by Nevil Shute
Carl Zlinter said, “I am trying to find out if he left any papers or books, or any letters from his family in Pilsen, or anything to tell us who he was. I think you are the only person in this district who was living in the Howqua at that time, and I have wondered if you could tell us anything, if you remember.”
The old woman said testily, “I knew nothing about that man, or any other of those men. Why should I know anything about his papers? There was a man there with that name; that’s all I know about it.”
“Do you remember what happened after he was drowned, perhaps?” the Czech asked. “Do you remember what happened to the things that were in his house? Who took them?”
The old woman made a gesture of irritation. “Sure, how would I be knowing that, after all these years?” she said. “There was many a man went away or died or was away out of it for one reason or another, and there was no keeping track of them all, if a body had wanted to. If a body had wanted to,” she repeated.
Carl Zlinter asked, “Can you remember where he lived? Would you know where he had his house?”
“I tell you, I know nothing about the man at all,” the old woman said angrily. “He was drunk and he got drowned, that’s all I know. How would I be knowing where he lived, or what happened to his gear? I was a decent girl.” She stared at them fiercely.
“There, Auntie, there,” said her niece. “He didn’t mean nothing. He just wants to know if you remember anything about this man.”
The old woman sank back into her chair. “I don’t know nothing about Charlie Zlinter,” she said sullenly.
There was an awkward silence. Jennifer looked up at Carl Zlinter and he nodded slightly; it was developing as they had thought. He said, “I am so sorry—when I heard that you had been in Howqua at that time I thought perhaps you might remember something.” He moved towards the door. “I have now to take my utility to the garage before we start back; we have burst a tyre. May I leave Miss Morton here for half an hour till I have had that repaired?”
Mrs. Stevens said, “Oh, that’ll be right. I was just going to give Auntie a cup of tea. You’ll have a cup of tea with us while you’re waiting, Miss?”
“Jenny’s the name,” the girl said. “I’d love a cup. Can I do anything?” Carl Zlinter slid out of the door behind her.
“Oh, it’s nothing.” She bent to the old woman. “You’d like a cup of tea, Auntie?” she asked rather loudly. “Jenny’s going to have a cup of tea with us—I’m just going to put the kettle on.”
“I could drink a cup of tea,” the old lady said. Her niece disappeared into the next room, and Jennifer squatted down on a stool before her. “I went over to the Howqua last week,” she said. “There’s nothing left there now, only the gum trees.”
“You went into the Howqua?”
The girl nodded. “We drove the utility up to the top of the ridge, and then walked the last two miles down into the valley.”
“Eh, you’d never drive down that track in a motor-car. I heard of one man tried it once, but they had to get a team to pull him out again. Bullocks they used to use when I was there, eight bullocks to a wagon, in and out of Banbury. That was before the days of motor-cars.” She peered about her. “What’s happened to that man who was here just now, the foreigner?”
“He’s gone to take the car to the garage,” Jennifer said. “We had a flat tyre coming here; we had to change the wheel. He’s gone to get it mended before we start back.”
There was a long silence. The old woman sat staring at the paper flowers in the fireplace, in red and silver tinsel. “What did he say his name was?”
“Charlie Zlinter,” the girl said. “It’s just a coincidence, I think; he’s got the same name as a man who used to work in the Howqua.”
The old woman shook her head. “He never worked in the Howqua. He was a bullocky; used to drive a bullock team between Banbury and the Howqua.” She paused for a while. “He talked like this fellow. Foreign, he was.”
There was another long silence; from the next room Jennifer could hear the rattling of cups. “You’re a pretty girl,” the old woman said at last. “Too pretty for the likes of him. Not getting up to any mischief with him, are you?”
The girl said, “No,” and smiled, colouring a little.
“Well, mind you don’t. Don’t you let him do nothing till he’s married you. These bullock drivers, and the miners too, they’ll say anything, and then in the end you find they’re married already with a wife and three children out behind some place, and you to have a fourth.”
Mrs. Stevens came back with the tea and saved Jennifer from the necessity of answering that one. When the old lady was sipping her cup the girl brought her gently back to the subject by asking, “Did the Charlie Zlinter that you knew look like this one?”
“Ah, Charlie Zlinter was a fine, upstanding man,” she replied, “twice the man of this one. He was a great strong man with black curly hair, strong enough to break the neck of an ox, and he with his bare hands alone. Broader in the shoulders he was, than this man of yours, and a champion at anything that he’d be setting his hand to. A grand, powerful man.” She sat sipping her tea and staring at the tinsel flowers, lost in memories. “There was a slab of stone before the fireplace in his cabin,” she said, “the way the ashes would be kept back in the fire. A slab as big as that … four hundredweight, he said it weighed. I’ve seen him lift that slab with his two hands, and carry it away. Sure, there wasn’t a man in Howqua could have done the like of that. Anvils, barrels of beer, loads no two men could carry, he’d just lift them down from off the wagon to where they had to be, and he whistling a tune and thinking nothing of it.”
“It must have been a terrible loss when he got drowned,” the girl said.
“Ah,” said the old woman, “it was a sad, sad day, and Howqua was never the same after. The mine closed down, and folks began to drift away, because with the mine shut and the gold finished there was nothing left to stay for. By the time I went out there was every other cabin in the place empty, and folks just walking in and out picking over stuff that had been left behind for that it wasn’t worth the charge to take it out to Banbury upon the wagons. It’s a sad, desolate thing to see houses left that way, and nobody to live in them. I did hear that the whole of Howqua came to be like that, with nobody to walk along the streets but wallabies and rabbits. That was before the fire came through the valley.”
“Which cabin did Charlie Zlinter live in?” the girl asked.
“Number fifteen, Buller Street,” the old woman said. “It was just the one room with a fireplace and a bed, and a bench where he’d sit working at the bullock harness, sewing with a palm upon his hand like a sailor. He was a sailor one time, so he told me; that’s how he came to be in Australia. He jumped his ship, and came up to the gold-fields, but he found that he could make more money with the wagon.”
“Did he make much money?”
“My word, the bullockies made money,” the old woman said, “more than the miners or prospectors ever did. Everything that: came to Howqua had to pass through their hands, and they charged terrible for bringing it. But they were generous as well, ah, Charlie Zlinter was an openhanded man, a kind, generous man. Many’s the thing he used to bring me from the town—a new saucepan from England, or an alarm clock from America, or maybe a length of dress material if it was Christmas—anything he’d see that would take his fancy he’d bring out of town for me, as a surprise, for that I’d never be thinking. Ah, he was a grand kind man.”
“You must have been great friends,” the girl said.
“Better than we should have been, maybe,” Mary Nolan said quietly. “But there, it didn’t seem to be no harm at the time, and now it’s a long while ago.”
There was a silence after she said that. Jennifer sat at her feet hoping that Carl Zlinter wouldn’t come back and break the spell; she felt now that she could ask this old woman anything. She said presently, “Did anybody live in Charlie Zlinter’s cabin after he died?”
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br /> The old head shook. “There was people leaving Howqua every day from that time on. Nobody lived in it before I left. There were houses to spare, the way you’d see doors open all along the street.”
“You’re sure of that, are you—that no one lived in it?”
“Nobody lived in it before I went,” she said. “I would have known about it if they had.”
“What happened to all his things? I mean, what did happen in the Howqua when a man died like that? Did the police take them?”
Mary Nolan set her cup down. “There was a policeman, Mike Lynch was his name, from County Kerry; he lodged about the middle of Jubilee Parade, but I’m not sure if he was there. I don’t think there was anything in the cabin to trouble with. Early in the morning, the day that he was found in the river, I went to his cabin in Buller Street, because he was back from Banbury. I knew that because I heard him in the dark night singing outside the hotel that Peter Slim kept, and I knew that he was having drink taken. And I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep in his clothes or done himself an injury in the cabin, and so I went out and went to his cabin on the far side of the water before it was light, the way the neighbours wouldn’t see me go. I had done that before sometimes, and cleaned him up and made him breakfast, and taken his clothes home to wash, very early in the morning, so nobody would know. But Glory be to God, the man was dead already and I crossed the bridge that he had fallen from, and never knew.”
Jennifer said, “Did he leave any papers or books in the cabin, Mrs. Williams? Can you remember anything like that?”
“Never a book,” she said. “There wouldn’t have been many books in Howqua at that time. Charlie was no scholar, but he could read labels and that—not the longer words. He did have papers of some sort with him, although he never showed me. He kept them all locked up in a tin box he called his ditty box, not very big.”
The girl asked, “What happened to the box after he was dead? Can you remember that?”
“It wasn’t there,” said Mary Nolan. “I remember looking for it special when I found he wasn’t in the cabin, and his door left open, because I knew he set store by it. Sometimes it stood on a little kind of ledge he’d made in the earth chimney, and other times it wouldn’t be there at all. So when I went into the cabin I looked, but the box was away out of it, and then I looked around a little but I didn’t see it. I didn’t give much heed to it, because it wasn’t always there. I wouldn’t know what happened to that at all.”
“Could he have left it in Banbury?”
“He might. I wouldn’t know at all. It could be that he had it with him when he fell into the river.”
“He had the dog in his arms,” said Jennifer. “He wouldn’t have gone to cross the river with the dog and the box too, would he?”
“He was a wild, reckless boy when he had drink taken,” Mary Nolan said. “But there, he had a way with him and a body could deny him nothing. I would not say anything of what he might have done when he had drink taken.”
“What would have happened to the rest of his things?” the girl asked. “Who looked after those?”
“Sure, and there wasn’t very much,” the old lady said. “He was buried in his Sunday suit, they told me. I never went near, because there had been tongues wagging in the Howqua about him and me, and I knew that if any of the women spoke against me I would have flown out at them, and that I would not do at Charlie’s burying. So I stayed in my own cabin all the while, but they told me he was buried in his Sunday clothes. There would have been some working clothes, maybe, but nothing of value, and his wagon and the bullocks. There was a Scots boy worked for him, Jock Robertson; I think he took the wagon and the team. When the working clothes and the harness were gone from the cabin there wouldn’t have been much left, and what there was nobody would want, for all the folks were starting to leave about that time.” She stared at the tinsel flowers in the grate. “I looked into the cabin once, and the bedclothes were still upon the bed, but a possum or a rat had nested there, and the bucket still half full of water, and a loaf of bread still in the cupboard, all gone green with mould.” She shivered a little, and drew the shawl more closely round her. “It’s not good to go back afterwards to places where there has been happiness,” she said. “It tears at your heart. I never went back again, and soon after that I left the Howqua myself. I’d say the cabin stayed like that until the fire came through.”
The girl took one of the old hands and held it in her own. “You must have loved him very much,” she said.
“Whisht,” said the old woman, “there’s a word that you must never use until there’s marrying between you, and Charlie Zlinter was a married man already in his own country. He was a kind, gracious man and I looked after him when he would let me; that’s all there was between us, child. This foreigner that brought you here today and has the same name, is he a married man?”
“No,” said Jennifer. “I asked him that.”
“Maybe you’ll be luckier than I was,” Mary Nolan said. “Maybe he’s telling you the truth of it. The other Charlie Zlinter never told me any lies.”
They sat in silence for a time. The old woman was tiring, and it was evidently nearly time to go. “One last question,” Jennifer said. “Did Charlie Zlinter ever tell you anything about his wife—the wife he had in his own country?”
Mary Nolan shook her head. “He wouldn’t be after telling me the like of that.”
The girl stayed ten minutes longer for politeness; then she said that she would have to go and see how Zlinter was getting on with the car, or they would be late in getting home. She said good-bye to the old woman; Elsie Stevens stepped outside the door with her.
“She had a nice talk with you,” she said. “I haven’t seen her so bright for a long time.”
“I hope I haven’t made her too tired,” the girl said.
“Oh, no. I think it does old people good to have a talk about old times, now and then. It comes easy to them. Did she tell you what you wanted to know?”
Jennifer shook her head. “She couldn’t tell us anything very much—except where he lived. She did tell us that. But she didn’t know anything about him, really.”
“Ah, well, it isn’t easy after all these years.”
She said good-bye to Mrs. Stevens and walked up the lane to the utility; Carl Zlinter was sitting there in it, smoking. “She got talking when you went away, Carl,” she said. “She told me a lot of things, but I don’t know that any of it’s much good to you.”
“Shall we drive out of town, and then stop, and you can tell me what she said?”
“Let’s do that. Let’s go back and stop somewhere by that river, and I’ll tell you all I can remember.”
They drove back over the col where they had lunched, and down to Gaffney’s Creek and to the Goulburn River; presently they parked the car at a place where the river ran near the road, and walked across a strip of pasture to a bend. As they went she told him all about it. “She didn’t know much really that you didn’t know already, Carl,” she said. “There were papers in a box, a tin box, but she doesn’t know what happened to that, or what was in it.” She told him what she had heard from the old woman. “She did look for it particularly that morning, but it wasn’t there.”
“She didn’t know of any other place he might have put it?”
The girl shook her head. “She thought he might have had it with him when he fell into the river—in that case, it’ld be at the bottom of the Howqua.” They walked on for a few steps in silence. “She was so sweet,” Jennifer said quietly, “the way she went out very early to the cabin to find where he was and clean him up. She said she often did that.”
“She must have been very much in love with him, to do that for a drunken man.”
“I think she was,” the girl said. “Yes, I think she was.”
They came to the rocky edge of the river and sat down on a boulder in the shade to watch the water and to talk. The water made a little lilting noise from the run at the end of
the pool, a cockatoo screeched now and then in the distance, and the air was fragrant with the clean scent of the gum trees in the summer sun. “She said he lived at Number Fifteen, Buller Street,” Jennifer told him. “Is that enough to tell you where the cabin was?”
He took a folded paper from his breast pocket, and began to spread it out. “What’s that?” she asked.
“It is the township plan that I copied in the Shire Hall,” he said. He stood up, and spread it on the flat boulder that they had been sitting on; she helped him to hold the corners down. The paper was dazzling in the bright sun. He moved his finger down the plan. “Here is Buller Street,” he said. “Here is Fifteen, the number on the block. I think perhaps this was the place.”
She bent to look at the faint pencil lines with him, her head very close to his own. Her hair brushed his cheek and he could smell the fragrance of her skin. “This is Fifteen,” he said, a little unsteadily. “The cabin must have been on this allotment.”
“Could you find the actual place on the ground from this map, Carl? Is there anything left there now to show, that’s marked upon this map?” She stood up, and moved a little away from him; it was difficult for her, also, to be quite so close.
“I think that we could find the place from this,” he said. “Here, this solid marking, this must be the Buller Arms Hotel, and that still shows upon the ground a little. This map is to the scale of two chains to each inch. Perhaps there are other markings left, that Billy Slim will know. I think it will be possible to measure out upon the ground, and find this Block Fifteen in Buller Street.”
“When are you going to do that?”
“I would like to do it tomorrow,” he said. “Would you come with me once more to the Howqua tomorrow?”
She looked at him with laughing eyes. “I don’t know what the Dormans’ll think if I keep going out with you like this, Carl.”
He smiled back at her. “Does that matter very much? You will be going to Melbourne very soon to start your work, and then we shall not go out any more, and the Dormans will be happy.”
