The Beach of Atonement

by Arthur W. Upfield

  It was almost light. The leaves of the fig-tree hung downward from the weight of the falling rain. It fell straight down, a swishing, roaring, tremendous downpour. Beyond the tree, through the leaves and branches, she could see no farther than twenty yards. The milking-shed and yards, the paddocks beyond, and the virgin bush beyond them, were obliterated from human vision by the falling sheets of water.

  And above the roar of the rain that other sound, sinister, mysterious terrifying. It reminded Hester Long of the throbbing hum of German raiding aeroplanes. No other sound did it resemble.

  “In God’s name, what is it?” she whispered.

  “Mummie, come back to bed,” James cried, half-fretfully, half-fearfully.

  Turning from the window, she regarded her two boys sitting upon the one bed, their eyes wide, as shown by the lamp.

  “Just a minute, sweetheart! I must fasten the window.” She spoke almost automatically, listening—listening to that throbbing hum growing in pitch, wild, menacing. If only she knew what it was! It seemed to be something monstrous, tearing across the world to destroy them. What should she do? The underground cellar! The cellar where the butter cream was kept during summer was fourteen feet underground. It would offer security against that frightful thing that was coming.

  If only her husband were alive! If only Hector Cain were there, or even Tom Mallory or Joe Brown! Never during all the days of her lonely solitary fight had she felt the need of a man as at that moment. The sound, that devil’s tune, was now as one played by a thousand insane violinists.

  Time! Had she time to get her boys out from the house to the under-ground cellar some ten or twelve yards from the kitchen door? There might be time. She flew to the bed. The children, used to discipline and obedience, acted as well-trained soldiers.

  She gave them no time for questioning. They made no effort to ask, seeing that on her pale face which frightened them more than the roar of the rain and the humming horror. Sweeping up the bed-clothes, she led them out of the room, past her own bedroom, where she did not stop to secure a gown to cover her night attire, and thence to the kitchen. A lad at each side of her, the three reached the door. She fumbled at the latch, the bed-clothes hindering her fingers. The latch was released, and the door flew inward under pressure of the south wind being sucked northward to meet the storm.

  With the opening of the door the devil’s tune roared into gigantic crescendo. The rain slanted in upon them, blinded their eyes, stung their faces and naked feet. How it rained! And that awful sound!

  Hester Long waited no longer than that momentary pause. The clothes she held in her arms hampered her ; yet the urge, the need for haste, was no more compelling than the necessity for warmth in the stone-cold cellar.

  “Run!” she screamed.

  Out in the full force of the rain the children sped, she at their sides shepherding them as a dog shepherding lambs. Leaving the kitchen door was like taking a plunge into the sea. She clung to her blankets. Several garments were dropped by little James, who, wanting to cry, was unable to obtain sufficient breath.

  Gone now was the throb in the dreadful sound. One omnipresent note encompassed them, low-pitched and vibrant. It seemed hours and days before they reached the brush-covered shed protecting the steps leading down to the cellar, a journey of a hundred miles through a surging torrent of water.

  Arrived within the shed at the head of the wooden steps, she threw her bundle of clothes down to the door of the cellar, and, lifting James in her arms, scrambled down them, slipping at the third step from the bottom and falling in a heap on the bed-clothes. Gripped by panic, yet thoughtful only of her boys, she flung inward the cellar door, and, dragging the lads inside, slammed it shut.

  Each second that they stood in the darkness seemed an eternity. She wondered later why at that moment she methodically counted the auger-holes in the door which gave the cellar ventilation and some light. There were nineteen two-inch holes in the form of a diamond, and the fact was impressed on her mind that it was the first time she had noted the number of holes, although she herself had bored them.

  The children clung to her. Both now were crying and whimpering alternately. Dropping to the semi-saturated bed-clothes, she drew them down beside her, and the same instant that their bodies pressed against hers Hester Long’s panic subsided and the stunned lethargy of her brain was replaced by a delicious calmness.

  “Let’s pull the clothes round us, sweethearts,” she said with amazing cheerfulness. “The storm will soon be over now, and we’ll go up and get breakfast. Cuddle in and get——.”

  Her voice was drowned by supreme cacophony. A monstrous roar, a ripping tearing of corrugated iron, a bump, bump, bump down the wooden steps without. Something struck the door and sent it flying inward on its hinges. They were flooded with daylight. Within their vision was the rain streaming on the now glistening wooden steps, and a mass of broken squared timber that had supported the roof of the shed. As a fire roaring up an open flue the mighty wind sped across the uncovered descent to the cellar, and within the roar other sounds, smashing of crumpling sheets of roof-iron, and wind-driven kerosene buckets. And, some thirty seconds after the door flew inward, there came to them an earth-quaking crash that wrenched cries of fear from the children and a gasp of terror from herself.

  It seemed that that tremendous crash marked the apex or crisis of the storm, for shortly afterwards the wind slackened its terrific even pressure, and came in ever more accentuated gusts and comparative lulls.

  “It has almost gone now,” she whispered ; and Harold on her right sighed as a man of forty, and James on her left clung to her fiercely and shook with sobs. “Hush, hush, darling ! It is all right. See, the rain is stopping, and soon the sun will come out. Just let us stay a little longer, and then we’ll go up and get breakfast.”

  “The noise, mummie! What was that noise?” the younger cried, eyes staring, chubby face tear-drenched and uplifted to hers. She bent her head and kissed the wet eyelids.

  “It was only the wind,” she said, forcing a laugh.

  “Yes, mummie,” Harold chimed in. “But that other noise—the big noise?”

  “Oh! that was the pig-sty roof blown away, I expect. But let us see what clothes you have, and then you can dress. By that time the rain will have stopped, I am sure.”

  James could not find his jacket and Harold had lost his shirt and braces; but, as Hester Long had prophesied, by the time they had put on the garments they did have, the rain had almost stopped. The wind, however, blew tempest-strong, and with the squalls of a tempest, and down upon them rushed cold currents of air.

  Hester Long stood up, and wrapped about her small but strong body one of the white woolly blankets. Followed by her children she reached the steps, and the water on them, as well as the water lying at their base, struck chilly against her naked feet. Helping the younger to ascend the slippery, littered steps with her, she finally reached the ground-level—and there stood aghast, confronted by the ruins of her home strewn on the ground like a collapsed house of cards. The red pisé-built walls, two feet thick, lay broken and jumbled beneath battered twisted sheets of roof-iron ; wooden veranda posts were snapped off ; brick chimneys lay partly buried in the little plot of kitchen garden, whilst here and there, visible and protruding, were parts of a bedstead, a table, a broken picture-frame, and, oddly enough, a book, laid open as by a human hand, resting on an upturned, uninjured kitchen chair.

  The children were stricken dumb. With the wind whisking the hem of the blanket about her, oblivious of the biting coldness of it, Hester Long surveyed the destruction of the home she had worked and struggled so hard to maintain. With infinite slowness the corners of her mouth drooped, with infinite slowness tears welled into her limpid grey eyes and, unheeded, trickled down her lined cheeks. The house wherein she had known great joy, great sorrow, and deep loneliness, the house that had been her protection and the protection of her fatherless boys, was now but a mullock-heap.

  But i
n that moment Hester Long felt no anger against God, or against Fate. Whereas a man would have wrung his hands and cursed, Hester Long stood holding in each of her hands the hand of a small boy, and wept. The balance, she recognized, was in her favour. The house, with each article of furnishing which she had loved for its associations, was no more; but her boys were alive and uninjured, and she was alive and uninjured, and able to go on fighting for them. God, as it were, had given her a pound and had taken away but a shilling.

  It was then that the voice, deep and vibrant, and oh ! so welcome, of Tom Mallory fell on her ears ; and, turning, she saw him mounted on a great grey gelding, splashing through the water running in rivulets everywhere.

  “Gad, Mrs. Long! This is a smash, to be sure. I feared the house wouldn’t stand that cyclone, for it was built in the year One. But how did you manage to escape?”

  “We—we hid in the cream-cellar. I heard the wind coming. I didn’t know it was the wind, but the sound frightened me. And now look—look at our home, Tom! What are we going to do now? It’s gone. It’s all gone. Everything.”

  Keen-faced and lithe of figure, Tom Mallory slid off his horse and tied the bridle-reins to the one remaining upright of the cellar shed. He then came and stood before Hester Long, and in his eyes was a gleam she did not then see. His voice was very gentle when he said :

  “Nothing is ever so bad that it cannot be mended. Here is Edith coming with two horses and a dray, because a light horse could never drag a buggy or buckboard through the mud. You must come home with us as soon as we can get you there, and to-morrow we’ll all start in and salvage your undamaged possessions and then rush up a new house.”

  Hester Long saw her friend Edith driving two powerful draught-horses along the flooded track towards them. The girl was standing upright on the dray and urging the animals with whip and voice, like a charioteer in a Roman arena. From her Hester looked up into the sympathetic face of Tom Mallory, and, smiling wistfully through her tears, she said:

  “Everything is never utterly lost until one loses one’s friends.”

  Two hours later she was dressed in Edith Mallory’s clothes, which with a little alteration fitted her passably well. The Mallorys’ farm had suffered comparatively little damage, but to what extent the storm had damaged their neighbours they were unable to learn for several days, since all telephone wires were down. The Broadcasting Station at Perth was equally without information for the same reason.

  Whilst Edith Mallory fussed about her and the children, Hester noticed how strained was her face and the frightened hungry look in her blue eyes. It was whilst they lunched in the Mallorys’ light and airy dining-room, with the sun now and then peeping through the cloud-wrack and brightening the drenched landscape outside the french-windows, that she said softly :

  “You are worrying about Mr. Cain, Edith?”

  “Oh! I can’t help it,” the other burst out, gripping one of Hester’s arms. “I am frantic with fear now that we have you here safely. His camp must have been in the line of the storm centre, for I saw how the trees between it and your house are torn up. I want to know, Hester—I must know! You must release me from my promise—you must let me go to him.”

  He should be all right, dear. Remember that his camp is well protected by the coast sand-hill; better protected by far than was my house.”

  Whilst she honestly believed this, Hester Long herself, too, was suffering an agony of anxiety; yet still she endeavoured to persuade her friend from going to the beach that day, or any other day: The promise she had exacted from Edith Mallory, that the girl would not again go to the beach alone, Hester Long knew would be kept. It was Edith Mallory’s pleadings to be allowed to know the worst that won Hester Long’s consent to leave the children in the care of the maid and accompany her friend on horseback to the Beach of Atonement.

  “I only want to see him, Hester dear, to be sure he is unhurt,” urged Edith somewhat wildly. “If we can see him moving about from Big Hill, it will be sufficient.”

  “Very well; we’ll go. But your brother will think us mad.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  DEATH—AND LIFE

  ONCE again Arnold Dudley sat on the Seagulls’ Throne. It was noon, yet he had eaten nothing, for the magnetism of that terrific storm had drawn him, early that morning, irresistibly to the beach, and had held him there spellbound by its magnificent aftermath.

  From the rocky summit he watched the coming of the wind with the lightning ripping and sizzling about him and the deluge flattening the sea. And out of the rain-fog had sprung the wind, bringing in its mouth a ten-foot wall of water and pressing down the sea behind as though by its enormous weight. With a hideous shriek it came, giving him just time to sprawl flat on the Throne and cling with lacerated fingers to its sharp edge.

  Between eyelids lowered to mere slits he saw the sea rush up to the low sand rampart backing the clear beach on his right and left; saw the water kept to its level by the force of the wind, whilst the summits of the beach sand-hills were blown away in smoke, and in the smoke the small tenacious bushes that had held the sand together. Deeply into the hills of sand bit the wind, tearing across them gutters that magically widened and deepened into gullies. Across the permanent gullies it screamed to the slightly higher hills beyond. With an ear-shattering blast it swept up and over the sand-mountains in the background, blotting them from sight with sand and debris. A hundred-mile-an-hour wind had pounced on the beach, and in ten seconds had shifted countless tons of sand, wiping out sand-hills that had stood for years, and creating new hills of pure sand where before had been level beach.

  How long this devastating pressure lasted Dudley could not estimate. It banished all physical feeling, save that his face smarted as though bathed in boiling water ; for the sand on the steeply-rising slope below him had played on him as a flaying sand-blast.

  The scene of chaos chained his mind as the wind his body. Watching the rain lift, his vision leapt to the far horizon. The sea, the usually calm and lovely sea, was white and hideous with passion. It showed a million rows of serrated teeth—long, low wavelets of foam—leaping landward at amazing speed. The entire ocean was boiling as a stupendous cauldron.

  Almost as suddenly as the wind had reached the beach it passed over, leaving a dead calm that lasted possibly ten seconds. The sea sank to its normal level, with the effect of the backwash of a monstrous wave. As though the entire beach had shaken itself free from the gripping wind, it sent outward into the face of the next gust an enormous counter-wave. As though hell’s fires had been lit beneath, the ocean rose in hummocks and mountains, seemed to pause, and then to rush madly shoreward impelled by the wind, now blowing from the south-west.

  Whereas on ordinary days the Ramparts had been marked by the rising and falling horizon-line, their position now was lost in a smother of high-flung spray, which wiped out the horizon altogether. Shoreward from them raced waves of a monstrous, an incredible hugeness. The crests of them appeared to be on a level with the awed Dudley, and he was a hundred feet above the Pontoon. The pitch, or distance between crest and crest, appeared to be fully half a mile. They were mountain ranges racing against the beach, threatening to overwhelm the land and to surge up the slopes of the sand-mountains two miles eastward. Their height, where they met the submerged Sugar Loaf and the Pontoon, was enormous, bearing on their upflung crests low walls of water that were swept into spray by the following wind, to pause for a fraction of time, curl over landward as some vast, green, white-laced, wonderful sea-shell, and rush on the bluff headland or the open sandy beach on either side.

  As for the Seaweed Mountain, it was gone. In its place twenty-foot waves curled over the beach, thence to dash up the steep slope of sand and slap the wall of the first sand-ridge. In foaming masses each wave surged over the Pontoon and struck the limestone headland with a reverberating roar, shooting up spouts of water from its face, water to be whipped into fine spray and carried to and past the watching man.

  Black a
nd evil were the troughs between the waves; white and terrifyingly beautiful their crests. Their power was fearful to watch, their aspect paralysing. Arnold Dudley felt much as the man probably felt who was bound to a post surrounded by chained lions, who every now and then were given a further foot of chain.

  At noon the racing cloud-wrack broke up, affording glimpses of sun. The wind pressure was relaxed, coming now in fierce squalls with comparatively calm intervals between; yet, whilst the wind slowly eased, the seas seemed to rise to greater heights. The smoke from the sand-ridges thinned. Saturated by the rain, it was marvellous that they smoked at all. Towards one o’clock the conditions had moderated to those of an ordinary gale.

  Another day was passing. The vision of frantic water was losing its grip, and the mind of the man was becoming increasingly aware of the discomforts of his body and the hideous monotony of his existence. It was as though the cyclone had frozen his brain, which the peeping sun was slowly melting, releasing first the impressions of an awful world and then thoughts of his frightful exile.

  Another day was passing. How many more were to pass before freedom came, before the shackles of his supreme stupidity fell from him ? He sat upon the Seagulls’ Throne and buried his smarting face in his crossed arms supported by his bent knees. The old feeling of nakedness came over his spirit, and his body visibly shrank towards the rock.

  How long had he really been there on that rock? A few hours? Or hundreds of years? It seemed to him that he had been there before Time was, and sudden terror, more exquisite than terror of the wind, made him raise his head and open his eyes to the light of day—then spring to his feet and gaze with wild bloodshot eyes over the vast welter of maddened water.

  And, as suddenly as he had broken into violent movement, his body stiffened when he saw, for the first time off that forbidding coast, a ship.