Honey Harlot (2 page)

Andrew Gilling it was, the second mate, a big, burly, bearded man, rough and crude, a bullying man. He said: ‘Why don’t you go down and find out?’

I looked with dismay at the filthy cobbled waterside, with its rats and its crowds and its hustle and bustle of men and those terrible women. It was early November, a time when in these parts, they say, there often comes a sort of second summer, a week or two of sunshine, the weather cold but clear. Now the sun slanted down, its rays lit up the huddled, dark figure abandoned to its grief. My husband had warned me—as though it were necessary—never to leave the ship. But…
She,
after all, was down there alone. I stood, hesitant, confused, bewildered, at a loss what to do: and at that moment she lifted her beautiful, tear-stained face and looked up at me.

Without further thought, I leaned over the rail and beckoned her to come aboard.

I had thought that Gilling might go forward to meet her but he had disappeared, fading into the background without another word. She rose, looked up again at me as though to question that I really invited her; then slowly moving, so tall and stately, wrapped in the black shawl with her honey hair shining, she passed through the jostling throng and came up the companionway steps to where I stood awaiting her on the deck. And it seemed to me—and well may have been the case, as it later proved—that the hustle on the wharf-side was for a moment stilled, that a hundred faces were lifted, curious, incredulous, and as I now know—amused. I put out my hand to her and she stepped on to the deck of the brigantine Amazon; and so into my life, and his.

I said to her, holding her hand: ‘Can I help you in some way? You look so sad.’

She looked back at me with her great eyes, the colour of amber, drowned in tears. ‘I am wrong to come to you,’ she said.

‘If you’re unhappy—?’ I held her hand still and led her into my cabin in the stern of the ship. There was water there in a carafe and I poured out a glass for her—my husband, though he carried so incongruous a cargo, would permit no liquor aboard his ship. She drank as it seemed gratefully, sinking down into the chair I offered her and throwing back the black shawl. And so for the first time I saw her in all her beauty.

She was magnificent: tall, exquisitely slender and yet with a full bosom, her shoulders brushed by the tumbling curls of heavy golden hair. Her waist was small, her hips spreading out beneath but only into a fullness, a roundness which left her slender still: she was a creature all curves, not an angle about her, never a movement without its matchless grace. Yet her gestures were quick and expressive, there was no heavy slowness about her, she was all life and movement and as she spoke she used her hands to illustrate every point. Her voice was low and vibrant and even when she raised it, it had in it a sort of sweetness. She was all sweetness—Honey Mary; and even I whose long life has been through her something close to hell, must ever concede that for all her monstrous wickedness there was something in her, deeply and essentially, true to her name.

I waited in silence while she drank the water, put down the empty glass. I would not press her confidence. She also was silent, drying her eyes, pushing back the damp curls from her forehead, settling the neck of her dark dress where the golden cross hung gleaming. She touched the cross with her fingers when at last she spoke to me. She said: ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m in great distress, it’s true, but I shouldn’t be here, not with such as you.’ And she raised the great tear-filled eyes to me. She said: ‘I’m a bad woman. I daresay you don’t even know that such women as I exist.’

I was a little frightened but I said: ‘I don’t think anyone so beautiful as you can be bad.’

She made no foolish denials of the compliment implied. She said: ‘It’s
because
I’m beautiful.’

Where she was slender and rounded I was angular and thin, where her eyes were the colour of amber, mine were brown and bright; my hair was pale auburn but its sheen was diminished to extinction by her honey-gold and where hers curled riotously down to her shoulders, mine was straight and must be brushed back into decorous bands about my head. And yet there were those who had thought me to have something of beauty. I said: ‘I don’t think that a woman’s good looks need make her bad.’

‘Then you don’t know men,’ she said.

Poor little bride of a few weeks; coming to an awareness of men, or at least of one man. ‘I am a married woman,’ I said, protesting.

‘Your husband is the best, the most respected, the most splendid of men. His reputation goes before him like a pillar of fire. He’s a righteous man, a man proud of his good name, preaching God to all sinners—invited into the pulpits, I’ve heard, to thunder out his warnings to us, the damned

‘You mustn’t!’ I cried. ‘You mustn’t call yourself damned! You blaspheme.’

Her voice dropped. ‘If you knew all,’ she said,
‘you
would call me damned.’

‘I know only that you’re very unhappy,’ I said.

Outside it was bitterly chill, the grey light beat down from the glassed-in skylight raised fifteen inches above deck level; but within a fire burned and the small cabin was snug and trim. I had entered it with pride, putting my girlish touches here and there, my basket of needles and threads and scissors and pins, my sewing machine. My husband’s gift at our marriage had been a melodeon, very pretty in mahogany inlaid with other woods, and this was fitted in between the heavy chests, battened down to the floor, which held our personal possessions. Not that I was musical; he had hoped I should at least improve enough to entertain him with the hymns he delighted in, for I had a pretty enough singing voice; but so far, little had been accomplished. There was something—stupid—about me; I was so slow to learn, to learn to play the piano or any of the other accomplishments a young woman was supposed to attain to, or even indeed to any degree of education or practicality. I know that there had been some astonishment when such a man as Captain Benjamin Briggs—sober, settled, famous as a lay preacher and twenty years my senior, had singled me out for marriage. None, I promise you, more astonished than I; though by gradual degrees I was by now beginning to find out the reason. Perhaps it was some vague reference to these discoveries that prompted me now to ask of my visitor why she should describe herself as ‘bad’. She replied: ‘I am a woman of the water-front.’

I didn’t know, not really, what it meant. I stammered out: ‘But isn’t that—something terrible?’

‘What have I been telling you?’ she said.

‘You…? I’ve seen women—go up to men… But not women like you. You, you’re beautiful, you aren’t dressed like they are, vulgar and—indecent, one can’t bear to look at them. Your dress is what a dress should be, you wrap yourself in your shawl. And you wear this cross

‘The cross was given to me by one I love,’ she said. ‘To teach me to repent.’

‘Then if you repent—’

‘I’ve repented too late,’ she said. ‘He’s left me, he’s gone. He sailed away on this morning’s tide and left me alone with my sins. And my sins are my way of life; I have nothing, there’s no other way for me. I repent and yet I must turn back to it. Now that he’s gone, how else shall I live?’

I stared back at her, trembling, in absolute terror. I knew nothing of the realities, I knew only recent experiences of my own which, all untaught as I was, had deeply shocked and frightened me. I was only now beginning to comprehend that such experiences might be exchanged not only between man and wife but between a man and many women, a woman and many men—and, horror of horrors, even as a way of life, as a means of earning one’s bread. Up to now, when such vague knowledge had come to me through my observations of the life of the waterside of New York’s harbour, I had shied away from it, blocked off my mind from it; my own uneasy gropings for comprehension of the ways of one man had troubled me enough, I needed to know no more. But now… ‘There must be other ways to live. There must be work to do—’

‘Who will employ me?’ she said.

‘Surely… So beautiful as you are—could you not marry—?’

‘Who would marry me?’ she said.

I was silent, defeated. She sat with her bright head bowed into her hands. She said only: ‘Pray for me!’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I will pray.’ And I knelt down before her, put my hands up, curving them round her own white hands and her buried face. ‘We’ll pray together,’ I said.

And I prayed, prayed to God for her salvation, for hope for her, for help for her. She remained silent. When it was done she sat for a moment with bowed head; then she straightened herself, rose up, wound her shawl again about her shoulders and shook back her heavy hair. She said: ‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Sarah,’ I said.

‘Then Sarah,’ she said, ‘with all my heart I thank you. I shouldn’t have come, I would never have come if I hadn’t been half blind, half mad, in my despair; I had no right to come. But thank you. And now I’ll go.’

I stood before her, my hands held out to her, trembling. ‘Where will you go?’

So lovely she looked, standing there; so lovely, so sweet and—so sad. ‘Back to where I came from,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else for me,’ and she bent forward and kissed my cheek and straightened again.

Oh, kiss of Judas! For she knew when she kissed me who stood in the doorway and watched her, she knew what would follow: it was for this that she had come.

My husband’s voice thundered out: ‘Sarah! For God’s sake! What is this woman doing here?’

I think I never knew a silence more terrible: a silence that lasted so long. She had dropped off the shawl again, it slid back from her shoulders—who knows with what clever little shrug she dislodged its folds so that it should fall back and leave her standing there in all the magnificence of her beautiful body, in the dark dress, reaching up to her throat and down to her instep, yet so closely fitted and clung that I recognised suddenly that in his eyes she might have stood naked there. She lifted her head and looked back into his face. For a long time she looked back at him and he, whose great splendour of language could rise like a storm to threaten all the world of wickedness with a very deluge, stood speechless before her. I think I half fainted, moving aside, leaving them standing facing one another, those two; but at last it was I who spoke, faltering and yet not ashamed; terribly frightened of him, but yet not ashamed. I said: ‘She’s unhappy. She’s lost the man she loves. I asked her to come, I wanted to comfort her.’

‘The man she loves!’ he said. ‘She loves a thousand men, only that she goes to them, not in the name of love. She’s filth, she’s vile she’s the lowest scum of all this low waterside.’

She made a sort of forward little bowing movement, bending her head in unprotesting acquiescence. She said: ‘To which I will now return.’

‘Don’t let her go!’ I cried. ‘She repents, she doesn’t want to go, it’s only that there’s nothing else for her.’

‘Nothing else?’ he said, staring back into her pale face his own dark with indignation. ‘Let her be like other women. Let her work.’

She lifted her head and gave him back look for look. ‘Do you think I don’t?’ she said.

‘You
work!’ he said. ‘Is that work to you?—lying back in your sinful luxury, lying back against your soft pillows with that hair all spread out like a web of gold to trap men’s souls and drag them down to that hell that you make heaven for them… Is that work to you?—to part your red lips to those foul kisses, to wind your white arms round the naked bodies of men unknown to you outside the narrow bed of your whoring, is that work to you…?’ His words gushed forth now, his voice was raised to a pitch of something like fever, his face was white, dreadfully patched with red. He went on and on. My mind reeled, I stopped my ears against the filth of his accusations, the crudity of his expression, the horrible depths of his comprehension of the depravities of her trade. But she stood still and quiet and listened to him as though she were frozen in the icy hail of his wild impeachment; and when at last for very exhaustion, it seemed, he fell suddenly, abruptly silent, standing, head bowed, hands hanging at his sides, she said only, very quietly: ‘Then—help me!’

He swayed where he stood, all the fury and fervour gone. He mumbled: ‘Help you?’

‘Your voice is like a silver trumpet,’ she said. ‘No man has spoken to me with such words before.’ And she made a little beseeching movement with those narrow white hands of hers and said again: ‘Help me!’

He turned away from her. ‘You are lost,’ he said. ‘None can help you but God. Turn to God. Pray to God. No other can help you.’

‘I can’t pray,’ she said. She put out her hand to me where I stood sick and frightened. ‘She tried to teach me—this sweet thing, so innocent and lovely in her innocence. But I’ve forgotten what it is to pray—as I’ve forgotten what it is to be innocent.
He
can’t help me—my life has put God beyond my reach.’

‘Your way of life was your own choice,’ he said.

‘Do you think so?’ she said, sadly.

‘Its future at any rate is your own choice,’ he said.

She said again, sadly: ‘Do you think so?’

He straightened himself, squared his shoulders. ‘At any rate, it is nothing to do with me or mine. I shall not touch pitch. Get away from me. Your life is in your own hands.’

She put up her arms slowly with a movement all careless grace and lifted her heavy hair with the back of her wrists so that her two hands might meet behind her neck and unfasten the chain that held the golden cross. Then she slid the cross from its chain and with one of those flashes of movement, before he could draw back, had put it into his hand. ‘Now my life’s in my own hands no longer,’ she said. ‘I have put it into yours.’ And while he stood bemused and I stricken almost into immobility, she had lifted the shawl once more around her shoulders and folding it about her, slipped out through the low door of the cabin and was gone.

He said not a word to me; just stood there staring down at the little golden cross in the palm of his big hand. Then he turned at last and went out on to the deck. I followed him.

She had come to the foot of the gangway, a man put out a hand to help her step ashore. She took his hand but released herself immediately she was safe on the cobble stones, and moved away from him with a word of thanks—with, I thought, a light shake of the head. The dark shawl clutched about her, she returned to the pillar against which I had seen her crouched, weeping, and standing there, turned and looked back and up at the ship and then began to move off slowly, through the crowd. A man stopped her and spoke to her but she shook her head; a second spoke and was repulsed also, and a third—then she moved away out of our sight. My husband’s two hands were clenched into fists on the wooden rail of the deck. When the last glimpse of her bright head was gone he said, in a low, sick voice: ‘Pray for her,’ and a moment later had gone about his work. I heard his voice raised in rough anger against some member of the crew, failing in his duty. I turned and went away out of the cold, back to the cabin.