Honey Harlot (5 page)

My sewing-machine stood all ready, but what was there to sew? My neat work-box with its needle-case and cotton reels was untouched. I could almost have torn off a button or two to create the necessity for stitching them back on again. Should I then employ myself by learning to understand something of the ship? Filled with that sudden eagerness—pathetic to look back upon, that eager courage with which I would put aside my fears and go forth all freshly expectant, only to meet the more rebuffs that were but too sure to come!—I wrapped myself in warm shawls and went up on deck, my pale hair blown in straight strands across my face, escaping from its shining, smooth bands, wound about my head. Stooping, I stepped over the high sill across the doorway, with its strip of criss-crossed brass, and looked up at the two men on the poop deck, just opposite. I thought they exchanged glances as they looked back at me; and then they raised their heads and stared up into the rigging as though something were amiss there. But up in the rigging, I think nothing was amiss.

The poop deck is in the stern of the ship, raised up, maybe four or five foot from the main deck; at either side there were steps up to it and across its front edge, a wooden rail with a row of brass-bound firebuckets set under the rail. Above my head and behind me the great sails arched themselves out, wind-filled, bowling the vessel along. I called to the men: ‘May I come up and speak with you?’

They lowered their gaze to mine; exchanged glances, nodded and shrugged. I lifted my wind-blown skirt up from my insteps and climbed up to the deck, one hand holding the shawl close about me, and so began my pitiful little gropings for knowledge. I said: ‘I feel that if my life is to be at sea, I should know about my husband’s ship.’

‘And all who sail in her?’ said Gilling, the second mate, standing with his hand on the wheel; and looked up into the shrouds again.

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I’d like to come to know the crew. We shall be—three or four weeks at least, indeed more, I suppose, to Genoa? And perhaps make the voyage back together?’

‘As to that, I think it’s hardly likely, Ma’am,’ said Gilling, exchanging a glance with the other.

From the first I liked Richardson and tolerated the rest; but I never liked Gilling. He was, I think, a mean-minded man; very strong and rough, brown bearded with cold, pale blue eyes. I think there was no warmth in him, no affection, no loyalty, he was a man who walked alone. He was a New Yorker and I believe unmarried. He would not be one to care for a family of his own and a home.

The other man with him was a German, an East Prussian in fact, from some of the tiny islands in the Baltic Sea, one of two brothers named Lorenzen, Volkert and Boz. Two more of the crew were from East Prussia also—they made fine sailors, I believe, highly educated for their station in life and for the most part steady-going and quiet; and the one, I suppose, would introduce others of his race and so four had come together in the Mary Celeste, out of a crew of eight in all. Martens and Goodschaad, the others were named—Mart and Good the men called them, but I never could discover much of good in either. They were, all four, shortish men, square and thickset, very strong, with powerful rounded arms and, when they rolled up their trouser-legs to swab decks, strong, rounded calves; indeed they were rounded men altogether, rather bulging, rounded men, they reminded me of the Flemish paintings by the brothers Breughel in a picture book at home; I came to think of them collectively as The Breughels. They habitually went barefoot aboard, but then, except for the chief mate and the Captain, so did all the men. Martens was the oldest of the crew. The youngest was the cook and steward, a boy from New York, not very bright in the intellect, whose name was Edward Head. They called him Tedhead or more often Blockhead which might suit him well enough but must surely have pushed him yet further back into his dull vacuity: did I not know? But mostly, with the wits of a child, he was known simply as ‘the boy’.

It was Boz Lorenzen who stood on the poop deck with Gilling. I followed their glance up to the shrouds and the great sails bellying there. ‘Will you tell me their names?’

‘Whose names?’ said Boz. ‘Dose wot sails in der Mary Celeste?’

‘No, the sails up there. Should there not be the one great sail?’

‘She’s been divided up,’ said Gilling, ‘for easier handling.’

‘Don’t most ships have three masts?’

‘This is a brigantine,’ said Gilling. ‘Or a half-brig, in fact. What they call a hermaphrodite only Cap’n Briggs don’t like the word.’ He glanced slyly at the other man.

‘Dere’s many verds Cap’n Briggs isn’t liking,’ said the German. ‘It comes hard on a man, all de time minding his tongue.’ He grumbled: ‘No dice, no grog, no svearing—vot a man does mit his time aboard such a ship?’

‘I wonder you should join her if you feel so dissatisfied,’ I said, out of loyalty.

‘I din’t had no choice,’ said the man shrugging. Gilling explained: ‘Boz and Volk lost all in their last berth, wrecked and nothing saved but their lives.’

‘So now we take what berth we can westwards and get back to our home. For tree yearss I am not seeing my girl.’ His heavy round face grew thoughtful and sad. I said: ‘Do you long for her?’

‘I tink she is not true to me,’ he said, bluntly. ‘Tree yearss is long time. And dere is udder mens.’

‘Few enough,’ said Gilling, rallying him. ‘You’ve told me that in your whole island there’s six hundred souls.’

‘And two hundert is men,’ said Boz; but he laughed.

‘Have you children,’ I said, ‘or a child? When you say your girl, do you mean your wife?’

‘I haf child, yes,’ said Boz. ‘But when I say my girl, no—I’m not meanink my vife.’ He laughed again.

‘Sailed away in good time?’ said Gilling, laughing too.

‘When I sailed, I vos not knowing,’ said Boz. He shrugged. ‘No matter—better for keep udder men away. When I get back, I marrying.’ He saw perhaps my look of concern. ‘You thinking bad, Mrs Briggs. But not so very bad. Mine mudder, nine childern, is married, mine brudder, tree childern is married: only I, one child, is not. But two out of tree—not so bad, eh?’ I thought that all the same his heart bled a little still, under the laughter.

I had thought of them less as individuals, more as merely a pack of roving seamen, picking up a living from this quayside or that as chance arose, loyal to no one ship and no one master, to no woman, to no home; brought together by nothing in common but the ship they sailed in for a few weeks of too close companionship, until they moved on, uncaring—rough, untaught, each out for himself and no other; from very childhood each a man and each his own man and no other’s. But they were persons in their own right, after all, and I felt myself the less for having thought less of them.

I believed I had troubled them long enough and wandered off, with a word of thanks, moving about the decks, asking a man here or there what was this object called, or that, and what was its purpose. The fore deckhouse was smaller than the main deckhouse where my own cabin was, and the saloon—and yet must be divided off into a cabin for the second mate, and the galley with a bunk for the cook; leaving a space of nine foot by seven for the crew’s quarters, with two two-tiered bunks and a table and benches. Across the upper bunks curtains were hung so that men might get some sleep by day, who had been on the night watches—what sleep they got while the rest ate, talked, gambled around the table, who knows? From both upper bunks, at any rate, came the sound of heavy snoring and I hastily withdrew my head; what might my husband not make of my actually looking into a room where men were a-bed? The galley had a real stove in it with a chimney, and heavy pots bubbled furiously, copper and iron. I knew to my cost, already, that Tedhead’s idea of a meal was to boil everything to shreds and dish it up swimming in water or weak gravy. I said into a fog of cabbage-smelling steam, ‘This isn’t tonight’s meal cooking already?’

He was a tallish boy, yellow-haired with the strong, twangy accent of New York’s docks. He said: ‘You don’t want the grub raw?’

‘But while the vegetables are fresh, Ted… Half an hour would do, even for this great potful. And then you needn’t squeeze out the water so hard, the leaves could be quite loose and separate.’ Green vegetables came to the table pressed hard and cut into square chunks. ‘And this poor bit of bacon—’

He flung back the ladle into a saucepan with a great splash of liquid that sizzled and stank on the hot iron surface of the stove. ‘You want you should do the work yourself?’ Martens stood in the entrance, Breughel-dwarfish and heavy. ‘First it’s the Master preaching hell and damnation,’ the boy said to him, ‘because I let out a yell when I dropped hot fat on my hand; now it’s the woman coming telling me to dish up raw ham and cabbage leaves. I never knew such a berth. I wish already I was out of it.’

‘Giving anudder yell and
she’ll
being out quick enough,’ said Martens, grinning. ‘She’s not liking bad words, no more dan de Captain does.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘Come, lady, dis ain’t no place for you, go where you belonging.’ And he grinned again. ‘On de lower deck you’ll maybe finding better companies.’ I think that I flinched away, mystified that they should be so rough and hostile and he added, winking across at the boy. ‘Below deck is where is keeping de pigs unt der hens.’

A couple of poor sea-sick piglets for slaughtering on the voyage to provide fresh meat; a coop full of hens for eggs. On this trip, however, we carried none; I think that in his panic rush to leave New York and Mary Sellers, my husband would not wait for livestock; and I was thankful enough not to have to think of them, cooped up and stifling down there. I turned away sadly and leaned in my old way on the rail and looked down at the rush of the water against the side of the ship and thought how wide was the ocean, limitless about me and how bright; and how wide was the world into which the past few weeks had brought me—and how dark.

That evening the boy slapped down upon the table a piece of bacon, barely cooked, a dish of potatoes hard at the centre and a bowl of hot raw cabbage leaves. The chief mate was at the wheel, the second mate ate with us. My husband said: ‘What’s this?’

‘
Her
orders,’ said Tedhead with a crude gesture in my direction.

‘Her orders, whose orders? Do you speak of your Captain’s wife with a jerk of your thumb?’

‘Mrs Briggs told him the way she wished the food cooked, sir,’ said Gilling. To me he added, with sneering triumph: ‘I regret, Ma’am, already the men are complaining.’

‘Go,’ said my husband to the steward. Tedhead disappeared back into the pantry. My husband said: ‘Madam, what is this?’

‘I only said that… He’s only a boy, he doesn’t understand…’

‘And you an older woman, I suppose, and accomplished ship’s cook?’ And indeed, the boy was older than I by two or three years, I daresay, and I knew only what my mother had taught me and all those officious sisters, complaining, ‘You’re all fingers and thumbs, can’t you so much as cook a cabbage leaf?’ If I had been a little cleverer, cleverer in my mind or cleverer in my hands, either one or the other!—but I was neither, I was nothing. I thought how happy it might all have been, the Master’s wife brisk, capable, and yet charming them all into ready acquiescence, revolutionising the dreary intake of necessary food into meals that, even when the fresh food had given way to conserved meat and dried pulses, would be a pleasure after each spell of hard work. I thought of a jolly crew, vying with one another to satisfy my questioning, explain things to me, until all the world of sail would speak of young Mrs Briggs, ‘knows as much about her ship as the Master does’; in my mind’s eye, I saw the crew lining up after each voyage to wish me God speed and thank me, caps off and three cheers for the mistress of the Mary Celeste… The boy’s harsh voice broke in: ‘Shall I bring in the duff, sir? It’s from the dinner hour, heated up. It wasn’t eaten then.’

My fault, my foolish fault that a meal of raw bacon and uncooked vegetables should be followed by a soggy mess of heated-up plum duff, heavy as lead. I saw the triumphant gleam in the mate’s cold blue eye and I thought, what have they got against me? Why should they resent me? What mistake have I made?

I am a figurehead, a wooden figurehead all painted in gay colours in the sparkle of the sunshine, in the fine white spray; and if when storms arise I am lashed by the waves of my husband’s wrath, foundering beneath the heavy seas of his loveless lust—at least a painted wooden figurehead has no heart to break…

Two more days passed and on the third day my heart broke and for ever. For my husband being asleep in the cabin after a night disturbed by some trouble with the steering, or I know not what, I heard muffled laughter and went out on to the deck—and she was there.

I
WAS WEARING THAT
day my dress of a pale sepia, with bands of amber brown which I knew lighted up the colour of my eyes; what talents I had lay in such directions as this. But what was I in my pale auburns and ambers?—against all that opulence of honey and scarlet? For the dark dress was gone now and the black shawl and indeed I never saw them again and can only suppose they’d been borrowed to serve her purpose; she wore a brilliant scarlet with a heavy white braiding. Nor was this gown high to the throat as the other had been, but with a low, rounded neck, with buttons up the front of the bodice, but the buttons left carelessly open right down to the frilled white edge of her bodice. So creamy her slender throat was and her beautiful shoulders and bosom!—that golden creaminess, set off by the blue-white of white cambric and lace. About her shoulders hung a Paisley shawl in bright colours: with what abandon of her beautiful body had she paid for that Paisley shawl?

Outrage opposed to cool mischief, we confronted one another. Panic fear—a pretended alarm. Innocence—experience; wantonness—virtue. The tigress amiably purring and the trembling white doe. But as though we were conspirators in some childish naughtiness, she turned her eyes towards the cabin where my husband slept, put her finger to her lips to hush me and beckoned me to follow her to the fore deck, further from harm’s way.