Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

‘If one of them should fall!’ Mr Roxburgh remarked aloud.

He was staring up. Anyone coming upon him would have caught him with his mouth and his thoughts open. He was not particularly thinking of the men, but instinctively touched his own ribs. His breath rattled in his throat as though he were emerging from out of a heavy blanket of sleep.

‘There was a lad fell from the riggin’ on the voyage out.’ It was Pilcher, the second mate, with whom Mr Roxburgh had exchanged scarce a word all the way from Hobart Town; yet here they were, brought together fortuitously.

‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh would not be lured too far too soon.

They had gone across and were standing together at the bulwark. The wind was attempting to lift the passenger’s cap, while the sea turned on its side as though preparing to reveal some hitherto hidden aspect of its realm.

‘Yes?’ Mr Roxburgh repeated so quickly it sounded unnatural.

‘Poor Harry! Apart from his fall, d’you know what happened? Bosun forgot to weight ’is shroud.’

‘He was buried at sea?’

‘Where else? She’s big enough.’

Mr Roxburgh and Mr Pilcher stood looking over the side.

Pilcher laughed. ‘If the sharks don’t get a man, it’s the worms.’

Mr Roxburgh agreed; it seemed the only rational thing to do.

As they were placed, he could not have seen Pilcher without turning, but it would have been unnecessary to look: he knew his companion as that wiry individual of livid complexion and indeterminate age. He did not care for the mouth as he remembered it, thin-lipped, not unlike his own.

Mr Roxburgh shook himelf to free his thoughts of a morbidity in which his mother and Nurse Hayes would not have permitted him to indulge. In search of a more wholesome image, he looked landward and saw that an opalescence had bloomed on the hitherto leaden slab of shore. An invisible sun struck at the land with swords of light, but only for a few moments, before the weapons were again sheathed, the target veiled in cloud and mist.

‘What curious and beautiful tricks the light will play!’ Mr Roxburgh at once regretted his remark, but needlessly; Pilcher appeared to consider it unworthy of his attention.

‘Ever been any way in?’ Austin Roxburgh thought to inquire.

‘In where?’

‘Into the interior.’

‘Nao!’

The mate was of another element. He continued staring at the water, his contemptuous expression dissolving in what entranced him.

‘Not if I was paid,’ Mr Pilcher said. ‘Nothing there.’

On the other hand, he seemed to imply, the sea was peopled with his like.

‘Only dirty blacks,’ he added, ‘and a few poor beggars in stripes who’ve bolted from one hell to another. The criminals they found out about! That’s th’injustice of it. How many of us was never found out?’

Mr Pilcher spat into his element, but the wind carried the thread of spittle, stretching it into the shape of a transparent bow.

‘That is certainly an argument,’ Mr Roxburgh said.

‘That is the truth!’ the mate blurted passionately, and looked in the direction of the land. ‘If I was sent out here in irons, for what I done — or what someone else had done, ’cause that can happen too, you know — I’d find a way to join the bolters. I’d learn the country by heart, like any of your books, Mr Roxburgh, and find more to it perhaps.’

The passenger was surprised that one whom he scarcely knew should be acquainted with his tastes.

‘Experience, no doubt, leaves a deeper impression than words.’

‘’Specially when it’s printed on yer back in blood.’

Mr Roxburgh winced, and sucked at his moustache.

‘They wouldn’t hold me, though,’ Mr Pilcher continued. ‘Not for long. No conger was ever slipp’rier’, he laughed, ‘when his liberty was threatened. That’s why I come away to sea. A man is free at sea. He can breathe. But I wouldn’t suffocate there, neither — if I was put to it — in their blisterin’ bush.’

Just then, the canvas tree above them shuddered and rattled to such an extent the mate appeared to remember his duties.

‘Well?’ He smiled, indulgently for him, and slipped away.

Mr Roxburgh was left with an impression of a vertical cut down either side of the man’s mouth. Of course these were no more than lines with which the face had been weathered, but Austin Roxburgh could not avoid connecting them with their somewhat disturbing conversation. The conger was still twisting and glinting at a depth where he feared to follow, while in the element more natural to himself his hands had become unrecognizable as he tore a way through the blistering scrub, his nails as broken and packed with grime as the mate’s own.

It was a relief when the arrival of a messenger rescued him from thoughts over which he had so little control.

‘Mrs Roxburgh sent me, sir, to ask whether summat had detained ’ee.’

He recognized the boy who lent a hand in the galley, amongst his other duties, and helped Spurgeon carry the dishes down to the saloon. Usually blithe and elastic in all he did, his present mission had given him a primly formal, not to say ladylike air, perhaps in imitation of the one who had dispatched him.

‘ Detain? ’ the gentleman spluttered. ‘How? What could detain one on board ship? Where time is of no account it isn’t possible to be detained !’ He appeared genuinely angry.

‘She’s worryin’ that ’ee ’s gone so long,’ the boy explained, gloomy now, as if this were one of the moments when lack of understanding in those who should possess it lowered his spirits.

Mr Roxburgh might have continued grumbling had the boy not disengaged himself from the unwelcome situation, skipped expertly beneath the mainsail, and made for the forecastle head.

Stranded thus, the passenger condescended to go between decks. On entering the saloon he found his wife busy with some sewing, an occupation he knew her to dislike. Such strength of mind in one he respected, and even loved, irritated him still further.

He frowned, and grumbled, ‘I wish you wouldn’t strain your eyes sewing by such a wretched light.’

She looked up, smiling too sweetly for his present fancy. ‘Sewing isn’t such a skill that one can’t go along at it by instinct after a while.’

Each knew that in her case it was untrue.

Mr Roxburgh seated himself without taking off his overcoat. It made him look temporarily possessed by a sensation of impermanence. He proceeded to choose something to glare at, which happened to be the teasel-shaped flower, by now faded and wizened enough to justify throwing out.

‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ she asked.

‘Enjoy myself at what?’

‘How am I to know?’

‘How, indeed! Or I!’

So they sat in silence awhile.

Then Mr Roxburgh so far relented as to reveal, ‘I had some conversation with the second mate.’

‘On what subject?’

‘Difficult to say.’ It made him glare at the dead flower.

Mrs Roxburgh sewed.

‘That is,’ he said, ‘I can hardly remember, and if I could, it would be difficult to express in words.’

In fact, the mate’s allusions had disturbed him so deeply he would have preferred to dismiss them from his mind.

Mrs Roxburgh continued sewing with an indifference born of obedience, which at last made itself felt.

‘It was about the country beyond,’ he was forced to admit, ‘beyond the known settlements. Prisoners’, he positively drove himself, ‘will sometimes escape. And wander for years in the interior. Supporting themselves off the land. Suffering terrible hardships. But as a life it is more bearable than the one they have bolted from.’

On passing a hand over his face he found he was perspiring for something he might have experienced himself. He realized, for that matter, he could have continued embroidering almost without end on the few words the mate had uttered.