" '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.
9: 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!"