Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She bowed her head, humbly as well as gratefully, for what she had been vouchsafed, and whatever God might have in store for her.

As she developed an aptitude for climbing trees she was sent in search of birds’ nests in addition to opossum. Not only fresh eggs, but the addled and fertilized were relished by the blacks. Sometimes she found honey-combs; the empty ones were in themselves a prize for the maggots and other insects in their disused cells, but a full comb was a major source of ecstasy, in which the blacks generously allowed her to share. When they had devoured the best of the honey, her masters would eke out their enjoyment by sopping up the dregs with bark rags. They would give their slave the honey-rag to suck when everyone else was satisfied and only a faint sweetness remained in the dirty fibre object. None the less, as she dwelt on memories of more delicate pleasures evoked by sucking the honey-rag, she might have swallowed it down had its owner not snatched it back.

She was submitted to worse humiliation when the women were searching their own and their children’s heads for vermin. They urged her to join them in their hygienic pastime. Nothing was wasted, and as her nails grew more skilful at crushing fleas and lice, she found her fingers straying to her mouth, then guiltily away, as they had if ever she was caught out picking her nose and disposing of the spoils when a little child.

Surely she could not sink any lower? A vision kept recurring of her friend Mrs Daintrey’s tea table, the Worcester service, the sandwiches filled with crushed walnut and cinnamon butter, and a tea-cake on its doily in the silver dish. At least it would never enter the heads of any of her acquaintance, not even Maggie Aspinall slopping her Madeira, that Mrs Roxburgh could sink to the level of bestiality at which she had arrived.

Sometimes seated cross-legged beside the coals she would snigger with imbecile lack of control at a situation as wretched as it was unalterable, and her long leathery breasts, not unlike brown, wizening pears, bumped against the hollowness inside her. As a result of which, she might fall to snivelling and whimpering, before attaining to the state of apathy she was resolved to cultivate. She must.

To add to her mental and moral confusion, a subtly different performance was expected of her in the role she had been assigned in the beginning. Whereas the women of the tribe continued to scratch and beat the slave, to relieve their feelings and spur her on to perform her duties, they submitted her also to ceremonies, and when released from their worldly preoccupations, treated her with almost pious respect. They anointed her body regularly with grease and charcoal, and plastered her cropped head with beeswax, and stuck it with tufts of down and feather as on the occasion when she was received into the tribe. They enthroned her on an opossum skin rug after smoothing it with their flattened hands, and sat in a semi-circle staring at her. Their faces were her glass, in which she and they were temporarily united, either in mooning fantasy or a mystical relationship. What the blacks could not endure it seemed, was the ghost of a woman they had found haunting the beach. They may have felt that, were the ghost exorcized, they might contemplate with equanimity the supernatural come amongst them in their own flesh. Yet they lowered their eyes at last; could it have been for recognizing their own shortcomings? Ellen Roxburgh accepted the possibility, and in her turn, looked away.

Members of other tribes, several of which must have shared the island, called on their neighbours at intervals to examine the phenonemon, their faces expressing incredulity, fear, envy, as well as worshipful respect for this demi-goddess temporarily raised from a drudgery which the blacks’ practical nature and their poverty-stricken lives normally prescribed. She played up to them. As she had conciliated Austin Roxburgh and his mother by allowing herself to be prinked and produced, she accepted when some elderly lady of her own tribe advanced to adjust a sulphur topknot; it might have been old Mrs Roxburgh adding or subtracting some jewel or feather in preparation for a dinner or ball.

What might have toppled the whole formal structure was a fever which frequently glittered in the divine as well as the human eye, stimulated less by the craving for food than by the forthright stench of male bodies, their hard forms prowling up and down, engaged in no discernible pursuit beyond that of stalking shadows.

God forbid! Not wholly bereft of her rational mind, Mrs Roxburgh would have expected disgust to protect her, yet knew too well that loathing can feed a fever; and now the skies, the goddess’s natural habitat, translated from watchet into peacock, and from peacock to flamingo, were what she had also to resist, along with the darkness in which human weakness plunges mortals.

During this time of tribal famine and individual fever, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that a play was being enacted round her, by the large, jowled woman, her chief tormentor among those who had discovered her alone on the beach, the big fellow who had driven the slave to shin up a tree and drag an opossum out of its nest, and the prettier of the two girls who had gone diving for lily-roots in the heat of the day. There was a night in particular when Mrs Roxburgh hoped she had no part in the play, the three evident protagonists of which were coming and going, prowling round the hummock on which she was sitting. Seated or lying, most of the others were too exhausted by hunger to notice. But herself became particularly aware of the flumping and stamping of pale soles beneath black feet, the smell of crushed ants and of armpits, the crackle of breaking sticks, and ejaculations of the roving actors.

She was forced at last to contribute to the action when the great warrior squatted beside her, placed the top of an index finger on one of her shoulders and drew the finger downward and across her body until it all but arrived at the nipple, to which it was obviously attracted.

At once the two aspirants for the fellow’s sinewy favours started a hissing and a chattering. Each of the women was armed, the girl with a club, her rival with one of the pointed sticks used for digging. Mrs Roxburgh might have experienced greater alarm had she provided more than the spark from which their emotional tinder took fire; she was but the indirect cause of the pandemonium which ensued.

Carried away by their jealous fury the two women were abusing each other. The man leaned against a tree and watched as though warming himself at the passions he had roused. When the more agile girl leaped at her rival and bashed her on the head so savagely that it was laid open. Bellowing with pain and rage the woman retaliated with such a jab that the yam-stick pierced the girl’s side below the breast. She fell without a sound, and the man saw wisdom in making off before anyone held him responsible.

There arose a frenzy of ear-splitting speculation as relatives of the contentious women rushed from different corners of the camp. The wounded victim was sat propped against a tree, from which position they could better examine the bloody mess her assailant had made of her scalp. Somebody brought a handful of charcoal and rubbed it in. Nobody finally seemed of the opinion that the deep gash was more than a superficial cut, though the woman moaned fearfully, and her complexion was drained of its black, leaving a sediment of dirty yellow. Eyes shut, she did not leave off grinding her head back and forth against the tree.

Dreadful shrieks from those in support of the young girl left Mrs Roxburgh in no doubt that she was dead. Yet she lay so naturally, her wound practically bloodless when the murderous stick was withdrawn from her side, her breasts so youthful and shapely, that she presented the same picture of grace and beauty as on the day when she rose laughing and spangled from beneath the quilt of water-lily pads.