Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

A bird was calling; or was it warning?

It did in fact call her attention to voices at the foot of the hill, their volume amplified by morning stillness. They were men’s voices, growing louder, more cacophonous, as they approached the summit. Sometimes the babble was cut by the terser tone of orders, or again, by curses, in a different key. Mrs Roxburgh should not have felt panic-stricken; it was what she had wished in her heart, she realized: however painful the collision might prove, she was drawn to the companions of the man she may have wronged.

The gang mounting the hill through the scrub were now so close she distinctly heard the clanking of irons, the rustle of chains. Her impulse was to draw aside and remain the unseen observer, but fear, remorse, or some hellish desire to participate again in what she already knew through the experience of suffering, caused her to stand rooted to the track where the men would pass.

Heads were bowed as they struggled on towards her, so that they were not immediately faced with what must at a glance appear an illusion. The two guards preceding the chain-gang were the first to catch sight of the woman in black. They stiffened and gasped, jerking their muskets to the ready as though preparing to defend the prisoners against a rescue. Then the leaders of the convict file threw up their heads like so many dun-coloured animals. Startled into an abrupt halt, they could not avoid jolting their dependants into disarray; curses flew as body thumped against body and head cannoned off head.

Mrs Roxburgh roused herself to draw aside. All down the line, faces were feeding on the apparition. The mouth of one bumpkin of a guard was quivering in his fiery cheeks; another, of less sanguine cast, had buttoned up his lips in disapproval or disbelief. The prisoners’ expressions showed them either devouring the present with overt lust, or else exhuming the buried past with despair for what they re-discovered. As for Mrs Roxburgh, she was united in one terrible spasm with this rabble of men, their skins leathery above the unkempt whiskers, eyes glaring with hatred when not blurred by cataracts of grief, hands pared to the bone by hardship. She recognized it all, and over it, that familiar stench of foxes. If there were scars, at least they were hidden by the felons’ dress; nor would she feel their bodies shudder while asleep in her arms, though the rustle of never-motionless chains conveyed a distrust which no passion or tenderness of hers could ever help exorcize.

Then she realized that an uproar had broken out around her; the bush kindled, crackled and spat beneath the shower of oaths, ribaldry, laughter, and gusts of frustrated desire to which it was being subjected.

One fellow shouted, ‘I jobbed it inter better than ’er at ‘Ounslow, an’ got the pox for it.’

‘Ay, you can never tell where the pox lies.’

‘It could lie with me, I don’t mind tellin’ yer, Billy, if there was any chance uv runnin’ the colours up the bloody flagstaff.’

One of the guards had taken his musket-stock to the prisoners.

‘This is no place, ma’am, for a lady,’ the corporal-in-charge advised her in a wavering voice. ‘Better go down to the settlemen’.’

Mrs Roxburgh regretted having forgotten her veil. She hardly knew what she murmured in reply to the corporal. Whatever her feeble remark, it was drowned in the torrents of abuse, warnings, simulated farts, and above all, the sound of blows. She started walking as quickly and smoothly as her skirt and the sticks littering her path allowed, but had not escaped the length of the linked prison file when one of those she was passing, turned and spat. She felt his spittle trickling down her cheek.

The increased hullabaloo might have humiliated her worse had it not been partly her intent to submit herself to humiliation as punishment for her omissions and shortcomings. She was punished and humiliated none the less. As she dragged her skirt over the stones and tufts of uncharitable grass, it saddened her to think she might never become acceptable to either of the two incompatible worlds even as they might never accept to merge.

She went on, wiping the man’s spittle from her face, and after negotiating a sluggish creek, regained what the inhabitants doubtless regarded as the streets of their township. By now she should have felt liberated from her own morbid thoughts and intentions, free to return to the Commandant’s hospitable house, its citrus groves and pretty children, had she not sensed the approach of a second trial, as unavoidable as the first in that it was of her heart’s choosing.

What she presently perceived could only be the party of women prisoners marching from the female factory towards the hospital where they worked by day. Their progress was less regimented than that of the male felons. The soldiers accompanying them were but token guards. In one instance she suspected the man’s compliance to be the return for services rendered. The fellow strolled rather than marched, chatting to the girl beside him with the familiarity and lack of further expectation which informs many a marriage. There was no immediate evidence of the rampant hatred and despair which distinguished the male prisoners from human beings, but as the women drew closer, in their dust-toned, ill-fitting uniforms, their appearance grew more slovenly, their pace ragged and out-of-step. Their laughter was doubtless directed at the stranger; an individual giggle, rising shrill above the general mirth, made it more pointed.

Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head. Her meeting with the women could prove more disturbing than her brush with the men, since women, particularly those who have been persecuted, are more resentful of another woman’s intercepting their thoughts and mingling with their fantasies. The women would no doubt dread that she, a stranger and a lady , should visualize their more obscene dreams, their substitutes for frustrated love, the tenderness shared with a husband in his absence, or their ploys to attract a current lover.

The distance separating her from the women was so diminished that neither side could avoid appraisal. For her part, she could see that some of the faces had died, while the life which remained in others showed every sign of hopelessness, brazen defiance, or passive depravity. The women stared back at their accuser (she could only be that) from eyes bolstered on pouches of skin, in bloated cheeks, their mouths hinged on incredulity and bitterness. Any remnant of sweetness or beauty looked as though it depended on hypocrisy for its continued existence.

One young woman of noticeably Irish countenance, black, frowzy ringlets, and lashes so thick they could have been beaded with flies, greeted the stranger jauntily. ‘Mornun, mum. The freedom of a walk is somethun I reckon we all of us can share and enjoy, on such a day.’

The others, with the exception of those who had died, hooted in appreciation of their companion’s audacity. The guards laughed with them. Though her words had the sting of irony, she spoke with such immense good humour no one could accuse her of insolence.

Mrs Roxburgh hesitated at the side of the road. She would have liked to speak to the questionably cheerful Irishwoman, to have taken her hands and held them in hers, and after some fashion conveyed to her, how they had both aspired and lost; when the loose ranks were jostled forward, and the woman’s last glance, bereft, yet curiously consolatory, suggested that they might have understood each other.

The prisoners marched on in the awful abandon of their coarse frocks, wrinkled boots ploughing the dust, while Mrs Roxburgh humbly turned in the direction of the Commandant’s ‘residence’.

Here an immediately recognizable figure was emerging from the gates. True to her nature, Miss Scrimshaw was investigating something or other. In her brown gown, her padded hair, her bobbled shawl, she stood looking out from the lee of a straight hand.