Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The chaplain was halted.

‘If I was given a soul, I think it is possibly lost,’ she said.

Mr Cottle appeared to poise himself on the balls of his feet inside his large-size army boots. ‘If that is the case, I suggest you might be recovered for the faith here in our Moreton Bay communion.’

Mrs Roxburgh confessed, ‘I was never able to live up to all that others expected of me.’

‘Humility has its peculiar rewards, as you will realize if you join us. It will rejoice your heart only to hear the men doing justice to the hymns.’

‘Have you a church at the settlement? I’ve not noticed one on my walks.’

‘No,’ he told her, ‘we haven’t, as yet. Our services are held in a hall at the prisoners’ barracks.’

‘I could hardly worship under the eyes of prisoners, some of them condemned for life.’

‘You would not see them, Mrs Roxburgh. You would sit at the front of the congregation, with the Commandant and Mrs Lovell and the officers of the garrison. The prisoners are ushered in after the arrival of the official party, and are seated at the rear of the hall, where the guards keep a close watch on them. You will have nothing to fear, I assure you.’

‘Only my conscience, and that can be more terrifying than any unseen criminal.’

The chaplain’s lips moved wordlessly until he managed, ‘In case you might find it more to your liking, I ought to mention a small unconsecrated chapel built by an unfortunate individual with whom you are already acquainted — Pilcher of Bristol Maid , now employed at the Commissariat. Soon after his arrival here, he started working, in his own time and with his own hands, to build this chapel, which some might call a folly. It is not commendable as architecture, but I do not doubt the sincerity of the builder’s intention. It might appeal to you, Mrs Roxburgh.’ His eye grew hectic as he thought he might have penetrated this Cornishwoman’s opacity and reached the quietist inside.

But Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘I would not care to break in upon Mr Pilcher’s prayers.’

‘It can be arranged, if you wish. He’ll be flattered to feel you take an interest in him and his creation.’

Mrs Roxburgh smiled, but her expression had more of sadness in it. For a moment, but only a moment, Mr Cottle feared he might have floundered out of his depth. Then his faith flung him a lifeline, and he sprang to, and stationed himself in the centre of the carpet, determined to effect the rescue of a fellow being bent on spiritual immolation.

‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ he announced, ‘I am going to ask you to join me in a short prayer. Let me but guide you, and like many others, you will find that Jesus is expecting you.’

Mrs Roxburgh sat looking petrified. ‘I’ve forgotten the language!’ her stone lips eventually ejected.

Now that the spirit was working in him the evangalist was not to be discouraged. He had got down upon his knees, from where his military boots, the best fit the Commissariat could provide, looked more noticeably roomy, his fluttered eyelids whiter and more exposed in their closure.

Still seated, her hands on her sash, Mrs Roxburgh could feel herself looking desperately brutish.

But the chaplain had begun to pray, ‘Our Lord and Maker — you who have shown mercy to one whose life was most grievously threatened, lighten I pray you, a heavy heart, and spare the soul its torments real or imagined …’

Suddenly it was the chaplain who found himself most grievously threatened: the other side of his devout eyelids the Cornishwoman had started to scream.

‘What — yes, it is! Don’t let them, for God’s sake! They’ll flay the skin off ’is back. They’ll beat the soul out of ’n — and that’s worse, a thousand times, than killing a man!’

Still on his knees, Mr Cottle had opened his eyes, to see the woman who was also Mrs Roxburgh screeching like a peacock in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour; while out of the distance, from across the creek, through the humid ranks of lemons, shaddocks, citrons and guavas, the voice of a human being answered or appealed in such unearthly tones the chaplain might not have realized had his intended convert not drawn his attention to them.

‘Go!’ she screamed. ‘Do! Do! We can — surely? Oh, we must!’

The chaplain could feel her nails eating into the wrist she had torn from its prayerful attitude. Her insistence allowed him little dignity as he tottered to his feet in his wretched boots.

‘Dear Mrs Roxburgh,’ his voice trembled from arriving at the upright in double time, ‘this is a penal settlement for hardened criminals. Captain Lovell is humane by comparison with his predecessor. But punishment must be administered, in certain cases, when it is due.’

He could feel the blood trickling down his wrist where she had siezed him.

‘I advise you,’ he continued, but need not have bothered: she had slipped from him, and was lying stretched on the parlour carpet.

So the chaplain at least was freed, and went, mopping his forehead, his eyes, his hectic cheeks, in search of ladies who might take charge of the hysterical female who had frightened him not only at his prayers, but also almost out of his wits.

It was Miss Scrimshaw who informed Mrs Roxburgh a while later that she had gone off in a faint. The latter lay on her bed looking up at the white ceiling. Miss Scrimshaw herself was white-lipped within her brown complexion, for the scene she had recently witnessed had been a most distressing one: sobbing children, flustered servants, her friend Mrs Roxburgh stretched out cold in her rucked-up muslin. In calmer circumstances the picture might have appealed to the spinster’s cool eye and æsthetic sense as a somewhat unorthodox Dormition. Now the chaplain alone, twitching inside his shabby tunic, prevented her appreciating what she saw.

Miss Scrimshaw could not care for this small cleric of an evangelical persuasion. She admired large men, handsome officers in His Majesty’s Services, and those other officers of the cloth, if large too, and destined for the purple. She had exchanged vows as a girl, it was known, with a naval lieutenant who died of a fever at Antigua, and remained more or less faithful to his memory, though she might have accepted a certain bereaved bishop had he proposed.

All this passed through Miss Scrimshaw’s mind as she supervised the gathering up of Mrs Roxburgh from the carpet, and afterwards, as she stood bathing her friend’s temples, a sibyl as it were, broody with the fumes of eau de Cologne.

But that which Miss Scrimshaw did not care to recall as she pursued her ministrations was the screaming of the man they had strung up to the triangle in the gateway of the prisoners’ barracks. She must banish it from her memory, along with anything else too naked or too cutting, which her upbringing and undefined social position had taught her to ignore. She only hoped her friend Mrs Roxburgh would not make it too difficult for her.

But Mrs Roxburgh, again in possession of her mind, appeared to have chosen Reason as her mentor. ‘Don’t you find him a tiresome little man?’

‘Whom?’ asked Miss Scrimshaw, as always careful of her grammar.

‘Mr Cottle.’

‘Yes indeed!’ Miss Scrimshaw agreed with such heartiness her rather yellow teeth were exposed.

‘But well-meaning.’

‘If well-meaning is ever enough.’ On second thoughts Miss Scrimshaw added magnanimously, ‘We should be thankful, I suppose, for minor virtues when vice is so often in the grand manner’ while hoping she had not regressed too far in the direction of the incident which had been the cause of Mrs Roxburgh’s collapse.

But the latter spent a fairly cheerful evening, helping little Kate with a watercolour, and accepting to take a hand at whist with the Commandant, Mrs Lovell, and Miss Scrimshaw herself, after the tea-table had been cleared.