The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  A couple of days after the fish orgy, the blacks struck camp. There was good reason for doing so: the stink of rotting fish-remains was becoming intolerable, and the fleas had grown so aggressive that human beings could be seen scratching themselves with the vigour of their similarly afflicted dogs.

  As the huts were dismantled, the sheets of bark were loaded on the women when the slave looked incapable of carrying more. They started out, the men as vanguard, the female sumpter-beasts and children trailing behind. A clear morning, laughter and songs, made the migration less insufferable than it might have been. Glancing up from under her load Mrs Roxburgh was inspirited by glimpses of blue haze, the aromatic smoke from the firesticks they carried along with them, and the dark forest alternating with stretches of open country, this latter a dead green illumined in places by the light off reflective lake-water.

  Later in the morning a halt had evidently been made, for those at the rear of the file were suddenly squeezed concertina-fashion against those in front. In consequence the slave dropped most of her load, but was rewarded by improved vision. What she saw was a group of men standing round a vast grey tree, at an elbow of which a flock of pied birds repeatedly swooped, squawking in anger.

  One of the blacks procured a length of vine, and by looping this round the trunk and pressing on the latter with the soles of his feet, was soon hauling himself in an aerial squatting position towards the bough at which the birds were directing their displeasure. Upon arrival he thrust his arm inside a hollow, and pulled out a small furred animal, and dashed it from high to his companions on the ground; where the beast was clubbed to instantaneous quivering death.

  From engravings in the library at ‘Dulcet’ Mrs Roxburgh believed the little creature to have been what is called an ‘opossum’. Exhausted as she was by the journey, and chafed raw by her load of bark, she felt no more than a slight tremor of sympathy, brushing it aside with her filthy hands as though it had been the folds of an actual, and as proved by experience, superfluous veil or fichu, before returning to the state of detached assent with which she received almost every occurrence in this present life. The opossum, moreover, was food, to be stored in one of the netted ‘dillis’, though whether she herself would benefit by it was doubtful.

  The women again loaded themselves. Not long after the march had been resumed there was a repetition of the foregoing scene, with incensed birds revealing the whereabouts of an intruder in their elective tree. But the men were conferring longer than before, and with exaggerated laughter in which the women and capering children finally joined. Until the slave realized she had become the object of their attention and mirth. She was dragged forward, the vine was produced, and a grinning giant of a man indicated that they expected her to climb the tree in the manner already demonstrated.

  Mrs Roxburgh immediately became faint with terror. If she could have but conjured up her hardy girlhood; instead it was as though her spirit had taken refuge in stays, petticoats, a straitening bodice, the great velvet bell of a skirt, in fact all the impedimenta of refinement bequeathed to her by her mother-in-law. Her actual blackened skin, her nakedness beyond the fringe of leaves, were of no help to her; she was again white and useless, a civilized lady standing surrounded by this tribe of scornful blacks.

  When one fellow more scornful than the rest, and more vindictive, thrust a firestick into her buttocks, and again, and yet again, she cried out in pain and fright, ‘No, no! I expect I’ll do it. Only don’t hurt me.’

  In imitation of the man she had watched climb the tree farther back, she looped the vine and felt for a hold with the soles of her feet, and began this fearful climb. If her strength or courage threatened to desert her, a firestick was held beneath her person, and the fear of burning drove her higher—or else it was the spirit of Ellen Gluyas coming to Mrs Roxburgh’s rescue.

  Indeed, she found herself close enough to the bough to thrust her arm inside the hollow and feel around for animal fur, which was there, warm and springy, on the tightly curled, slightly shivering muscular body. Compunction made her falter, but only for an instant. She dug in her own desperate claws, and hauled, and brought the creature well outside its nest before the pink little snout opened and the teeth were sunk in the back of her hand. Then she did scream with pain, and the blacks below roared and cheered, and clubbed to death the animal she let fall.

  Somehow slithering she began her worse descent. As she was tossed from branch to branch, her greatest fear was for her precious girdle. If she clutched, it was at air, by handfuls, fistfuls of perfumed leaves, everything either evasive, or stubborn like the tree itself, but after a last long agonizing embrace with the abrasive trunk, she landed on earth in a state of pins and needles, torn skin, broken nails, and a throbbing hand.

  She was scarcely more alive than the dead opossum, but her girdle had held and she was comforted to see amongst the leaves, her ring.

  When she had adjusted her dress the other women did her the kindness of helping her load, and the file moved on.

  The site chosen by the elders of the tribe for their next camp was a stretch of flat sandy ground separated from a sound or river estuary by a mangrove thicket. The grey, deformed trees, the grey water and sandy soil depressed the captive, shaken and exhausted besides by her experience earlier that day. Her companions had immediately set to work re-erecting the bark huts. She too, was expected to work, digging with a flat pearl-shell and her hands the shallow trenches she had noticed surrounding the huts at their previous camps. She imagined them to be a practical device for draining off the water in the event of a tropical downpour, but in her present frame of mind would not have cared had she and all of them been inundated and drowned like ants.

  Needing to relieve herself, she went a little way apart from the others, into the mangroves, and when she had finished squatting, took the opportunity to stray farther and investigate the lie of the land. By the view she had from the water’s edge she was persuaded that they were living on an island, separated from the mainland only by this narrow strip of water. In her dispiritment and acceptance of her fate, she was glad that her discovery absolved her from making an attempt to escape by following the coast to Moreton Bay. She was immured, not only in the blacks’ island stronghold, but in that female passivity wished upon her at birth and reinforced by marriage with her poor dear Mr Roxburgh.

  She was standing stubbing her toes on the moist grey sand and reconsidering whether Mr Roxburgh had in truth been poor or dear (of course he was! her dead husband of glossy whiskers and exquisite hands) when two children appointed as spies arrived full of frowns caught from their elders, to lead her back to camp, and she went as was expected of her.

  This present camp differed in no way from the last, except that it was free (at first) of fleas, she was not plagued by the ailing child, and food became less plentiful. As the blacks grew emaciated they were more inclined to glower and sulk, and to beat or pinch their servant, whom they may have blamed for the dearth which had been visited upon them. There was the occasional opossum, snake or lizard, and once or twice the huntsmen brought in a species of small kangaroo. Otherwise the tribe subsisted on fern-roots and yams. Fish, it seemed, had migrated to other waters. On a memorable evening Mrs Roxburgh snapped up from under her masters’ noses a segment of roasted snake, which produced in her an ecstasy such as she had never experienced before.

  There had been occasions in the past of course when a happy conjunction of light with nature had roused tender sentiments in her, or even more deeply felt emotions, although to be honest, they were more than likely the response her husband and his mother would have expected of any individual with pretensions to sensibility. By the same code, she listened to Mr Roxburgh reading Latin verses, in hopes of his esteem rather than her own distraction. If she attempted to convey that his exercise had given her pleasure, her drooping shoulders and hands dutifully folded in her lap must have told him more, had he observed them; perhaps the poor man had. The ecstasy of physical passio
n she had experienced with her husband scarcely ever, and with her one regrettable lover it had been not so much passion as a wrestling match against lust. Now reduced to an animal condition she could at least truthfully confess that ecstasy had flickered up from the pit of her stomach provoked by a fragment of snakeflesh.

  She bowed her head, humbly as well as gratefully, for what she had been vouchsafed, and whatever God might have in store for her.

  As she developed an aptitude for climbing trees she was sent in search of birds’ nests in addition to opossum. Not only fresh eggs, but the addled and fertilized were relished by the blacks. Sometimes she found honey-combs; the empty ones were in themselves a prize for the maggots and other insects in their disused cells, but a full comb was a major source of ecstasy, in which the blacks generously allowed her to share. When they had devoured the best of the honey, her masters would eke out their enjoyment by sopping up the dregs with bark rags. They would give their slave the honey-rag to suck when everyone else was satisfied and only a faint sweetness remained in the dirty fibre object. None the less, as she dwelt on memories of more delicate pleasures evoked by sucking the honey-rag, she might have swallowed it down had its owner not snatched it back.

  She was submitted to worse humiliation when the women were searching their own and their children’s heads for vermin. They urged her to join them in their hygienic pastime. Nothing was wasted, and as her nails grew more skilful at crushing fleas and lice, she found her fingers straying to her mouth, then guiltily away, as they had if ever she was caught out picking her nose and disposing of the spoils when a little child.

  Surely she could not sink any lower? A vision kept recurring of her friend Mrs Daintrey’s tea table, the Worcester service, the sandwiches filled with crushed walnut and cinnamon butter, and a tea-cake on its doily in the silver dish. At least it would never enter the heads of any of her acquaintance, not even Maggie Aspinall slopping her Madeira, that Mrs Roxburgh could sink to the level of bestiality at which she had arrived.

  Sometimes seated cross-legged beside the coals she would snigger with imbecile lack of control at a situation as wretched as it was unalterable, and her long leathery breasts, not unlike brown, wizening pears, bumped against the hollowness inside her. As a result of which, she might fall to snivelling and whimpering, before attaining to the state of apathy she was resolved to cultivate. She must.

  To add to her mental and moral confusion, a subtly different performance was expected of her in the role she had been assigned in the beginning. Whereas the women of the tribe continued to scratch and beat the slave, to relieve their feelings and spur her on to perform her duties, they submitted her also to ceremonies, and when released from their worldly preoccupations, treated her with almost pious respect. They anointed her body regularly with grease and charcoal, and plastered her cropped head with beeswax, and stuck it with tufts of down and feather as on the occasion when she was received into the tribe. They enthroned her on an opossum skin rug after smoothing it with their flattened hands, and sat in a semi-circle staring at her. Their faces were her glass, in which she and they were temporarily united, either in mooning fantasy or a mystical relationship. What the blacks could not endure it seemed, was the ghost of a woman they had found haunting the beach. They may have felt that, were the ghost exorcized, they might contemplate with equanimity the supernatural come amongst them in their own flesh. Yet they lowered their eyes at last; could it have been for recognizing their own shortcomings? Ellen Roxburgh accepted the possibility, and in her turn, looked away.

  Members of other tribes, several of which must have shared the island, called on their neighbours at intervals to examine the phenonemon, their faces expressing incredulity, fear, envy, as well as worshipful respect for this demi-goddess temporarily raised from a drudgery which the blacks’ practical nature and their poverty-stricken lives normally prescribed. She played up to them. As she had conciliated Austin Roxburgh and his mother by allowing herself to be prinked and produced, she accepted when some elderly lady of her own tribe advanced to adjust a sulphur topknot; it might have been old Mrs Roxburgh adding or subtracting some jewel or feather in preparation for a dinner or ball.

  What might have toppled the whole formal structure was a fever which frequently glittered in the divine as well as the human eye, stimulated less by the craving for food than by the forthright stench of male bodies, their hard forms prowling up and down, engaged in no discernible pursuit beyond that of stalking shadows.

  God forbid! Not wholly bereft of her rational mind, Mrs Roxburgh would have expected disgust to protect her, yet knew too well that loathing can feed a fever; and now the skies, the goddess’s natural habitat, translated from watchet into peacock, and from peacock to flamingo, were what she had also to resist, along with the darkness in which human weakness plunges mortals.

  During this time of tribal famine and individual fever, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that a play was being enacted round her, by the large, jowled woman, her chief tormentor among those who had discovered her alone on the beach, the big fellow who had driven the slave to shin up a tree and drag an opossum out of its nest, and the prettier of the two girls who had gone diving for lily-roots in the heat of the day. There was a night in particular when Mrs Roxburgh hoped she had no part in the play, the three evident protagonists of which were coming and going, prowling round the hummock on which she was sitting. Seated or lying, most of the others were too exhausted by hunger to notice. But herself became particularly aware of the flumping and stamping of pale soles beneath black feet, the smell of crushed ants and of armpits, the crackle of breaking sticks, and ejaculations of the roving actors.

  She was forced at last to contribute to the action when the great warrior squatted beside her, placed the top of an index finger on one of her shoulders and drew the finger downward and across her body until it all but arrived at the nipple, to which it was obviously attracted.

  At once the two aspirants for the fellow’s sinewy favours started a hissing and a chattering. Each of the women was armed, the girl with a club, her rival with one of the pointed sticks used for digging. Mrs Roxburgh might have experienced greater alarm had she provided more than the spark from which their emotional tinder took fire; she was but the indirect cause of the pandemonium which ensued.

  Carried away by their jealous fury the two women were abusing each other. The man leaned against a tree and watched as though warming himself at the passions he had roused. When the more agile girl leaped at her rival and bashed her on the head so savagely that it was laid open. Bellowing with pain and rage the woman retaliated with such a jab that the yam-stick pierced the girl’s side below the breast. She fell without a sound, and the man saw wisdom in making off before anyone held him responsible.

  There arose a frenzy of ear-splitting speculation as relatives of the contentious women rushed from different corners of the camp. The wounded victim was sat propped against a tree, from which position they could better examine the bloody mess her assailant had made of her scalp. Somebody brought a handful of charcoal and rubbed it in. Nobody finally seemed of the opinion that the deep gash was more than a superficial cut, though the woman moaned fearfully, and her complexion was drained of its black, leaving a sediment of dirty yellow. Eyes shut, she did not leave off grinding her head back and forth against the tree.

  Dreadful shrieks from those in support of the young girl left Mrs Roxburgh in no doubt that she was dead. Yet she lay so naturally, her wound practically bloodless when the murderous stick was withdrawn from her side, her breasts so youthful and shapely, that she presented the same picture of grace and beauty as on the day when she rose laughing and spangled from beneath the quilt of water-lily pads.

  Affected by her renewed acquaintance with death in the midst of continuing life Mrs Roxburgh’s pangs were revived, and she added her grief to that of the mourners, and took her place without second thought in the procession forming to carry the body into the forest.

  But where th
ey had allowed her to attend the funeral of the child she had nursed, now they waved her back, uttering what sounded like warnings; and a hitherto respectful, elderly man went so far as to punch her in the chest.

  So she stayed behind, curled up on the edge of the fire, in the hut which was hers as much as anything she might lay claim to—excepting of course her wedding ring. As she fell asleep she felt inside the fringe of leaves which she had but recently renewed, and without detaching the ring, slipped it on as far as the first joint of her ring-finger. She hoped it might lead her to dream of her husband. But the night remained confused, her dreams filled with hostile and unrecognizable shapes.

  By the first light of morning she saw that the child members of her ‘family’ had returned without their elders, and she fell to wondering how the mourners were conducting their vigil in the depths of the forest.

  She crawled outside about dawn, and after first recoiling at the shock of cold, went shivering amongst the trees, somewhat aimlessly it would have seemed had she not invested her action with purpose by remembering how her mother-in-law advocated a ‘healthful morning constitutional’.

  She was rewarded at last when the scrub through which she had been struggling was transformed into a mesh of startling if chilly beauty. Where she had been slapped and scratched at first, she was now stroked by the softest of fronds. Shafts of light admitted between the pinnacles and arches of the trees were directed at her path, if the hummocks and hollows had been in any way designed to assist human progress. But she felt accepted, rejuvenated. She was the ‘Ellen’ of her youth, a name they had attached to her visible person at the font, but which had never rightfully belonged to her, any more than the greater part of what she had experienced in life. Now this label of a name was flapping and skirring ahead of her among the trunks of great moss-bound trees, as its less substantial echo unfurled from out of the past, from amongst fuchsia and geum and candy-tuft, then across the muck-spattered yard, the moor with its fuzz of golden furze and russet bracken, to expire in some gull’s throat by isolated syllables.