The Beach of Atonement Read online

  Seated on the Seagulls’ Throne, Dudley was the only human being in that wild world of roaring water and hissing sand. The small community of gulls, one day numbering seventeen, the next day but nine, the following day again seventeen, deprived of their throne, settled on the Seaweed Mountain, and looked out over the sea with their heads laid rearward over their backs. A solitary shag came winging southward, almost touching the wave-crests, rose several feet to clear the Pontoon, and swept down again when it was past. Sand-martins fluttered over the beach, always watching and waiting for what the waves might leave them.

  Nearly all the daylight hours of that first week Dudley had spent seated on the Seagulls’ Throne. There was in the eternal restlessness of the sea, the malignant cruelty of the wave-shattering rocks, the wild, wailing wind, an affinity with the exalted mood which at that time governed him. He likened himself to the ever-pounding sea, and Tracy to the ever-pounded rocks. At every magnificent thundering charge of the hugest waves his body tingled with exultation, as though he had Edmund Tracy at his mercy to pound and smash with roaring triumph.

  Hour after hour he sat, his face cupped in his hands, watching, fascinated, those rolling hills of water. He seemed never to be weary of watching, never satiated by the thrills experienced, his mind occupied wholly by Tracy, his awful victory over the body of Tracy, his stupendous achievement in sending Tracy’s soul to hell.

  The relative phases in the evolution of Ellen and Tracy were, in his mind, reversed. It was Tracy who seemed alive, receptive of burning, scorching hatred, and Ellen who was dead and at peace, draped in the white burial sheet of wonderful memory. At the precise moment that he had fired at Edmund Tracy, Ellen’s existence had ceased. When Dudley did think of her it was to remember her vivid laughter, which began invariably with a low gurgle and ended in a clear high note; or, again, the trick she had of pinching his ear when especially pleased with him; or how she looked when, at Belmont, she watched Flying Feet pass the judge’s box first and win her three hundred pounds; or the recurrent mental vision of her lovely arms when they rose and slipped around his neck:

  Tracy was alive, vibrant. He was there beyond the edge of the Pontoon, fighting, struggling in the leaping water, tortured and smashed and pounded by every incoming wave ; he was sunk yards deep in the Boiling Pot, whirled everlastingly round and round, whilst eternally he fought for air and found none.

  No man could conceive the exquisite pleasure Dudley felt when he went crab-hunting among, the rocks, armed with stones, when a hit was greeted with a yell of exultation; for Tracy lived within the brittle blue and red and black shells, and Tracy writhed on the spindly hairy legs. Dudley murdered Tracy by proxy and shouted his joy; he murdered him again and again in his mental visions and chuckled gleefully. Because, at the end of his first week on the Beach of Atonement, Arnold Dudley was very near insanity.

  It was the coming of Hester Long which saved him.

  Seated on the Seagulls’ Throne, the laughter-lit shouting of children finally enticed his mind from its inward concentration to the reality of the world of wind and sea and beach. It was some time after midday, and the tide was at its lowest. A miniature lagoon immediately north of the Pontoon furnished safe paddling for two little boys somewhere about seven or eight years old. Their arrival he had not noticed. A woman, evidently their mother—for even at that distance Dudley observed her matronly appearance—stood at one side of the Pontoon, fishing with a hand-line. The way she handled the line, the manner, dangerous even to the most expert, in which she heaved the lead sinker round her head to cast the several baited hooks clear of the rocks, proved that she was no novice at fishing. On the bare sand-patch up back from the beach a buggy stood close, to the single horse, then tethered to a post and feeding from a petrol-box. Near the buggy a second woman, slim and girlish, was coaxing a fire into being.

  Arnold Dudley’s interest was only momentary. Fleeting resentment at the intrusion on his solitude was followed by utter obliviousness of it. His mind, alive and furious, worked on the body and soul of Tracy, and it was eventually with an unpleasant nervous start that a fresh musical voice broke into that terrible world he alone had created and was developing.

  “I am sorry to intrude, but my friend has met with an accident.”

  Dudley looked up from his lofty perch, oafishly remaining seated, not seeming to realize that the lovely blonde face and slim figure of a young woman of some twenty years of age stood regarding him in the flesh, in reality. He stared at her vacantly, stupidly, and she spoke again, a trace of petulance in her voice.

  “My friend has got one of the hooks of her fishing-line buried in her thumb,” she said. “Do you think you could get it out?”

  “Er—hook in her thumb?” Dudley replied slowly. “Well, I don’t—don’t know. You see, I have no hook in my thumb. I was wondering if Ellen was living in a seagull.” He frowned, and the young woman’s eyes expanded with perplexity, then fear. “Hang it! What am I talking about? I am sorry, but I was thinking of other things. What was it you said? Oh yes! I remember. You said your friend has a fish-hook in her thumb. Am I right?”

  “Yes. But don’t let it worry you. I can drive her to Dongara, where there is a doctor.”

  Dudley slid off the rock, to stand immediately at the lady’s turned back. “I should be glad to help if I could,” he said; “I’ll come with you at once.”

  Making no reply to that, she moved off down the curving track his feet had made along the steep incline of the sand-hill; followed by the man she had concluded was not quite sane. The other woman was seated on a. tucker-box beside the buggy, one hand and the entangled line on the lap of her white duck dress. When Dudley stood before her he had to make a mental effort to bring himself to reality out of his world of nightmares.

  He saw a woman whom at first sight he thought to be about fifty, but a hasty examination of her face reduced that age by fifteen or twenty years. The enhanced age effect was produced by the lines about her forehead, and at the corners of her eyes and her mouth; her real age lay revealed in the steady, limpid grey eyes that regarded him bravely.

  “You have a hook in your hand,” he said, without questioning intonation.

  “Yes. I am afraid it is rather deeply buried,” she said in a soft voice which in tone was as beautiful as her eyes were in colour. “Do you think you could get it out? I wish you would try, please.”

  Holding out the injured hand, she let drop the yards of twisted line, leaving the lead sinker on her lap, and a second hook caught in her dress. Dudley saw that the other hook was invisible in the ball of her thumb, half-way up its straight length, and he shuddered, because his real nature revolted at the sight of pain and injury in others, and because his imagination was of that vivid order which magnifies things and events out of their true perspective.

  “I’ll try, if you wish,” he said, straightening himself, “but it is going to hurt badly. I am afraid I am very inexperienced. Would you not prefer the doctor?”

  “No—if you can take it out,” she replied, smiling valiantly. “You see, we are so far from Dongara, and—and I must be home at six o’clock to milk the cows. Besides, the doctor will charge so.”

  “Very well. Let me cut the hook from the line first,” he rejoined, producing a skinning knife from a sheath attached to his belt; then, when the line was clear : “ Just wrap the handkerchief round the thumb and try not to think of it, while I run to my camp for one or two things. Why not sit on the ground with the buggy-wheel for a rest?”

  Taking a rug off the seat, he folded it and gently assisted her to be seated on the soft sand. There, leaning back against the wheel-spokes, she closed her eyes, her face growing white. Looking up suddenly, he caught the other woman regarding him curiously, as though he were a newly-discovered species of the genus Homo. And in this survey she was supported by one of the children. The other knelt beside his mother crying: “Poor mummie ! poor mummie!”

  At his camp Dudley searched for a suitable knife;
and, finding none, resolved to use the skinning-knife. It was really a much-used butcher’s knife, but the edge was keen, and, finding an oil-stone in a tool-box, he put a still keener edge on it, the while apostrophizing all women in general, and fishing ones in particular. To get a bottle of brandy he was obliged to open a case containing a dozen bottles. He had completely forgotten the spirit, not so far having needed it. Carrying a bottle of the brandy, a wash-dish, and a billycan of water, he walked slowly back to the fishing-party—slowly, because he shrank from the thing he was going to do—an operation he would emphatically have refused to perform, could he have delegated it to someone else.

  Midway between camp and buggy he halted, returned to search for an antiseptic of some sort, and found in Finlay’s ammunition-box a tin of permanganate of potash. Now fully equipped, with no further excuse for delay, he gained the visitors’ temporary camp, where he placed his billycan on the fire and the dish, antiseptic, and brandy on the sand close by.

  “How is the thumb—hurting?” he asked with well-assumed cheerfulness.

  “It is aching a little,” the woman replied, once more smiling bravely.

  “Well, I am going to have a nobbler of brandy,” he told her, picking up the bottle and producing a corkscrew. “You will have a nobbler of brandy, too. You, please, take the little fellows for a paddle, will you?” he added to the younger woman.

  “I—I never—but perhaps a little sip would do me good.”

  “Of course it will,” Dudley assured her, pouring a great many sips into an enamelled pannikin, which he offered her. And, a minute later: “Now, just rest your hand on this step and watch the seagulls sleeping away the afternoon on that hill of seaweed.”

  Had Dudley’s nature been of coarser fibre, he might have imagined, when he possessed himself of the woman’s hand, that he had Tracy’s throat to cut. As a matter of simple fact Tracy was for the first time banished from his mind. He hesitated for seconds before he gently held the extremity of the hook with his left hand and cut once deeply with the knife in his other hand. He heard the woman’s breath drawn in sharply, but there was no tremor, no flinching in her hand, which he sub-consciously saw bore the lines and corns of hard, rough work.

  The blood welled up from the cut, ran down on the iron step, and dripped to the white sand. For an instant he thought of giving up, but the woman’s pluck and strength of mind shamed him, and he cut again, right down to the buried barb. A second later he had the hook out of the quivering flesh, and, throwing aside the knife, jumped for the billycan and partly filled the basin with the now warm water. Adding a pinch of the potash, he placed the water beside his patient, and himself lowered the hand into it from the step. Her eyes were open, wide and grateful. She tried to smile, but there was a tremble in her voice.

  “Have you got it out?” she whispered, to which he said: “Yes. By God! you’ve got grit. You stand it better than I do. I—I feel a bit sick. I must sit down.” Dudley almost collapsed. The bright world about them grew suddenly dark, and as suddenly became light again. Reaching for the bottle, he almost half-filled the pannikin, raised it to his mouth, put it down again, lurched to his feet, almost staggered to the tucker-box, from which he procured a china cup and poured some of the spirit from the pannikin into the cup.

  “No, no! I don’t want any more,” the woman protested. “Drink some yourself. It’ll make you better. Never mind me. I—I feel all right.”

  He drank the spirit neat. Rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands, he forced himself to walk a few paces from the buggy, to return with the nausea relieved.

  “Now let me finish the job,” he said quietly. “I am a bigger coward than you. You are a plucky woman, indeed you are! I am going to tear up this cloth for bandages.”

  “Very well. It won’t much matter. It’s an old tablecloth, you see.”

  Not very expertly, to be sure, Dudley bandaged the injured thumb with swathes of the tablecloth until the woman’s hand was lost to sight.

  “How is that, now?” he asked, standing up and regarding her with admiration. “No, no! Don’t get up for a little while. May I make the tea? The billy is boiling.”

  “If you please,” she said, answering his second question first. “Thank you ever so much for getting out that wretched hook. It was silly of me to throw out the line like I did, only there is a deep hole out from the rock, and we did so much want a fish.” To the other woman on the beach with the children she called; “Miss Mallory! Come and have lunch.”

  Standing, Dudley watched the approaching girl, accompanied by the racing children, with suddenly narrowed eyes. The exuberant spirits of the small boys and the joy expressed in the figure of Miss Mallory, who climbed up the low sandy bluff whilst the wind played havoc with her golden hair, inexplicably hurt him.

  It did not seem right that there should be happiness on that beach, his beach, where Tracy constantly fought for life and as constantly lost it. Why could not these people go elsewhere, with their fish-hooks, and golden hair, and high-pitched juvenile voices?

  “Well—I must be going,” he said bitterly, and gathered up his billycan, his wash-tin, and the brandy.

  “But you’ll stay and have lunch with us, surely?”

  For a moment he stared into the steady grey eyes regarding him with surprise. There was something in them which angered him, but what it was he could not then define.

  “You must stay and have lunch after what you have done for me.”

  “No. I must go,” was his decision, spoken in a voice that hinted at tiredness, spoke of resentfulness. He left them gazing at him in silent wonder, and from his camp walked and walked over the sand-hills until nightfall.

  CHAPTER V

  THE ABSENT-MINDED TRAPPER

  IT was on a morning early in November that Arnold Dudley, during his breakfast, resolved to idle no longer. He had then been on the Beach of Atonement a little more than a fortnight, but the urge to work was not produced by a surfeit of idleness, but to justify his being there. The people of Dongara, as well as Mallory and the two women who had visited the beach, all knew, as he had intended them to know, that he was a rabbit-trapper. Tongues wag and speculation would rear a dangerous head it he did not prove that he was a rabbit-trapper by gathering and dispatching skins to the Perth market.

  Moreover, the mental phase following his sudden departure from Perth was wearing itself out. No human mind can long be dominated by the consuming passion of hatred, the duration of that phase being governed by the strength of the emotion. His hatred of Tracy had been and was a thing so terrible intense as to threaten his reason. Undoubtedly it would have led to madness had not the fierce concentration on his wife’s seducer been cut as a thread of cotton by the fishing woman’s imperative need. Through the opening thus made extraneous affairs pressed their claims, the proof of his supposed profession or trade being the most urgent. Yet, if his hatred of Tracy was more under command, more subdued by reason, it remained a living flame.

  The previous afternoon he had examined the country and decided where he would make his first “set”. So thick and close was the bush that it was impossible for trap-setting; but at the edge of the bush, such as that made by the cut track from the main road to the beach, as well as several large natural clearings in the dips between the hills, he found ideal trapping ground.

  Rabbit-trapping may not be regarded by the elite as an occupation suitable for a gentleman. It demands, however, qualities that are not always to be found in successful professional men. To be a successful trapper requires not only perseverance and attention to detail, but in addition that formed habit of observation, patience, and untiring energy. The neophyte will set thirty traps and consider the day well spent; the expert will set two hundred, and wish he had set more.

  Dudley left camp carrying over each shoulder a dozen traps, and a setting hammer—not unlike a trench-tool of wartime use—slipped through his belt. About a hundred yards along the narrow track leading to the main road, he dropped his lo
ad, selected a trap, and with his setting hammer made a bed for it in a freshly used buck-heap. From a hip-pocket he detached from a small block a cut square of newspaper, which he placed over the tongue and that half-side of the plate before covering the whole with dirt. The trap was now set, held to the ground by an iron peg at the end of a short chain.

  Here and there were little breaks or clearings in the bush which provided ideal playgrounds for the rodent, and the traps he set in these he marked by making a trail with a stick to the track. Those set beside the track were also marked.

  Now to set a number of traps—and Dudley set sixty that morning—requires care and thought. If the places where the traps are set are not marked plainly enough to be found even at night-time, it will be discovered when they are taken up to be reset that several of them are missing; and from the standpoint of economy it would be but a matter of time for the trapper’s stock-in-trade to dwindle until he had no more traps than would catch rabbits to the value of a packet of cigarettes.

  It is astonishingly easy to overlook marking where a trap has been set. Should the mind of the trapper be exercised by any other subject than the task in hand, he will assuredly omit to mark his set traps. A man in love with a woman will lose many traps; a man in love with his job will not lose one. The number of traps a man loses, or does not lose, thus furnished a clue to the state of his mind.

  Arnold Dudley knew all this, and more, quite well. In the old days, whilst he was engaged in making a living by rabbit-trapping, he prided himself on the very few traps he had lost, accounting it a slur on his efficiency if he lost six in six months, Therefore, when he started to set his traps, he resolutely banished from his mind all thoughts of Tracy ; yet in this he found that his hatred governed his mind, not his mind his hatred, and it became essential more than once to force his mind to concentrate on his work.

  Not only his will-power but also two separate traps wrenched him back into the world of realities from his world of dreams. He possessed the knack of opening a trap with one hand and flicking the tongue under the catch below the plate with the other hand. A wandering mind failed on one occasion to observe that the tongue was not properly against the catch, and the jaws of the trap snapped against his fingers as a reminder. Half an hour later, whilst covering a trap with soil, his other hand worked too low. It touched the plate and sprung the trap. Both hands were now ripped by serrated, iron jaws. The pain helped him to concentrate on his work; and the work, allied to the fishing woman’s demand on him, saved his brain from shipwreck.