Bony went again to the entrance to ponder and was appalled by what the new day revealed. On returning, he said: “Why the hurricane lamp?”
“I brought it for Marvin. When he complained about the poor light, I brought the pressure lamp, and left the hurricane in case my torch failed.”
“Simple. Well, as it appears we’ll be here for hours, let’s get on with the story. You say that Marvin missed his suitcase left behind at the hut. You promised to go for it after dark. All that is clear and in order. What follows is in order too. Because you wouldn’t go for the case before dark, and he knew there was a great deal of money in it he’d want for his getaway, he became moody, and the mood became insane rage. Right?”
“Yes. He did fly into a rage. And then . . .”
“It’s quite clear as to what followed. His automatic pistol with other things were lying on the chest. Correct?”
Sadie nodded, slightly bewildered.
“In the storm of his fury he made a grab for you, and you could see terrible things in his eyes and on his face. You turned and ran, but he blocked your escape at the entrance. You told him what you thought of him after all you’d done to help him, and he came for you again. Correct?”
“Yes. No, it wasn’t like . . .”
“It was, Sadie. You know it was. He came for you in a wild rush and you ran behind the chest and you saw the automatic, and in your fear and desperation you snatched up the weapon and fired at him. Now didn’t you? In your extremity, you snatched up the pistol and fired at him.”
“Yes. Yes, Nat. No, it wasn’t. . . . Stop making me say things I don’t mean.”
His eyes grew big and as deep as the deep blue sea. He shouted at her:
“I’m not making you say anything, Sadie. I’m saying it for you.”
Chapter Twenty-four
At High Tide
THE EYE of the wind, having circled towards the Antarctic, had worked on the sea with spectacular results. The Front Door of Australia was now being savaged by all the white ghosts from the South, tearing at the feet of the monolith, leaping high as though to clutch the hair of a giant and pull him down for the lesser attackers to devour.
Waves and rollers there were none, for the white hills of water rushing in behind the Door, there to meet and rise to mountainous summits, could not be likened to waves. You could count slowly fifty seconds from the appearance of one range at each edge of the Door until the appearance of the next. Having entered behind the Door, they proceeded as the spokes of a wheel, curving against the tall rock faces of the cliffs in white masses, ultimately to meet and struggle opposite where Bony stood with Sadie under the overhang. Every half-minute or thereabouts, the rocks at the beach level were boiled black, and half a minute later the level of the tortured ‘snow-field’ was less than ten feet below the ledge where they were standing.
The sky appeared to be resting on the top of the Door and it appeared also to be taking to itself the colour of the sea to make it French-grey. The wind was cold, and showed its velocity when whipping off great masses of suds and rushing them up the cliff-faces and over into the tea-tree. The ledge under the overhang gave almost a vacuum, so that these masses of suds flew up and past them like bed sheets whisked off a line by a twister.
That section of the ledge which joined the rock over which they would have to clamber to reach the upward path, was smothered at the apex of each water-hill. Having repeatedly counted the seconds from one flood to the following one, Bony calculated they could reach the rock provided they hastened for it and provided they did not slip on wetted rock pavements. To run would be hardly possible.
To hear on this exposed ledge what either might say would be impossible too, and he motioned Sadie to retreat with him into the cavern.
“D’you know when high tide is due?”
“No,” replied the girl. “I would have, had I seen the sun rise.”
“I’ve been studying those waves, and if they rise much higher we’ll be cut off. What d’you think?”
“Even if the tide is on the ebb, the wind won’t let it fall. The waves could rise so high as to wash into this cavern and drown us. I wish it would. I want to die. I don’t want to go on living. So let me be.”
They were standing near the hurricane lamp where the daylight served them. Bony moved fractionally to gain position between Sadie and the sea. She stood there looking at his feet, seemingly demure but actually lost in a world of dark despair. When he spoke again his voice was raised to biting anger, and there can be no doubt that what he said and how he said it would have merited his Marie’s approval.
“You don’t want to live any more. You want to die. What bloody rot! You stand there moaning and wringing your hands like that fool Othello after he’d strangled Desdemona. Your heart, your mind, every part of you, is weeping over a Thing. Blast your eyes! I’ve a good mind to slap it out of you.” With one hand he gripped her arm, and with the other roughly forced her chin upward, only to see her eyes closed. “Now let me tell you this, stupid. Thirteen, fourteen years ago you were a simpering, dreamy-eyed, fool of a female child in love with a great big Knight arrayed in Shining Mail. Your own words. And the truth. Your Knight in Shining Mail went off to capture a dream for you, and a Dragon killed him. A Dragon! What an insult to a dragon.”
Still Sadie wouldn’t look at him. He shook her, and went on with the verbal thrashing:
“All you’ve had to cling to, like a limpet to a rock, was a vision of a Knight in Shining Mail. And don’t call me a liar. D’you hear? You’ve been in love all these years with a vision, and when this Marvin came slinking back you kidded yourself he was still the knight you created. When Marvin proved to you, and the proof I’ll get out of you before I’m through, when he proved to you that he wasn’t the substance of your Glorious Vision of Love you shot him, shot a Thing, not the Vision.”
Sadie’s eyes opened wide. They were steady in dazed wonderment, in puzzled astonishment, and he sensed it was not because of what he was saying but of the manner of saying it. He despaired of getting through to her, yet persevered.
“Your Knight in Shining Mail has been just a disguise you put around poor bloody Marvin. You shoved it on: he didn’t put it on. Most every woman in her secret heart has the vision of the Knight. My Marie’s always had it. Every time Emma looks at her Matt, I’ve seen she too has the vision of Love. You’re nothing out of the ordinary, you silly bitch. You’re damn lucky to have had it and still have it. And you are going to meet a man some day on whom you can put the disguise, and find him able to wear it. It won’t fit properly, of course, because no man could possibly wear well the magic suit you women weave and make.” He shook her again. “You listening to me?”
“You’re rather wonderful, Nat,” she said, and Bony gasped.
“Wonderful be damned! Oh, my tragic aunt! I’ve been ramming common-sense down your throat and you say I’m wonderful. Now you get going along that ledge and up the cliff, not down. Are you going to be difficult? Am I to handcuff you to me? Or what? Go on! Go on! Answer me.”
“I promise not to commit suicide, Nat, if that’s what you fear.”
“I fear nothing of the kind. If I did, I’d clip you under the chin and carry you up the cliff on a shoulder. No one suicides on me, or not often. No. You’ve got to come out of that Alice in Wonderland world of yours. You’ve got to be your age. Ahead of you are sticky patches, and a few dark places, but you are going to be all right because you have with you all along the road your old pal, Nat. Now let’s get out of this joint.”
Again on the ledge, Bony urged Sadie forward and out from the overhang. He had foreseen the obstacle of her oilskin and had said nothing as the rain had stopped. They became at once the sport of the strong uprush of air carrying the masses of sea-suds. They proceeded as far as the waves had left untouched, and this was some hundred feet from the junction rock.
Sadie looked back to Bony, and saw the sud-mass wrap itself about his head, causing him to dig it fr
om his face and out of his eyes. Another mass hit her back, and the lip of a white wave came to her feet. As it began to recede he waved her forward and she began to run.
The path, roughly horizontal here with the beach, sank a little towards the goal. There were short stretches of sand on which Bony had first seen her tracks, and these stretches were separated by rock-bars and slivers of rock and pebbles. The girl was wearing sand-shoes, having serrated rubber soles, and the advantage was with her as Bony’s shoes were of leather. Reaching the rock, she clambered upward to its summit, perhaps ten feet higher in elevation, and on glancing backward saw Bony on hands and knees.
The next wave was on its course, and she screamed at him to hurry. He could see the wave engulfing the beach rocks, could look down at its terrifying maw and the vast body of white water humped behind it. He flung himself forward, slipped and recovered his balance, and reached the rock at the instant his feet were trapped.
Then Sadie was hanging head downward like a lobster to its crevice, one hand gripping Bony’s wrist. The wave swept his feet from under. It buried him to his shoulders, raised him to Sadie’s level. For an age it seemed he clung to the rock with one hand and felt Sadie’s grip about his other wrist. He did nothing to resist the subsequent drag and, the wave retreating, regained his feet and climbed to the girl’s side.
At the cliff top, he said:
“Where would I have been now had you determined to die? Come on, pal. There’s music to face.”
Among the tea-tree clumps it was almost calm. Sadie retrieved her gunny-sack from a branch where she had left it, and side by side they went down the slope to the Inlet. Bony said:
“One day Matt and I were talking up here, and someone tried to overhear what we were saying. Who was it, d’you know? Luke or Marvin?”
“Luke. He told me about it. He suspected you from the first. I did, too. But as Marvin was dead, I thought I had nothing to fear from you.”
“You haven’t. From me.”
In one of its many moods the sea had shredded the seaweed-mountain and had nudged its soggy masses past the Inlet sand-wall, and on towards Australia’s Front Door. The Door had refused to admit it. The irritated sea had taken it back. The angry sea had rebuilt the weed into a mountain opposite the Inlet sand-bar. Now the furious sea was beating upon it, surging over it and about it, making no impression on the spongy mass. The sea had built a Door of its own, only to find in its blind temper that its Door was as impervious to its onslaught as the great rock Door had been for centuries.
As happened behind Australia’s Front Door, here, too, the sea was rushing in behind its seaweed mountain, and with each tremendous surge was carrying thick slices off the front of the sand-bar. The width of the great wall was now but a fraction of what it had once been.
“Doesn’t look so good,” Bony shouted to conquer the wind. “There’s strangers at the homestead, too.”
Outside the garden-gate was a group of horsemen. One held the reins of a horse ridden by the man talking to people on the house veranda. Even at this distance and in the light of this angry day, they could see among the group two aborigines. The man below the veranda came hastening to the party, and on taking the reins of his horse, vaulted into the saddle and led his companions at a canter to the sea wall.
“We’d better hurry if we want to cross,” shouted Sadie.
Bony brought his mouth closer to her, and she failed to understand him when he said:
“We don’t want to cross to the homestead. It’s too late now, anyway. Look at this one coming in.”
By comparison the sneaker was a dwarf. It rushed upon the seaweed mountain. The wind seemed to lift from its summit vast masses of water, only to send them chasing after the parent-body, and to arrive at the obstacle at the identical moment. The enormous wave rose to fall upon the enemy, to bury it and frenziedly struggle to strangle it. It raced in behind the victim to fall upon the sand-wall, to churn and tear at it, finally to stand back as though to observe the effects. It might not have liked what it saw, for it began hurriedly to by-pass the still triumphant seaweed mountain and retreat to the reinforcement racing shoreward.
The Inlet now took over. It burst the weakened sand-wall. It flung the seaweed mountain from its path. It roared over the remains, and in black solidity chased the retreating white wave to catch it just before it met the next incoming water range. It rode high over all opposition, drove a mighty black wedge into the white ocean. It tore the remainder of the sand-bar from its foundations. It knifed slices off the opposite sand-dune, and it ate into the solid earth below Bony and the girl, flicking rocks off their iron bases and making the ground shudder. Although safe, they stepped slowly backward and up the slope, unable to remove their gaze from the spectacle of the imprisoned power suddenly released.
“It’s terrific! Just terrific!” Sadie kept shouting, and Bony was conscious of her arm being slipped under his, and his arm pressing it against his side. He thought grimly that where he might have failed in the cavern, this event was knocking some common-sense into her.
Over on the far side, Sasoon waved to them. Bony saw him shouting but was unable to hear above the roar of the released Inlet. Two were strangers to him, but he recognized Matt and Breckoff and Fred and Lew. Mark Rhudder was running from the homestead, and old Jeff was standing with Sarah at the garden-gate. Already the shore was draped with an ever-widening ribbon of black mud as the water receded.
The boat would be already useless in its shelter shed. Bony was glad that they would have to walk around the west side of the dying Inlet and so on to Matt’s homestead, instead of being able to cross and confront old Jeff and his wife with Sadie’s detention, and the reason for it.
“We’ll have to walk round to Matt’s house,” he told Sadie. “Sasoon and those with him will meet us somewhere. After last night’s deluge cars and trucks will be impossible for a couple of days. Come on, let’s start.”
Turning to walk up the slope, the girl would have withdrawn her arm so impulsively slipped under his, but it was held captive.
Chapter Twenty-five
The Man at the Helm
SADIE HAD once read a detective book Emma had given her, and the detective had said to the murderer: “Come, take a little walk with me.” This must be what Nat was doing right now.
Presently she espied among other trees that old hollow one in which she had dropped Marvin’s case, and she asked how he had found it.
“Just followed your tracks, Sadie.”
“But. . . . But, I smoothed them out with a branch. I made sure.”
“You did so. You changed your footprints to leaf prints. Next time you think to fool your old pal, do it just before a good rain.”
He compelled a halt in the lee of a tree, and released her arm to roll a cigarette. He offered to make her one but again she declined. The wind sang through the branches, and now the clouds were being blown to pieces and the sun was due to take command. When going on, he took her hand in his. They were able to move more easily. She said, without attempting to pull away:
“I won’t try to escape, Nat.”
“Escape from me, no. And I shall not permit you to escape from yourself any more. You’ve been doing that for years, trying to escape from yourself.” They stood for a few moments looking at the Inlet already shrunk to half its original area, and bordered by ever widening strips of mud. “It will look very ugly until the grass grows and covers it all up. Now come on, and if you’d rather not have me hold your hand, I’ll oblige.”
Then she was free and walking in step, and he said:
“You see, Sadie, I know much about you because before I met and married my Marie, I was lonely, too. I know what it is to live always alone with myself, having no one to be close to, having to travel always on a one-way street. I had my studies, but they didn’t really help. At present you are walking into a great deal of trouble and anxiety. You will be subject to constraint because us poor policemen have to follow routine laid d
own by our betters. You won’t like the publicity. You will be asked countless questions, by police officers, court officials and lawyers.
“You will feel battered, but I believe you will stand up to it because you have for long been introverted. I’m game to bet you haven’t laughed properly for years. Anyway, presently we shall be met by Sasoon and others, and I shall have to commit you to them, and you will be arrested and eventually charged with murder. I am doubtful how far the law will go. I won’t be able to be with you, you know, to keep you in order and threaten to smack you if you don’t behave.”
Glancing at him, she noted his strong profile, and straight hair whipped by the wind, the old clothes he was wearing in that way where mufti cannot disguise the soldier. The odd thing about him was that he made her feel she had known him all her life. He was saying:
“You’ll be staying with Emma for a day or two, and I’ll have someone ride down to the homestead for the things you’ll want. Then I’ll have you make a statement covering all that has happened, and get you to sign it before witnesses. Will you remember something?”
“I shall never forget anything, Nat.”
“Oh yes, you will, eventually. But remember this, and it’s important. Don’t answer any questions put to you by anyone about what has happened before I take your statement. Clear?”
Sadie replied by clasping his hand and pressing it.
Minutes later, he said:
“Ah! Now, chin up! Here they are.”
Emma placed on a tray two cups of tea, sugar, a plate of buttered scones, with a dish of her own strawberry jam. She carried the tray from the living-room to a bedroom where the lace curtains were trembling before the open french windows, and to which had been added two easy chairs and a table. Putting the tray on the table, she sat and looked at Sadie Stark.
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