Honey Harlot (12 page)

He looked almost helplessly at Richardson. Richardson said: ‘She can’t be kept below decks, sir. And where else? There’s only the men’s bunks in the fore deckhouse and five of them sleeping there; and the boy’s bunk in the galley.’ He shrugged. ‘Shall I give her my cabin, sir, and doss down where I may?’

To have her here! So close! ‘It’s not decent,’ my husband said, ‘with Mrs Briggs so near.’

‘Oh, but what would make it decent,’ said Mary,
‘but
Mrs Briggs being so near?’ She had returned to her even temper, she gave me one of her tender, kindly looks. ‘Mrs Briggs has nothing to fear from me,’ she said. ‘She has harm enough coming to her from elsewhere.’

‘You will be locked in,’ said my husband, speaking directly to her for the first time. ‘You will speak to no one. And if the crew know what’s good for them, none will speak to
you.
I have yet to be convinced that they didn’t bring you aboard, and if they did…’ He left the threat hanging in the air. ‘Go back to your cabin,’ he said to me, and to Richardson: ‘See to it then,’ and he swung about and went away up the companion steps. Richardson said: ‘Come Mary!’ and followed her into his cabin. They left the door open, for fear, I suppose, of the Captain returning and finding them closeted together there. I went into my own cabin but I stood at the door, leaving it open a crack to hear what they said. He said half whispering, ‘Best do what he says or he’ll make trouble for us all.’

‘He dare not,’ she said, not whispering at all.

‘He will, Mary. There’s nothing you can do against him that’ll save
us,
if he lays charges against us.’

‘But I’ll threaten him—’

‘Mary, hush!’ he said. ‘What the ship’s Master may have done with a waterfront woman will make no difference if he brings his crew before a court of law. You’ve had your say now, you’ve had your revenge. God knows what the men will be saying of him, now and when they come ashore. For the rest, keep quiet, do no more; you’ll be snug enough in here, I’ll bring you your things

I heard my husband’s voice above decks, shouting orders to the men in the rigging, and dared to open my door a little. I besought her: ‘Mary, please! You’ve done enough.’

‘Enough to spread his ill fame all over the waterfronts,’ she said, ‘so why stop now, what difference will it make?’

‘Rumours will spread. The men will talk, of course. But they’ll be only half believed. If it can’t be denied that the moment he discovered your presence aboard, you were kept close, kept a prisoner, then no one can say that he brought you aboard for himself. That he went with you once… That you seduced him just the once by your wicked ways—he could live with that, Mary. Every man is human, no one can know that better than seamen, betraying their wives in every port across the world. He’ll preach no longer, perhaps, he must admit to failure; but that’s very different from bringing you to sea with him, and with his wife aboard

‘You’re a fool about the man,’ she said, resentfully.

‘I’m not a fool about my whole future. What future would he have if he couldn’t any longer go to sea? And his future is mine.’

‘Well, in that God help you, poor little thing!’ she said; and to Richardson, shrugging: ‘Very well. But on one condition. Let him lay one hand on her in unkindness, let him speak one bullying word to her—and I take it all back, I’ll submit no more. On that understanding, I’ll behave like an angel—well, hardly that: you can’t close up a tigress in a cage like this and expect her to do nothing but purr. But I’ll promise, the crew shall know that I’m kept here under duress and in silence. No one shall say that he brought me aboard or wished me here. So, come take your property, Albert, and go and get me mine.’ She pushed him out of the cabin and slammed-to the door. He said to me quietly, ‘Close your cabin door, Ma’am, and stay there, keep out of the way of more trouble,’ and he gave me a glance, half pitying, half conspiratorial and went away. I waited a moment to see whether Mary would open the cabin door but she did not. He hadn’t locked it. She had given her promise. I think that that was enough for both of them.

H
OW STRANGE IT IS
to recall that out of conditions so extraordinary, we should have settled for the next weeks into a sort of routine. When breakfast was over, I would tidy up my cabin and vacate it, so that Mary might be released from her prison and go there, where there were more facilities for her ablutions. I saw to it that tubs of hot water were ready for her and toilet soap and suds; I knew what it must mean to her to keep herself and her clothes as she always did, so scrupulously spick and span. I had feared on the first day to return with my husband and find the place festooned with her intimate under-garments, hung out to dry, but she played no teasing tricks on
me;
everything disappeared with her, back to her cell and I presume she dealt with it there. And all the time, she left no sign of her having used my premises; no spilt water, no soiled towels, no bowls and basins that had not been emptied all into the one tub, wiped round and the cloths wrung out and hung across the rim to dry. Not my mother nor my sisters, so apt and practical back home in the neat little house in Massachusetts, could have kept all so tidy and clean.

Back home in Massachusetts! Could they but have known! Poor, vague, silly helpless little Sarah, caged between a lion and a tigress, each raging, helpless, in cages of their own—my husband in the grip of those twin passions of desire and shame, of terror at the pass he had been brought to, of the day of discovery to come, to which, however, he must drive his ship ever faster and more smoothly on; she in her close confinement, idle and bored, plotting what mischief she might that wouldn’t break her promise to ‘behave’. I think they should not have sold me into slavery at my husband’s hands, that family of mine. Looking back I absolve my father of all but a too hasty relief at finding for his difficult child a respectable and an older man, but I think that my mother knew better—I think that my mother, though she might not understand my weaknesses, was too well aware of them to be guiltless in offering up so frail a victim to the mercies of such a beast of prey as Benjamin Briggs. Can it be possible that she didn’t ask herself why he should choose
me,
from that quiverful of excellent daughters, useful, capable: only not beautiful. But—she could get rid of a nuisance, my father of a responsibility. That I should within a few brief weeks be forced by my married loyalty to a half-sadistic monomaniac, to go down on my knees to a waterfront harlot, could hardly, I suppose have occurred to either of them. I sometimes wondered how my smug, clever sisters would have acted in my place.

For all went by no means so smoothly as that word ‘routine’ might suggest. Caged she might be and submit to it, but the tigress still used her polished claws. Someone must take her her food. On the first evening, my husband stood by while the cookboy and steward, Edward Head, opened the door just enough to introduce the tray. She took the tray with her left hand but with her right pushed the door wide. ‘Are you there, my honey?’ she said to my husband, ‘—standing back in the shadows under the swinging lamp where you think I shan’t find you out. But I see you: come forward, come closer, we were close enough once, when you flung me to the floor and rolled with me there, and I naked in those strong arms of your; not even waiting to come to the bed!’ He strode forward and slammed shut the door but from behind the partition her triumphant laughter rang out like a chime of bells. I quickly closed the slit of my own cabin door and was back, sitting at my melodeon when he came into my cabin. He sat down heavily at the table, his face in his hands. Pretending ignorance of anything newly untoward, I rose and went to the little window. I said: ‘The air’s very strange. Does it mean a storm brewing?’

And appropriately enough! I thought—after the storm enclosed by time and space, that had raged that day. It had grown dark early, no stars in the sky, the sea in the evening gloom only a restless threshing of unseen waters with glimpses of white spray. The air was very heavy, cold and yet sultry if such a thing could be. I thought to myself that such a phrase well expressed my husband’s habitual humour: cold and yet sultry. Until now…

He made no direct answer. He lifted his head at last and said: ‘You heard?’

‘The partitions are thin.’

‘The woman is a devil,’ he said. ‘What can be done?’

It was the first time he had spoken directly to me since she had confronted him; if indeed he spoke to me now and not mostly to himself. I answered, however. ‘She’s teasing you. She’ll do you no real harm.’

‘No harm? What do you think she’s doing to me now?’

‘None heard but the steward, and he’d only half believe, a poor, thick-headed boy like that. No one will attend to him.’

He raised his head, staring at me as though he noticed me now for the first time. ‘You seem very confident,’ he said. ‘What do you know of all this?’

Not a word of remorse for those vile accusations, since proved totally untrue, for having struck me across the face. I said coldly, ‘You may treat me as a fool, but that doesn’t make me one.’

‘You were in that cabin with her—with her and Richardson. What were you doing there?’

‘Richardson had that moment come there—to warn me that you’d left the wheel. I’d been there alone with her.’

‘Alone with her! You’d been alone in the company of a woman like that?’

I said almost savagely, I couldn’t control myself: ‘You’ve been alone with her also, in your time.’

He did not deny it. He put his head again in his hands. ‘The serpent beguiled me,’ he said, ‘and I did eat.’ It was not very often that he quoted from the Bible though I believe that he knew it almost by heart; since he had taught himself to think that he was as good as God, he believed, I suppose, that his words could match the words of the Bible. But now he said it simply—far more simply than in his own words he would ever have expressed it. ‘The serpent beguiled me

‘It is a sin as old as Adam’s,’ he said. ‘It is the first sin.’

I did not remind him that it was Eve who had spoken those words. I said only: ‘Is it not simply nature?’

He turned upon me again his dark face, heavy with despair. ‘The world will have other names for it, when the world knows that Captain Benjamin Briggs has been guilty of it.’

‘That was the reason I went to her. To plead with her not to tell of it.’

He said disgustedly: ‘You lowered yourself to plead with such a woman as that?’

The day had been very long and terrifying, I was worn out with anxiety and fear, with the anxiety and fear I had felt for
him;
with the shock of his foul accusations as to my conduct with the crew, with the shock to us both of Mary’s appearance; with those last brief moments of appeal to her on his behalf. My head ached, my heart was sick within me, I felt that I had been through the storm which was in fact shortly to come… I lost my temper. ‘
I
lowered myself! You lowered yourself even further, I understand. To the floor, she said. You couldn’t even wait to take her to a bed, but rolled with her like two animals on the floor. Naked, she said.’ He was silent with a terrible silence. ‘I went to her to beg her not to make these ugly revelations. She agreed at last. But for your vile accusations of me—which she must reveal herself, to disprove—you need never have known she was aboard, the men need never have known of your downfall, for she’d told nobody and Captain Morehouse had agreed with her to say nothing. She meant to taunt you and tease you, to exert a little blackmail perhaps, for trinkets or clothes, no more, there’s no ugliness in her and no greed. But she had no wish to destroy you, that would have been all of it, the end.’ And I went and fetched the little mirror from the wall and held it close up under the swinging lamp and peered into it. ‘I have the stain still, Captain Briggs, where you hit me across my face. I wish it might stay there always, disfiguring though it may be, to remind me every time I look in the glass of what you really are; to remind
you,
when ever you may look at me, of what you really are.’ I flung down the mirror on the table beside him. ‘I promised to love, honour and obey you. Well, I absolve myself of those promises.’ He stared up at me, bereft of words, but J was not bereft, I went viciously on. ‘As to love—you’ll hardly now expect that of me?—nor honour either, I suppose? And as to obedience—that presupposed you to be a decent man. Well, you’re not a decent man, you’re a man not fit to have a dog at his command let alone a human creature, let alone a young woman defenceless. Or as you thought, defenceless. But I’m not. Stupid I may be, God knows I’ve been told so often enough. Well, I’ll play the stupid now, I’m too stupid to understand your commands any more—or your demands either; too stupid to cower, creep-mouse, and let you hurl your filthy epithets at me and let them lie, when you’re proved wrong, never unsay a word, let the filth lie—as the stain lies still across my face, of your stinging hand… But not so stupid that I’ll stay in this cabin one moment more with you, in this foetid air made more vile by the emanations of your foetid mind.’ Where I got such fine expressions, I don’t know; but I felt clean, purged of the dirt he had flung at me, like ordure flung at a creature caught in the stocks; and I caught up my shawl and swept out of the cabin and into the saloon, and unloosed the door of the mate’s cabin. ‘Mary,’ I said, loud enough for my husband to hear, ‘come with me. We’ll go up to the deck.’

For once she lost her cool acceptance, she said: ‘But I can’t, I’ve given my word.’ Richardson had been right to trust to the illogical integrities of a woman of the streets.

‘You can come back. I’ll be your gaoler; and you can’t run very far! You’ve promised to make no more trouble

‘Hardly that,’ she said, laughing.

‘Well, you’ll make none for me, Mary, I know. So bring your shawl and we’ll breathe in some clean fresh air.’

She wrapped her bright shawl about her and took my hand; and, I leading, we went up the companion and to the deck rail and looked out over the sea. My husband made no move to prevent our going.