Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Then there was the slither and trample of feet overhead.

‘Mr Courtney, sir! Mr Court- ney ?’

‘Good God,’ a second voice moaned obliquely through the fog, ‘can’t you see we’ve struck? A reef! Plain as your nose, man!’

‘We’re keel-ing!’

‘… need to tell me …’

So the gull-voices of men called faintly in the outer air.

Mr Roxburgh observed his pins protruding from beneath his wife’s skirts. His chest was protesting at her weight.

‘Do you hear, Ellen?’ asked his old man’s voice. ‘We’ve struck a reef!’

‘Oh, my dear! I was thrown off my balance. Have I hurt you?’

He ignored that. ‘We must stay calm and keep our wits about us.’

He was determined that they should not give way to emotion, but could not help being aware how ineffectual his voice sounded, as on all occasions when he gave orders. Yet others never appeared to notice.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, and succeeded in withdrawing her harsh breath from his ear, her disarrayed feathers from off his person, though they were still bundled together in the trough made by the bunk and the wall.

‘We must make our way — somehow — on deck,’ Mr Roxburgh decided.

‘… that I haven’t hurt you,’ she persisted, and took his cold hand in her warmer ones.

He found it unnecessary. ‘It’s no time, Ellen, for delicacy of sentiment.’

It was she, however, who grew practical, initiating the series of grotesque movements necessary for their escape from the cabin.

‘Ma’am? Mrs Roxburgh?’

She looked up, laboriously, and saw Oswald Dignam staring down at them from an unorthodox angle. His eyes were protruding slightly as he clung to the jamb of the swinging door.

‘Captain Purdew, ma’am,’ he called, then swallowed as the door caught his fingers. ‘You must come up quick,’ he recovered himself and shouted, ‘on th’ old man’s orders.’

Though crisis and the pain from his jammed fingers had temporarily transformed him into a small, girlish boy, his sense of authority would not allow him to feel ashamed.

‘We’re stuck fast,’ their messenger informed them, ‘but will try to bring her off.’

Mrs Roxburgh herself was so dazed by the situation, as well as entranced by the sweet, milky face of what might have been a cherub on the ceiling of some great house, she answered only with an effort, ‘Yes, Oswald. Yes. We shall get ourselves ready. And come on deck.’

She stretched out a hand to her husband. It felt surprisingly strong and capable despite the years in which she had been discouraged from using it. He was grateful for his wife’s hand, and she for the opportunity to justify herself.

Oswald Dignam had disappeared under cover of their concentrated activity.

Mr Roxburgh began the climb towards the hook which held his overcoat, while his wife crawled in the direction of the carpet bag, to find she could not think what to pack. Instead she fumbled with the small leather dressing-case in which she locked her more valuable or intimate possessions such as jewels, journal, false hair, the prescribed smelling salts which she never used, and began stuffing in few random articles as though she were a thief.

‘Wrap up as warm as possible,’ she advised needlessly.

Already in his overcoat and cap, Mr Roxburgh was winding round his neck an interminable woollen muffler she had knitted to his specifications several autumns ago.

She tied her shawl tighter, the same green one admired by Mrs Merivale at Sydney, and made a grab for her mantle.

Her breath was coming in desperate grunts, as though she, not her husband, were the invalid.

‘Take your time,’ he appealed to her. ‘All this is by way of precaution. I doubt the danger is as great as it appears, or if it is,’ he cleared his throat, ‘she’s not likely to break up at once — not before they’ve launched the boats.’ He would do his best till the end to impose some kind of logic on unreason.

She finished tying down her bonnet with what she liked to think firmer movements. ‘Well, now?’ Her smile was a wry one, but directed at him personally.

They began to scale the floor of the listing cabin, clinging with one hand to their sole article of luggage, with the second, clawing at any support offered by furniture or fitments, and after the same fashion, once through the doorway, navigated what had been the saloon. Neither would have admitted to the other that water had penetrated, when there it was lying before their eyes, oozing and lapping, an antithesis of ocean — a black, seeping treacle which the plush table cloth failed to stanch, while a teasel-shaped flower they had brought back on an afternoon at Sydney Cove was too light and withered to have been sucked under as yet.

Not until they arrived at the companion-ladder did the Roxburghs allow themselves to contemplate fully the dangers with which they might be faced. Up till now, they had been superficially irritated, he understandably more than she, by a rude break in their measured routine, and by having to adjust their physical bearing to the angle of a heeling ship, but now, suddenly, the cold air pouring down from above, was aimed at their defenceless bodies, and struck even deeper. Their souls shrank dreadfully under the onslaught, and would have wrapped themselves together in a soft, mutually protective ball had that been possible. As it was not, the man and woman were left flattening themselves against a wall, bones groaning, almost breaking it seemed, as they wrestled perhaps for the last — and was it also the first time? with a spiritual predicament.

Ellen Roxburgh then, was pinning her husband against the wall, grinding her cheek into his as she would never have dared. ‘Tell me — this once,’ she commanded, ‘I have not made you unhappy?’

He fought back with a strength he had never thought he possessed. ‘Ah, Ellen , it is no occasion for foolish questions!’ His voice issued from its deepest source to expire at the surface amongst what sounded like dry reeds.

In the obscurity at the foot of the ladder he knew her eyes were staring at him, and he stared back: for the moment they were both contained in the same luminous bubble which circumstances threatened to explode.

It was she who broke. Her tears were streaming.

He would have started dragging her up the ladder, to protect her from that mortal danger, herself. ‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ he ordered, ‘or not till we know there’s cause for it.’

‘I’m not afraid for myself,’ she cried. ‘It’s for you. And my child.’

‘Child?’

‘Oh, yes. I would not have added this to your cares, but it isn’t possible — any longer — to avoid it.’

‘My dearest dearest Ellen!’ He fumbled for her face, to unite her tributary distress with the love he felt flowing out of him. ‘Our child is our best reason for surviving.’

Only obtuseness and self-absorption could have prevented him seeking a reason for the frequent torpor, the growing softness and whiteness of the form which had supported him in sickness, and for the presence of which he found he craved increasingly. Now his contrition was the more intense and searing for the drought from which it sprang.

Again it was she who came to her senses, who began to protest, and assume her normal role of protector. ‘We are wasting time! You go first, Mr Roxburgh, and I will follow with the bag. You must take care — more than ever — now that we have an ordeal to face — not to over-tax yourself.’

As they struggled upward, he issued a reprisal of warnings in lowest key. ‘Ellen! Keep calm ! As I told you. And especially since you have other responsibilities. Besides, they’ll see that you’ve been crying if your manner is — noticeably —agitated .’