The Beach of Atonement Read online

  Hester Long received them all with a kiss or a hand-shake, and above all a gladsome, welcoming smile. The women kissed her as though they meant it, and the men grinned shyly and wiped their hands on their tattered trousers before taking hers and squeezing it with genuine admiration. The Browns and the Smythes were people of affluence, the Jessops were as poor as mice, Tom and Edith Mallory could individually have bought up the other, whilst Hester Long was at last set on her own financial feet. Wealth and the snobbery of wealth were there non-existent. The clothes they wore had been selected to suit the particular labour they were embarking on that afternoon. Joe, of the ancient Ford, cracked a joke with Mrs. Smythe of the new single-seater, even Mrs. Jessop, her voice raised to overcome the chorus of juvenile voices around her, handed her baby to Miss Mallory, precisely one girl will loan her doll to a special friend to nurse for a few minutes.

  Hester brought out to them a kerosene-tin full of tea, and a great tray piled with buttered scones and little cakes. She set tea and cakes on the veranda, Mr. Brown filled the cups and pannikins, and Mrs. Smythe handed them round, whilst Mrs. Brown dispensed the scones and cakes. The children shrieked, the women laughed, and the men discussed the weather outlook.

  About half-past three the party set out for the burn. Arrived at the windward side, they stood in sudden silence whilst Hester Long’s children, their high spirits temporarily subdued by the importance of the act, lighted the first two fires, which they had carefully prepared two days before. Now, with the two fires well alight, Hester Long cried: “Go!” and the men each seized a burning brand and, running along the edge of thick-lying dry branches and leaves, set up a chain of fires.

  Into the brazen sky rose a cloud of bluish-white smoke. The fire hissed and crackled, spread, grew, leapt into its stride. The women and children watched, fascinated: the men separated and rapidly took up positions along the south side, where the dried lupins would invite the fire. The column of smoke quickly became a rising mountain with a crimson fiery base—a mountain of smoke seen at Dongara, where speculation became rife as to whose burn it denoted.

  Somewhere, invisible in the smoke, a man shouted. Dudley and Mallory, with chaff-bags heavy with water, raced to the point and madly beat out the fire among the lupins caused by a flying spark. Onward swept the main fire, eating up. Acre by acre, the tones of dead rubbish which had met the axe of Hester Long.

  From within the smoke farther away along the south side a youthful voice cried : “Hi-aye!” and Dudley rushed in that direction to join forces with one of the Jessop lads in beating out another fire. And so it went on. Eyes smarted and burned, arms ached from flailing the wet bags, and the heat-parched throats to lime-kiln dryness. The sun, shining sometimes through the high, whirling smoke, resembled a sovereign and gilded the world beneath. Towards four o’clock, the fire had reached the farther side of the burn. A little before five, the wind dropped to a calm. The smoke rose to the sky in a straight column, and people at Dongara who looked that way saw how it mushroomed two thousand feet above the earth in a flat-topped, motionless black cloud.

  All danger of the fire spreading outside its prescribed bounds had disappeared. The stumps and logs from the larger branches still burned redly in the smoke sent up from the heated ground in a million tiny spirals from the hot ashes of leaves and twigs and sticks.

  The sun, now almost at its setting, whitened the pillar of smoke and tinted the cloud resting on it bright yellow. Hester came along to invite everyone home for tea, and in twos, threes and fours the visitors reached the neat white house, where the men and boys washed at the well and hurriedly assisted Hester Long to bring out to the cool veranda dishes of cold meat, dishes piled with cooked eggs, heaped with tinned salmon, plates of bread and butter-bread that was famed around Dongara and butter famous in many magnificent homes in Perth—plates of cakes and apples, the repast being set out on a snowy white table-cloth on the veranda floor.

  “You’ve had a good burn, Mrs. Long,” announced the enormous Mr. Smythe with little twinkling grey eyes. “The rubbish was well laid and the wind just right. What are you going to put in it?”

  “I don’t think I shall have much time to put anything in, Mr. Smythe,” Hester replied doubtfully. “If the stumps burn out well, I could just scarify it and broadcast clover.”

  Mr. Smythe fell to examining the rising column of smoke, his beaming face as that of Friar Tuck smelling a cooking haunch of venison. Mr. Brown gazed at him with peculiar hopefulness. Jessop waited also.

  “Seems a pity letting that fifty acres lie fallow this winter,” presently remarked the fat man to no one in particular. “What about it, Bert?”

  “Anything you says goes,” encouraged Mr. Brown, looking at Joe. Joe’s mouth stretched in a grin, and he nodded.

  “All right, then,” Mr. Smythe again observed to no especial person. “To-morrow you and me, Bert, will fetch over our tractors and ploughs, and get going. The next day Bill Jessop and Joe can bring over their teams and seeders ; and, Mrs. Long,” and Mr. Smythe paused, apparently to allow his smile to widen to the limit—“in three days’ time we’ll have your fifty acres ploughed and sowed.”

  “I-I, oh! it is too kind of you, really it is,” Hester told them with shining misty eyes, her seamed face suddenly radiating an inward glory that made it lovely. “You’ve all been so helpful ever since I came here. It is like imposing on your generosity.”

  “Of course it’s not!” cried the thin and dismal-looking Mrs. Smythe. “They’ll come bright and early, won’t they, Mrs. Jessop?”

  “They certainly will,” agreed the burdened Mrs. Jessop, as though at the last minute the men would wish they hadn’t promised, which was absurd.

  “Don’t I get a part in this play?” asked Tom Mallory.

  “You bet! Your job will be to keep the tea up to us,” Joe Brown pointed out.

  “All right,” laughed Mallory; “but you, Jessop, needn’t bring your team eight miles. Let Brown bring your seeder behind his plough, and I’ll have a team of my own here for you to work.”

  And so it was arranged.

  The sun having gone down into the sea beyond the towering sand-hills, the men sat and smoked whilst the women cleared and washed up, and the children raced around the house and orchard.

  Dudley and Mallory, sitting a little apart, discussed rabbits and other vermin in the district and idly watched the smoke cloud hanging above them change in colour from white to yellow, yellow go gold, and gold to purple. The column became violet-blue when night settled at its base, where it was alive with lightning flickered from the countless fires over the burn. The cries of the romping children were intermingled with the warbling of the sleepy magpies and the occasional throaty melody of a butcher-bird.

  “First time you’ve been to Dongara?” inquired Mallory.

  “Well, no. I was here for a week before the War,” Dudley replied.

  “Ah! Then it will be the first time you met Mrs. Long?”

  “Yes. Our acquaintance dates from some five months ago. She is a wonderful woman.”

  “Indeed she is. A battler, if ever there was one. Her husband was crippled by the War, you know, and Mrs Long came here straight from England, and, she tells me, straight from teaching at school. To bog in at once and do a man’s work better than the average man does it.”

  “Long got the Repatriation Department to buy this farm. The Department paid a boom period price for it, and from the beginning the land was over-capitalized. How they managed to pay the interest, let alone the capital, I don’t know—or rather I do know. You know what a Government Department is—it demands its pound of flesh. The Repatriation Department had no mercy on Hester; when her husband died it wanted to seize the farm from her, so that it could be sold at a profit to the Department. Smythe and me paid out Shylock, and to-day Hester owns her own farm.

  “Yes, a wonderful woman, our Hester,” Mallory went on softly. “The pity of it is there are not more of her sort in the world. They are the peopl
e we want in Australia instead of those Southern Europeans who, directly they come to understand our values, loaf far worse than the Australians when the boss’s back is turned. I know. I’ve employed ’em, more shame to me, but never again!”

  “Ah well ! Come on. They’re going back to finish the burn.”

  Rising, they followed after the men and boys and joined with them in the final operation. With long-handled shovels and crowbars the still burning logs were rolled against one another and against the stumps by the crow-bar wielders. The shovellers knocked charcoal away from the logs to help the eating fire. The countless separated fires burned up with renewed life, and to these the boys dragged the remaining branches and sticks too green for the general fire to have consumed.

  The women presently came and watched. The scene was like some imaginative artist’s idea of hell. Lit by the flames of a hundred fires, the men and boys worked as so many devils with their crowbars and shovels, their faces crimsoned by the heat and colour of the conflagration. Then became apparent the wisdom of wearing the oldest clothes and the stoutest boots. Sparks dropped on the workers’ old hats and tattered garments, burning fresh holes. Thick-soled boots trod underfoot red-hot ashes.

  At nine o’clock most of the work was done. The Jessops were the first to leave in their buckboard. One hour later the Smythes drove off, and shortly afterwards Joe’s Ford roared like twenty aeroplanes, and the Browns departed. Tom Mallory remained with Arnold Dudley until midnight, when they decided that there was nothing more to be done.

  Utterly weary, but happier than he had been since; coming to Dongara, Arnold Dudley went to bed, and was at once asleep. At dawn he arose, refreshed and reinvigorated, and hurried out to look over the burn. The work had been well done from the very start. Not a branch or stick remained. Not a stump protruded above ground. Even the roots were mostly burnt out. A carpet of grey ash and black charcoal lay spread over fifty acres which a few months before had been covered with dense, tangled, sweet-smelling but useless bush.

  Fifty acres! Fifty acres added to the British Empire; wealth to the amount probably of five hundred pounds added to the wealth of the British Empire. Fifty acres of ash and charcoal, soon to be fifty acres of luscious clover, a monument raised by a lone, dauntless woman to the greatness of her race—a monument that bore the words: “To my children.”

  And when Arnold Dudley heard footsteps behind him, and, turning, found Hester Long coming to see her work, his hat was removed automatically from his head in homage.

  “Bravo, Hester Long!” he said with sincerity.

  CHAPTER XV

  BEAUTY SURFACE DEEP

  ONE afternoon, in the first week of April, Arnold Dudley returned to the Beach of Atonement. Reaching his camp, he drove his truck off the track into its bush-cleared parking space, and before alighting surveyed the litter-strewn neglect of what was his home.

  The tent sagged sadly. The bush-built table was messed with empty brandy bottles, pannikins, and remnants of food. Over the naturally clean sand lay enough paper to provide a “scent” for twenty paper-chases. Billy-cans, a fry-pan, jam and milk and fish and meat tins lay everywhere—an eyesore amidst a scene of sylvan beauty.

  Dudley’s face reddened. As a pig in its sty he had wallowed there until Hester Long had come to his rescue. The camp would have disgraced an aboriginal: as a white man’s habitation it would have disgusted the lowest vagabond.

  When he jumped to the ground he halted, urged equally by two opposed longings: one to set to at once and tidy the camp, and the other to hurry along to the Seagull’s Throne and gaze upon his beach. For he was like unto the man who hugs to himself his chains. The heavy, sickly bush scents, the tang of the sea air, the soft thundering of the ceaseless surf, were as voices welcoming him home. If it was a home wherein he had suffered the agonies of the damned, it was no less a home for that.

  For the vision of the vast deserted beach was as the vision of a city man’s house: the northern stretch of white sand being one room; the Pontoon, with the adjacent Seaweed Mountain, the Sugar Loaf, the Boiling Pot a second room; whilst a third lay to the south as far as the beetling cliffs. Rocks, sand-hummocks, lagoons and pools, tiny bays within the greater bay of the beach, and the flotsam and jetsam of the tide, were all separate entities, pieces of furniture within his house.

  There, too, dwelt the spirit of Ellen, the elfin, elusive, desirable, lovely Ellen, whom he had loved and married and possessed. And out among the rocks that other spirit, that wailing lost soul of the man who had fouled and dragged down into the muck—the lovely Ellen. In the wind and surf he heard, standing twixt bush and camp, the fretful sighs of his lost Ellen and the remorseful, restless, pain-racked cries of the vile Tracy.

  Arnold Dudley knew which longing would master him, even before he admitted decision. The camp could wait. When he returned from the beach he would set to and clean it; but first he must visit his beach, his home, and examine with loving care each article of its furnishing.

  From the truck he took a large biscuit-tin, which he carried along with him. It contained bread-crusts. When he rounded the southern spur of the coast sand-dune and came to the open sandy space, he saw that the gulls were resting on their throne; and there he stood and called them, and, hearing as well as seeing him, the birds fluttered upward, and then swooped down to hover with harsh welcoming cries above his head. The man laughed and shouted at them whilst he jumped down on the beach and almost ran to the Pontoon, then well above the low tide. And into the pools on the great rock he tossed the crusts and watched with a thrill of pride his birds feed, the while carefully counting them, and finding them all to be there.

  Now with the empty tin he regained the sandy space, where he left it, to climb unencumbered to the hillock of sand and seat himself on the Seagull’s Throne.

  The Beach! It lay spread far away north and south, white and delicate and slender as a new moon, cradling in its gigantic curve the rushing lines of white surf sweeping across a floor of turquoise blue, which towards the horizon deepened to living steel. As of yore the squadrons of white horses charged far out over the Ramparts, lifting high the horizon line in contemptuously leaping the sunken barrier, thence to regain formation and strength to rush on the Sugar Loaf and the outer wall of the Pontoon, there to be flung back in disorder.

  Ah! And there, too, was the old enemy. Dudley could see the sinister triangular fin of his shark cutting the water, rising and falling with the chop between the Pontoon and the Sugar Loaf, sending out behind it radiating ripples. Everything was as it had been, and strangely enough at that moment he felt the loss or absence of the poor lone shag, and fell to wishing that another would come and occupy his beach.

  The wind blew softly from the south, whispering of icebergs and ice-fields and freezing snows which it had passed over. The world was a-glitter with light and colour. Vivid green behind him, white at his feet, and brilliant blue before him. The sun, now in the north, was reflected at a million points, its radiance sent back by the rolling sea beyond the Ramparts and the chop beyond the Pontoon, sent back by gleaming brown and green and red seaweed, and black and grey water-washed rocks.

  Nothing in that great open world lay visibly decayed. Nothing therein was impure, nor did there exist ugliness in any shape or form. Arnold Dudley saw and studied and understood. He had come to his beach as a man returns to his house in the early summer after the spring-cleaning. That the beach was the same beach, yet a beach more brilliant, more beautiful, without blemish, he was dimly conscious was due to the change in him brought about by Hester Long. She had spring-cleaned his mind: she had swept down the winter cobwebs from before his eyes and permitted the light and the beauty to enter into him.

  His mind dwelt on the marvel of Hester Long. He recalled her picture when she stood looking up at him sitting behind the steering-wheel, the engine running. Her work-lined, plain-featured face appeared wonderfully lovely, and whilst he gazed thereon the thought had occurred that if a woman’s eyes are beauti
ful and her hair is beautiful, the face catches beauty as a night-closed flower opens in beauty at the touch of the sun.

  Just then there was an appealing look in the limpid grey eyes as though she were his mother, and he departing for the metropolis where temptations awaited inexperienced youth. He thought, too, that then he had seen behind her grey eyes that which he had vainly sought in the dark-blue eyes of Ellen, a vision of the innermost, the real woman. And what he saw, or fancied he saw, startled him. He knew, whilst he sat on the Seagulls’ Throne, that in Hester Long there was no guile, no deceit, nothing whatever to hide. There was no mental cupboard containing little skeletons for Hester eternally, and instinctively to guard. Time had written nothing on her heart but what was wholesome, sympathetic, and beautiful.

  To her Dudley’s heart warmed. She was Woman, the Woman, the ideal of every man since Adam. A. woman true as tempered steel, firm as a lighthouse rock, pure as water at the spring, courageous, gentle, and—feminine! A woman to whom a sin-stained man could take his troubles, confide his transgressions, sure of understanding and of sympathetic advice; rather than one who could arouse admiration and the passion to possess. Her sweet voice echoed in his ears:

  “Don’t forget that you have promised to come and take dinner with the children and me every Sunday,” she said. “Let your body be exercised with work and your mind with thoughts of the future, and seldom of the past. Good-bye for the present, Mr. Cain. And good luck!”

  He had come away loaded with gifts of apples, of eggs and butter, a batch of bread, and a mysterious gift wrapped in brown paper. He had left her with hope in his heart once more, that he would find content and happiness once again, and determination that there should be no back-sliding into that Slough of Despond out of which she had dragged him.

  Ellen! He knew that his wife was alive, yet that day Ellen appeared to have drawn farther away from him. The impression that she was dead and had died true to him persisted. In all but reality she was dead to him, and he mourned her as such, and sometimes asked himself with his honest bluntness if he hated her for her betrayal of him. And always the small voice of his conscience said: “No ! He still loved her no whit less than he had ever done, and in his heart he knew that if she stood confronting him he would hold out to her his and cry aloud his joy at the touch of her.