Honey Harlot Read Online Free PDF Page B

upon your ship’s bows as yours is painted in letters of hell fire across her heart
    Who knows what in fact she said? Who knows how far her wickedness took her, that wickedness that was in those early days but a sort of mischief really, a sort of malicious teasing, a sort of punishment for his strictures on sins in her, which in fact were sins of his own commissioning. I know at least that he wrenched her arms from his neck, flung her away from him, called up sharply to the men; and that the name M—a—r—y slowly appeared over the blotted-out name of Amazon. But when he came to the second name, his heart failed him. He compromised; and so the name Mary Celeste was blazoned across the brigantine’s bows, that has ever since been blazoned across the memory of men’s minds whenever mention is made of great mysteries of the sea.
    From that day on, he worked with feverish haste to be gone. In the hurry of loading, two kegs of alcohol were dropped, stoving in the longboat which any such vessel as the brigantine would carry, as well as the small boat-yawl with its single sail. But the delay in repairing it was too much for him and he would not wait. On 6 November, five days before she had been due to leave, the newly christened Mary Celeste set sail from New York, Genoa bound.

CHAPTER IV
    I T WAS COLD BUT bright in those first days out from New York but there was a strong wind ahead, and we anchored for the night off Staten Island so that it was actually on Tuesday, 7 November that, in a light breeze, we sailed down the quiet waters and at last out into the ocean. For the first time I knew what it was to be out of sight of land, a tiny world alone, encompassed by the shining sea.
    I had been at first enchanted by my trim little new home, the ship so shining and pretty at her moorings, loading her cargo. We had travelled separately down from Marion, the ship being sailed round by a skeleton crew, my husband meanwhile seeing to her papers and picking up more hands in New York. The accommodation was cramped enough, the cabin I shared with my husband a narrow room, only six foot wide by twelve or fourteen long, with a water closet at one end, curtained off; and a double bunk in the next corner, a window at each end looking out on to the top deck, and a swinging oil lamp. There was no access to the deck, you must pass through a door at one corner, cross the saloon and so go up the companion-way to the after-deck, ducking your head in the low doorway, stepping over the high sill that in heavy seas would keep out waters sweeping across the deck. ‘Companion-way’—‘afterdeck’—the terms come back to me but I have forgotten most of them—indeed in the short time I spent aboard that ship or any ship, I never learned the difference between port and starboard and hardly know it now; and though my life had been spent in a town on the waterfront, I never could understand them as other girls learned to, going aboard ship for visits, talking with sailor men—halyards, bollards, top-gallants and winches, I could no more understand it all than fly. I shall have to say simply what I mean and if I name these things wrongly or give them no nautical names at all—well, I am very old, for many, many years, if I have spoken at all, have spoken in a language not my own, and anyway have long forgotten what little I ever knew…
    So—it was all very pretty and charming, but I soon found that there was little enough for me to do. Always humble and unsure, I had been afraid at first of failing in my marital duties but, as they had been from the day of my wedding, my duties remained confined to the night hours and consisted then only in passivity; lying passive beneath the weight of his violence breaking out from the repression of his long life of celibate virtue—passive, a victim, and as such in myself a reproach. My first timid efforts at reciprocity met only with a shocked disgust and so I desisted. A God-fearing man. For the