on, " 'twas my single aim to go to sea, like Captain Salmon. Boats were my only toys; sailors my only playmates. On my thirteenth birthday I shipped as messboy on the Captain's vessel, a West Indiaman, and so taken was I by the mariner's life that I threw my heart and soul into my apprenticeship. Ere we raised Barbados I was scrambling aloft with the best of 'em, to take in a stuns'l or tar the standing rigging, and was as handy with a fid as any Jack aboard. Eben, Eben, what a life for a lad -- e'en now it shivers me to think on't! Brown as a coffeebean I was, and agile as a monkey, and ere my voice had left off changing, ere my parts were fully haired -- at an age when most boys have still the smell of the womb on 'em, and dream of traveling to the neighboring shire -- I had dived for sheepswool sponges on the Great Bahaman Banks and fought with pirates in the Gulf of Paria. What's more, after guarding my innocence in the fo'c'sle with a fishknife from a lecherous old Manxman who'd offered two pounds for't, I swam a mile through shark-water from our mooring off Curasao to squander it one August night with a mulatto girl upon the beach. She was scarce thirteen, Eben -- half Dutch, half Indian, lissome and trembly as an eight-month colt -- but on receipt of a little brass spyglass of mine, which she'd taken a great fancy to in the village that morning, she fetched up her skirts with a laugh, and I deflowered her under the sour-orange trees. I was not yet fifteen."

"Gramercy!"

"No man e'er loved his trade more than I," Burlingame continued, "nor slaved at it more diligently; I was the apple of the Captain's eye, and would, I think, have risen fast through the ranks."

"Then out on't, Henry, how is't you claim my failing? For I see naught in thy tale here but a staggering industry and singlemindedness, the half of which I'd lose an ear to equal."

Burlingame smiled and drank off the last of his beer. "
Inconstancy,
dear fellow, inconstancy. That same singlemindedness that raised me o'er the other lads on the ship was the ruin of my nautical career."

"How can that be?"

"I made five voyages in all," Burlingame said. "On the fifth -- the same voyage on which I lost my virginity -- we lay becalmed one day in the horse latitudes off the Canary Islands, and quite by chance, looking about for something wherewith to occupy myself, I happened on a copy of Motteux's
Don Quixote
among a shipmate's effects: I spent the remainder of the day with it, for though Mother Salmon had taught me to read and write, 'twas the first real storybook I'd read. I grew so entranced by the great Manchegan and his faithful squire as to lose all track of time and was rebuked by Captain Salmon for reporting late to the cook.

"From that day on I was no longer a seaman, but a student. I read every book I could find aboard ship and in port -- bartered my clothes, mortgaged my pay for books, on any subject whatever, and reread them over and over when no new ones could be found. All else went by the board; what work I could be made to do I did distractedly, and in careless haste. I took to hiding, in the rope-locker or the lazarette, where I could read for an hour undisturbed ere I was found. Finally Captain Salmon could tolerate it no more: he ordered the mate to confiscate every volume aboard, save only the charts, the ship's log, and the navigational tables, and pitched 'em to the sharks off Port-au-Prince; then he gave me such a hiding for my sins that my poor bum tingled a fortnight after, and forbade me e'er to read a printed page aboard his vessel. This so thwarted and aggrieved me, that at the next port (which happened to be Liverpool) I jumped ship and left career and benefactor forever, with not a thank-ye nor a fare-thee-well for the people who'd fed and clothed me since babyhood.

"I had no money at all, and for food only a great piece of hard cheese I'd stolen from the ship's cook: therefore I very soon commenced to starve. I took to standing on street-corners and singing for my supper: I was a pretty lad and knew many a song, and when I would sing
What Thing Is Love?
to the ladies, or
A Pretty Duck There Was
to the gentlemen, 'twas not often they'd pass me by without a smile and tuppence. At length a band of wandering gypsies, traveling down from Scotland to London, heard me sing and invited me to join them, and so for the next year I worked and lived with those curious people. They were tinkers, horse-traders, fortune-tellers, basket-makers, dancers, troubadours, and thieves. I dressed in their fashion, ate, drank, and slept with them, and they taught me all their songs and tricks. Dear Eben! Had you seen me then, you'd ne'er have doubted for an instant I was one of them!"

"I am speechless," Ebenezer declared. " 'Tis the grandest adventure I have heard!"

"We worked our way slowly, with many digressions, from Liverpool through Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, and Bedford, sleeping in the wagons when it rained or out under the stars on fine nights. In the troupe of thirty souls I was the only one who read and wrote, and so was of great assistance to them in many ways. Once to their great delight I read them tales out of Boccaccio -- they all love to tell and hear stories -- and they were so surprised to learn that books contain such marvelous pleasantries, a thing which erst they'd not suspected, that they began to steal every book they could find for me: I seldom lacked reading that year! It happened one day they turned up a primer, and I taught the lot of 'em their letters, for which services they were unimaginably grateful. Despite my being a 'gorgio' (by which name they call non-gypsies) they initiated me into their most privy matters and expressed the greatest desire for me to marry into their group and travel with them forever.

"But late in 1670 we arrived here in Cambridge, having wandered down from Bedford. The students and several of the dons took a great fancy to us, and though they made too free with sundry of our women, they treated us most cordially, even bringing us to their rooms to sing and play for them. Thus were my eyes first opened to the world of learning and scholarship, and I knew on the instant that my interlude with the gypsies was done. I resolved to go no farther: I bid adieu to my companions and remained in Cambridge, determined to starve upon the street-corners rather than leave this magnificent place."