The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  ‘It’s unnecessary, thank you,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied. ‘I mean, I would hate to waste anybody’s time.’

  Mrs Lovell gave her friend’s shoulder a push. ‘Oh, go on, Mrs Roxburgh! Again you’re doing yourself an injustice. And Mr Cottle is not the fate my husband makes him sound. It will be good for you, besides.’

  She was one of those practical women too distracted by their daily responsibilities to give overmuch thought to religion, but who will recommend a helping of moralistic pudding to any they feel in need of it. Deprived of humour by a sense of duty and his own handsome features, her husband might have disapproved of his wife’s mundane translation of his more sententious advice had he not also been her lover.

  As for Mrs Roxburgh, she accepted once more the fate or chains that human beings were imposing on her. It was not altogether weakness on her part: surely her survival alone proved her to be possessed of a certain strength?

  None the less, she awaited with foreboding the chaplain’s visit, which was to take place like the second mate’s in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour. As the day had been a sultry one the shutters were stood open at evening to admit the faint gasps of a breeze. A coppery light lay to somewhat baleful effect upon the carpet and the furniture. Because of the heat Mrs Roxburgh had not exchanged her muslin for the weeds the chaplain might have expected.

  The members of the household were most likely strolling or playing in the shrubberies, or dallying in the kitchen garden, for she was aware of that attentive silence which prevails in houses temporarily abandoned by their occupants. It was not so much the unwanted visit as a sense of rising hostility and emotion which prevented Mrs Roxburgh enjoying what should have been peace and quiet. Through the aching emptiness of martyrized scrub and rutted streets, she became conscious of a thudding from metal being hammered into wood, men’s voices shouting instructions, and at last a deep threnody accompanied by concerted rapping, as of spoons battering on tin plates, but muted by confinement and distance.

  If at this point silence seemed to fall in the lesser parlour, it could have been because the chaplain walked out of the garden, across the veranda flags, past the open shutters, and into the room, unannounced. Her attention was necessarily distracted by the presence of Mr Cottle, a small man, bright-lipped, eager-eyed, perhaps not entirely happy in the honorary tunic which had displaced his frock, but which did not disguise an abundant spiritual energy. The nervous cocking of his head and plaiting and unplaiting of fingers failed to suggest that the rebuffs he had received would deter him from continuing to exercise that energy in the rescue and cure of souls.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh!’ He smiled, and if his smile too, was nervous, he had fired his first, tricky shot in a siege by enthusiasm. ‘I believe—according to my wife—that you and I come, more or less, from the same part of the Old Country.’ The dimple in a shaven, pointed chin appealed to her out of its blue surrounds.

  Poor Mr Cottle, he was so small, his army boots were too large for him, his tunic inadequately patched where the right elbow had worn through (only vaguely could she recollect a small, but eager wife as one of Mrs Lovell’s morning callers).

  ‘From which part?’ it was Mrs Roxburgh’s duty to inquire.

  ‘From Somerset—Withycombe, to be precise.’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, and with a sad look which doubted his credentials, ‘there’s the river between us. You are from England.’ She laughed, not unkindly, but to dispel any illusions he might have about their consanguinity. ‘I was born to poor country, and perhaps for that reason take more than usual notice of pastures. I admired your fat fields, Mr Cottle, as I drove with Mr Roxburgh, after our marriage, into Gloucestershire.’ Again she smiled amiably enough, and the chaplain grew dewy with relief, if not actual gratitude.

  ‘I hope you will not be disinclined to listen,’ Mr Cottle was becoming every instant more nervously ardent, ‘if I remind you of the comfort your faith could bring—in a bereavement which the circumstances must have made doubly painful.’

  Mrs Roxburgh lowered her eyes.

  ‘Others have clothed and fed you since what all of us see as your miraculous escape. I would offer you the Gospels,’ Mr Cottle patted his pocket to give his statement shape and substance, ‘and an invitation from your fellow believers to join them in bearing witness this Sunday, and any other on which you find yourself at Moreton Bay.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Roxburgh moaned, ‘I don’t know what I any longer believe.’

  ‘I can’t accept that your lapse in faith is more than a temporary backsliding,’ Mr Cottle asserted, and ventured to add, ‘that of a truly Christian soul.’

  ‘I do not know, Mr Cottle, whether I am true, leave alone Christian,’ Mrs Roxburgh murmured.

  The chaplain was halted.

  ‘If I was given a soul, I think it is possibly lost,’ she said.

  Mr Cottle appeared to poise himself on the balls of his feet inside his large-size army boots. ‘If that is the case, I suggest you might be recovered for the faith here in our Moreton Bay communion.’

  Mrs Roxburgh confessed, ‘I was never able to live up to all that others expected of me.’

  ‘Humility has its peculiar rewards, as you will realize if you join us. It will rejoice your heart only to hear the men doing justice to the hymns.’

  ‘Have you a church at the settlement? I’ve not noticed one on my walks.’

  ‘No,’ he told her, ‘we haven’t, as yet. Our services are held in a hall at the prisoners’ barracks.’

  ‘I could hardly worship under the eyes of prisoners, some of them condemned for life.’

  ‘You would not see them, Mrs Roxburgh. You would sit at the front of the congregation, with the Commandant and Mrs Lovell and the officers of the garrison. The prisoners are ushered in after the arrival of the official party, and are seated at the rear of the hall, where the guards keep a close watch on them. You will have nothing to fear, I assure you.’

  ‘Only my conscience, and that can be more terrifying than any unseen criminal.’

  The chaplain’s lips moved wordlessly until he managed, ‘In case you might find it more to your liking, I ought to mention a small unconsecrated chapel built by an unfortunate individual with whom you are already acquainted—Pilcher of Bristol Maid, now employed at the Commissariat. Soon after his arrival here, he started working, in his own time and with his own hands, to build this chapel, which some might call a folly. It is not commendable as architecture, but I do not doubt the sincerity of the builder’s intention. It might appeal to you, Mrs Roxburgh.’ His eye grew hectic as he thought he might have penetrated this Cornishwoman’s opacity and reached the quietist inside.

  But Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘I would not care to break in upon Mr Pilcher’s prayers.’

  ‘It can be arranged, if you wish. He’ll be flattered to feel you take an interest in him and his creation.’

  Mrs Roxburgh smiled, but her expression had more of sadness in it. For a moment, but only a moment, Mr Cottle feared he might have floundered out of his depth. Then his faith flung him a lifeline, and he sprang to, and stationed himself in the centre of the carpet, determined to effect the rescue of a fellow being bent on spiritual immolation.

  ‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ he announced, ‘I am going to ask you to join me in a short prayer. Let me but guide you, and like many others, you will find that Jesus is expecting you.’

  Mrs Roxburgh sat looking petrified. ‘I’ve forgotten the language!’ her stone lips eventually ejected.

  Now that the spirit was working in him the evangalist was not to be discouraged. He had got down upon his knees, from where his military boots, the best fit the Commissariat could provide, looked more noticeably roomy, his fluttered eyelids whiter and more exposed in their closure.

  Still seated, her hands on her sash, Mrs Roxburgh could feel herself looking desperately brutish.

  But the chaplain had begun to pray, ‘Our Lord and Maker—you who have shown mercy to one whose life was most grievously threatened, lig
hten I pray you, a heavy heart, and spare the soul its torments real or imagined …’

  Suddenly it was the chaplain who found himself most grievously threatened: the other side of his devout eyelids the Cornishwoman had started to scream.

  ‘What—yes, it is! Don’t let them, for God’s sake! They’ll flay the skin off ’is back. They’ll beat the soul out of ’n—and that’s worse, a thousand times, than killing a man!’

  Still on his knees, Mr Cottle had opened his eyes, to see the woman who was also Mrs Roxburgh screeching like a peacock in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour; while out of the distance, from across the creek, through the humid ranks of lemons, shaddocks, citrons and guavas, the voice of a human being answered or appealed in such unearthly tones the chaplain might not have realized had his intended convert not drawn his attention to them.

  ‘Go!’ she screamed. ‘Do! Do! We can—surely? Oh, we must!’

  The chaplain could feel her nails eating into the wrist she had torn from its prayerful attitude. Her insistence allowed him little dignity as he tottered to his feet in his wretched boots.

  ‘Dear Mrs Roxburgh,’ his voice trembled from arriving at the upright in double time, ‘this is a penal settlement for hardened criminals. Captain Lovell is humane by comparison with his predecessor. But punishment must be administered, in certain cases, when it is due.’

  He could feel the blood trickling down his wrist where she had siezed him.

  ‘I advise you,’ he continued, but need not have bothered: she had slipped from him, and was lying stretched on the parlour carpet.

  So the chaplain at least was freed, and went, mopping his forehead, his eyes, his hectic cheeks, in search of ladies who might take charge of the hysterical female who had frightened him not only at his prayers, but also almost out of his wits.

  It was Miss Scrimshaw who informed Mrs Roxburgh a while later that she had gone off in a faint. The latter lay on her bed looking up at the white ceiling. Miss Scrimshaw herself was white-lipped within her brown complexion, for the scene she had recently witnessed had been a most distressing one: sobbing children, flustered servants, her friend Mrs Roxburgh stretched out cold in her rucked-up muslin. In calmer circumstances the picture might have appealed to the spinster’s cool eye and æsthetic sense as a somewhat unorthodox Dormition. Now the chaplain alone, twitching inside his shabby tunic, prevented her appreciating what she saw.

  Miss Scrimshaw could not care for this small cleric of an evangelical persuasion. She admired large men, handsome officers in His Majesty’s Services, and those other officers of the cloth, if large too, and destined for the purple. She had exchanged vows as a girl, it was known, with a naval lieutenant who died of a fever at Antigua, and remained more or less faithful to his memory, though she might have accepted a certain bereaved bishop had he proposed.

  All this passed through Miss Scrimshaw’s mind as she supervised the gathering up of Mrs Roxburgh from the carpet, and afterwards, as she stood bathing her friend’s temples, a sibyl as it were, broody with the fumes of eau de Cologne.

  But that which Miss Scrimshaw did not care to recall as she pursued her ministrations was the screaming of the man they had strung up to the triangle in the gateway of the prisoners’ barracks. She must banish it from her memory, along with anything else too naked or too cutting, which her upbringing and undefined social position had taught her to ignore. She only hoped her friend Mrs Roxburgh would not make it too difficult for her.

  But Mrs Roxburgh, again in possession of her mind, appeared to have chosen Reason as her mentor. ‘Don’t you find him a tiresome little man?’

  ‘Whom?’ asked Miss Scrimshaw, as always careful of her grammar.

  ‘Mr Cottle.’

  ‘Yes indeed!’ Miss Scrimshaw agreed with such heartiness her rather yellow teeth were exposed.

  ‘But well-meaning.’

  ‘If well-meaning is ever enough.’ On second thoughts Miss Scrimshaw added magnanimously, ‘We should be thankful, I suppose, for minor virtues when vice is so often in the grand manner’ while hoping she had not regressed too far in the direction of the incident which had been the cause of Mrs Roxburgh’s collapse.

  But the latter spent a fairly cheerful evening, helping little Kate with a watercolour, and accepting to take a hand at whist with the Commandant, Mrs Lovell, and Miss Scrimshaw herself, after the tea-table had been cleared.

  Early morning, once the source of innocent joy, had become for her a breeding ground of dread. The children no longer came to her since the fright they got on finding her lying, as they thought, dead, a deception which could not be soon or easily forgiven. But she continued to waken as the first tinge of grey was filtered through the darkness surrounding her, the hour when she felt most isolated, and consequently, induced to explore the labyrinth of conscience. As the light grew more substantial she appeared abandoned even by her shadow, and however ecstatic the choir of birds, silences were inevitably appended, through which she would find herself tramping rather than walking in bush featureless and listless enough to have been a reflection of her hopes.

  On such a morning, thrusting her way through scrub grown denser, the going rougher, still within sight of the brown, sluggish river, though well beyond the confines of the settlement, she was arrested by a glimpse of something which at first suggested floating, flickering light rather than any solid form: it was such a refractive white, and her thoughts had withdrawn far from her surroundings into the obscure recesses of her mind.

  Then she saw that here among the dusty casuarinas she had come upon a small rustic building in crudely quarried, but whitewashed stone, and realized that this must be Pilcher’s folly, the unconsecrated chapel the ordained minister had mentioned. Her heart was beating uncomfortably, her breathing strained, as she trod carefully, lifting her skirt to avoid stumbling over rocks and breaking sticks in her cautious approach to the open doorway. What she feared was that Pilcher himself might be inside and catch her in the act of trespassing, for trespass it could only be, from her experience of the architect’s mind—not unlike certain pockets in her own.

  So that to set foot upon the whitewashed threshold was in some sense for Mrs Roxburgh a regrettable action. Ellurnnnn, she heard her name tolled, not by one, but several voices. Yet nobody barred her entry into the primitive chapel. The interior was bare, except for a log bench and a rough attempt at what in an orthodox church would have been the communion table, on it none of the conventional ornaments or trappings, but an empty bird’s-nest which may or may not have reached there by accident. Above the altar a sky-blue riband painted on the wall provided a background to the legend GOD IS LOVE, in the wretchedest lettering, in dribbled ochre. Nothing more, but the doorless doorway through which she had entered, and two narrow, unglazed windows piercing the side walls of the chapel.

  Mrs Roxburgh felt so weak at the knees she plumped down on the uneven bench, so helpless in herself that the tears were running down her cheeks, her own name again mumbled, or rather, tolled, through her numbed ears.

  All this by bright sunlight in the white chapel. Birds flew, first one, then a second, in at a window and out the opposite. There was little to obstruct, whether flight, thought, or vision. If she could have stayed her tears, but over those she had no control, as she sat re-living the betrayal of her earthly loves, while the Roxburghs’ LORD GOD OF HOSTS continued charging in apparent triumph, trampling the words she was contemplating.

  At last she must have cried herself out: she could not have seen more clearly, down to the cracks in the wooden bench, the bird-droppings on the rudimentary altar. She did not attempt to interpret a peace of mind which had descended on her (she would not have been able to attribute it to prayer or reason) but let the silence enclose her like a beatitude. Then, when she had blown her nose, and re-arranged her veil, she went outside, to return to the settlement in which it seemed at times she might remain permanently imprisoned.

  She looked back once in the direction of the chapel in spite of a
warning by her better judgment against wilfully revoking perfection. There she saw a figure which became that of the lapsed seaman and dedicated architect. Although she restrained herself from acknowledging his presence, he started scrambling up the slope, causing saplings in his path to shudder, dislodging minor rocks, one of which bounded to within inches of the intruder’s feet.

  She hastened away, and upon reaching the settlement, sensed at once that something out of the ordinary had happened to dispel apathy and relieve tension.

  One of the assigned servants ran out of the house and announced from the edge of the veranda, ‘Oh, ma’am, the cutter is in the river. They’ve sighted ’er from up the mill.’ The woman was so elated by an occurrence which could not ease her own lot, but which she regarded none the less as an event, that Mrs Roxburgh experienced a pang of remorse.

  ‘And when will they sail?’ she dared inquire.

  ‘Who knows?’ the woman answered. ‘’Tisn’t for me to decide, is it?’ and was brought down to reality and the leaden soles of her boots.

  Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to restore the woman’s spirits, but in the absence of inspiration, could but murmur, ‘Thank you, Mary,’ and bow her head, and go inside.

  The morning was full of coming and going, slammed doors, voices raised but never enough, laughing and scuttling through the passages (lessons were evidently waived). Mrs Roxburgh’s cell seemed the only corner of the house to remain untouched by the cutter’s arrival.

  Of course she should have gone out and joined in the excited confusion. If she hesitated to celebrate her longed-for release becoming actual fact, it was because she could not ignore a future fraught with undefined contingencies. Had the walls but opened at a certain moment, she might even have turned and run back into the bush, choosing the known perils, and nakedness rather than an alternative of shame disguised.