‘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 t
o 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.
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.’
CHAPTER III
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, whe
n 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.
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