The Beach of Atonement Page 10

  “That’s right, ole feller. Drink and be merry, although you are dead. How does it feel to be a worm-eaten corpse, Tracy? Now, now! No bad feeling ! You’re no worse off than I am, remember. A bit cold? Well, drink up and get warm. How would a song go?”

  Once more Dudley drank. He pulled himself to his feet by gripping the table-edge, cleared his throat, and beamed down to where the awful apparition of his imagination was sitting. Then he sang in a cracked voice:

  “And the old man said, ‘Strike me dead

  If Barcoo wins this race, me lad,

  We’re done—we’re up the pole!’”

  Then: “How’s that? Have another drink. Go on! It’ll banish dull care—dull care. My! You make—you make just a lovely corpse, Tracy—’deed you do ! Cold! Cold, are you? I’ll get you a blanket. ‘Tween frien’s, you know.”

  Half-way to the tent, Arnold Dudley collapsed and lay still, breathing stertorously. The rain came and beat on his upturned face. The wind shrieked and howled about the summits of the invisible sand-hills. The sea, lashed to fury, roared and thundered and swept high up the beach, and from its fury fled the thousands upon thousands of land-crabs.

  They scurried up the beach from the ever-rising tide, scuttled up the low sand-bank, and sheltered about the stems of the short scrub bushes. Even there the wind and the stinging fine sand pursued them, and the higher they went the greater became the force of the wind. During the lulls they could be heard everywhere making a “cleek-cleek” sound, sharp and shrill.

  The tide, impelled by the north-west wind, set south. The roaring monstrous rollers that raced shoreward with four-foot walls of foam on their gaping crests tore at the Seaweed Mountain, bit into it, pounded and smashed its seaward front, slowly demolished it. South of it the hundreds of tons of weed floating on the surface calmed the breakers as oil cast on the waves. The Mountain was doomed, and from it a grand army of crabs evacuated their quarters and swarmed up and over the ridge, and descended to the little valley that sheltered Arnold Dudley’s camp.

  The rain became a deluge. Its impact on the stunted bushes was a hissing equal in volume to the hiss of the surf being sucked back into the sea. Hour after hour the deluge fell, and nowhere along that terrible desert coast did the rain .make a stream or a puddle. The sand hummocks and hills absorbed it as if composed of sponge.

  When day dawned the sky showed great rents in the flying cloud masses, rents aflame with brilliant stars. The eastern summits were silhouetted against a background of dark grey, which magically turned to dove-grey, thence to pearl-grey, and successively, with marvellous rapidity, to yellow, orange, crimson. The wind died out as though from very exhaustion, and veered to the south, a mere zephyr. The racing hills of water, white-capped and splendid, were tinted turquoise blue. When they rose as leaping horses at the outer reef, they lifted the horizon line high, paused as though surveying the land, their enemy, curled over and outward, and with undiminished speed charged on the rock-bound shore.

  It was the clear flute-like song of the butcher-bird which awakened Arnold Dudley. He thought it strange that a butcher-bird should be at sea with him in such a storm. He marvelled that the ship did not turn right over, marvelled at and groaned from the sensation of the deck of a ship at sea. An arctic cold gripped his legs and his arms, and encircled his chest as a steel band. Someone was beating his head with an iron bar, the blows of which were oddly rhythmical, and in between the blows he became conscious of the silence surrounding him, and of the roar of the sea thousands of miles distant.

  To open his eyes to admit the light was an agony. Once he tried, and decided to do so never again. Fire burned in his mouth, a foul, stinking fire. What a sea was running! How the vessel that bore him was sent high, high towards the sky, and then down, down into a veritable sea-pit. Another sound came to him, a peculiar sound. “Cleek-cleek-cleek-cleek!” It was like a chorus. Something cold and hard touched his chin, something loathsome ran across his face.

  That forced open his eyes and jerked him upright in a sitting posture. First, he was astonished to find himself surrounded by the walls of the bush; secondly, his astonishment was succeeded by chilling fear. For the ground was orange-tinted. Everywhere he looked, across the track, close up to where he sat, under the ramparts of bush-trees and shrubs, the ground was a sheet of orange. And upthrust from the sheet were a million tiny cylinders, each supporting an eye—black, malignant, cold and evil.

  Dudley leapt to his feet with a scream. He was answered by a hundred thousand crabs, which chorused: “Cleek-cleek-cleek!” incessantly. His sudden jump to his feet, to stare about him with horrified eyes, was as the dropping of a stone in an orange-coloured lake. Over the orange surface, in an ever-widening circle, passed a ripple, whilst the countless bodies swayed from him to escape, as though the fear in his mind darted into the minds of those nearest him, to pass thence from crab to crab to the outer edge of the mass.

  Five minutes later Arnold Dudley still stood staring about, a little less wildly, a little more sanely. There was not a crab to be seen.

  The man brushed his eyes with a forearm, looked round again, and laughed in a cracked voice. In the ensuing silence he could distinctly hear the crabs’ “cleek-cleek-cleek” on their way beneath the low bush back to the beach.

  The sun, topping the eastern ridge, shone through a vaporous haze. He felt no warmth from it. He was as cold as the dead, his teeth a-chatter, his hands and arms blue. The surrounding sea-green hills took on the aspect of gigantic waves that moved and closed in upon him threateningly.

  Yet, though his eyes played him tricks—he had come almost to believe that the crabs were evidence of a waking nightmare—his brain was sober enough. His body cried out for warmth, and his brain set about contriving means of producing heat. The bush was then a vast shower-sprinkler. Every piece of dead stick was soaked through and through, and only by first starting a tiny blaze with paper and a smashed-up pine-case did he manage to get a fire going.

  Later, crouching over the mounting flame, he surveyed the bottle-littered table, noted the half-filled tin pannikin, and the case set close beside it. He knew why that case was there; remembered the invitation he had given his enemy. He remembered, too, that the invitation had been accepted, and that a foul, rotting, eyeless, faceless thing had been his guest. How his head ached! How his stomach turned over and over upon itself! How like to the most terribly imagined hell was life!

  Perhaps a wee nip would steady the heaving ground. Lurching to the table, he picked up Tracy’s pannikin, and, lifting it to his lips, vomited instead of drank. Flinging the pannikin from him, he almost collapsed over the fire, but dropped close to it, and was fervently thankful to feel its scorching heat on his face, his arms, and his chest, feeling it penetrate his soaked clothes, from which uprose a cloud of steam into the still air.

  And, whilst lying there, his mind went back over the incidents of his orgy, of which he remembered every one. He remembered his wild laughter, the feeling of exultation that preceded his invitation to Tracy to join him in a drink. He knew now that the invitation had been accepted by a Tracy of his imagination, and realized that he was unafraid of his self-created phantom because he had always been unafraid of Tracy. Similarly, he had experienced no remorse at sight of the phantom, since he never had experienced remorse at having killed the fellow.

  Thinking of Tracy automatically brought thoughts of Ellen. As clearly as though he was then in his own house in Perth, he saw her sitting up in bed drinking the early cup of tea. Her blue eyes were sleepy still. Her hair was dishevelled, for her boudoir-cap had fallen from her head. The pinkness of her throat and breast was as the pinkness of a rose, colour wonderful and alluring, and when she caught him looking she wrapped about her still closer a rose-pink bed-wrap.

  Dudley closed his eyes at the sweet agony of it. When he opened them again he saw the bottles on the table, the tin pannikin where he had thrown it, the mouth-organ half-buried in the water-darkened sand, the litter of paper,
empty tins, pieces of board, and straw sheaths. His tent, wet and heavy, sagged in the middle. Within was wild confusion. His bed was on its side, the blankets in a heap near the door, cases and tins of meat and fish were scattered and jumbled.

  His body was tingling from the new-found heat. His nerves were on edge. When he got to his feet it was with difficulty that he restrained his surging anger, unreasoning, insane, against the inanimate objects he possessed. The mental storm passed, and was succeeded by a fit of weeping, which he made no effort to control. Whilst he filled a billy-can he wept.

  He continued to weep whilst he waited for the water to boil, tears running down his face, his body shaking, and through his mind ran words ceaselessly reiterated:

  “I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead!”

  He was still wishing that, and still weeping, a man on the verge of mental collapse, when he made himself strong coffee. Pouring himself out a cupful, he added a generous measure of sugar and a most generous measure of brandy. And when it was cool enough he sipped, and with his sipping his weeping ceased, and once more his mind was exhilarated, and from the Slough of Despond he rushed to the mountain summit. Half an hour later he was laughing.

  About noon he suddenly groped for and found the mouth-organ. Wanting music, he blew on it, to discover that several of the holes were clogged with sand. With half closed, blurred eyes he gazed at it stupidly, knowing it was out of action, nevertheless. With a mumbled curse he tossed it inside the tent and slumped down beside the table once more. The pannikin he raised to his lips clattered against his teeth. And whilst he drank he looked over it, to see Edith Mallory regarding him with horror-filled eyes.

  CHAPTER XI

  EDITH MALLORY’S CONFESSION

  THE day was gloriously fine. The night of rain and wind had cleansed the coast country of its almost stagnant bush scents and replaced the heavy sultry heat with a bracing clearness. The world was washed and bright and new. Even Hester Long’s cattle appeared to shine, their colours fresh and vivid against the ruddy brown of autumn paddocks.

  Hester was inconvenienced by the rain, which had come, for her, too early. It delayed her “burn”, which that year would add no less than fifty cleared acres to her farm. Throughout the summer she had wielded an axe for several hours of each day, chopping and felling the thick low scrub eastward of her house-work that had been subsidiary to the ordinary tasks of milking, feeding the pigs and the fowls, overlooking her cattle, and sometimes yarding her sheep to operate on some with a pair of shears in her battle with the blow-fly.

  Work! Incessant work from dawn till dusk, work that taxed her small feminine body to the utmost, that made her sigh with weariness, but that filled her days with the gladness of achievement.

  Hester Long was that kind of woman in whom the maternal instinct is a deathless passion. Her love for her husband was a consequence of his suffering from the effects of gas. He lay in the bed next her brother’s in a hospital in the south of England. Long had come out of the Australian bush that the Empire might be preserved, and especially that Australia might be reserved as a play-ground for politicians. The War left him shattered in health. And the strength that he had laid down, his wife took up.

  The farm had been made not by Long but by his wife.

  A semi-invalid, Long was unfit for rough work. He tended the pigs, fed the fowls, and overlooked the cattle and sheep. Hester did the cooking and, when not burdened with children, repaired the old fences, erected new, and cut down scrub. Hers was the mind that ran the farm immediately she had grasped the essentials of that peculiar kind of farming. Hers was the spirit that raised a hedge of security around her man and her boys. And when her man was taken, her life became devoted to making the hedge thicker and stronger around her children.

  It is refreshing to turn from our professional politicians, everlastingly chanting praises of the British Empire on which they batten as parasites, to the Hester Longs, the quiet workers who in the past have made the British Empire and to-day are remoulding it.

  By noon on the day after the storm the sun had dried the scrub, so that to cut it or move under it was not to invite a shower-bath. The midday meal over and the utensils cleaned and put away; Hester Long donned an old tweed skirt and a pair of man’s thick boots, and then, calling her children from their own allotted little playground, she and they walked out to the scene of her summer labours.

  She had cut down the fifty acres on a gentle rise of ground. Everything within that area had fallen to her axe, from the whip-stick mallee-like bush to the several large box-trees lining a tiny creek. Over most of the area the cut branches had been laid out evenly, and around the stumps dry limbs and sticks had been packed, so that when the fire went through it the stumps would be completely burned out.

  A little of this work yet remained to be done, and, helped by the children, who had become adepts at packing a stump, Hester Long proceeded to do it.

  It was the “doing” of all that work which had helped her to live down the grief caused by her husband’s death ; for when her husband was drowned she lost also a lover. It was the idleness of Arnold Dudley’s life on the beach which had kept his loss so vitally alive. Three months almost of idleness spent in utter solitude had emphasized his loss of Ellen so fiercely that the serpent of desire, kept quiescent during his life with her, now writhed convulsively and was strangling his soul. Had Ellen died, the loss of her sex companionship would have been made up for by intensified application to business. Her loss being unrelieved by business or even social demands on him, but accentuated by forced banishment from the world of men, even climatic conditions putting a stop to his trapping work, Dudley was left with no occupation but to think and live wholly in the past.

  To one placed as he was, a man’s greatest and most deadly enemy is himself.

  Whilst the two boys worked on the clearing they directed each other, criticized each other, but manfully stuck to their task. There had been no sulking when called to labour from their play. At six and eight respectively they fully realized, even at that early age, the necessity for work. They knew that their efforts not only pleased their mother, but also in some mysterious way would benefit themselves. Hester Long sang whilst she worked, dragging a branch here to cover a bare place, another there away from a heap, so that the branches lay evenly over the whole of the ground, for clear spaces would balk the fire.

  Towards four o’clock, when Hester Long was thinking of returning to the house to put on the dinner before beginning the evening attendance on her live stock, she was halted in her singing by the sound of horse-hoofs thudding on yielding turf. The boys simultaneously shouted the fact that Miss Mallory was coming, and a moment later Edith Mallory pulled her mount up almost viciously, slipped from the saddle, tied the reins to a dead bough, and suddenly faced Hester Long with wide, horror-filled eyes, her face white and drawn. A picture of woman sorely distressed, she almost tottered towards Hester Long, who stepped quietly forward to meet and catch her in her arms. The small boys were silent at this somewhat dramatic interruption of their labours. Their mother, seeing that the young woman was hysterical from some severe shock, said to them:

  “Miss Mallory has hurt herself. Not much, though.”

  “How would it be if you both ran home and brought a billy-can and something to eat? Harold, you could get the billy-can, and the cups, and some milk in a clean bottle, and a tin of tea and sugar; and you, Jim, could fetch a loaf of bread, a jar of butter, and a big knife and spoon. Put everything in that apple-basket with the wicker-handle. And when you come back we’ll have afternoon tea here beside the creek.”

  The lads departed with enthusiasm, and when they had scampered off Hester Long led Edith Mallory to the trunk of one of the cut box-trees and gently urged her to be seated.

  “What has happened, dear?” she said coaxingly.

  “I-I-I! Oh-oh-oh!” and Edith Mallory laughed and cried alternately. Hester Long shook her.

  “Stop it!” she orde
red sharply. And, again: “Stop it, I tell you!”

  After a while she managed to calm the girl, and then, holding her hands in one of hers, her other arm around the shaking shoulders: “What is it, Edith? Just tell your old pal.”

  “I—I went down to Hector Cain’s,” she said, almost whispering. “I—oh! don’t you understand?”

  Hester Long smiled, and her smile held wonderful sympathy. “Yes, I know,” was all she said then.

  “He found out, then, about my going to his camp, and told you ? I can’t explain about that now—it seems so silly of me—and yet—and yet, I just hated to think of the way he was living, so down, so, so abandoned. You know, Hester, how he lives, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know,” the elder woman repeated. “But tell me what has sent you here like this. Tell me everything. Is he dead?”

  Edith Mallory’s eyes were tragic when she searched Hester Long’s lined face.

  “No—no, not dead. Much worse than being dead. We—Tom and I—got back from Perth last night. I was glad to get back. Perth didn’t seem to be the same. After lunch I rode down the beach track and tethered Moky just this side of the big hill. I always had done that, and as I have always done I walked up to the summit and examined Hector’s camp with my binoculars to make sure he was away. Funny of me, isn’t it? Why don’t you laugh?”

  Edith Mallory’s lips trembled. Hysteria again threatened. Said Hester Long with conviction:

  “I shall swear if you don’t tell me at once what happened.”

  “I wish you would swear, Hester. Well, I couldn’t see him about the camp, nor did I see any smoke from his fire, so I went down. And there he was, sitting beside his rough table littered with bottles of whisky or brandy. He saw me at the instant I saw him. His face was dirty and unshaven and flaming. His eyes—oh, his eyes, when he saw me! They grew big, like cat’s eyes, and in them was sudden green fire. He was drunk, mad drunk. He held to the table with his hands and glared at me. Suddenly he rose to his feet and shouted :