The Beach of Atonement

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “I love my home.”

  She said it with a slight smile of joy. Holding out the palms of her small yet remarkably calloused hands to him, she added:

  “I was a school-teacher in England when I married Fred, who was in the A.I.F. Ours was a hasty war wedding, and everyone said it would be a failure. When I came to Australia with him we had about three hundred pounds between us, and through the Repatriation people we got this farm. We had paid off half our debt when Fred was drowned. The remaining half is almost paid off now, but I have had to work very hard.”

  “You run the farm yourself?”

  “Yes. I milk ten cows twice every day, and make butter which I send to special customers in Perth. I look after four hundred sheep, and manage to fatten fifty store cattle every year for the Perth market. Oh yes, I’ve worked! I’ve cleared a hundred acres of land, and built almost three miles of fencing.”

  “You have?”

  Again she showed him her hands.

  “Look at the marks of the axe and the crowbar and shovel,” she indicated. Then: “Of course the Mallorys have been more than kind. Tom Mallory buys my store cattle for me and has them delivered here, and Edith, ever since poor Fred went and I’ve had to battle alone, has been teaching the children. They go over to their house every day but Sundays.”

  For a moment he was silent. He was thinking how plucky a woman could be, how strong in spirit, how wise in mind. Her calloused hands, her lined face, spoke eloquently of the unfeminine labour she had borne, but the light in her eyes revealed—what was it he saw there? And when next she spoke he knew.

  “You see, when my husband was taken, the farm was loaded by debt, and I had my two boys to think of,” she explained. “It meant either going to Perth and taking a situation at anything, or remaining here and carrying on Fred’s work. I stopped, as you see. And now I am glad, but there have been times when my sore hands and aching back made me cry. My boys will have an inheritance, after all.”

  “You’re wonderful,” he managed to say.

  “Perhaps—and perhaps not so wonderful,” she told him, giving him tea from a pot enveloped in an old-fashioned bead-worked cosy. “Work helped me over Fred’s passing. There is no soul-wound so deep that it cannot be healed by work. Don’t you think I am right?”

  “Yes,” he answered slowly. “Do you know, when I first came here I idled for weeks? It was you who set me to work, and now my heart doesn’t ache so much.”

  “I set you to work?”

  “Yes. As I was taking the hook out of your thumb I saw the corns on your hands, and seeing them I felt ashamed.”

  “Which reminds me that I am very remiss. Thank you for that lovely lot of fish.” For a little while she looked steadily at him, and he as steadily at her. Then: “Among several vices, my greatest is curiosity. Why did you give me them?”

  “Because you set me to work, and work saved me from madness.”

  “Then I am glad the hook did get stuck in my thumb. I knew that day you were suffering from great loss or sorrow.”

  The light of sympathy in her eyes dimmed his own. He knew then that Hester Long had done more for him than save him from insanity. She had saved his faith in his own kind. She was the kind of woman of which there are not sufficient in the world—the woman who does not merely invite confidence, but absolutely tempts a man to confide in her his worries and troubles, knowing that their recital will be received with sympathy and balm laid on his tortured soul.

  And, had he not shot Tracy, he would have told her then of Ellen.

  It was thought of his blood-guilt which forced him to his feet, saying what had been his business motto:

  “Time flies. There is much to be done before night falls. Will you show me which of the two ridges will provide me with trapping ground?”

  “Yes. It’s that running along my north boundary,” she said, leading him through the house to the back veranda. On the veranda he gazed over the expanse of knee-high, fading, lupin-covered paddocks to a low ridge about two hundred feet high, at which she pointed.

  “Look! I can see two eagles now.”

  Dudley had seen them, too. A thousand feet high, they sailed in vast circles with never a flap of a wing, less in size at that height than one of Mrs. Long’s many half-grown chickens. Turning to her, he said:

  “When you described to me your daily tasks you did not mention the fowls. Who looks after them?”

  Why, I do,” and seeing him give one of his very rare smiles, she laughed—a golden laugh, a laugh that began with a delightful gurgle, and ended on a high note.

  At the sound of it his smile vanished and his face became drawn. She found him staring at her with leaping anguish in his eyes, and, taking a little step towards him, said softly:

  “Oh! What have I done?”

  “Nothing, really, Mrs. Long. But the sound of your laugh recalled another woman whom it is my task to forget.”

  His voice, which she had thought very pleasant, was harsh when he said, stepping off the veranda:

  “That track along there will lead me to the foot of the ridge?”

  “Yes. But wait a minute! Won’t you take some eggs and some of my butter? Or will you come back here for meals?”

  “Thank you, but I must get on,” and he left her almost rudely—left her watching him drive away, with three vertical lines above her nose, and eyes that were saddened.

  Ellen’s laughter rang in Dudley’s ears whilst he drove recklessly along a rough cart-track. The sound of it coming from Hester Long had dragged wide the healing lips of his wound, stirred within him love for his wife which he had imagined was stark and dead. Work! Work was the only palliative for loss and sorrow. Hester Long was right in that.

  Parking his truck at the fringe of bush which extended half-way up the ridge, he savagely dragged the rabbit-traps from the truck, and as savagely counted out two lots of twelve each. Assured of a supply of paper squares, and thrusting the handle of his setting-hammer through his belt, he caught up the traps, swung a dozen over each shoulder, and zigzagged up the steep slope to the summit of the ridge. There the bush did not extend. It was open grass country, and a maze of rabbit burrows.

  During his recent trip to Dongara he had augmented his stock of traps, so that then he owned exactly a hundred. An hour before sunset he had set them all, marking each with a short stick and dragging a trail from stick to stick. The eagles watched him, and when he descended to his truck they swooped lower. Five of the first-caught rabbits they ate.

  That night he went over his trap-line at eight o’clock, at ten, and at midnight. He went over it again at dawn. He then had seventy-one skins. Thirty-seven rabbits were too young to skin, and these he hid beneath a blanket of boughs. The carcasses of the seventy-one he left exposed, divided into fourteen separate lots over a distance of a full mile.

  His method of catching eagles he had learned in New South Wales. In Western Australia the method was not nearly so widely known.

  About nine o’clock he was breakfasting, when he saw a girl riding a hack up to the homestead, and half an hour later, whilst stretching his skins on the U-shaped pieces of wire, he observed the same horsewoman swinging her mount towards him, and recognized Edith Mallory. Over the crook of her left arm she carried a basket.

  It pleased Dudley that morning to be cynical, yet he could not forbear admiration of her easy seat. His admiration was tempered, however, when he observed that she wore breeches and top-boots, a fashion doubtless prevalent at agricultural shows and in magazine illustrations, but seldom to be found adopted by real bushwomen who ride at stock-work and not for pleasure and effect.

  “I’ve brought you some butter and eggs which you could not stop for yesterday,” was her greeting. And then she asked the question Dudley knew she was going to ask: “Have you caught any eagles yet ?”

  “No,” he admitted, with assumed disappointment.

  “None!” She stared at him in her disconcerting way. Then: “Did you forget to bring your salt
?”

  At that he laughed mirthlessly, for at that time he could laugh no other way.

  “I have a bag full,” he told her. “Anyway, I am not going to give up. I’ll try again this afternoon.”

  “That’s right,” she said mockingly. “If you’ve no objection, I’ll pay you another visit to-morrow. I hope you get one or two. Mrs. Long and I counted seven a while ago.”

  “So many!” he exclaimed, mockery also in his voice. “Then I hope to get at least two.”

  Watching her canter back to the house, Dudley pondered the fact that this young woman appeared to have the power of raising antagonism in those whom she disliked, and he felt sure she disliked him ; though why, was beyond his comprehension. His experience of women had been limited to one. Miss Mallory’s mockery of him, however, was not due to dislike, but was a hastily-donned feminine defence against a growing liking for his strong clean-cut face and lithe body. The man mystified the woman, and few women like to be mystified.

  By noon his campaign against the eagles was in full force. The original four in sight settled on the bounteous feast prepared for them. Their nearest neighbours, several miles distant and out of sight, rapidly converged when the first four circled down to the ground. Their coming inward to the centre of the circle; which was the laid-out feast, attracted after them yet other eagles miles farther out still; and when, towards four o’clock, Dudley went again up to the ridge, no fewer than twenty kings and queens of the air fluttered upward lazily from the crumbs, climbed ever more swiftly towards the brazen sky, and drifted back to their seemingly allotted areas.

  Ere the sun had set Dudley had gathered his traps into fourteen separate heaps, twelve of seven traps and two of eight traps. Uncovering then the bodies of the unskinned young rabbits, he divided them among his trap heaps. That done, he prepared what are colloquially known as hurdy-gurdies. The rabbits he fastened securely to the ground with long wire pins, and around the carcasses, in a circle with a radius of about a yard, he set the seven or eight rabbit-traps.

  That night he went early to bed and rose late the next morning. After breakfast he did several little necessary jobs to the truck, one of which was to erect rails along each side and a few feet from the floor of the vehicle. Towards eleven o’clock he cut a stout cudgel from a green box-tree and mounted the slope to his traps.

  At his appearance nine eagles flew up, joining five others who evidently had just arrived. In the first of his hurdy-gurdies an eagle had got each foot in a trap, and the tip of one Wing in yet another. Dudley killed it with a qualm of regret, a feeling he always experienced when killing eagles, for in beauty, majesty, and power the Australian eagle has few superiors. With a wing-span of from five to seven feet, brown and black plumage, its neck and head feathers of lighter brown, some with feathered legs, clean silver-scaled feet armed with talons of tremendous strength, and a graceful yet wicked-looking beak, to give it the hyphenated name, “eagle-hawk”, is to belittle it without excuse. It is no more a hawk in appearance or in flight than the eagle of the Pyrenees.

  In the second hurdy-gurdy were caught three eagles. They strove to fly, and glared malevolently at their approaching destroyer: poor, beautiful, devilish birds, the enemies of man because they are the enemies of lambs and sheep, and of new-born weakly calves. One of the saddest sights in the world is to see them caged in Australia’s zoological gardens.

  One of Dudley’s hurdy-gurdies held five eagles. Several held four. Only one was birdless. When he had butchered them all, he found he had secured thirty-one.

  After resetting the traps he dragged the eagles down to the truck and concealed all but two beneath a spare tent that he then did not trouble to erect. For he expected Edith Mallory, and presently she arrived.

  “I got two,” he told her triumphantly, indicating the eagles by the truck.

  “My! You are doing well !” she gibed. “How is the salt supply?”

  “I have still a little left. I am going to try again presently. There seem to be quite a lot about here, don’t there?”

  “Yes, several.”

  Her blue eyes danced, little gleams of mockery and flashes of wonder showing in them alternately. At heart she was not surprised that he had secured two, nor was she surprised that he had secured only two. It was his—to her—boasting of a few days before which rankled in her mind, for Edith Mallory was older than her years. It liked her not to hear a grown man boast as a callow youth.

  That evening, between sunset and dark, Arnold Dudley caught eleven more. After dark he trapped for two hours for sufficient “bait” for the next day, and by noon of his third day he secured yet five others, making a grand total of forty-seven. He, himself, was astounded by his catch. Finlay had told him that, using that method in New South Wales, at a time when the rabbits had been numerous for years, he and a partner had caught one hundred and eighty-six eagles in seven days. However, Western Australia was not vermin-ridden as were New South Wales and the neighbouring States, because in the Western State the rabbit is comparatively a new-comer, and it is “bunny” that provides a large proportion of the eagles’ food supply.

  Keeping watch on the homestead, a splash of brilliant white on an emerald-tinged carpet of brown, he dragged his birds and his traps down to the truck. After he had loaded his gear on the truck, he hung the eagles along the rough rails, so that his turn-out was like a poultryman’s lorry on its way to Smithfield with the Christmas turkeys.

  At five o’clock he saw the two little boys and Edith Mallory drive up to the homestead in a pony-cart, and when they reached the house he cranked his engine and set off in a mood positively cheerful. They awaited him on the veranda of the house. He saw the women turn excitedly toward each other, and when he stopped the truck outside the little garden paling fence, they were silent and the youngsters vociferous. Standing at last before them, he smiled broadly at Edith Mallory, saying:

  “I’ve run out of salt.”

  Her eyes were wide, her answering smile provocative. She said:

  “I don’t know whether to apologize to you or ask you to apologize to me, Mr. Cain.”

  “Let us consider the apologies as cancelled out, Miss Mallory. And let us both hope that Mrs. Long will not be troubled by eagles for some little time to come,” was his pleasant response.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE DREAM

  THROUGHOUT January and February Arnold Dudley followed the occupation—if occupation it can be called—of beach-combing. It was not that he became tired of work, or that the period of his activity was as a growing and bursting bubble; it was merely because, from the trapper’s point of view, those months constitute a natural “close time” in the year. The fur on animals is at its shortest. The old fur has fallen out, and the .new has but just started to grow. Consequently the market price of fur and skins is at its lowest, and trapping becomes an absurdity.

  He retired late and slept late. The heat of the summer sun made his wind-sheltered camp unbearable after ten o’clock, and sometimes long after the sun had set. The vast sweep of the beach he explored from end to end. He came to know it as a man comes to know his own house; and, as a man comes to regard his house as his particular sanctuary from the world, so Dudley came to look upon the beach. It became his beach, something in which he could experience the pride of possession.

  The land-crabs, orange-coloured, which scuttled to their holes high above the tide or ran down to the sea at his approach—crabs that sidled along as though on one edge of their shells, and saw him coming with little black eyes set on the tops of spindly golden cylinders—were the protectors of his beach. The seagulls lorded it from their Throne, and evidenced supreme contempt when he usurped their place and they took refuge on the Seaweed Mountain. The solitary shag, so wise and companionable, met with a violent end.

  It was shot by one of three “sportsmen” who spent two days on the beach at Christmas time. They came in a car and camped at the cleared place where Hester Long always tethered her buggy horse, and
it was whilst on his way to his own camp one afternoon that he picked up the bird, broken-winged and blood-stained, which the waves had washed up south of the Pontoon. Carrying the bird, he approached the trippers, and with steely politeness inquired if it was their bird.

  They admitted having shot it, whilst Dudley idly gazed over, the beach and counted his flock of gulls. All were there, by great good fortune. Knowing the uselessness of argument over the killing of the shag, he dropped it on the running-board of the car and left them without further word, only to come back twenty minutes later with a thick slice of damper. The gulls were then resting on the Seaweed Mountain. The three men watched Dudley climb down on the beach, and with interest saw the gulls feeding from the crumbled bread he tossed almost at his feet. Presently rejoining them, he said:

  “I live here alone. Those gulls are my pets. They are no good to eat, and therefore I ask you in all humbleness to spare their lives. I hope you understand.”

  They thought they did understand. In any case, they appeared to understand the look of cold fury in his eyes, and, not liking it, left the next day.

  The absence of the solitary shag, so little a thing of itself, became a poignant regret to the equally solitary man. Dudley had often wondered why that bird elected to live alone, for, unlike him, it could choose its own way of life. For days following the sportsmen’s visit he missed something from his beach, just as though a piece of furniture, associated with his life for many years, had been removed against his wish.

  He told Hester Long about it when one afternoon she paid the beach another visit with her boys. He told her with petulance in his voice. He was excited at meeting her, and unconsciously told her of his starvation for want of human company.

  That was towards the end of February, when he had been on the beach for four months, and during those four months he had spent no more than seven hours in the company of his kind. She was fishing from the Pontoon when he joined her, to plunge at once into the story of the shag’s death. Listening to him with sympathy in her eyes and a soft smile on her rugged face, she observed that whilst his clothes were in tatters, whilst his feet were bare and brown and scarred by the rocks, and his hair long, and uncovered from the sun, he was scrupulously shaved and clean. She remarked the peculiarity of that in a man so evidently becoming a victim to his environment.