Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

He did not receive any, however. Mrs Roxburgh’s only thought was to fill the hollow of her own insides, and regardless of whether she might burst, to grab another slice out of the ashes if she were lucky and remained unnoticed.

This evening her every stratagem succeeded. Uncomfortably gorged, she rubbed her greasy hands with sand to appease a convention she faintly remembered through the veil of exhaustion hanging between herself and it. She was tolerably happy, happier in fact than the principal source of her unhappiness should have allowed. In ‘not remembering’ she continually recalled the incident of incalculable days ago. It seemed less unnatural, more admissible, if only to herself. Just as she would never have admitted to others how she had immersed herself in the saint’s pool, or that its black waters had cleansed her of morbid thoughts and sensual longings, so she could not have explained how tasting flesh from the human thigh-bone in the stillness of a forest morning had nourished not only her animal body but some darker need of the hungry spirit.

Her lips had not closed from brooding when the blacks started wrapping any scraps of dugong in wads of grass, gathered together their possessions, and departed in some haste for their camp on the other side. So she had to follow or be left behind in darkness. The blacks themselves she suspected of being afraid of the dark, and for that reason had taken the precaution of renewing the firesticks they were carrying with them on the journey. As they climbed the ridge separating the ocean from the straits, night was poised in readiness to close in upon them. Several times the travellers’ chatter broke, and was mended but diffidently. Silent consent seemed to call a halt beside a small lake, on the surface of which torch-light and the ghosts of their fleshly forms underwent a series of fearsome fluctuations. Their customary wailing, either of supplication or lament, which broke from the wayfarers at this juncture had never been more appropriate.

In Mrs Roxburgh’s case, appeased hunger had increased her daring, and she joined in with what began as a parody. If the desire to mock left her it was not through the failure of courage, but because the spirit of the place, the evanescent lake, the faint whisper of stirring trees, took possession of her. When the blacks resumed their flickering march almost in silence, she could smell their fear. If she too, flickered intermittently, it was less in fear than because she might have come to terms with darkness.

They reached the camp, and she stubbed a toe, and somebody pushed her with such force and complete disregard for decency that she bumped her head against a tree; and saw stars. Everybody recovered their irritability and their tongues on returning from the shades into what was safe and familiar. Little children left in the charge of the aged and the halt were running hither and thither, bleating like black lambs, before becoming re-united with their mothers. The family of the child they had buried continued to regard themselves as her official owners, an arrangement which indifference and lack of choice on her part gave her no reason to deplore. The hut filled with smoke and body-smells, and fleas, had never provided a more desirable home or the ground a more accommodating bed.

The camp fleas’ greed for human flesh might have dictated another move had there not appeared more significant reasons for removal. She could sense a restlessness in the air, actually visible at times in fingers of smoke tapering in the sky above the mainland trees. Not only this, but ambassadors from neighbouring tribes arrived with intelligence which elated those who received it and involved them in unusual preparations.

Men ordinarily engaged in sharpening and repairing their tools and weapons when not out hunting or fishing began building a flotilla of canoes out of bark sheets slit with stone knives from the trunks of certain trees. The observer became more engrossed than any of those engaged in the operation. She was both fired and fearful. If canoes implied a voyage to the mainland, she would be faced with coming to a decision more positive than any she had hitherto made in a life largely determined by other human beings or God: she must resolve whether to set out on the arduous, and what could be fatal, journey to the settlement at Moreton Bay.

For the time being, preparations for the sea-crossing and for the functions her adoptive tribe expected upon arrival were enough to blunten her forebodings. She was in any case well schooled in warding off her worst thoughts, and was made less vulnerable by the various and exacting labours her owners now demanded of her, such as carrying loads of bark upon her back, gathering firewood, minding babies, digging for a white clay in particular demand at this season. All of which she performed with what might have seemed to others who did not share the blacks’ preoccupations, the manner of one engaged in a secret mission. But there was nobody present sufficiently detached, or capable of interpreting what amounted to nervous excitement. She got the hiccups on one occasion from swallowing too fast a lump of glutinous possum flesh with the fur still attached to it. The black children laughed to hear her. They were growing to love their nurse, and initiated her into their games, one in particular which resembled cat’s-cradle, with a string spun from hair or fibre. Skill at cat’s-cradle was a talent she had never suspected in herself, but she won her children’s admiration by her ability to disentangle them. She indulged their every caprice, and received their hugs and their tantrums with an equanimity which approaching departure made it easier to maintain. She was at her blandest in searching for and mining the whitish substance which reminded her of Cornish china-clay. The gloves of fat and charcoal and accumulated filth which had become an habitual part of her dress were now streaked with white in addition. If her hands trembled as she grubbed the clay surrounded by peace and a chastened sunlight, her exertions could not have accounted for it.

The morning the tribe assembled for the crossing to the mainland was of a whitish blue intensifying as the fog lifted. It would have been a leaden soul indeed who failed to respond to the dash and glitter, the shouts and laughter of those who were embarking, the runaway wavelets feathering the straits, and a scent distilled by the wind out of smoke and rampant eucalyptus leaves. It was Mrs Roxburgh’s chief concern not to appear over-responsive.

They had seated the slave-nurse amidships, in a nest of children, between the two paddles of one of the larger bark canoes. Anticipation and the chill of morning had brought out the gooseflesh on her arms and shoulders and a blue glint in the whites of her eyes. That she did not feel colder was due to the warm bodies of the children heaped around her, their skins still smooth and bright, unblemished by the life which was preparing for them. From time to time she touched a head or stroked a cheek to allay the apprehension which had rendered her charges unusually silent. She could have eaten them on such a morning, but only when they were safe inside her allowed them to share her joy. Instead she pinched back the snot she saw oozing from a button nose, and the little boy started a caterwauling for an attention he had not experienced before. She laughed, and reassured him, ‘Dun’t tha knaw, love, I wudn’ harm ee?’ He understood her words even less than her offending behaviour, but quieted down in the absence of any alternative.

As they were propelled, plunging and rocking, over the water, the spray from the forward paddle was dashed repeatedly in their faces. Ellen sought to comfort her children with an example of spurious calm, because any display of her true feelings, her exultation and straining hopes, might have thrown them into a panic. Without apparent reason, she remembered how in other days she had been tormented by a dream both waking and sleeping, of a ship’s prow entering the cove (she had never yet while in her senses seen Tintagel) and how later still she had scratched the name upon an attic window, not out of affectation she thought, rather from frustrated desire. Now she had no desire beyond the simple wish for a ‘tay-drinking’ at the end of a fearful, still only theoretical, march.