Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Ellen Gluyas had not encountered a more unlikely situation since forced as a bride to face the drawing-rooms of Cheltenham. The difference in the present was that she had grown numb to hurt, and that those she had loved and wished to please could no longer be offended by her lapses in behaviour or her scarecrow person.

The party of women strolled round her in amazement at the spectacle; one or two were moved to pull her hair, unlike their own which had been hacked off within a few inches of the roots; the large woman with heavy jowls who had yanked her to her feet, caught sight of and started fingering her rings, their stones not entirely dulled by grime.

‘Take them if you want,’ Mrs Roxburgh insisted, and with no thought for whether she might be understood. ‘They no longer have any value for me. Do, please, take them. Only leave me my wedding ring.’

The natives glowered and cowered on hearing for the first time the voice of one who might have been a supernatural creature, so that the prisoner herself worked the rings off her swollen fingers and offered them on the palm of an outstretched hand.

The monkey-women snatched. An almost suppressed murmuring arose as they examined the jewels they had been given, but their possessive lust was quickly appeased, or else their minds had flitted on in search of further stimulus.

A young girl came up behind her and was tearing at her bedraggled gown. It required no special effort to remove the tatters. Petticoats provoked greater joy in the despoilers, but short-lived: the stuff was whipped off as lightly as a swirl of sea drift, leaving the captive standing in the next and more substantial layer, her stays.

Glancing down her front Ellen Gluyas recalled a certain vase on the mantelpiece of the room where old Mrs Roxburgh spent her days after her son’s bride was installed. Now that she was stranded under the most barbarous conditions on a glaring beach, the image of the slender-waisted vase, its opaque ribs alternating with transparent depressions, brought the tears to her eyes, if it was, indeed, the vase, and not its gentle owner, her hands of softest, whitest kid upholstered beneath with pads of crumpled pink.

So the daughter-in-law indulged herself to the extent of weeping a little; the little might have turned to more had not the black women whirled her about as they tore at her corset. She came to their assistance at last, to escape the quicker from nails lacerating her flesh.

She was finally unhooked.

Then the shift, and she was entirely liberated.

They ran from her trailing the ultimate shreds of her modesty, as well as the clattering armature, their laughter gurgling till lost in their throats or the undergrowth to which they had retreated.

Thus isolated and naked, Mrs Roxburgh considered what to do next. While still undecided, she stepped or tottered a pace or two backward and trod upon something both brittle and resistant. She glanced down the length of her white calf and noticed the hand with signet ring, of the one for whom she could do nothing more. She was propelled, logically it seemed, in the opposite direction, up the slope, and found herself amongst those burning mattresses of dry sand laced with runners of convolvulus such as she had noticed farther back along the beach.

She bent down and began tearing at the vines, in her present state less from reason than by instinct, and wound the strands about her waist, until the consequent fringe hanging from the vine allowed her to feel to some extent clothed.

Her only other immediate concern was how to preserve her wedding ring. Not by any lucid flash, but working her way towards a solution, she strung the ring on one of the runners straggling from her convolvulus girdle, and looped the cord, and knotted it, hoping the gold would not give itself away by glistening from behind the fringe of leaves.

It was her first positive achievement since the event of which she must never again allow herself to think. She might have felt consoled had she not caught sight of the aboriginal women returning.

They bore down, less mirthful, of firmer purpose than before. Their captive went with them willingly enough (what else could reason have suggested?) into the forest, which was at least dark and cool. If she sustained physical wounds from swooping branches, and half-rotted stumps or broken roots concealed in the humus underfoot, she neither whinged nor limped: the self which had withdrawn was scarcely conscious of them. What she did feel was the wedding ring bumping against her as she walked, a continual source of modest reassurance.

After but a short march the party of women reached an open space in which the other members of the tribe were encamped. Children left off skipping and playing at ball to examine what at first appeared to them a fearful apparition, until one by one they found the courage to touch, to pinch, some of them to jab with vicious sticks. The men on the other hand paid little attention to what they must have decided on the beach was no more than a woman of an unprepossessing colour. As males they lounged about the camp, conversing, mending weapons, and scratching themselves.

Nowhere was there any sign of the long-boat crew or their officer. Mrs Roxburgh felt she could not hope to see them again. As for her own future, she was not so much afraid as resigned to whatever might be in store for her. What could she fear when already she was as good as destroyed? So she awaited her captors’ pleasure.

Those who had brought her to the camp led her to a hut built of bark and leaves, at the door of which a woman, seemingly of greater importance than the others, was seated on the ground with a child of three or four years in her lap. Not anticipating favours, the prisoner passively resigned herself to inspection, but thought she detected a sympathetic tremor, as though the personage recognized one who had suffered a tragedy.

Whether it was no more than what Mrs Roxburgh would have wished, or whether harmony was in fact established, it but lasted until she noticed the child’s snouted face and tumid body covered with pustular sores. From time to time the little girl moaned fretfully, wriggling, and showing the whites of her eyes.

The women held a conference, as an outcome of which the oldest and skinniest among them approached Mrs Roxburgh and without ceremony squeezed her breasts. These were hanging slack, shapeless, fuller than was normal in preparation for her own child, which she should by rights have been feeding. Relieved of the necessity for making milk by the dead baby’s premature birth, she was pretty sure her breasts were dry; nor was the hag satisfied by her investigations.

The assembly of women, and more than anyone the mother, were none the less determined to transfer the sick child to the captive’s arms. The child herself left Mrs Roxburgh in no doubt that she was to become the nurse, for a mouth was plunged upon her right nipple, and the yawed hands straightway began working on her breast. Compassion inspired by the memory of her own attempts at motherhood was flickering to life, when her foster-child doused it beyond re-kindling. On discovering that she had been deceived, the little girl bit the unresponsive teat, and spat it out, and screamed and writhed in the nurse’s arms. Pain alone would have driven Mrs Roxburgh to drop its cause, but the mother’s looks dared her to, and the blows she received on her head and shoulders from the attendant women, persuaded her to keep hold of the wretch.

Presently, when she had quieted it, she seated herself on the ground beside a fire burning near the entrance to the hut, and hoped she might be, if not forgotten, at least ignored. She sat mechanically stroking the diseased arms, the greasy hair. An automaton was what she must become in order to survive.