The Beach of Atonement

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “It might,” he conceded. “I will read it. I appreciate the thought behind the gift.” Dudley was silent for a moment or so. Then: “You, say the book is called ‘A Master of Fate’. According to the tale it appears that the hero wasn’t sufficiently master of his fate to see the stupidity of becoming a murderer.”

  “Ah! But in that you are wrong,” she countered. “The hero became master of his fate only through the love and sympathy and help of his beautiful wife.”

  “At what part of the characters’ lives does the book end?”

  “When they had been married about five years.”

  “Yes, it would be, to end happily. The author knew where to stop. He would not have dared to carry on the tale till the hero had reached very old age, or even further—beyond death. Have you read Omar Khayyam?”

  “No.”

  “He was a very wise old poet who put very big truths into quite short verses. One of the truths he versified was:

  “‘The Moving Finger write; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’

  “We may be masters of our fate by planning ahead, but we cannot put the clock back or obliterate one act, one thought.”

  Dudley was looking at her shapely face in profile, and remembering what Hester Long had said about St. Anthony. Dressed in navy-blue, with a light-grey hat fitting low over her head, Edith Mallory made a delightful picture. Without turning her head she said:

  “Agreed that the act has been committed, should we not try to live it down and make the best of life nevertheless?”

  “There are some acts that can never be lived down,” he told her quietly. “Murder is one of them. Atonement has to be made, not only to man, but to God also. I am not a religious man, but I still believe what my mother taught me as a child. I believe in God. I believe in a future existence. And, most important of all, I believe in the just punishment of our sins.

  “Even if I did not believe in the first two articles of faith I must, being a man of ordinary intelligence, believe in the third. If I do not believe in God I must believe in Nature. And, after all, God and Nature are one. I am realizing this more fully these last few days. I have come to recognize that my banishment to this place is a just punishment for having committed murder. A far juster punishment than hanging. The agony of death by hanging lasts but a few seconds ; my agony in life is worse than death, and has lasted for many months. The sentence was passed upon me the instant I pulled the trigger. Assuming that in the circumstances my fellow-men acquitted me of murder, I should still have to face the judgment of God.”

  “And why should God’s judgment be less merciful than man’s?” she questioned swiftly.

  “Because God’s judgment is invariably just; and, if man did acquit me, man’s judgment would not be just, for man’s sympathy would over-cloud his reason.”

  “I cannot see it from your viewpoint, indeed I can’t,” she said earnestly. “I think the trouble is that you are living so much alone that the whole matter of right and wrong is distorted in your mind. If you would but go far away and mix with other people, you would come to look upon the act in its true perspective, as merely an act of folly. Being merely a foolish act, though quite justified, you would soon almost forget it and find happiness again.”

  Slowly Dudley shook his head.

  “I shall not find happiness again, never,” he said. “Even were I to deceive the people I finally settled among, even if I loved and married again and deceived the woman, it would always be impossible to deceive myself.”

  “Not if the woman truly loved you. She would make you forget. A writer or poet once said: ‘A man remembers nothing when he is in the arms of a woman who loves him’.”

  “Maybe there is truth in that,” agreed Dudley, wondering if the girl fully understood what she had quoted. “But such moments of forgetfulness are fleeting, and Time is without end. We come back, you see, to the relentless Moving Finger.”

  Edith sighed. Dudley knew why. He knew she realized that reason was on his side, as indeed it was. At that meeting he was thinking more lucidly than he had done for months, and the cause thereof appeared to be this girl’s determination to show him a way out of the morass in which he had sunk. She demanded reason of him, and found it.

  “Your friend has not come back,” she said abruptly.

  “Not yet. He said he would be away a week. He went to Perth to fix some business which would assure his wife a small fixed income for a year, so I understood. When he does come, we shall probably go north on a prospecting expedition.”

  “How long do you think he has been gone?” she asked, her brows knit with perplexity.

  “Three or four days. Why?”

  “You are losing count of time, Mr. Cain. Your friend has been gone twelve days.”

  “Twelve days!” he gasped.

  “Twelve days,” Edith Mallory repeated. “It was twelve days ago when he passed through Dongara. I learned that from the storekeeper this morning. You see now how this sort of life is treating you, don’t you?”

  “Twelve days!” Dudley repeated. “Impossible!”

  “Twelve days it is.”

  The man stared out on the sea. The girl watched him keenly, agonized by her love of him, and hurt by every line on his face which told of suffering. The longing, the desire to throw her arms around him and cradle his head in them there, to stroke his hair and soothe his wounds and make him forget the horrible past, caused a feeling of faintness.

  As for Dudley, he had for the moment forgotten her. To him was the future made vivid. The signs were plain, writ in letters of fire before his eyes. The body of a kangaroo became the body of Tracy. Nine days and nine nights had slipped away unaccounted for, unaccountable. How had he passed those days and nights? Think! Remember! He must try to remember. He put his hands over his eyes to shut out the memory-clogging light, and sat thus for a full minute trying to remember. To remember meant merely that that lost period of time was but forgetfulness ; not to remember it, not to recall an important incident or two, meant but one thing, the thing he had suspected—the madness born of solitude.

  At last his hands fell. Edith Mallory saw the terror in his eyes, the terror that made the corners of his mouth to quiver. The elements at long last had made impression on him. Space itself had worn away the shell covering his soul. Wind was ever increasingly whistling through the cracks. Temperature, cold and hot, sent shafts of fire and ice against the thinning, weakening body-armour. And now behind him, tracking him as a relentless aboriginal tracker, drawing closer and ever closer to him, was the Thing called Madness.

  The writing on Dudley’s pain-racked face made Edith Mallory catch her breath. There was nothing now in the world that mattered but the saving of Arnold Dudley. She believed—woman-like, she had finally come to believe what she wanted to believe—that she could save him from himself, could make him forget the past by the power of her love—believed that her love was powerful enough to create love in him to compensate it.

  “Hector! Hector! Listen to me,” she cried, gripping him by the arm. “You can see now where this terrible life is leading you. Let me help—please let me help!” Dudley was looking into her tear-drenched face almost stupidly. “You must go away—indeed, you must go away. You want taking care of, you want sympathy and love. Let me go with you, Hector! Let me take the place of that other woman. We could go away to some place where neither of us is known, and start life afresh, perhaps presently in some other country.”

  He made no effort to speak, showed no sign that he understood her meaning. In her earnestness she shook his aim held in her two hands and twisted her body towards him, so that she came to be kneeling and sitting on the heels of her riding boots.

  “Don’t think, Hector! Please don’t think of what you know, what I know, is coming if you stay here,” she pleaded with trembling voice. “Just realize
that I am here now and want to be with you always, to take care of you and love you and make you well and happy. Lean against me, Hector! Let me be your support till you have forgotten and are yourself once more. Take me away with you in your truck now, this day, this hour. See, here in my handbag is money. I drew it from the bank at Dongara this morning. There is a thousand pounds, and presently, if we want more, I can send for it. You need worry about nothing, think of nothing, care for nothing. You needn’t love me, or try to love me, or think of me if you would rather not. I don’t matter in the least. It is you, you, you that matters. Let me give all I have, all I can. I shall demand nothing of you in return, nothing but to be permitted to be near you, to watch over you and for you.”

  She paused only to regain her breath. The words came in a torrent, low-toned, vibrant with passion, with entreaty, with the desire to serve. In those moments she was indescribably lovely. Her eyes were pools reminding Dudley inexplicably of the Psalmist’s description of green pastures beside running water. Her mouth, a-quiver with emotion, fascinated him with its infinite invitation and allure. Her voice soothed the chaos of his mind into a semblance of orderliness. And that devil-voice within him cried aloud:

  “Why not? Why not?”

  Why not? Why not fling the past further behind? Why not take from this lovely girl all that she entreated him to take? She offered him escape from the Thing called Madness living there on the beach of desolation and ever creeping nearer to him. She offered him temporary forgetfulness of Tracy and of Ellen. What use, to what purpose was it to go on there dreaming of an Ellen who would eternally evade him just because he had shot her seducer? Why not race away from the past with this alluring, desirable woman, rush out of the present into the future, accepting joyfully the God-given gift, even if the gift faded and vanished in a few years? He heard a voice. Was it his own?

  “You would some day regret it.”

  “Regret! Hector! Oh, Hector! Never would I regret serving you, working for you, planning for your happiness.”

  Again that voice. Again the doubt that it was his own.

  “Are you sure—sure?”

  She saw the light of desire flash into his blazing hazel eyes, was lifted up by the surge of triumph, and cried loudly:

  “I am sure. Please believe I am sure.”

  He was smiling, a smile such as she had never dreamed to see. She knew she had won her fight, and the knowledge almost made her heart stop with its exquisite portents. His face seemed to become larger, so large that presently all that she could see was the hunger in his eyes. She felt his lips upon hers, and the fire they sent rushing through her veins burnt out her sight of him. The world stopped. She lived in a stupendous silence, broken at last by a well-known voice that held a sob in it, seeming to come from a far distance:

  “Edith! I have come to take you home.”

  Onward rushed the world. The gentle roar of the waves, the faint murmur of the wind about the Seagulls’ Throne, came again into her consciousness, as into her flame-lit mind entered the calm, pure light of day. Standing near the rock was Hester Long. Edith saw in the grey limpid eyes a great sympathy and understanding. Dudley, looking down into the same grey eyes, saw neither sympathy nor understanding, but reproach. And what he saw there sent him to his feet on the Throne, and the idea, the thought, which came to dominate his mind, was that he had betrayed his wife, had been disloyal to her, and also to the ideal she was to him.

  He forgot Hester Long. He forgot Edith Mallory. He knew only that he had been untrue to Ellen. In that supreme moment it was the woman who had dishonoured him, and not the woman who had laid her all at his feet, who dominated his mind and his soul.

  He jumped the rock, tore madly down the sand-hill, and rushed across the gully and over the next and the next, whilst Hester Long helped the wildly-sobbing Edith down from the Throne, then gathered her in her work-hardened arms and hugged her to her flat bosom.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE FOX HUNTER

  THE sun was touching the horizon, a disc of concentrated fire which crimsoned the sky above it and the sea on which for an instant it rested, joining sea and sky as one vertical sheet of flame.

  A further twenty-four hours had passed, and still the sea remained as blue glass at midday and rose-pink to emerald-green at sunset. Still the wind blew fitfully and softly from the East. That day had been almost hot, even for Australia, and the coming night promised to be warm and kind.

  When the sun sank into the sea, causing passing wonder that it made not the sea boil and steam, Arnold Dudley turned eastward from the beach between the twin hills of pure white sand. With satisfaction having no basis other than the instinct of the trapper, Dudley noted that the hills, as well as the narrow stretch of sand between them, carried far more fox-tracks than they had done at his earlier visit. That, however, did not indicate an increase in the number of foxes visiting that place. The absence of wind allowed Time to multiply the original number of tracks by the number of nights since the last wind or the last rain had obliterated those made before.

  On account of its numbers, as well as its destruction of lambs, the fox is considered and dealt with in Australia as vermin. A price is placed on his scalp ranging from two pounds in Western Australia down to half-a-crown in many pastoral districts over the Eastern States. The pelts, of which many thousands are sold to foreign buyers every season, range from three and sixpence to sixteen and seventeen shillings apiece. Therefore the fox is closely studied by all fur-getters.

  Dudley had learned a great deal about the fox from George Finlay, and had found out a great deal more for himself. His knowledge, however, had been gained in New South Wales. In Western Australia the fox is a comparatively recent immigrant, like the rabbit. The rabbit came westward one bumper year. It came in droves, and after it came the dingo, and in lesser numbers, the fox.

  That evening in mid-May Dudley carried a “drag” and a quantity of baits, as well as a canvas water-bag, a small billy, and sufficient cooked food for two meals. He made his camp by lighting a small fire a quarter of a mile inland along the green-floored, bush-bordered valley where he had shot the kangaroo, and then hastily breaking off a quantity of bush-boughs for a bed. Leaving the food and water-bag, he snatched up the “drag” and the baits, and hastened back to the twin sand-hills.

  By then it was the magic period of the twenty-four hours called half-light, neither full daylight nor twilight. During the few minutes of Dudley’s absence the green of the sea had changed to deep-blue north and south of the wide ribbon of pearl-grey at the farther end of which the sun had vanished. The white surf, the white sandy beach, the drab white sand-dunes, had softened to pale cream. The bush on the westward slopes of the dunes reflected the sheen of yellow-green satin; the bush on the eastern slopes pale purple; whilst that deep in the shadow of dell and valley was blackening rapidly.

  It was a world painted wholly in three colours—green, white, and blue, vivid and brilliant, but colours having each a thousand differing and ever-changing shades.

  Dudley waited, regardless of the beauty surrounding him. He waited because two white-eyelidded crows—sleek, glossy, funereal black, and sinister—were watching him intently, whilst pretending to be searching for the worm caught by the late bird. Of all living things that fly the crow surely is the most intelligent. Seeing the observers, Dudley laughed and spoke aloud, as was now an established habit.

  “And there were two crows, an old fellow and a young fellow. And the old fellow said: ‘My son, beware of the man who stoops to pick up a stone, for assuredly he will throw the stone at you.’ And the young fellow said: ‘All right, father, I will remember and act on your advice. When I see a man stoop to pick up a stone, I’ll make myself scarce. But, father, what am I to do if the man puts his hand in his pocket?’

  “Ha, ha, ha! you wily devils,” Dudley cried to them. “It’s a hard road for the dog and sandy for the pup. You’d like me to lay the baits now, wouldn’t you, so that you could come along an
d gobble them up? Wait, friends, wait! To-morrow morning I’ll do better for you than that. All I have now is some little cubes of fish seasoned with strychnine. They would make you mighty sick, though I believe you know enough to fly to a tree and hang upside down till you disgorge them again. That’s a trick worth knowing. The devil must have taught it you.”

  Crows are late as well as early birds. This especial pair pretended to hunt industriously for the late worm until it was almost dark, when disgustedly they flew away to roost in the branches of a wattle farther up the valley. Safe now from their interference, Arnold Dudley stood up and took the end of a short line attached to a ten-pound gummy shark—known in English waters as a species of dogfish—and proceeded to drag a trail. The shark had been caught five days previously, and was in that state of decay when its oils were oozing from it. Upon every particle of sand it passed over the “drag” left its pungent oily fish-smell.

  Dudley dragged the shark around the base of both hills and zigzagged over the sand-patch between them. The passage of the fish made a broad shallow line on the white sand, and at intervals of fifty paces he placed on the trail thus made two half-inch cubes of rock-fish flesh to one side of which adhered powdered strychnine crystals. Where the twin baits were laid he marked the sand with the heel of his boot.

  A casual observer at this point might ask: “Why two baits together? Why not one, or more than two?” The fur-gatherer is not a casual observer. If he were, he would soon have to take to a pick-axe for a living. He knows that were he to drop a single bait at intervals the fox might well pick it up and carry it between his teeth for a considerable distance before swallowing or burying it. When, however, the animal, running along an alluring trail, comes upon two baits, he will be obliged to swallow one, even should he desire to pick up the other and carry it away, possibly to bury it. It is needless to say the second bait is not carried very far, seldom over the next stretch of fifty paces. To lay a number of baits at one spot also is foolish, because too large a quantity of strychnine will most likely make the animal vomit what it has taken, and it will get far away before succumbing to the effect of the small residue left in its stomach. And to poison a furred animal without a chance of getting the fur is considered by trappers nothing short of a crime.