Cleary slipped over the rail.
“Off with you!” cried Jude.
“Put down that mop!” cried Sellers, now suddenly furious. “Put down that mop, you braying little bitch! Go’n get inter your petticoats! You ain’t a boy! I never b’lieved it, not for the last six months, an’ now I know. You’ve give yourself away proper. Why, look at you, as round as a tub—you’re a wumman!”
Ratcliffe looked on horrified. Jude, flushed and bright-eyed, had somehow revealed her sex. In her excitement she looked for a moment almost beautiful. Her tongue had done the rest. The smashing of the plates had brought the woman out of her as a conjurer brings a rabbit out of a hat.
“Put down that mop!”
Jude from rose color had turned awfully white; then with the élan and dash of a gamecock she charged. The wet swab hit the ruffian full in his flat face, and he fell on the deck with a bang.
In a second he was up and scrambling over the rail. Again she charged, the swab meeting him this time full on his stem and sending him over into the boat like a bag of oats.
A slush tub, fortunately half-full, and marked by her prescient mind, was her next weapon. The contents caught Cleary full in the face, and as the boat made off, the oars, all at sixes and sevens, wildly rowing, she pursued it with the battery of her tongue till it was out of range. Then she broke down and cried, sniffed, with her arm hiding her face, and then flushed, like a thing of shame dived below.
Ratcliffe knew.
Her sex proclaimed aloud by the shameless Sellers was as a garment stripped off her publicly. On the very first day Satan had stated her case and she didn’t mind, though he, Ratcliffe, had been a stranger; but it was different now, somehow. It was as if the end of her boyhood had come. Sellers would no doubt proclaim the fact in Havana.