The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  Something of the maze was indeed suggested by the natives’ movements, meandering over the hard earth, crossing and recrossing one another’s tracks in their interminable search. Yet the black women’s fate was not so far determined by invisible walls that science and experience could not guide them; their probing was almost invariably attended by success, while the benighted slave stabbed the ground more often than not fruitlessly.

  The sun’s weight upon her shoulders replacing the weight of the child in her arms, she grew to hate the hard grey earth with its tufts of wiry, dead-seeming grass, although in the course of wandering from patch to patch, she realized she was beginning to develop a skill in ‘potato’-sticking, and when one of her companions looked in her direction, she laughed with pleasure for her discovery. Overcoming her instinctive suspicions the black woman laughed back. Both fell silent after this exchange, partly since their shared emotion had been but imperfectly conveyed, more because pleasure had to succumb to the demands of drudgery.

  During the heat of the day the company rested in the shade beside one of the several lakes watering their country. Two inexhaustible girls shed the fibre shawls they wore and started diving for lily-roots. The prisoner narrowed her eyes, lulled by the contrast of shade and glare and her vision of the two swimmers, their slender arms and still shapely breasts regularly rising above an undulating sheet of water-lilies.

  She may have dozed, but only briefly. She awoke to find the child was being restored to her arms, where it immediately resumed its grizzling.

  The whole of life by now revolved round the search for food, which her own aggravated hunger made seem the only rational behaviour. It was in any case what she had accepted as the answer to the hard facts of existence before she had been taught the habits and advantages of refinement. Consequently when some of the hunters returned to the camp that evening with the carcase of a kangaroo slung from a green pole, and a detachment appeared from the direction of the shore, several glistening monsters dangling by the gills from the hooks of their fingers, she would have joined the other women, childlike in their shrieking and hand-clapping, had it not been for the child in her arms.

  As for this actual child, its snouted face had a dead look. Or was it what she hoped to see? Were she to be honest, she did wish the creature dead, even though its owners might accuse her of casting a spell.

  She looked about her. Everybody was too engrossed in preparing for the evening’s feast to intercept their slave’s evil thoughts.

  The child stirred, jerked awake, and stuck a finger in her nurse’s eye.

  Tonight again, the prisoner was offered no more than scraps: a bone to gnaw, a fragment of the beast’s scorched hide to chew or suck, acts which she performed while aware of her own ugly greed and the filth which had become an accepted part of her blistered hands. She was comforted, however, by the smells she snuffed, the fat she licked, and her saliva trickling down her throat into a wizened stomach.

  Had her stomach been less shrunken she might have been made unhappier by unassuaged hunger when, later that night, lying in the hut, in the ashes from the fire, alongside the family to whom she was assigned, she was forced to listen to three women taking their turn to satisfy (or so it sounded) a man’s demands. Her own prospects would have given her greater cause for alarm had she not felt that the spiteful nature of her mistress must resist any move on her husband’s part to add to his seraglio.

  Surrounded by the stench of rancid fat and sweat, the blanket of wood-smoke, the grunts and cries of animal pleasure, she dared for the first time resurrect her own husband, the image at least of what she remembered: the fastidious hands and glossy whiskers, the eyes too deeply concentrated on an inner self she had never been privileged to meet. Whatever his deficiencies or hers (in retrospect she thought that perhaps she had loved him most for the ailments and the crankiness which called for her sympathy or forbearing) she willed herself to experience that greater reality which dreams can bring; and fell asleep in Mr Roxburgh’s embrace.

  She was disconcerted however to find herself subjected, then submitting, to coarser treatment. Ohhh she detested what she was physically incapable of resisting, most of all the hairy wrists and swollen veins. Exhausted by the ensuing struggle she could only lie like the spent fish she was, gills subsiding as emotions expired.

  She awoke stiff and cold except where the embers touched her, still surrounded by the sighs, the breathing and dreaming of others, while her own dream faded into ash-colours, and she realized that it was not Austin but Garnet Roxburgh who had possessed her.

  His continued immanence and her own disgust forced her to her feet at such speed that she was almost stunned by a blow from one of the saplings supporting the thatch of leaves. She fell upon her knees, and crawled instead on all fours towards the entrance, like any sow shaking off the night and lumbering out of a foetid sty. Without having seen them she knew that her breasts must be swinging lean and russet as she lurched into a pearly light. Dew raining down along her spine and rump cleansed her to some extent of her dream. It was her locked joints which were making her groan in her efforts to stand erect.

  But the hour before dawn offered compensations. Her ghost drifted with the wraiths of mist, among the ghosts of trees, and found itself again haunting the shore, a bland, unobstructed verge which presented no sure way of escape to a lost soul, a woman, or a rational being. If one of them accepted to be seduced by its beauty, and a second fainted at the prospect of a footsore journey, the third, a sceptic, feared that this ribbon of sand might not lead to Moreton Bay, but could double back upon itself to create a prison in an island.

  Reason might have made Mrs Roxburgh more disconsolate and lost had it not been for the sound of a receding tide. She stood awhile in the shallows, letting the wavelets play round her ankles, rubbing one sandy shin against the other, listening to the clatter of shells and pebbles as the current dragged them back and forth. She found herself smiling for these lesser pleasures which appealed to what Austin Roxburgh deplored as ‘the sensual side of Ellen’s nature’.

  The cold broke in upon her at last. She recoiled shivering from the expanse of colourless water, and sky as colourless except for the hint of an apocalypse, to stumble back in what she hoped was the direction from which she had come. She positively panted after the tribe to which she now belonged. What if she never found it, and spent the rest of her days on earth (if not in hell) circling through the scrub till her bones gave up? She longed for even the most resentful company of whatever colour. She might have bartered her body, she thought, to one of the scornful male blacks in return for his protection.

  To indulge in such an unlikely fancy could not be regarded in any degree as a betrayal, but while she walked, her already withered fringe of leaves began deriding her shrunken thighs, and daylight struck an ironic glint out of the concealed wedding-ring.

  So her lunging and plunging through the forest was as much an attempt to elude her thoughts as to find the camp she had unwisely deserted. She was made quite feverish by her search, in the course of which she came to a hollow where she was halted, indefinitely it seemed, by the horror which paralysed her.

  Directly in her path a fire had but lately burnt itself out. Amongst charred branches and the white flock of ash gone cold, lay a man’s body set in a final anguished curve, the roasted skin noticeably crackled down one side from shoulder to thigh. One of the legs had been hacked away from where the thigh is joined to the hip. If the skull, bared to the bone in places by wilful gashes, grimaced at the intruder through singed whisker and a crust of blood, grime, and burning, the mouth atoned for all that is fiendish by its resignation to suffering.

  Mrs Roxburgh only gradually realized that she was faced with the first officer’s remains. She was left gasping and sobbing, not so much for decent stolid Ned Courtney, her relationship with whom had never been more than rudimentary, as for the death of her husband and her own insoluble predicament. She might have forgotten her intention of finding h
er way back to the vindictive but necessary blacks, and lost herself deeper in the forest, if two children had not appeared, full of admonishment and anger which could only have been inspired by their elders. Although she took it for granted that these children had been sent to spy on her and lead her back to captivity, she was ready to surrender herself. They first beat her about the shoulders with switches, which in the circumstances she felt, then of their own free will offered her their moist, childish hands, a gesture she accepted gratefully.

  During the journey back the children found a crop of berries, some of which they forced into her mouth. The berries were watery, insipid, but not unpleasant. Shortly after, halfway down a slope, she caught her foot in a vine which had escaped her notice, and tumbled like a sack off a cart. Imitating her fall, the children rolled downhill and landed in the same heap. They all lay laughing awhile. The young children might have been hers. She was so extraordinarily content she wished it could have lasted for ever, the two black little bodies united in the sun with her own blackened skin-and-bones.

  Not surprisingly, her wish remained ungranted. The children cleared their faces of smiles, and they marched on.

  At the camp they found the men had already departed on the day’s errand, while the women were at work dismantling the huts for setting up, it eventuated, at no great distance from their former site. The women had little but scowls and pouts for the recalcitrant slave, whom they loaded with the heaviest sheets of bark and thickest swatches of leafy thatching. However capricious the present manœuvre she carried her loads willingly enough, grateful for her reinstatement in the community to which she belonged. (Only at evening she discovered the reason for their arbitrary move: fleas are less predatory on virgin ground.)

  Later in the day a troupe of females and middle children proceeded by instinct or pre-arrangement to the beach, where fishermen had been casting their nets. A hush had fallen upon the men, some of them immersed up to their heads, others but waist-deep in water, like stanchions to which the nets were attached. The women, if incapable of silence, chattered in subdued monotone like birds at roosting. Less controlled, the children scampered around and about flinging handfuls of wet sand which the sun transformed into arcs of light.

  Suddenly even the children were stilled as they noticed a shuddering of the water some distance offshore. This barely visible disturbance of a calm sea, like the very slight agitation of a sheet by innumerable hidden bodies, was moving ever closer to the mouth, then into the belly of the net, the outline of which could be traced from the black blob of one motionless head to the next, and closer inshore, the more exposed human stanchions. When a distinct collision took place underwater. Single fish, mercurial enough to appear as liquid as their element, leaped briefly above the surface. There began a frenzied shouting, and hauling on the net. Women shrieked, children squealed, as all dashed into the mild surf to join in dragging the net to land, when they were not dabbling their hands after an individual catch of slippery and, in most cases, elusive fish.

  Not until the beach could the extent of their haul be estimated, as the men, all ribs, lungs, and teeth, stalked glistening around their slackened net with its silver swag. As for the ecstatic women, they were already stuffing their holdalls. Children playing with escaped fish squeezed them to make the milk shoot out of soft roes.

  The slave had no part in any of this, unless when a fishy opalescence clashing with a transparency of light induced in her a certain drunken tranquillity. No doubt hunger, revived by the scent of roasting flesh, would overcome revulsion from the sight of fish twitching and dying round her on the beach.

  She was in fact already brought halfway back to her senses by the full ‘dillis’ with which her masters were loading her. She was soon staggering under the weight—of food which is, after all, life, as she had forgot while sipping chocolate and without appetite nibbling macaroons at Birdlip House Cheltenham.

  Arrived at the camp, she dumped her load, and was immediately sent back for more. It occurred to her that she had been free all day of her loathsome charge, the pustular child, and that the mother had not come to the fishing. On their return from the beach, the expression on the woman’s face had been one of puzzled grieving, while the child lay inert outside the hut, like a stricken animal for which little can be done beyond dispatching it, as Ellen Gluyas knew.

  In this case, approaching death actually quickened life in the living. Mrs Roxburgh knew that she had wished for the child to die. Perhaps for once her wish was being granted. Yet from looking at the unknowing mother, she was not able to rejoice in what amounted to her own evil powers, and wondered whether she could expect for herself some form of appropriate retribution.

  While she was returning to the beach her mother-in-law came into her thoughts, and she was pleased to have her company. Old Mrs Roxburgh had always hoped that the clothes she possessed would see her out. As might have been expected, she was dressed in her brown kerseymere of several winters, over it the black bombazine spencer she had worn in mourning for her husband. It was hardly the hour, and the wrong season, for a parasol, but thus she might have held its great pagoda of lace and muslin tilted against the antipodean sun to protect a complexion which was still her pride.

  ‘I shall not delay—or embarrass, I hope—if I walk with you. I should like to see my son.’

  ‘I haven’t seen ’n sence several days.’

  ‘You haven’t—what?’ Shock made the old thing forget herself. ‘You haven’t forgotten all you have been taught?’

  ‘The words’, Ellen could only mumble, ‘seem to be falling away.’ This was what she truly feared in the event of long association with the blacks.

  ‘But are you not keeping up the journal? I only suggested it to help you learn to express yourself.’

  ‘Oh, the journal—it’s lost!’ Now she was crying. ‘We both lost them before—before Mr Roxburgh died.’

  ‘It was not Austin who died, but his brother. You forget they buried Garnet in Van Diemen’s Land.’

  The old woman was looking at her so keenly out of her white-kid face, where Ellen noticed for the first time a little patch of rouge, dry and peeling, on each cheek. The expression of the eyes and the two patches of dry rouge made her wonder whether her mother-in-law were less innocent than she had appeared hitherto.

  ‘And where is your garnet ring, Ellen?’ the old creature persisted.

  Although her glance was directed at the blackened hand to which the ring belonged, she showed no interest in the more noticeable tatters of flesh or the wedding-ring which its owner felt the fringe of leaves no longer concealed adequately.

  ‘I gave the garnets to a person who claimed to be in greater need of them than I.’ Mrs Roxburgh constructed her sentence along lines which she felt might appease her mother-in-law.

  But in any case, the next instant she dismissed from her mind an inquisitor she had so unwisely introduced, and thrust her way through the grey scrub upon the same expanse of sand and light where the blacks were still sorting fish.

  Again she became their beast of burden. As they loaded her back and sides, she took it they were not unkindly disposed, by their ingratiating show of teeth, rumbustious laughter, and possibly, jokes.

  One of them went so far as to smack her rather hard on the bottom.

  ‘Aw, my life!’ she shouted in the tongue they might have understood. ‘As if I dun’t have enough to put up with!’ She could not give over what were by no means counterfeit giggles.

  (Although she would not have admitted it to her mother-in-law or any lady of her acquaintance, or confessed it to Mr Roxburgh, leave alone Garnet R., she had always preferred the company of men.)

  Back at the camp, the women were busy scaling fish, using the sharp blades of shells. They took no notice of the arrival of the laden donkey, herself smelling by now as rank and fishy as the commodity she had been carrying.

  At the entrance to the hut of the family to whom she was assigned, a ceremony was taking place. A wr
inkled, elderly man of evident importance was squatted beside the sick child, weaving signs, making passes in the air above the prostrate body. The family expressed their gratification when at last the physician—conjurer drew a small brown stone, or unpolished crystal, out of the patient’s mouth. There were cries, there was hand-clapping. Only the slave could not bring herself to join in their celebrations, for her own encounters with death showed her that the child was beyond cure.

  Instead she broke in with the announcement, ‘Can’t ’ee see she is gone? She’s dead!’ It sounded the more terrifying for being unintelligible to her audience, just as her emotion, her bursting into tears, must have seemed disproportionate to those who had not shared her sufferings.

  While Ellen Roxburgh wept for her own experience of life, the pseudo-physician, to judge by his excited jabber, appeared to be holding her responsible for his failure. He did not succeed, however, in rousing an opposition. For the first time since the meeting on the beach, the captive and her masters, especially the women, were united in a common humanity.

  They allowed her to accompany the funeral procession, trapesing into the forest until they found a hollow log in which to shove the body. At once their grief evaporated, except in the mother’s case, who was prepared to keep up her snivels, but only awhile, for they were returning to the fish feast.

  On this occasion the captive was first allowed a head, even a half-raw liver, but as the company grew sated, nobody thought to prevent her reaching out of her own accord to snatch a whole fish from off the coals, burning her fingers and lips in her haste to devour.

  Finally she too was satisfied, not to say gorged, bloated, stupefied. She scarce heard the blacks wailing at dusk to appease whatever spirits lurked in the surrounding air. She would surely have been free to join in their prayers if so moved, but her soul had grown too dull and brutish to concern itself with spiritual matters.