Bony and the White Savage

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “As you won’t go home, and as you won’t go down to your cave to meet Marvin, then you stay right here and keep your eyes on the tree-signal while I go down and finish looking around,” he was told. “And should you see the signal drop, look over before you topple this boulder because I might be under it. I won’t be long.”

  The time by Lew’s watch was shortly after ten when Bony left him, and on again entering the cavern he had decided he would use the pressure lamp as it was unlikely that Sadie would make her next visit until the afternoon, when the smell of the lamp would not be noticeable, after being extinguished.

  The brilliant light changed the cavern from a place of dark menace to one approaching fairy-like beauty, and Bony made another thorough inspection of it, resulting in the discovery of a primus stove behind the chest with a tin of kerosene, and another but smaller tin containing calico bags of tea and sugar, biscuits in cellophane, a china cup, and a tin of powdered milk, half full.

  Lew’s eyes would have glistened at this find, for neither had drunk tea since leaving the base camp, and that now seemed days ago. He found no water, and the primus was empty of oil and appeared not to have been used for some time.

  Now for the old chest which in the light of the lamp cried for cedarwood oil and the employment of sandpaper to wipe the marks of ill-usage from the wood which could be made to gleam again. Bony expected to find fishing tackle, and oddments prized by boys and girls who had adventured with blithe spirits. He raised the heavy lid and saw a white dress with red polka spots, a pair of cotton gloves and a pair of red shoes.

  The lid was maintained upright by its own rear balance, and Bony gazed upon these articles with astonishment greater than when he had discovered the candlesticks. Bluebeard’s umpteenth wife could not have been more surprised.

  On his knees he lifted the dress carefully from the chest, keeping its folds and arrangement. With it he placed the gloves and the shoes. There was then disclosed a cuttings book, and, between several expensively-bound books, an automatic pistol of heavier calibre than his own. Aware that the use of a handkerchief would destroy rather than preserve prints, yet he used his handkerchief when taking up the weapon and sniffing at the barrel.

  The perfume of boronia pervaded the cavern. Even stronger among the contents of the chest it thwarted his sense of smell, and regretting the unorthodoxy of the act, he dismantled the pistol, removing the cartridges remaining in the clip, and, finally peering through the barrel, pointed at the lamp. It was dirty, not having been cleaned after firing.

  Reassembled, the pistol was laid beside the cuttings book, the cartridges now in his pocket. He removed the books from the chest, finding them to be prizes won by Marvin Rhudder when at Sunday school. There was a leather-backed folding photograph wallet and within was a studio portrait of Marvin as he must have been about the time he left home. It was a youthful face. The mouth had a quizzical smile about it. The eyes were seen here to be a shade too close together, and in them was no expression to match the mouth. Opposite this picture was one of Sadie Stark, and she was dressed in a white frock having polka dots. She was looking directly at the camera. Her eyes were wide and the expression in them was allied with the expression about her mouth and chin; the mysterious, withdrawn, all-knowing smile Bony had seen.

  He found, too, what he had expected. Disjointed fishing-rods, hand-lines, a small calibre rifle, a mouth organ, old paperbacks, and a layer of oddments including sea-shells, rifle bullets, pieces of stone and rock.

  Returning all the articles to the chest as near as possible to their original position, taking special care with the dress, Bony went to the entrance to smoke a cigarette and to ponder on the significance of the white frock with the polka dots, the exact replica of that worn by Sadie at the cricket match fourteen years earlier. If the dress recently purchased, and the use of boronia perfume, together with the candlesticks either side the beret was the build-up of a personality who again had departed from her life, it would mean only that Sadie was mentally abnormal. This he could not believe, despite his experience of extraordinary human behaviour.

  He hadn’t the exact time, but at eleven-fifteen this day Matt Jukes was studying his old barometer and thinking it must have died of age and would have to be replaced by a new one. Had Bony maintained interest in the sea instead of cogitating on his mysteries, he might have observed the phenomenon that towards the Inlet the sea for many yards outward from the beaches was a flat and unbroken expanse, and the colour tarnished copper. Had he observed this he might not have attributed it to the dismantling of the great seaweed mountain near Ted’s Rock by the sea in its most passive mood.

  However, he did notice that it was beginning to rain.

  Passing along the passage entrance to the cavern he paused at the hurricane-lamp and match-box. It was well kept and the glass was polished. Why was the lamp there at all? Anyone familiar with this place would know of the pressure lamp which could be located in the dark. Everything was at sixes and sevens, with nothing coming out at evens.

  Remembering the rain, he remembered Lew who would be feeling uncomfortable. Glancing outward he was struck by the picture of Australia’s Front Door being perfectly enclosed by the frame of the passage. Had the weather been clear it would have been remarkable and memorable indeed.

  Taking the cutting-books again from the chest, he closed the lid and sat on it with the book on his knees. It was spacious, and of good quality, and he lifted the front cover to see another portrait of Marvin Rhudder, and read beneath it in small and neat calligraphy:

  He wore a Suit of Shining Mail,

  Evil was the Acid which Disintegrated It.

  In the centre of the next page, written by the same hand, Bony read:

  On Monday, February 15, 1947

  Marvin left home to begin the Final Term

  At College

  The World waited for his Conquest

  And The Woman Conquered Him.

  The succeeding pages were filled with newspaper cuttings, all of them having been headline news under their dates. As Bony flicked over the pages, the following phrases and announcements reviewed a Monster’s Progress.

  Small Child Brutally Outraged. Man Arrested for Child Attack. Three Years for Marvin Rhudder. Woman Ravished on Allotment. Man Wanted for Rape. Marvin Rhudder Arrested for Attack on Woman. Psychiatrists Battle Over Rhudder. Rhudder Released On Bond. Couple Savaged in Park. Man Arrested for Park Crimes. Marvin Rhudder Again. Trial of Marvin Rhudder. Male Victim in Mental Hospital. Rhudder Guilty: Five Years. Rhudder Released. Public Protests. Echo of Park Crimes. Woman Walks Over Gap to Death. Royal Commission Urged.

  Bony closed the book, sickened by a criminal career presented in tabloid form. Revolted, on impulse he opened it again at the last occupied page and there read:

  He Who Wore

  The Shining Suit of Mail

  Has Departed

  So Sadie had spoken the truth. Marvin Rhudder had left the district. And somewhere there was a woman ignorant of her coming rendezvous with a human tiger. It was the end of the assignment. It would be the first time in his own career that he had failed, unless he were re-assigned at some future date, and that, he felt, would not be distant, to hunt again for Marvin Rhudder.

  Replacing the cuttings-book, he reached up to turn off the pressure lamp, and then paused to survey this strange place before retreating from it to announce defeat. What a terrible set-up for a man to leave in the memory of others! The rocklike altar with the candlesticks flanking what might have been a casque worn by the man in shining mail. The care with which the altar was tended, even the sand about it smoothed and virgin.

  The lamp extinguished, Bony stood for a moment listening into the darkness as though hoping to hear the echo of voices. Then he was irritated because he could not smell human beings, as he and Lew had smelled them in the hut, could not smell them for the pervading boronia perfume.

  There must be another explanation for all he had seen here. Surely there was ano
ther reason than making of this place a shrine? He would wait for Sadie, wait to see what she did when next she came, wait to demand of her just when Marvin left, which way he went, and follow him even if it meant years before confronting him with a waddy and a pair of handcuffs.

  The rain had thickened to blur the great rock so romantically named by a youth in shining mail. The wind was low and the sea was cold and drab and lethargic. So, too, was poor Lew.

  “You been having a good time, Nat, and me as wet as a shag.”

  “But I didn’t forget you,” Bony said. “Let’s get under cover. I’ve brought a beautiful present for you.”

  “What?” The rain was forgotten, and the discomfort of wet clothes. “What did you find down there?”

  “Can’t show it out here. Might get wet.”

  There were still dry places inside the arboreal igloos, but they would soon vanish did the rain continue. From inside his shirt Bony drew an old tin, and the black eyes of the aborigine gleamed when Bony lifted the lid.

  “Tea,” breathed Lew.

  “And sugar,” added Bony, producing another tin. “Make a fire. We can douse it if the signal drops. Down in that cavern where I’ve been there are biscuits, too. So we can eat the last of our tucker, have a drink of hot tea, and then a good hard smoke.”

  “Crikey! We’re always having good hard smokes, Nat.”

  “But we can’t smoke down in the cavern,” Bony said, filling the billycan with the last of the water, and not worried by future lack of it.

  “Why not, Nat?”

  “Because you don’t smoke in church, that’s why not.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Good Night for a Murder

  AS THE DAY died in sick misery and Sadie Stark had not visited the cavern, Bony was convinced that the weather had influenced her.

  They had shifted camp into the cavern, concealing their meagre equipment behind a rock upthrust at the far side, and one or other had to watch for her from the shelter of the entrance beneath the overhang. The rain had steadily increased to tropic downpour, then abruptly ceased when the light east wind changed to the north, and blew harder. For an hour it came fitfully from the west, and towards the end of the afternoon heavy swells mounted to high rollers to sweep in behind the Door and take long long bites at the shore.

  On observing the great masses of weed, Lew had instantly guessed that it had once formed a mountain which the sea had disintegrated. Now they could see its slow advance along the serrated shoreline, and later on noticed how the rollers stopped it at the east side of Australia’s Front Door, and began to send it back towards the Inlet. Lew said:

  “Big storm coming up all right. Funny about that weed. I seen it like that before. Away to the Leeuwin it was. One day a dump of weed what’d take you half a day to walk round. Next day all the weed floating away to be built up again some other place.”

  “What’s the coast like over by the Leeuwin?” asked Bony, for something to say.

  “Good! Better’n this. Cape Leeuwin sort of protects it. Nothing like that here. Them rollers is gettin’ big, ain’t they?”

  “I can’t see them washing up and into the cavern, Lew. Must be more than a hundred feet up from the beach. How did the sand get in here? Blown in?”

  “Could be. Perhaps washed in by a big sea.” Lew was interested more by another subject. “We’re dry enough in here, anyhow. Good camp, eh? What about fixin’ the primus for a mug of tea? What about them biscuits you told of?”

  As with all aborigines, so with Lew comfort and a full belly are of paramount importance. And as it was six o’clock when it was unlikely that Sadie would appear in her dinner hour, Bony agreed, leaving Lew still watching the way down from the cliff.

  Partially filling the tank, and attending to the burner with the pricker attached, he obtained rain-water from a rock at the end of the overhang. They munched biscuits and drank tea well laced with sugar as the sea and the great rock withdrew slowly into the night.

  Despite the growing storm Bony determined to maintain surveillance of the descent from the top throughout the night hours, not forgetting that Sadie or another had visited this place at night. Thus when Lew fell silent and then yawned, he said they would have to stand watch and that Lew could sleep for the first six hours.

  Having made sure there were no traces of their presence, Lew lay down on his blankets in his damp clothes and slept in the complete darkness of the cavern, while Bony sat at the entrance watching and listening to the growing roar of the sea below and the whining of the wind about the rock overhang. He expected nothing to happen, but it did. And he was made happy by the end of boredom.

  The torch-beam flickered on the rock-splinters as its owner came carefully down the treacherous descent, now most dangerous in the dark with the heavy surges below. Aided by his own torch he retreated and roused Lew.

  “Someone coming. No noise, not a breath. Whatever you see you keep dumb. This could be the job’s end.”

  Lew’s response was to kneel beside Bony and with him peer between the saw-teeth of the upthrust rock. The darkness remained with them for a further two minutes, and then with little warning the torch-beam was probing into the entrance. There reached them a low sound. The visitor was humming ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. The visitor came onward too, and the moisture of rain on the oilskin coat was gleaming in the reflected light of the torch.

  The figure, looking immense, arrived at the chest. The torch was placed on the chest, and the figure’s arms were raised to take down the pressure lamp. And when the lamp was being pumped the springing light revealed Sadie Stark.

  They watched her replace the lamp, switch off the torch, and remove her sou’wester and oilskin. She was dressed as a man, and did any set of conditions demand male apparel it was the set ruling this night. From her gunny-sack she took a leather holdall and either a Bible or a Prayer Book; and for minutes she sat on the chest, her face tilted downward in that attitude of still repose never to be forgotten by Bony. When she moved to action she gave a slight shock to the watchers.

  Kneeling before the chest, she opened the holdall and from it took an ivory-backed hairbrush and hand-mirror and comb, and proceeded to brush her hair which fell to a surprising length. The light made it shine in its chestnut hue. She began again to hum the hymn, almost crooning a lullaby, as though she delighted in what she was doing.

  Neither Bony nor Lew were strangers to a woman combing her hair and putting on her face, but as the minutes passed they witnessed the birth of another woman, a much younger woman in this new hair arrangement, plus the application of powder and lipstick and eye-shadow. Sadie might have done this every day for years, so expert was she.

  The two men who long since had lost interest in a woman dressing and only gave a verdict on the completed preparation for a party, were now unable to avoid watching this woman remove all her clothes down to her panties. Standing, she touched the nipples of her breasts with rouge. She took the mirror to examine them better, then to survey her hair and her face, and it seemed many minutes before she was satisfied and removed the toilet articles from the chest in order to raise the lid.

  From the sack she took a parcel wrapped in stout paper, and from this a slip, and a pair of nylon stockings. Sitting on the edge of the open chest, she put on the nylons. She reached for the red shoes and put them on. The men, now really interested, saw her stand to slip over her head with expert care the white dress with the polka dots, carefully smooth it into position and be transformed into the young girl of the picture taken at the cricket match.

  When she was finished the wide mouth was set in a derisive smile. She made a final check with the mirror, and pirouetted in a dainty way as she might have done in those faraway years in the company of Rose Jukes and the Rhudder boys. The smile vanished, and there appeared vexation in its place and a soft expletive of annoyance broke from her lips.

  From the gunny-sack she took two short red candles, and from the chest what looked a steel meat-s
kewer. She proceeded to the altar rock, passing to stand behind it, and from the iron sticks she removed the candle-butts and placed there the red candles which she lit. On returning to the chest she tossed the butts and the skewer into it, and again surveyed the altar rock.

  These actions conforming to theatrical mime would not in themselves have been of interest to Bony if performed by a woman mentally deranged, but Sadie revealed nothing of mental disturbance and no indication of it had been revealed at their previous meetings. She had always appeared to he self-reliant, studious, well-balanced and sometimes introspective as proved by the periods of deep meditation. He was now watching her take up the black-covered book and step forward to stand on the rock-rib at the outer edge of the sand, before the burning candles with the beret between them.

  There she made a semi-curtsy, the free hand spreading the frilly skirt. The blazing lamp behind her cast her silhouette against the grey-dark rock wall. She was a stranger to him in these moments. Previously she had appeared to him with her hair tight and her body encased in men’s clothes: now her hair was beautiful, and her body was full and free. Every movement portrayed youth, with its restless urge to fly.

  Then she was kneeling, facing the altar, and the book was opened and held by both hands, Her face was uplifted as though her gaze was centred at a point high above the beret, and she began to intone from the book which her eyes did not see.

  It seemed to Bony that this went on for some time. He could hear her voice but could not distinguish the words, and there was a flatness in the voice indicative of reciting well-remembered passages. When it was ended, the book was set aside, and the girl remained kneeling, but now with her face downward in the old pose of meditation ... or praying.

  When Bony felt the coldness in his scalp, he attributed it to the change of wind, to the cold south blowing into the cavern. It was with him when Sadie Stark fell forward on to the sandpatch, fell face down with her arms stretched. He could see her fingers clasping and unclasping, and then taking up sand and tossing it over her head and her white dress.