The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  She might have continued on her blissful journey and ended lost had other voices not broken in and a most delectable smell mingled with the scent of drifting smoke. She altered course in the direction of the voices, and eventually came upon a party of blacks whom she recognized as members of her tribe. All appeared and sounded languid as a result of their night’s activities; their faces when turned towards the intruder wore expressions which were resentful and at the same time curiously mystical. She realized she had blundered upon the performance of rites she was not intended to witness. There was no immediate indication of what these were; most likely the ceremony was over, for she sensed something akin to the atmosphere surrounding communicants coming out of church looking bland and forgiven after the early service.

  The morning air, the moisture dripping from frond and leaf disposed Ellen Roxburgh, naked and battered though she was, to share with these innocent savages an unexpectedly spiritual experience, when she caught sight, to one side of the dying fire, of an object not unlike a leather mat spread upon the grass. She might have remained puzzled had she not identified fingernails attached to what she had mistaken for fringes, and at one end, much as a tiger’s head lies propped on the floor at one end of a skin rug, what could only be the head of the girl she remembered in life laughing and playing amongst waterlilies.

  After swallowing their surprise at the intrusion on their privacy, the initiates regurgitated; it came spluttering back as rude and guttural sounds of anger. Women rolled up the dark skin, as well as gathering the head and what she saw to be a heap of bones. It was easy to guess from the greasy smears on lips and cheeks how the flesh had disappeared. The revolting remains of the feast were stuffed inside the dillis which accompanied the women on their outings. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt sickened had the stamping and threats of some of the men not frightened her instead. The elderly man who had punched her the evening before to deter her from following the funeral procession, ran at her now, but stumbled over a tree-root, and no longer being at the height of his powers, fell prostrate before arrival.

  The party moved off, driving the offender before them. As it seemed their urgent aim to leave the scene of their rites as quickly and as far behind them as possible, they hurried past the culprit after a while, and soon forgot, or did not bother to look back, to insult and remonstrate.

  Mrs Roxburgh followed, not so far behind that she would be likely to lose her way. As she went, she tried to disentangle her emotions, fear from amazement, disgust from a certain pity she felt for these starving and ignorant savages, her masters, when she looked down and caught sight of a thigh-bone which must have fallen from one of the overflowing dillis. Renewed disgust prepared her to kick the bone out of sight. Then, instead, she found herself stooping, to pick it up. There were one or two shreds of half-cooked flesh and gobbets of burnt fat still adhering to this monstrous object. Her stiffened body and almost audibly twangling nerves were warning her against what she was about to do, what she was, in fact, already doing. She had raised the bone, and was tearing at it with her teeth, spasmodically chewing, swallowing by great gulps which her throat threatened to return. But did not. She flung the bone away only after it was cleaned, and followed slowly in the wake of her cannibal mentors. She was less disgusted in retrospect by what she had done, than awed by the fact that she had been moved to do it. The exquisite innocence of this forest morning, its quiet broken by a single flute-note endlessly repeated, tempted her to believe that she had partaken of a sacrament. But there remained what amounted to an abomination of human behaviour, a headache, and the first signs of indigestion. In the light of Christian morality she must never think of the incident again.

  During the days following the rites in which, she had to admit, she had participated after a fashion, shoals of fish appeared in the straits separating the island from the mainland. This in itself would have given cause for joy, although nothing to compare with the netting of a sea-monster on the ocean side.

  The fishermen were beaching the creature helplessly parcelled in the net as the rest of the tribe broke through the trees fringing the shore shouting, ‘Dugong, dugong!’ and raced down over the dunes, breasts flipping, arms thrashing the obstructive air. One little boy who turned a violent somersault paused but an instant to decide whether he had broken his neck.

  Almost before the beast was dispatched by spears, individual butchers began hacking at the flesh. Fires were kindled in the evening light, while anticipation brought out a glow in dark skins long before the feast itself was ready. In the rush to satisfy their own hunger the blacks were less conscious than usual of their slave, who succeeded in raking from the coals a lump of the rather blubbery flesh. Her eyes were bulging as she strained to chew, her lips running with fishy fat, and she all but growled a warning at one of the dogs, who kept a prudent distance, trailing his plume of a tail as he watched her for scraps.

  He did not receive any, however. Mrs Roxburgh’s only thought was to fill the hollow of her own insides, and regardless of whether she might burst, to grab another slice out of the ashes if she were lucky and remained unnoticed.

  This evening her every stratagem succeeded. Uncomfortably gorged, she rubbed her greasy hands with sand to appease a convention she faintly remembered through the veil of exhaustion hanging between herself and it. She was tolerably happy, happier in fact than the principal source of her unhappiness should have allowed. In ‘not remembering’ she continually recalled the incident of incalculable days ago. It seemed less unnatural, more admissible, if only to herself. Just as she would never have admitted to others how she had immersed herself in the saint’s pool, or that its black waters had cleansed her of morbid thoughts and sensual longings, so she could not have explained how tasting flesh from the human thigh-bone in the stillness of a forest morning had nourished not only her animal body but some darker need of the hungry spirit.

  Her lips had not closed from brooding when the blacks started wrapping any scraps of dugong in wads of grass, gathered together their possessions, and departed in some haste for their camp on the other side. So she had to follow or be left behind in darkness. The blacks themselves she suspected of being afraid of the dark, and for that reason had taken the precaution of renewing the firesticks they were carrying with them on the journey. As they climbed the ridge separating the ocean from the straits, night was poised in readiness to close in upon them. Several times the travellers’ chatter broke, and was mended but diffidently. Silent consent seemed to call a halt beside a small lake, on the surface of which torch-light and the ghosts of their fleshly forms underwent a series of fearsome fluctuations. Their customary wailing, either of supplication or lament, which broke from the wayfarers at this juncture had never been more appropriate.

  In Mrs Roxburgh’s case, appeased hunger had increased her daring, and she joined in with what began as a parody. If the desire to mock left her it was not through the failure of courage, but because the spirit of the place, the evanescent lake, the faint whisper of stirring trees, took possession of her. When the blacks resumed their flickering march almost in silence, she could smell their fear. If she too, flickered intermittently, it was less in fear than because she might have come to terms with darkness.

  They reached the camp, and she stubbed a toe, and somebody pushed her with such force and complete disregard for decency that she bumped her head against a tree; and saw stars. Everybody recovered their irritability and their tongues on returning from the shades into what was safe and familiar. Little children left in the charge of the aged and the halt were running hither and thither, bleating like black lambs, before becoming re-united with their mothers. The family of the child they had buried continued to regard themselves as her official owners, an arrangement which indifference and lack of choice on her part gave her no reason to deplore. The hut filled with smoke and body-smells, and fleas, had never provided a more desirable home or the ground a more accommodating bed.

  The camp fleas’ greed for human flesh
might have dictated another move had there not appeared more significant reasons for removal. She could sense a restlessness in the air, actually visible at times in fingers of smoke tapering in the sky above the mainland trees. Not only this, but ambassadors from neighbouring tribes arrived with intelligence which elated those who received it and involved them in unusual preparations.

  Men ordinarily engaged in sharpening and repairing their tools and weapons when not out hunting or fishing began building a flotilla of canoes out of bark sheets slit with stone knives from the trunks of certain trees. The observer became more engrossed than any of those engaged in the operation. She was both fired and fearful. If canoes implied a voyage to the mainland, she would be faced with coming to a decision more positive than any she had hitherto made in a life largely determined by other human beings or God: she must resolve whether to set out on the arduous, and what could be fatal, journey to the settlement at Moreton Bay.

  For the time being, preparations for the sea-crossing and for the functions her adoptive tribe expected upon arrival were enough to blunten her forebodings. She was in any case well schooled in warding off her worst thoughts, and was made less vulnerable by the various and exacting labours her owners now demanded of her, such as carrying loads of bark upon her back, gathering firewood, minding babies, digging for a white clay in particular demand at this season. All of which she performed with what might have seemed to others who did not share the blacks’ preoccupations, the manner of one engaged in a secret mission. But there was nobody present sufficiently detached, or capable of interpreting what amounted to nervous excitement. She got the hiccups on one occasion from swallowing too fast a lump of glutinous possum flesh with the fur still attached to it. The black children laughed to hear her. They were growing to love their nurse, and initiated her into their games, one in particular which resembled cat’s-cradle, with a string spun from hair or fibre. Skill at cat’s-cradle was a talent she had never suspected in herself, but she won her children’s admiration by her ability to disentangle them. She indulged their every caprice, and received their hugs and their tantrums with an equanimity which approaching departure made it easier to maintain. She was at her blandest in searching for and mining the whitish substance which reminded her of Cornish china-clay. The gloves of fat and charcoal and accumulated filth which had become an habitual part of her dress were now streaked with white in addition. If her hands trembled as she grubbed the clay surrounded by peace and a chastened sunlight, her exertions could not have accounted for it.

  The morning the tribe assembled for the crossing to the mainland was of a whitish blue intensifying as the fog lifted. It would have been a leaden soul indeed who failed to respond to the dash and glitter, the shouts and laughter of those who were embarking, the runaway wavelets feathering the straits, and a scent distilled by the wind out of smoke and rampant eucalyptus leaves. It was Mrs Roxburgh’s chief concern not to appear over-responsive.

  They had seated the slave-nurse amidships, in a nest of children, between the two paddles of one of the larger bark canoes. Anticipation and the chill of morning had brought out the gooseflesh on her arms and shoulders and a blue glint in the whites of her eyes. That she did not feel colder was due to the warm bodies of the children heaped around her, their skins still smooth and bright, unblemished by the life which was preparing for them. From time to time she touched a head or stroked a cheek to allay the apprehension which had rendered her charges unusually silent. She could have eaten them on such a morning, but only when they were safe inside her allowed them to share her joy. Instead she pinched back the snot she saw oozing from a button nose, and the little boy started a caterwauling for an attention he had not experienced before. She laughed, and reassured him, ‘Dun’t tha knaw, love, I wudn’ harm ee?’ He understood her words even less than her offending behaviour, but quieted down in the absence of any alternative.

  As they were propelled, plunging and rocking, over the water, the spray from the forward paddle was dashed repeatedly in their faces. Ellen sought to comfort her children with an example of spurious calm, because any display of her true feelings, her exultation and straining hopes, might have thrown them into a panic. Without apparent reason, she remembered how in other days she had been tormented by a dream both waking and sleeping, of a ship’s prow entering the cove (she had never yet while in her senses seen Tintagel) and how later still she had scratched the name upon an attic window, not out of affectation she thought, rather from frustrated desire. Now she had no desire beyond the simple wish for a ‘tay-drinking’ at the end of a fearful, still only theoretical, march.

  The navigators paddled, first to one side, then the other. Smoke from the coals they carried to renew their fires on the farther shore stung Mrs Roxburgh’s eyes. Habit made her reach for a great orange-mouthed shell and start bailing the water they had shipped, in such insignificant quantities her action was hardly justified, and in any case they would soon be there. The green tinge invading bronze cheeks was arrested by a bark keel grating and bumping over sand.

  The children jumped out and scampered off, the nurse accepting that they had no further need for her. She had done her duty by them, and would soon be faced with a graver duty towards herself.

  In the meantime she was too busily employed helping carry tackle from the boats, and soon dazed besides by the glare from the mounting sun, the sultry pall of stationary air, and the press of strangers from the mainland tribes already foregathered. The foreign blacks were as importunate as the ants crawling up her legs, but where the ants stung, their human counterparts pinched, poked, and breathed upon the phenomenon from the island, who was spun about by her owners in their determination to display a rare possession. In fact, while the camp was not more than half pitched, some of the women interrupted her labours and took her aside, to plaster her head afresh with beeswax and decorate her hair with tufts of down and yellow topknots so that she might appear at her best. She was again brought forward and put on show. The blacks were for the most part lost in open-mouthed wonder as they examined the exhibit from every angle, but a flock of big white parrots alighted on a neighbouring tree, shrieking and discoursing, their sulphur crests raised in disapproval of a monster such as might have roused the derision of country folk at a fair.

  Mrs Roxburgh was relieved when allowed to resume her menial duties of digging ditches and gathering firewood.

  In the course of the day, incoming tribes joined those already encamped, who greeted the new arrivals with bursts of wailing, to signify joy it would seem, whereas she had only ever sensed in the chorus at morning and evening the doubts and forebodings of a troubled spirit.

  She kept to herself as much as she could throughout the day, but was grateful when her children expected her to pick up the pieces after a quarrel or take part in their sporadic games.

  Many of the mainland blacks were endowed with a physical grandeur which made the islanders look runtish, but every one of them was hideously scarred by incisions which could only have been deliberately inflicted, in patterns which distinguished one tribe from another. The women, unless adolescent girls, were all either plodders, or innately dejected souls who disguised their true nature under a contralto cheerfulness. These latter were the most inclined to pinch or pull.

  Mrs Roxburgh longed for night, except that she would then be forced to consider an escape which terrified her.

  As night approached she saw that the blacks were planning celebrations of some kind. There was a continual weaving and interweaving of their paths while the air fizzed and crackled as though with invisible sparks of anticipation. Some of the men already danced and postured, struck one another, recoiled, and laughed. They roamed, or squatted together in chattering circles, and resumed their stalking, their sinews as tense as their eyes looked feverish.

  One giant of a fellow, a natural clown by any standards, would twirl, and leap in the air slapping his heels, and entertain those within earshot of his patter. She could tell that he was res
pected and envied. What most distinguished him from his companions was an axe, or hatchet, which he wore in his woven belt. She wondered how he had come by his hatchet. It was much coveted by the other blacks, who would stroke it, and some of them attempt to prise it away from the owner.

  But the giant was equal to their cunning. He would slap down pilfering hands, and leap expertly out of reach, keeping up the gibberish which made others laugh.

  She admired him for his agility and enjoyed the jokes she could not understand. When he disappeared from sight the axe-head continued glinting in her mind. It was plunder such as might have fallen to any black from any wreck—that of her own unhappy experience included. But she would have liked to know where he got the hatchet.

  Then, during one of his leaping turns, she found herself so close to the clown she realized that what she had taken for conventional scars were unlike those left by tribal incisions. The expanse of the man’s back was covered with what appeared to be a patternless welter of healed wounds.

  She had been digging a drain round one of the freshly erected huts. She hung her head above the earth she was heaping at the base of a bark wall. She knew that she was breathless, and not from physical exertion.

  When she looked again, the man leaped, and was lost in the crowd. He did not return, perhaps having finished his display, and she was left with her vision of a ‘miscreant’ according to the doctrine of her brother-in-law Garnet Roxburgh.