The Beach of Atonement

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Tired to the point of exhaustion by the unpractised toil, Dudley returned to camp about one o’clock, when he washed and treated his injured hands, and ate a lunch of ox-cheek, damper, and tea. He had made himself a rough table in the shade of the bush, the interior of the tent being far too hot during the day ; and, his lunch finished, and a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, he came suddenly to realize that his camp was in a disgraceful state.

  Upon him was falling the mantle of his old outdoor life. Camp cleanliness was with him a fetish. He noted then the litter of paper, of labels from milk and jam tins, a wash-dish half-buried in the sand, a bar of soap flung against a bush-root, empty tins—a great attraction to ants—lying everywhere, shreds of straw from the sheath that he had wrapped the bottle of brandy he had used the day the visitors came. And, seeing the litter, Arnold Dudley felt a qualm of shame, and instinctively knew what any of his old acquaintances would say should any one of them enter his camp.

  Even so he made no immediate attempt to remedy his laxity. The temptation to fall again into his stirring day-dreams, wherein he and Tracy were the chief characters, was too great to be resisted then. Seated there beside the littered rough table, oblivious of the hovering flies and the converging—ants, Dudley witnessed with the vivid sight of his mind the death and damnation of Tracy, whilst his physical eyes stared unwinkingly at the wall of bush, here brilliant green, there black with shadow.

  A low-flying crow broke the slumbering quietude of the afternoon with its caw, caw, caw-aw and faint swish of wings. Dudley heard nothing. A magpie warbled a few detached notes, and the butcher-bird, perched but five feet above the seated man, produced five distinct bugle-clear notes that composed an utterly sweet melody. Yet Dudley heard nothing. His physical ears were deaf, stone deaf, because the ears of his mind were deafened by the shrieks of Edmund Tracy.

  To observe the man then, his strong and now tanned face working successively in triumph, in pure hate, in loathing, was to observe the handiwork of Satan. Hour after hour he sat with contorted face and working fingers, terrible to behold, pitiful to observe, demanding, nay compelling, sympathy.

  For in his normal state Arnold Dudley was a most likeable man. He had strange ideas of personal honour, ideas that proved to be the foundation rocks of his success in the business world. His attitude towards his fellow-men and women was reflected faithfully by their devotion to him and his interests. It accounted for the instant co-operation of George Finlay, who risked and was still risking imprisonment for himself as an accessory after the fact, as well as destitution for his wife and children. In fact, Finlay, as he had said, would gladly himself have undertaken the murder of Edmund Tracy. And a man who can inspire that degree of friendship is not to be reckoned mean-spirited, small-minded, sharp-dealing, or snobbish.

  Where the birds failed, the sudden piercing scream of a trapped rabbit succeeded in rousing him from his dreams—to face the fact that the day was rapidly dying. From beyond the low sand-hill between him and the beach the roar of the surf was as persistent as the droning of the flies. His camp lay in purple shadow, and above it to the east the rising green slopes were transmuted into gold by the sun then kissing the ocean.

  Automatically, Dudley felt the thickness of the paper-wad in his hip-pocket before picking up his setting-hammer to slide into his belt. Into an enamelled pannikin he poured the remainder of the tea made at lunch-time, added sugar, and drank. Then, with a chaff-bag, he began his sundown tour of his “set”.

  In the second trap he came to his first rabbit, which had run round and round with the trap in a circle, having for its centre the iron pin. Taking it from the trap, he broke its neck with one quick pull ; and, the buck-heap being scattered, carried the trap to another a few yards on.

  Working smoothly, with quick expert fingers that had not lost the knack, he went on along the track until in his bag were twelve rabbits. That number always had been reached in the old days before he seated himself to skin, and now it was the assertion of a habit formed long ago which governed his actions. Not yet was his mind free of hate. His hatred of Tracy was certainly weakening. There were recurrent periods, daily becoming more numerous, when Tracy was forgotten; but the sum total of these periods of forgetfulness was but a small proportion of the day.

  Seated on the ground beside the little furry heap, Dudley whipped out his skinning-knife and operated on the first rabbit. One cut behind the ears, another cut down the inside of one leg and up the other, a nick under the loose skin at the belly, and the knife was laid aside. One sharp pull at each leg, the rabbit then reversed, its hind-quarters clamped between his boots, a final pull, and the pelt was off. It took him fifteen minutes to skin those twelve rabbits, because his fingers were stiff. When he trapped for a living, the skinning of those twelve rabbits would have taken him but five minutes, and he was never considered a quick skinner.

  When he reached the end of his “set” on the summit of the highest sand-hill, he had taken twenty-two rabbits. Then it was almost dark. The gullies below were invisible in the blackness of night, made more intense by the gleaming silver of the upper slopes. Faintly discernible were the sea and the beach, the latter a ribbon of dull white, a ribbon that swelled and shrank everlastingly when each roller added its quota of white foam. Beyond, to the far-flung horizon, the darkness of the heaving waters formed a bar, a base-line supporting the golden edge of the dome of sky. The golden band was the first to catch the eye, and then, whilst vision travelled upward, the cloth of gold changed to purple, and from purple to silver, from silver to cadmium, and on into the indigo-blue of night.

  With his chin resting on his crossed arms supported on his bent knees, Arnold Dudley gazed at the glory of the west. As the light of day was fast passing from the earth, so had the sunshine vanished from his life. For the first time solitude spoke to him, solitude which there was omnipresent, filling all the universe, hemming him in on all sides as the stone walls of a prison.

  Turning his head, he gazed into the southern blackness, his eyes suddenly immobile, as though he would with his vision leap the hundreds of miles separating him from Perth, the city he knew so well, where he had really lived and known happiness and peace and content, before had fallen the dungeon-gates named degradation and dishonour which had cut him off from the light.

  The injustice of his incarceration in the prison of solitude burned and seared his mind to the extent that his flesh shrank as though from actual fire. From the city of sunshine he had been flung forth into the darkness of the world on which he sat. From the community of men he had been thrust into a place where man was not. Taken from the warmth and bliss of Ellen’s arms, he had been hurled to the summit of a hill of sand, at the mercy of the elements, garbed in rough clothes, a pariah, an outcast dog, a thing that men would execrate. And for all of that he was not responsible. The decree of exile had been signed by another man, one whom he had never harmed, one whom more than once he had helped along the road to success.

  Tracy!

  Dudley leapt to his feet. Out-thrust were his hands, clenching and unclenching. His head projected forward from his body bent towards, the sea. From him came a moan of anguish, and then a sudden screamed torrent of words.

  “Hear me, Tracy! Hear me—damn you! Your body rots, eaten by worms. Your beauty, your magnetism, is but an evil memory. The women you lured and ruined would shudder to see you now. Never again will your thrice-damned soul thrill at a conquest, or your filthy rotting body thrill at a woman’s touch. You are there, close by, watching me, Tracy. I know it. Look at me! Alive, able to feel, to breathe, to live. Able, if I wish, to taste good food, good wine, feel the warmth and delight of women, thrill at races and revel in pleasure. Think of it, Tracy, curse you a thousand million times ! Think of it, as you hover there in the night, your soul dead and damned, your body rotting and stinking. You filthy bastard! It was I who parted you from your beloved body. Remember that, Tracy! It was I who cut you off for ever from the pleasures of men. Shriek—go o
n—scream for life! Your shrieks are divine music in my ears.

  “Some day I’ll follow you and I’ll strangle and smash your soul as I have smashed your body. If you can—ah! but you wouldn’t dare. If you can, Tracy, come alive again in another body, and I’ll show you what dying really is. I’ll burn and sear and cut and rack you, and laugh at you as I laugh at you now, you poor bodiless thing! You’d steal my wife, my Ellen, eh? By God! you’ve done it. Ellen! Ellen! My Ellen! He’s taken my Ellen from me—for ever. Ellen—Ellen—Ellen——!”

  The paroxysm wore itself out, leaving him slumped on the ground, his nerves quivering, his body shaken by terrible tearless sobs. What he had done to Tracy was of infinite mercy compared with what Tracy had done and was doing to him. For an hour he crouched, wrestling with the demon of hatred; and when presently he rose and picked up the bag containing the rabbit-skins, he staggered down by the gullies to his camp. It seemed as though bedecking his hatred of Edmund Tracy in words and phrases acted as a safety-valve, for the articulation of the thoughts that governed his mind preceded a period of mental calmness lasting several weeks. In sharp contrast to his recent mood he ate his supper of damper and tinned meat almost light-heartedly; For two hours he lay and read a year-old weekly paper. It was after ten o’clock when he set off with a hurricane-lamp to go over his trap-line once more.

  The value of his trap-marks was now to be appreciated. The bush, buried in blackness of night, took on a different aspect when the rays of the lamp fell on the towering walls. Sense of direction was restricted, and the ground appeared even and without surface irregularity no matter where he looked. When he reached a mark drawn across the track, he followed it to its extremity, where was the trap it indicated. From some he took crouching; large-eyed, frightened rabbits, dazzled by the light, curiosity vying with fear. Others he passed, after swift examination to ascertain that the paper over the jaws was still hidden by the soil.

  Towards midnight he returned with nineteen skins, tired out. Boiling the billy, he made coffee, and drank a pint laced with brandy before lying down, not troubling to undress or make up his bunk. Almost at once he slept, falling asleep in the delightful lethargy produced by the unaccustomed brandy. And at daybreak he was up and on his trap-line once more. An additional twenty-one rabbits raised the total of his night’s catch to sixty-two. The total would have been sixty-six, had not a cat partly eaten one rabbit and foxes devoured three others.

  Dudley was satisfied with the night’s work, having averaged a rabbit to each trap. After breakfast he stretched the skins over U-shaped pieces of fencing wire and set them out to dry. His satisfaction was dimmed, however, when he collected the traps in heaps, preparatory to moving them to fresh ground, to discover that he had missed eleven of them. He searched all that morning and found only two of those missing. The remainder of the day he spent searching for missing traps, and found only five. Two he found the following day; two he never did find.

  He had been worse than the trapper in love with a woman. He had lost two traps and a whole day’s labour.

  CHAPTER VI

  HESTER LONG

  ARNOLD DUDLEY had been trapping for nearly a month when, adding his nightly totals, he found he had almost fifteen hundred skins. That was the month of November, and the first day of December found him vastly changed from the keen business-man of Perth.

  Such weeks on the Beach of Atonement had aged him woefully. The coming of many little lines at the corners of his mouth and at the centre of his forehead had transmitted a little of his good looks into a harsh grimness. His hazel eyes, once kindly and laughter-lit, seemed now to have receded into his head, to become almost invisible between the narrowed eyelids, as though their vision turned constantly inward and seldom went outward to examine the things of reality. Yet where his age appeared to be accentuated was in the greying hair above the temples, and the slight body-stoop when he walked. This latter, however, was caused not by his exile, but by constant walking over loose fine sand.

  After midday dinner that warm December morning he rolled his habitual cigarette with calloused fingers and observed once again the bale of skins ready for dispatch. Really, it was the wrong time of the year to trap. The fur then was mostly outgoing, and if his return cheque amounted to fourteen pounds it would be as much as he could expect. Even so, that sum would much more than balance his expenditure since he had arrived there. That, however, was not so important. His work would establish him among the people of Dongara as a rabbit-trapper. It had benefited him in yet another way. The work had helped him to recover himself, had kept his mind on the mountain peak, high above the valley of madness.

  No longer did paroxysms of hatred of Tracy shake and exhaust him. He had come to realize life as it was, life without man-made comforts, without man-made divergent, without home attractions, without Ellen. At long last he recognized himself for what he was—a man apart, a man dishonoured, a man derided by men and scorned by women, one who had become a law unto himself.

  Seated there beside his rough meal-table in the shade cast by the circumambient bush, Dudley decided to take his bale of skins to Dongara on the morrow. He would fish that afternoon, and what fish he caught he would sell or give away. Accordingly he got out his lines, one armed with large hooks and a heavy sinker, another with much smaller hooks and a lighter sinker. These, with spare sinkers, he put into a gunny-sack slung from his shoulder, and, after making another cigarette, set off for the rocks. Immediately he came to the squat headland beyond the sheltering arm of sand-hill, the north-west breeze, which but just ruffled the tops of the combers, struck him with refreshing coolness. A community of gulls occupied the Seagulls’ Throne. The solitary shag stood at the edge of the Seaweed Mountain with wings outstretched to dry.

  The sea was calm, the succession of mile-long rollers, sluggishly sweeping shoreward, crashing languidly with low rumbling moans against the rocks. The tide was almost out, and he saw that he could stand at the outer edge of the Pontoon with comparative safety.

  It was indeed a wonderful day. Not a cloud sailed in the burnished sky. North and south the beach reflected the sunlight as a crescent-shaped ribbon of white silk, bordered at its outer edge by the green bush-covered hummocks, its inner side turquoise-blue, the sea sending to it line after line of glittering white surf.

  Yet that wondrous beauty was lost on Arnold Dudley. His brain was too much benumbed by the tragedy of his life, his mind too self-centred to regard extraneous reality with joy. His heart was not lightened by anticipated sport. Life was too empty of joy to discover joy. Life was no longer interesting, no longer offered anything to look forward to, because after all he had lost, the little that might remain was valueless.

  For half an hour he hunted shellfish for bait, gathering large whelks with variously tinted shells. Without qualm, he smashed them with a rock, and put the long curly fish bodies into a tin. Then he proceeded to set the heavy line. Baiting the three large hooks, he unwound the hundred-yard line, to gather it back in neat coils hanging over one hand. His other hand held the line a foot or so above the top hook.

  The waves even then surged against the edge of the Pontoon, here dashing spray high in the air, there boiling up above the level of the rock, overflowing it, to rush shoreward in a tiny wavelet. Selecting a point where the sea welled up on the rock, Dudley, dressed in old trousers and boots, splashed his way till he halted within two yards of the sea. Here he whirled the heavy sinker round and round, finally to cast it outward in a high descending curve, almost to the full length of the line. His end of it he secured to an upthrust snag of rock, before paddling ashore for his second, lighter line.

  With this baited, he returned to the very edge of the Pontoon, where he lowered the sinker and hooks, and allowed the cord to lie over his stretched forefinger. Wave after wave rolled in upon him, until it met the face of the Pontoon, its own momentum sending it upward till it surmounted the level rock and overflowed it, burying Dudley to his knees in hissing foam. Much of the rock-ca
ught water swept toward the beach, some of it rushing back to cascade over the serrated black lip into the trough made when the body of the wave was sent seaward helter-skelter to challenge and pass through the next incoming mountain.

  The Pontoon at that place presented a twenty-foot wall of rock to the caress or fury of the Indian Ocean. Almost as soon as Dudley’s sinker rested on bottom, he felt the small fish nibbling at his hooks. He struck when a more emphatic tug was telegraphed up the line to his finger, but missed the fish, and almost immediately after that came a succession of rapid tugs, and the line moved away from the rock whilst he hauled it in and landed a gleaming silver-scaled sea-perch almost two pounds in weight.

  Ten minutes later he brought up a crimson backed, pink-bellied rockfish, a thing of utter splendour of the sea. Followed almost to the edge of the rock a blue-black crayfish, which let go its hold on the tempting bait as soon as it found air. Within an hour he had about ten pounds’ weight of fish in his gunny-sack.

  The tide now was coming in fast. No longer was the top of the sunken rock immediately opposite to be seen in the troughs of the waves. The green and grey limpet-encrusted Sugar Loaf was sinking ever deeper, and when the waves welled up and over on the Pontoon the water reached his thighs. Dudley decided he had had enough, and was winding in his line when he observed his other white cord cutting through the foam like wire.