The Beach of Atonement Page 22

  A further hour he spent in endeavouring to ascertain the attraction for the foxes at that place. There were no rabbit-tracks to indicate that they came there hoping to catch an unwary rabbit far from a burrow. Here and there the sand bore evidence that a fox had sat on its haunches to scratch itself against the tormenting rabbit-ticks. He saw where a fox had begun to dig, and near the shallow hole were smaller holes dug by two young foxes, either from native instinct or in imitation of their senior. It was only after careful survey that Dudley gave up the puzzle, to which he could conceive that one possible answer.

  The attraction of that place might have been its salt.

  It is possible for man and meat-eating animals to live without meat ; wholly impossible to exist without salt : remembering which fact, Dudley remembered, too, that he had plenty of salt in his camp, but not the red meat for which he craved. The foxes could wait. They would visit the place next week and the weeks following that, until the day came when the lack of water among the dunes, added to the sultry summer heat, would send them inland. And when he did lay poisoned baits, the baits would be salted fillets of fish.

  Passing eastward along the floor of the miniature winding valley, Dudley had proceeded but a quarter-mile when he came to grass-ground and dense bush-covered hills. Precisely in the centre of the valley ran a fifteen-inch-wide “pad”, evidently made by cattle ; and, whilst now there were no tracks of cattle on it, Dudley discovered rabbit-tracks, fox-tracks, kangaroo-tracks, and the tracks of goats: these last probably the descendants of those goats brought to that part of the continent by the early settlers.

  Of the several tracks, those that now interested him were made by kangaroos. He saw the regularly-spaced twin marks made by the ’roos’ hind feet, and sometimes the clear outline of a ’roo’s paw appearing as though a little child had pressed the soft soil with its hand. Only once did he espy the tapering fifteen-inch impression of the animal’s tail.

  Ahead of him the valley took a sharp northerly turn to avoid the steep slope of a great sand-mountain, and when he drew near the turn Dudley edged to the left-hand side to gain cover. At the angle he moved with caution, and, edging round the turn, suddenly halted at sight of four kangaroos sitting up in the middle of the valley, alert and alarmed by even his quiet coming.

  Of the four, one was a monstrous fellow with a white chest and red back. Sitting on its shanks, balanced back against its thick yet tapering tail, it measured slightly over five feet in height. Two others, evidently does, were six inches shorter. One of them was red-backed, the other bluish-grey-backed, with white front. The fourth almost a baby. It stood near the blue animal.

  Faces turned towards him, ears taut and motionless, Dudley thought they saw him and waited for him to move before racing for the shelter of the bush. As a statue he, too, waited. Three hundred yards separated hunted and hunter, a distance too great for reliable shooting. From the waiting game the man emerged victorious, for after a while the blue ’roo went down on her fore paws and began feeding. Shortly after, the other doe began to feed; but the “old man” remained suspicious for a full further five minutes.

  Dudley allowed them ten minutes of quiet feeding before he walked straight towards them, no longer bothering about cover. He had shortened the distance by fifty yards when one of the does suddenly sat up. The man as suddenly halted, to stand immobile. To move an arm then, even as much as an inch, would have alarmed them. Followed by the “old man”, the other doe and the baby also sat up to regard him with soft curious eyes, unafraid still.

  One could almost imagine the “old man” grunting annoyance at his suspicious wife when he went to ground, gracefully turned, and moved away several yards on all fours, for all the world as though he were some gigantic, ungainly spider.

  The blue doe, however, remained sitting with unabated curiosity, her young one keeping very close, ready to dive into the protecting pouch, large though the infant was. At long last she went to ground, but only for a second or two, when up she came again, cunningly expectant. But Dudley was too wily a hunter to have moved so soon. He expected that little trap set for him, and when again the four ’roos were feeding he gave them five minutes before he moved, and then he walked rapidly, arms stiffly at his sides, prepared at the instant to stop. When he did stop he was within a hundred and twenty yards of them.

  Unable to remove his gaze from the kangaroos, he trod on a dry stick that snapped no louder than a man can snap his fingers. At once the “old man” and the two does sat bolt upright, whilst the young fellow jumped for, and into, its mother’s pouch.

  Even then, with Dudley so near and quite revealed to them, they did not flee. He almost feared to wink his eyelids at this point, when movement would have spelled failure. And in that position he and the ’roos remained for minute after minute, until at last Dudley could have cried out with the cramp slowly eating him up. And when he found that he could endure it no longer and decided to take a standing snap-shot, the “old man” ’roo went to ground with a contemptuous grunt, and—instead of following his example—the two does edged close to each other and began to play. Face to face, sitting well back securely against their supporting tails, they gave open-pawed clawing blows, and defended themselves in precisely the manner of boxers. Their occupation gave Dudley his chance. Both fighters were intent on watching each other, and slowly Dudley sank to his knees in the long grass, and slowly he fell forward on his chest pushing the rifle in front, till finally he was lying full length on the ground, his rifle sights bearing on the hip of the blue ’roo.

  It was whilst waiting for movement to cease—for the combatants, if not changing position, at least swayed in their efforts to avoid each other’s blows—that Dudley remembered the young fellow, whose head and shoulders showed above the rim of the pouch. From the blue he shifted his rifle-sights to the red.

  What it was that alarmed them was unapparent, for they were not alarmed by Dudley’s going to ground. Possibly the youngster’s interest in the fight or bout had waned, and it had seen the slight movement of the rifle. In any case, the bout suddenly stopped. The blue ’roo sprang into the air about nine or ten inches, and at the instant her hind feet again felt the earth she brought her tail down with a thump on the ground. It sounded like a carpet struck by a stick. The old fellow sat up with amazing swiftness. Three beautifully-coloured, noble-looking beasts faced the hunter.

  Aiming at the red doe’s chest, Dudley fired.

  He expected her to collapse. The impact of the bullet readied him a split second after the sharp report. The struck ’roo rocked on her haunches. The blue doe never moved. The “old man”, made uneasy at long last, turned away, and with short unhurried jumps made off to a more peaceful spot.

  Dudley stood up. The blue doe turned in a flash, and, taking double-length jumps, overtook the “old man” as an express train passing a signal-box. Once the “old man” looked back. He saw Dudley running toward the stricken ’roo, when he heaved himself along the valley , after the doe at extraordinary speed, covering thirteen feet at a jump.

  The wounded kangaroo remained, shocked by the bullet, yet still sitting up. She waited, poor brave thing, to give battle, seeming to know that escape was impossible then for her. Dudley stood four yards from her and fired again at her chest. The bullet sent her backward, but with extraordinary vitality she sat up once more facing the man, regal, beautiful. For three seconds she sat thus, whilst Dudley ejected the empty shell and pumped another cartridge into the barrel of his rifle.

  He was about to fire a third shot, sick at the sight of her, racked by the pity and the cruelty of it, when the doe’s head very slowly fell forward, and at first slowly, then with sudden finality, she lay down on the green grass and died.

  In all his hunting life Dudley had never seen a kangaroo he had shot die so hard. At the last there was neither hate nor fear in the soft, deer-like, black eyes, only an expression of great reproach ; and, whilst he stood gazing down on the soft-furred graceful body, memory, vivid bl
azing memory, revealed in the ’roo’s place the body of Edmund Tracy.

  Late that night he wrote in his diary:

  … There have been many times when I have recognized clearly the danger of insanity. Too many poor devils, lonely and at grips perhaps with some grisly skeleton, have I come across during my wandering in the bush, harmless yet quite mad, not to see the danger in my life of solitude.

  Standing in the green valley gazing down upon the kangaroo, I saw its carcass vanish and in its place the body of Tracy. He lay precisely as he did when I shot him dead, clothed in a light-grey lounge suit, black shoes on his feet, hat and stick clenched in his left hand. Upon his face was the identical expression of comical surprise. I might have put this strange occurrence down to a trick of vision, or some unexplainable mental phenomenon, had it not been for the fact, stranger still, that at sight of the man who blasted my wife and destroyed my happiness I felt no hatred, only a very poignant regret that I had killed him. I know now, Hester, that it was a fit of madness. It will come again and last longer, and again and yet again, till it will last all my life.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE FALL OF ST. ANTHONY

  THE sea beyond the Sugar Loaf and the adjoining southern sunken rocks was like a sheet of widely ribbed blue glass. The low swells now did not crash in foaming white against the Sugar Loaf and the Pontoon, but meeting these obstructions they rose and rolled back without breaking, as if exhausted by their ocean-wide journey.

  Never, since his arrival on that beach, had Arnold Dudley seen the sea so calm and languid. From a cloudless sky the sun, noticeably northward when at zenith, was heated almost to midsummer fierceness. It sucked up the countless scents from the coast bush and the inland pastures, and the east wind wafted the fragrance west-ward to the glittering beach and far out over the still waters, far beyond the horizon, bearing news of land to people in ships.

  For that time of the year—towards the middle of May—the weather was abnormally free of rain-clouds and wind. Over the great pastoral areas eastward sheep and cattle staggered about in search of the ground feed that in the absence of rain had withered and died. Beyond the coast areas the autumn was as dry and as hot as in any of the drought years that are the affliction of Australia. The squatters despaired, the farmers waited anxiously for rain to permit them to plough and seed, whilst already city business languished and the standing army of unemployed gained many recruits,

  Dudley, however, was entirely unconscious of these conditions. So far from being interested in the problem of drought facing the pastoralists, or the problem of the Midland Railway sympathetic strike, or the politically-controlled Arbitration Court, he had lost all concern for dates, seasons, or public events ; although the weather conditions and the industrial upheaval combined to affect his destiny.

  Seated on the Seagulls’ Throne, he surveyed the sea and the beach below him. That day the beach revealed yet another of its infinitely varying moods. To the lonely man it appeared vaster in extent, and in proportion he seemed immeasurably smaller. The sky, void of content other than the sun, was sunken towards the earth and the sea, giving the impression that presently it would fall on the world and crush him.

  The horizon, an ink-stroke on a sheet of cadmium-coloured paper, hid, or seemed to hide, cat-like monsters of wind and tempest waiting, waiting to spring on the midget on the rock, sweep him off, and dash him down into the very bowels of the planet. The sun was monstrous in size, and he imaged it as the unfaceable eye of an ogre watching him with scientific interest before lifting him up and dissecting him.

  And on all the world Dudley sat alone, and into the brain of Dudley came the thought to hide, and into the heart of him a great fear, a fear of the world on which he sat. It was so terrifically big, and he so hopelessly little. Points ten miles distant in reality appeared to be within one mile. The sand-mountains, two miles back from the beach, hovered in the heat haze and towered above him in close proximity; whilst the horizon-line was so close that had he but taken a short walk he would have come to the awful gulf down which the sun sank daily.

  In him was aroused the primitive instinct of man for a shelter, a cave, a house, a place to live, a refuge where he could be safe from danger for some little while. He was leading the life of an eagle who even sleeps a-wing, whereas man’s natural habitat is the earth. He had been wrenched away from the living habits of man implanted in him by countless generations of ancestors, who had dwelt first in caves and then in houses. Now he was as a snail without its shell, blistered or frozen by the elements, at the mercy of every enemy, naked, unprotected, lost.

  It came to him, sitting there above the beach with the glittering sea for a footstool and the sand-mountains for a back-rest, that after all he was a poor puny thing, of less account in the scheme of cosmos than any one of the foxes that had left their tracks on the twin sand-hills. He was a man banished to the desert from a lovely city of men because of the brand that was upon him. In the desert he must wander until he perished. Never again could he return to the city, never more could he mix with his fellows, be one of them, delight in their delights, thrill and sorrow, hope and fight for success as did they.

  There, marked on the sea-chart by the low hill-lines of water, was the number of the years he had to face, or the number of months, or of days, left to him to live. They stretched, those marks, to infinity, wherein lay the change called death. And after the change, the weighing is the balance, the judgment—as inevitable, as fixed, the spaces into which he gazed!

  The Judgment Seat—the Sitter thereon—the accuser—the witnesses—his defence—the verdict!

  “I accuse this man of having destroyed my life on earth,” Tracy would state.

  “I witnessed this man destroy Edmund Tracy,” Ellen falteringly would add; earthly relationship not counting in that Court.

  “I killed the man because he robbed me of my wife,” would be his ready defence.

  “Vengeance is MINE!” would come as thunder from the Sitter on the Judgment Seat. “Can one injury be wiped out by inflicting another? Of all sinners against me a Fool can I suffer least of all. Pass, Fool, to thy damnation!”

  Almost could Arnold Dudley hear the Voice coming from the brazen sky, whilst there, on the rock, his soul was as naked as his body seemed to be. Regret! That moment which revealed Arnold Dudley to Arnold Dudley was poignant with regret. Perhaps one or two further moments of self-examination would have produced Repentance, a softening of his adamantine heart. We know how Jacob wrestled with the Angel.

  An Angel was pleading with Dudley—when the Devil intervened, insinuating into the ambit of Dudley’s consciousness the soft, sweet voice of Edith Mallory.

  “You don’t appear to notice me, Mr. Cain,” she said softly; and, turning his head, he saw hers on a level with his granite seat, her face made radiant by a wistful smile. There was something so childishly frank about that smile that the crust of self-centredness which had been thickening during the months was split open, and for the first time during his sojourn on the beach he felt sympathy for someone other than himself.

  “Certainly I was unaware of your presence, Miss Mallory,” he told her, swiftly removing his old felt hat. She saw the ghost of an answering smile on his face, now lean and hawk-like, and even whilst her heart leapt she likened him to an eagle on its eyrie, gazing into the distances with all-seeing eyes, yet an eagle that never more would spread its wings and fly.

  “I have been standing here for at least two minutes,” was her reproof. “Please help me up. I want to sit up there with you and see what you have been seeing.”

  The strained hard look returned, and she thought the smile had fled from her suggestion to sit with him, whereas it had vanished before memory of what he had been seeing. Kneeling, he held down his hands to her, and she, putting one foot into a narrow crevice, helped him to pull her up beside him. Then, their bodies touching, so small was the flat summit, she said with forced gaiety:

  “I went to Dongara this morning
and noticed, when passing the beach-gate, that there were no motor-tracks. I knew then that your friend hadn’t come back. Then in the store at Dongara I was looking over some new novels just arrived, and found among them a reprint of ‘A Master of Fate’, by Guy Willow. Have you read it?”

  “No. I don’t remember having read it.”

  “I’m glad of that, for I have brought it with me for you to read.”

  “Is it worth reading? Have you read it?”

  “Yes; I read a cheap edition of it three or four years ago,” she replied.

  Dudley glanced sharply at her, and she encountered his too brilliant eyes with unfaltering steadiness.

  “What is there about the book which causes you to recommend it to me?” he asked.

  “I would rather not tell you. I would rather you read it; but I will tell you if you wish.”

  “I do wish,” Dudley said simply.

  “Well, the hero killed a man because this man ruined his sweetheart—the hero’s sweetheart, I mean. Afterwards he escaped out of the country, went to some place in South America, and there he fell in love with a beautiful Spanish girl. On the eve of their wedding he found that he could not marry her unless she knew about his killing the other man. He did tell her, and it made no difference with her. And afterwards, for several years, he was saddened by his vengeance, but she clung to him, and led him always away from his thoughts until at last she conquered the past and made real happiness out of the present and far into the future.”

  “And you think reading this book will help me?”

  “It might point out a road for you to follow.”