Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

As the men departed with an arrogance proper to a mission of importance, Mrs Roxburgh was ready to throw in her lot with the depressed women, when they suddenly descended upon her for some calculated purpose. Three of them seized her by the hair, stretching it to full length, even yanking at it for extra measure, while one beefier female began hacking at the roots with a shell.

The unexpectedness of the operation and the pain it caused made the victim cry out. ‘Leave off, can’t ’ee?’ Ellen Gluyas shrieked, and then, as Mrs Roxburgh took control, ‘Why must you torture me so? Isn’t it enough to have killed my husband, my friends?’ She was about to add, ‘Kill me too, rather than hurt me,’ but knew at once that she did not want to die.

After forcing her down on her knees her tormentors continued hacking and sawing. Between the shell and the efforts of those who were assisting, and who leaned back fit to tear out the hair by the roots, they got it off. Recovered enough from her pain and fright (at one stage she thought she might faint) the victim put up a hand and found she had become a stubbled fright such as those around her, or even worse. From the bloodied hand returned to her lap she knew she could only look horrifying.

But the women had not finished their work. They dragged her to her feet. Next the hide of some animal was brought, filled with a rancid fat with which they smeared their passive slave; she could but submit to her anointing, followed by an application of charcoal rubbed with evident disgust, if not spite, into the shamefully white skin.

Although nauseated by the stench, her sunburn smarting from the friction of the charcoal, she was beginning to feel after a fashion clothed, when again she was forced down upon her haunches. A young girl fetched a woven bag containing what could have been beeswax, with which they plastered her bleeding scalp. From a second, similar reticule, an old woman produced down by the handful and bundles of feathers. She could feel the old, tremulous fingers patting the down, planting the feathers in her wax helmet. An almost tender sigh of admiration rose in the air as the women achieved their work of art.

Laughter broke out, a stamping of grey-black feet, a clapping of hands. Only the work of art sat listless and disaffected amongst a residue of black down and sulphur feathers shaped like question marks.

If they had made her the object of ritual attentions, they had not forgotten her practical uses. Again pulled to her feet, the slave was loaded with paraphernalia, and last of all, the loathsome child, heavier it seemed than the evening before.

Their setting out was less ostentatious than that of their men. From the first moment they plodded, but no less purposeful for being flat-footed. Instead of spears they carried long, pointed sticks. They chattered unceasingly and with apparent cheerfulness. Now and then somebody thought to prod the slave; in more usual circumstances it might have hurt, here it served to punctuate the monotony. She looked down once and saw the pus from her charge’s sores uniting with the sweat on her own charcoal-dusted arms.

Disgust might have soured her had it not been for a delicious smell of dew rising from the grass their feet trampled and the bushes they brushed against in passing. The sky was still benign. Were she presently to die, her last sight, her last thought, would be of watered blue.

But she would not, must not die — why, she could not imagine, when she had been deprived of all that she most loved and valued.

Arrived at their destination, the women threw off their loads and started jabbing the ground with the sticks they had brought. She too, was encouraged to join in the search for what proved to be a kind of tuberous root. Any they unearthed were popped inside the net carry-alls. Although unskilled, aching, and still shocked by the operation to which she had been subjected earlier that morning, she was relieved to be rid of the child while digging, and free to indulge in the luxury of her own thoughts: a potato-cake she remembered frying on a bitter night of her impoverished youth; an aigrette with a diamond mount she had worn in her hair to a ball; Oswald Dignam’s milky skin seen throught the weft of fog at sea. She encouraged random images rather than consecutive thought, which might have driven her to search for a cause or reason for her presence in a clueless maze.

Something of the maze was indeed suggested by the natives’ movements, meandering over the hard earth, crossing and recrossing one another’s tracks in their interminable search. Yet the black women’s fate was not so far determined by invisible walls that science and experience could not guide them; their probing was almost invariably attended by success, while the benighted slave stabbed the ground more often than not fruitlessly.

The sun’s weight upon her shoulders replacing the weight of the child in her arms, she grew to hate the hard grey earth with its tufts of wiry, dead-seeming grass, although in the course of wandering from patch to patch, she realized she was beginning to develop a skill in ‘potato’-sticking, and when one of her companions looked in her direction, she laughed with pleasure for her discovery. Overcoming her instinctive suspicions the black woman laughed back. Both fell silent after this exchange, partly since their shared emotion had been but imperfectly conveyed, more because pleasure had to succumb to the demands of drudgery.

During the heat of the day the company rested in the shade beside one of the several lakes watering their country. Two inexhaustible girls shed the fibre shawls they wore and started diving for lily-roots. The prisoner narrowed her eyes, lulled by the contrast of shade and glare and her vision of the two swimmers, their slender arms and still shapely breasts regularly rising above an undulating sheet of water-lilies.

She may have dozed, but only briefly. She awoke to find the child was being restored to her arms, where it immediately resumed its grizzling.

The whole of life by now revolved round the search for food, which her own aggravated hunger made seem the only rational behaviour. It was in any case what she had accepted as the answer to the hard facts of existence before she had been taught the habits and advantages of refinement. Consequently when some of the hunters returned to the camp that evening with the carcase of a kangaroo slung from a green pole, and a detachment appeared from the direction of the shore, several glistening monsters dangling by the gills from the hooks of their fingers, she would have joined the other women, childlike in their shrieking and hand-clapping, had it not been for the child in her arms.

As for this actual child, its snouted face had a dead look. Or was it what she hoped to see? Were she to be honest, she did wish the creature dead, even though its owners might accuse her of casting a spell.

She looked about her. Everybody was too engrossed in preparing for the evening’s feast to intercept their slave’s evil thoughts.

The child stirred, jerked awake, and stuck a finger in her nurse’s eye.

Tonight again, the prisoner was offered no more than scraps: a bone to gnaw, a fragment of the beast’s scorched hide to chew or suck, acts which she performed while aware of her own ugly greed and the filth which had become an accepted part of her blistered hands. She was comforted, however, by the smells she snuffed, the fat she licked, and her saliva trickling down her throat into a wizened stomach.

Had her stomach been less shrunken she might have been made unhappier by unassuaged hunger when, later that night, lying in the hut, in the ashes from the fire, alongside the family to whom she was assigned, she was forced to listen to three women taking their turn to satisfy (or so it sounded) a man’s demands. Her own prospects would have given her greater cause for alarm had she not felt that the spiteful nature of her mistress must resist any move on her husband’s part to add to his seraglio.