The Beach of Atonement Read online

  Hester Long was no woman to stand aside from trouble, or loss, or sorrow. It but aroused her sympathy the more, and there and then she determined, in her own phrase, to have it out with him.

  “Come along and boil the billy,” she said, after commiserating with him regarding his loss. “This is the first time for ever so long that I and the boys have come to the beach without Miss Mallory. She went to Perth two weeks ago with her brother on holiday.”

  “Ah! I wondered where she had got to,” Dudley said, speaking rapidly.

  “Oh! How did you come to miss her?”

  “I think it began about Christmas time.” Suddenly his eyes were dreamy. He gazed unseeingly out over the glittering ocean. He was talking as he talked when alone. “She got into the way of riding her horse to the brow of the hill just behind the camp, where she tethered it to a bush and watched to see if I were away. If I was away, she would steal down to my camp and wash the utensils and tidy it up. You know, I wish she hadn’t done it. I didn’t like to tell her that I knew who did that for me, nor do I care about her knowing that I know.”

  He did not see Hester Long regarding him with wide eyes. She had heard something she had known nothing about. Without being conscious of it he had told her a secret on which but one interpretation could be placed. Whilst she poured the fresh-made tea into the cups there was added to her genuine sympathy for the man a sudden fear for Edith Mallory, who had proved so staunch a friend to her in her hour of need. He went on:

  “You see, Mrs. Long, I am not the kind of man in whom any woman should be interested. In strict fairness I should not permit you to speak to me, certainly not allow you to show kindness to me.”

  “Why not?” Her. question was sharply spoken. It shocked him out of his mood, as she intended it to do. Yet, when he looked at her suddenly, he found her face wonderfully soft and radiant, and her voice when next she spoke was not less radiant.

  “Why do you live here like this?”

  “Because I can live nowhere else.”

  “How is that?. Tell me. Perhaps I can help.”

  “Help!” He shook his head. “You and Miss Mallory have helped all that it is possible to help. You have helped me to retain personal self-respect. Beyond that you cannot help. You cannot wash out what the Moving Finger has written.”

  “Perhaps not. But the result of what the Moving Finger has written, where it concerns you, may be eased or lightened by confidence,” she argued. “If there is a problem to face, two heads are better able to face it than one, don’t you think?”

  For a while he sipped his tea. Watching him, Hester Long thought of Edith Mallory and her surreptitious visits to this man’s camp to tidy it in his absence. Now, she knew the reason of the change in her friend, those little hardly noticeable things like the smaller pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. She heard him say:

  “Could you teach me to forget? If you could, I would become your bond slave for life.”

  “You must first tell me what you want to forget.”

  “Very well, I’ll tell you.” His eyes were suddenly wide and glaring into hers. “I want to forget my wife and the scoundrel who stole her from me. How can I forget when you laugh like Ellen used to ? Tell me how to forget, how I can wrench this torturing agony out of my heart—how I can find peace without destroying myself. Do you know why I haven’t destroyed myself? It is because I know, for my mother taught me, that death is but a change.”

  Again swiftly he moved his gaze from her to the far-flung horizon almost invisible in the sunlight. And when he seemed to have forgotten her she put a hand on his bare, sun-blackened arm, saying:

  “Just tell me.”

  For a full minute after that he did not speak. She removed her hand and idly watched the youngsters playing in the lagoon safe from the rollers everlastingly crashing against the outer rocks. Then abruptly he plunged into the recital of his tragedy. He told her of Ellen, of their courtship, their marriage, and their life together.

  “Perhaps she thought I neglected her for golf. I don’t know. I had no thought of neglecting her,” he said. “A man who was my friend saw his opportunity, though. Someone told me on the telephone that she sent the servants away on Saturday afternoons, when he would visit her at the house I had built for her. I couldn’t rest till I had made sure of Ellen one way or the other. I crept into my own house one Saturday afternoon. The servants were absent. I heard her and him talking in her room, the room I looked upon as almost holy because we had made it such. I waited outside in the passage. Seated on a chair I waited for them to come out.”

  The agony of that time was torturing Arnold Dudley now. She saw his hands clench and unclench, and his body twitch with throbbing nerves.

  “What did you do?” she whispered.

  His voice was almost a whisper also when he replied: “I shot him.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed and quickly opened wide. There was in them amazed horror, and when she did not speak he turned and looked at her. His voice held a hint of a sneer.

  “Well, what do you think of that?”

  The expression of anguish in his clear hazel eyes had changed to one of mocking defiance. Regarding him, Hester Long sought for a sign of remorse. She found none, and knew that the mood troubling his mind was not remorse. She felt that she had not yet solved the mystery, unless it was that he still loved his wife. Sighing, her eyes fell away from his, and mechanically she filled the teacups.

  “Meeting a murderer is not a nice sensation, is it?” he said almost jeeringly.

  “No,” she admitted slowly.

  “I am glad we agree. As you have been nice to me, I will remove myself from your presence. To stay would be fair neither to you nor your children.”

  He had risen quickly to his feet when she said: “Stay! Sit down again and finish your tea.”

  She spoke to him as in years gone by she had often been obliged to speak to a recalcitrant scholar, and he obeyed, partly because he wanted to, partly because the child in him had often obeyed such a voice.

  “Well?” he asked grimly.

  “As you say, it is not a nice sensation meeting a murderer,” she said quietly, adding very slowly and distinctly: “A much more unpleasant sensation is meeting a fool.”

  “You surprise me.” His voice was openly jeering. It hurt her and he saw it, and suddenly his body bent forward and his face became buried in his arms, which rested across his knees. She heard him say, in what was almost a wail: “A fool! Yes, you are right. A fool I am. When I exterminated the vermin I condemned myself to a hell on earth.”

  “It was inevitable, as you should have known before you committed the deed, that you would live the remainder of your life clouded by remorse.”

  Once more he was looking at her.

  “There you are mistaken,” he said quickly. “I do not experience the slightest remorse for having killed him, in so far as killing goes. I could kill him many times over for what he did to me. Where I was a fool was in merely killing him, when I should have cut his vile handsome face to ribbons, and let him live to see the women shudder at him. I could then have sought him out again and again and mocked him, and every woman that I knew would have been taken with me to be introduced to him.

  “Remorse! Yes. I feel remorse for having killed him, because killing him was too good. Listen!” He was becoming excited again, and his voice would not have been recognized for the clear, calm voice of the business man of a few months before. Hester Long heard in it the inexorable influence of solitude. “About the time I got all those eagles, my hate of—never mind his name—became dulled, as it were. As though it had grown into a part of me, a habit, I had come to believe that the man’s death was full recompense for what he had done. The price he paid was big, not so big as he would have paid had I let him live with a slashed and scarred face, but big enough to satisfy me, as I can’t now exact a bigger.

  “And then I had the most extraordinary and vivid dream I ever dreamed. I dreamt that with another man I was in
an underground passage, like one of those leading from vault to vault in France where they store the wine. Yet somehow this passage was a cul-de-sac, and my companion and I could go no farther. The passage was distinctly visible, even though it was underground. I could see the rough-hewn stones forming the walls.

  “We were fugitives—fugitives from what, I do not know. We were standing waiting, and there came to us round a bend sounds of hurrying footsteps and voices. Now, although I didn’t know what it was all about, I did know that those sounds meant the end of my life. I knew that the men approaching were going to kill me. It was quite inevitable. There was no possible evasion or escape.

  “Two men suddenly confronted us. They were dressed in tunics of light grey which fell to their knees, and their feet and legs were encased in sandals and criss-crossed leathers to their knees. The first man fell back and the other came in front. I stepped forward to meet him. I did that to enable him to kill me first. He said: ‘Thus die all traitors,’ and, raising a pistol, fired at me.

  “I felt no pain. I collapsed in a sitting posture with my back against one of the walls. I knew that the bullet from his pistol had entered my head exactly in the middle of my forehead. I knew I was dead, yet I could see my killer and the opposite wall. I saw a small red flame dart from his pistol and knew that he was shooting my companion. And then what I saw slowly faded into blackness.”

  Dudley ceased talking and sighed. Hester Long was silent. After a while he spoke again:

  “There was perfect sequence in that dream. It was not a jumble of incidents which compose most dreams, and when I awoke I remembered every second of the dream period. But I knew that I had carefully aimed at the two vertical lines above my enemy’s eyes, and knew that he died precisely as I died in my dream. And in my dream I had died without the slightest pain.

  “You see that I had imagined my enemy to feel agony when I shot him, whereas I now know he suffered none. You think I am a monster. I can see it in your face. If I am, he made me a monster. You don’t understand what he took from me. I can’t make you understand. When he made me a laughing-stock among men and women who knew me, the injury he did me was little in comparison to his robbing me of my wife. Even the theft of my wife’s body was little in comparison with the theft of my wife’s love. Don’t you see that ? A woman’s body can be replaced by another woman’s body. If a man wants a woman’s body he can purchase one. But he can’t purchase a woman’s love. My enemy stole from me what all the money in the world can’t buy. Not only that, he could not return what he had stolen. No law ever made could compel him to return what he had stolen from me. He could not return it if he wished. He could not make restitution if he possessed and paid over to me all the money in the world.”

  Hester Long thought she saw the light.

  “Let us assume that the man could have returned to you your wife’s love. Would you have accepted it?”

  “Yes. In spite of her dishonour I would have accepted it. I would have been weak enough to have accepted it because,” Dudley stuttered with a sob in his voice, “—because Ellen is the only woman I have ever loved, the only woman I have ever kissed, other than my mother. If he could have given me back my wife’s love, I would have accepted it. I would have taken her away to another country and tried my very hardest to forget the nightmare of the past. And, if I did not forget it, my love for Ellen would have relegated it among the least important things.”

  “Then why not find out from your wife for certain if she does still love you?” Hester Long suggested softly.

  “Because, for one thing, there is blood on, my hands.” Unconsciously almost Arnold Dudley raised his hands and looked at them.

  “That would make reconciliation between you easier,” she told him, all Eve in her voice. “You would be on a level, as it were. Your leaving here would be dangerous, probably, but were you able to escape the country it would be worth all the risk.”

  For a long minute each examined the features of the other. Then: “You are a strange woman,” he told her.

  “Perhaps not so strange as you think,” she said cheerfully. “I am far from being horrified now by your act of homicide in the circumstances. The man deserved death, although you were most foolish to cause it. If the law made the seduction of married women a death penalty, there would be less misery in the world for both men and women. Have you any children?”

  “No.” His answer was whispered. His gaze was once more fixed on the ocean. She saw it move inward and rest finally on her two boys, deliriously happy in their lagoon. “No, we have no children. If only we had had one!”

  “Then why not seek out your wife?”

  “For the very simple reason that Ellen does not now love me,” he said with conviction. “I know my wife. She gave herself to my enemy because she no longer loved me, but loved him. Nothing but love would have caused that.”

  “I wonder!” And when Hester Long said this, there was all the wisdom of the ages in her expression.

  CHAPTER IX

  IN CHAINS

  MEN and women living in the hurly-burly of some great city seldom have time to reflect. A man living as Arnold Dudley was living on the Beach of Atonement has too much time to think. At the end of a day the city man probably remembers half a dozen sentences out of the hundreds of speeches he has heard. From the welter of incessant speech he has retained a few words epitomizing as many ideas. The man living in solitude for long spaces of time remembers every word spoken in the course of a rare conversation. To him the spoken words are imprinted deeply on the tablets of his mind—imprinted words which he reads and re-reads and examines in all their possible, and sometimes impossible, shades of meaning.

  Dudley remembered with vivid clearness every word uttered by Hester Long. His own words in that conversation were less distinctly remembered. Seated on the Seagulls’ Throne a week after the conversation took place he was pondering her expression, “I wonder!”

  What did she wonder at? He had said: “I know my wife. She gave herself to my enemy because she no longer loved me, but loved him.” And: “Nothing but love would have caused that.” To which she had said, with a strange look in her eyes: “I wonder!”

  What was it she wondered at ?

  It was an enigma he could not solve. Probably, she knew the answer. She had looked as though she did. Did she believe that it was possible for a married woman in love with her husband to give herself to another man? Being a woman, certainly she possessed authority in the matter. To his male mind it was inconceivable for a man wholly in love with his wife to take another woman. So disloyal an act was an unnatural act.

  It was a grey morning, a morning hot and clammy and airless. The sky was the colour of gun-metal, and the sun was like a patch of orange-paper lying in the gutter after a night of carnival. The silence! The silence of the world was as a living omnipresent Thing. It pressed on the sea, flattening it, so that it seemed that the long-spaced rollers found difficulty in rising high enough to wash the Sugar Loaf. There appeared to be no energy in them that morning. They came ashore lethargically as though drugged.

  Dudley, too, felt lethargic that morning. He was too brain-weary to continue seeking an answer to Hester Long’s riddle. The seagulls, then paddling in the shallower pools on the Pontoon looking for tiny fish, seemed as though they did it from force of habit and not because they were hungry.

  Silence and solitude! For three days and nights the silence had been absolute! Even at night the surf had made no perceptible sound. Solitude ! Solitude that passes the understanding of men, with the exception possibly of one in ten million. Dudley’s solitude was not that of the romantic white living amidst a host of blacks, nor of the wretch undergoing solitary confinement in a gaol. His solitude was utter, complete. Had he even a dog for a companion his solitude would have been a crowded one.

  A dog! Perhaps he could buy a dog from someone in Dongara? A pup! a little pup dog would be better—a pup dog he could play with, go down on his hands and knees and gamb
ol with, as a man would romp with a small child.

  A child! Hester Long had said: “Have you any children?” and he had said: “No.” And seated on the Seagulls’ Throne he, for the first time in his life, wanted to own, to play with, a child. Or was it the first time? The first time, no doubt, that he had actually expressed the wish to himself.

  The possibility of Ellen having children had been so remote when he married her that he was almost indifferent, but to Ellen the possibility had been real and vivid. He had been surprised by her knowledge of nativity no less than her fear of having children. She had broached the subject in a manner that tacitly assumed that children in his mind occupied as great a prominence as it did in her own. And she seemed not a little relieved to discover that he was indifferent.

  At first he thought she regarded child-birth as a tie that would prevent her accompanying him in his skin-scouting expeditions. The thought pleased him, flattered him. And afterwards, when they settled in Perth and prospered, and lived in a succession of houses each more imposing than the last ; houses in different suburbs, each suburb more fashionable than the last ; and every change bringing into their world a fresh set of acquaintances and new interests—Ellen had still refused to bear children that might hamper her in their social climb. That knowledge, too, had flattered him.

  Would Ellen have failed him had there been children? Dudley felt convinced that in that case she would not have given herself to Tracy. Tracy would never have come between Ellen and her babies as he had come between Ellen and her husband. Dudley was sure of that. He knew Ellen’s love for the weak, the defenceless.

  Hester Long had told him that a much worse sensation than meeting a murderer was meeting a fool. How right that was! Of all God’s creatures worthy of damnation none is more worthy than the fool. If he had not been so selfish as to wish never to share Ellen’s love with a baby, if he had insisted or even let her see that he wanted a child, her selfishness would have been vanquished, and that day he would not have been sitting on the Seagulls’ Throne.