"My sentiments exactly," growled Captain Slye, "but pray recall who's host, or 'tis two pistols I shall fire."
" 'Fore God, good Captains!" Ebenezer croaked, but legs and sphincters both betrayed him; unable to say on, he sank with wondrous odor to his knees and buried his face in the seat of his chair. At that instant the rear door opened.
"Stay, here's the barmaid!" cried Captain Scurry. "Fetch me two beers, lass, while I jettison this stinkard!"
"Beers be damned!" roared Captain Slye, who had a view of the entrance door. "Yonder goes our Laureate, I swear, along the street!"
"I'faith let's at him, then," said the other, "ere he once more slips his mooring!"
Turning their backs on beer and poet alike they hurried out to the street, from which came shortly the sound of pistols and a retreating clamor of curses. But Ebenezer heard them not, for at mention of their quarry he swooned upon the tavern flags.
9: Further Sea-Poetry, Composed in the Stables of the King o' the Seas
When he regained his senses Ebenezer found himself in the stables of the King o' the Seas, lying in the hay; his friend Burlingame, dressed in Scotch cloth, squatted at his hip and fanned his face with the double-entry ledger.
"I was obliged to fetch you outside," said Henry with a smile, "else you'd have driven away the clients."
"A pox upon the clients!" the poet said weakly. " 'Twas a pair of their clients brought me to this pass!"
"Are you your own man now, or shall I fan thee farther?"
"No farther, prithee, at least from where you stand, or I'll succumb entirely." He moved to sit up, made a sour face, and lay back with a sigh.
"The fault is mine, Eben; had I known aught of your urgency I'd not have lingered such a time in yonder privy. How is't you did not use this hay instead? 'Tis no mean second."
"I cannot make light of't," Ebenezer declared. "The while you sported with the wench, two pirate captains had like to put a ball betwixt my eyes, for no more cause than that I ventured to settle their quarrel!"
"Pirate captains!"
"Aye. I'm certain of't," Ebenezer insisted. "I've read enough in Esquemeling to know a pirate when I see one: ferocious fellows as like as twins; they were dressed all in black, with black beards and walking sticks."
"Why did you not declare your name and office?" Burlingame asked. " 'Tis not likely they'd dare molest you then."
Ebenezer shook his head. "I thank Heav'n I did not, for else my life had ended on the spot. 'Twas the Laureate they sought Henry, to kill and murther him!"
"Nay! But why?"
"The Lord alone knows why; yet I owe my life solely to some poor wight, that walking past the window they took for me and gave him chase. Pray God they missed him and are gone for good!"
"Belike they are," Burlingame said. "Pirates, you say! Well, 'tis not impossible, after all — But say, thou'rt all beshit."
Ebenezer groaned. "Ignominy! How waddle to the wharf in this condition, to fetch clean breeches?"
"Marry, I said naught o' waddling, sir," said Burlingame, in the tones of a country servant. "Only fetch off thy drawers and breeches now, that me little Dolly maught clean 'em out, and I shall bring ye fresh 'uns."
"Dolly?"
"Aye, Joan Freckles yonder in the King o' the Seas."
Ebenezer blushed. "And yet she is a woman, for all her harlotry, and I the Laureate of Maryland! I cannot have her hear of't."
"Hear of't!" Burlingame laughed. "You've near suffocated her already! Who was it found you on the floor, d'ye think, and helped me fetch you hither? Off with 'em now. Master Laureate, and spare me thy modesty. 'Twas a woman wiped thy bum at birth and another shall in dotage: what matter if one do't between?" And Ebenezer having undone his buttons with reluctance, his friend made bold to give a mighty jerk, and the poet stood exposed.
"La now," chuckled Burlingame. "Thou'rt fairly made, if somewhat fouled."
"I die of shame and cannot even cover myself for filth," the poet complained. "Do make haste, Henry, ere someone find me thus!"
"I shall, for be't man or maid you'd not stay virgin long, I swear, thou'rt that fetching." He laughed again at Ebenezer's misery and gathered up the soiled garments. "Adieu, now: thy servant will return anon, if the pirates do not get him. Make shift to clean yourself in the meantime."
"But prithee, how?"
Burlingame shrugged. "Only look about, good sir. A clever man is never lost for long." And off he went across the yard, calling for Dolly to come get his prize.
Ebenezer at once looked about him for some means to remedy his unhappy condition. Straw he rejected at once, though there was enough and to spare of it in the stable: it could not even be clenched in the hand with comfort. Next he considered his fine holland handkerchief and remembered that it was in his breeches pocket.
" 'Tis as well," he judged on second thought, "for it hath a murtherous row of great French buttons."
Nor could he sacrifice his coat, shirt, or stockings, for he lacked on the one hand clothes enough to throw away, and on the other courage enough to give the barmaid further laundry. "A clever man is never lost for long," he repeated to himself, and regarding next the tail of a great bay gelding in a stall behind him, rejected it on the grounds that its altitude and position rendered it at once inaccessible and dangerous. "What doth this teach us," he reflected with pursed lips, "if not that one man's wit is poor indeed? Fools and wild beasts live by mother wit and learn from experience; the wise man learns from the wits and lives of others. Marry, is't for naught that I spent two years at Cambridge, and three times two with Henry in my father's summerhouse? If native wit can't save me, then education shall!"
Accordingly he searched his education for succor, beginning with his memory of history. "Why should men prize the records of the past," he asked, "save as lessons for the present?" Yet though he was no stranger to Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Suetonius, Sallust, and other chroniclers ancient and modern, he could recall in them no precedent for his present plight, and thus no counsel, and had at length to give over the attempt. " 'Tis clear," he concluded, "that History teacheth not a man, but mankind; her muse's pupil is the body politic or its leaders. Nay, more," he reasoned further, shivering a bit in the breeze off the harbor, "the eyes of Clio are like the eyes of snakes, that can see naught but motion: she marks the rise and fall of nations, but of things immutable — eternal verities and timeless problems — she rightly takes no notice, for fear of poaching on Philosophy's preserve."
Next, therefore, he summoned to mind as much as ever he could of Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the rest, not forgetting his Platonical professors and their one-time friend Descartes; but though they'd no end of interest in whether his plight was real or fancied, and whether it merited concern sub specie aeternitatis, and whether his future action with regard to it was already determined or entirely in his hands, yet none advanced specific counsel. "Can it be they all shat syllogisms, that have nor stench nor stain," he wondered, "and naught besides? Or is't that no fear travels past their Reason, to ruin their breeches withal?" The truth of the matter was, he decided, peering across the court in vain for Henry, that philosophy dealt with generalities, categories, and abstractions alone, like More's eternal spissitude, and spoke of personal problems only insofar as they illustrated general ones; in any case, to the best of his recollection it held no answer for such homely, practical predicaments as his own.
He did not even consider physics, astronomy, and the other areas of natural philosophy, for the same reason; nor did he crack his memory on the plastic arts, for he knew full well no Phidias or Michelangelo would deign to immortalize a state like his, whatever their attraction for human misery. No, he resolved at last, it was to literature he must turn for help, and should have sooner, for literature alone of all the arts and sciences took as her province the entire range of man's experience and behavior — from cradle to grave and beyond, from emperor to hedge-whore, from the burning of cities to the breaking of wind — and human problems of every magnitude: in literature alone might one find catalogued with equal care the ancestors of Noah, the ships of the Achaians —