Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

When she thought she could detect in the man’s gibberish the first semblance of an intelligible word. ‘Gee — a—jur — juk — juk — tch — ar — tchack!’

‘Your name is Jack?’ She all but wrung his hand from him.

‘Jack — CHANCE!’ He pronounced it ‘Chaunce’, and there followed a smile which the effort and a battered face could not prevent looking misshapen.

Gratitude and relief threatened to spill out of her eyes and mouth, but she managed instead, ‘My name is Ellen.’

He had withdrawn inside his leather mask, through the slits in which, eyes of a pale, drained blue were looking at her suspiciously.

‘We shall have to trust each other,’ she persisted. ‘Only bring me to Moreton Bay and I promise they’ll give you your pardon.’

The mask in wrinkled leather immediately set into a rusted-iron visor. ‘No —ppardons— for the likes a’ me. A stripe for every day since I bolted!’ He produced a noise which may have been intended as a laugh.

She realized she was still holding his hand and how cold and hard it felt in hers. He must be hard; the life he had been forced to lead could only have made a brute of him, if he were not one by birth.

Then the brute began shivering, and she dropped the hand lest his anguish should prove contagious.

‘They can’t refuse you a pardon — Jack — if you bring me to them. It would be unjust and unnatural.’

‘Men is unnatural and unjust.’

She was so desperate she cried out in anger. ‘They won’t dare! I am Mrs Roxburgh!’ Had she not temporarily lost her detachment she might have heard herself and disbelieved.

The convict evidently had. He looked her over quickly in the manner of a professional who could have made his first mistake, and disappeared through the trees in the direction of the hubbub and fires.

She had scarce time enough to indulge in self-pity, for two of the women came in search of her and dragged her with them, back to the scene of the festivities.

It was by now fairly dark, so that the fires, behind which the female blacks were seated in rows, burned more brilliantly. Somewhere about the middle of the dark assemblage the captive recognized the women of her own tribe. Here her companions led her, after considerable trampling between the rows of seated figures, and vocal protests and outright blows from those who were trampled over. The errant three were squeezed at last into the conglomerate, sweating mass.

From where Mrs Roxburgh found herself she saw there would be no opportunity for escape, either alone, or accompanied by the convict were he to experience a change of heart. If anything, she felt relieved. To have started screaming in a drawing-room would not have been worse than to return by the way she had come, between the rows of correctly seated black women.

As yet, there was not a man in sight, although from the surrounding dark, voices could be heard whenever women’s chatter and the roar and crackle of the fires allowed. As the fires heaved and resettled the sparks shot upward towards a sky pricked with their counterpart in early stars.

The women were growing impatient: they sighed, groaned, some of them shouted; the rows of seated figures swayed with what looked like an early stage in drunkenness.

Ellen Gluyas swayed with them as a matter of course. Pressed in amongst the black women, her body had begun, not disagreeably, to sweat.

The darkness erupted at last, hurling itself in distinguishable waves into the firelit foreground. White-ribbed men were stamping and howling the other side of the fiery hedge as they performed prodigious feats related to hunting and warfare.

The rows of women swayed in time with darkness, slapping their thighs, or in the case of the older, croaking grannies, the possum-skin rugs covering their string-and-paper thews.

Ellen Gluyas was swayed with them, although she would rather have joined the men, the better to celebrate what she was re-living. She was again dancing as they carried in ‘the neck! the neck!’ at harvest, and as she danced she twitched the corner of her starched apron. (It was, in fact, her recently renewed fringe of leaves.)

One of her neighbours looked at her askance, but only for an instant. They were all swaying seated melted together in runnels of light and sweat.

The dance performed by each successive tribe made its own comment. Now there was a great snake uncoiling, at first slowly, then in involuted frenzy. Arms worked so hard their elbows threatened to pierce the ochre-stippled chests behind them; black thighs in motion were all but liquid with reflected light.

The women swayed in time, and bowed, and swung their too-heavy heads, and righted themselves, and clapped or slapped, either with a smart sting of flesh or the muffled thump of opossum fur.

Dust rising made the captive sneeze. But she bowed her head and swayed in time. She slapped and moaned, and was carried away. She might have been carried further still had it not been for the sudden vision of Mr Roxburgh: his beard failed to conceal the wound in his throat through which the blood continued welling. (Or had they burnt him? In her drunkenness she could not be sure.)

She clapped and thumped and moaned, and bowed her head until it hung between her thighs. It inspired her neighbours to increased frenzy.

Her vision was making her cry out: one of his legs had been torn off at the hip; she could smell the smell of crackled skin.

Now when the great luminous ochre-scaled dripping snake had almost driven itself into the dust by its exertions, she saw upon raising her head that the tail’s hindmost vertebra was becoming detached.

There it was, wriggling and contorting of its own free will.

The women’s voices climbed, ‘Ulappi! Ulappi!’ to acclaim the dancer of everybody’s choice.

The captive woman bowed her head upon her splayed thighs, buried her face in her fringe of leaves, from which she might never recover herself.

When at last she sat up, her eyes were closed, her lips parted to receive — the burnt sacrifice? the bread and wine?

She knew that the man, this Ulappi, was dancing for her the other side of her clenched lids.

Possum tails attached by strings to his belt flumped and cavorted against his buttocks; even at a distance they stroked her skin with such delicacy she could barely distinguish fur from the wind in which it danced. There was less doubt about the hard chest she bumped against (‘what is “paps”, Mamma?’) the pig’s-bristles got by singeing, the channel down which the sweat poured, as far as the bronze cauldron where it was seethed and evaporated. As they whirled.

When she opened her eyes she saw her wishful partner submerged by a rushing wave of fresh dancers.

She lost interest, unless in the gristly neck of one seated in the row ahead, an old woman made conspicuous by red markings. Mrs Roxburgh thought to recognize the grandmother of the girl who had been killed for love. The day following the girl’s death, after the secret ceremony in the forest, the woman had blossomed red in mourning for her grand-daughter. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt more resentful, that her widowhood had not been formalized in red ochre, if widowhood, as she saw it embodied in Aunt Tite and old Mrs Roxburgh, were not a formality in itself. (Well, wasn’t it but another figure in the formal dance?)

Ellen sat picking at her fringe of leaves. The corroboree was over, except for the embers, the ashes, and the continued exchange of hoarsened voices. As the tribes detached themselves from one another she knew that her hoped-for rescuer would not re-appear.

Thus she was again saved from undertaking the hazardous journey to Moreton Bay. As her owners claimed her and led her away, she was persuading herself it was reason for relief rather than dejection to remain their chattel, when they came face to face with a second group advancing upon them as though by arrangement. She recognized by his topknot and the dilli containing the magic stone carried under one armpit, the physician, or wise man, or conjurer, who had failed to resurrect the dead child.