The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  He laughed, and by now she too was able to see it as something of a sombre joke. She was committed to following him through whatever subterranean darknesss he led, however foul the unchanging air, however daunting the rustle and splashing of rats. She could not have borne to be bitten, though. She could accustom herself to slime, and would grope through it up to the elbow in search of ‘valuable articles’, hopefully a sovereign, at least a silver spoon. She only prayed that she might be preserved from ever touching a drowned cat.

  ‘I used to take me haul to a Jew at Stepney who’d give me not above ’alf its worth. But I was in no position to complain. The important thing was to fill me belly and lay low—and keep a little ready cash for greasin’ a palm that might turn nasty. There’s ale ’ouses at Stepney an’ Wappin’ where I’d ’ang around—never too long—there was allus the odd face to put you in mind of a peeler on the loose. I’d down me plate of ’ot meat—dumplin’s if I was real ’ungry—and shoot the moon. I used to doss in one of the ’ouses along the river which was all that was open to the likes o’ me. A regular free for all inside when everyone was laid end to end. Nobody was choosy, least of all the bugs. I’ll not mention the women.’

  He would not have had to. He could not guess at the extent to which she was taking part. Out of shame, or in hopes of forgiveness, she pressed closer against her innocent protector.

  ‘My downfall’, he said, ‘was this cottage at Putney—the prettiest little place you could imagine. And those birds of mine. ’Course I knew it must of been all up with the birds. But was proud of me place. I wanted to take a look at it again. So I walked down one evenin’ after dark, and moved in quiet like, with me bull’s-eye lantern. The place smelled—well, it smelled dead—of birdshit, and dead birds. They was no more ’n feathered skeletons lyin’ on the floors of the cages. All my linnets and finches. I ’ad a pair o’ nightingales. Well—in spite of my quiet movements and the bull’s-eye lantern, a woman ’oo lives at the corner come an’ said she done what she could for the birds till the outlay got too much for ’er. I think she was honest. It was ’er old man I reckon, ’oo blew the gaff. Never liked the look of ’is physog. One o’ the long yeller ones. Anyway, the peelers come for me first thing next mornun. Found me settin’ in the arbor beside the river. I couldn’t get that stink of birds’ corpses outer me nostrils. And the river allus appealed to me—right from when I was a boy down from Arfordsheer. There’s times when the river gets to be the colour of pigeons—both sky an’ water. I love that river. Well, they come. It was time, I reckon. What else could I of done?’

  He yawned, it sounded with relief for having told it, and must have fallen asleep soon after.

  Her vision would not be shaken off. There was the husk of a bird still lying on its back, its claws crisped, amongst the scattered seed, the grit and droppings. The incised eyelids were the last detail to fade. They had detached themselves and were floating, mauve-grey, beneath the arbor, above the pigeon-coloured water.

  As she lay batting her eyelids, the magic slide of her dream was replaced by the interior of this leaf hut. It must have been very early, for the light was at its steeliest. During the night the damp had been to some extent dried out by the heat of their bodies. There remained the familiar, if anything stronger, stench of foxes.

  Mrs Roxburgh rose as far as the low-pitched roof allowed. She was hunched and aching, but would have felt no less cramped and crippled in more luxurious surroundings. She might have expected to awake to a sense of joy on such a day, or to be carried away by a tumult of excitement, but overall she knew that she was angry with someone, about something.

  She began kicking his thigh. ‘Wake up!’ she shouted. ‘At this rate the sun will be up before we’re started.’

  Anybody must have agreed that the situation called for sternness on Mrs Roxburgh’s part, so she kicked again, and hurt a toe. ‘Jack? Aw, my Gore!’ She could have cried, less for the pain than her failed attempt at dignity and authority. ‘The blacks are sure to come’, she persisted at her loudest, ‘after being warned by that old man. It will be all up with me—if not you, perhaps.’

  She administered a last, moderating kick before withdrawing outside.

  Still hunched and aching, as though the roof had not left off pressing her head into her shoulders, she knew that her anger was directed at herself. Her greatest strengths were perhaps her cunning and her stubbornness, one of which was possibly provoked only by a man’s presence, the other also dependent on him: although she had the will to survive, doubtless she would have succumbed had the convict not dragged her along. Of course he had the strength, the physical strength, until at this late stage in their journey he seemed to be making demands on her for that moral strength she had rashly promised in the beginning.

  Now while she stood in the grey morning, chafing her arms and shoulders, it was not the convict she despised; it was her wobbling, moral self, upon which he so much depended. Alarm mingled with exhilaration to cause the shivers, as she contemplated the landscape and the power given to an individual soul to exercise over another.

  She could hear him inside the hut, sighing, yawning, hawking, returning unwillingly to life. She regretted kicking him and wondered how she might make amends. He would hardly believe that her anger had not been intended for him when, at the time, herself had not understood.

  He joined her at last in the shiversome morning, and she simply said, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘For what?’ Such simplicity on his part made it more difficult for her; yet he was not simple, as his life and his survival showed.

  ‘Let’s start at once’, she said, ‘on this important day.’

  At the same time she took his hand and they walked thus for quite a distance. He did not exactly hang back, but today it was she who was leading him, and the hand she held was unresponsive.

  ‘Why sorry?’

  He had returned to what she had decided to ignore, hopeful that his simpler side, which did at times predominate, would persuade him to drop the matter. Instead it appeared that his cunning would prevail.

  ‘You was not tryin’, Ellen, was you? to excuse yerself for what we been to each other?’

  ‘How can you ask such a thing? Sometimes you’re hardly delicate, Jack!’ Her neck might have showed the blushes she could feel, had it not been for the accumulation of dirt and a skin become almost as rough as bark; worse than her physical condition was the knowledge that her blushes had been whipped up by a recurrence of anger against herself.

  ‘Oh, I’m no gentleman. I don’t allus use the right word. And act as I feel. I would of thought you knowed that by now.’

  ‘Yes indeed, I do!’ she answered tight and dry, and with an added effort, or extra tightening, ‘I should have thought you must know that my affection for you will always make me overlook your faults.’

  Because in the course of her embarrassment she had dropped the hand she had been carrying she was now able to force the pace.

  And what would others know? she wondered when the distance between them allowed her to indulge in more private thoughts. Even if the pardoned convict respected the laws of decency, would society think to see her reflected in his eyes, or worse still, the convict in hers?

  She was marching, or stumbling, into the sun, blinded by it. She could hear him following heavily, more like an animal than a man.

  Once she panted over her shoulder, ‘Are you sure we are going in the right direction?’

  ‘If we aren’t, we’re not far out,’ he mumbled seemingly at the ground.

  She was pretty certain her instincts and her desperation would have taken her in a straight line to the farm they had sighted the evening before, but the strain had begun telling on her.

  So she paused and waited for him. ‘Are you tired?’ she asked, her solicitude mingled with expectancy.

  ‘I’m not by no means fresh.’

  The rims were sagging under the bloodshot eyes. How would those who had not known him as a man, leave alone ret
urned his embraces, receive this shambling human scarecrow?

  Constant preoccupation with the inevitable made her twitter. ‘Do I look a fright, Jack? My awful hair!’ It worried her more than her nakedness, for hair is a curtain one may hide behind in an emergency.

  ‘I reckon there’d be those who wouldn’ know you.’

  He wiped her mouth, and kissed her on it. It would have seemed no more unnatural than on the other occasions had she not been about to re-enter what is commonly referred to as civilization almost as naked as a newborn child.

  It was here that Mrs Roxburgh looked down and saw that she had lost the vine she had been wearing as a gesture to propriety; worse by far was the loss of the wedding-ring threaded upon her fringe of leaves.

  She began to cry and teeter. ‘We must go back! D’you suppawse I left ’n at the waterhole? Or hut?’ She could not remember. ‘Could only be one place or t’other. My ring!’ she moaned.

  ‘You are carryin’ on like a imbecile,’ he told her.

  If she were, she was also too tired, battered, ugly before her time, frivolous even at her best moments, or perhaps but the one against whom circumstance bears a grudge.

  So she said, ‘You ent ever goin’ to understand. My weddingring!’ and started turning in her tracks.

  ‘What’s in a ring that’ll bring back yer husband?’

  She was already walking away from him; she hated this convicted murderer.

  ‘And ringless didn’t prevent you an’ me becomin’ what we are to each other.’

  The truth in his insolence did not make her admit defeat; he had to run after her and start hitting her about the head with his open hand. ‘If you wanter be taken by the blacks, then go, and good luck an’ riddance to yer!’

  She fell down, and he sat beside her, waiting for her to recover her wits.

  ‘You’re very often right, Jack. I wish I could always appreciate it.’

  He was looking at her with an exhausted helplessness in which she shared.

  But roused herself.

  ‘It can’t be much farther on,’ she said, although the distance they had covered since escaping might prove to be the least part of the journey; she almost hoped it would.

  When they were again on their feet she limped forward, taking the lead, as she sensed he expected of her. She must have looked a sight: her lacerated feet were causing her the greatest pain; the damp and cold of the night before were at work in her bones; the sun, as always towards the middle of the day, was becoming their chief torturer. The fluctuations of the landscape before her suggested that she might be launched upon the early stages of a fever.

  Soon after, she slowed up, and when he came level, grinned at him with what must have looked ferocious insistence. ‘We must help each other, mustn’t we? whatever the outcome.’

  He answered, ‘Yes’ with a detachment which hardly reciprocated the sentiments she had intended; nor did his stare, from behind the curtain of sweat, suggest that she was part of his vision.

  Yet a little distance farther they put their arms round each other, as of one accord, hobbling, staggering, on.

  She told him, ‘Even in mid-summer you could draw a bucket of water from the well under the sycamore that would take the breath out of you. Pa found the well. He had diviner’s hands. The twig would bend for me too, but not regular.’ She sighed. ‘It was the coldest water.’

  When here they were, walking over these blazing stones. The bird laughing.

  ‘Did I ever tell you, Jack, how I walked all the way to St Hya’s and let meself down into the pool? In they days people went to the saint for all kind of sickness. What I went there for I dun’t remember not at this distance. Or if I were cured. I dun’t believe a person is ever really cured of what they was born with. Anyway, that is what I think today.’

  In fact she was thinking of the engraving in the book she had found in Mr Roxburgh’s library, in which the inhabitants were shown escaping from the Cities of the Plain. Whatever had happened the couples were holding to each other as desperately as she and the convict, and every bit as naked. Because of the nakedness she had not asked her husband to explain the situation.

  Now, as they escaped from one hell into what might prove a worse, however fulsome their reception at Moreton Bay, this man was leaning on her so heavily she hoped she was not a similar drag. She no longer believed in physical strength; it was the will that counted.

  ‘Do you think you will undertake the voyage Home after we have reached civilization?’ Her teeth were clicking like pebbles inside her mouth. ‘Or perhaps you would find the associations too painful.’ If her grip loosened, her arms slithered papery up and down his ribs. ‘Sydney, we are told, is going ahead. I am inclined to advise Sydney. Set yourself up in some safe business with the reward they’ll give you. My husband will contribute to it handsomely—of that you may be sure.’

  What she was thinking, doing, saying, she did not know—perhaps dying on her feet, had a breath of cool not come at them through a gap in the scrub ahead.

  When they emerged from the trees, there was a field with rows of methodically hilled plants, and but a short distance beyond, the house, and the more imposing barn, each built of roughly hewn timber slabs.

  ‘There, you see? Just as we planned!’

  In speaking, she turned towards him, but did not recognize Jack Chance the convict: some demon had taken possession of him.

  ‘Ah, Ellen, I can hear ’em settin’ up the triangles—in the gateway to the barracks! They’ll be waitin’ for me!’

  Immediately after, he turned, and went loping back into the bush, the strength restored to his skeleton.

  Her torn hands were left clawing at the air. ‘JACK! Don’t leave me! I’d never survive! I’ll not cross this field—let alone face the faces.’

  But she did. She plodded gravely across the rows of tended plants as though they had been put there, cool and sappy, for the comfort of her feet.

  ‘They are—teddies?’ She sighed unnatural loud before reaching a track which wound down along a hillside towards the barn. Ruts and hoof-prints had set like iron. She fell among the cow-pats and crawled farther, a lopsided action dictated by the ruts, until halted by the barn and a pair of man’s boots, the latter serviceable in the extreme, as grey and wrinkled as the earth in which they were planted.

  Mrs Roxburgh could not have explained the reason for her being there, or whether she had served a purpose, ever.

  ‘Naked?’ The voice was just discernible; it was a woman’s, and of a tone she had not thought to hear again.

  She heard shoes approaching, spattering over bare boards, then retreating as soon as a door squealed.

  She lay with her head in the dirt because she could not raise it; the flies were busy settling, partly on blood, partly on the moist cow dung with which her arms were smeared.

  Then the shoes were returning, the door squealed a second time, and she was enveloped in what could have been a cloak, or simply a coarse blanket.

  Mrs Roxburgh was most grateful for whatever it was, even more for the woman’s voice. ‘There, dear! You are here. Nobody will want to know what ’appened till you’re ready to tell.’

  Swaddled in the voluminous garment or harsh blanket, as well as what sounded like the woman’s genuine concern, she thought she might never want to ‘tell’ (you cannot tell about fortitude, or death, or love, still less about your own inconstancy).

  Mrs Roxburgh said, when she had sufficient control over teeth jaws, limbs, to be able to risk her voice, ‘I will only want to sleep and forget,’ when she knew from experience that she was aspiring to the impossible.

  ‘That you shall,’ the vast woman answered, gathering up her new child.

  After which the child was dragged, if solicitously (the owner of the wrinkled boots might have been adding his support; she could not be sure) on this latest stage of her journey.

  ‘We must all help one another,’ Mrs Roxburgh giggled as her toes came in agonizing contact with a s
plintered step, ‘mustn’t we?’ Then she was hoisted over the threshold.

  ‘Yairs, yairs,’ the woman agreed; heat and hardship may have flattened the voice but without destroying conviction and kindness.

  Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head beneath a weight; in all memory a house had never seemed so stuffy or so dark. With the remote hope of catching a glimpse of sky between twigs she would have glanced upward, but the operation defeated her. Perhaps she would remain for ever downcast, and those who like to think the best might mistake an affliction for humility.

  This woman would, who remained all around at the same time as she was giving orders in the distance. ‘No, no, Ted! I can bring the tub meself—but not carry the full kettle—and not the bucket of cold neither. We mustn’t scald the poor soul.’

  They had sat her to wait upon what her fingers slowly discovered in the dark to be a leather throne, its woodwork carved, but very roughly, with a leaf-pattern. Was she worthy of her throne? Horsehair pricking through her coarse robe suggested she might never be.

  Mortified, she hung her head lower still.

  The tub had been dragged towards her, or so it sounded, across the boards. Water hissed furiously on being poured into tin. Over and above her heavy woollen robe, the pains she was suffering, her shame, the love and gratitude she had never adequately expressed to anybody, she was now enveloped in a cloud of steam.

  ‘I do not—think I can—bear it!’ she cried.

  The male boots were retreating as though in fright.

  ‘I’ll water it down,’ the woman promised. ‘You’ve nothing to fear now, love.’

  She would have liked to think so; she would have liked to find the woman’s hand and kiss it for a promise made in the face of human experience.

  Only the woman, since they were alone together, was too busy disrobing her patient. However silent her nurse’s unbelief in what she saw, Mrs Roxburgh heard it.