by Nevil Shute
“We do not have fires like that in my country,” said Zlinter. “Perhaps it is too cold, and too much rain. We have fires sometimes, but not to jump two miles.”
“Which is your country?” asked Jack Dorman. “Where do you come from?”
“From Czechoslovakia,” the other said, “In Pilsen I was born.”
The names meant nothing to the Australian. “Working up at Lamirra?”
“That is right. I work there for two years.”
“Like it?”
“I like it very much. It is like Czechoslovakia, with the forests and the mountains. I would rather be working here than in the city.”
Billy Slim said, “You don’t have gum trees in your forests over there, do you?”
“No, we do not have the gum tree. There all is pines and larches, and oak trees a few, and sometimes the silver birch.”
“Get much snow in winter?” asked the ranger.
“Oh, we get much, much snow. Three feet, four feet deep from November until March. It is much, much colder in Czechoslovakia than it is here.”
“I wouldn’t want four feet,” the forest ranger said. “Four inches is enough for me.”
Carl Zlinter said, “I am from Europe, where villages remain for many hundred years. I do not know of any village in Bohemia that has vanished with no sign left, as this one has.”
The ranger said, “Aw, well, there’s plenty left here if you look for it. Only there aren’t no people living here any longer. There’s the mine adit, and the battery, and down the river, ’bout a mile, there’s the cemetery with all the stone headstones still standing up. The fire couldn’t burn up those.”
“Where’s that?” asked Alec Fisher.
“You know where there’s a red stone bluff on the right side going down? Well, on past that there’s a big tree-trunk lying along the bank, where I pulled it with three horses when it fell across the river. The cemetery’s in behind that, on the north side.”
“Many graves there?”
“Aw, no—just a few. Just a few headstones, that’s to say. Might have been more one time, with a wood cross perhaps; there wouldn’t be nothing left to show those.”
Jack Dorman sat puzzled, hardly hearing what was going on, a vague memory of little Peter Loring and Ann Pearson stirring in his mind. “Say,” he said to the Czech, “is your name Cylinder by any chance? Are you a doctor?”
“My name is Zlinter—Carl Zlinter,” said the other. “I am a doctor in my own country, but not here in Australia. Here I work at the timber camp.”
“That’s right,” said Dorman. “I heard about you one time. Didn’t you pick up a boy that had fallen off his pony?”
Zlinter smiled. “He had a very high temperature,” he said. “The lady was helping him when I arrived. It was not that he fell off because he could not ride. He was ill, that little boy, with a bad ear.”
“That’s right. You took him into hospital.”
The Czech nodded. “I think his mother was a stupid woman not to see that he was ill when he left from his home to go to school. It could have been a serious accident, but he was scratched a little, only.”
“You speak pretty good English,” said Jack Dorman, curiously. “D’you learn it since you came out here?”
The other shook his head. “I learned English at school, and then for nearly five years I was in Germany, where many people now speak English, in the camps and with the officers. Also, I have been here now for fifteen months, and perhaps I have improved.”
“What’s it like, coming to Australia from Europe, now?”
“It is good,” the Czech said. “It is a good country, plenty to eat and to drink, and plenty of freedom.”
“You’ve not got plenty of freedom, working for two years in the woods.”
The other shrugged his shoulders. “I like the woods and the mountains. It is not cruel to me, to send me here.”
Alec Fisher said, “Lot of people coming out here to this country now.”
“My word,” said Jack Dorman. “My wife’s got a niece, an English girl, arriving in about a fortnight’s time. Seems like it’s better out here now than it is in England.”
“An English migrant, like your wife’s niece,” asked Zlinter, “—she will not have to work for two years, like a New Australian?”
The grazier shook his head. “I don’t think so. This girl, she’s coming out just on a visit, though—paying her own passage. She says she’s going back again in six months’ time.”
“It must be very expensive, to do that.”
“She got a little legacy,” the grazier said. “She’s spending it in coming out here for the trip, to see what Australia’s like.”
They settled down to an evening of local gossip, with the assistance of a bottle of Scotch whisky produced by Alec Fisher.
They were all up soon after dawn, to take advantage of the cool of the day when fish feed well. They had a quick breakfast of eggs and bacon, and split up for the day’s fishing. They tossed a coin for who should go alone, and Alec Fisher won; he started off up-stream. Carl Zlinter and Jack Dorman went down-stream, having arranged to fish alternate pools, leap-frogging each other.
They fished on down-stream for an hour or so, catching a few fish and exchanging a word or two when they overtook each other. Presently Carl Zlinter, going on ahead, came to a red stone bluff upon the right side of the river, and a memory of the conversation of the night before came to his mind.
Jack Dorman was not far behind him. He sat down and waited for the grazier by a little rapid; when he came, Carl said, “There is the red bluff that Billy spoke about. Somewhere here is the cemetery of the old town of Howqua.”
The Australian grunted. “Want to go and look for it?”
“It is a pity to be here and not to see it,” the Czech said.
“He said it was behind a tree-trunk lying along the bank, didn’t he?”
“There is a tree-trunk, there. Perhaps that is the one.”
They laid the rods down on a boulder by the rapid, and pushed their way through the scrub that lined the river. Away from the water there were wattle trees in bloom among the gum trees of the forest, vivid splashes of a bright mimosa colour in the dappled sunlight. For a time they saw nothing of the cemetery; they moved down the bank in the forest, keeping near the river. Presently Jack Dorman spied a leaning headstone, and they were there.
There was not very much to see; three leaning headstones, and four or five lying on their faces on the ground, partly covered in creepers and trash. If there had been a fence at any time it had gone the way of the houses in the forest fires; if there had been wooden crosses marking graves, fire and the ants had taken them. Jack Dorman bent to read the lichened names carved on the three headstones still erect. Peter Quilliam, of Tralee, Ireland. Samuel Tregarren of St. Colomb, Cornwall.
He came to the third headstone and stood staring at it, amazed. “Hey, Zlinter!” he said. “This some relation of yours?”
They stooped together at the stone. It read :
Here lies
CHARLIE ZLINTER and his dog.
Born at Pilsen, Bohemia, 1869.
Died August 18th, 1902.
The Czech read it carefully, in silence. Then he looked up at the grazier, smiling a little. “That is my name,” he said, “—Carl Zlinter, and I was born at Pilsen in Bohemia. Of all the things that have happened in my life, this is the most strange.”
Five
THE Dormans left Leonora for their holiday in Melbourne on New Year’s Day. They drove down in the old Chevrolet utility, leaving Mario in charge of the station and taking Tim Archer with them, sitting all three in the front seat and with four suitcases in the truck body. Mario had had letters from Lucia; her passage was booked on the Neptunia for April, and he was busy with the builder working on the shack extension of the stable that they were to live in. Tim Archer came to Melbourne with them to drive the old utility back to Leonora and to see his parents; Jack Dorman had already arrang
ed to buy another near-new Ford utility at an inflated price in Melbourne, and to drive it home.
They went with an air of festival excitement. Thinking back over their long married life, Jack and Jane had been unable to remember when they had last gone away together for a real holiday; there had been trips to Melbourne for various business reasons, always cramped and curtailed by the need for rigorous economy and by the need to get back quickly to the station. Certainly, they had not had a genuine holiday for at least ten years. Now, with two men to help them and with what was, for them, unlimited money, they were able to relax and to enjoy the fruits of thirty years’ hard, grinding work.
Jane Dorman had heard from Jennifer that she was coming to Australia and that she proposed to take a job at once in Melbourne and would like to come out to Merryjig to see them as soon as she could get a holiday. Jane thought this a bad idea; the Orion was due to dock in Melbourne on January 3rd and they had put forward the date of their holiday to meet the ship. There had been no time to write to Jennifer before she sailed, but Jane had written to her at Port Said and at Colombo urging her to come back with them to Leonora for a short visit before taking a job in the city; she was arriving at the hottest time of the year, Jane said, and office work in Melbourne might be trying till the end of February for anybody just arrived from England, especially if the summer was a hot one.
It was hot the day that they drove down from Merrijig; at midday the shade temperature in the country was in the nineties. Before long they stopped by the roadside for Jack Dorman to take off his coat and undo his collar; Tim Archer got out of the front seat and into the back with the luggage; the dust swirled round him there and made sweat streaks of mud upon his temples, but it was cooler so for all of them, and better travelling.
They stopped at Bonnie Doon for the cold, light Australian beer, and at Buxton for lunch. By four o’clock they were running into Melbourne, perhaps the pleasantest city in the Commonwealth, and at four-twenty they drew up in front of the Windsor Hotel.
Tim took the utility away and the Dormans went up to their bedroom, a fine, lofty room with plenty of cupboards and a bath. After the constrictions of their rather mediocre station homestead it seemed like a palace to them; the hard years fell behind them, and for the moment they were young again. “Jack,” said Jane, “don’t let’s see anyone tonight. Let’s just have a very, very good dinner and go to a theatre. Any theatre.”
“Don’t you want to see Angie?”
“Angie can wait till tomorrow,” said her mother. “I want to see a theatre. Angie’s probably seen them all. Let’s go out alone.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go down and see what we can get seats for.”
She said, “And I want a bottle of champagne with dinner.”
“My word,” he said. “What’ll I order for dinner—mutton?”
“You dare! Oysters and roast duck, or as near as you can get to it.”
They went out presently and walked slowly in the heat down the tree-shaded slope of Collins Street, tacking from side to side to look at the shops. Jane said presently, “I know what I want to buy.”
“What’s that?”
“A picture.”
He stared at her. “What sort of picture?”
“An oil painting. A very, very nice oil painting.”
“What of?”
“I don’t mind. I just want a very nice picture.”
“You mean, in a frame, to hang on the wall?”
“That’s right. We had lots of them at home, when I was a girl. I didn’t think anything of them then, but now I want one of my own.”
He thought about it, trying to absorb this new idea, to visualise what it was that she wanted. “I thought you might like a bracelet, or a ring,” he said. With so much money in their pockets, after so long, she should have something really good.
She squeezed his arm. “That’s sweet of you, but I don’t want jewellery, I’d never be anywhere where I could wear it. No, I want a picture.”
He tried to measure her desire by yardstick. “Any idea what it’ll cost?”
“I don’t know till I see it,” she said. “It might cost a hundred pounds.”
“A hundred pounds!” he said. “My word!”
“Well, what’s the Ford going to cost you?”
“Aw, look,” he said. “That’s different. That’s for the station.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “The Chev’ll do the station work for years to come. It’s for you to run about in and cut a dash, and it’s costing fourteen hundred pounds.”
“It’s for both of us,” he said weakly, “and it comes off the tax.”
“Not all of it,” she said. “If you’re having your Ford Custom I’m going to have my picture.”
He realised that she was set on having this picture; it was a strange idea to him, but he acquiesced. “There’s a shop down here somewhere,” he said. “Maybe there’d be something there you like.”
When they came to the shop it was closed, but the windows were full of pictures, religious and secular. He knew better than to offer her a picture of the infant Christ in her present mood, although he rather admired it himself. He said, “That’s a nice one, that one of the harbour. The one where it says ‘St. Ives’.”
It was colourful and blue, with fishing vessels. “It’s not bad,” she said, “but it’s a reproduction. I want a real picture, an original.”
He studied the harbour scene. “Where would that be?” he asked. “Is it in England?”
“That’s right,” she said. “It’s a little place in Cornwall.”
“Funny the way people want to buy a picture of a place so far away,” he said.
“I suppose it’s because so many of us come from home.”
There was nothing in the shop window that she cared for, nor did it seem to her that there was likely to be what she wanted deeper in the shop. “I’d like to go to picture galleries,” she said. “They have a lot of galleries where artists show their pictures and have them for sale. Could we see some of those tomorrow, Jack?”
“Course we can,” he said, “I’ve got to pick up the Custom in the morning, but we’ll have all day after that.”
She smiled. “No, we won’t—you’ll be wanting to drive round in the Custom. We’ll go to the picture galleries in the morning and pick up the Custom in the afternoon.”
They went back to the hotel, and rested for a time in the lounge with glasses of cold beer, and dined, and went out to see Worm’s Eye View, and laughed themselves silly. They got up late by their standards next day, and early by those of the hotel, and went down to their breakfast in the dining-room. As country folk they were accustomed to a cooked breakfast and the hotel was accustomed to station people; half a pound of steak with two fried eggs on top of it was just far enough removed from normal to provide a pleasant commencement for the day for Jack. Jane ate more modestly, three kidneys on toast and a quarter of a pound of bacon. Fortified for their day’s work they set out to look at pictures with a view to buying one.
The first gallery they went to was full of pictures of the central Australian desert. The artist had modelled his style upon that of a short-sighted and eccentric old gentlemen called Cezanne, who had been able to draw once but had got tired of it; this smoothed the path of his disciples a good deal. The Dormans wandered, nonplussed, from mountain after mountain picture, glowing in rosy tints, all quite flat upon the canvas, with queer childish brown scrawls in the foreground that might be construed into aboriginals. A few newspaper clippings, pinned to the wall, hailed the artist as one of the outstanding landscape painters of the century.
Jack Dorman, deep in gloom at the impending waste of money, said, “Which do you like best? That’s a nice one, over there.”
Jane said, “I don’t like any of them. I think they’re horrible.”
“Thank God for that,” her husband replied. The middle-aged woman seated at the desk looked at them with stern disapproval.
They went out into the street. “It’s this modern stuff,” Jane said. “That’s not what I want at all.”
“What is it you want?” he asked. “What’s it got to be like?”
She could not explain to him exactly what she wanted, because she did not know herself. “It’s got to be pretty,” she said, “and in bright colours, in oils, so that when it’s raining or snowing in the winter you can look at it and like it. And it’s got to be like something, not like those awful daubs in there.”
The next gallery that they went into had thirty-five oil paintings hung around the walls. Each picture depicted a vase of flowers standing on a polished table that reflected the flowers and a curtain draped behind; thirty-five oil paintings all carefully executed, all with the same motif. A few newspaper cuttings pinned up announced the artist as the outstanding flower painter of the century.
Jane whispered, “Do you think she can do anything else?”
“I dunno,” her husband said. “Don’t look like it. Do you like any of these?”
“Some of them are quite nice,” Jane said slowly. “That one over there … and that. But they aren’t what I want.” She paused. “I’d never be able to forget that there were thirty-four others just like it, if I bought one of these.”
The last exhibition that they visited that morning was of paintings and sculpture by the same artist; at the door a newspaper cutting informed them that the artist was a genius at the interpretation of Australia. The centre of the floor was occupied by a large block of polished mulga wood with a hole in it, of no recognisable shape or form, poised at eye-level on a stand that you might admire it better. Beneath it was the title, “Design for Life”.
“Like that one to take home?” asked Jack. He glanced at the catalogue. “It’s only seventy-five guineas….”
The paintings were a little odd, because this artist was a primitive, unable to paint or to draw, and hailed as a genius by people who ought to have known better. Purple houses that might have been drawn by a five-year-old child straggled drunkenly across vermilion streets that led to nowhere and meant nothing; men with green faces struggled mysteriously and perhaps discreditably with ladies who had square blue breasts. “That’s a nice one …” said Jack thoughtfully.
