The Beach of Atonement Read online

  “Swore at you!” Hester Long echoed. “Really, Mr. Cain, I think you are too bad. I am not in the habit of swearing.”

  Dudley: felt ashamed, as he was meant to.

  “I am sorry I made a mistake,” he said contritely. “It must all have been a horrid dream. I don’t know. I think I have been a little mad. To-morrow I’ll try and apologize.”

  “To-morrow you’ll be a new man,” he was assured, before Hester left him in the dusk of evening.

  “Half an hour later, when Hester Long crept into the store-hut, she found him sleeping peacefully. In a saucer she held was a night-light, and this she set down on the washstand, and beside it she placed a glass of milk in which was a very moderate portion of brandy. For Hester knew that the best remedy for brandy-created devils and. insects was brandy, and she knew moreover that Dudley would be almost sure to wake before morning, to see once again things of unnatural aspect and colour.

  For a moment before leaving him she stood looking down on him with an expression that doubtless had been often on her face when she gazed on her sleeping children before going to her own bed. His face was weather-beaten and dirty and hairy. Yet she could see so plainly the nobility of the man, the cleanness of his mind—and the marks stamped on its index by the mental turmoil he had lived through. Even in that minute Hester Long was glad, more than glad, that she had brought him out of the hell on the beach into her own quiet haven of peace and purity.

  Leaving the door open, she stepped across the yard, through the little garden gate, and entered the kitchen to find Edith Mallory reading a fairy-tale to two entranced little boys. Looking up quickly when Hester entered, Edith saw on the work-scarred, lovely face that which made her glad, too, and it was with a song in her voice that she completed the reading.

  “Now, we are all going to bed,” Hester announced. “Mr. Cain has gone to sleep so as to be strong and able to help with the burn. And you two little men are going to help, too, aren’t you?”

  “Can we light the fires, mummie?” eagerly asked six years.

  “You’ll let us, mum, won’t you?” pleaded eight years.

  “You shall each of you have a box of matches. And must have a wet bag, too, in case the fire gets into the lupin paddocks. Now, come along into the Land of Nod.” Miss Mallory was kissed with affection and abandon, and returned the kisses with equal fervour. She seemed very happy just then. Her eyes were a-sparkle in the lamp-light. Yet when mother and children had left the kitchen her beautiful face became sad, and into her blue eyes entered an expression of pain.

  When prayers were said, and the little boys were safely in their respective beds, Hester Long gave each a final hug before going to her own room. She had decided to do something that to her bordered on sacrilege. The urge came to her whilst she stood looking down on the sleeping Dudley, and now when she drew from beneath her bed a brass-bound double-locked oaken chest she hesitated, her mind occupied by thoughts of Arnold Dudley and her husband. Her candle lit up the scene—a small white-washed room containing a narrow single bed, a chest of drawers, a washstand, and a chair : no pictures on the walls and only one ornament, a crucifix made of sea-shells, hanging above the head of the bed. That moment was ever to remain a vivid memory, because, when her mind was occupied by the one man she loved and the other man she could have loved, a sentence of living words came to her with the force of a command:

  “Now as I serve you, you go out and serve.”

  How deep must be the subconscious mind that will throw up into consciousness a phrase that has been read and thought about and forgotten perhaps many years before ! No longer did Hester Long hesitate. Grave doubt had been vanquished by decision. Kneeling swiftly, she set the candlestick on the floor, and, unlocking the chest, raised and pushed back the shut lid. With the candle now in her left hand, she took out of the chest, slowly and reverently, object after object wrapped in tissue-paper, and when each object had been looked at it was set on the floor beside her. There were broken toys, a baby’s rattle with a tinkling bell, a baby’s dummy with an ivory ring, and little garments pressed and folded and scented. Next came the cabinet-size photographs, one of her husband taken in his military uniform, and one each of her children at twelve months of age. She unwrapped and for an instant looked at a masonic apron within a morocco-leather case, a pair of pipes in another case, a man’s glove, a white glove—her bridegroom’s glove.

  At last she came to what she sought, an oblong electroplated box, and this she placed on the bed whilst she gently put back the articles lying beside her. The chest, her “treasure chest,” was relocked and pushed beneath the bed.

  For an hour she sat with Edith Mallory in the kitchen, talking of the coming burn, the cows, and the sheep, and the market reports, and the illness of old Mrs. Black in Dongara, whose husband had been one of the first to settle there. Neither spoke of Arnold Dudley, and each knew that the other wanted to talk about him.

  After supper they took a hurricane-lamp and went out to the stable to feed Edith’s hack and Hester’s buggy horse, and then they made a round of the chicken-runs to see that doors were shut and fastened against the marauding fox. By ten o’clock they were in bed.

  Several hours later, Hester awoke, and, lighting her candle, looked at the clock and discovered the time to be ten minutes after two. She wondered if her guest was sleeping, and, wondering, realized that she would not herself sleep again until she had found out. Very quietly she arose and slipped into an old dressing-gown, and, picking up the candle, stole along the passage to the kitchen, where she left her light, out through the door, which was never locked, and across to the store-hut. Through the open door of the hut she saw Arnold Dudley seated on his bed, gazing steadily at the night-light.

  The glass containing the brandy and milk was empty. Hester was sure that it had been emptied some time before, because whilst she watched Dudley now and then brushed an imaginary insect off his clothes. He was a stage further on the road to normality. For he knew that the things he saw did not exist, whereas before he had believed them to be real.

  Hester stole back to the kitchen. When she emerged the second time she carried the candle in one hand and in the other another glass of milk with a yet smaller portion of brandy in it, and in it besides three powdered aspirin tablets. Dudley looked round sharply when she entered, for an instant frowning, and then, when she asked why he could not sleep, laughed shortly, and explained that something running across his face had awakened him, and banished sleep.

  “What is the time?” he asked.

  “About half-past two,” she replied. “Thinking you might be awake, I thought a glass of warm milk would do you good.”

  “You should not have troubled. Why do you bother with me?”

  “Why!” Hester echoed. “Didn’t you bother about the hook in my thumb? Besides—”

  “Well?” he prompted.

  “Oh! just because. Now drink this milk. I have put a few aspirins in it. That’ll make you sleep, I’m sure.”

  When Dudley stood up—the state of his mind made him forget to do so earlier—she saw there were tears in his eyes. His hands shook when he accepted the glass, and whilst he drank the glass clattered against his teeth.

  “Funny what a beast a man can make himself, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Not so much a beast as a fool, Mr. Cain. To-morrow you’ll decide never to be a fool again. We’ll have a long talk sometime. You’ll find that I understand men, or you will say I do if you will but follow my advice. Now lie down again and try to sleep. Good night!”

  “Good night!” he answered, and wondered if there were any more Hester Longs in the world.

  He slept late that morning, but when he did awake, about nine, the pains in his head were gone, and when he stood up he discovered that the ground no longer heaved and swayed beneath him. Memory caused him to feel a shame never before experienced. He wondered what he looked like, and, seeing a small mirror on the wall behind the washstand, he went to it and gazed long an
d miserably at himself.

  “Arnold, you’re a dog,” he whispered. “She was right when she said: ‘You are a fool’. Fool! Yes, you’re a fool.”

  His gaze fell to the water ewer standing in the basin. Beside it lay a cake of soap, and near that a small electroplated box. Picking it up, he pressed a button, whereupon the lid fled up to reveal an ivory-handled safety razor, flanked by small ivory boxes containing spare blades. There was engraved matter on the inside of the lid, and he read:

  “To the Dearest Man in the World,

  From Hester, his wife,

  23rd January, 1921.”

  He knew then what lay behind the loan of Hester Long’s gift to her dead husband. He knew, too, that he could never accept that loan. Suddenly he realized that he could not possibly look into Hester Long’s eyes as he then appeared.

  She saw him, a minute later, running down the farm track to the main road. Edith stood with her. Dudley ran as though in a race to his camp. When he returned it was midday. He was shaven and washed and dressed in clean clothes. He drove in his truck and told them he had come to work.

  CHAPTER XIV

  “BRAVO, HESTER LONG!”

  THE burn actually took place on March 20th. For two days the wind had come from the north-east, come from the vast sun-baked interior of the continent, hot and dry.

  At ten o’clock that morning, Hester Long left the house with a billycan of tea and fresh buttered scones in a basket, and set off to one of her far paddocks which was being re-fenced by Arnold Dudley. He was sinking holes and erecting posts that he had cut out of the bush and brought to the “job” on his truck the day before. The unaccustomed work made him perspire and caused the muscles of his arms and back to ache atrociously. The cutting of the posts had made him perspire much more than the erection was doing, and because of it he already felt a different man.

  A perspiring body is the most healthy, which is the reason why Australian bush people are the most healthy in the world. People in towns who lounge in offices, shops, trams, and theatres seldom perspire, which is why they are white of face, dull-eyed, and limp. A bushman will tell you that he feels “dopy” in the morning until, by using an axe or other implement of labour, he sweats the “dopy” feeling out of him. Then he is his own man.

  After Dudley had swung an axe—which he could use—for nine hours, his body had exuded not only the result of an orgy of brandy drinking, but also impurities that had collected during months of idleness. At the end of the day’s work he had taken a towel to the little creek east of the house and had lain down in the shallow stream for half an hour. Although his hands were blistered, and his arms and back ached, he felt like an athlete of twenty, and ate supper in company with Hester Long, Edith, and the children with avidity.

  Whilst Hester crossed the paddock to where he was putting up the posts with evident skill, she smiled. She felt glad to be taking the morning lunch to him, glad to match him working, because she knew that the labour would benefit him in mind as well as body ; for, if one works willingly, one has to centre one’s thoughts on the work. And, if a person’s thoughts are on work, thoughts of anything else cannot intrude. That secret she had learned through her own bitter experience. It is Work, not Time, which is the healer of wounded hearts.

  Dudley had put up forty-one posts when Hester Long reached him. She saw at once that he was no novice in fencing, the posts being accurately set apart in absolute alignment, and all exactly five feet three inches out of the ground. Then, in dark-blue duck trousers, cotton singlet, and an old straw hat on his head, the man was not to be recognized as the drink-maddened ruffian who had leapt into her buggy three days before.

  ‘“This is not the first fence you have put up, Mr. Cain,” she said brightly.

  “Well, no, it is not. But it will be the first one I’ve erected for many years,” he told her in a manner that was quiet and yet different from what she had known it to be. “I am not so young as I was, nor am I as hard as I was. What have you there—some tea?”

  “Yes; and some buttered scones. Let us go over into the shade, shall we? You see, I’ve brought two cups.”

  “Bravo ! And where are the boys?”

  “They are at school on the veranda,” she told him, seating herself on the grass beneath a wattle and spreading out a miniature table-cloth. “They are having a half-holiday this afternoon, because I think the time has come to burn off that fifty acres.”

  “Good ! You’ll fire it, which end?”

  “If the wind does not increase, I think we’ll fire the lower end, don’t you?”

  “Yes. The fire will go through it the quicker, and I see you ploughed a fire-break along the top end yesterday.”

  Arnold looked at her curiously. “Do you know, you are a first-rate ploughman? Those furrows are as straight as a die.”

  “Not so bad for a school-teacher,” she laughed.

  “Harder work, though.”

  “Indeed it is not. There is no harder work in the world than teaching school,” was her instant reply. “I can go out all day and plough—yes, even swing an axe all day—and at night I can sing and romp with the children. After one of my days teaching school, I wanted to go to bed at six o’clock.”

  “Still, ploughing all day must be monotonous,” he persisted.

  “Not at all. I was never satisfied that the furrow I had just ploughed was straight enough. There is no monotony in any task if it is done with one’s heart as well as with one’s hands.”

  “You are right there.” For a moment he sipped his tea. Then “The paddock on the south side of the fifty acres is tinder dry. We shall have to have a few buckets of water and plenty of bags handy.”

  “The water and the bags and the wielders will be there,” Hester Long said with suddenly twinkling eyes “There will be the Mallorys, the Jessops, the Smythes, and the Browns. They’ll all come, because I have told them to. You see, Mr. Cain, they have always come every year to my burn. They look upon it as a picnic, something like we Pommies look upon a harvest-home in England. For twelve months and longer, after my husband was taken, they came and ploughed, and dug and cut and built for me. They’re just a wonderful lot of people.”

  “We Australians are a wonderful people,” he said with mock gravity.

  “You are no more wonderful than the Canadian people, or the English people, or the Scotch people,” he was informed seriously.

  “I am justly rebuked.”

  “You are!” Hester Long said laughing, and the timbre of her laughter brought back to the man memory of his wife. How strange, he thought, that two women, so different in looks and temperament, should laugh alike “You are rebuked because when you said you Australians were a wonderful people you thought only of those British people born in Australia. To me it seems to make no difference where the British people are born.”

  “When I said: ‘We Australians are a wonderful people’, I was but quoting our politicians before an election.”

  “You were not; you were teasing me!” Hester said with ill-assumed severity. “For that you can smoke or go tack to work I am leaving you. I’ve piles of scones to bake, and cakes and sandwiches to make. Come in to lunch at twelve sharp, please. Edith has to go round the neighbours directly after, to tell them we will be burning off this afternoon.”

  “All right. You’ll want me this afternoon, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I must continue man-handling those posts at once.”

  Looking up from his work now and then, he watched a little figure in its blue print dress swing along back to the house, and to the crowbar murmured: “Yes, the Australians are a wonderful people, because the Hester Longs came to Australia over twelve thousand miles of sea. Who was the fool who said the British Empire was decadent? He was a darned sight bigger fool than I was, and that is saying something.”

  Immediately lunch was over, Edith Mallory saddled her hack and rode off on her round of the neighbours, the nearest of whom, apart from her brother
, lived four miles south. For Hester Long’s children the burn was more thrilling than any Guy Fawkes bonfire. They changed their school clothes for the oldest they possessed, and naturally their oldest clothes were several sizes too small. When they appeared before Arnold Dudley they looked like scarecrows, the only substantial article of their apparel being their boots, which were exceptionally stout and heavy.

  Dudley spent an hour making buckets from four-gallon kerosene tins, and a second hour taking them, filled with water, to various strategic points. By that time the first of the visitors arrived in a very ancient Ford car. They were the Browns. Mr. Brown was small and wiry and sixty; Mrs. Brown, fifty, fat and fair. Joe Brown drove the car: Joe was thirty and, like his father, thrifty. He owned the car, and, although able to own ten new ones, his first love was evidently going to be his last.

  About three, the Jessops and the Smythes arrived together. The Smythes came in their new single-seater, Mr. Smythe being very fat, ever bubbling with laughter, and his wife painfully thin and appearing prim and severe, which she certainly was not. They had no children, but their lack of them was made up for by the super-abundance of Mr. and Mrs. Jessop. Mr. Jessop drove two spirited horses in a buckboard with a single seat, built high above the long floor. Two of the daughters sat with him, girls of perhaps fourteen. Mrs. Jessop sat on the floor nursing a new baby, and around her in such numbers that the poor woman was almost submerged in a mountain of humanity was the rest of the family. In that district there were other people who could have come, but they were the “grandees”—a class of person unfortunately rapidly increasing in Australia—and they were not Hester Long’s “neighbours”, which was their loss. Had the Jessops, the Smythes, the Browns, and the Mallorys congregated in the market-place of any British town, most certainly they would have been arrested as people without visible means of support. The clothes they wore were amazingly dilapidated, and one can imagine the incredulous disgust on the face of any tramp had Joe Brown’s pants been offered him.