The Beach of Atonement Page 3

  Dudley nodded.

  “Ellen–by Gawd ! You didn’t do ’er in, too?”

  “No. Ellen is a vase—a broken vase. It was no use breaking a broken vase, was it?”

  “If yer ’ad of done Ellen in, I ain’t sure but wot I’d ’ave bashed you, Arnold, and ’anded you over to the police,” Finlay whispered hoarsely. “She may ’ave come ’er thud, but it wasn’t ’er fault. That there Tracy mesmerized ’er—must ’ave done. Anyway, things being as they are, the sooner you do a get the better. Do you know where you’re headed for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’d better get on and get there. But, first of all, slide out of them clothes and climb into this old suit of dungarees. Come on, now! Here they are on the seat of the truck. There’s no one about and I’ll keep nit. Spark up, Arnold, old lad! Killing Tracy ain’t nothing to worry about, exceptin’ that you were such a crimson fool as not to liven me up to ’is little game and leave the killing to me. Yes, off with them shoes! Put on them old boots. You’re dopy, man! You wouldn’t make a real murderer’s shadow, dinkum you wouldn’t! And that flash ’at! Here, shove on this old felt. This good clobber I’ll take ’ome and burn in the copper. Your car I’ll leave on the river-bank below Guildford, and heave your flash hat into the water. The police’ll think you’ve drownded yourself—with luck. Avoid talking to people as much as possible, and keep yer old felt down over yer eyes. Now—are you right? Good! Let me know if you want anything. Away you go! Jam both feet on that blasted accelerator, and keep ’em down hard. So long!”

  Conscious of nothing but the present, Dudley had driven north, finding his way along the main road with the sureness of a somnambulist. His driving was perfect. At Three Springs and Mingenew he filled the petrol tank, and early on the day he reached Dongara he stopped to remove the plugs and clean them and readjust the points, because the engine was missing on one cylinder; but of that he remembered nothing whatever.

  The road he was following lay along a valley leading to the sea. He was passing paddocks fenced, in places, by the old method of posts and rails—paddocks wherein enormously fat lazy market cattle were wallowing knee-deep in a rippling sea of emerald-green lupins. Away on his right rose the steep slopes forming the edge of a great breakaway worn back ages ago, when the ocean swept up this wide inlet. Here and there the slopes were covered by short bush trees, but on the flats below grew giant boxes and gums, set here and there like grand ancestral oaks in an English park. Above the ridge; in mighty sweeps, circled eagles of seven-foot wing-span, watching, incessantly watching, the scurrying, gambolling rabbits below. In the rattling, roaring old truck, Dudley passed across the three-mile bridge, but had no eyes for the old pise-built hut erected by some dauntless settler in years when the State was young. One of the richest valleys in the Commonwealth, one of the fairest that early summer morn, was lost on Dudley, who saw beyond the radiator nothing but Tracy’s face wearing its comical expression of surprise.

  Presently he arrived at the eastern end of the long straggling village, where the houses were typically English in their walls and chimneys, but crowned with modern Australian ugliness in their cheap corrugated iron roofs. Two cottages there were, before which a British exile would have paused, and which might have been transplanted from a Hampshire countryside by Aladdin’s genie. The yellow-washed walls, the squat wide chimneys, so suggestive of an open hearth and great wood logs a-blazing, the neat little gardens filled with homely hollyhocks, wallflowers, and geraniums—all were there in that transplantation of England to Western Australia.

  He stopped the truck outside the main store. The whole village was more English than Australian. Even the newly-built hotel, its name and date lettered on the cement beneath the eaves—“Dongara Hotel 19—”—was less of Australia and far more of England in its architecture. Placid peacefulness reigned here, the peaceful placidity that had caused men contentedly to omit to add the figures after “19” to indicate the precise year when the hotel had been built.

  At the store, where grocery was sold on one side, drapery on the other, and kitchenware at the farther end, Dudley waited whilst a man wearing blue dungaree trousers and a navy-blue woollen guernsey examined a mass of fish-lines and boxes of fish-hook lying on the counter. The task of selection was deliberate, unhurried, as though the fisherman had lost many a fine jew-fish through faulty tackle.

  When Dudley’s turn came to be served he told the storekeeper he wanted to leave an order which he would call back for the next day. Without surprise the man behind the counter made out the list—a case of tinned milk, a case of tinned meat, a case of assorted jam, a dozen this and two dozen that. Petrol in four-gallon tins and oil in one-gallon tins; billycans and saucepans, a mincing machine, and a camp-oven. Oh! And flour—a 56-lb. bag will do—and half a dozen tins of baking powder. Also two hundred twelve-bore BB cartridges, a hundred high-power ’32 Winchester cartridges, and half a dozen bottles of strychnine—and so on.

  “How is the track into the Nineteen Mile Rocks, do you know?” Arnold asked languidly.

  “I don’t think anyone has been down there since last year,” replied the storekeeper cheerfully. “Are you thinking of going down for a day or so?”

  “Yes. I want to put in time rabbiting and foxing, and do a little fishing in between. It is several years since I was there, but where the track turns off the main road there is a well, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. That’s so.”

  “Who owns the land there now?” was Dudley’s next question.

  “Mallory. Just as well to ask his formal permission to rabbit on his property.” The storekeeper gazed across his shop as though he dreamed of a life of freedom among the hills and sand-dunes. “If you get any fish you’d find a ready market here,” he said. “We can’t get fish. The fishermen won’t sell their fish locally. They send it all to Perth.”

  “All right. I’ll remember,” Dudley answered slowly. “I’ll go along now and make camp. I’ll be in to-morrow afternoon for the stores and one or two things I expect I’ll need. Goodbye!”

  Going out, he climbed into his truck, finding the fisherman standing close by eyeing the rabbit-traps and other items of gear not covered by the tarpaulin. Within an hour the whole population of Dongara would know that a strange rabbit-trapper had come to town. This kind of publicity Dudley saw no reason to fear.

  He drove seawards, the murmur of the surf coming towards him as a mother’s crooning lullaby. At the school, the only real Australian building, he turned to the right and headed north towards Geraldton, past the bakery and several old-fashioned cottages, and then the station on the single track that had borne the train carrying Tracy to Perth and back to Geraldton.

  And, in his northward journey, the farm lands gradually gave place to raw bush lands which to the west rose in high hummocked coast sand-hills, and to the east in gently rising slopes. Perfumes, sweet and sometimes sickly, greeted his nostrils, wafted from the low bush growing it, with here and there tiny open grass-grown glades where countless rabbits raced about or browsed with nervous trembling ears.

  Sometimes above the roar of the motor the sound of the waves pounding against rocks was audible. On his right he passed a tiny farm where sheep grazed, fat and slow-moving. Where the bush trees were cleared, the grass grew knee-deep. Presently he came to the round coping of a well above which was a windlass, and close by an iron drinking-trough where a black and white butcher bird was drinking.

  At Mallory’s farm he stopped. Mallory, a young and keen-looking man, whose business was to buy store cattle cheaply in the dry hinterland and fatten them for the Perth market in his lupin-covered paddocks, readily gave permission to Dudley to trap where he liked, and draw what water he wanted from the well near where the beach-track turned west from the main road.

  Reaching the well, Arnold filled two empty petrol-tanks and set off on the last three miles to the coast. The track had been cut through the dense bush that pressed wall-like on each side so closely that
branches and twigs slapped the sides of the truck. It rose and fell and twisted over and round the jumble of steep sand-hills, rabbits dashed across it in front of him, and the perfumes of the bush lay heavy in the dells.

  Then, climbing a long steep gradient, the engine roaring at low gear, the truck slowly reached the summit of the highest hill ; and quite suddenly, as a picture thrown on a screen, Dudley looked out over the immensity of the Indian Ocean, and down on the fringe of sand-hummocked coast, with its edge of white sand beach and the bluff promontory that thrust shelving, sharp-edged masses of grey and black rock far into the swelling sea.

  Stopping the truck, he got out and stood there in front of it, the sunlit vision of wonder space dazzling his eyes, the pure fresh breeze blowing on his heated face and creeping within his rough clothes, touching his body with a million soothing fingers.

  He breathed deep, deep, deep. The mist of unreality, the phantasmagoria that had descended on his brain, enveloping him, was torn to shreds and blown away from him by the clean wind as a sail is torn from a ship in a gale. There on the height he regained his mental equilibrium, his right perspective of time, his consciousness of the present; and it was as though a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders when he again climbed into the truck and sent it down the hillside, the engine in low gear to assist braking.

  Now once again the sand-hills towered above the bush walls, hemming him in, and, following the track, he twisted and turned in its maze till abruptly he came to the track’s end on a clear sandy place above the jutting rocks. There, with the vast empty restless ocean before him and the scrub-covered white sand-hills behind, Dudley looked about for a camp site. He saw the marks of buggy wheels and the place where a horse had been tethered. Week-enders, probably. Well, they would not annoy him.

  The place he selected was a few hundred yards back along the track. There in a hollow, protected from the wind by a low sand-ridge separating him from the beach, he cut out of the bush a space large enough to erect his ten-by-twelve-foot tent. The task of erecting it and placing within his stretcher-bed and swag—provided by the thoughtful Finlay—and all his gear, other than the traps, occupied him till sunset. He cooked bacon and fried eggs and made strong coffee, and whilst it was still light lay on his bed and slept. It was the first sleep he had had for close on eighty hours.

  Contrary to popular melodramatic ideas concerning the state of a murderer’s mind, Arnold Dudley slept sixteen hours, never once troubled by nightmarish dreams. True, when he awoke he was puzzled as to his whereabouts, and for a moment thought he was somewhere in the north-east during his pre-Ellen days.

  The sun-created silhouettes of bush-tree leaves danced on the white canvas roof of his tent. Clean cool air swept in through the open doorway, fanning his face, vanquishing the last languors of sleep. From somewhere close by a butcher-bird whistled two bars of its favourite song with wonderful clarity and sweetness, whilst omnipresent was the slow droning of blow-flies.

  It was with a nerve-shaking rush that remembrance swept through his brain. The sunlight went out, was born again, but it was of a tint as though filtered through a vast sheet of black gauze. No hint of remorse was present, only anger—dull, gnawing anger that sent the blood into his head under pressure. He was glad he had killed Tracy. Realization of the result of his action sent a glow of satisfaction through him—satisfaction slightly chilled by the fact that he could not kill Tracy again.

  Why not? Tracy had robbed him of his dearest possession, happiness; robbed him of the body and soul of Ellen. It was a calculated robbery of which no man, not even the thief, could make restitution. If a man, poverty-stricken and starving, stole his watch, the thief would be sent to prison by an indignant magistrate. Yet the value of the watch was small. He could buy a watch every morning before lunch. But a man could steal another man’s happiness, another man’s wife’s virtue, and not even imprisonment threatened him. Financial damages possibly might be wrested from the robber, but the amount would be assessed on the thief’s income, making him a debtor, one who owed money, not one who owed happiness and honour, which all the world’s money cannot buy.

  From the moral standpoint Arnold Dudley honestly believed himself justified in taking Tracy’s life—a thousand times more justified than in taking the life of a Turkish soldier in Gallipoli ; one who had done him no harm, a man he did not know. For legalized killing he possessed medals; for the recent unlegalized killing he was in grave danger of being hanged. Where, in the names of good and evil, was to be found logic in man’s justice?

  “Thou shalt not kill,” had said the Voice amidst the thunders and lightnings on Sinai. The command in plain English was expressed by four simple words. There were no riders to that commandment, no exceptions. Dudley had broken that commandment many times during the Dreadful War, he had again broken it three days past; yet, whilst he felt no remorse for killing the man who had robbed him, he often had felt remorse for the killing of men who had robbed him of nothing.

  Getting up from his stretcher-bed, he passed outside and, from habit formed many years before, examined the sky to forecast the weather. Lighting a fire, he placed a billycan of water against the flames to boil for tea, washed and shaved, and dressed in his ill-fitting rough dungarees.

  Whilst driving to Dongara to obtain the rations he had ordered and purchase fishing gear and a fifty-gallon galvanized tank in which to cart his water supply, Arnold Dudley experienced no emotion other than elation. The loss of Ellen, and all that Ellen represented in his life at Perth, was outweighed by the satisfaction he felt in having upheld the Unwritten Law.

  Not that day, nor yet for many more days, did Arnold Dudley again remember that great truth epitomized by the immortal Persian:

  “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: …”

  CHAPTER IV

  THE BEACH

  ONE morning, about a week after he had established himself on what he was to call the Beach of Atonement, Arnold Dudley was sitting on the Seagulls’ Throne. The Throne was a basalt rock, roughly cubical in shape, which crowned a low sand-hill rising at the base of the headland of ugly sea-thrusting rocks. How the cubical rock, weighing at least a ton, came to be where it was, was to him an insoluble mystery; since its base was a hillock of fine sand, covered with stunted coast-shrubs—a hill fifty feet high from its foundation of granite.

  He called the cubical rock the Seagulls’ Throne because at his first visit the top of it was splashed white by resting gulls. From the Seagulls’ Throne it was possible to view the whole length of the beach from the great northern promontory to the southern extremity, where the coast-line curved eastward around hundred-foot cliffs. From promontory to cliffs was possibly a stretch of twenty miles, and where he sat above the short bluff headland was about midway.

  Immediately below him lay a comparatively level mass of rock, about two acres in extent, covered by several feet of water at high tide, and at low tide awash by the waves that crashed unceasingly against its crumbling seaward edge. This he called the Pontoon. At low tide there could be seen now and then the top of a rock mass approximately two hundred yards out, whilst farther to the north a flat-topped, oblong-shaped rock he named the Sugar Loaf was visible even at high tide. A little north of these two rocks, where the sea was ever in turmoil, little wavelets cutting back across the tops of the combers, whirling masses of froth thrust this way and that in a wide circular motion, was situated the Boiling Pot.

  It boiled the fiercer when the tide swept northward, impelled by a fresh south wind. From Dudley’s view-point he could see the back-cutting wavelets, the white froth, and several spars of timber which drifted round; and round, animate things that longed for the freedom of the open beach, but were kept back by the water-devil till such time as the tide changed.

  A mile or more at sea, a serried line of deep-sunk reefs broke the larger waves. Out there the sea rolled shoreward in mighty swells—swells that lifted up the horizon-line on their broad backs, high above the gen
eral ocean level, high and higher in menacing black lines, forced upward by the reefs, until the peaks curled and rushed forward in foaming lather.

  Shoreward from the sunken reefs—Dudley called them the Ramparts—each wave regained a little of its broken strength and came charging in across a welter of chop to climb up and over the Sugar Loaf, take the sunken rock on the south like steeplechasers, and finally hurl themselves against the Pontoon with leaping curtains of white water. And, whilst the main body of each wave was inevitably flung back, tons of water advanced’ across the Pontoon with a hissing roar, looking like a charging squadron of white horses in line abreast.

  Every wave brought in its quota of dead and living seaweed, carried it over the sunken rocks, swept it across the Pontoon to the narrow shelving strip of sand at the foot of the headland, there to leave it on the sand, and to retreat in the manner of a cat who wants a nearly-dead mouse to run. And the next wave, fearing jealously that the streamers of seaweed would escape, sprang in, grasped its prey, dragged it away from safety and carried it a few yards northward, there throwing the weed up again to await recapture by the succeeding wave.

  The streamers of weed were thus teased northward for perhaps a quarter of a mile, when in one of her amazing caprices the sea piled up the weed into a huge hummock, acres in area and twenty feet high.

  North and south extended the white glittering sweep of the sand beach, ever pounded by the insatiable surf eternally eating into the sand-bound coast. Above the curling breakers the wind swept shoreward the spray in iridescent veils, and, as if dissatisfied, whipped up the sand on the dunes into a white thin fog.

  Never a ship was seen off that coast unless it were wounded or storm-driven. Day after day and year after year the sea was empty of ships ; for sailing ships steered clear of its. rock-lined jaws, and steamships, knowing the fallibility of propellers and rudders, passed north and south fifty or a hundred miles away.