Free A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White

verses had sounded well-intentioned rather than inspired. By the time Garnet was riding to hounds with the young Stafford Merivale, Austin had attempted a novel, but already by Chapter III, it was clear that his characters were rejecting him. Laying his manuscript on the fire, he watched it catch, not so much with regret as relief; it allowed him to return to the classics. Yet Austin Roxburgh, whatever appearances suggested, was not all bookish: in him there stirred with vague though persistent uneasiness an impulse which might have been creative.
    He was unable to draw, or he would have sketched the farmer’s daughter in her country hat, or returning from the moor, driving her ewes ahead of her to pen them for the night. Remembering her thus, after he had left for home, started him wondering whether he might also be in love. If his passion had been stronger, the obvious course would have been to make her his mistress. It was inconceivable that she should ever become his wife; and yet he continued thinking of her, standing in a light reflected off fuchsias punching a basinful of dough on a scoured table, or again, arms folded against a starched apron-bib as she crossed the yard on some undefined errand. He certainly needed someone. Perhaps he did love her. He remembered her strength and kindness when overtaken by an autumn squall which brought on one of his attacks.
    That he might marry Ellen Gluyas became after all a tenuous possibility on seeing her not only as his wife, but also as his work of art. This could be the project which might ease the frustration gnawing at him: to create a beautiful, charming, not necessarily intellectual, but socially acceptable companion out of what was only superficially unpromising material. There were remedies for chapped hands and indifferent grammar; nothing can be effected without the cornerstone of moral worth.
    Austin Roxburgh felt so inspired he could not wait for his mother to leave him to his studies as she did each night at ten o’clock. When at last she kissed him and he could hear her groping her way upstairs, and finally trundling overhead, he sat and wrote, though with a caution to which his initial inspiration had been reduced:
Dear Mrs Gluyas,
Remembering with pleasure the weeks I spent beneath your roof last summer, it occurred to me that it would be most agreeable to repeat the experience, shall we say, from the beginning of June? if those same rooms are not already promised to somebody more fortunate than I.
My regards to Mr Gluyas, and my best wishes to your daughter, whose concern for my welfare touched me deeply on my previous visit.
Hoping to hear from you in good time so that I may complete my plans …
    Mr Roxburgh did in fact receive a reply in good time, if not at all favourable:
Dear Mr Roxburgh,
I am sorry to inform you my mother passed on this Janury and my father does not feel we shld let rooms for not being able to do the best by a lodger, least of all one so particler as yourself.
I hope your health has improved since autumn last, and thank you for thinking kindly of us.
Yrs ever respectfully, E. GLUYAS
    Mr Roxburgh was so put out by this setback to what he visualized that his feelings immediately became suffused with genuine tenderness, if not actual passion (he might never be capable of that). He wondered at the time what he could do, beyond compose the correct reply, just as he was still pondering over his relationship with the woman he had made his wife.
    ‘Yes,’ he repeated as the saloon was battered out of perspective, then allowed to settle back into its original shape, ‘green is the colour I advised you to wear, because unlike so many women you have nothing vapid about you. That is why you appealed to me.’
    He had evidently satisfied himself; whereas Mrs Roxburgh, indolently lolling in a somewhat primitive saloon chair, dangling one hand as ladies are apt to do, was relieved to hear a rattling of the door-knob.
    It was Captain Purdew to