Honey Harlot Read Free Page A

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