The Beach of Atonement Page 16

  When again he awoke it was eleven o’clock. He rolled and smoked a cigarette before dressing. The rain still fell, but the wind was half a gale. From beneath his bunk he drew out a box of pine chips, stored there for such a day as this, and with them soaked in kerosene he made a roaring, leaping fire that defied the rain and beat off the chill of wind.

  It is a peculiarity of solitude, acting on the brain of a man, that he becomes given to impulse far more than is the case under normal conditions. Unless he holds to strict self-discipline he will inevitably slide downhill to a mental morass in which personal cleanliness and care for what he eats become almost non-existent. Every little task concerned with the welfare of the body becomes too utterly boring to perform. He sinks finally to the level of the ape.

  Whilst Arnold Dudley still performed the ablutions and shaving as fastidiously as when living in civilization; he had unconsciously arrived at the stage when cooking food was a task to be got through as easily or lazily as possible. To open a tin of herrings or corned beef was easier than catching and cooking fish. Baking-powder bread was a necessity, as also was boiling the billy for tea.

  The supply of potatoes and onions he had bought in Dongara months before had been thrown away, rotting. He had lived principally on canned food, damper, and tea. Apart from the labour of cooking a rabbit, Dudley never ate one. Only a few Australian rabbit-trappers can bring themselves to eat rabbit. Whilst lying in his bunk that rainy Sunday morning, however, he felt the impulse to cook himself a proper breakfast.

  The inconvenience of doing this with the rain pouring on sizzling bacon and eggs was not so great as being compelled to eat it sitting on his bunk inside the tent. Therefore that afternoon he dumped his canned food and many accessories on a flooring of sticks outside the tent and covered the heap with bags. The space thus gained enabled him to rebuild the table within the tent. Several other small jobs were attended to, and by the time darkness fell he was better able to meet the approaching conditions of winter, and sat down to his dinner of a slice of boiled bacon, flanked by potatoes and hot tinned peas, with a dish of stewed apples and a cup of black coffee to follow.

  An hour later he sat at the table with Hester Long’s gift lying open at the page apportioned to that day’s date. Impulsive again, he had decided to take her advice and write down the things in his heart clamouring to be told to sympathetic ears. For a little while he read and re-read the words he had written on the fly-leaf, and for a little while gazed through his cigarette smoke at the lamp with eyes that saw it not.

  Presently he took up a pen, dipped it in the ink, and wrote two words, when he paused before writing a third. That third word he never did write. For half an hour he wrote rapidly, when the page was filled with his somewhat neat handwriting, and then he rolled a cigarette and, after lighting it, read what he had written.

  DEAR HESTER—

  You seem to be totally unaware of the kind of woman you really are, and it seems far from being right that you should stoop to reach a man with blood upon his hands. There is a saying that “They that touch pitch will be defiled”, and of all women I have known you must not be defiled by contact with me. You and I are what we are. You had the courage and the intelligence to make adversity serve you and not be governed by it as I was governed when the test came. You were as clear cold water untouchable by the fires of human emotion; I was as inflammable spirit to an electric spark.

  I know the reason why you made me promise to dine with you and your boys every Sunday. You thought that that single connecting link with human friendship would save me from utter damnation. You exacted the promise not merely because you delighted to entertain, but because you could not fail to stoop and lift a poor wretch as that other was tended by the Good Samaritan.

  I cannot keep the promise, and I am not a little perturbed at that, and regret keenly having given it. Your estimation of me will fall, and yet I broke my promise because you are what you are, Hester Long.

  To have kept it, to have continued the friendship you have given me, would have been for me to repay good with evil. I killed Tracy because he robbed me of my most valuable possession—the love of my wife. I feel no remorse whatever. I know he deserved to lose his life. I know that he did not love Ellen as a decent man loves a woman. I know he seduced her to gratify his passions and his vanity. I know why he seduced married women—so that the natural consequences of his alliance might be shifted to the woman’s husband. He was not man enough to face the same consequences for a single woman.

  That is why I killed him. If he had been honestly in love with Ellen, and she with him, had he been honestly desirous of marrying Ellen divorced from me, I would have given her the opportunity to be free of me. If he had come and manfully told me that he loved her, wanted her as a wife, and up to that time had acted honourably, I would not have shot him.

  The world would say, and says, that I am a murderer. In my heart I know I am not a murderer, any more than is a lawful hangman. You believe I am not a murderer. So does Miss Mallory. But no other would. It is more than possible that the long arm of the law will find me even here, and when it does find me I must be no friend of yours ; I must be the friend of none, least of all of you, whom I esteem almost reverently.

  The rain beats down on my tent. There is no other sound but the surf. I can almost hear my heart beating.

  To-morrow will be as yesterday, and next week as this week——

  Arnold Dudley sighed and closed the book, and fell to thinking of that awful afternoon when he had heard voices within his wife’s room. He saw again the slowly-opening door. Again he saw the comical expression on Tracy’s face before he collapsed, as though he were utterly surprised at being killed by an enraged husband. At that point Dudley pulled himself up. He was beginning to realize that it was necessary to govern his thinking. Time itself was softening the blaze of his hate, and deliberately to undo the work of Time would be a foolish thing.

  Yet what else was there to do but think? He had no books, not even an old newspaper. He had not wanted to see anything in print about his crime. Now, for the first time since his banishment, he felt the need of papers and books. He did not know it, but this was a healthy sign. His mind was satiated with itself, it was seeking something other than itself to feed upon. Undoubtedly he was rapidly becoming normal—that is, mentally normal.

  It was not eight o’clock. To sleep then after his late rising was impossible, and, impulsive for the third time he brought forth his mouth-organ and played, seated at the table, his elbow resting on it.

  Finlay had said often, not entirely in jest, that if he could play a mouth-organ as Arnold Dudley played it, he would go through life playing at hotel bars and keeping perpetually drunk on the free drinks showered upon him. In common with most bushmen, Dudley had taught himself to while away the hours in lonely camps.

  He played hymns first: “Now the day is ended”, and “Knocking ! knocking! who is there ?” But presently he broke into waltz music rendered in very slow time and with infinitely delicate variations.

  It was whilst playing “Drifting down a silver river” that a king moth as large as a man’s hand flew into the tent and spiralled round the lamp before alighting between Dudley’s elbows. Quite suddenly he stopped to look at it with admiration of its marvellous markings.

  And distinctly he heard somewhere outside a horse champ at its bit.

  From the moth his gaze tried to pierce the canvas walls of his tent and the impenetrable darkness without. So sure was he of what he had heard that he passed out into the rain and called:

  “Who’s there?”

  No reply came to his question. Blanketed, beaten down by the moisture in the air, the surf rumbled and moaned. The hiss of raindrops on drenched scrub leaves and the soft patter of raindrops on sand were the only other sounds.

  “Is there anyone there?” he called again, this time doubtfully.

  Deciding that his ears had tricked him, he turned to re-enter the tent, and paused as though tu
rned to stone when he heard the soft creak-creak of leather. Into his mind flashed two words, words brilliantly lit by imagination:

  “Mounted police!”

  So the long arm of the law had reached him! The police were surrounding him, believing him desperate, knowing him to be armed. Well, he would not fight, certainly he would not attempt to shoot. The men were but doing their duty. There would be a trial. He would be the focus of public attention for a little while. Then would come early one morning a man with shackles to lead him out to death. What of it? He was tired. And no longer was life desirable.

  He waited for the rush. It did not come. Only the sound of the rain and of the surf fell on his straining ears. He brought out the light and stepped on the track, peering between the walls of bush. No horse was to be seen. But there, a few yards from the tent, he did find a horse’s track in the soft yielding sand—the tracks of one horse only. They told him that a horseman had come to that point, halted a while, and had gone back up the track.

  For a long time after that he sat in his tent and waited.

  CHAPTER XVII

  TEMPTATION

  AT the first hint of dawn the next morning Dudley’s butcher-bird put unusual energy into its singing. It appeared incredible that so great a volume of sound should emanate from so small a body, but little larger than an English thrush. For a full five minutes the melodies were rendered one after the other without an instant’s pause. The music awoke Dudley; and, before he arose and dressed and passed outside to the light the fire, he knew that there was not a cloud in the sky.

  It was a day like one of those rare March days in England which almost persuade one that it is mid-June. The moisture still on the leaves of the scrub accentuated their greenness. The absence of wind permitted the scrub scents to be wafted low on the ground by the unnoticeable air eddies and currents made by the warmth of the rising sun. Dudley yawned, stretched luxuriously, and smoked his before-breakfast cigarette with thorough enjoyment.

  Until the second that recollection came of the night-visitor.

  During his breakfast, thoughts of the visit worried him. He was worried because the visit was not followed by immediate action. That it was a police visit he felt certain, and because the horseman had retreated he concluded that the retreat had been for the purpose of securing reinforcements. That made him smile wryly. There was not a little humour in one man going back for help to arrest a man quite willing to be arrested. However, the visitor could not have been expected to know that.

  For Dudley had reached the point of mental resignation which ordained no effort to escape the law when once the law had discovered him. In his inmost heart he believed thoroughly in the ancient maxim that “murder will out”. Also he was intelligent enough to know that once the law got on his footprints it would be but a matter of time before it caught up with him. Nevertheless, he must make sure whence came that night-rider, for he was a man who hated doubt, as was shown at the beginning of this history.

  Breakfast over, he slipped a handful of cartridges into a pocket, and, taking his double-barrelled breech-loader, set off on a tracking expedition. In no sense was the gun taken to resist arrest. He took it by force of a habit, formed years before, of going out equipped to destroy vermin as opportunity served.

  In spite of the rain that had fallen since the tracks were made, they were quite distinct on the moist white sand of the dunes. Only in the deeper dells where the ground was of black soil had the rain washed out the traces completely. They kept to the twisting switchback roadway, right up over Big Hill and beyond throughout the three miles, until the gate was reached in the fence skirting the main coast road.

  Once through the gate, he expected to see them turn south towards Dongara. Yet the muddy sand-outlined points of horse’s hoofs indicated clearly that the rider had come from, and had returned to, the north. When he saw that, the riddle was explained.

  His non-appearance at Hester Long’s farm had sent one of two women out into a wet and pitch-dark night to ascertain if he had been unable to come through physical disability, or had merely-forgotten. And, because he knew very little about women, he docketed the incident in his mind as feminine inquisitiveness.

  By that time the sun had dried the bush trees and shrubs, and he decided to walk straight over sand-hill and bluff to the south-west till he reached the coast, there to walk northward along the beach until he came to the Pontoon. That decision, at least, was not an impulse.

  He had long wanted to scout the surrounding country, to ascertain if there were dogs or foxes about, and, if so, their likely number.

  He knew, of course, that to walk through that dense low bush would not be so easy as walking a city pavement, even during peak hours. He was obliged to push his way through the scrub, at times to make a detour round a particularly dense belt, and from the moment he left the road his direction led him upward along the steep slopes of a gigantic hill of sand.

  A passing crow, observing him as a possible food-producer, circled and alighted far above him to watch with cunning white-lidded eyes. In all probability it was one of half a dozen who long before had found it worth while to keep this particular human under observation. For this human left rabbit carcasses about. He left scraps at his camp, too, but the butcher-birds saw to it that the precincts of the camp were well protected against crows.

  Rabbits there were a-plenty, and Dudley noted how the coming of the rain and the approach of winter made them excessively wild. High in the sky, so high indeed that the eyes failed to follow it continuously, circled an eagle. Possibly it was three thousand feet overhead, yet it watched Dudley, too, and would see if Dudley dropped a match. He wondered why it was that eagles never flew over the beach.

  It took him an hour to gain the summit of the enormous sand-hill, and there the scrub was no higher than a man’s knee. He sat down then to observe and enjoy the view. To north and south stretched the coast-hills, looking to him like a carpet in three colours—one of those old-fashioned cottage carpets laboriously made of innumerable strips of cloth. The green-black patches denoted the dells and gullies, the light-green splashes the hill-slopes, the greyish-white the summits of those hills so wind-blown that no scrub could take root.

  Westward lay the blue ribbon of sea, its nearest edge frayed by sand-ridges, its farther edge bounded by the sharp unbroken line of the horizon. Away to the east, beyond the long valley down which came the Geraldton road, other valleys jutted into it, and one could surmise that they were originally sea inlets and the arms of high sea headlands, and that the coast sand-hills were of comparatively recent origin.

  Far to the south a cluster of white buildings marked the homestead of the Smythes. Nearer, to the north-east, Dudley could see the white house and paddocks belonging to Hester Long; and that occupied by the Mallorys farther north still. Beyond those farms stretched the uncleared bush, as far as the eye could see, bush-land awaiting the settler when it was freed from the relentless grip of the land monopolists.

  Almost in Dudley’s chosen line of direction he espied, at the foot of the hill on which he then was, a large natural clearing, whose existence till then he had never suspected. Towards this clearing he made his way, and when he got down to its level he came across a very old cattle-pad, which he followed until he reached the edge of the clear space, covering ten or eleven acres.

  It was of deep rich soil, and was one of Nature’s surprises. Despite the obvious depth and richness of the soil, despite the fact that knee-high grass grew over it, there was not one single tree or bush. A veritable rabbits’ paradise, there could be seen quite equally spaced the bare surface of some twenty enormous rabbit burrows. Hundreds of rabbits squatted on the burrows dozens played at the edges of the burrows where the grass was eaten down ; and yet dozens more raced along the lanes through the thick grass. And all those rabbits were utterly oblivious to the fact that a fox was busily digging up one of the burrows.

  Whilst it dug, Dudley could see the red-brown arched back behind which
was flying a constant shower of moist earth. Now and then the digging temporarily ceased, when the fox sat down for a rest, which brought its head up from the hole to gaze around with lolling jaws and eyes that held no fear.

  At heart Arnold Dudley was a naturalist, as indeed is every successful trapper. He knew what purpose lay behind that furious digging. When rabbits were first liberated in Australia, they were governed by habits or instincts adapted to the conditions of their countries of origin. The does hid their young in shallow holes well away from the burrows. With the coming of the fox to Australia, he, like the rabbit, increased enormously. He thrived on the young rabbits, at first so very easily obtained.

  Animals, we are informed, are unable to reason. It is a thesis difficult for a bushman to believe. The rabbit, coming to understand that its method of leaving its young in shallow holes during the day would determine its extinction, now rears its young in the depths of deep burrows, in some cases yards below the surface. The fox, also supposedly without reason, does not follow a rabbit-run down to the youngsters’ nest. Either by scent or hearing, probably the latter, the fox digs straight down from the surface to the nest.

  Every time the fox in the clearing went on digging down to its little luxury, Arnold Dudley moved a few more yards round the clearing towards it, being careful to keep hidden behind a scrub tree. The buck rabbits saw him and thumped their warnings. The fox became uneasy and his spells of digging were shortened. From two-minute breathing spaces he advanced to five minutes, thence to ten.

  At sixty yards Dudley fired his choke-barrel, and a quarter of an hour later had the fox skinned from nose to tail-tip. The time expended was well repaid. For the head and tail the Government would pay a bonus of two pounds, and the skin at that time of the year was worth at least ten shillings.