The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  As the Roxburghs looked on and waited they did as they had been told by Spurgeon. Although Mrs Roxburgh almost revolted in swallowing a lump of rancid fat, and splinters of lean stuck between their teeth, the wholly physical act of chewing began to pacify their squeamish souls. The biscuit was more austere than the meat, but responded to gnawing and sucking; reduced to a wholly insipid pap, it trickled down easily enough, and encouraged a sense of melancholy fulfilment in revived stomachs.

  In the course of the afternoon the crew finished patching the damaged boat, with lead, leather, and scraps of blanket, their handiwork copiously daubed with pitch. It was past five by the time the boats were clear of the wreck. Mr Pilcher, in charge of the pinnace, had with him the boatswain, four seamen, and a lad, while Captain Purdew in the long-boat was accompanied by his first officer, the steward, a carpenter, five seamen, the boy Oswald Dignam—and the two passengers in addition. As the boats parted from Bristol Maid none of the survivors was able to believe that any of this had truly happened, so their dazed eyes seemed to express, their mouths either clenched, tight and resentful, or hanging slack with a look of watery injury.

  Of all the company, Mrs Roxburgh was perhaps the most deeply moved: to be ejected thus from the cramped cabin and rather inhospitable saloon which her own moods, thoughts, and attempts at occupation had furnished as a dwelling place. Now she could not bear to visualize even the lumpy palliasse on which she had learnt to sleep, or the mirror in which her face had floated, often unconvincingly, amongst the frosting and the blemishes.

  Here they were, however, in long-boat and pinnace. Mr Courtney was using his quadrant to make calculations, as the result of which, a course was set for the mainland, an estimated thirty miles to the west.

  ‘Bye-bye, Bristol Maid!’ a seaman aboard the long-boat shouted from the depths of his lungs.

  He began at once to laugh and cough, exposing the ruins of some brown teeth set in expansive though bloodless gums, the tendons in his neck showing in relief like a protective bulwark.

  Mrs Roxburgh decided not to turn her head, much as she was drawn to the hulk they were abandoning.

  Despite the presence of gentry the crews of the rival boats started shouting ribaldries at one another. The burr and clash of their men’s voices seemed to give them courage.

  ‘See you in Wapping, Nat!’ yelled a tiger from the pinnace.

  ‘We’ll wap in other parts afore we ever see bloody Wappin’!’ answered a hitherto speechless youth.

  ‘Ay,’ a grizzled fellow beside him snuffled back the snot in his pug’s nose, ‘there’ll be rocks aplenty with shag on ’en for those who fancies.’

  The men fell into a gloom after that. Whether the object of their outburst was to disguise tender feelings in themselves, or to shock a lady they had at their mercy, they failed either way; for the lady, who showed no signs of being hard of hearing, continued taking a clear-eyed if somewhat exaggerated interest in the empty sea surrounding them.

  If Ellen Gluyas resented their obscenities it was on account of Mr Roxburgh: that his sensibility might be offended, or that he should suspect her of countenancing ‘men’s talk’. But he gave no indication of having heard or understood, and soon they were all immersed in preoccupations of greater moment.

  The sea which had appeared gentle enough as they drew away from the wrecked ship slapped at the boat’s sides with increasing vigour, and a stately ice-pudding of a cloud evolved less passive forms and blacker intentions as it was moved towards them. The gold of a rampant sun and the threatening obscurity of storm and night offered an intolerable contrast to the more fearful among the castaways. Any of those who looked her way saw such a substantial Bristol Maid it pierced their conscience to know that they were abandoning her. Heeled over as she was on the reef, the little ship held firm, even when the sea raised a great white arm and brought it crashing down across her bows.

  The restraint she had been taught to cultivate made it difficult for Mrs Roxburgh to cry, when Ellen Gluyas would probably have blubbered out loud, for witnessing something of the slow death of a ship. But Mrs Roxburgh did at last gently weep, hoping that none of the men, least of all Mr Roxburgh, would see.

  ‘Ma’am, look! Yer shawl’s trailin’ over th’ gunnel. ’Tis soaked!’ It was Oswald Dignam’s voice; he had wormed close, then closer she noticed, since boarding.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘the shawl,’ and smiled at the boy like the benevolent patroness she was expected to be.

  She had bundled the shawl over an arm, and forgotten about it. Now she hauled it in and wrung out the water from the drowned fringe.

  ‘Thank you, Oswald. But will it, I wonder, matter?’

  Because he did not altogether understand, and was afraid of damaging a delicate relationship, he did not answer.

  The boats were blown on their reckless course.

  Mrs Roxburgh realized that water had seeped beyond the soles into the uppers of her boots.

  ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she asked, ‘have you wrapped up?’

  The crew sat staring at the passengers with a half-dreamy incredulity bordering on insolence.

  ‘Yes,’ he assured her, baring his teeth in the convention of a smile.

  The sun was blinding in its last moments. It provided Austin Roxburgh with an excuse for closing his eyes and shutting out at least the visible signs of his wife’s solicitude for him. What he could not shut out was the sight of Captain Purdew. So he opened them again. Did this scarecrow of a man, under whose command they had placed themselves, still possess the wits and the self-respect required in an emergency? Involved in a personal disaster, the loss of his ship, the captain sat grinning at the horizon, until suddenly taking off his cap, and producing a comb, he started attacking his surviving strands of hair.

  Something occurred so forcibly to Mrs Roxburgh that she elbowed her husband in the ribs, twisting and turning in the cramped space in which she was sitting. ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she called, although he was beside her, ‘where is the bag?’ as she felt or kicked around with sodden feet for the dressing-case which should have been there.

  He answered slowly, ‘I’ve forgot it, I think. But what use, Ellen, would it be?’ The fragment of a so-called ‘memoir’, the bilious journal! (His Elzevir Virgil was buttoned safely inside the bosom of his coat.)

  Again Mr Roxburgh bared his teeth.

  ‘Oh dear!’ She began openly to cry, however he might deplore the show she was making of them. ‘The bag! We have so little!’

  Like a lover, the boy could not gaze at her enough.

  ‘Ellen! Ellen!’ Mr Roxburgh coaxed.

  None of those who were listening understood, least of all Captain Purdew, his eyes trained on distance in the abstract, or the pinnace ploughing on ahead.

  Mr Roxburgh had taken his wife’s hand, plaiting his fingers together with hers, grinding the rings into them. It was a source of deep interest to the boy. He watched until darkness came down upon their heads.

  It was becoming evident, not only to the sailors, but to the landsmen in their midst, that the long-boat was barely seaworthy. Her jury-rig was of little more use than a broken wing to a bird, and in the absence of a rudder, a boat’s oar had to be pressed into service. By their first dawn, with the sleep still sticky on their faces, the most optimistic of the company could not very well ignore the fact that their vessel was leaky. So that bailing was included in the orders for the day. Those who were detailed for the duty set to it, not so much with a will, as with the hope that monotony would drug their minds. The Roxburghs were secretly glad of a forced labour in which they might join. Mr Roxburgh even discovered a method which he first demonstrated to his wife, and later went so far as to explain to members of the crew. (Ellen Gluyas simply bailed, head bowed almost to her knees; until the random twinge of pain began darting through the disused muscles of her back.)

  Some of the men had taken to the Roxburghs, or else their contempt would not stand the strain of long keeping.

  It was a fit
ful progress, by human as well as nautical standards. From time to time intangible cats’-paws made a play for the improvised sail, which would start to fill, and falter, and subside, along with unwarranted hopes. Manpower was Captain Purdew’s only recourse. The arms of those pulling on the oars bulged and cracked, while teeth bit on oaths the rowers refrained from releasing out of deference to a lady.

  If an occasional expletive escaped from between the crew’s overworking lips, it was not that of a dead language, but one she had forgotten on emigrating, as it were, from the country of her birth. Mrs Roxburgh mused on the false impression it seemed her fate in life to give, to rough sailors, refined acquaintances, even her own dear husband—and one she preferred not to remember. Trapped between the walls of a room she might have gone on to torment herself with speculation on the nature of the seed which had been planted in her body, whether it would grow to reveal her better or her worse side, and whose face it would wear. Here on the open sea she was more distressed to observe the superior performance given by the pinnace, and in her disheartenment, found herself resenting Captain Purdew’s unwise choice of a boat for his command.

  Towards the close of the morning, when condescension on the part of Mr Pilcher had allowed the distance between the vessels to decrease appreciably, Captain Purdew stood up, and with a hand on the improvised mast for support, signalled with the other to the captain of the pinnace. After much hailing, there took place a discussion laced with such professional detail the passengers could only take it on trust. Mr Roxburgh had his crypto-faith in those who perform feats of manual dexterity and technical miracles which might contribute to his personal welfare, while Ellen had the frivolous mind of which he accused her, and which she had ended by accepting. At least it allowed her to be less affected by the flow of arcane language. During the discussion she was drawn rather, to the boiling and bubbling of the sea, and recalled a glass door-stopper she had acquired with her rank of wife and lady, and which had become a source of innocent pleasure as it lay on the carpet of the morning room at ‘Birdlip House’.

  ‘You will have to take us in tow,’ Captain Purdew was shouting at his second mate.

  Although Mrs Roxburgh could sense that the mate’s attitude to this decision was disrespectful, he was preparing to obey the captain’s order, while she, so delighted by her vision of the green door-stopper, continued rounding it out, partly in her mind, partly in the sea water undulating beyond the gunwale. There was a girl called Matty Somerton, only briefly in her service, who had stumbled over the stopper while carrying a trayload of cordial. It had been something of a speciality with Matty to stumble and fall, tray in hand. She could not help it, she confessed, and on the stairs, always up, but never yet down.

  Narrowing her eyes in the sunlight, in this seascape from which she remained detached, Ellen Gluyas knew that she should have felt more sympathy for her maid, from having brought suppers to the lodger on a tin tray, and almost dropped it out of nervousness, in the refined atmosphere of books and medicine bottles. Sucked deeper still into the whorls of memory and water, she was less than a maid: her mother’s drudge and her father’s unpaid hand.

  She was dragged back to the surface by seeing that the two boats had been manœuvred to within a short distance of each other, and that Mr Pilcher himself was securing a hawser which one of the long-boat’s crew flung across the gap.

  Captain Purdew remained upright and unemployed, holding to the mast, grinning, and trying to suppress a moral anguish he was not yet prepared to admit. Since Pilcher’s head was at an angle which allowed him to concentrate on the hawser, it was impossible to observe the lines, so deep as to be black, which fascinated Austin Roxburgh when he was in a position to examine the second officer’s face. He felt peculiarly drawn to Pilcher, compelled by repulsion rather than inspired by the spark of positive attraction. He would have liked to find favour with this offensive individual, but could not feel that his aspiration would be recognized.

  Having knotted the rope, the fellow suggested by the hang of his head and a thin-lipped shamefaced smile, that he was preparing to launch a joke. But humour could only have eluded Pilcher, and he turned to resume command of the pinnace.

  They struggled on.

  In the hands of others, and without compensating books or needlework, the Roxburghs were left pretty much with their thoughts. The solace of conversation was more or less denied them since both sensed that the foreign language they spoke might cause surprise, or worse, arouse resentment. So they confined themselves to such unexceptionable banalities as, ‘Look, Mr Roxburgh, would you say that is an albatross?’ or, ‘It must be midday, Ellen, don’t you think? by the position of the sun.’

  Nobody could accuse them of not trying to comport themselves. It was during the silences that Mrs Roxburgh, to her own knowledge, got out of hand. In silence she was able to indulge, even flaunt, a difference she had been made to feel most forcibly as they helped her over the side, probing with a foot for the rope ladder, in her passage to the long-boat from the familiar deck of Bristol Maid. She was dangling, a bundle of incredible clothes, cruel stays, and spasmodic breathing. She had been softened and made more defenceless, as was to be expected, by the precious child she was carrying, when in normal circumstances, she, if no one else, knew herself to be tough-fibred. So it was also frightening to be suspended in this airy limbo. The strong hands of rough, kindly men had held, only to relinquish her. Swinging and bumping on the rope ladder, she was at the mercy of her own initiative, and that of the wind filling her skirts, making of her a mute bell which would have emitted a pathetic tinkle had it attempted to chime. Other men stood goggling up at her ankles from below. One fellow blushed for her as he passed her on. She was quick to conceal the cause of his shame on feeling solid boards beneath her feet. Until now, she had been proud of her neat glacé button boots, bought a year or two before on a visit to London.

  A day later, still set in one of the only two attitudes she found it possible to adopt in the space allotted to them, she only had to work her toes very slightly to feel the water squelching in her boots, a pastime not without its melancholy pleasure. When she was not taking her turn at bailing, a soporific so potent that sight of a trickle of blood from a cut in her hand did not detract from its effect, she sat and watched men exerting themselves, the certain rough elegance of even the thickest wrists alternately compelling and rejecting a boat’s oar. As their movements fused and confused she saw above all her father’s wrist flicking the whip with a movement of its own as they jogged side by side in the cart, or on feast days, the jingle. She stepped forward at last over the legs of the rowers and closed the scaly lids when the eyes were no longer looking at her and folded the hands on the wesket before hurrying up the road for help. Had she been left to mature naturally she had inherited that same chapped skin. Looking at her hands, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that she was returning, and not by slow degrees, to nature.

  During the voyage, of circumnavigation as it seemed to have become, the shore so distant, if not mythical, the boy Oswald moved about the boat more freely than most, now taking his turn at bailing, now straining upon an oar, but always with an end in mind: to seat himself at the knees of one who was not so much the lady as a Divine Presence. Thus crouched, he would concentrate on the pair of hands lying in a lap.

  He did not see them in their present shape, as scratched and filthy as a man’s, but as he remembered them, like a pair of smooth, dazzling fish, only hidden to be re-discovered, while playing together in a white sea of fog. He had even experienced their touch, and shivered again at the approach of jewels, in particular the ring with a curious nest of stones which glittered like dark, clotting blood. The memory of this ring, rather than its counterfeit on a grimy finger, seared his already burning cheek.

  ‘You are contributing as much, Oswald, as any of the men.’ Mrs Roxburgh spoke with the dutiful kindness of the dull woman she felt herself to be.

  So lethargic, she could scarcely raise a hand to remove a
hair from her lips, or brush away the crumbs which tumbled down her front when she ate her ration of mouldy bread. If she glanced disinterestedly, it did not seem unnatural that the grey, and in some cases, green crumbs should be lying on the shelf her bosom provided. Agreeable enough in itself, her lassitude gave her a plausible excuse for neglecting her person, as well as an argument for not resisting, morally at least, the stares of the rowers and the boy at her feet.

  It could have been lassitude again which was developing her faith, not in God, in whose service she had never been punctilious, nor in the more compelling gods of the countryside into which she had been born, but in the umbilical rope joining the long-boat to the pinnace. No, it was more than the ebb of her mental and physical powers, it was life itself dictating her faith in this insubstantial cord.

  ‘You will bring us to land,’ she said to the boy because he was so conveniently placed, ‘and we shall find water—and limpets—winkles. Oh yes, I’m certain of it!’

  She dismissed the painful probability of cutting her hands in the struggle to open shellfish, and could already feel the slither of fat oysters down her throat.

  As they progressed, if they did, the smoother passages under sail, but more often jerked forward by manpower, she learned the least tic, the faintest convulsion, the essential ugliness of men’s straining faces, if also their relaxed beauty while they rested sweaty and thoughtless after exertion.

  Only at such moments, when she was most absorbed in her lesson, did Oswald dare cone her face. Then he would try to delve beneath the salt scales and ruins of the original skin, to reconstruct a beauty, true as well as legendary, which he had discovered for the first time on a foggy afternoon, and never again experienced a perfection he knew to exist, if only in a dream, or fog.