Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

This was how he found her, breathless, goggle-eyed and half-blinded as she surfaced, hair plastered, shoulders gleaming and rustling with water.

He squatted at the water’s edge beside her heap of lily-roots. ‘When I rescued a lady,’ he shouted, ‘I didn’t bargan for a lubra .’

‘Wouldn’t go hungry, would ee?’ she called. ‘Even if tha was a gentleman.’

After which he slipped in, and was wading towards her as she retreated. It was sad they should destroy such a sheet of lilies, but so it must be if they were to become re-united, and this after all was the purpose of the lake: that they might grasp or reject each other at last, bumping, laughing, falling and rising, swallowing mouthfuls of the muddy water.

In the gaps between mangled lily-flesh he made the water fly in her face by cutting at it with the flat of his hand. She could not imitate his boy’s trick, but followed suit after a fashion by thumping the surface and throwing clumsy handfuls at him.

He caught her by the slippery wrists, and they kissed, and clung, and released each other, and stumbled out. Their aches were perhaps returning. He stooped and stripped a leech off her.

While they were lying on the bank resting, happily she would have said, her restlessness took her again as her eyes started roving over the branches of a tree a short distance from this sheet of provident water. She remembered how the blacks had fired her to climb a tree, to drag a possum out of a hole, and how, as she grew hardened, she swarmed up trees regularly in search of birds’ nests and wild honey. Much of this experience had been difficult and abrasive, when here was a tree furnished with branches almost as a ladder with rungs.

She could not resist it.

Jack the convict, her saviour-lover, must have been dozing. His hand gave like a weakened lock to allow her her freedom. She moved carefully, remembering, when she did not care to remember, that other hand on which she had trodden unintentionally. She did not wish to hurt this sleeping man who depended on her, and whom she truthfully loved.

She was soon climbing, breathing deep, planting her spongy, splayed feet on sooty rungs. She was rejoiced by the solitary nature of her undertaking at the same time as it released tremors of guilt from her. She continued climbing, and as she rose the sun struck at her through the foliage furbishing her with the same gold.

‘Hey! Ellen!’

Jack Chance too, was climbing, but she hardly dared look back in the direction of the ground. She was afraid of falling. (Or was it the broken hands? the rotted teeth?)

The branches immediately affected by her climb were vibrating and undulating round her like tasselled fans. Together with light and air, they were the allies of her recklessness. She was only half-aware when torn by the spikes with which the black trunk was armed. Once or twice she felt for her girdle of vines to assure herself that it held. At one point she dared glance down, and there was the ring jiggling on its cord, and not so far below her the crown of the convict’s head, darkened by water except where a whorl at the centre exposed the tanned scalp beneath.

Her throat contracted, was it from pity alone? The fact that she could outclimb the man made her less dependent on him. She experienced a second spasm which she could not pause to interpret; she was far too close to the tree’s crest. She had stuck her head out between the branches, and was clinging reeling and breathless before an expanse of haze.

Had she been alone she might have hung there indefinitely, swayed by the tree and her exultancy, but in the circumstances felt bound to warn, ‘Better climb no higher, Jack. Between us we may snap something.’ The common sense of it made her sound irritable.

He did not accept her advice, but seemed to become more stubbornly determined to stand beside her, or else to bring them down in a simultaneous descent, in a blaze of light and cataract of green, to be driven deep into the earth, still together.

‘Jack!’ Mrs Roxburgh shouted; it was becoming an order. ‘I forbid you! Such foolishness!’

Even so, he would not stop, and in her anger she descended to meet him. She must have stubbed part of his face with a toe, but she did not regret it. She would not have cared had she put out one of the brute’s eyes. She had no wish to die — not if her beloved, lawful husband were to expect it of her.

Upon arrival at the convict’s level, she panted, ‘Do you want to kill us?’ At that height the mast between them was still pliant enough to sway, though less alarmingly.

Exertion had dulled his eyes: they had never looked paler, nor more extinct. ‘Why — if you love me,’ she breathed, ‘will you not believe in my gratitude — and love?’

But she could not restore lustre to his eyes; perhaps it was the mention of gratitude. Though running sweat, his skin felt cold, which she now tried to warm, after sidling round the mast, by pressing against him as far as she could, by chafing, moulding with her free hand a flank, a shoulder, the sinews of his neck.

‘Jack?’ His lips were cold, and at their thinnest.

So Mrs Roxburgh frowned and sighed, and in her distraction looked out through the foliage.

‘Why,’ she cried, ‘that is surely a barn! Or a house, is it? Not that many miles off. Isn’t it a ploughed field? Oh, God be praised! It’s over!’

Before the tears rushed out of her eyes she had identified the cocoons or maggots which become sheep on consideration by one who has lived amongst them.

‘Aw, Gore!’ Ellen Gluyas bellowed; and blubbered softer, ‘Dear life !’ She had scarce undone the withy hurdle before they came pushing, scuffling past, their fuzz of wool teazing memory.

He was looking where she had directed his attention. ‘That’s a farm all right — at several hours walk, I’d say. That’s Oakes’s, I reckon. And beyond, in the distance, you can see the river. There was never such a vicious snake as Brisbane River.’

His voice might have sounded too flat, too evenly measured, had she given thought to it, but she could not wait to feel the ground under her feet. She slithered down. She was distressed thinking of her hair, still short enough to suggest it had been cropped as punishment for some crime she had committed.

‘Do you suppose they’ll take us for human beings?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked when he had rejoined her.

She could not stop touching her hair, her arms, her lashless eyelids, while he withheld from her the reassurance for which she was hoping. They reached the camp in silence.

Although evening was approaching, it was darker than it should have been; the light, the air foreshowed a storm.

‘At least we have food left over,’ Mrs Roxburgh pointed out. ‘We shall need all our strength for the last lap. Shouldn’t we eat before starting?’

‘Can’t you see there’s a storm’ll break at any moment?’

‘I’m not afraid of storms. There’s been too many.’ She had begun tearing at the left-over emu. ‘Eat!’ she commanded. ‘There’s plenty.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ he mumbled back.

Although tonight she first adopted a finical attitude towards her food, Mrs Roxburgh was soon gobbling the sinewy meat after wiping off a swarm of ants and any maggots. ‘All our strength,’ she repeated between mouthfuls.

He sat neither eating nor watching.

‘Oh, Jack,’ she called from a full mouth, ‘you are not — sulking, are you? Or is it the storm? Surely a man cannot be afraid of thunder and lightning?’

He did not trouble to answer.

Remorse pricked her for taunting him when she was pretty sure of the reason for his silence. She could never match his delicacy. Gluyas’s Ellen a regular gobble-gut — and otherways greedy slut . Self-knowledge caused her first to gulp, then to hiccup unmercifully.