Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The hiccups became downright violent when she noticed an aged aborigine standing at no great distance. He must have discovered them by accident. Too old and too frightened to effect an immediate retreat he was now fearfully observing them.

Jack Chance lost no time, but tried to make the stranger feel at home by talking with him. The old man replied only by desultory murmurs.

‘What does he want?’ she rasped between her hiccups.

The convict did not interrupt his attempts at conversation. If the aborigine kept his silence, he appeared gravely entranced by his vision of food.

Presently the convict hacked off part of the carcase with his axe. The old man silently accepted the meat, hid it under his bark shift, and left them by walking backwards.

In her nervous state Mrs Roxburgh was exasperated. ‘What did he say ?’

‘We couldn’ understand each other good. His tribe is camped farther to the west. So it seems.’

‘But we should have held him!’ Nobody could accuse her of thinking ‘killed’ because they could not read her thoughts, or if they were to, she had grown, most understandably, agitated. ‘Now he will go back, and they will come and murder us unless we make a start at once.’

He reminded her that the blacks feared to travel by night, and that the storm would make them even less inclined.

She might have been convinced and pacified if her opinion of herself had not sunk so low. It was the hiccups too, which continued to rack her, and the swags of cloud billowing black almost upon the crests of the trees, and the wind which had risen, threatening to snap any but the stoutest trunks. She wished she was still the girl who understood the moods of nature through close association with them, or the lady she had studied to become, acquiring along with manners and a cultivated mind a faith in rational man (whether a condemned felon, or even that fragile gentleman her late husband answered this description, she was not sure). In the circumstances Mrs Roxburgh could only crawl inside a bush shelter and hope that Divine Providence would respect her predicament. She might also have wished to remain alone, but could hear Jack Chance the convict crawling in behind her.

Soon afterwards the wind fell. The rain which took over from it lashed at the dry earth and at the twigs and ineffectual leaves overhead. It was not long before the nakedness of the creatures huddled together inside the hut was completely sluiced.

During a pause in the watery onslaught Mrs Roxburgh ventured, ‘We shall never sleep, Jack. We’ll be too soaked and wretched for that. It would be more reasonable to push on and reach the farm.’

Curled on his side, he ignored her.

‘If there is a moon.’ She could not remember how much of a moon they might expect.

What she did see was the lamp standing on a farmhouse sill; she heard the people getting out of bed, running to the door, welcoming one of their own kind.

She chewed at a thumb-nail until she found herself biting on the quick.

‘You’re no company,’ she complained, ‘when we’ve every reason for celebrating.’

At least the rain had poured itself out; the storm was passing; a steely glimmer instead of total obscurity should have heartened the survivors in the hut.

Mrs Roxburgh had survived so much, she yawned and said, ‘I believe I look forward more than anything to my first mouthful of tea — from a porcelain cup.’ Then, to jolly her servant, she asked, ‘Do you enjoy your tay, Jack?’

He could only bring himself to mump, ‘It’s too long since I tasted what you’d call tea. At the settlement, ’twas no more ’n green stuff — sticks — if the crowminder ever smuggled us a pinch.’

‘What else, then,’ she tried again, ‘that you can remember? that you will ask for?’

She might have been coaxing her child, and at last, it seemed, she had roused him into taking an interest. ‘A dish o’ boiled beef. With the wegetables to it. And praps a ’ot dish o’ peas in addition.’

He was a simple man, and she could never help but feel fond of him.

She was smiling to herself for her own munificence as much as for the hearty meal her companion conjured up, when he cut her down. ‘Askin’ is all very well, but receivin’’, he reminded, ‘is a different matter.’

Whereupon, he broke.

She was alarmed to hear him sobbing like this in the dark and wet. ‘But my dear — my darling,’ she was pawing at the little child he had become, ‘you know I’ll make it up to you for all you’ve suffered. Nobody would do more for you,’ she herself was by now crying into the nape of his sopping neck, ‘not even Mab.’

She succeeded in forcing him round until he faced her. She was holding him close, against the wet flaps of her withered breasts: her little boy whom she so much pitied in his hopeless distress.

He did in fact nuzzle a moment at a breast, not like an actual child sucking, more as a lamb bunting at the ewe, but recovered himself to expostulate, ‘Mab is the reason why I’m ’ere in the Colony.’

‘Mab? How?’

‘I killed ’er. I slit ’er throat.’

They were shivering, shuddering, in each other’s arms.

‘That’s why I’m doin’ me life term.’

‘Perhaps there’s a reason’, she chattered, ‘why you’re not to blame.’ If there were not, they would have to find one, that no one should accuse her of complicity, in coupling with this murderer.

‘There’s often reason why the condemned is not to blame, but the law don’t always reckernize it — not what it don’t see written down.’

His arms tightening around her as though to impress an injustice on her, implicated her more closely with his crime.

‘Was she not — true to you?’ Mrs Roxburgh not only gasped, she had good reason to hesitate.

‘No. She was not. Mab, I found, had took up with a young feller, a sword-swallower — and fire-eater. The night I caught ’em at it, ’e got away. Mab was the one ’oo was outfaced. Praps she thought she could remind me of what she was worth by simply throwin’ back the sheet and showin’ me ’er wares. She didn’t persuade me, as it ’appened. ’Er fancy boy ’ad left behind the tools of ’is trade when ’e made ’imself scarce, and that’s ’ow Mab—’ow both of us struck unlucky.’

The night had quietened, except for a solitary floating bird and sudden freshets from an aftermath of rain.

‘Do yer believe I was guilty? Eh?’ Her monstrous child was prodding and pummelling at her to hear her pronounce his innocence.

His demands became more peremptory, the wet hands more positively determined on remission.

She thought, and said, ‘I believe many have murdered those they love — for less reason.’

At once he removed his hand from her throat, and began plastering her with kisses, wet from rain as well as slobbery with relief.

‘There, Ellen! There! I knew we’d understand each other.’

But did they? Now that they were again lovers he might suspect her of faithlessness, and kill her in the night with his little axe.

She wished she might die painlessly, then again knew that death was her last wish. As he grappled her to him in the wet dark she only hoped she might live up to his expectations.

When he had taken his pleasure, he said abruptly, ‘Your heart isn’t in it, Ellen. It’s like as if you’d went dead on me.’

‘Oh,’ she moaned, ‘my bones are aching!’

‘Not more, I would of said, than at other times.’

‘You mustn’t expect too much of me. You know it’s Mab you love still.’ There was no longer any reason why she should speak with bitterness.

He continued stroking her, but absently.

‘The night I finished Mab I didn’ know what I was doin’ at first. It didn’t strike me that the young feller might warn the family where she lodged, of the scot I was in. Or the people might hear of ’emselves and come to look. Not that they did. I reckon the sword-swallower must have scuttled quick an’ quiet, glad to be out of a nasty mess. Mab, I dunno. She accepted what was comin’ to ’er. She made no sound or move, even when she must of knowed it was the real thing.’