Honey Harlot by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online

their lives.’
    ‘So now we take what berth we can westwards and get back to our home. For tree yearss I am not seeing my girl.’ His heavy round face grew thoughtful and sad. I said: ‘Do you long for her?’
    ‘I tink she is not true to me,’ he said, bluntly. ‘Tree yearss is long time. And dere is udder mens.’
    ‘Few enough,’ said Gilling, rallying him. ‘You’ve told me that in your whole island there’s six hundred souls.’
    ‘And two hundert is men,’ said Boz; but he laughed.
    ‘Have you children,’ I said, ‘or a child? When you say your girl, do you mean your wife?’
    ‘I haf child, yes,’ said Boz. ‘But when I say my girl, no—I’m not meanink my vife.’ He laughed again.
    ‘Sailed away in good time?’ said Gilling, laughing too.
    ‘When I sailed, I vos not knowing,’ said Boz. He shrugged. ‘No matter—better for keep udder men away. When I get back, I marrying.’ He saw perhaps my look of concern. ‘You thinking bad, Mrs Briggs. But not so very bad. Mine mudder, nine childern, is married, mine brudder, tree childern is married: only I, one child, is not. But two out of tree—not so bad, eh?’ I thought that all the same his heart bled a little still, under the laughter.
    I had thought of them less as individuals, more as merely a pack of roving seamen, picking up a living from this quayside or that as chance arose, loyal to no one ship and no one master, to no woman, to no home; brought together by nothing in common but the ship they sailed in for a few weeks of too close companionship, until they moved on, uncaring—rough, untaught, each out for himself and no other; from very childhood each a man and each his own man and no other’s. But they were persons in their own right, after all, and I felt myself the less for having thought less of them.
    I believed I had troubled them long enough and wandered off, with a word of thanks, moving about the decks, asking a man here or there what was this object called, or that, and what was its purpose. The fore deckhouse was smaller than the main deckhouse where my own cabin was, and the saloon—and yet must be divided off into a cabin for the second mate, and the galley with a bunk for the cook; leaving a space of nine foot by seven for the crew’s quarters, with two two-tiered bunks and a table and benches. Across the upper bunks curtains were hung so that men might get some sleep by day, who had been on the night watches—what sleep they got while the rest ate, talked, gambled around the table, who knows? From both upper bunks, at any rate, came the sound of heavy snoring and I hastily withdrew my head; what might my husband not make of my actually looking into a room where men were a-bed? The galley had a real stove in it with a chimney, and heavy pots bubbled furiously, copper and iron. I knew to my cost, already, that Tedhead’s idea of a meal was to boil everything to shreds and dish it up swimming in water or weak gravy. I said into a fog of cabbage-smelling steam, ‘This isn’t tonight’s meal cooking already?’
    He was a tallish boy, yellow-haired with the strong, twangy accent of New York’s docks. He said: ‘You don’t want the grub raw?’
    ‘But while the vegetables are fresh, Ted… Half an hour would do, even for this great potful. And then you needn’t squeeze out the water so hard, the leaves could be quite loose and separate.’ Green vegetables came to the table pressed hard and cut into square chunks. ‘And this poor bit of bacon—’
    He flung back the ladle into a saucepan with a great splash of liquid that sizzled and stank on the hot iron surface of the stove. ‘You want you should do the work yourself?’ Martens stood in the entrance, Breughel-dwarfish and heavy. ‘First it’s the Master preaching hell and damnation,’ the boy said to him, ‘because I let out a yell when I dropped hot fat on my hand; now it’s the woman coming telling me to dish up raw ham and cabbage leaves. I never