The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  ‘Did you take part in their corroboree?’

  ‘As much as a woman is expected to. It is the men who perform. The women only accompany them, by chanting, and by slapping on their thighs. Oh yes, I joined in, because I was one of them.’

  ‘Did you understand what you were supposed to be singing?’

  ‘Of course not. I was not with the tribe long enough to pick up more than a few words in common use. But surely it is possible to understand what words are about without understanding the words themselves?’

  The Commandant more than likely did not understand, but was writing. Mrs Roxburgh suspected that what she understood had little to do with words, in spite of tuition from Mr Roxburgh and his mother. So it would be throughout her life.

  ‘There was one morning,’ she remembered, ‘very early, when I came across some of the members of my tribe, in a forest clearing. I never understood so deeply, I believe, as then.’

  ‘What were the blacks doing?’

  ‘It was a secret ceremony. They were angry with me and hurried me away.’

  ‘Because you saw what they were at?’

  ‘It was too private. For me too, I realized later. A kind of communion.’

  ‘If it made such an impression on you, I should have thought you’d be able to describe it.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ She lowered the eyes she had raised for an instant in exaltation.

  The Commandant threw down his quill, and sat back so abruptly the chair and his heels grated on the threadbare carpet.

  ‘To return to our more factual narrative, it was at the corroboree, was it not? that you first saw the escaped convict who, according to my informants, rescued you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and added, ‘I am sorry that friends I hold dear should have informed against me.’

  The Commandant could not suppress his irritation. ‘Isn’t it natural for human beings to exchange information on matters of importance?’

  ‘Yes, and I am unreasonable, I know. Mr Roxburgh often suggested that.’ She smiled at her hands as they tightened on each other against the sash.

  ‘This man—the convict,’ Captain Lovell suggested, ‘would have told you his name—or a name—I don’t doubt.’

  ‘Yes. Chance. Jack Chance.’ She pronounced it softly because she could not remember ever having spoken it before in its entirety.

  The Commandant echoed it, little above a whisper. His quill engraved, then embellished it, but in the margin, because he might not have accepted the name.

  ‘Don’t you believe in him?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘There was a man called Chance who bolted, but before my time. I have it in my predecessor’s record.’

  Captain Lovell continued embellishing the name ‘Chance’ with curlicues. ‘How did he treat you?’

  ‘With the greatest kindness and consideration.’

  ‘His reputation is not of the best.’

  ‘Oh, I know he is a crude man. But I am used to crudeness, Captain Lovell.’

  She looked at him to reinforce her assertion, and his blue eyes snapped at her.

  ‘Haven’t I lived among the blacks? But had I not, to live is to experience crudeness.’

  ‘From what I have heard of the Roxburgh family, I should have thought, Mrs Roxburgh, that you had led a sheltered life.’

  ‘The mind is not always sheltered, Captain Lovell, from its own thoughts and imaginings.’

  It must have sounded eccentric. She could read distaste in the expression of his mouth; he was only used, no doubt, to sweetness and compliance in a woman.

  ‘The man Chance,’ he asked, ‘how is it that, after accompanying you on this arduous journey, in what can be termed a gallant rescue, he ran back into the bush on reaching the Oakes’s farm?’

  ‘He was frightened, of course.’

  ‘But could he not imagine that his action might weigh in his favour, perhaps even earn him a pardon?’

  ‘I promised him a pardon.’

  The Commandant frowned.

  ‘But he was still frightened, naturally,’ she said, ‘after all he suffered. The scars are in his back.’

  ‘Those were from the old days,’ Captain Lovell grumbled.

  Then he looked at his witness and asked, ‘You did not by any chance discourage him, did you? I have known men frightened by forceful women.’

  ‘He is a forceful man. He cannot have been discouraged by any action on my part. I promised him a pardon,’ she insisted.

  ‘My dear Mrs Roxburgh, the pardon is for His Excellency to grant, upon my own recommendation.’

  She had begun twisting her hands. ‘But I promised it, Captain Lovell! I have nothing left in life, not even my wedding-ring, which I preserved till the last day—and lost. Nothing, I tell you! It is for this reason—and surely I deserve some reward for all I have undergone? for this that I insist on a pardon for my rescuer.’

  After she had subsided into unhappy silence the Commandant seemed to be listening for reverberations.

  ‘Perhaps you do not realize, Mrs Roxburgh, that the man was convicted for the brutal murder of his mistress, herself a slut of the lowest order.’

  ‘Oh, Captain Lovell,’ she cried, ‘most of us are guilty of brutal acts, if not actual murder. Don’t condemn him simply for that. He is also a man who has suffered the brutality of life and been broken by it.’

  She could hear, she could feel herself, gasping with the desperation of the farmyard in which she was reared: the calf with the knife at its throat; the hissing goose whose neck she herself had severed; more relevant, and worse, she could see the terror in Jack Chance’s eyes, and the mouth on which her own had failed to impress that loving-kindness which inspires trust.

  The Commandant poured his prisoner a generous quantity of brandy. ‘You are carried away by a tender heart,’ he decided with approval, to which was added the slightest dash of irony.

  ‘Duty’, she protested, ‘will not allow me to keep silent.’

  Would his sense of irony persuade him to question her claim? She was almost too shaken by emotion, as well as too fogged by brandy, to care which direction her defence took. The tumbler with only the dregs left was hanging aslant in her hand.

  When suddenly she asked, because it had been nagging at her, ‘Who is the other survivor?’

  ‘A fellow named Pilcher, the second mate, who was in command of the pinnace when it became separated from the long-boat in a storm. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember Mr Pilcher the second mate.’

  ‘But the circumstances in which you last saw him?’

  ‘Yes, I expect I do. But it was all storms for weeks on end—and dreams—or nightmares. I believe I was delirious for much of the time, from drinking sea-water—and the birth of my little boy. Had not Mr Roxburgh sustained me throughout, I would not be here.’

  She had stood the empty tumbler on the desk, and sat twisting the invisible band on her ring-finger.

  ‘I think’, said the Commandant with cruel persistence, ‘I should bring you together with your fellow survivor. He is a little unhinged, poor wretch. He is working at present as a clerk at the Commissariat, and shows no inclination to proceed south or be forwarded home. Yes, I think you should meet. The exchange of common experiences may exorcize some of the ghosts in your recollections.’ The Commandant was standing above his victim, looking down upon her with what could have been scientific detachment or vindictiveness, though if taken to task, he might have professed solicitude.

  ‘I am willing to see Mr Pilcher and hear his story.’

  The Commandant sprung open his watch, and at the same moment, a gong sounded in the outer regions. ‘Excellent!’ he declared. ‘I hope you are as ready as I for dinner. I am told there is a suckling pig. Or chaudfroid of fowl if you prefer it. And sillabub.’

  ‘Thank you, I have no appetite. I would rather go to my room.’

  ‘But will receive Pilcher this evening?’

  ‘If you and Mr Pilcher wish it.’

 
Mrs Lovell herself tried to tempt their guest to a very small helping of the chaudfroid, or at least a glass of sillabub, both of which she refused.

  Mrs Roxburgh might have dozed had she not been lying so straight and tense in anticipation of the threatened visit. There were intimations of thunder besides, followed by a plashing of rain, a sluicing of leaves in the darkened garden. As aftermath, a scent of citrus and laid dust invaded the room. Even the light seemed to have been washed: it wore a pronounced, lemon gloss; the shadows were a bluer black.

  Presently Miss Scrimshaw came to suggest she join them at the tea-table. ‘Your spirits will be lowered,’ she warned, ‘lying here alone in the dark.’

  But Mrs Roxburgh declined tea. She casually remarked that she was still ‘half-expecting a visit’.

  Miss Scrimshaw’s discretion was severely taxed, but she thought to reply, ‘Perhaps the person did not care to set out through the storm, and now that it is late, has decided to postpone coming. Your friend’s company should be doubly agreeable tomorrow.’

  Mrs Roxburgh did not enlighten the spinster on her friend’s sex or the nature of the visit, and Miss Scrimshaw, who flourished on mystery, went away burgeoning.

  The day following the visit that failed to materialize, Mrs Roxburgh rose even earlier than on her first morning at Moreton Bay and dressed herself in her black Paramatta, which those who served her had returned brushed and decent to her room. During the night she had conceived the notion of taking a solitary walk to acquaint herself with the neighbourhood before human activities influenced its character. That her own mind might influence what she saw and heard was a possibility she easily dismissed.

  All was much as she had experienced already in company with Jack Chance the convict: the dust, the stones, the ruts over and against which she was soon toiling; the native trees scrubbier and more deformed for their contact with intrusive man; stone and brick houses in sturdy imitation of a tradition, together with more slapdash hovels in currency daub-and-wattle. It was the hour before arthritic age and inquisitive innocence begin to stir; the humblest dwelling still buzzed with the respectability conferred by sleep. Catching sight of the stranger, a sow with a string of squealing piglets galloped for safety, and a red, cankered dog snapped at the folds in a trailing skirt.

  Upon climbing the hill she reached the inactive wind- or treadmill, round about it a litter of corn-cobs stripped of grain, near by a hand-cart which had lost a wheel. Children might have left off playing here had the scale of things been a lesser one and her knowledge incomplete. She crossed the trampled grass separating her from the stationary mill, to touch nail-heads which feet had polished in the worn boards, and become re-acquainted with some of the stations of purgatory.

  A bird was calling; or was it warning?

  It did in fact call her attention to voices at the foot of the hill, their volume amplified by morning stillness. They were men’s voices, growing louder, more cacophonous, as they approached the summit. Sometimes the babble was cut by the terser tone of orders, or again, by curses, in a different key. Mrs Roxburgh should not have felt panic-stricken; it was what she had wished in her heart, she realized: however painful the collision might prove, she was drawn to the companions of the man she may have wronged.

  The gang mounting the hill through the scrub were now so close she distinctly heard the clanking of irons, the rustle of chains. Her impulse was to draw aside and remain the unseen observer, but fear, remorse, or some hellish desire to participate again in what she already knew through the experience of suffering, caused her to stand rooted to the track where the men would pass.

  Heads were bowed as they struggled on towards her, so that they were not immediately faced with what must at a glance appear an illusion. The two guards preceding the chain-gang were the first to catch sight of the woman in black. They stiffened and gasped, jerking their muskets to the ready as though preparing to defend the prisoners against a rescue. Then the leaders of the convict file threw up their heads like so many dun-coloured animals. Startled into an abrupt halt, they could not avoid jolting their dependants into disarray; curses flew as body thumped against body and head cannoned off head.

  Mrs Roxburgh roused herself to draw aside. All down the line, faces were feeding on the apparition. The mouth of one bumpkin of a guard was quivering in his fiery cheeks; another, of less sanguine cast, had buttoned up his lips in disapproval or disbelief. The prisoners’ expressions showed them either devouring the present with overt lust, or else exhuming the buried past with despair for what they re-discovered. As for Mrs Roxburgh, she was united in one terrible spasm with this rabble of men, their skins leathery above the unkempt whiskers, eyes glaring with hatred when not blurred by cataracts of grief, hands pared to the bone by hardship. She recognized it all, and over it, that familiar stench of foxes. If there were scars, at least they were hidden by the felons’ dress; nor would she feel their bodies shudder while asleep in her arms, though the rustle of never-motionless chains conveyed a distrust which no passion or tenderness of hers could ever help exorcize.

  Then she realized that an uproar had broken out around her; the bush kindled, crackled and spat beneath the shower of oaths, ribaldry, laughter, and gusts of frustrated desire to which it was being subjected.

  One fellow shouted, ‘I jobbed it inter better than ’er at ‘Ounslow, an’ got the pox for it.’

  ‘Ay, you can never tell where the pox lies.’

  ‘It could lie with me, I don’t mind tellin’ yer, Billy, if there was any chance uv runnin’ the colours up the bloody flagstaff.’

  One of the guards had taken his musket-stock to the prisoners.

  ‘This is no place, ma’am, for a lady,’ the corporal-in-charge advised her in a wavering voice. ‘Better go down to the settlemen’.’

  Mrs Roxburgh regretted having forgotten her veil. She hardly knew what she murmured in reply to the corporal. Whatever her feeble remark, it was drowned in the torrents of abuse, warnings, simulated farts, and above all, the sound of blows. She started walking as quickly and smoothly as her skirt and the sticks littering her path allowed, but had not escaped the length of the linked prison file when one of those she was passing, turned and spat. She felt his spittle trickling down her cheek.

  The increased hullabaloo might have humiliated her worse had it not been partly her intent to submit herself to humiliation as punishment for her omissions and shortcomings. She was punished and humiliated none the less. As she dragged her skirt over the stones and tufts of uncharitable grass, it saddened her to think she might never become acceptable to either of the two incompatible worlds even as they might never accept to merge.

  She went on, wiping the man’s spittle from her face, and after negotiating a sluggish creek, regained what the inhabitants doubtless regarded as the streets of their township. By now she should have felt liberated from her own morbid thoughts and intentions, free to return to the Commandant’s hospitable house, its citrus groves and pretty children, had she not sensed the approach of a second trial, as unavoidable as the first in that it was of her heart’s choosing.

  What she presently perceived could only be the party of women prisoners marching from the female factory towards the hospital where they worked by day. Their progress was less regimented than that of the male felons. The soldiers accompanying them were but token guards. In one instance she suspected the man’s compliance to be the return for services rendered. The fellow strolled rather than marched, chatting to the girl beside him with the familiarity and lack of further expectation which informs many a marriage. There was no immediate evidence of the rampant hatred and despair which distinguished the male prisoners from human beings, but as the women drew closer, in their dust-toned, ill-fitting uniforms, their appearance grew more slovenly, their pace ragged and out-of-step. Their laughter was doubtless directed at the stranger; an individual giggle, rising shrill above the general mirth, made it more pointed.

  Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head. Her meeting with the
women could prove more disturbing than her brush with the men, since women, particularly those who have been persecuted, are more resentful of another woman’s intercepting their thoughts and mingling with their fantasies. The women would no doubt dread that she, a stranger and a lady, should visualize their more obscene dreams, their substitutes for frustrated love, the tenderness shared with a husband in his absence, or their ploys to attract a current lover.

  The distance separating her from the women was so diminished that neither side could avoid appraisal. For her part, she could see that some of the faces had died, while the life which remained in others showed every sign of hopelessness, brazen defiance, or passive depravity. The women stared back at their accuser (she could only be that) from eyes bolstered on pouches of skin, in bloated cheeks, their mouths hinged on incredulity and bitterness. Any remnant of sweetness or beauty looked as though it depended on hypocrisy for its continued existence.

  One young woman of noticeably Irish countenance, black, frowzy ringlets, and lashes so thick they could have been beaded with flies, greeted the stranger jauntily. ‘Mornun, mum. The freedom of a walk is somethun I reckon we all of us can share and enjoy, on such a day.’

  The others, with the exception of those who had died, hooted in appreciation of their companion’s audacity. The guards laughed with them. Though her words had the sting of irony, she spoke with such immense good humour no one could accuse her of insolence.

  Mrs Roxburgh hesitated at the side of the road. She would have liked to speak to the questionably cheerful Irishwoman, to have taken her hands and held them in hers, and after some fashion conveyed to her, how they had both aspired and lost; when the loose ranks were jostled forward, and the woman’s last glance, bereft, yet curiously consolatory, suggested that they might have understood each other.

  The prisoners marched on in the awful abandon of their coarse frocks, wrinkled boots ploughing the dust, while Mrs Roxburgh humbly turned in the direction of the Commandant’s ‘residence’.

  Here an immediately recognizable figure was emerging from the gates. True to her nature, Miss Scrimshaw was investigating something or other. In her brown gown, her padded hair, her bobbled shawl, she stood looking out from the lee of a straight hand.