The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  At last when light began to thin out the solid but no longer painful darkness (she had grown too numb to react humanly to the most vicious blows and scratches) she heard him say, ‘I reckon we’ll camp here for a bit in the gully,’ and felt at liberty to fall down where she was. She lay there as grey and indeterminate as the early light surrounding them.

  She did not doubt but that her companion would know what to do next. In the circumstances she could not afford to be distrustful. Beyond her numbed physical condition, her blurred vision, and mere tatters of thought, he was chopping at branches with the hatchet he carried in his belt, driving stakes into the ground, building a shelter of sorts, low and shapeless, scarcely distinguishable from the living bushes. She saw that the bark cloth he had worn across one shoulder and through the belt, had been torn off during their flight through the scrub. That he was stark naked apart from the belt and a few remnants of feathers in his hair, did not, or rather, must not, disturb her. In her own case she had the satisfaction of knowing that the swathes of vine about her waist were to some extent intact, and her wedding-ring still where she had knotted it.

  Comforted by what amounted to a major dispensation of grace, she dozed off.

  She awoke only under compulsion. He was prodding at her with horny toes. ‘… if you want to get inside. We’ll be safer, anyways, for not showin’ ourselves.’

  She should have thanked or smiled at him, but her face and voice had lost the power to do so. Yet she must summon up the strength to reach the hut since he made no attempt at assisting her. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt put out by evidence of what she knew to be uncouthness, but Ellen Gluyas crawled gratefully enough into the luxurious privacy offered by this shelter.

  She lay aching, smiling after a directionless fashion, even when the entrance was darkened by her companion’s figure stooping and following her in.

  Without any further communication, he lay down, turned his back, and was still.

  She slept, and woke, and slept, and woke. The sun must have climbed high. She was conscious of a criss-cross of bird-song imposed on light and silence. Fingers of sunlight intruding through the green thatch stroked her body and that of the man stretched beside her. The incongruous had no part in the world of limitless peace to which her senses had been admitted, perhaps by divine compunction, until some invisible bird derided human simplicity with an outburst of ribald mockery.

  Returned to a rational state of mind she was at once aware of her companion’s snores. The hut, moreover, was filled with a stench which might have become intolerable had she not remembered kneeling in her pinafore beside a fox’s earth. She too, would be smelling pretty foxy were she able to smell herself. She sighed, and snorted, and thought how foolish she must look, naked and filthy, beside the naked filthy man.

  When he started a broken yelping, his body twitching, his free shoulder warding off whichever the danger pursuing him.

  He sounded in such obvious distress she put out a hand and touched his back to break the nightmare.

  ‘It’s a dream,’ she tried to persuade him. ‘Jack!’ she raised her voice in a command.

  But neither her voice nor her hand was able to restrain his desperate twitching, and she realized she was touching the scars she had noticed on his first appearing at the blacks’ camp, when their apparently motiveless welter distinguished them from the formal incisions in native backs.

  He let out a single yelp more bloodcurdling than any of those preceding it, and she snatched back her hand and put it for safety between her breasts. She felt perturbed for having touched on an area of suffering he might have wished to keep from her.

  Nor was she reassured by his calling out soon after, ‘… lay off, can’t yer?—‘Twasn’t me!—I only give’er what she asked for—’ He fell to drivelling and sobbing; anything further was meaningless.

  Then he wrenched himself round. He lay on his back, waking, she could see from the lashes risen on the lids, before the face turned and he was staring at her out of pale eyes, as remote as those of the dead.

  ‘It was a nightmare, Jack,’ she explained feebly, ‘which I tried to free you from.’

  ‘It was no dream. I could feel it. They’d strung me up to the triangle, and started layin’ inter me. I was in for a good ’undred stripes. Treadmill after.’

  She began counting on herself as he spoke, but only got as far as two: it was her nipples.

  ‘Are you afraid’, she asked, ‘that I’ll not keep my word if you take me to Moreton Bay?’

  His answer to that was but a snuffling as he ground his head back and forth against the earth floor of their refuge.

  He is an animal, she decided, but for all that, tractable.

  She put out her hand and touched him on the wrist. ‘You must trust me,’ she said.

  He neither stirred nor answered.

  Thought of her own husband’s not wholly justified trust made her avert her face so that her rescuer might not see it swelling.

  ‘If you have a wife,’ she found herself exploring, ‘you will surely understand.’

  ‘She was not what you would call my wife, but as good as one, in the Old Country.’

  ‘How she must have suffered losing you!’ He showed no sign of being moved; it was she who suffered for the woman separated from her convict lover.

  Had it not been for his detachment, she might have re-lived against her will the last moments of what represented her real life. As it was, she only re-enacted them, brightly lit as for a troupe of actors on a stage seen from the depths of a darkened theatre, a woman stepping forward to drag a spear from out of the throat of a man lying wounded upon the sand.

  Was she becoming callous? Surely not, when the moment before she could have cried for the woman who lost her convict lover.

  She heard a renewed cackle from the bird of ribald voice.

  She felt anger creeping on her. She was angry at the behaviour of this unmoved and unmoving, this crude man, whom she should, she knew, accept and understand for what he was, considering her own crude origins.

  She hoped he had not been aware of her anger; she needed his sympathy and understanding. ‘Did you know, Jack, that I lost my husband—that he was cruelly murdered—along with the members of the crew?’

  ‘I heard tell’, he said, ‘among the blacks. They was provoked though, by whites.’

  So she did not know where she stood.

  ‘No one is ever,’ she heard herself managing the words as though they had been pebbles, ‘is ever wholly to blame.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘Except Mr Roxburgh—he was innocent.’

  In the long, expiring, golden afternoon, she drowsed again, and sank. When she returned to the surface, rudely pulled, or so it seemed, she realized that nothing more violent than a breaking of sticks was responsible for disturbing her rest.

  She dragged her bones outside the hut. Jack Chance was coaxing a fire. A heap of bronze feathers was glinting in a spangled evening. As Ellen Gluyas she would have busied herself plucking and gutting a brace of pigeons, but Mrs Roxburgh had her aches to cosset, nor could she resist the luxury of being waited on.

  She might have rewarded her servant with a smile had he shown himself conscious of her presence. He carried the dangling birds to the creek, and returned with them encased in mud coffins which he buried in the depths of the fire.

  She heard her languid, tutored voice. ‘It was clever of you, Jack, to catch the birds. You learned it from the blacks, I suppose.’

  The voice from the past made her wonder whether her friend Mrs Daintrey would find cause to reproach her for neglecting to write.

  ‘It was my business,’ he said, ‘long before I would of guessed that blacks could know about it.’

  ‘Oh?’ She would have liked her assigned slave to entertain her, but he had fallen silent, and would not be lured out she saw, so she went to the creek and washed herself; she cleaned her teeth with a finger: it was the first time she had attended to them since—when? she could not remember.r />
  As the evening drew together, a shimmer as of pigeons’ feathers was transferred to it. She frowned, however, recalling the dangling heads, the broken necks.

  She squatted beside the fire and waited, as he was squatting on the opposite side, thus far respectful of formalities.

  ‘You must tell me how you trap the birds,’ Mrs Roxburgh encouraged.

  She almost expected candles to illuminate her ignorance in the mahogany surface of an endless dinner.

  But it was the moment when he reached out to rake the coffins out of the fire. Broken open, they revealed neat pigeon-mummies, for the feathers had come away with the casing of baked mud.

  The diners wasted no time before tearing into the flesh. Mrs Roxburgh burned her lips, her fingers; a drizzle of precious gravy was scalding her chin, not to say her breasts. Practice, and hunger more regularly satisfied, had made the convict comparatively adept at dealing with such a situation; they had taught him table-manners, moreover: he ate almost finically, holding his head on one side, and crooking a finger.

  Mrs Roxburgh had to forget about him before devouring the more pungent innards, left in the bird by the cook for reasons of practical economy. She was only halted by the skeleton, and a pair of legs and crimped claws from which the coral had departed.

  A melancholy descended upon her, increased by the contracting light and a dying fire.

  ‘What was her name—this woman?’ She ran her tongue between her lips and her teeth to extract the last fragments of pigeon, and knew she would be looking her ugliest.

  He laughed. ‘Why would you be interested, I wonder?’ He spat a pigeon bone into the fire. ‘She was called “Mab”, if you wanter know.’

  She had hunched herself since the untended fire and night at her back made her conscious of the cold. ‘That is a name I never heard, not in the country I come from. Nor, for that matter, in England, where I lived after I crossed the river—after I was married.’ This latest gap in her knowledge which old Mrs Roxburgh and Mrs Daintrey had omitted to fill might have depressed her further. ‘Mab.’ She spoke it flat, as though testing it for its flavour and texture.

  Her companion, for all his attempts at refinement during their meal, did not attempt to restrain the wind escaping from him.

  ‘It was her name.’ He belched softer than before. ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘Tell me’, she ordered, yawning, ‘about the birds.’

  By now he appeared only too ready. ‘Well, you see, I was in the trade. There was always a market for cage-birds—linnets, finches, thrushes, but none as popular as the linnet. ’E’s the most cheerfullest songster, longer-lived—tough, you might say—’e’ll adapt ’isself to neglect. Most birds and animals—plants too—is neglected—once the whim to own ’em dies in the owner.’

  ‘Then why did you carry on, Jack, at what amounts to an immoral trade?’

  ‘If we considered only what’s moral we’d go ’ungry, wouldn’t we? an’ curl up an’ die. There’s too much thinkin’—an’ not enough. Would men go with women, or women with men, if they started thinkin’ of the trouble—the deceit and treachery they might run into?’

  ‘Not all men and women are treacherous or deceitful.’ But she scowled at the fire, and dug into the ground with a stick her hand found lying beside it.

  ‘I’m not saying as you—a lady—is treacherous and deceitful—or would know about any of that. I know, because I’m one who’s ’ad the hard experience.’

  Was he innocent enough not to have recognized her true station in spite of the clues she had dropped for him? She might have enlightened him there and then, in plain terms, had it not occurred to her that he could have been subjecting her to cynicism, in which case he would expect the worst of her at any level.

  So she confined herself to saying, ‘Whether I am a lady or not, I was deceitful—I believe—but once.’

  She was annoyed by what she heard as reply.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ she was quick to ask.

  ‘Oh, no! I’m not accusin’ nobody!’

  ‘But laughed.’

  ‘Praps none of us thinks ’ard enough to remember what we done or was.’

  Their surroundings had all but disappeared. The black was relieved only by the remnants of their fire. This, and what did amount to accusation, made her feel most desolate.

  ‘Why dun’t tha stoke ’n op, Jack?’

  He said it could give them away if aborigines happened to be camped in the vicinity. Shortly after, he went so far as to tear off a branch and beat any life out of the embers.

  She had no choice but to crawl inside the hut. In doing so she wished he might not follow; she had grown to dislike him; she would have preferred to lie alone and think how she would employ her freedom were she ever to reach Moreton Bay.

  But he followed her inside, bringing with him, together with the now familiar stench, a warmth which combined with her own as a comfort against the hostile night.

  A night-bird whirred over and past, and was wound up. There was only the silence to listen to, and moisture falling to the ground outside, and the sound of her own eyelashes, and Jack Chance clearing his throat.

  It alarmed her when he spoke, although in a voice lowered out of respect for the past, ‘When I was in the cage-bird trade as I was tellin’ you, Ellen, I took to goin’ farther afield to meet the demand. I’ad a little place on the river at Putney, on the north bank, and did well enough at ’Ighget at first, but begun to find it more profitable to go into ’Arfordsher, and even as far as Suffolk. Suffolk for linnet. I’d drive there with a ’orse an’ cart. I’d sometimes spend several days, sleepin’ under the cart, and makin’ my catch early an’ late. I kept my birds in the cottage at Putney. I’d drive out daily around the streets, sellin’ to whoever was in need of a song-bird, among who was a good few genuine fanciers.’

  ‘And Mab, I suppose, stayed to mind the birds at Putney?’

  ‘Birds was not in Mab’s line. An’ she couldn’t abide the country—bad enough Putney, let alone Suffolk. She come up there with me once. I fixed a bivouac inside a field, in the shelter of a ’edge, an’ cooked ’er a nice supper of larks. It was no go all the way. She ’ad it against the blessed grass for wettin’ ’er feet.’

  ‘What was Mab’s line?’

  ‘She were a cress-seller. She lodged with folk in a court off ‘Oborn, to be in good time for Farringdon Market, where she bought ’er cresses off the dealers, early. Then she’d go hawk it door to door, damaged stuff mostly, a girl like ’er in business on ’er own.’

  Since recovering his tongue he was anxious to use it, and inclined to prattle. It detracted from his stature, she felt, what she remembered of Ulappi the dancer and Jack Chance the escaped convict. She might not have entrusted herself to a babbler. She came of silent stock; and Mr Roxburgh ever judicious.

  Listening to this light-coloured voice telling about his girl, she asked, ‘How did she look? Was she tall? And of what colour? Was Mab pretty?’

  Well, it was only right to take an interest in this poor cress-seller, rising early in the court off Holborn (she knew how the girl’s hands must have looked) to hawk her inferior wares from door to door.

  ‘She was black—like you,’ he began reconstructing carefully. ‘Dark lips. On frosty mornins’ I’d tell ’er she looked like she’d had a feed of cherries—the juicy black uns. She was big-built, too. You’re not more than two parts of Mab, Ellen.’

  ‘I was never thought small. I’m above medium, wouldn’t you say?’

  He might not have been giving it thought, when suddenly he surprised her. ‘Big enough. And pretty.’

  From what she had been taught she should have resented his licence, but in the circumstances, was more displeased with herself.

  They had lost their inclination to talk. She listened to the cart grinding its way in and out of ruts, and the squeak of a wheel which needed greasing. It was a lopsided vehicle, though gay-painted, the little horse a sturdy bay with hairy fetlocks
. She could smell the dew from the fields beyond the hedgerows. She loved to rise early, and go outside their bivouac without her shoes, and feel the dew on the soles of her feet.

  She did not think she could stomach the dish of larks. (If pigeon, why not lark?) Nor birds moping and dying in captivity. Some of them huddled tragically from the moment they were snared, and in the jolting cart, pressed together, their plumage filthy with their own dirt.

  ‘I can imagine’, she said, ‘Mab’s feelings—when you was sentenced.’

  He did not answer. It sounded as though he was breaking a stick into little pieces.

  ‘Is your term a long one?’

  ‘Life.’

  He spoke so flat and matter-of-fact, sympathy was not called for. It shocked her none the less.

  ‘Her term is no shorter than yours.’ She knew it was herself of whom she was thinking. ‘I can understand her suffering.’

  ‘Nobody ’as suffered without they bit the dust at Moreton Bay—least of all Mab. Mab, anyways, is dead.’

  She lay crying as soft as she could so that her ‘rescuer’ might not hear. Beyond the thatching of twigs and leaves, stars were reeling and melting, to mingle with her tears and blind her. A person, she supposed, might choke on grief if she did not take care.

  She was prevented from dwelling on this morbid and precipitate possibility. Jack Chance was touching her arm; he was stroking her wrist, she realized. If she did not withdraw, it was because her body for the moment seemed the least part of her, or because it might never have been touched, not even by her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, dead these many years.

  He continued stroking.

  ‘Why do you cry, Ellen, when it isn’t no concern of yours?’

  ‘Oh, it is! But it is! Mine as well as yours and hers.’

  When he kissed her thigh through the loops and trailers of vine-leaves she twitched so violently that she rammed her knee against what must have been his face.

  He cursed, not necessarily Mrs Roxburgh, or not as she heard it; it was a curse against mankind in general.