Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

So they came out upon the sloping deck. Between them, though by no specific agreement, they were carrying the leather dressing-case. They stood bracing themselves against the list of the marooned vessel, which had brought upon them every distortion of grace, not to say abandon of propriety.

Never since boarding Bristol Maid had Mr and Mrs Roxburgh looked so awkward, foolish, and superfluous. It was not surprising that those who might be competent to deal with the present situation paid no attention to them as they stamped or slithered about their business. The passengers were made to feel they must pay for their ignorance. Humbly smiling, they prepared to accept their just deserts.

Mr Courtney, although very much the first officer coping with a crisis, took pity at one stage. His jacket unbuttoned, his mouth loose from shouting, he demonstrated with his large hands how their ship had brought up suddenly on a semi-circle of coral.

There it was, if they cared to look, a pale, greenish glimmer, on which the lovely lace of foam was being torn to further tatters.

Mr Courtney was of the opinion that nobody was to blame but the fog; they had been doing a bare five knots. He was so convinced he repeated himself several times over.

The fog was lifting, as though to expose the full irony of its work. The stranded ship had swung round and was lying broadside on to the sea.

‘Close-hauling’, Mr Courtney bellowed at the passengers, ‘could bring her off.’

The Roxburghs were appreciative if dazed. They intended to maintain hope, but in the face of the mate’s practical knowledge they dared not contribute even the token of an amateur suggestion.

For his part, Mr Courtney, although a genial, kindly man, felt he had done his duty by the passengers, and was determined to dismiss them from sight at least. ‘I advise you to take shelter, Mrs Roxburgh, in the charthouse or the galley.’

Presumably included in the invitation, the lady’s husband was left to accompany her down the deck to whichever asylum she happened to choose. Mr Courtney, who had already limped away, might have stamped in level circumstances. Unusually sensitive to moral criticism from others, Austin Roxburgh wondered whether the mate had been concealing from the beginning a streak of that contempt which members of the lower classes often harbour against their betters, but shelved the theory for further examination at a more appropriate time. At the moment there was nothing for it but to follow his wife.

They proceeded, tittuping on their land legs, clinging to whatever was offered them by way of support. Over the side, the variable sea, now a milky, liquid jade, poured itself on the snoozing coral, the latter not so passive that it would not rise at times, to snap with a mouthful of teeth, or lash from under with swathed limbs.

Mrs Roxburgh came to the decision not to look seaward as she made her way forward. If asked to consider why she was choosing the galley in preference to the charthouse, her only reason could have been that she had visited the galley during their progress through a sea which had not yet grown hostile, in a gently breathing ship, which now lay stiff and stubborn beneath them, or grumbled, or shuddered. Aloft, a man was swinging, all sinews, tendons, muscular contortions, grinning at the wind as he fought the canvas. Herself straining along the deck beneath, Mrs Roxburgh felt relieved when this battered Punch was removed from sight, if not from thought; indeed, he might return in her dreams.

Remembering her husband, she glanced back once or twice to call and encourage. ‘We are practically there,’ she told him, whether her voice would carry or not.

She caught herself smiling, from habit, and was glad she could not see herself; at this point the only significance her smile could have had was that of an arbitrary, not to say perverse, decoration.

They reached the galley. Never much more than one of those protuberances with which the deck was capriciously furnished, it now resembled a tilted hutch. They blundered their way inside, into a consoling stuffiness, clean-swept of the utensils one would have expected. In a depression formed between the opposite wall and the steep floor, dented pots were lying, together with the shards of crocks, and the white shambles of what must have been the saloon dinner service. Over all hung the smell of cold ash and fat.

‘Here I am going to stay,’ Ellen Roxburgh announced, as though it might still be granted to her to exercise her will.

There was a fixed table behind which, on a similarly immovable bench, she succeeded in wedging herself, along with the leather dressing-case. (If she had sole control of this during the latter stages of their journey, it was what she considered natural, and would have wished.)

After perching uneasily beside her on the bench, Austin Roxburgh wondered aloud, ‘… whether I might give them some kind of assistance.’

Mrs Roxburgh did not answer, for the simple reason that she had withdrawn even out of reach of the husband whose protection was her chosen vocation. She would have liked to pray, but found the vocabulary and the necessary frame of mind for prayer, wrecked inside her. Mentally she was still too exhausted to sort out the wreckage, and recoiled moreover, from a possibility that she might never restore order to a spiritual cupboard which had not been kept as neat as it looked.

So she sat with her arms round that other responsibility, the child whose presence had been her secret burden over the last five months.

The sea raked the sides of Bristol Maid with increasing fury. As its spray lashed the deck, in collaboration with more vicious because more substantial whips in the form of snapped cordage, the galley walls strained and vibrated.

Those sheltering inside did not realize that the captain had appeared at the doorway, until he called. ‘Are we in good heart?’

Captain Purdew followed it up with a curiously half-hearted laugh. These whom he was looking over through the doorway were officially his passengers, not pet animals to which he had taken a rash fancy and now regretted having acquired. Had they been pouter-pigeons or white mice — or easiest of all, silkworms, he might have disposed of them without a qualm.

Mr and Mrs Roxburgh assured Captain Purdew that they were in the best of spirits.

From their perch they sat looking back at the one who had them in his keeping, and who, they hoped, was possessed of benign wisdom and superhuman powers in spite of resembling an old, moulted member of the same species, Adam’s apple wobbling above a dirty collar, blue-red flesh thinly stretched over such bones as were visible, and deposits of salt on drooping lids and in the corners of disillusioned eyes.

Captain Purdew braved their inspection. ‘We have two stout boats which the men will lower at the first opportunity.’ For more than the first time he glanced over a shoulder, and confirmed in a trailing voice, ‘The sea is too high at present.’

Then he left them, not to direct further operations, but to avoid, one suspected, those of his subordinates who had automatically taken over. In fact, Captain Purdew was in much the same plight as the inferior beings, or unwanted pets, his passengers, though nobody might have admitted yet to the true state of affairs.

The Roxburghs languished on their perch, and to give each other courage, asserted from time to time that the storm was surely abating; when Mr Roxburgh made a most distressing discovery.

‘My Elzevir! I don’t remember — but could have left it — in the cabin — no, more likely the saloon.’

‘Your what ?’

‘My Virgil.’

‘Ohhh?’ Her voice climbed to a point of disbelief which almost revealed an opinion of her own: that in spite of a respect for books instilled by her husband and mother-in-law, they were another kind of furniture, but unlike tables, chairs and so forth, dispensable.