Honey Harlot Read Free

wickedness there was something in her, deeply and essentially, true to her name.
    I waited in silence while she drank the water, put down the empty glass. I would not press her confidence. She also was silent, drying her eyes, pushing back the damp curls from her forehead, settling the neck of her dark dress where the golden cross hung gleaming. She touched the cross with her fingers when at last she spoke to me. She said: ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m in great distress, it’s true, but I shouldn’t be here, not with such as you.’ And she raised the great tear-filled eyes to me. She said: ‘I’m a bad woman. I daresay you don’t even know that such women as I exist.’
    I was a little frightened but I said: ‘I don’t think anyone so beautiful as you can be bad.’
    She made no foolish denials of the compliment implied. She said: ‘It’s because I’m beautiful.’
    Where she was slender and rounded I was angular and thin, where her eyes were the colour of amber, mine were brown and bright; my hair was pale auburn but its sheen was diminished to extinction by her honey-gold and where hers curled riotously down to her shoulders, mine was straight and must be brushed back into decorous bands about my head. And yet there were those who had thought me to have something of beauty. I said: ‘I don’t think that a woman’s good looks need make her bad.’
    ‘Then you don’t know men,’ she said.
    Poor little bride of a few weeks; coming to an awareness of men, or at least of one man. ‘I am a married woman,’ I said, protesting.
    ‘Your husband is the best, the most respected, the most splendid of men. His reputation goes before him like a pillar of fire. He’s a righteous man, a man proud of his good name, preaching God to all sinners—invited into the pulpits, I’ve heard, to thunder out his warnings to us, the damned
    ‘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