The Sot-Weed Factor (73 page)

"It ill becomes you to rejoice," the poet replied. "You set out a-purpose to ruin my life, but whate'er injury or misfortune you've suffered at my hands hath been no wish of mine at all."

"Marry!" Bertrand exclaimed. "Is't the pimp from Pudding Lane, sir, that tattled to Master Andrew?"

"I take it ye gentlemen know each other," the Captain said, "and have some quarrel betwixt ye?"

"Why, nay," McEvoy answered, "no quarrel at all; 'tis only that I made his fortune -- albeit by accident -- and out of gratitude he hath wrecked my life, hastened my death, and ruined the woman I love!"

"Yet not a bit of't by design, and scarce even with knowledge," Ebenezer countered, "whereas 'twill please you to know
your
revenge hath surpassed your evillest intentions. I have suffered at the hands of rogues and pirates, been deceived by my closest friend, swindled out of my estate, and obliged to flee forever in disgrace from my father; what's more, in following me here, my sister hath been led into Heav'n knows what peril, while poor Joan Toast --" Here he was overwhelmed with emotion and lost his voice.

"What of her?" snapped McEvoy.

"I will say only what I presume you saw at Malden: that she hath suffered, and suffers yet, inconceivable tribulations and indignities, in consequence of which she is disfigured in form and face and cannot have long to live."

McEvoy groaned. "And ye call me to blame for't, wretch, when 'twas you she followed? I'Christ, if my hands were free to wring your neck!"

"I have a burthen of guilt, indeed," Ebenezer admitted. "Yet but for your tattling to my father you'd ne'er have lost her; or, if you had, 'twould've been to Pudding Lane and not to Maryland. In any case, she'd not have been raped by a giant Moor and infected with the pox, or ruined by opium, or whored out nightly to a barnful of salvages!"

At the pronouncement of each of these misfortunes McEvoy moaned afresh; hot tears coursed from the poet's eyes, ran cold across his temples and into his ears.

"Whate'er thy differences, gentlemen," the Captain put in, " 'tis little to the purpose to air 'em this late in the day. All our sins will soon enough be rendered out, and there's an end on't."

"Aiee!" Bertrand wailed.

"True enough," McEvoy sighed. "The man who won't forgive his neighbor must needs have struck a wondrous bargain with his own conscience."

"The best of us," Ebenezer agreed, "hath certain memories in the night to make him sweat for shame. Once before, in Locket's, I forgave you for your letter to my father; yet 'twas a bragging sort of pardon, inasmuch as what you'd done had seemed to make my fortune. Now I have lost title, fortune, love, honor, and life itself, let me forgive you again, McEvoy, and beg your own forgiveness in return."

The Irishman concurred, but admitted that since Ebenezer had at no time set about deliberately to injure either him or Joan Toast, there was little or nothing to be forgiven.

"Not so, friend -- i'Christ, not so!" The poet wept, and related as coherently as he could his trials with Captain Pound, the rape of the
Cyprian,
his bargain with the swine-girl, the loss of his estate, and his obligatory marriage to Joan Toast. In particular he dwelt upon his responsibility in Joan's downfall, her solicitude during his protracted seasoning, and the magnanimity of her plan for their flight to England, until not only himself and McEvoy, but the whole imprisoned company were sniffling and weeping at her goodness.

"For reward," Ebenezer went on, "she asked no more than that I give her my ring for hers, to make her feel less a harlot, and that she be given the honor of providing for me in London --"

"As she did for me," McEvoy reverently interposed.

The Captain sniffled. "She is a Catholic saint of a whore!"

"And to think I spoke so freely to her at Captain Mitchell's," Bertrand marveled, "when we thought her but a scurfy wench of a pig-driver!"

"Stay, sirs," Ebenezer demanded sadly; "you have not heard the beginning of my shame. D'you think, when she made this martyr's proposition, I refused to hear of't, but ordered her off to England on her own six pounds and promised to rejoin her when I could? Or did I, at the very least, go down on my knees before such charity and kiss the hem of her ragged dress? Imagine the very worst of me, sirs: d'you suppose I merely thanked her with great feeling, let her whore up her boat fare from the Indians in the curing-house, and sailed off with her to be her pimp in London?"

"God forgive ye if ye did," the Captain murmured.

"Should God forgive me thrice o'er," said Ebenezer, "I would bear still a weight of guilt sufficient to drag ten men to Hell. The fact is, gentlemen, I accepted the six pounds, sent her off to the curing-house -- and fled alone to the bark in Cambridge! What say you to that, McEvoy?"

"Forgiven, forgiven!" cried the Irishman. "And God save us all! Methinks the fire that cooks our flesh will be cool beside the flames that roast our souls!"

Some minutes passed in silence while the company reflected on the story and their fate. Presently, in a calmer voice, Ebenezer asked McEvoy what ill fortune had led him to Bloodsworth Island. The query elicited a number of great sighing curses, after which, and several false starts, McEvoy offered the following explanation:

"I am but two-and-twenty, sirs, as near as one can reckon that hath not the faintest notion of his birth date; but i'faith, I've been an old man all my life! My earliest memory is of singing for ha'pennies by Barking Church, for a legless wretch named Patcher that called himself my father; I was half dead o' cold and like to faint away from hunger -- for de'il the crust I'd see of a loaf old Patcher bought with my earnings! -- and the reason I recall it, I had to sing myself alive, as't were, or fall down in the snow, yet I durst not unclench my teeth lest they ruin the song with chattering. Old Patcher must needs have been a music-master, for whene'er I strayed a quaver out o' key he'd cane me into tune with his hickory-crutch. Many's the lutist that can play with his eyes closed, but I'll wager 'tis a rare tenor can sing a com-all-ye with his jaws shut fast!

"Yet sing 'em I did, and true as gospel, nor did I e'er lament my plight or rail at Patcher in my mind; in sooth, 'twas not his cruelty made me vow to be shed of him but his mistakes upon the lute he played to accompany my songs! Some winters later, when I was stronger and he weaker, we were working Newgate Market in a blizzard; Patcher's fingers were that benumbed, he played as I might with the toes o' my feet, and the sound so offended my ear, I flew into a passion, snatched up the hickory-crutch, and laid him low with a clout aside the head. So doth the pupil repeat his lesson!"

"You killed him, then?" asked Ebenezer.

"I did not tarry to find out," McEvoy laughed. "I snatched up his lute and fled. But Newgate Market was near deserted, and the weather freezing, and though I begged my way through London for many a year after, singing the songs he taught me and playing on his lute, I ne'er saw old Patcher again. Thus ended my apprenticeship: I joined the ranks of those who get their living from the streets, a journeyman musician and master beggar, and my own man from that day to this."

"Unhappy child!"

McEvoy sniffed. "So speaks the virgin poet."

"Nay, John; for all your trials you were still an innocent amongst the wolves."

"Say rather a whelp amongst his elders, and no mean hand at wolfing. My virginity I lost to the whores that nursed my boyish ailments, but innocence I never lost, nor fear nor faith in God and man -- for the reason one cannot lose what he never hath possessed. I played in taverns for my bed and board, and whene'er I wanted money -- but 'tis no news to the Laureate that your true artist need not be handsome to please the ladies; his talent serves for face, place, and grace together, and for all he hath been sired by a legless beggar upon a drunken gutter-tart, if his art hath power to stir he may be wined and dined by dukes and spread the knees of young marquesas! In short, when I grew fond of inventing melodies, I invested in the love of wealthy women --"

"Invested!" cried Bertrand, who to this point had expressed no interest in the tale.." 'Tis a rare investment that pays cash dividends on no capital!"

"Nay, don't mistake me," McEvoy said seriously.
"Time
was my capital, the precious mortal time one wastes a-wooing; and my return was time as well -- hours bought from singing for my supper, and from doing the hundred mean chores a poor man doth for himself perforce. 'Twas an investment like any other, and I chose it for a proper tradesman's reason: it paid a higher return on my capital than did aught else, in mortal time."

"Yet you must own 'twas something callous," ventured the poet.

"No more than any honest business," McEvoy insisted. "If hearts were injured, why, the wounds were self-inflicted; I promised naught, and kept my promise, and there's an end on't."

"But surely Joan Toast --"

"I have said naught o' Joan Toast," the Irishman reproved. " 'Tis the wives and daughters o' the rich I did my business with, that call their pandering
patronage,
and are much given to fornication in the noble cause of Art. Joan Toast was a penceless guttersnipe like myself -- and an artist as well, in her way, only her instruments were different from my own."

"Ha! Well said!" cried Bertrand. Ebenezer made no comment.

"I was eighteen when first I met her: she had been hired to service a certain debauched young peer, whose wife, not to be outdone, hired me to play the same game with herself. The four of us sat down to pheasant and Rhenish, for all the world like two pairs o' newlyweds, which much pleased his lordship's fancy; in sooth, as the wine got hold of him he made a series of lewd proposals, each more unnatural than the one before. And since perversion, like refinement, is an arc, the which, if ye but extend it far enough, returns upon itself, by the evening's end naught tickled the wretch so much as the thought of taking his wife to bed! Joan Toast and I were turned out together, and as we'd done no more than eat a meal to earn our hire, we made a night of't in her little room near Ludgate. E'en then, at seventeen, she was the soul o' worldliness: fresh and full of spirit as a blooded colt, but her eyes were old as lust, and in her gestures was the history of the race. Small wonder his lordship craved her: she was the elixir of her sex, and who swived her swived no woman, but Womankind!

"We stayed some days there in her chamber, sending out for food till our hire was spent; when we went down again together to the street, 'twas with a certain pact between us, that lasted till the night o' your wager with Ben Oliver."

"In plain English," remarked the Captain, "ye was her pimp."

"In plainer," McEvoy replied without hesitation, "we twain were to the arts o' love like the hands o' the lutist to his music: together, at our proper work, we could set Heaven's vaults a-tremble; all else was the common business of survival, to be got o'er by whatever means were most expedient. I'd no more have quarreled with her arrangements than I'd quarrel with the sum o' history, or cavil at the patterns of the stars."

"For all that," Bertrand remarked, "thou'rt no nearer Maryland now than when ye started, and this night shan't last forever."

"Let him tell on," the Captain said. " 'Tis either a tale or the Shuddering Fearfuls in straits like these."

"Aye, John, tell on," Ebenezer encouraged. "How is't you knew Joan Toast had followed me? And how is't you fell into Tom Tayloe's hands?"

"Tayloe! Ye've heard o' Tom Tayloe and me?"

Ebenezer explained the circumstances of his acquaintanceship with the corpulent seller of indentured servants. McEvoy was vastly amused; indeed, he laughed as heartily at the news of Tayloe's indenture to the cooper William Smith as if he were hearing the story in Locket's instead of a prison-hut, and the Captain was moved to observe, "Methinks 'tis
he
should be merry, not you, sir; he hath the better bargain after all!"

"Aye and he hath," Ebenezer agreed. "But e'en were we not here in the very vestibule of death, 'twould ill become us to jest at the man's bad luck."

McEvoy laughed again. "What humanists death hatches out of men! Ye have forgot what a worthless wretch Tom Tayloe was, that preyed on masters and servants alike!"

"A wretch he might have been," the poet allowed, "and deserving of your prank; but his time is no less mortal than our own, and to rob him of four years of't is to carry the jest too far." He sighed. "I'Christ, when I think of the weeks and years I've squandered! Precious mortal time! I begrudge every day I spend not writing verse!"

"And I every night I slept alone in London," Bertrand said fervently.

"As for that," the Captain put in, "what matter if a man lives seven years or seventy? His years are not an eyeblink to eternity, and de'il the way he spends 'em -- whether steering ships or scribbling verse, or building towns or burning 'em -- he dies like a May fly when his day is done, and the stars go round their courses just the same. Where's the profit and loss o' his labors? He'd as well have stayed abed, or sat his bum on a bench."

Although Ebenezer stirred uneasily at these words, remembering his state of mind at Magdalene College and in his room in Pudding Lane, he nevertheless reaffirmed his belief in the value of human time, arguing from the analogy of precious stones and metals that the value of commodities increases inversely with their supply where demand is constant, and with demand where supply is constant, so that mortal time, being infinitesimal in supply and virtually infinite in demand, was therefore infinitely precious to mortal men.

"Marry come up!" McEvoy cried impatiently. "Ye twain remind me of children I saw once at St. Bartholomew's Fair, queued up to ride in a little red pony cart. . ."

He did not bother to explain his figure, but Ebenezer understood it immediately, or thought he understood it, for he said, "Thou'rt right, McEvoy; there is no argument 'twixt the Captain and myself. I recall the day my sister and I turned five and were allowed an extra hour 'twixt bath and bed. Mrs. Twigg would set her hourglass running there in the nursery; we could do whate'er we wished with the time, but when the sand had run 'twas off to bed and no lingering. I'faith, what a treasure that hour seemed: time for any of a hundred pleasures! We fetched out the cards, to play some game or other -- but what silly game was worth such a wondrous hour? I vowed I'd build a castle out of blocks, and Anna set to drawing three soldiers upon a paper -- but neither of us could pursue his sport for long, for thinking the other had chosen more wisely, so that anon we made exchange and were no more pleased. We cast about more desperately among our toys and games -- whereof any one had sufficed for an hour's diversion earlier in the day -- but none would do, and still the glass ran on! Any hour save this most prime and measured we had been pleased enough to do no more than talk, or watch the world at work outside our nursery window, but when I cried 'Heavy, heavy hangs over thy head,' to commence a guessing game, Anna fell straightway to weeping, and I soon joined her. Yet e'en our tears did naught to ease our desperation; indeed, they but heightened it the more, for all the while we wept, our hour was slipping by. Now bedtime, mind, we'd ne'er before looked on as evil, but that sand was like our lifeblood draining from some wound; we sat and wept, and watched it flow, and the upshot of't was, we both fell ill and took to heaving, and Mrs. Twigg fetched us off to bed with our last quarter hour still in the glass."