The Beach of Atonement

by Arthur W. Upfield

  It was about a mile from the beach. At first sight Dudley knew there was something amiss. It was without power, incapable of self-movement. It wallowed even in rising to the highest crests, and each time it sank into the long troughs Dudley had no hope of seeing it again.

  A ship! There! On that coast! Disabled!

  Again it rose into sight, and he saw and noted its colours. A black funnel with one narrow white band, two squat masts, white-painted upper-works, and a black-painted hull with a red bottom. Every time it heaved upward into his line of sight tons of water cascaded from its fore and aft well-decks. Squat, tubby, a tramp. An ocean tramp of perhaps two thousand tons.

  Dudley pressed his hands to his eyes, and when again he looked the ship was not there. So after all it was another trick of the devil. But no! There it was again, nearer, driven nearer by the wind straight towards him.

  “Mad! Mad! I’m going mad!” he shouted suddenly. Then, in what was almost a whimper: “It can’t be. I tell you it cannot be. No ship could get there. No ship could get across the Ramparts and float. And yet—and yet it is there. I see it. I can almost see—yes, I can see men. They’re lowering a boat. Dear God! as though a boat could live, could ever come ashore.”

  For a little while he watched. Then: “Yes, that must be the reason. A huge wave must have carried her clean over the Ramparts. What’s wrong with her? Hey, you, captain! What’s wrong? A broken propeller? Slipped your propeller? No? Ah yes, yes! I hear. Smashed your rudder. Poor, poor ship with a smashed rudder!”

  Dudley’s firm mouth seemed to disintegrate and become a slobbering gap. From his eyes fled the ever-keen, fierce gaze which, added to his faintly outlined Roman nose, gave his face that slight resemblance to an eagle’s. The sight of the helpless ship, the thought of the sure inevitable doom of its people, seemed to snap the last thread that had held his sanity. His face was pitiable, his attitude abject. His fingers hovered tremblingly about his mouth. His hazel eyes were clouded, yet still fixed on the shoreward-driven tramp.

  The Thing that men call Madness had laid one claw on him. It had stalked him, tracked him with the pertinacity of a tiger-cat following a kangaroo. Now it had caught him up.

  Arnold Dudley leapt from the Seagulls’ Throne. Lo! it stood twice its original height, its secret bared. It was not a casual boulder after all. The Throne was the top portion of a pillar forming the core of the hill of sand, and the storm had blown tons of its sand covering away from it, leaving fifteen feet of it exposed. Dudley dropped on his feet, but the distance he fell upset his balance, and he pitched forward on his face and rolled clown to the narrow ledge of rock edging the headland.

  On his feet once more, unhurt and unshaken, he stepped right to the edge of the low headland and shouted at the ship, now half a mile nearer and drifting directly to the Pontoon. Below him the monstrous waves roared against the face of the headland, shaking the rock beneath him a second before the sheet of spouting foam sprang upward, blotting out the ocean and the ship and drenching him. His eyes cleared of their cloudiness, and, raising his fists above his head, Arnold Dudley screamed:

  “Fools! Fools! Your boats are no use to you. You’ve got to die! You’ve got to die! You’re better off than I am. I’ve got to live—live for ever and ever and ever!” His voice sank to a whisper. “What do you want to come here for? You’re not going to have my gulls. D’you hear? They’re my gulls. I’ve fed them and looked after them. They’re my gulls, I tell you! My gulls!” Again his voice rose to a scream. “Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? They’re my seagulls. What’s that? Ellen! Ellen coming ashore! You are sending Ellen ashore for me? Liar! Captain, you’re a liar! Ellen is a broken vase. What’s the use of a broken vase to me ? Tracy broke the vase. A vase full of cracks and lines, chipped and in pieces. Ha, ha, my bonny heroes! Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest! Die, damn you! Why can’t you drown like men instead of hitting my brain with wireless hammers? Yes, that’s what you are doing. But I can stand it—you bet I can——.”

  “Mr. Cain, what are you saying?”

  The words were shouted at him above the wind and the roaring sea, and, turning his head, he looked down into the horrified face of Edith Mallory. And, seeing her, the fire seemed to be quenched within him and his face fell into lines of pitiful weakness. It was as though he stood on the verge of tears because of what he saw in her wild eyes and strained, ghastly face. His eyes left hers quickly, shiftily, and again his hands flew up to his quivering mouth, which his trembling fingers seemed as though trying to still. Then suddenly he saw Hester Long on his other side.

  “Have you seen a broken vase?” he stuttered. “The captain said he had left one here for me and Ellen to pick up.”

  “Think of a broken ship, Mr. Cain,” Hester Long said sternly, believing that she had to deal with hysteria.

  “Can’t we do something to help those poor people out there?”

  She saw him gape at her with vacant eyes, whilst a second passed, two seconds, three. Straight into his eyes she stared, her heart almost stopped by the look of him, realization dawning of his madness.

  Hester Long never knew precisely what it was Arnold Dudley saw in her face which for the time restored his reason. With wonder she saw the vacant look give way to intelligence, watched the lines of his face straighten and harden into the semblance of those she knew. He rubbed his eyes with his open hands as though the light were too strong, and when again he looked at her she saw in them bewilderment and surprise.

  “Why, Mrs. Long, I did not see you come,” he said slowly. “What brings you here on a day like this?”

  “We saw the ship from Big Hill,” she told him, pointing to it.

  “The ship! Miss Mallory, too! The ship—what ship?”

  He saw the tramp, now less than half a mile from them, and his body stiffened and his brain froze with the sudden horror of it beating on his clear mind. The last period of sanity had come to him, and because it was the last his mind was crystal clear. He saw all that he had seen before, and remembered. He realized that there was no hope for either ship or crew, for nothing that he or the two women with him could do would avert its fate. Cut off from civilization and without the most elementary life-saving appliances, the three onlookers were powerless. There was nothing they could do but stand and watch the end, and perhaps pray, or try to pray, for the welfare of departing souls.

  “Can’t we do something?” Hester Long cried.

  Dudley slowly turned and looked at her, shaking his head.

  “What can we do? See! they are lowering a boat.”

  Hester Long’s plain face was white with pity and horror. She stood, small, frail, yet dominant, her hands rigid against her sides. Edith Mallory held Dudley’s right arm in her two hands, her breath coming in sobbing gasps. The man between the two women watched the fated tragedy, drenched repeatedly by the leaping walls of water shooting up the face of the headland, oblivious of the hissing, roaring, pounding sea at their feet, or of the gulls that arrived in twos and threes to settle on their Throne, high above the watchers’ heads.

  The launching of the boats was a pitifully forlorn hope. The wind was driving the steamer northward as well as eastward to the beach, driving it directly towards the Pontoon. From the Pontoon southward for four miles the beach was open and sandy. The forlorn hope lay in reaching the open stretch of beach, for against the Pontoon no boat constructed by man could live. And even if men managed to get a ship’s boat to the open beach the chance of escaping from the undertow was small.

  The watching three saw one boat launched and clear of the ship, evidence of superb seamanship. Not for many long seconds was it possible to see the small boat in the trough. Then into view it sprang, tossed high by a mighty foam-capped wave. Six or eight men, tugging frantically at their oars, managed to keep the boat’s stern to the crest that rose behind and above them. The boat was a match, the crest a match-box on edge. It curled over and down on the boat, hiding it in white foam, and Dudley and his two compan
ions saw neither boat nor men again.

  “Gone—they’re gone!” he cried.

  Hester Long closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but if she spoke the wind blew away the words. The girl’s face was as white as chalk, her features as immobile. Even her eyelids never flickered whilst she gazed at the hapless ship.

  Now broadside to them, each wave that carried her up out of the water-pits showed the watchers the decks tilted their way, and they could see broken deck-rails and twisted and splintered wood and iron. Over came the ship, so that almost they could look down her solitary squat funnel.

  Tons of water swept up her topmost, almost horizontal, side to pour over on the slanted decks. And then, when the wave passed under her, the ship gallantly righted herself, thence to heel seaward and reveal a third of her red-painted bottom before again she slid down into a water-pit. And each time she appeared she was fifty yards nearer the Pontoon.

  The end came when but a quarter-mile separated ship from shore. Sliding down a water-pit, her bottom came with smashing impact on submerged rocks. The hollow, metallic crash of it reached the watchers, a sound utterly horrible. The rocks must have torn her bottom clean out. Coming into sight on the following wave, they saw that her funnel had gone, lying as a black stick across the bridge to the fore well-deck. Her masts, too, were down. She was a ship no longer, for her hull was below water and it seemed as though only her ripped and torn decks were afloat. They were submerged by the wave-crest, blackening here and there the white foam. That was the end, for nothing was seen on the crest of the following wave.

  “It is all over,” whispered Dudley unheard.

  Edith Mallory was clinging to him, her hair swept loose, head thrown back, great tears sliding down her face. Her eyes were wide and strangely vivid, and from her mouth came one phrase screamed over and over again.

  “I’ll never forget it—I’ll never forget it—I’ll never forget it!” Dread of unfailing remembrance, of unfading vision, was upon her haunted face, and frantically she shook Dudley’s arm, perhaps because he continued to stare at the sea, unconscious of her presence.

  And now the sea began to exhibit its spoils, bringing in wreckage to sweep it over the Pontoon at their feet. A barrel riding high was the first to come. Then a plank, followed by an upturned boat miraculously saved from destruction against the Pontoon. A packing-case and the top part of a swivel-chair came next, and afterwards a hundred and one wooden things or their fragments.

  The flotsam came careering across the Pontoon, escorted by countless streamers and bunches of green, black, and brown seaweed. The tide, forced by the north and north-west wind, had carried the wave-disintegrated Seaweed Mountain southward along the coast, and now that the wind had veered to the south-west the tide set northward and was bringing back the seaweed to build it again into a mountain at its former site immediately the waves subsided. Already its position was marked by acres of floating weed, among which the curling surf was unable to penetrate.

  A four-knot tide raced across the Pontoon, now submerged by twelve or fourteen feet of water when a wave roared against the headland, now covered by a bare three feet when the wave rushed out to meet the next. The flotsam was beaten and battered by the incoming walls of white water, pulled round and past the headland, and there divided by the currents. The heavier items were drawn seaward again into the Boiling Pot, north of the Sugar Loaf, a spewing, racing cauldron ; but the lighter and great majority of the items of flotsam were carried on to be embedded among the floating mass of seaweed, presently to be buried within the mountain. It was a whim of the sea, one of countless whims of the eternal sea, feminine in its softer moods, masculine in its placidity and its rage.

  Of his companions Arnold Dudley was but dimly conscious. He was alive when twenty or more brave men had died. He, an outcast, bloody and damned, lived when decent men, some certainly with women and children dependent on them, had perished. The irony of it bit deep, and its breath scorched his soul. Regret! Regret! Tracy had come out best. He had won over Ellen in life and over him in death. And in the end, when death claimed him, Tracy would win again; for he was a martyr and his slayer a murderer, abhorred by God and man.

  “Look! Oh look!”

  The command was hurled at him by Hester Long, who was pointing her outstretched hand at the sea south of the Pontoon. Edith Mallory saw what she pointed out before Arnold Dudley emerged from his reverie, shaken out of it by two suddenly frantic women. Not a hundred yards from where he stood, but a few yards within the shooting water-wall at the edge of the Pontoon, the tide was sweeping towards them a hatch-grating, and on it lay, face upward, a man. The grating was either small or broken. About it and through it twined a length of heavy rope. The rope lay coiled about the man’s arms, as though he had used it in haste to secure himself to the hatch.

  A rushing ledge of water swooped on the hatch-grating, buried it in white suds, swept it forward on its lip, left it to sink down into the trough whilst it sprang to the headland, was dashed backward, and ran out in a lesser ledge to fall once more on the hatch-grating, pass over it, and leap to meet the next incoming wave. Buffeted and flung forward and then back again, the castaway was brought to the very feet of the watchers.

  Now in the grip of the north-bound tide, grating and man swept past them. They saw a calm bearded face, in which the eyes were closed, and a great muscular body covered by a ship’s officer’s uniform.

  “He’s alive—he’s alive still!” cried the older woman, her voice vibrant, her small body tense and dangerously near the cliff-edge. “See! His eyes are closed. If he were dead they would be open.”

  Dudley understood that. He knew, knew absolutely, that the man was alive, although unconscious. How it had been possible for him to live through all that hellish water was of no concern to Dudley then. What wholly occupied his mind was which way would the tide take the grating? Shoreward to the floating seaweed, or far out into the rushing, leaping smother marking the Boiling Pot? And as certainly as he knew that the man was alive, so certainly he knew that the Boiling Pot would be his destination.

  If, however, a swimmer could push it farther shoreward before it reached the point where the tide separated all flotsam, it would be a comparatively easy task to bring man and grating right to the beach before it was claimed by the seaweed mass. For immediately north of the headland was created by wind and tide a back-water, gentle in movement and sheltered by the formation of the Pontoon.

  To Dudley then was given the hope of redemption. The hope was as a light flaring through his mind, expelling the depression that had held down his spirit as beneath a weight of many tons. It washed him clean of blood, that amazing hope, it flung off the baffled Thing men call Madness, and when he turned and faced the two women they were startled by the radiance emanating from his face, so changed, so beautiful.

  “He’ll go to the Boiling Pot for sure,” he cried, and, stooping, whipped off his elastic-sided bushman’s boots. “You see—it’s my chance. If I get him out, I atone for Tracy’s life which I took. If I lose my life in the effort I make atonement also. Don’t I?”

  He stood now with his coat off, his back to the sea, the wind blowing his over-long brown hair low over his broad forehead, and when he said: “Don’t I?” Hester Long saw that he was looking straight at her, clearly, steadily, sanely. A woman screamed.

  “No, no, no! You shan’t—you shan’t! You haven’t a chance. Hector! Dear Hector! You cannot! you must not! you’ll be drowned ! you can do nothing. Oh, my God! you shan’t go—you shan’t !”

  Edith Mallory clung to his arms, hung on them. Her wild, staring eyes were terrible in their intensity, reflecting the horror of her thoughts. Yet never did he look down on the anguished, upturned, lovely face, but gazed steadily over it into the eyes of Hester Long.

  And Hester Long knew that the choice lay with her, knew that Arnold Dudley awaited her response. Time stopped. Death, death, death lay waiting for him in the sea. It was impossible for him to accomplish the salv
ation of the castaway. She heard, within, a sound of many voices calling, shrieking. The voices took sides and, benumbed her brain with their clamour. “Death awaits him in the sea. You cannot let him go. You know how much you love him. Loving him, how can you send him into that terrible water?—Let him go, Hester! What is your love against his atonement? Let him go now, before again the madness springs upon him.”

  The agony of indecision tore at her nerves and stabbed her heart. Standing there waiting, his lips still parted after having said: “Don’t I?” radiant with the vision of redemption in his eyes, splendid in his virile manhood, Hester Long shrank backward and raised her hands in supplication. From her lips at last came the fateful word, distinctly, firmly spoken, but low, as fraught with the awe of a decision made for eternity:

  “Yes!”

  The woman of her wanted to rush to him and help her friend to restrain his mad impulse. The soul of her sang triumph at her sending him forth to grasp this one and only opportunity held out to him of winning salvation. The roar of the sea became a monstrous sound in her cars. Her heart! Would her heart stop? Why could she not move ? How was it she could not roach him and cling to him as Edith Mallory was doing, and give vent by shrieks to the horror eating away her vitals? Her eyes appeared to fail her, for her vision became blurred; yet she could see him smiling at her, such a smile as she never had seen on his face, and above the roaring in her ears she heard him say:

  “Thank you, Hester! Dear old pal! You understand.”

  Gently, yet quickly and firmly, he forced the girl’s hands from his arms, pushed her away to give himself a start, then raced along the headland to its north-west point. Edith Mallory stumblingly raced after him imploring him to stop, but if he heard he never once looked back.

  Hester Long saw him standing at the cliff-edge. A wall of water leapt up in front of him, and when it sank he jumped feet foremost into the smother. She saw her friend on her knees looking downward. She wanted to go to look down also, but found her legs held as by immovable weights. She knew he was drowning even at that awful moment. But no! There he was, being swept away from the headland, swimming with thrashing strokes after the grating a bare dozen yards away. Her heart leapt with exultation at the thought that victory would be his, in that he would push the castaway on his raft into the currents racing towards the seaweed.