The Far Country

by Nevil Shute

“I think the week-end,” Zlinter said. “In the week he will be working always, on the railway somewhere.”

  Jim Forrest said, “He won’t be working today, Mrs. Dorman.”

  She turned to him. “Why not?”

  “The railwaymen are on strike.”

  “Are they? What’s it for this time?”

  “It’s a twenty-four-hour stoppage,” he said. “The wharfies went to the Arbitration Court for another pound a week for something or other, and they didn’t get it, so they’ve stopped work for a day to show their displeasure, and the railwaymen have done that too. Like what they call a Day of Mourning in India.”

  “My word,” said Jane. “Everybody’s making too much money in this country, that’s the trouble.”

  “Too right,” said Mr. Forrest.

  “You think I’d find Shulkin at his home?”

  “Unless he’s in the pub. These twenty-four-hour stoppages, most of ’em spend the Day of Mourning in the pub.”

  “I do not think that Shulkin will be in the pub,” said Zlinter. “I think he is a serious man. I think that you will find him in his garden, or perhaps painting.”

  Mr. Shulkin was painting, but not in the style that Zlinter had visualised; Jane and Jennifer found him distempering a bedroom of the little weatherboard house beside the railway coach. He got down off a chair to greet them, brush in hand; a little girl about five years old, smothered in distemper and rather dirty, stared at them, finger in mouth. Jane said, “Are you Mr. Shulkin?”

  He smiled. “I am Stanislaus Shulkin.”

  “Mr. Zlinter was telling me that you paint pictures.”

  He beamed at her, pulled forward the chair and dusted it. “Please—I am so sorry you must find me like this. Carl Zlinter, he was telling me that there is—there is a lady who was wanting beautiful picture. So?”

  Jane said, “I do want a very, very nice oil painting, Mr. Shulkin. The trouble is, I don’t want just anything. I don’t even know what I do want until I see it.”

  He smiled. “Also, you do not know if I can paint such a picture, that you will want.”

  She laughed with him. “That’s right.”

  “I can paint any kind of picture,” he said. “Just like the carpenter, he can make any wood—a chair, a table, a bed, a cupboard. The good carpenter he can make all things, in all woods. So the good artist, he can paint all kinds of picture. But the good carpenter, he makes some things in some woods ver’, ver’ well, and the others, just like anyone could make. So the good artist. Some things I can do ver’, ver’ well, and others just as any artist, so-so.” He glanced at her. “You understand me?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “So. Now we will go and I shall show you some pictures.”

  He took Jennifer and Jane to the railway coach and showed them his pictures. For half an hour he pulled canvas after canvas out of untidy piles, set them up upon the easel, and described them. Of the ten or fifteen canvases displayed, Jane set aside three, all landscapes, one of them the Delatite river picture with the wattles that Zlinter had admired.

  “These are something like it,” she said slowly, “but not just what I want. I’m sure they’re good enough in the technique, but they are not my picture. Do you understand what I mean?”

  He nodded. “I understand ver’ well.”

  She said slowly, “Let me tell you something, Mr. Shulkin. I grew up with pictures, and I never thought about them much. I was born in England and my people were well off, and there were lots of paintings in the house. I think some of them must have been very good, but I never thought about them at the time. It’s only now that I’m getting old that I’m beginning to realise what a lot you miss by not having good paintings. When we couldn’t have them because we hadn’t enough money I never worried about them, or thought about them much. But now we’ve got a bit more, and I want a good picture almost more than anything.”

  He nodded slowly. “May I ask a little question, or two?”

  “Of course.”

  “What is it that you do?” he asked. “What interests have you?”

  “I don’t do anything except the housework,” she said. “It’s a whole-time job upon a station. You can’t get any help.”

  “Are you interested more in flowers or in people?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Cold beef or Thursday.” She thought for a moment. “I think, really, I like flowers more than people. They never disappoint you.”

  “Do you like the high mountains and the rivers better, or the bright lights in shop windows in the coming darkness of a winter night?” he asked.

  “I like the high mountains and the rivers better,” she said. “I don’t really like the city.”

  He said surprisingly, “This young lady, she is a relation of you?”

  “Why, yes. This is Jennifer Morton, Mr. Shulkin—she’s a kind of niece. She’s only just arrived from England.”

  “So—she is English.” He moved round Jennifer and looked at her in profile, thoughtfully. “Ver’ interesting,” he said at last. “Now one last question, Mrs. Dorman. Do you like better the picture that is full of colour or that is full of good drawing, with the colour more quiet?”

  Jane thought for a long time. “I think the picture that is full of good drawing,” she said. “One gets such brilliant colours in this country all day long. Unless it was very unusual colour, it would be a repetition of what you see all the time, and I think one might get tired of that. I think I like quiet colours with good drawing.”

  “So,” he replied. “Now I will say what I can do for you.” He looked at her, smiling. “I like to paint,” he said, “but I cannot now buy canvases and paints for pictures that nobody will buy. I would like to paint three pictures, of this size,” he raised a canvas, “and show the three for you to choose which you like best. If you like one to buy it, you shall pay me seventy pounds. If you do not like any of the pictures, then you shall pay me five pounds for the cost of the canvases and the paints. That is all that I would need, the money that I shall have spent.”

  “That sounds fair enough,” Jane said. “But if I don’t like any of the pictures, you’ll have done a great deal of work for nothing.”

  “I like to paint,” he said simply, “I will have been able to paint three more pictures because you will have paid for the materials.” He paused. “Also,” he said, “the work is not alone for me. This young lady will require to work with me.”

  “Me?” asked Jennifer.

  “These pictures are to have quiet colour and good drawing,” he said equably. “Your head also has quiet colour and good drawing. One of the pictures is to be a portrait of you, upon some landscape background of this place.”

  There was a momentary silence. “It’s not a bad idea Jenny,” Jane said at last. “You’ve got some lovely colours in your hair, if he could ever get them right.”

  “I also have notice those,” said Mr. Shulkin. “It will be ver’ difficult, and I may not do well. But I would like to try the portrait, for one picture.”

  “I don’t mind sitting,” said Jennifer. “I’ve never done it before, though. How many times should I have to come?”

  “Three times,” said Shulkin. “If it was not possible in three sittings, then it would be impossible, and we should stop and do something different. But I think it will be possible.”

  They arranged for Jennifer to come down to his cottage in the evenings after tea; he wanted her at the week-end, but she objected to that, having in mind her excursion to Woods Point with Carl Zlinter. She thought of offering to drive herself in to these sittings in Jane’s little Morris; she had driven her father’s car in England a little and she held an English licence. But she abandoned that idea; Jane was still proud and jealous of her little Morris, and would probably not have taken kindly to the idea, and the Chevrolet was bigger than anything that Jennifer had driven, and she was rather frightened of it. “It won’t be any trouble, driving in after tea, just three times,” Jane said. “I should com
e into town more anyway.”

  The week was an uneasy one for Jennifer. Each day a letter from her father came by air mail; she knew that he must be very troubled to be writing every day. These letters had been written earlier than the cable that she had received, of course, and disclosed a crescendo of her mother’s illness, worse with each letter. She got no more cables, which comforted her a little; she wrote to her mother and father every day, long cheerful letters about the Australian scene.

  These troubles were half smothered by the beauty and the interest of her life at Merrijig. She went into market one day with Jack Dorman and spent a couple of hours among the pens of sheep and pigs and cattle with the grazier and Tim Archer studying the form and characteristics and the prices of the beasts; they sold one of the homestead cows that had gone dry and bought another one, and she enjoyed every minute of it. She sat twice for Shulkin in the little railway coach, a couple of hours each time till it became too dark to work, while dumpy little Mrs. Shulkin brought her cups of tea and little foreign macaroons and biscuits that she had made herself; conversation with Mrs. Shulkin was difficult because she spoke practically no English. With the artist she got on very well.

  Once she asked him, “Are you glad you came to Australia, Mr. Shulkin?”

  He did not answer at once, being in the middle of a careful stroke. He finished it, stepped back from the canvas, and then said, “You are just from England, no? Not Australian?”

  “I’m not Australian,” she laughed. “You can say what you like with me. I’m English.”

  “So … the pose again, please, just for one minute. So …” He stepped up to the canvas, worked for a moment, and stepped back again. “I think it was best to come to Australia from the camp in Germany,” he said. “When I come first and I was told that my work would be on the railway, I was sad then that it had not been possible to go to the United States. But there also, I think perhaps my work would have been upon the railway, because there also they have their own teachers of fine arts. So, if it is to work upon the railway in Germany or America or Australia-” he stepped up to the easel again and began to work—“then I think Australia is good, because here is more opportunity for my children than even in America.”

  He stepped back again and looked critically at his work. “One little minute, and then you may relax…. Also,” he said, “it is now three years that I have worked upon the railway, and it is not bad work. It is happier, I think, to live quietly in the country than to strain always with the mind, to teach art all the day, and to think art all the day, nothing, nothing, nothing but art. So, I think the mind will soon be sour, like bad milk.” He waved his hand towards the untidy stacks of canvases. “I have here pictures that I painted before the war in Kaunas, that I took with me in the war to Germany, and so to the camps, and after here to Banbury, because I thought they were good pictures, ver’ good, that would show me the great artist in Australia. But now, these pictures do not please me; they are strained, too much complicated, too much technique, too little to be said. You may rest now …”

  He stepped back and looked critically at the picture. “Too much art,” he said. “Art all the day and night; I think my mind was sour. Perhaps it is better to work on the railway for a living, and come to art for pleasure, not so often.” He stood with half-closed eyes staring at the portrait. “This will be a good picture,” he said thoughtfully. “This will be better than the paintings that I brought from Germany.”

  In these sittings Jennifer could sit quietly with her own thoughts, and these were mostly on the Howqua valley and the memory of her day there with Carl Zlinter. The Howqua had a dream-like quality of unreality for her, a place so beautiful and so remote from anything she had encountered in her life before that it fell into the category of a fairy story in her mind, a fairy story with a Prince Charming, moreover. Her life up to that point had been in the somewhat bleak settings of Leicester and the London suburbs. These places were more real to her than Melbourne or Merrijig; she knew what to do with a red London bus, but it was still unreal to her that a horse should be used in this country as a normal means of locomotion. Stranger still was the story of Charlie Zlinter and his dog, whose tombstone she had felt and touched, who had driven his bullock team daily from this town named in the memory of Banbury near Oxford only fifty years ago, and who had drunk and loved in a town called Howqua that had vanished absolutely from the face of the earth, and had left only beauty in the place where it had been. This sort of thing didn’t happen in Leicester or Blackheath, and as she sat quiet in the little railway coach, while the Lithuanian platelayer painted her portrait, she wondered which of her two lives was real and which was a dream.

  Carl Zlinter rang up from Lamirra on Wednesday evening to ask Jack Dorman if he could borrow the utility on Saturday to go to Woods Point with Jenny. “That’ll be right,” the grazier said. “She told us you wanted to go over there. Want to speak to her?”

  When she came to the telephone she was in a slight flutter of eagerness to speak to him, which annoyed her slightly because the telephone was in the kitchen and everyone was there. She made the arrangements with him about lunch and time of starting with elaborate casualness that deceived nobody. Then he said, “There is one other thing. I have now got a map of the town of Howqua.”

  “Where on earth did you get that from, Carl?”

  “It was in the Shire Hall, at Banbury,” he said. “It belongs to the Lands Department. I went in there yesterday to see if perhaps there would be anything, and there I found this map. It is very yellow and torn, and they would not allow me to take it away, and so I went out and bought paper and I made a tracing of it.”

  “Does it show where the houses were?”

  “It shows all the streets and all the town allotments with their numbers,” he said. “It does not tell us where Charlie Zlinter lived or anybody else, because there are numbers only on the map, street names and the numbers of the lots. It is ver’ interesting.”

  She said, “Could you tell from it where any particular house was?”

  “I think it would be possible,” he said. “There are marks on it which a surveyor will understand, but I do not; these I have copied with great care. I will ask Mr. Forrest before Saturday if he can tell me what they mean, and how to find the place where any house was from the map.”

  “That’s fine, Carl. I’m awfully glad.”

  “What have you been doing all the week?”

  “I’ve been sitting for my portrait—to Mr. Shulkin.”

  “For your portrait?”

  “Yes. He’s painting me. I’ll tell you about it when we meet.”

  “I shall want to see this portrait,” he said. “I must visit Stanilaus.”

  She laughed. “You’re not to till it’s finished—if then. Goodnight, Carl.”

  “Good-night, Jenny. I will not promise anything.”

  He came to the homestead on Saturday morning with his grill and his steaks in newspaper, having got a lift down from Lamirra on a truck. She was ready for him and the Chev was full of petrol; he made a half-hearted attempt to reckon with Jack Dorman, who said, “Aw, forget it. It all goes on the farm, ’n comes off tax.” So they started for Woods Point before the day grew hot.

  Jane watched the Chev go off across the paddocks to the road. “Well, there they go again,” she said. “I don’t know what her father’s going to say, or her mother.”

  “From the looks of it, her mother won’t be saying anything before so long,” he remarked.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “It doesn’t look too good, from the letters she’s been getting.”

  Neither of them had ever met Jennifer’s mother, and they could discuss the matter dispassionately. “What’ll she do if she dies?” he asked.

  “I think she might go back,” Jane said. “She’s very fond of her father, and he’d be alone.”

  “She don’t want to get too deep with this chap Zlinter, then.”

  She stood silent for a minute.
“It’s her business,” she said at last. “She’s got her head screwed on right. We can’t interfere.”

  As Jennifer got back into the Chev after closing the last gate, and as they started on the road for Banbury and Woods Point, Carl Zlinter said, “Will you mind if I drive over the police sergeant when we go through Banbury?”

  “Not specially,” said Jennifer. “It might make trouble, though, because you haven’t got a licence.”

  “Does one need a licence to drive over police sergeants in this country?”

  “My word,” she said. It was easy to fall into the idiom. “You can go to prison if you do that without a licence. Why do you want to drive over the sergeant, anyway?”

  “It was not necessary to have that inquest at all,” he said. “He knew the answer before he started anything. It was stupid, and it caused me very much worry, so I could not sleep the night before.”

  “There were a lot of things that could have stopped you sleeping the night before,” she observed. “Too much steak, for one thing.”

  “It was the inquest,” he asserted. “I was ver’ worried, for that they would send me back to Germany. I could not sleep. If we see that police sergeant we will not run over him, because I have not got a licence, but we will give him a very big fright. Now we will go and see Stanislaus Shulkin on our way to Woods Point and we will see what he has been up to.”

  She turned to him, “Carl, you’re not to go and see that picture. It’s not finished, and it’s nothing like me, anyway.”

  “So,” he said. “If it is a bad picture of you then I will cut it with my knife so it cannot be finished. If it is good, then I will let him finish it and I will hang it in the house that I shall build in Howqua City.”

  She burst into laughter. “You are a fool. You can’t have it; it’s for Jane Dorman. He’s painting three pictures for her to choose from.” She told him what was happening.

  “All right,” he said. “We will now go and see this picture, and decide what is to be done with it.” She could not move him from that, and she did not try very hard.

  His mood was different from anything that she had known in him before. Hitherto she had known him as a surgeon faced with a difficult and delicate task in improvised conditions, and as a man with the threat of a manslaughter charge on his mind. She was now seeing a totally different Carl Zlinter, a man on his way out from years of life in camps, a man beginning to enjoy life who was unused to joy, a man laughing clumsily because he was unused to laughter. She did not know quite what to make of him.