Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

There were howls from the blacks, and the shouting of incensed, helpless sailors.

For the second time Mr Courtney took aim, but his gesture produced no more than silence.

Ellen Gluyas watched the bloodstain widening on the sand. There had not been so much blood since Pa and will slaughtered the calf during their lodger’s interminable stay.

Now she too, was interminable, transfixed by time as painfully and mercilessly as by any spear. She, the practical one, and a woman, should tear herself free and rush back into life — to do something .

But it was Mr Roxburgh who ran forward, to do what only God could know. Here he was, bestirring himself at least, in the manner expected of the male sex. Into action! He felt elated, as well as frightened, and full of disbelief in his undertaking. (It was not, however, an uncommon reaction to his own unlikelihood.)

He was several yards from the dying man when Mrs Roxburgh became aware of a terrible whooshing, like the beating of giant wings, infernal in that they were bearing down upon her more than any other being. Indeed, nothing more personal had happened to her in the whole of her life. For a spear, she saw, had struck her husband; it was hanging from his neck, long and black, giving him a lopsided look.

‘Awwwh!’ Ellen Gluyas cried out from what was again an ignorant and helpless girlhood.

Austin Roxburgh was keeling over. On reaching the sand his body would have re-asserted itself, but the attempt petered out in the parody of a landed shrimp.

‘Oh, no! No, no!’ It was the little skipping motion, of defeat in the attempt, which freed her; it was too piteous, as though all the children she had failed to rear were gesticulating for her help.

When she reached his side his eyes were closed, pulses could be seen palpitating beneath the skin, while the long black spear led a malignant life of its own.

At least there was no sign of blood.

‘Oh, my husband — my darling!’ She was blubbering, bellowing, herself the calf with the knife at its throat.

He opened his eyes. ‘Ellen, you are different. The light … or the brim of that … huge … country … hat . Raise it, please … so that I can see …

In her desperation she seized the spear and dragged at it, and it came away through the gristle in his neck. At once blood gushed out of the wound, as well as from the nostrils and mouth.

She fell on her knees.

‘I forgot,’ he said, rising for a moment above the tide in which he was drowning. ‘Pray for me, Ellen.’

She could not, would never pray again. ‘Oh, no, Lord! Why are we born, then?’

The blood was running warm and sticky over her hands. Round the mouth, and on one smeared temple, more transparent than she had ever seen it, flies were crowding in black clots, greedy for the least speck of crimson before the sun dried the virtue out of it.

Huddled on the sand beside a husband with whom the surviving link was his dried blood, Mrs Roxburgh had taken refuge inside the tent of matted hair which, hanging down, could be used to protect her face from the flies, as well as screen her to some extent from what might provoke a further wrench of anguish.

Had she been a free agent she would have chosen just then to succumb to the heat, the weight of her clothes, and numbness of mind, but heard a shot followed by an outburst of laughter, and raised the curtain enough to discover the reason why the second incongruous explosion should follow so closely upon the first.

The men, it appeared, had begun digging a trench in the sand in which to bury their late captain, scratching with their hands alone in a frenzy of application to create the illusion that they were occupied positively, while hoping that the officer who had joined them at their work might come up with some plan to reduce their plight. During it all, a youth named Bob Adams who had a record as a sawney, started digging with the butt of one of the impotent muskets. Which went off. Mr Courtney’s ally, Frank Runcie, cursed fearfully, and the officer himself used every word of a vocabulary to which his blunted authority entitled him.

It was a relief for the others to laugh. ‘At any rate, nobody stopped it!’ one fellow guffawed, and some of the others persisted in labouring the joke.

When Mrs Roxburgh glanced again, the sailors and officer had finished their game of sandcastles: Captain Purdew was decently disposed of, his tomb decorated with a pattern of the hand-prints of those who had shared his last trials. It did, however, face them with the problem of how to deal with the passenger whose wife sat mourning over him. Not one of them would have cared to intrude on the lady’s grief, least of all Mr Courtney, whose duty it was to take the lead and offer some form of condolence.

Mrs Roxburgh made no attempt to help, simply because she could not have been helped.

A solution was provided by the blacks’ return, the more dignified among them striding directly towards their objective, others capering and play-acting. The party of ineffectual whites was soon surrounded by the troop of blacks, all sinew, stench, and exultant in their mastery. One of them ripped the shirt off Mr Courtney, another the belt from Runcie’s waist.

Mrs Roxburgh might have felt more alarmed had any of their play concerned herself, but the natives seemed intent on ignoring a mere woman seated by her husband’s corpse. In the circumstances, she no longer felt constrained to turn her head or hide behind her hair. To the spectator, what was happening now was far less incredible or terrifying than the events leading up to it.

The blacks had begun stripping their captives garment by garment. One fellow’s skin was such a glaring white, the tuft of hair below his belly flared up like a burning bush. Mr Courtney’s testicles were long, slender, pathetic in their defencelessness. Because she had never been faced with a naked man, Mrs Roxburgh at this point looked away, and instead caught sight of her husband’s naked feet.

She hung her head, and wept for the one she had failed in the end to protect.

After much laughter and caracoling as they bore away their spoils into the scrub, the blacks returned and started driving their white herd, by thwacks and prodding, into the dense hinterland.

Watching her companions disappearing from sight, Mrs Roxburgh wondered what she could expect — probably very little, at best the luxury of lying down to putrefy beside her dead husband.

While the sun sank lower the landscape was subjected to a tyrannical beauty of deeper blue, slashed green, and flamingo feathers. She who had been reared among watercolours whimpered at this sudden opulence, the saliva running down her chin. There was almost nothing she might risk looking at, least of all her husband’s feet, austerely pointed at the luxuriant sky.

When again she heard voices and saw that some black women were approaching. A high chatter interspersed with laughter suggested a kind of game: the words tossed by the women into the cooling air could have been substitutes for a ball. This, Ellen Roxburgh sensed, was the beginning of her martyrdom.

The females advanced, six or seven of them, from hags to nubile girls. On arriving within a few yards of the stranger, one of the girls bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and flung it in the white woman’s face.

Mrs Roxburgh barely flinched, not because sustained by strength of will, but because the spirit had gone out of her. She was perhaps fortunate, in that a passive object can endure more than a human being.

Her tormentors were convulsed by their companion’s inspiration, and several others followed suit throwing sand, until one more audacious member of their set darted forward and dragged the prisoner to her feet.