Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The navigators paddled, first to one side, then the other. Smoke from the coals they carried to renew their fires on the farther shore stung Mrs Roxburgh’s eyes. Habit made her reach for a great orange-mouthed shell and start bailing the water they had shipped, in such insignificant quantities her action was hardly justified, and in any case they would soon be there. The green tinge invading bronze cheeks was arrested by a bark keel grating and bumping over sand.

The children jumped out and scampered off, the nurse accepting that they had no further need for her. She had done her duty by them, and would soon be faced with a graver duty towards herself.

In the meantime she was too busily employed helping carry tackle from the boats, and soon dazed besides by the glare from the mounting sun, the sultry pall of stationary air, and the press of strangers from the mainland tribes already foregathered. The foreign blacks were as importunate as the ants crawling up her legs, but where the ants stung, their human counterparts pinched, poked, and breathed upon the phenomenon from the island, who was spun about by her owners in their determination to display a rare possession. In fact, while the camp was not more than half pitched, some of the women interrupted her labours and took her aside, to plaster her head afresh with beeswax and decorate her hair with tufts of down and yellow topknots so that she might appear at her best. She was again brought forward and put on show. The blacks were for the most part lost in open-mouthed wonder as they examined the exhibit from every angle, but a flock of big white parrots alighted on a neighbouring tree, shrieking and discoursing, their sulphur crests raised in disapproval of a monster such as might have roused the derision of country folk at a fair.

Mrs Roxburgh was relieved when allowed to resume her menial duties of digging ditches and gathering firewood.

In the course of the day, incoming tribes joined those already encamped, who greeted the new arrivals with bursts of wailing, to signify joy it would seem, whereas she had only ever sensed in the chorus at morning and evening the doubts and forebodings of a troubled spirit.

She kept to herself as much as she could throughout the day, but was grateful when her children expected her to pick up the pieces after a quarrel or take part in their sporadic games.

Many of the mainland blacks were endowed with a physical grandeur which made the islanders look runtish, but every one of them was hideously scarred by incisions which could only have been deliberately inflicted, in patterns which distinguished one tribe from another. The women, unless adolescent girls, were all either plodders, or innately dejected souls who disguised their true nature under a contralto cheerfulness. These latter were the most inclined to pinch or pull.

Mrs Roxburgh longed for night, except that she would then be forced to consider an escape which terrified her.

As night approached she saw that the blacks were planning celebrations of some kind. There was a continual weaving and interweaving of their paths while the air fizzed and crackled as though with invisible sparks of anticipation. Some of the men already danced and postured, struck one another, recoiled, and laughed. They roamed, or squatted together in chattering circles, and resumed their stalking, their sinews as tense as their eyes looked feverish.

One giant of a fellow, a natural clown by any standards, would twirl, and leap in the air slapping his heels, and entertain those within earshot of his patter. She could tell that he was respected and envied. What most distinguished him from his companions was an axe, or hatchet, which he wore in his woven belt. She wondered how he had come by his hatchet. It was much coveted by the other blacks, who would stroke it, and some of them attempt to prise it away from the owner.

But the giant was equal to their cunning. He would slap down pilfering hands, and leap expertly out of reach, keeping up the gibberish which made others laugh.

She admired him for his agility and enjoyed the jokes she could not understand. When he disappeared from sight the axe-head continued glinting in her mind. It was plunder such as might have fallen to any black from any wreck — that of her own unhappy experience included. But she would have liked to know where he got the hatchet.

Then, during one of his leaping turns, she found herself so close to the clown she realized that what she had taken for conventional scars were unlike those left by tribal incisions. The expanse of the man’s back was covered with what appeared to be a patternless welter of healed wounds.

She had been digging a drain round one of the freshly erected huts. She hung her head above the earth she was heaping at the base of a bark wall. She knew that she was breathless, and not from physical exertion.

When she looked again, the man leaped, and was lost in the crowd. He did not return, perhaps having finished his display, and she was left with her vision of a ‘miscreant’ according to the doctrine of her brother-in-law Garnet Roxburgh.

As the light was gathered in, the trampling increased, the coming and going, the stench of ants and bruised leaves and human bodies. The women had begun lighting fires, not to cook a meal, but rather to illuminate a ritual of some kind. The slave was expected to contribute fuel. Carrying her bundles of sticks she had resumed her habitual state of mind, of dull indifference. The darkening scrub was alive with male figures, prinked with feathers, streaked with clay of various colours. She now understood why she had been put to grubbing clay on the days preceding their departure from the island; her own tribesmen were white-streaked. Some of the men, when she came across them face to face, were wearing slender bones stuck through the cartilage separating the nostrils. The bones made them look especially fierce, but there was no reason why their fierceness or splendour should impress her. They were none the less superb, as their women did not fail to recognize, while humbly building, then kindling, and stoking the fires.

In a pause from her labours Mrs Roxburgh had gone into deeper scrub for the simple purpose of urinating. She had barely finished squatting when, to the embarrassment of each, she saw the great pseudo-black approaching. In the dusk the axe-head resting on his belt was more than ever a focus point. It convinced her that the man was some escaped prisoner who had taken up with a black tribe and probably acquired their more horrid ways to add to his natural propensities.

At the same time the longing to speak again with someone of her own kind (if such he could be called) produced in her throat and side a felted chuffing almost as distressing as more dangerous symptoms.

The man came straight towards her, and when they were but a few yards apart, was brought to a halt. She saw that, in spite of his size and strength, his shanks, his dangling hands, were trembling.

To help him out of his difficulty she said to him in her native tongue, ‘Where’s tha from, eh?’ then, on remembering who she was supposed to be, she sternly asked, ‘Are you a Christian?’

The man stood mouthing sounds, like an idiot, or one in whom time or shock had destroyed his connection with the past.

Her hopes shrank. Where she had glimpsed for an instant the possibility of rescue, it now seemed as though it was she who must become the saviour, not of a rational being, but a lost soul.

‘If you can’t tell me who you are,’ she babbled breathlessly, ‘perhaps you will still be able to help me’ and stepping forward, she took him by the hand.

The man might have been struck. His formless mumbling loudened, in the course of which saliva flew out from between his lips, almost as though he were taken by a fit. But she had reached a stage where she could not have felt frightened, nor disappointed, only detached from everything that had ever happened or might still be in store for her. She had been rendered as impervious as lead, and would sink, if necessary, without a qualm.