The Beach of Atonement Read online

  A fool! What a fool sat on that rock, alone in solitude, sitting in a dead dumb world washed by a dead dull sea! What a fool to have pushed God’s gift aside in a headlong rush for money and success! And, as with the fabled frog, his foolishness grew and grew. If he hadn’t shot Tracy, he still would have the chance of getting back Ellen. He knew that he would have fought to get her back, fought her herself; and, judging by what Hester Long had said, he might have succeeded. But with Tracy dead, with himself a murderer, the Moving Finger had written that which never could be cancelled. Ellen, even the fallen, dishonoured Ellen, could not be expected to reciprocate the love and the caresses of a murderer. Fool! Fool! Oh, what a fool sat crouched on the Seagulls’ Throne!

  Quite suddenly Arnold Dudley felt compelling need for movement. Standing up, he looked north, along the wide sweep of beach, till the colour of it merged in that of the sea long before it reached the great promontory. Southward, the sea where it joined the cliffs appeared just of the dull brownish white, almost colourless, of the beetling battlements. North or south? Which way? Direction did not matter. The hours that must be lived! The days, the weeks, the months! Perhaps years lay ahead of his life’s march—years of unforgetfulness, sorrow, anguish, repentance.

  The lean figure in tattered shirt and dungaree trousers almost lurched southward. Dudley removed his old felt hat, burned and blackened by frequent use as a pot-lifter, and carried it. The air was hot and humid, and perspiration damped his long hair, dark brown at the crown, greying at the temples. His eyes were visible through the slits of narrowed lids, lit as though by a fever, whilst piercing the almost limitless distances. Lean was his face, with accentuated cheek-bones and slightly hooked nose. A strong face, already foretelling the fierce patriarchal mien of old age. But the candle of his life was burning too fast, the leaping flame was consuming the man’s vitality at thrice the normal rate.

  He kept to the edge of the sand-hills where they skirted the beach, little hills of white sand covered with coarse coast bush. They were as miniature foot-hills to the miniature mountains of sand farther inland. And in the narrow winding miniature valleys he saw the tracks of rabbits, faint and dim of outline, and fox-tracks, four-padded and sharply clear. And down on the narrow strip of clean, dazzling white sand, between the ocean and the sand-hills, chains and spirals and criss-crossed line of one pattern showed the passage of the countless land-crabs. He could see them ahead of him, settled on the beach like pieces of orange-peel on Hampstead Heath after a bank holiday. And when he came to within a hundred yards, the bits of peel quickened and glided down to the limpid waves, or circled about and disappeared in the sand.

  They knew not solitude as did he, and the poor lonely dead shag.

  Dudley’s body was thrust forward whilst he walked on the loose sand, his bare tanned feet sometimes disappearing beneath its fine surface. Dry as dust, yet it was cool ; whereas the air was stifling and still, although the sun was now invisible. In spite of the relaxing heat, or in defiance of it, the man flung himself forward as though he would sweat the salt of memory from his mind as his body sweated its physical salt. He was of iron, tireless. The sea winds, the summer suns, had vanquished all the fat around his muscles which had begun to accumulate during the years of city life.

  Here the beach was widely curved, perfect in symmetry, the floor of sand gently sloping till it reached the surging upward rush of water impelled by each crashing wave, where its slope became steep and ugly, so moulded by the hammer of the sea. Now he came to a sharp indentation in the line of beach, as though the sea were a giant, living, hungry thing that had bitten out a chunk of the land. The white dry sand was strewn with flotsam, sawn lengths of timber, casks, boxes, and seaweed. Ahead were low, shelving rocks, similar to his Pontoon, a granite landing place for small boats, had there been a breakwater to protect it from the surf.

  Arrived opposite the rocks, Arnold Dudley halted on a pinnacle of sand and looked down on them with weary eyes. The sea was the colour of lead, the sky was the colour of lead; the beach was black with a tinge of white. A mist, so fine, so diaphanous as to appear almost a figment of imagination, shortened the distance to the horizon, and blurred the outlines of the shoreward hills. The green of the little, stunted bushes had changed to greenish grey, on the upper surfaces of the tiny leaves. The undersides of the leaves, where normally would be shadow, were tinged with purple.

  Space! He was alone in space. Freedom! He was as free as the sea, as free as the gulls that had accompanied him all the way. Power! He was lord of all he surveyed, the ruler of a world. And yet he was weighed down by chains mental chains that galled and clogged his mind as the sand clogged his feet. And the chains he wore had been wound about him, and locked and interlocked by—Ellen.

  Where was the key that would unlock his chains? The key that would free his mind as his body was free? Those questions lay deep in his subconscious mind. They had not crystallized into conscious questions demanding answer, for as yet he was not fully conscious of the third, phase of his life on the Beach of Atonement. His dreams had become more numerous and more vivid, and he had not studied them for their physiological import.

  Yet they had become a part of his life in the same way that sea-bites into the wide curve of the beach were a part of the coast. As the sea-bites were an accentuated feature of the beach, so were his dreams an accentuated feature of life. So much so that his dreams had more of the stuff of reality than had his waking actions.

  Always were these dreams, which had become of nightly occurrence, of Ellen. If they were varied in scene and movement, their climax was invariably the same. Sometimes in a garden, sometimes there on the beach, at times in his house at Perth, once in a hospital ward, Ellen had drawn near in these dreams. A lovely woman in figure and face—a woman whose eyes were big and violet blue, whose hair was brown as an autumn leaf, a mouth a little large for the oval face, and a small nose that wrinkled at the bridge when she laughed. Lovely and adorable and desirable. A woman, the epic of femininity! Sometimes she smiled at him: mostly her face was tragic in expression, her eyes soft and tender and inexpressibly sad. And always when he was at the point of embracing her she drew away from him as though some evil power impelled her.

  Never once did any one of his dreams leave him with any feeling of comfort, or of lightness of heart. They did, however, awaken memory of the happy years of the past—awaken memories that had been forgotten, memories of Ellen as she had looked at a particular instant; and of those memories one recurred with surprising insistence.

  When he had held Ellen in his arms, when her face had been so close to his that he could see into the pools of her eyes, he used to search their depths, seeking to see the soul of Ellen, to find revealed that part of his wife which was elusive, her ultimate mystery. And when he searched Ellen’s eyes like that he used to see the faintest flash of fear, as though she knew what he was searching for, knew he was on the verge of finding it. The flash of fear was invariably succeeded by an expression of merriment, as though, knowing what he wanted to see, she drew down the blind of laughter to conceal it.

  During those moments he loved Ellen with so much passion that he himself was amazed. He knew she loved him with equal fervour. She surrendered her body to him unreservedly, yet never would allow him to glimpse her soul. Was that instinct—blind feminine instinct to guard, even from him, the secret of her soul ? Was it instinct more powerful, more inherent than the instinct of the preservation of life itself?

  It was tantalizing to be always on the verge of glimpsing it, yet never to do so. Why was that? Did some women allow the men they loved to look right through the windows of their eyes, keeping up the blinds, letting them view the interior? If they did, why had Ellen never allowed him to do so? Had she kept up the blinds when she lay in Tracy’s arms? Had she?

  As she had always withdrawn before his ardent, scrutinizing gaze, so she withdrew from him in his sweetly-torturing dreams.

  Memories of Ellen filled, loaded, his mind
. There were times when his body so ached and throbbed and writhed for the touch of her that he was lashed into frenzied action that sent him rushing madly up the steep bush-covered slopes of the sand-hills in the dead of night, or drove him with unnatural energy to take long tramps along the beach, unwearied by the foot-clogging sand, unconscious of fatigue until his body refused further movement, and there was nothing for it but to fling himself down on his chest, bury his face in his arms, and sob.

  And when those mental storms occurred in daylight, driving him along the beach, his bodyguard of friendly gulls accompanied him, calling out sometimes as though with sympathy, sometimes as though in mockery.

  Often had death occurred to him. The temptation to destroy himself at times was almost irresistible. Without a shadow of doubt, Arnold Dudley would have killed himself if he could have brought himself to believe that death brought oblivion. Exceedingly few sane minds wholly believe that death is an end and not a change, or a restful interval preceding change. Existence after death has been a belief through so many generations of men that it has become almost instinctive. It is not the clouding of the instinct of self-preservation which is the mark of insanity in suicides so much as the clouding of the instinct of existence beyond death. And Arnold Dudley was not insane.

  Death was no escape from the mental torture he was enduring. And if death provided no escape; could there be any escape ? Seated on the sandhill overlooking the shelf of rocks his mind dwelt on the subject of escape. If there was no escape, then the end was, he was beginning to think, insanity. Gazing out on the calm, flattened ocean, it was as though he peered out over the years of life normally remaining with him, each roller a year, and like the rollers, the years, drab and leaden in colour, each year precisely as drab and as leaden as its predecessor.

  How to escape? The whole purpose of his life was directed on that problem. Would the gaiety of cities provide a means? Would work, hard, never-ceasing work provide it? Hester Long had said it would, and she was a wise woman. Would drugs open wide the door to freedom? Alcohol! Alcohol was easy to procure when one had money, and he had a good amount.

  Into his mind flashed memory of his store of brandy. Brandy would deaden the longing for Ellen: it well might kill that longing. In any case, it would bring temporary oblivion. Rising to his feet, he almost ran towards his camp.

  CHAPTER X

  THE DEVIL IN THE BOTTLE

  ARNOLD Dudley’s camp-bed lay along one side of the tent. On the opposite side was his ration dump, and from the dump he took the opened case of brandy and set it on the rough table erected a few feet beyond the entrance to the tent. From the case he took out eleven bottles of brandy with seals still intact, and a twelfth bottle about half-full. The liquor he set up in two ranks with as much care and precaution as a child gives to setting up its toy soldiers.

  A meal of tinned-fish—fish in tins was easier to procure than fish from the sea to a man in his state of mind—and old and dry damper, with milkless tea to accompany it, had been eaten. Truly it could be said that Dudley ate to live, and did not live to eat. In the dells between the sandhills lay the first hint of gloom preceding night.

  The wind had come. With ever-increasing gusts between ever-shortening spells of calm it blew from the north-west. The sky was an unbroken leaden cloud. The summit of the sand-hill, or ridge separating his camp from the beach, began to smoke, creating a diaphanous veil of wind-blown sand. Already the temperature was dropping, but the heat still clung to the valleys. The wind was sweeping away the scents, sweet and often sickly, of the bush, replacing them with the tang of salt-water and the odour of rotting seaweed.

  Above Dudley, perched on the topmost branch of a coast-wattle, crouched a cock butcher-bird, comfortably fed from the man’s crumbs, but yet uneasy at the prospect of a stormy night. He warbled five notes forming a complete melody, and his mate, perched in another wattle-tree beyond the truck, which was parked in the cleared space beyond the track, replied with two notes that were not a part of any melody.

  It was the cock-bird’s custom to render nightly a serenade comprising four distinct melodies, but this night either the comfort of his body or the discomfort of his mind caused boredom. For, after a single rendering of the one melody, he buried his cruel hooked beak in the feathers of his back, and watched the man with one bright unwinking eye until darkness was complete.

  Darkness! It was the blackness of the Ninth Plague.

  Dudley sat against the table, revealed by the light of a hurricane-lamp, his profile bold in relief, the light reflected strangely by the wide, staring eye nearest the lamp. On his face was a scowl, and around his jaw were the lines of desperate determination.

  Be it thoroughly understood that his mind was made up to do a thing from which he shrank. Alcohol never once had got any grip on him. When he drank at all it was generally wine, and seldom that unless it was at meals. Spirits he rarely touched. The impelling force of an old trapping habit lay behind the purchase of the case of brandy. During those long periods when Finlay and he were rabbit-trapping till the early hours of the morning, or lying out at a water-hole all night shooting kangaroos, a drink of strong coffee laced with spirit ensured vivid warmth in winter-time and mental lethargy in summer, when they threw their weary bodies down to sleep. For the fur game is no mere pastime. Success depends chiefly on opportunity, or the seasons, and when opportunity comes it must be seized to the extent of from sixteen to twenty hours work out of the twenty-four. And for that a man’s body must be toned up.

  When he took the first sip of neat brandy Dudley shuddered. It was like taking a filthy medicine. Yet it was a medicine that was going to paralyse memory, was going to banish Ellen from his mind for a little while. But how strange, how strong, how vital is memory!

  Again he sipped. The spirit sent its delightful warmth coursing through his veins. Another sip, almost a drink this time, and it was as though the Angel of Happiness hovered above him and drew up out of him the miasma that had settled around the cells of his brain. He began to drink. Around him the roar of the rapidly rising sea and the thin wail of the beating wind were as the orchestra accompanying his damnation. Already his vision was becoming slightly blurred; but his mind was quickened, and the rapid flash of mental pictures for a while became entrancing.

  Why had he not thought of the brandy before? How foolish of him to suffer physical torture and mental agony produced by the desire for woman ! The devil of desire was so easily cast out by the devil in the brandy-bottle. To hell with desire ! deeper into hell with woman who stretched man on the rack of longing! and into the bottom-most depth of hell with memories the past !

  Good! May hell claim its own! Here’s to hell!

  A fitting place for all things invented and created for the purpose of torturing man. A nice thing, to be sure, when a man couldn’t live a life of ease and freedom, the life of a king, without being annoyed by woman. It was about time man took a tumble, and remembered that woman, as a plaything, was a delight, but as master of a man’s mind was altogether out of place.

  What a fool he had been! What an utter, arrant fool! To allow himself first to be annoyed because Tracy seduced Ellen, and then again to be annoyed because Ellen was not with him on his beach. His beach! You bet it was his beach. And the next damned sportsman who came to shoot his birds would find out that it was his beach. Let them keep away! He didn’t mind Hester Long coming occasionally. There were no flies on Hester, A good mate; Hester Long! None of your shrinking goggled-eyed women about her. Didn’t faint or screech when he told her he was a murderer. No fear! Good as told him he did right to carry out the good work. Course he did right in one way ; even so, he was a bit stupid to shoot Tracy. He ought to have collared Tracy and taken him down into one of the cellars, and cut bits off him, little tiny bits, now and then. With proper management, he could have been kept alive for a couple of months.

  Poor old Tracy! Wasn’t he surprised when a bullet crashed into his brain! Ha, ha, ha! He looked, just before h
e dropped, as though he was offered the crown of England. It was the stuff to give him all right. No more would he show his teeth in that smile he must have practised before a mirror for weeks, Never again would he stare at a girl, and never again would a girl say : “Isn’t he a dear?, I’d love to own a man like that.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” Dudley chuckled gleefully. “What a lark to go and find out where Tracy was buried, and dig him up, and shovel him into a barrow, and wheel him down Hay Street and round about Forrest Place, and call on the doting women to come and look at handsome Tracy! Would they say: ‘Isn’t he a dear?’ I could imagine ’em.”

  The partly-filled bottle was now emptied into his cup, and flung away with a laugh. He laughed again when he lurched to staggered within his tent, there to curse and laugh alternately, and upset the cases and crash on the bed, laughing again, and again cursing when he reappeared with a mouth-organ.

  “Another little drink, and then I’ll play a lament to poor worm-eaten Tracy. Poor old Tracy, so full of maggots! Fifteen men jumping on, Tracy’s chest. No, that’s not it. Anyway, I’ll play to Tracy shivering out there in the cold in a nightdress.”

  Dudley blew discordantly on the mouth-organ. Then shouted with laughter. Came then a short interval of silence, which was broken by a truly wonderful rendering of the Dead March in “Saul”. The man, drunk though he was, played the Hymn of the Dead with marvellous skill. He played it right through, twice.

  “How’s that, Tracy? Good, eh? Come now, don’t sulk. There’s no reason to bear me animosity. Come and have a drink, and be sociable. Here, sit down! Dudley kicked an empty case, to the table beside him and uncorked a bottle, his body swaying. Dashing a quantity into his own cup, he groped about the ground beneath the table and retrieved a tin pannikin. This he half-filled and set before the second seat, saying: