Honey Harlot (3 page)

That night he took my body with a violence that had something in it almost of savagery; but when I made some small responsive movement of my own, he bade me fiercely to lie still—did I think I was a whore?

The next day I watched from the deck and he now and again joined me and I knew that he, also, watched for her, both of us praying for her that she should not be there. But the day after that, she was there; she looked very pale and I thought to myself that when she had said that she did what she did for her bread, that might in actual truth be so. For this time she replied to the first man who spoke to her, and I saw the gesture of the lovely hand; you could almost read that she said: ‘I must have something to eat.’ He laughed and dived into his bag and taking out his knife, cut off a chunk of some bread or meat or biscuit, I don’t know what, which she took from him and ate voraciously. When it was done, he spoke to her again, earnestly; she seemed to plead a little, to protest perhaps; then, with drooping shoulders, not looking up to where, with my husband, I stood on the deck looking on—she went away through the crowd with him.

My husband put his hand into his pocket and took out the golden cross. He stood for a moment staring down at it; then he said to me: ‘Should I go to save her?’

And God help me, I answered: ‘Yes.’

I
AM VERY OLD
now—very old; but kneeling here before the crucifix, praying for his soul as, over so many years now I have knelt and prayed—it all comes back to me as clearly and brightly as though it were yesterday. And if sometimes I seem to invent what in fact I cannot know from my own actual experience, it is because I have for so long, so often imagined it, built it all up in my mind, that it comes to life and tells its own story as though indeed I
had
been there…

Was I there when Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia offered my husband that wager?—no, of course I was not. And yet—I see it, I hear the very words they spoke. Captain Morehouse was a big, bluff man with a heavy moustache and a heavy, rather frizzy beard dividing below his chin into two points; a handsome, cheery fellow whom all men would call a friend. Coming strolling up to my husband as he stood on the cobbled quayside, his hands in the pockets of his knee-length heavy cloth jacket with its brass buttons, looking up at his pretty new ship. A big man also, my husband, Captain Benjamin Briggs, with his fine, fierce face, dark hair, brushed back, worn long, just concealing his ears and the nape of his neck, thick dark moustache and short jutting black beard. ‘Well, Briggs—a very pretty little piece of work; a very pretty little craft.’

‘She is beautiful,’ my husband would have replied; that was always his word for the brig. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘I remember her when she first appeared, ten years ago or more. Nova Scotia built. She had only the one deck then, a very trim little piece even in those days. But her history wasn’t good.’

‘She did well enough the first years, till she went ashore at Cape Breton, in the gale.’

‘But messed about a bit, since then. However, you’ve made a lovely piece of work of her now. Part owner, aren’t you?’

‘Eight twenty-fourths; over a thousand pounds I’ve got in her. Syndicate, all Americans now. Cap’n Spates brought her down from Cow Bay. He says she handled very well; I have high hopes of her.’

‘Well, God speed to her and all who sail in her; we’ll hope she’ll not play the Amazon with
you
.’

‘I mean to change the name,’ my husband will have said. ‘I don’t care for the word.’

Not care for the word—Amazon; which suggested a big, fine strapping woman; which suggested… Dear God, who knows? Who knows what red fires burned, unsuspected of all, beneath the damped down embers of that dark heart of his? He would turn the thought aside. ‘We sail in eight days’ time for Genoa.’

‘Why—I too, to Genoa, carrying petroleum. What’s your cargo?’

‘We carry crude alcohol. Six thousand pounds value.’

‘Crude alcohol! Well, that’s a fine one for such as you! For the Italians to fortify their wine.’ And Morehouse would burst out with his great Ho! Ho! of laughter. ‘A man of your pretensions—to carry alcohol!’

‘I carry what cargo is offered me. I’m part of a company, if the orders are to carry alcohol, that’s what I carry. Crude alcohol may have other uses than to make men drunk.’

‘Ay, well, and so you take comfort to your conscience.’

‘My conscience is clear, sir. No drop of spirits has ever passed these lips.’

‘You’re the poorer for it, Captain Briggs. A skinful of liquor, an armful of woman—what harm did they ever do a man, bound for the long, cold emptiness of a voyage half across the world from which, if the seas rise up in their wrath against him, he may never even come back? To go to your Maker, never having drunk a dram or whored with a wench—why, what did the Lord intend such comforts for?’

And the face would grow grey beneath its weather-beaten tan and the dark eyes stream fire and the whole tall, strong figure seem to tense to rigidity in its passion of evangelistic fury. ‘Man, you blaspheme! You insult the great God who made you, who made such poor creatures as, in your filth and debauchery, you defile and destroy. But beware, I warn you, beware…’ And he would thunder on and on, and launch at last into the final great peroration of all his thunderings. ‘I implore you, beware! Beware, before it’s too late, beware lest perhaps in this very hour, He grow weary of your obduracy and lift, at last, His great golden hand and sweep you, with all your sins upon you, off the face of this earth which you defile with your very presence on it; and so cast you into the outer darkness for unimaginable eternity

Not many men laughed on, in the presence of Captain Benjamin Briggs, when he spoke from this great rostrum of his fiery indignation in the name of God. For, with all his weaknesses, on account, perhaps of those very weaknesses, there burned within him a deep sincerity, believing as he did with all his being in a great, and a vengeful God, a God whose white blaze of purity it was sin and shame to offend against, and to himself a very agony to see defiled. Not many men laughed; but Captain Morehouse, he would laugh, he laughed at everything, God save his soul!—and he would laugh now and protest: ‘Well, well, you’ll never convert me, Briggs, from a breasty wench and a bottle of rum; and I’ll wager you the second, if not the first, for you’ve got a pretty woman of your own and a marriage bed to enjoy her in—that if you would but take a drop of it now and then, you’d be an easier fellow to live with, even to yourself.’ And he would insist, ‘Come, a wager! A bottle of whisky, that the Dei Gratia reaches landfall in Portugal before your pretty Amazon—and you’ll drink it if I win!’

My husband never struck a man in his life—or had never struck a man until that day. But they say that he lifted his fist against David Morehouse then; and only at the last moment dropped his hand, turned and walked away.

And Captain Morehouse sauntered off still laughing and, laughing, met with another spirit of mischief: and took a handful of her bright curls and yanked back her head and fastened his mouth, she all willing, upon hers; and went with her. And as they went, arms entwined, confided to her his recent encounter with that tub-thumping prophet of doom and disaster, Captain Benjamin Briggs. ‘I don’t know the man,’ she’d say.

‘And never will; not in any sense.’

‘What will you bet?’ she must have said.

What would he bet?—that she would not cast the honey toils of her charms about the body and soul of Captain Benjamin Briggs? Well, she coveted a gold cross such as was worn by so many of her kind, whose hearts were so strangely more innocent than their poor, misused bodies; who said their prayers and knew a God more merciful than the Great Avenger of Captain Briggs, the God of the harlots who looked with compassion upon the life that poverty and want and often just a natural physical pleasure had led them to—a gold cross with her name on it, Mary Sellers. When his pleasure had had its fill of her—and she was generous with her wares—he promised her: never mind any wager, you shall have your gift anyway. Which gift she suggested, thinking it over, plotting it all out carefully in her mischievous, clever mind—would make her task the easier.

And so, wearing the cross, in her dark dress, wrapped in her great black shawl—Honey Mary crouched weeping theatrical tears at the foot of a tall pillar among the bustling waterside throng; and Sarah Briggs, ignorant, innocent, eager, compassionate—leaned over the rail of the brigantine Amazon and beckoned her doom aboard.

And the slow plot unfolded—conceived in a spirit of mischief with no thought of the terror to come—and the game was played out and, as she moved away through the crowds with pretended reluctance on that man’s arm, my husband weighed the gold cross in his hand and asked me, should he go after her to her salvation? And I answered, yes.

When at last he came back, I looked into his face and recalled the cold ferocity of his marital embracings; and I knew it all.

The next day being a Sabbath, we went to church. I wonder if he felt as I did that sly glances followed us, exchange of grinning smiles, mocking laughter when we were beyond earshot of it. I think he did not. He held himself so high in his own sight, he knew himself so well to be the feared, the revered, the untouched, the untouchable and most righteous of men, that he would not for a moment dream that any could suspect that he had fallen, momentarily, from the tall pedestal of his almost ferocious respectability. Nor would he suppose, knowing nothing of the wager, that she would trouble to comment on it, that he would count as anything but just another of a harlot’s customers, no more, no less. This man or that, she would hardly recall which had come to her easy bed. He had gone to preach and stayed to fall, but what would that be to her? Many men, no doubt, might come to love her for that sweetness that was in her, despite all the rest; would try to convert her, to bring her to love them alone, to forsake this life and marry them; (for what she had said to the contrary had been all a lie to win her wager, to bring him to this pass in which he was now). Many men, at any rate, would wish to alter her way of life; and he be only one more. So he would argue to himself; would believe, still, simply that she had repented, promised herself reformation—and failed. By the time he had come to her, she had been back in her old ways; and, thinking no more of him than of any other man, had dragged him down with her. With what agonised fervour would he inwardly suffer to wash away the memory of that sin; against what threatened danger to his spiritual pride, would he convince himself that none of all those who admired and respected him, would ever come to know of it!

As it transpired, strange to relate, none ever did.

They had invited him into the pulpit; and he preached there with all his accustomed strength and conviction, and I saw, as always, tears in many eyes and the purpose of amendment on many faces. But his sermon mentioned nothing, for once, of the evils of the sins of the flesh. He walked back with me on his arm, stern, erect, quiet, outwardly impregnable; and when we came face to face with Honey Mary strolling by with her hands linked into the arms of two jolly sailors, carefree and laughing, no glance was exchanged between any of us. Only I felt his muscles grow taut beneath my hand; and relax again when she had gone safely by.

The next day, Monday, he called his first mate to come with him and stood on the quay pointing up to the bows of the ship. He was carrying out his intention to re-christen the Amazon. I had thought he might call her after my name, Sarah Jane, but he had no such thought, I believe. He had not, at any rate, consulted me. I think my preferences in such affairs as this mattered to him not at all; indeed, I was hard put to it to know in what way I did matter to him. They were astonished, I know, when he chose me for his wife; but none more astonished, as I have said—both before and after the marriage—than I.

I am old now but I look back to the girl I was then: a pretty girl—almost a beautiful girl, though in a very different way from that magnificent, flamboyant, flaunting, and yet hauntingly sweet beauty of Honey Mary’s.
My
looks were in the fine delicate skin that goes with pale auburn hair, the skin beneath which the colour comes and goes, not a fine, matt skin as hers was, a goldeny-cream. And the moulding of my face was very fine, the bones were beautiful, a small nose, a mouth like a flower and brown eyes, rare, I think, with my colour of hair. A thin young creature, yet prettily rounded enough—enough for him anyway, most evidently. But, for the rest… I suppose no girl more dreamily vague, more inapt in learning, more unpractical, and more totally without self-confidence as a result, ever wandered through the little world of my narrow home town, where all was briskness and handiness and ability. My mother was ashamed, despaired of me, my sisters left me contemptuously to my own drifting dreams, my brothers were fine, strong, manly boys and troubled with me not at all. Only my father, who perhaps lived also in dreams, though they were dreams only of goodness and Godliness—only he did not despair over me but laboured to teach and guide me, to imbue me with his own strong, pure and immutable principles. Vague, helpless, hopeless—in my own eyes and those of all others who knew me bordering upon downright stupidity—yet within, I know now, looking back over it all, he had forged for me a rod of pure silver, through and through. Why else am I here? Why else are they two where they have so long been?

On that Monday, then, he stood with his first mate, Richardson, looking up to where two men swung on a cradle lowered from the foredeck to the ship’s bows, with paint pots in their hands. They were to delete the name Amazon and inscribe there whatever name he had chosen; doubtless, though I did not, they already knew it. Peaked cap pushed back on his dark head, hands plunged into his jacket pockets against the cold, he stood there looking up, with no thoughts, I suppose, of anything but the work in hand; no thought certainly of Honey Mary and her wicked ways. And Honey Mary came up beside him quietly and slid her hand through his arm and, in easy familiarity, stood beside him there.