‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You must rest. At some time or other I shall be forced to get some sleep and then it’ll be your turn. You’ll be of no use unless you’re rested.’ Except that he gave no actual order, he might have been speaking to his chief mate; even in my condition of total exhaustion I had a flash of wry humour as I told myself that so, indeed, he was. ‘You too, Sarah,’ he said. ‘To your cabin! You look fit to drop.’
‘She’s done great work,’ said Mary.
‘You’ve both been magnificent. We might well have been lost. Now rest,’ he said and dragged himself up to his feet and staggered off up the companion. She called out: ‘I shall relieve you at four bells.’ Four bells, six bells, eight bells—I don’t know. The bell tells the passing of the watch; I never came to understand it, only that the constant clang of clapper against iron had oppressed my nerves in the days when regular watches had been kept. She went up at any rate some time during the night, I suppose; no use my offering, I couldn’t understand the binnacle, compass, whatever it was they must read and follow; nor indeed could I hang on with sufficient strength, to the great spokes of the wheel. But she… Well, yes—she was magnificent.
I slept heavily. By daylight the wind had lowered but it was very dark and heavily raining. I washed and dressed; Mary had returned from whatever watch she had kept and was washed and dressed also, though both of us still in loose wrappers over our drawers and bodices. She said: ‘You’d better light the stove in the galley and get us some breakfast,’ and at that moment my husband’s voice cried out on a note of wild exultation, ‘A ship!’
Faintly, faintly to be discerned in the distance—to me no more than a smudge, seen dimly through the darkness and rain. But my husband cried out, ‘My glass! Fetch me my glass!’ and I ran down to the cabin and came back with it. He put it to his eye and for a long time steadily watched the approaching vessel. Then he lowered the glass slowly. Now his hands shook and his face was that ashen grey. Gone was all the huge power and ruthlessness, all the half mad brutality that had brought us to this hour. He said: ‘The ship is the Dei Gratia.’
The Dei Gratia. With Captain Morehouse aboard, the only man left in the world who knew that Mary Sellers had been my husband’s woman, back in New York; the only man in the world who would cast doubt upon any story they had planned to tell.
CHAPTER XVII
COULD HE EVER IN fact have cast real doubt upon the story?—so that it be absolutely disbelieved and my husband suffer the consequence of crimes which surely could not have been proved in any court of law? At any rate, they made no attempt whatsoever to consider it; and indeed I think that in that moment my husband’s mind positively and finally gave way—that hard, narrow, bigoted mind that had received its first disintegrating shock when he came to himself and found himself—the great, the feared, the respected Captain Benjamin Briggs—tumbling on the floor of a waterfront brothel with a waterfront whore in his arms. He looked down now into her face and I think that he saw Death there—she had been to him through these days of advancing madness his Death-in-Life, his Life-in-Death… ‘Her skin was white as leprosy’—but her skin was golden and warm; she had thicked his blood not with cold but with the warmth of her woman’s body, with the warmth of her golden arms circled about his neck, with the white heat of her perverted love. He cried out: ‘To the yawl! Lower the yawl!’ and rushed to where the boat hung in the stern of the ship. She followed him. ‘Get food!’ she screamed to me,’—and water, and warm clothes!’ I was too much bemused to do more than stumble forrard as I had before, and, as I had before, collect provisions and fill cans with fresh water and stagger back with them to where they wrestled with ropes and cleats, winches, whatever it may all be called—crazily lowering the heavy boat down to the water. It tilted this way and that and at last with a violent splash landed right side up. The rope ladder was not there, they spent no time searching for it; he cut wildly at a lanyard and tying it to the rail, dropped it over the side. No time given for protest, I followed him down and she after me. The rope had been so tied that a flick would release it; there should be no sign that the boat had been boarded that way. Without a word they took each an oar and began with smooth strokes to pull away from the ship, as on a night that seemed an aeon of hells ago, she and I also had done. We could see dimly that the Dei Gratia slackened speed, changed course, was making for the abandoned brig; but by that time we were a speck in the heaving ocean, with the Mary Celeste between us and them. They spoke not a word, each with two hands to an oar steadily pulling further and further away.
How long before they rested?—hanging, exhausted, across their oars, he no less spent than she. She gasped out at last, ‘Dare we hoist sail?’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Not yet. In a little while, we’ll row again; but by now I think we must at least be out of sight—unless they begin raking about with a glass. And even then… Thank God for the rain, it’s like a curtain! Still, I think that a sail might be unwise for a little while yet.’
‘And anyway, they’ll be too much taken aback by what they find?’ She still had the forethought to suggest, ‘But if they do see us—?’
‘We must tell the same story as before. But… We can say that after last night’s storm, we could no longer control the ship. We thought she was sinking—’
‘You say there’s three foot or more of water in the hold,’ said Mary. ‘And there’s water in the lazaretto, I know.’ The lazaretto was, I think, where the spare gear was kept stowed. She herself had hauled the top off and I suppose never got it back on again, or only partially.
‘The water won’t convince them,’ he said. ‘They’ll see that I’d sounded the pumps. No one would believe that with all my experience, I’d think there was danger in a few feet of water here and there.’
‘If it got among the barrels—?’
‘It could do no harm. No danger to the ship, no reason for leaving her.’
‘One of the barrels stove in,’ said Mary. ‘They might believe you’d been afraid of some—explosion?’
‘We went into all that,’ he said impatiently, ‘when we made up the tale about the pirates. No man of my experience would be anxious about the cargo. All’s well with it, I’d know too well how to manage it.’
‘If they found the fuse,’ I suggested, ‘even unlit—’
‘He went in and got it,’ said Mary. ‘Knowing it was harmless and given time, he could get to it. We were afraid of what people might think, if it were observed there, in the unloading.’ She said wretchedly at last, ‘Perhaps we’d have done better after all, to stay with the ship?’
He sat on the board that stretched across the beam of the yawl, forming a seat, his elbows on his spread knees, his head in his hands. ‘I must have been mad,’ he said.
A strange, strange confabulation, the three of us, huddling there. The rain poured down, streaming off our oilskins, plopping into the puddle of water already forming in the bottom, and yet we must welcome it as a veil to hide us from the sight of man. On the heaving water, the little boat tossed and rolled, idling with the cessation of their rowing. We were going—whither? We were going—why?—going how? For mile upon mile about us under the teeming rain, the silent green heaving of the dark sea with its white hands slap-slap-slapping against the frail sides of our cockle-shell craft, the white spume spraying as wave mounted upon wave and fell back again and away…
A cockle-shell she was, tossing alone on the vast green waters of the ocean; but heavy enough to handle, by a man and two women. She was perhaps eighteen foot long, seven or eight at her widest part, in the centre. She narrowed again towards the stern and then was squared off. There were four or five boards across her for rowing—the thwarts, are they called?—and a wide seat in the stern. Here the rudder hung outboard with a—what?—a stick, a handle, a steering yoke I vaguely recall, something like that, and surely I should remember for God knows I clung to it long enough in the terrible days to
come. She was fitted with a mast which must be hauled upright, with a square sail, a spritsail, that I do remember. I had stowed the water cans and the food, wrapped in canvas and oilskin under the seat. Now I began to bail out the water, as once I had done before, scraping at the bottom of the boat, tipping the contents out into the sea. A time was to come when we should all think ourselves mad to have thrown away that water from the sweet, fresh rain.
He took up his oar again and she hers. ‘We must get as far away as we can. If they come aboard the brig and start using the glass—well, anyway, the further, the better. And so hope for some other vessel to pick us up and meanwhile think what best we can then say.’ To another man, some story might be, however doubtfully, credible: but to Morehouse, who already knew so much—coming upon the brig, hastily abandoned when his own ship must have been already in sight… Another ship finding us needn’t know that we had not gone earlier, before we ever saw that help was at hand. ‘I must have been mad,’ he kept muttering to himself as he rowed. ‘I must have been out of my mind.’ She lifted her hand a moment from the oar and laid it on one of his but he seemed not even to notice it. I, creeping about the bottom of the boat with my scraping tin can, thought to myself that it was a long time since Benjamin Briggs had been anything but out of his mind.
The rain ceased, we struggled, we three together, to raise the mast and get under sail. He came aft and showed me how to control the rudder. To go this way, I must push on the stick in the opposite direction, to go that way, I must push it—like this… Back to front, a mirror image—under his irritable instruction, I grew frightened and confused; a little patience, a little confidence at the outset that I wouldn’t be dull and stupid about it, and I daresay I should have understood well enough, and soon enough picked up the trick of it. But now! The boat ploughed this way and that, they both stood, balancing, over me, screaming at me furious instructions. No doubt it was an agony to know that even this simple task could not be left to me. I mastered it at last but by the end, we were all three worn out again, I with trembling uncertainty, they with frustration and contempt. I think that they were deeply afraid. They kept looking back to where men from the Dei Gratia must long ago have boarded our ship and found the strange condition of things there—the log not made up for the past ten days, as though she had been vacated then; all our possessions strewn about, the men’s clothes still there and small intimate things, their pipes and tobacco, the slate with those last words of poor Richardson scrawled upon it, ‘Fanny my dear wife…’ Money lying about, my small pieces of jewelry, and Mary’s; (would rough seamen recognise the difference between her dresses and mine and deduce that there had been more than one woman aboard?) My sewing-machine and the melodeon with music still propped up on it, though it was many a day since I had struggled with those hymn tunes there. That we had so very recently departed—no sign; we had not yet breakfasted, I hadn’t lit the galley stove nor yet the stove in the saloon where we might dry our wet things. Indeed, beneath the oilskins, Mary and I still wore only our underclothes, covered with loose wrappers so sudden had been his summons when he saw that smudge on the horizon that had proved to be the Dei Gratia; the decision to abandon ship. He had brought with him a barometer and a sextant, enough to enable him to navigate the yawl, I suppose; I wondered what they would make of those two being missing. But I saw when the rain stopped and he took off his oilskins, that his watch wasn’t in its breast pocket; would they find it swinging, tick-tick-tick over the head of what once had been my bed? Would anybody note that it must have been recently wound? As the rain ceased, the wind freshened and now with the sail unfurled we scudded through the swell of the waves and it was all I could do to hold her as I had been instructed. They two left me to it and went up into the forepeak of the boat and there unfolded a tarpaulin to its dry side and flung themselves down, side by side, and there sat and earnestly talked, she now and again throwing an arm about him as though to comfort him. I think that, having brought us to this pass, he was very much afraid; but she was never afraid. While she could see and touch him, put her arms about him, run her fingers through that rough, dark hair of his—she would be afraid of nothing. If ever there was a woman possessed by passion for a man, it was Honey Mary, the waterside harlot, for Captain Benjamin Briggs. After a while, she pulled him to lie down and lay up close against him, shameless in her need to be in his arms. Whether they loved, slept, or only lay for a little while forgetting, in the comfort of each other’s arms, I don’t know. I curled up on the broad seat and fought with the steering yoke and stared out to sea.
And so came about the last of our strange routines. At intervals one or other or both of them would come to the stern and take a turn at the rudder with me, or arrange the sharing out of the food and fresh water. Our course, within reason, was of little importance, as long as it should not head north and cut again across the path of the Dei Gratia. They discussed it anxiously. ‘Surely she’ll outstrip us within the next hour?’
‘Not if she decides to bring in the Mary Celeste for the salvage she’d fetch.’
‘Well, now one thinks of it, that’s sure enough,’ she said, laughing. ‘Davey Morehouse never would resist such a gamble as that!’
‘She’s perfectly sea-worthy; we knew that for ourselves, only you and I handling her. He’s only got to pump her dry, there’s a spare sail or two he can rig up; put two or three men aboard—’
‘Can he spare them?’
‘He carries the same crew as we did. If we two—with such help as she could give us—could manage the Mary Celeste, then he and three men can manage his ship and put three aboard burs.’
‘In that case, they’ll be far ahead of us in this wretched thing—’
‘They’ll be a day or two, making repairs; and he’ll hang back I suppose, and support the brig on her voyage. We must keep well away from them.’
‘As long as we stay within the trade routes,’ she said, ‘till some other ship finds us
So he plotted some course and between us I suppose kept the yawl to it. What speed we made, I have no idea. Allowing for the way made while we three handled the ship, we were still six hundred miles from land.
The day passed and the night passed, and the day passed and another night. By day I sat in the stern in control of the rudder, now and then relieved by one or other of them. By night I rolled myself in rugs and a tarpaulin and huddled against the curving hull and slept strangely, full of dreams. How they spent their nights, I would hardly enquire; through the days and the nights, I know that they shared watches between them and long before I slept and long after, all too early, I awoke, I would hear rustlings and murmurings and cries in the darkness. And another day passed and another night; and, sparely though we might have used it, the food that had seemed so much when I gathered it together was growing very low; and the water too. I cared so little for my life by then that they might have shared it out between them and let me simply fade into nothingness—if it had not been for the thirst. But in any event, they divided the ration always absolutely equally into three.
I think it was not bitterly cold; but the cold chilled one through and there was no means of getting warm. They two might lie together close and share their bodies’ heat, but I, always too thin and now rapidly getting thinner, felt it through to my bones. We made no moan. She felt, I think, that the smallest outward admission of suffering would have seemed like a reproach to him for that wild decision that had brought us to this pass; and if she could endure and give no sign, then neither would I.
They teach us that hell will be a pit of fire, burning. I think it will be that waste of dull, grey-green water, ever restless, heaving, upward leaping, with its promise of quenched thirst while our mouths grew ever more parched, our tongues furred and dry: water, water everywhere, slopping over into the boat, drenching our clothes with its salty spray, lying puddled where we might have slept in some small comfort; and we no longer with strength or caring to bale it out. Water, water everywhere, Nor any
drop to drink. The lines of the great old rhyme ran through my leaden head, it seemed to me that indeed ‘the very deep did rot, and slimey things did crawl with legs, upon the slimey sea.’ Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea, And never a soul took pity on My soul in agony…
But one took pity—crawled towards me, knelt there, took my hand, tried to explain through parched lips, cracked with the salt spray, that he would have refused food and water, given his life if it would have saved us; but what would we do, we two women alone, ignorant, helpless, strength gone…? I crouched there, uncaring. I was sick with the deep inner chill, the salt wind blowing off the sea, the ceaseless rocking of the boat. I said no word.
I know how his tongue felt huge in his mouth and dry, how every syllable was an effort of the will, forced out, half unintelligible from the burning throat. He mumbled: ‘We shall all die soon,’ and grasped at my hand again with his own hand grown to a thing of bones and stretched parchment, and looked up into my face and rattled out the words: ‘Pray for me.’
I lifted my heavy head, looked back into his eyes; but she came staggering across to us, dangerously shifting the balance of the boat; she couldn’t endure, I suppose, even in extremis, that he should show feeling for me. She had weathered the hardship better than either of us: her magnificence had lain in her health and vigour, in the lithe strength of that beautiful body, and she seemed to have drawn upon it but sparingly. The hollows in her cheeks served only to give a greater beauty to the bones beneath the flesh, her eyes were huge and brilliant in their shadowed sockets; the honey of her skin had been burned to a golden brown by the salt spray, her hair tumbled about her head like a lion’s mane. She clutched at his tattered sleeve and he hadn’t the strength, I suppose, to resist her; but before he pitched and staggered away from me, he touched my hand again, and again rasped and rattled it out to me: ‘Save—my soul!’
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