The Beach of Atonement Page 25

  Remarkable is the number of sudden and serious quarrels caused by the ill-treatment of a man’s pet. There are instances when the quarrel has culminated in murder, for the instinct to protect is as great as the instinct to love. Dudley would have fought off any danger to his gulls, forfeiting his life if necessary. The shooting of the solitary shag meant as much to him in his state of loneliness as the death of a child to a man living in normal circumstances.

  His gulls fed and duly chided for their greediness, Arnold Dudley mounted to the Seagulls’ Throne, there to make and light a cigarette. The sun was very low, big and crimson. The wind was a little stronger. It covered the sea with cat’s-paws and laid a carpet of rubies before the sun. Over the Pontoon welled the waves of the incoming tide, and to the south-west and west the horizon-line was being lifted and dropped by the rollers sweeping over the distant Ramparts. The sea was rising. On its surface it bore no different aspect, yet even to Dudley’s untrained eyes it was evident that the incoming waves were bigger than they had been at noon. They were what are known as ground swell. Raised by the growing weather disturbance far in the Indian Ocean, these long, distinct hills of water outran the storm in speed to become its pilots.

  Into its bed of fire sank the sun, and when it had sunk from sight it revealed low on the horizon a ribbon of clouds with the substance of mist, clouds of gauze with centres of scarlet and edges of pink-dream clouds, unearthly, Martian clouds. And whilst Dudley watched he saw their colour turn to orange and yellow, to cream and white, and then appear slowly to disintegrate and vanish.

  The Sugar Loaf was being washed by the rising swell. Low, thunderous vibrations came from the seaward base of the Pontoon at the instant tons of water rose up its concave face and welled shoreward in a white-fronted swathe of green water, three to four feet thick. The tide set southward and the Boiling Pot was free of flotsam. The incoming breakers gradually drew nearer and nearer to the Seaweed Mountain, as teasing monsters confident of power to destroy when they willed.

  Dudley sat on the Seagulls’ Throne when darkness fell and hid the water, but was unable to conceal the softly gleaming stretch of sand-beach and the lines of incoming surf. With the fading of daylight the easterly wind, warm and bush-scented, freshened. It rustled the dwarf bushes and disturbed the fine dry sand with a hissing sound so low that it was as the bursting of soap-bubbles.

  When he walked behind the low sand-ridge backing the beach, to his camp, the bushes on both sides of the rough track were full of the “cleek-cleeks” of the crabs. They were still fleeing the Seaweed Mountain and assembling in their thousands in the shelters between the dunes. Their strange voices appeared to Dudley to hold indignation at his presence among them. He still could hear them all around his tent whilst he recorded his observations of them in his diary, and he heard them later when he lay down to sleep.

  At dawn he awoke from a dream that left him stiff with horror, and sent him out to light the fire and boil the billy for tea, as a man who has passed through a frightful experience. Undoubtedly dreams are made up of memories stored by the subconscious mind. Often we can trace the substance of a dream to a recent thought or happening. When the thoughts entered Dudley’s mind which produced the nightmare that was to lead him to freedom from his chains, he did not know. So far from trying to recall those thoughts to account for the dream, he believed that it was a vision sent him by God to soften his heart.

  He dreamed that he was dead and walking along a white sandy road towards two low, thick pillars of marble. When he drew nearer to those pillars he saw on the summit of one seven seagulls, and on the summit of the other ten seagulls. They were his gulls. He recognized each of them with joy and called to them, and as one they left the marble pillars and flew to him and attacked him. Their bills he saw, with a feeling of terrible loathing, were fouled by flesh and were hooked as beaks of eagles. Screaming vile oaths, they pecked at his face and his ears and his hair, and when he wildly waved his arms to beat them off one pecked out his right eye and held it in its beak, so that with his other eye he could see his lost optic regarding him with malevolent hatred.

  Another gull pecked out his left eye, and even when suffering untold terror and pain he considered it strange that he could still see, could see the two gulls each holding one of his eyes in its bill. And both eyes shone with an awful hatred blazing from their green depths.

  Limb by limb the gulls tore him to pieces, and his disembodied soul hovered about them whilst it screamed for the return of its covering. It was then that he heard the voice of Edmund Tracy, whom he could not see, but who he knew was near. Tracy was crying, pleading for life, imploring the gulls to give him Dudley’s body, so that he might live his allotted span, and work out his redemption on earth. The gulls cried their familiar welcome, and there upon the ground built up the body of Tracy with the limbs of Arnold Dudley. And on Tracy’s face was a wonderful joy, whilst the gulls flew down the sandy road, beckoning him to follow them whence Dudley had come.

  The pillars of marble turned to living flame, and beyond them the road led to and vanished at the foot of a perpendicular grid of red-hot bars which ran up to the vault of the livid sky. And from the grid along the road came four figures carrying a stretcher with black leather handles which once had carried Dudley from a train to a hospital in England. Waiting there, he knew with sudden awful terror that those four men were coming to lift him on the stretcher, and carry him back to the fire beyond the grid. And when they drew near, and he shrieked and tried to flee, he saw that each of their faces was the face of Ellen. The four Ellens came, and, laying the stretcher beside him, bent over him, smiling with shocking evilness, and stretched down their beautiful white hands.

  That was the moment of his awakening. The next found him outside his tent, trembling, his temples damp with ice-cold sweat. The patches of orange laid on white helped him to regain his nerve, for the patches of orange swayed over the white sand, and the hundreds of crabs of which they were composed greeted him with their chorus of “cleek-cleek”.

  The effect of the dream was still upon him when, having breakfasted hastily, he went along to the beach. The day had brought but little change to sky and sea. The sun rose into a clear, brilliant sky, as had become usual, and the surface of the sea was but faintly marked by the soft easterly wind. The tide, however, was high, and racing into the beach. Widely spaced and evenly formed were great hills of water whose summits were as whales’ backs until they reached the Sugar Loaf and the sunken reef, or came to within fifty yards of the Seaweed Mountain, when the rollers reared and broke, thence to charge on the obstructions with the slow weight of terrific power.

  Obsessed by his dream, Dudley walked to the edge of the low headland abutting on the Pontoon, leaving the gulls feeding along the beach, since the tide was too high to afford any placid pools. Whilst he sat with his feet dangling over the water-combed edge of the headland, he felt an instinctive warning of coming danger, and thought of the migrating crabs, and wondered if their finer instincts or intelligence had received the same warning. Consideration of this hypothesis was rudely stopped by sudden conviction that his more than habitually depressed state of mind was due to the dream.

  It haunted him. Tracy’s cries for life rang yet in the ears of his mind. Vision of the faces of the four Ellens was still vivid to the eyes of his mind, whilst the horror of that doom awaiting him still made his hands tremble and the corners of his mouth quiver.

  Idly watching each roller leap and rush forward over the Pontoon, now many feet submerged; idly noting how each incoming wave rushed, fronted by a wall of water, to the base of the headland, careering over the comparatively still grey-green water, then sweeping backward to join the greater volume sliding southward with the speed of a racehorse, he tried to solve the enigma of his dream.

  The hours sped and time brought him no solution. He could make nothing of the stretcher, nor of the four Ellens. That his dead body should be taken from him and given to Tracy to enable Tracy to live aga
in and die a natural death after having had full time to repent his evil ways, was but justice. As a man in a dark room searching for the switch to turn on the electric light, Dudley had been groping toward real understanding of his act of killing. That part of the dream which directly concerned Tracy and himself became the switch that turned on the light. By it he saw clearly that when he shot Tracy he not only deprived him of his life, hut also deprived his soul of the hope of Redemption, in which he, Arnold Dudley, had always so thoroughly believed. He not only had hurled Tracy out of a world of pleasure, but moreover had hurled the man’s soul into Eternity, blackened by his lustful amours. Not only had Tracy lost his life; he had lost also the right of regaining Paradise by repentance and amendment which he might have exercised had he lived.

  That was the thought which became dominant in Dudley’s mind during the rest of his life. It absorbed him so intensely that morning that he failed to observe the knife-edged bank of clouds rising from the sea towards the north-west. This bank, dense and bluff-faced, with flat blue-black underside and its top side a glory of snowy white, rose to the zenith with astonishing swiftness, travelling south-east. He did not observe that whilst the general mass of clouds raced towards the south-east they also drifted eastward. They were as the outside edge of a wheel which spins slowly from right to left whilst the wheel itself moves steadily in one direction.

  During the approach of the cloud-mass to the sun the wind veered with infinite slowness to the north, at the same time increasing in velocity. By noon the sun was hidden. The summits of the sand-hills were faintly smoking, the sand-smoke sweeping over the beach to the sea, now grey-green and whipped by tiny wavelets that rushed away to meet the growing swells. The sound of them breaking along the beach and crashing over the now invisible rocks had risen to a low continuous roar, accompanied by the whine of the wind steadily ascending in tone. It came steadily, not in gusts, and in its rising pressure there was mysterious significance.

  As the wind increased, so seemed to increase the weight pressing on Arnold Dudley’s mind. Regret became an agony. He saw the fullness of his folly, the atrocity of his act, that day. Never since that fateful telephone call had he been so sane. In correct perspective he saw Tracy’s act, Ellen’s act, and his own act. After all, civilized man was right when he demanded that there should be no murder without death or life-imprisonment to the murderer, no matter what the provocation. Man was merely upholding a law of God.

  There was now no recall, no going back. What the Moving Finger had written could never be washed out. Not only had he destroyed Tracy, he had destroyed also himself, for there on the beach lived but a ghost of Arnold Dudley. He was enduring a living death, and why? Because he loved Ellen and had lost her? No. Because he hated Tracy? No. Because a man had pricked the bubble of his vanity? Yes.

  The afternoon waned. There had entered into the voice of the surf the roar of fury, and into the scream of the wind the anger of hell. No blaze of crimson glory laid the sun to rest that evening. The sand stung Dudley’s face and neck, and swirled around the Seagulls’ Throne high above his head. The whole beach beyond a quarter of a mile was hidden by the sand-smoke from the dunes, and the spaces between the ridges were obliterated by the white fog.

  The tide remained stationary. The pressure of the coming cyclonic disturbance held it at its abnormally high level. For a mile from the beach the sea was covered by endless lines of sweeping surf. Every roller crashed and spouted against the Seaweed Mountain, and from it tore its quota of weed, which drifted past the headland over the Pontoon in a dark mass acting on the chop as oil on greater waves.

  Not a crab was in sight. They huddled together in compact masses in the shelter of the scrub, and singly ran with apparent aimlessness as far inland as Big Hill. Dudley saw the clouds lower and come racing out of the sea. He watched the day weaken and die in a world of tossing, swirling water and flying, hissing sand. And not until midnight did he stumble into his tent and throw himself on his bed, oblivious of bodily wants of food and drink and warmth, realizing only that he had damned himself merely because his vanity had received a wound.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  HESTER LONG’S ORDEAL

  THUNDER awoke Hester Long, and if there was one thing that daunted this brave woman it was an electric storm. The electrically-charged atmosphere seemed to play on her nerves as a musician’s fingers on catgut. Nevertheless, a lightning display had a powerful fascination for her ; and, being awakened by a heavy roll of not-far-distant thunder, she lit the lamp at her bedside and noted the time to be five minutes past four.

  Slipping out of bed and throwing on a wrap, she went to the window and, drawing aside the blind, peered outside. Her room faced south, and the window was almost fully open. Quite invisible in the black darkness was the fig-tree near which opened the kitchen door. The stillness was profound.

  When she had gone to bed the wind was blowing half a gale from the north. Invariably, when a weather disturbance was due, the wind veered from the east to the north, thence to swing westward whilst the disturbance heightened, and southward when it had passed. These weather disturbances were almost always accurately foretold by the meteorologists in Perth from data wirelessed by ships at sea, and the result of the charted information was broadcast twice daily from the Government Broadcasting Station. The Mallorys, therefore, possessing a wireless installation, were well posted as to the approach. of these disturbances, and Hester Long, through Miss Mallory, had been advised of the coming of what was to be a notable storm.

  The dropping of the wind sometime whilst she was asleep was not unusual, but an electrical storm at that season of the year was most unusual. It predicted an unusually severe disturbance, and, whilst looking out through the open window, she thought of Arnold Dudley in his flimsy calico tent.

  The tree was illuminated for fully two seconds by lightning blue as turquoise. The thunder, following instantly, shook the house, and in the ensuing silence she heard two sounds, the roaring of the surf on the beach four miles away, and her younger son crying for her in the next bedroom. Even when she dropped the blind the lightning came again, flickering and terrifying, and her answer to the lad’s call was lost in a burst of thunder. With madly pounding heart, the lamp carried unsteadily in her trembling hand, she passed out of her bedroom and entered that of her two small boys.

  Their round childish eyes winked into her light. Harold, the elder by two years, was still lying down, manfully hiding his fear, but James was sitting up, frankly terrified.

  “Mummie! the thunder frightens me,” he wailed.

  “But there is nothing to be afraid of, darling,” Hester told him cheerfully.

  “That’s what I said,” Harold put in with scorn.

  “Oh, mummie, it’s getting worser!”

  “There is no such word as ‘worser’. We’ll see that we cannot find it in the dictionary in the morning. And it will soon be light. Now I’m going to get into your bed, Harold, and Jim can come in, too; and while we wait for day to come I’ll tell you a story about two little boys named David and Jonathan.”

  Yet that night Hester Long’s story was not successful. The storm broke on the coast about an hour before dawn. The blinded window, aided by the lamp, baffled the vivid lightning, but nothing could deaden the appalling crashes of the thunder. The very bed on which the woman sat with her two lads huddled against her shook from the concussions, as though it and the house were set beside the mouth of an enormous naval gun. The thunder rumbled from a far distance, it crackled with many rapid reports immediately above them, and once one single ear-splitting crack set the children frantically hugging her, drew the blood from her face, and caused her heart to miss a beat.

  Minute after long minute, after longer minute, the thunder roared and crackled and crashed without cease. The house shook and Hester thought it would collapse. To speak was almost impossible, and all the comfort she could give her children was to tighten her arms around them and alternately brush their hair with her fa
ce. Above her concern for them and for herself was her wild anxiety for the welfare of Arnold Dudley, there alone in the bush at the utter mercy of the elements. A fox in its hole, a rabbit deep in its burrow, would be infinitely more secure.

  Supposing the lightning struck him? Vividly Hester Long saw him lying twisted and charred beneath the smoking ash of his tent, and she wanted to cry out at the picture drawn by her own imagination. Dead! supposing that the new day found him dead ? At least he would have found peace, at the least his agony would be finished; for surely there would be no further punishment after death? And after death Hector Cain would meet her husband, and they would be friends, for they were so much alike in temperament and in spirit; else why had she loved both? Presently the intervals between the thunder-claps lengthened, and then she heard another sound, the hissing fall of tremendous rain. No tent without a protecting fly pitched over it would keep out such a downpour.

  Dudley’s tent she knew was unprotected. In a short time he would he drenched, and everything belonging to him would be drenched also.

  The dawn, when it came, brought yet another terror to succeed the thunder and lightning. Above the fall of the rain on the tin house roof, above the roar of the surf so far away yet seeming so close, she heard another sound, low-toned, humming as a top revolving faster and faster. That sound, strange to her, made her uneasy and fearful.

  How she managed to put genuine cheerfulness into her voice when she spoke to the children was beyond her accounting. The increasing humming sound forced her out of the bed to the window, when lifting the blind she peered without.