Honey Harlot Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    I was leaning in my useless, idle way over the deck rail, looking down—what else had I to do with my days? And I saw how once again my husband turned grey white beneath the brown skin, how he jerked away from her and made some exclamation that in another man would have been an oath. The mate, astounded, took her by the shoulder and clearly bade her begone. She looked into his face and laughed and he also lost colour and then