The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  The victim of her clothes, her body, and the formless hazards, Ellen Gluyas ran down bellowing towards the water, where a rising wave warned her off. She stood an instant mewing ineffectually, before stuffing a knuckle in her mouth. More forcibly than ever, she was made to feel there was nothing she could do but submit.

  But in accordance with the convention human beings are bound to obey even when their rational minds tell them the odds are against them, she was already starting back for help, running, scrambling by uncertain footholds and handfuls of grass, lumbering on, stumbling and falling, limping the last stretch, down to where the crew were methodically repairing the boats.

  Her cries elicited only dazed attention from the men who were caulking the long-boat with a mixture of soap, fat, and grass. Three or four appeared to realize what had occurred, but of these only two followed Mr Courtney in response to Mrs Roxburgh’s pleading. The others did not want to hear or know; Oswald Dignam the individual had slipped from the common consciousness as a result of what they had endured and what they might still have to undergo.

  Arrived on the crest of the ridge above the scene of the boy’s disappearance, the rescuers slouched back and forth, mumbling, as they searched the open sea with half-closed eyes. Only Mrs Roxburgh knew that it had happened, but could not convince these bemused, if not disbelieving, sailors, let alone spur them on to doing she knew not what.

  She was desolated. She felt ill, and only too glad to spend the forenoon resting under a shelter some of the crew improvised for her out of a sail. The smell of crude canvas, of ants, and the attentions of flies made little impression on her. She must have dozed, in company with her swollen belly and the ghosts of her lost children, nor did she remember that she had not set eyes on her husband these several hours.

  The caulking of the long-boat was proceeding parallel to, although not in accordance with the first officer’s unsolicited directions, and more intermittently, Captain Purdew’s transcendental hopes, when Mr Roxburgh and Spurgeon came tittuping down towards the work-party. Sharing a secret gave them the expression of guilty drunkards arriving home under a transparent veil of bravado. They were ignored by those more importantly employed, nor did anyone think to inform them of Oswald Dignam’s death, although he had been the steward’s nipper and the cause of Mrs Roxburgh’s inordinate distress. The sailors held their noses closer to their work, while Mr Courtney redoubled his efforts to impose his superfluous authority. As for Captain Purdew, his mind was wafted afresh in search of a salvation which might not be vouchsafed.

  ‘Had I gone down with her at least. But the Lord won’t overlook my record. Or will He?’ The poor old man stood scanning the unresponsive seascape, his eyes those of a stale mullet.

  Mr Roxburgh and Spurgeon continued smiling for their secret mission. Under cover of the general preoccupation it was easy enough to secure a handful of precious soap, while Spurgeon got possession of his hoard of sugar. They then retired to their own more esoteric rites at safe distance from the camp.

  Moulding the amalgam of soap and sugar into a pliable ball, Austin Roxburgh grew so rapt he might have been casting a spell into the grubby, sweating mess.

  Spurgeon was positively awed. ‘’Ow will we keep ’er in place on me neck?’

  ‘Wait!’

  When the medicament had been reduced to a sufficiently disgusting consistency the physician put it in the patient’s hands, and fishing out the tail of his own good linen shirt, tore a resounding strip from it. The steward’s disbelief in a gentleman’s behaviour expressed itself in open-mouthed breathing which might have sounded like overt snores to anyone breaking in upon them. But nobody intruded on their privacy, and Mr Roxburgh applied the poultice to the inflamed swelling on the steward’s neck, and bound it up, round and round, with the strip of shirt, sighing as he did so; he had come to love Spurgeon’s boil for giving him occasion to discover in himself, if not an occult gift, at least a congratulable virtue.

  They sat for a moment looking and not looking at each other, until the patient lowered his eyes to hide a gratitude which was threatening to spill over, and the physician roused himself from the trance in which his will had already induced a show of pus.

  ‘Well, we shall see, old fellow!’ he said in the brisk cheerful voice of one who had returned to his normal spiritual level and social station.

  At the same time Mr Roxburgh realized how tired he was; he yawned like a horse, showing his gums and longish teeth. He felt he had all but dislocated a jaw. One might, he imagined, by too vigorous a yawn. It made him scramble to his feet and remember the wife who had been several hours’ absent from his thoughts.

  On reaching camp, Spurgeon a respectful distance behind him, he was directed to the improvised tent, where, he was told, Mrs Roxburgh was resting.

  She was more, she was fast asleep it seemed when he lifted the loose canvas flap, prepared to share the tale of the boil and the part he had played—though not its deepest significance; gnostic delicacy would have prevented him revealing the secret of his occult powers. But she continued sleeping, and he lay down somewhat sulkily beside her.

  When Mrs Roxburgh started up, and called out, ‘’Twas me! He wudn’ a gone otherwise.’ Eyes still closed, she struck her husband across the mouth with an outflung arm.

  Mr Roxburgh winced for the numbing pain; he sneezed too, because his nose had shared the blow. ‘Please, Ellen!’ he protested. ‘Obviously you have been through a nightmare, but I don’t see why I should suffer for it.’

  ‘No.’ She sat trembling in her returning consciousness. ‘I was not in control of myself.’

  The loss of this cabin-boy, which the colours of her dream had transformed into a major bereavement, unloosed in her a need for affinity, a longing to be loved. She was prompted to pour out the tragic story on the one person close enough to respond to her distress; if the current sucked them under, they must rise from the depths revived and strengthened by their love for each other.

  So she would have liked it had she not seen that Mr Roxburgh would not. Although recovered from the undignified blow she had dealt him, he had retired, it seemed, to the remotest corner of their relationship, where he lay just perceptibly smiling for what she could not tell. At all events it was not the moment to break the news of Oswald’s death.

  Instead, she leaned over him, and drew her mouth across his parted lips, and breathed between them, ‘You know I would not willingly hurt you,’ and he put his arms round her, and she rocked him and cherished him, which appeared to be what he expected, and her distress at the boy’s death was temporarily assuaged.

  The light had almost wholly withdrawn from their suffocating canvas shelter. She must have slept, and Mr Roxburgh was still audibly asleep beside her. Outside, men’s voices, Captain Purdew’s, Mr Courtney’s, and less frequently, Mr Pilcher’s, were discussing a plan for the morning. The captain’s intention was to head for the mainland, and after making landfall, to set course for Moreton Bay, always keeping inshore out of consideration for the scarcely seaworthy long-boat and the constant need of replenishing their limited water supply.

  Mr Courtney promptly agreed; Mr Pilcher was more hesitant.

  When asked to declare his reservations, he answered, ‘I agree—yes—to anythin’ that be—reasonable, and water’s as important as anythin’.’ His reply was reasonable too, but for some reason, Mrs Roxburgh sensed, discouraging.

  Although it was of the greatest importance that the men should plan the future, the exclusively male tenor of their conference began to bore her, especially since the talk of water had aggravated an intolerable thirst which was becoming her own pressing concern.

  Forgetting the height of the tent, she rose to her feet, but was forced to her knees, and to crawling on all fours through the opening. Her hair, to which she no longer gave thought, hung round her face in ropes and mats, while her heavy skirt dragged behind her, ploughing a track through the sand such as the tail of some giant lizard might leave. Seated round the
chart they were studying with such evident concentration, the men did not appear to find the figure of a woman on all fours in any way incongruous, if, in their present employment, they noticed her at all.

  On getting to her feet Mrs Roxburgh walked discreetly past, under cover of her hair, in the direction of the boats. Here again, a group of sailors stretched on the sand paid no attention to her, but continued moodily pitching chunks of coral at the sea while talking in low voices, and by short bursts, of home and food.

  Because her purpose in being there was the dubious one of looking for and appropriating the pannikin they had used in the long-boat, Mrs Roxburgh could not very well take exception to their lack of interest. She was only surprised that she could pass unnoticed, for the waning light had magnified the objects on which it was lingering, such as the great knob of porous coral with the tattered chart spread out upon it, and their normally loose-jointed, fragile boats. An illusion of light had changed the latter into a pair of louring hulks, just as the same tinkering process had moved the scrub significantly closer, emphasized the washed-out colours in the litter of broken shells, deepened the lines in Mr Pilcher’s cheeks, and was drawing attention to the least hair in the tufts on a sailor’s toes. As she slipped past in her unkempt condition she imagined she must have looked like some matted retriever or water-spaniel up to no good.

  Particularly nosing round the boats, she felt herself guided by an instinct for cunning. If her design was not wholly dishonest, for not being altogether selfish (she did look forward to fetching water for the unpractical man who depended on her) it remained inadmissible according to Captain Purdew’s code. So she was driven to slink, in her spoiled clothes roughed up like a retriever’s coat, the lappets of her hair hanging and swinging like a spaniel’s silly ears as she searched.

  She came across what she needed amongst the tackle jettisoned from the long-boat before the caulking operation was begun. She hid the pannikin under her shawl, and had soon resumed her slinking, through a light which accused whatever it illuminated.

  Here and there birds flew skirring out of bushes, or in one case, opened its beak and hissed at her from a grass nest in a hollow in the sand. Farther on, she found a nest unoccupied, and fell upon her knees beside it, and broke open one of the eggs, inside it a putrefying embryo, from which she tore herself near to retching, tripping on the hem of her skirt as she lumbered off.

  Under divine guidance, she was prepared to believe, she was brought to a rock saucer in which water shone, sweet moreover when she tasted it. She dipped her shawl and wrung it into the tin cup, and only sucked the woollen fringes which had sopped the water out of the rock. Yet farther afield she came upon other pools, as well as mere hints of moisture, all of which she sopped up, wringing out the water into the pannikin.

  She was standing thoughtfully sucking at the fringe of her shawl when she heard footsteps behind her, and a voice breaking the silence.

  ‘What is Mrs Roxburgh up to?’

  Without turning she knew it to be Mr Pilcher; no one else could have aimed such scorn at a target which met with his disapproval.

  When she turned to face him she made no attempt to hide the half-filled pannikin; Mr Pilcher’s instinct would surely have told him of its whereabouts.

  ‘The gentry foragin’ for ’emselves, eh?’ he commented as soon as he saw.

  ‘Surely it will harm no one if I take my husband—who is in poor health—half a cup of rainwater?’

  ‘People like your old man, with all time on ’is ands, can afford to enjoy imaginitis.’

  He reached out, took the pannikin from her, and drained it.

  ‘That’s what I think of the both of ’ee.’ He returned the mug. ‘Anybody’s rights be as good as yours.’

  ‘If that is how you feel,’ she conceded, while her Cornish self struggled to restrain its temper. ‘you must obey your principles. They are mine too, I expect, and rainwater is free for anyone to take—if they’re so disposed.’

  ‘Then you can fill me another mugful—disposed or not.’

  ‘I am not your servant.’

  ‘If we’re not eaten by the maggots or the sharks, you may be yet. There’s few servants didn’t own to more ’n one master.’

  ‘What in life has hurt you to leave you so embittered?’

  ‘Not embittered—practical—for seein’ what the likes of you persuade ’emselves don’t exist.’

  ‘You too, are given to imagining,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘I am not all that you believe, for instance. I know and understand hardship—though I’ve grown away from it—and had it easy. I can remember winter nights when a teddy-cake was a luxury.’

  ‘Am I right then, in imaginin’ you was the servant who took ’is fancy?’ Mr Pilcher had never looked so odiously vindictive.

  ‘I was never anybody’s servant. If Mr Roxburgh asked me to be his wife, it was—I believe—because he loved me. In a sense I am under obligation, but choose to serve someone I respect—and love,’ she added.

  While they were engaged in what could have been an ‘imagined’ conversation in so far as it was related to her humble, and consequently, unreal past, the shadows had been enshrouding them. Now a moon was rising, like a single medal of the honesty her mother-in-law liked to arrange in vases, because it was so reliable and needed no further attention. Against a drained sky, the present moon might have passed for transparent to those who had not made a study of its face and learnt its peculiarities.

  Thinking she had worsted her opponent, Mrs Roxburgh was preparing to break away. ‘My husband will be expecting me.’

  But the mate’s eyes were glittering, like her own hands she realized, as they held the empty pannikin.

  He pointed to her rings. ‘Will ye give me one?’

  ‘Why ever should you want it?’

  ‘As a memento!’ He laughed, apparently embarrassed.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll never wake! And if we do, will you want to remember this bad dream?’

  ‘I’m not one that can afford dreams, and might get meself out of some future hole if I have a little something to fall back on.’ As he spoke he fell to fingering the nest of garnets.

  ‘Take it!’ she said. ‘I no longer have any use for them. For that matter, I’ve never truthfully felt they were mine.’

  She stretched out her hand, and he practically dragged the ring off, and fitted it on a little finger. Held to the light for him to look at, the garnets smouldered back at him.

  ‘Now you too, can be counted among the capitalists,’ she told him in making her escape.

  She was glad of the accompaniment provided by her skirt, sweeping coral and brushing scrub, as she returned to the camp and a mouthful of rancid salt pork.

  In the twilight before dawn the Roxburghs were awakened by voices and a sound of canvas, to find that their shelter was being dismantled. The men at work were not unkindly disposed towards them, and one went so far as to apologize to the tenants for the inconvenience they were causing them.

  ‘Bosun’ll bawl at us,’ he explained, ‘if we’re not stowed afore the captain finishes ’is prayers.’

  Mr Roxburgh laughed rather too heartily at the sailor’s joke, then made a mental note to commend them all to their Maker when a more suitable moment offered itself. Since the greatest need for it arose, he had lost the habit of prayer, he was ashamed to realize, but his wife no doubt included him in her own petitions. Prayer, he had always suspected, came more easily to women through their cultivating a more intimate, emotional relationship with God. Or was that so? Could one be certain of anything?

  His reflections ended by making him grumpy. ‘If you don’t get up, Ellen, you’ll put them against us. They’ll be in a bad enough temper as it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured drowsily, but could not yet bestir herself in the delicious grey which stretches between sleep and waking, not even if her sloth caused the Lord God of Hosts to abandon them at full gallop. ‘Yes,’ she repeated sharper, and sat up too quick, wondering how she
should dress for the day ahead, before realizing there was no choice.

  She might at least have inquired after Mr Roxburgh’s health had not her own heavy mind, and perhaps Mr Pilcher’s scorn, been against it. More than anything her pregnancy outweighed her solicitude for others.

  ‘Shall I give you a hand?’ Mr Roxburgh offered magnanimously.

  She was grateful to be pulled to her feet, and now that they were facing each other, she kissed him; it was still dark, though possibly not dark enough to satisfy Mr Roxburgh. Because she could feel a quivering in his rigid fingers she was careful to avoid the mouth.

  After the launching of the boats, which developed into a turmoil of emotion, oaths, torn skin, bruised vanity, and barely suppressed hatred, they were able to set course for the mainland thanks to a wind the captain and his first officer had been hoping to catch. But still the long-boat limped. Mr Courtney was disconcerted to the extent that he decided on hailing the pinnace. An excess of shouting drew their attention, and when the distance between the two boats had sufficiently diminished, Mr Pilcher flung an unwilling hawser. Mr Courtney himself seized upon it with what appeared to Mr Roxburgh the air of a man taking up a gage. He made it fast. No doubt it would have gone against the grain to admit, even from between his clenched teeth, that the long-boat was once more dependent on the good graces of the pinnace.

  Mr Roxburgh recalled his resolution to say prayers, but again the moment was not propitious; his heart was still padding irregularly he felt, as the result of his recent exertions, and someone had jobbed him in the eye with an elbow during the general mellay of clambering aboard in a stiff surf.

  Remembering his wife’s condition he deflected his thoughts ever so slightly in her direction, and was prompted to remark for her moral sustenance, ‘We can thank God, my dear, for bringing us a few yards closer to civilization.’