The Beach of Atonement Read online

  Dudley laid twenty pairs of baits before returning to his temporary camp with the drag, which, being no longer needed, he buried in the soft fine soil of the valley.

  Night was now come, soft, warm, comforting—comforting because the vast spaces of the beach were blotted out and the sense of defencelessness, ever growing upon him, for the time being was banished.

  The flames of his fire hissed and leapt upward, licking the small blackened billycan filled with water for tea. He washed his hands by pouring water on them from the canvas water-bag; although his hands were clean, for never once had they come in contact with fish-cubes or strychnine. The pungent odour of man on the baits would warn any fox not ravenously hungry, besides which to touch strychnine needlessly is the act of a careless fool, who, by avoiding such acts, might live to a wise old age.

  The huge sand-mountain on the one side and the lower jumble of hills on the other were then mere inky-black walls unrelieved by a single feature. Their summits, firmly curved, were outlined against the indigo-blue of the sky, clear and ablaze with stars, there never so clear and brilliant as they are above England when frost grips her. To the south-west, low and setting, was the constellation of six stars set in the shape of an irregular cross, no brighter and no more distinguished than their neighbours. The Southern Cross has been unduly honoured by romantic imagination.

  The night appeared to shut off many daylight sounds to accentuate the few that were of importance. It was a night full yet empty of sound—a paradox easily understood by a bushman. The silence of the windless night could almost be felt, as though silence itself were a living entity; as was the fox which “quok-quoked” far up the valley, as the tail-thumping ’roo, suspicious of the figure outlined by the fire, as the many tiny frogs whose “queek-queek” was kept up marvellously in perfect time, and as the waves crashing with a low rumbling sound on the sand-beach.

  Whilst Dudley stood and waited for the billy to boil he was but subconsciously aware of the night sounds. Night had contracted the uttermost walls of space to the radius of his firelight. He felt easier in mind and better clothed of body when thus within the narrow limits of a camp-fire world ; and standing there, as often in winter he had stood with his back to Ellen’s drawing-room fire, Arnold Dudley carried on aloud a complete conversation between Edith Mallory and himself. For the Thing called Madness was very close behind him, “sooled” on by the Demon of Solitude.

  Some men, in the stage of capture Dudley then was, will argue or converse with a hat placed on a stump or a fence-post. Political and economic questions will be thrashed out from two distinct angles or points of view. Perhaps the theme of the one-man conversation is the pros and cons of Protection. The hat may be for Free Trade and the hatless for Tariffs. Argument will be keen and lucid ; whereas the man’s thoughts when he enjoyed the doubtful advantages of sanity would be neither keen nor lucid. The mind of a man reduced to arguing with his hat is quite pleasurably excited. He is conscious of new-found mental superiority, never experienced before Solitude found him ; and, as with the taking of a drug, indulgence occurs with ever-increasing frequency.

  Dudley knew this, realized that his dual soliloquy was a sign and a warning, yet nevertheless he was unable to resist the desire, and did not wish to. He there told Edith Mallory how fortunate Hester Long’s coming upon them on the Seagulls’ Throne was; and proceeded then to inform himself how Edith Mallory was in despair of him, and how she would have proved her love and devotion to him. He told her that nothing she could do or plan would for long banish from his mind the loss of Ellen and the killing of Tracy. And he told himself, mentally in Edith’s place, that he was wrong, that love and passion and devotion would win him from the black past and carry him along into a brilliantly happy future. And he pleaded more eloquently than ever any woman could have done.

  The conversation closed. The elevation of his mind waned. He remembered the billycan and found it boiled almost dry, and with wry laughter refilled it from the water-bag to boil again.

  He supped standing, gazing down into the fire. He ate cold boiled fish and hard, cracked, old baking-powder bread. He was unconscious of what he ate. Of a truth he ate to live and lived not to eat.

  For an hour he sat on the heels of his boots in regular bushman’s style, and gazed into the glowing coals of the fire, wherein he saw strange faces, animals’ heads, and fantastic scenes, now silently smoking cigarette after cigarette. For most of that spell of day-dreaming his face was hardened by an expression of hopeless desolation, but now and then he smiled gently, and once he laughed long and loud. At the sound of it, echoing between the hillsides, two sentinel kangaroos, one just beyond the fire hidden by the darkness, and the other further up the valley, sprang into the air, raising their tails to bring them down with a resounding thump of warning at the instant their hind-legs met the earth.

  The frogs never ceased their litany of praise. The fox that had “quok-quoked” was answered presently by another fox over the sand-dunes with a “worle-worle”, and later the queer sound between a hiss and the screech of an owl informed Dudley that two or more foxes were contending over the body of a rabbit somewhere east of him.

  In that he recognized Nature, blood-raw and ivory-toothed. The foxes were fighting over a morsel of food which one, possessing initiative as well as luck, had snared. Greater even than sex instinct was the instinct to kill, the instinct to eat to survive coming second. And of all animals man is the most predatory, the most horribly ruthless, the most indifferent to suffering. That truth had come to Dudley more than once in driving his luxury car to his luxury home at Belmont. He passed by groups of workless men, shabby and down-at-heel, and in passing by he never could bring himself to look any one of them straight in the eyes. He felt as if he had stolen his luxury from their necessity. Always was he hurt by the cynical reference to the workless as the “work-won’ts” by fellow club-members—sleek and glossy and well-fed: men who regarded an army of unemployed as a gift of God where—with to break strikes and lower the wages of their producers. As with dogs and foxes, one of the things undreamt—of was to share a bone.

  The prosperous period or peak of Dudley’s career appeared to him at that time to be wholly foreign to the course of his life, in the same way as a vivid dream of affluence can be to a poor man. His sojourn on the Beach of Atonement seemed to follow naturally from the point when he had left the bush and his skin-buying operations to go to Perth. In retrospect his former bush life was much nearer to his present existence than had been the years spent in the city. Ellen of the bush was more vivid in memory than Ellen of the city. Memory of her in Perth was rapidly blurring in ratio to the increasing vividness of his memory of her before they went to Perth. That, too, was another sign of the approach of the Thing called Madness. The effect solitude was having on Dudley was very similar to the effect increasing age produces on ordinary sane people. As the aged become increasingly reminiscent of their activities decades before, when in the bloom of youth, so, too, does the dweller in solitude. The immediate past is quickly clouded; the fog gathering about the far-distant past is swept aside and that long-vanished past is re-lived again and again.

  Eventually Arnold Dudley spread out his heap of bush-boughs in the form of a mattress near beside the fire, and, removing only his hat, laid himself down on them and almost instantly was asleep. The lullaby of the surf drifted up the valley and was lost in the maze of the countless gullies. The kangaroos forgot their suspicions and fed themselves to the full, when they, too, laid down on their sides and slept, leaving one of their number sitting up to watch—a strong proof of animal intelligence, this. With the passing of time the silence seemed to increase, until towards dawn it was complete, save for the ceaseless moan of the surf.

  Long before Venus—then the morning star—showed palely above the summit of the eastern sand-mountain, Dudley was up, boiling water for breakfast tea. Breakfast was eaten, and he was smoking a cigarette waiting for day half an hour before it became light enough
for him to follow his fox-trail. The crows arrived almost as soon as he.

  Carrying a tin and a twig, Dudley started back over the now clearly-defined trail. Coming to his last mark, he found the two fish baits undisturbed, and these he scooped into the tin with the twig. The second and the third pairs of baits he found and likewise secured. The fourth pair was missing, and there he hastily made a fresh mark with his heel. The tenth and the eleventh pairs were missing. One each from the ninth and the eighteenth pairs remained, and those places where baits were missing he marked.

  There were three pairs and two single baits gone. Along parts of the trail the four-padded, diamond-shaped tracks of several foxes were plainly imprinted. By now it was broad daylight, and Dudley, arrived at the beginning of his trail, looked about him. There, on the seaward slope of the southern sand-hill, lay the red-brown body of a fox. Another lay stretched in death on the sand-patch between the hills. Almost at a run, Dudley raced up the southern sand-hill and brought down the fox to where lay the second. Both were dogs in their second year, with fur at top grade.

  The carcasses he took up the valley to the fringe of the more robust bush, where he laid them in shade from the rising sun, and covered with broken bushes to protect them from the crows. The crows! They were gone. Dudley raced back to the twin hills of sand and climbed the northern one, slightly the higher. Almost at once he espied four black dots dancing about a larger brownish dot two hundred yards along the beach. He reached the third carcass in time to save the skin from being torn by sharp beaks. The eyes of the dead fox, however, had been taken.

  With less haste now, he skirted the base of the sand-hills carrying with him the third fox, an old vixen whose teeth were discoloured and worn short by age. A second-grade fur, for it was thin and uneven. A fourth fox he found by luck in a clump of low bush east of the northern hill, and when the four were well hidden he climbed the higher of the two hills and from that vantage-point looked for the crows.

  So far he had beaten them. Their number had miraculously increased to seven. They flew singly, here over the beach, there along the valley, and there over the sand hills, and down into the dells, their needle-sharp eyes piercing the bush and travelling along the pads made by kangaroos or goats, and the rabbit-runs. Hopeless for Dudley to search all that dense bush for a fox or foxes, which, after all, might not lie poisoned there. Should dead foxes lie hidden there, the crows would find them quickly enough. Dudley made and lit a cigarette and watched his enemies, the crows, do his work of searching.

  Presently he saw one wheel, bank high, wheel again, and alight on a dead limb of a coast wattle. It cawed raucously, and another flew to join it. Both birds began to caw, lowering their heads as though bowing whilst they did so. The remaining five came back from their self-allotted sections of country, so that very shortly all seven birds were gathered in near view of some centre of interest.

  Dudley smiled grimly, stood up, made mental note of the position of the dead wattle, and walked to it, pushing his way through the close-growing scrub. And within four yards of the wattle he found the fifth fox, so obligingly indicated to hint by the crows. It was a dog fox, two years old, fur super class, long, even, clean, nut-brown with grey specks, glossy, and lovely.

  Half an hour later he had five pelts, each rolled into a ball and hung from his belt. The crows had as their well-earned breakfast the carcasses.

  Walking back to his tent, Dudley felt no elation whatever. Hanging from his belt were fur and scalps to the value of at least thirteen pounds. He was wholly unconscious of the colourful sea, the beach, the sand-hills. He was living over again the moment when he first met Ellen in a station-owner’s garden.

  CHAPTER XXV

  STORM

  GEORGE FINLAY was released from gaol on the 14th of May. He found the strike of the Midland Railway still in full swing; and, since the ball-race for his truck had not arrived from Perth, he wired Ellen Dudley to leave for Mingenew in a hired car as quickly as possible. Three hours later Ellen wired him that she was about to depart.

  That afternoon found Arnold Dudley tramping north-ward from the southern extremity of the beach, where he had been prospecting for fox-tracks. He had been away from camp since early that morning, and, although he had walked some twenty miles over loose sand, he was unconscious of fatigue. When half a mile from camp his seagulls came to meet him, flying about his head and screaming a welcome, and he acknowledged their comradeship by tossing his hat high in the air, and shouted when the birds converged on it with daring wing feats. Whilst he walked on they accompanied him, till he began to climb the hill behind the Pontoon, when they preceded him to the Seagulls’ Throne, on which they settled. When he reached it they rose, hovering, and when he climbed to its flat top they dropped down to the sand base. Love had conquered their shyness.

  For mid-May the weather was superb. For days the wind had come from the centre of Australia, warm and gentle. Day by day, although the sun was swinging farther to the north, it yet became hotter, so that on this day the atmosphere was humid and the great rock on which Dudley seated himself was uncomfortably warm. Still no cloud whitened the sky, and over all that vast expanse of water not a wave broke into foam. During many days the calm had continued, and to a person whose sojourn on the beach was shorter than Dudley’s the first indication of the coming of the greatest storm the people of Dongara had ever experienced would have been unnoticed. Dudley saw it immediately he sat on the Seagulls’ Throne, for from that elevated position he looked down on the sea. The tide was low, one of the lowest tides he remembered. Not a drop of water rolled over the Pontoon. The Sugar Loaf was revealed in the wave troughs to its foundation, an immense mass of granite, whilst the sunken reef south of it was occasionally disclosed, studded thickly with shellfish as large as oysters. Sky, sea, and beach were exactly as they had been the day before and for days before that. There was no sign of the coming storm in the sky or the sea. It was the beach crabs that predicted the coming change.

  The first crab to attract Dudley’s attention arrived at the summit of the sand-hill on which rested the great boulder he called the Seagulls’ Throne. Watching it idly, he saw it move straight to the clustered gulls, who made way for it ; and it struck Dudley as curious that he had never seen a gull kill a land-crab for food, although its shell is exceedingly brittle and it is incapable of self-defence against a bird the size of the gull.

  Excepting to move away at its approach, the gulls ignored the many-legged, grotesque beach-urchin moving on with its flat body on edge and its two black eyes tipping the high cylindrical towers. The crab, without haste yet with uncanny fixed purpose of direction, deviated not a hair’s breadth, and passed the Seagulls’ Throne to move down the landward side of the sand-hill, where it disappeared among the low coast-bush. Shortly afterwards Dudley saw two more travelling together and in the same direction. From his eminence the Seaweed Mountain appeared in shape and colour a flat wet rock lying at the edge of the beach. From this seeming rock he saw tiny points of orange become detached and move slowly across the narrow sand-beach till they disappeared in the coast-scrub. The moving points of orange were countless. The Seaweed Mountain must have been the home of many thousands of these peculiar crabs, and they were then evacuating their fortress for the greater security of the scrub-studded sand-dunes.

  So unusual an occurrence aroused his interest, and, climbing down from the Throne he made his way to the beach, there to walk along it till he arrived behind the Seaweed Mountain, which then cut him off completely from the sea.

  Its brown mass, interlaced with black-studded streamers, and spotted by scarlet sponge not yet dead from exposure to the drab atmosphere, was pointed by countless beach-crabs, reminding Dudley of a community of ants whose nest has been disturbed. They swarmed over the seaweed and appeared and disappeared from and into crevices and holes. An army of orange-uniformed soldiers moved from it up the beach, passing him on both sides, “cleek-clecking” acknowledgment of his presence, but strangely unafraid
of him.

  The migration fascinated him. The naturalist in him marvelled, and for a while he was absorbed by the problem of their collective purposeful movement. He wondered what the impulse was behind that migration, what had come to them from space ordering their evacuation. Dudley remembered then that one of the surest signs of heavy rain in the hinterland of the continent was shown by ants removing their eggs from ground nests and carrying them up into trees.

  Of a certainty these crabs were not afraid of rain. They had no need to be. Wind, however, did disturb them. Wind-driven sand appeared to frighten and hurt them; and, after more thought than he had given to anything for some considerable time, Dudley decided that they were hurrying for shelter at the approach of a storm long before a single indication of its coming was observable to man.

  For dinner that evening he ate kangaroo steak fried with sliced potatoes, accompanied by the inevitable tea. Through the open tent-door came the occasional “cleek-cleek” of a crab; and, when finally he went out for the wash-up water, he was greeted by a chorus of “cleek-cleeking” from dozens of the amphibians, mostly concealed by the surrounding bush.

  It still wanting half an hour to sunset, Dudley returned to the beach, carrying damper crusts and small pieces of kangaroo meat for his gulls. They were waiting for him, circling his camp into which they never would come, and they flew around him whilst he walked down to the Pontoon, where he tossed their evening meal into the rock-pools, for they preferred to pick up the bread and meat from water.

  The lonely man’s attention to these seventeen gulls was pathetic. It revealed a human soul starved and hungry for affection. The most depraved of men, hated and loathed by his fellows, will receive adoration from a dog, friendship from a bird, or even toleration from a reptile. A man must love something; he must receive solace from the affection of something living, and if he lives in solitude he will take infinite pains to secure from other sources the need of affection denied him by his kind.