The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  This was how he found her, breathless, goggle-eyed and half-blinded as she surfaced, hair plastered, shoulders gleaming and rustling with water.

  He squatted at the water’s edge beside her heap of lily-roots. ‘When I rescued a lady,’ he shouted, ‘I didn’t bargan for a lubra.’

  ‘Wouldn’t go hungry, would ee?’ she called. ‘Even if tha was a gentleman.’

  After which he slipped in, and was wading towards her as she retreated. It was sad they should destroy such a sheet of lilies, but so it must be if they were to become re-united, and this after all was the purpose of the lake: that they might grasp or reject each other at last, bumping, laughing, falling and rising, swallowing mouthfuls of the muddy water.

  In the gaps between mangled lily-flesh he made the water fly in her face by cutting at it with the flat of his hand. She could not imitate his boy’s trick, but followed suit after a fashion by thumping the surface and throwing clumsy handfuls at him.

  He caught her by the slippery wrists, and they kissed, and clung, and released each other, and stumbled out. Their aches were perhaps returning. He stooped and stripped a leech off her.

  While they were lying on the bank resting, happily she would have said, her restlessness took her again as her eyes started roving over the branches of a tree a short distance from this sheet of provident water. She remembered how the blacks had fired her to climb a tree, to drag a possum out of a hole, and how, as she grew hardened, she swarmed up trees regularly in search of birds’ nests and wild honey. Much of this experience had been difficult and abrasive, when here was a tree furnished with branches almost as a ladder with rungs.

  She could not resist it.

  Jack the convict, her saviour-lover, must have been dozing. His hand gave like a weakened lock to allow her her freedom. She moved carefully, remembering, when she did not care to remember, that other hand on which she had trodden unintentionally. She did not wish to hurt this sleeping man who depended on her, and whom she truthfully loved.

  She was soon climbing, breathing deep, planting her spongy, splayed feet on sooty rungs. She was rejoiced by the solitary nature of her undertaking at the same time as it released tremors of guilt from her. She continued climbing, and as she rose the sun struck at her through the foliage furbishing her with the same gold.

  ‘Hey! Ellen!’

  Jack Chance too, was climbing, but she hardly dared look back in the direction of the ground. She was afraid of falling. (Or was it the broken hands? the rotted teeth?)

  The branches immediately affected by her climb were vibrating and undulating round her like tasselled fans. Together with light and air, they were the allies of her recklessness. She was only half-aware when torn by the spikes with which the black trunk was armed. Once or twice she felt for her girdle of vines to assure herself that it held. At one point she dared glance down, and there was the ring jiggling on its cord, and not so far below her the crown of the convict’s head, darkened by water except where a whorl at the centre exposed the tanned scalp beneath.

  Her throat contracted, was it from pity alone? The fact that she could outclimb the man made her less dependent on him. She experienced a second spasm which she could not pause to interpret; she was far too close to the tree’s crest. She had stuck her head out between the branches, and was clinging reeling and breathless before an expanse of haze.

  Had she been alone she might have hung there indefinitely, swayed by the tree and her exultancy, but in the circumstances felt bound to warn, ‘Better climb no higher, Jack. Between us we may snap something.’ The common sense of it made her sound irritable.

  He did not accept her advice, but seemed to become more stubbornly determined to stand beside her, or else to bring them down in a simultaneous descent, in a blaze of light and cataract of green, to be driven deep into the earth, still together.

  ‘Jack!’ Mrs Roxburgh shouted; it was becoming an order. ‘I forbid you! Such foolishness!’

  Even so, he would not stop, and in her anger she descended to meet him. She must have stubbed part of his face with a toe, but she did not regret it. She would not have cared had she put out one of the brute’s eyes. She had no wish to die—not if her beloved, lawful husband were to expect it of her.

  Upon arrival at the convict’s level, she panted, ‘Do you want to kill us?’ At that height the mast between them was still pliant enough to sway, though less alarmingly.

  Exertion had dulled his eyes: they had never looked paler, nor more extinct. ‘Why—if you love me,’ she breathed, ‘will you not believe in my gratitude—and love?’

  But she could not restore lustre to his eyes; perhaps it was the mention of gratitude. Though running sweat, his skin felt cold, which she now tried to warm, after sidling round the mast, by pressing against him as far as she could, by chafing, moulding with her free hand a flank, a shoulder, the sinews of his neck.

  ‘Jack?’ His lips were cold, and at their thinnest.

  So Mrs Roxburgh frowned and sighed, and in her distraction looked out through the foliage.

  ‘Why,’ she cried, ‘that is surely a barn! Or a house, is it? Not that many miles off. Isn’t it a ploughed field? Oh, God be praised! It’s over!’

  Before the tears rushed out of her eyes she had identified the cocoons or maggots which become sheep on consideration by one who has lived amongst them.

  ‘Aw, Gore!’ Ellen Gluyas bellowed; and blubbered softer, ‘Dear life!’ She had scarce undone the withy hurdle before they came pushing, scuffling past, their fuzz of wool teazing memory.

  He was looking where she had directed his attention. ‘That’s a farm all right—at several hours walk, I’d say. That’s Oakes’s, I reckon. And beyond, in the distance, you can see the river. There was never such a vicious snake as Brisbane River.’

  His voice might have sounded too flat, too evenly measured, had she given thought to it, but she could not wait to feel the ground under her feet. She slithered down. She was distressed thinking of her hair, still short enough to suggest it had been cropped as punishment for some crime she had committed.

  ‘Do you suppose they’ll take us for human beings?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked when he had rejoined her.

  She could not stop touching her hair, her arms, her lashless eyelids, while he withheld from her the reassurance for which she was hoping. They reached the camp in silence.

  Although evening was approaching, it was darker than it should have been; the light, the air foreshowed a storm.

  ‘At least we have food left over,’ Mrs Roxburgh pointed out. ‘We shall need all our strength for the last lap. Shouldn’t we eat before starting?’

  ‘Can’t you see there’s a storm’ll break at any moment?’

  ‘I’m not afraid of storms. There’s been too many.’ She had begun tearing at the left-over emu. ‘Eat!’ she commanded. ‘There’s plenty.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he mumbled back.

  Although tonight she first adopted a finical attitude towards her food, Mrs Roxburgh was soon gobbling the sinewy meat after wiping off a swarm of ants and any maggots. ‘All our strength,’ she repeated between mouthfuls.

  He sat neither eating nor watching.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ she called from a full mouth, ‘you are not—sulking, are you? Or is it the storm? Surely a man cannot be afraid of thunder and lightning?’

  He did not trouble to answer.

  Remorse pricked her for taunting him when she was pretty sure of the reason for his silence. She could never match his delicacy. Gluyas’s Ellen a regular gobble-gut—and otherways greedy slut. Self-knowledge caused her first to gulp, then to hiccup unmercifully.

  The hiccups became downright violent when she noticed an aged aborigine standing at no great distance. He must have discovered them by accident. Too old and too frightened to effect an immediate retreat he was now fearfully observing them.

  Jack Chance lost no time, but tried to make the stranger feel at home by talking with him. The old man replied only by desultory mu
rmurs.

  ‘What does he want?’ she rasped between her hiccups.

  The convict did not interrupt his attempts at conversation. If the aborigine kept his silence, he appeared gravely entranced by his vision of food.

  Presently the convict hacked off part of the carcase with his axe. The old man silently accepted the meat, hid it under his bark shift, and left them by walking backwards.

  In her nervous state Mrs Roxburgh was exasperated. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘We couldn’ understand each other good. His tribe is camped farther to the west. So it seems.’

  ‘But we should have held him!’ Nobody could accuse her of thinking ‘killed’ because they could not read her thoughts, or if they were to, she had grown, most understandably, agitated. ‘Now he will go back, and they will come and murder us unless we make a start at once.’

  He reminded her that the blacks feared to travel by night, and that the storm would make them even less inclined.

  She might have been convinced and pacified if her opinion of herself had not sunk so low. It was the hiccups too, which continued to rack her, and the swags of cloud billowing black almost upon the crests of the trees, and the wind which had risen, threatening to snap any but the stoutest trunks. She wished she was still the girl who understood the moods of nature through close association with them, or the lady she had studied to become, acquiring along with manners and a cultivated mind a faith in rational man (whether a condemned felon, or even that fragile gentleman her late husband answered this description, she was not sure). In the circumstances Mrs Roxburgh could only crawl inside a bush shelter and hope that Divine Providence would respect her predicament. She might also have wished to remain alone, but could hear Jack Chance the convict crawling in behind her.

  Soon afterwards the wind fell. The rain which took over from it lashed at the dry earth and at the twigs and ineffectual leaves overhead. It was not long before the nakedness of the creatures huddled together inside the hut was completely sluiced.

  During a pause in the watery onslaught Mrs Roxburgh ventured, ‘We shall never sleep, Jack. We’ll be too soaked and wretched for that. It would be more reasonable to push on and reach the farm.’

  Curled on his side, he ignored her.

  ‘If there is a moon.’ She could not remember how much of a moon they might expect.

  What she did see was the lamp standing on a farmhouse sill; she heard the people getting out of bed, running to the door, welcoming one of their own kind.

  She chewed at a thumb-nail until she found herself biting on the quick.

  ‘You’re no company,’ she complained, ‘when we’ve every reason for celebrating.’

  At least the rain had poured itself out; the storm was passing; a steely glimmer instead of total obscurity should have heartened the survivors in the hut.

  Mrs Roxburgh had survived so much, she yawned and said, ‘I believe I look forward more than anything to my first mouthful of tea—from a porcelain cup.’ Then, to jolly her servant, she asked, ‘Do you enjoy your tay, Jack?’

  He could only bring himself to mump, ‘It’s too long since I tasted what you’d call tea. At the settlement, ’twas no more ’n green stuff—sticks—if the crowminder ever smuggled us a pinch.’

  ‘What else, then,’ she tried again, ‘that you can remember? that you will ask for?’

  She might have been coaxing her child, and at last, it seemed, she had roused him into taking an interest. ‘A dish o’ boiled beef. With the wegetables to it. And praps a ’ot dish o’ peas in addition.’

  He was a simple man, and she could never help but feel fond of him.

  She was smiling to herself for her own munificence as much as for the hearty meal her companion conjured up, when he cut her down. ‘Askin’ is all very well, but receivin’’, he reminded, ‘is a different matter.’

  Whereupon, he broke.

  She was alarmed to hear him sobbing like this in the dark and wet. ‘But my dear—my darling,’ she was pawing at the little child he had become, ‘you know I’ll make it up to you for all you’ve suffered. Nobody would do more for you,’ she herself was by now crying into the nape of his sopping neck, ‘not even Mab.’

  She succeeded in forcing him round until he faced her. She was holding him close, against the wet flaps of her withered breasts: her little boy whom she so much pitied in his hopeless distress.

  He did in fact nuzzle a moment at a breast, not like an actual child sucking, more as a lamb bunting at the ewe, but recovered himself to expostulate, ‘Mab is the reason why I’m ’ere in the Colony.’

  ‘Mab? How?’

  ‘I killed ’er. I slit ’er throat.’

  They were shivering, shuddering, in each other’s arms.

  ‘That’s why I’m doin’ me life term.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a reason’, she chattered, ‘why you’re not to blame.’ If there were not, they would have to find one, that no one should accuse her of complicity, in coupling with this murderer.

  ‘There’s often reason why the condemned is not to blame, but the law don’t always reckernize it—not what it don’t see written down.’

  His arms tightening around her as though to impress an injustice on her, implicated her more closely with his crime.

  ‘Was she not—true to you?’ Mrs Roxburgh not only gasped, she had good reason to hesitate.

  ‘No. She was not. Mab, I found, had took up with a young feller, a sword-swallower—and fire-eater. The night I caught ’em at it, ’e got away. Mab was the one ’oo was outfaced. Praps she thought she could remind me of what she was worth by simply throwin’ back the sheet and showin’ me ’er wares. She didn’t persuade me, as it ’appened. ’Er fancy boy ’ad left behind the tools of ’is trade when ’e made ’imself scarce, and that’s ’ow Mab—’ow both of us struck unlucky.’

  The night had quietened, except for a solitary floating bird and sudden freshets from an aftermath of rain.

  ‘Do yer believe I was guilty? Eh?’ Her monstrous child was prodding and pummelling at her to hear her pronounce his innocence.

  His demands became more peremptory, the wet hands more positively determined on remission.

  She thought, and said, ‘I believe many have murdered those they love—for less reason.’

  At once he removed his hand from her throat, and began plastering her with kisses, wet from rain as well as slobbery with relief.

  ‘There, Ellen! There! I knew we’d understand each other.’

  But did they? Now that they were again lovers he might suspect her of faithlessness, and kill her in the night with his little axe.

  She wished she might die painlessly, then again knew that death was her last wish. As he grappled her to him in the wet dark she only hoped she might live up to his expectations.

  When he had taken his pleasure, he said abruptly, ‘Your heart isn’t in it, Ellen. It’s like as if you’d went dead on me.’

  ‘Oh,’ she moaned, ‘my bones are aching!’

  ‘Not more, I would of said, than at other times.’

  ‘You mustn’t expect too much of me. You know it’s Mab you love still.’ There was no longer any reason why she should speak with bitterness.

  He continued stroking her, but absently.

  ‘The night I finished Mab I didn’ know what I was doin’ at first. It didn’t strike me that the young feller might warn the family where she lodged, of the scot I was in. Or the people might hear of ’emselves and come to look. Not that they did. I reckon the sword-swallower must have scuttled quick an’ quiet, glad to be out of a nasty mess. Mab, I dunno. She accepted what was comin’ to ’er. She made no sound or move, even when she must of knowed it was the real thing.’

  He spoke with a warmth and intensity she had not heard in his voice before, and what he told her, she suspected, he was telling for for the first time.

  ‘I stayed on in ’er room, regardless. I couldn’t think, only of Mab. It was a poor sort of lodging by most standards. Little
enough furnitures. A big dresser, which the family what let the place didn’t know what to do with. Mab kept ’er things in the dresser. Apart from that, there wasn’t much—a wash-basin, on the floor, for want of a stand—a piss-pot she’d empty out the winder—a chair with its bottom all but gone. I knowed the ’ardness of the bed, but ’adn’t always noticed it. That night I learnt every corner of the room by ’eart. And Mab, Ellen. I was never worse in love and she never give ’erself so trustful as on the last night I spent with ’er.’

  But it was Ellen’s throat he was kissing with renewed passion, and for all the fear, horror, cunning, which had been fluctuating in her since dark, she found herself responding to it. She must keep in mind that tomorrow she would again become Mr Austin Roxburgh’s widow, and must plead, not for a murderer, but a man to whom she owed her life.

  ‘That is more of my record, Ellen, than anybody knows. And no doubt you’ll hold it against me.’

  Mrs Roxburgh could not altogether lie, nor altogether speak the truth. ‘I shall remember’, she told him, ‘only those parts you wish me to’ since her own hunger for love had returned.

  Some while later she heard, ‘I come to me senses at last. I knewed I mustn’t stay till mornun.’

  She had been startled out of a doze, and did not realize at first that the morning to which he referred was none of hers.

  ‘I remembered ’ow a friend of Mab’s would come afore daybreak and the two girls start for the market to stock up their baskets with the cresses they sold. I got away easy enough from the ’ouse, and began makin’ me way to Putney, till I thought better on it. I bought meself a hoe an’ a bull’s-eye lantern, and joined the longshoremen. I lost meself in the sewers. Picked up a pretty decent livin’ too, from retrievin’ articles of value. It’s wonderful what goes down the sewers. It’s a good life once you get accustomed to the air. An’ rats. Rats is worst. They’ll set on a man if ’e don’t watch out. Their bite goes deeper, and is dirtier, than the bloody cat at Moreton Bay.’