The Far Country

by Nevil Shute

  “On June the seventeenth,” he said, “and I am thirty-six years old. I am too old for you, Jenny.”

  “That’s nonsense,” she said quietly. “We’ve got enough difficulties without that one.” She paused. “There’s so much we ought to know about each other, and so little time to find it out. I can’t even think of all the things that I shall want to know.”

  “It will be something to put into the letters from Leicester,” he said. “All the things you want to know about me.”

  He stood up, and drew her to her feet. “I am going to take you home now, Jenny,” he said, “back to Leonora. We have said everything there is to say, and you are very tired. Tomorrow you must start and travel for six days across the world. Before we say goodbye, will you promise me two things?”

  “If I can,” she said. “What are they?”

  “I want you to go straight to bed when you get back to Leonora station and sleep.”

  She pressed his hand. “Dear Carl. I’ve got some packing to do, but I think there’ll be time in the morning. Yes, I’ll go to bed. What’s the other one?”

  “I want you to remember that I love you very much,” he said.

  “I’ll always do that, Carl.”

  He left her then, and took the spade and the pick down the hill to return them to Billy Slim; she watched his lean form striding down the hill. She was so tired that she could think of nothing clearly; she only knew that she loved him, and that he was much too thin. She sank down on the grass again and sat there in the dappled sunlight under the great trees, in a stupor of misery and weariness.

  When he came back to her he was calm and matter-of-fact; he picked up the basket and the grill, and raised her to her feet. “I am going to take you home now, Jenny,” he said. “You have long travelling ahead of you, and I have very much work. We shall neither of us help ourselves or help each other by mourning over our bad luck.”

  She smiled weakly. “Too right, Carl.” And then she said, “I’ve only been three weeks in this country, but I’m getting to speak like an Australian already.”

  “We are both of us Australians by our choice,” he said. “Some day we shall be truly Australians, and live here together.”

  They walked up the steep rutted track through the woods slowly, hand in hand, not speaking very much; his calm assurance comforted her, and now the years before her did not seem so bleak. They walked steadily, not hurrying, not pausing; at the end of an hour they came to the old Chevrolet utility parked in Jock McDougall’s paddock.

  He put the basket in the back of the utility, and turned to her, and took her in his arms. “This is where we have to say good-bye for a little time,” he said. “Perhaps it will not be for very long. We are both young and healthy, and for people as we are twelve thousand miles may not be quite enough to keep us apart. We will not stay here long, because we have said everything now to each other, and you are very tired. Other things we can say by letters to each other.”

  She stood in his arms while they kissed for a minute or two; then he released her, and with no more spoken he put her into the utility, and got in beside her, and drove down the track towards the highway and Leonora station.

  They came to the station half an hour later; she got out and opened the three gates; at the end they drove into the yard by the homestead. He stopped the car by the kitchen door. “We will make this very short now,” he said in a low tone. “Good-bye, Jenny.”

  She said, “Good-bye, Carl,” and got out of the car, and forced a smile at him, and went into the house. He turned back to the car, expressionless, and took the basket and put it on the edge of the veranda, and got into the car again and drove it into the shed where it belonged. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should go into the house to see the Dormans, and decided against it; he would come in one evening in a few days’ time to thank them for the use of the car, after Jennifer had gone. He took his grill and the measuring tape and the wire pegs from the back of the utility and made for the yard gate. He turned the corner of the house, and Jack Dorman was there, sitting on the edge of the veranda, waiting for him.

  He paused, and said, “I have put the Chev back in the shed, Mr. Dorman. It was very kind of you to lend it. I do not think that we shall need to borrow it again.”

  “Jenny told you she was going back to England?” The grazier held out his packet of cigarettes; the Czech took one and lit it. “She has told me that,” he said.

  “Too bad she’s got to go back after such a short stay in Australia,” Jack Dorman said.

  “It is bad luck,” Carl Zlinter said, “but she is doing the right thing, and it is like her to decide the way she has.”

  “That’s right,” the grazier agreed.

  They smoked in silence for a minute. “What are you going to do yourself,” Jack Dorman asked at last. “Got another nine months in the woods, haven’t you?”

  The other nodded. “After that, I will try to be a doctor again. I will go and see Dr. Jennings very soon, I think, and talk to him, and find if it is possible. If I may not be a doctor here, I will try other countries. In Pakistan I could be a doctor now, at once, but I do not want to live in Pakistan. I want to live here.”

  “It’ld be quite a good thing to start off with Dr. Jennings,” the grazier said thoughtfully. “He thinks a lot of what you did with those two operations.”

  “He was very friendly to me at the inquest,” the Czech said. “I will go and talk to him, for a start.”

  The grazier got slowly to his feet. “Come along and see us now and then, and let’s know how you’re going on,” he said. “If you need a car to get around in, there’s the Chev any time.”

  Carl Zlinter said, “It is very kind of you, but I would not like to use your car.”

  “We’ve got three cars on the station now,” the grazier said, “and I’m getting a fourth, a Land Rover. We shan’t miss the Chev if you take it. If you’re going to be running in and out of town on this doctoring business, you don’t want to be stuck for a car.”

  “It would be a great help, certainly.”

  “You’d better get yourself a licence,” said Jack Dorman. “There’s no sense in running foul of the police. You can come and take the Chev when you want it.”

  Next day, in the afternoon, he drove a white-faced rather silent Jennifer with his wife to Albury to catch the Sydney express, a matter of a hundred miles or so. He said good-bye gruffly to Jennifer at the station and turned his Ford for home. He got back to Banbury by five o’clock, hot and thirsty, and ready for a few beers; he parked under the trees and went into the saloon bar of the Queen’s Head Hotel.

  It was full of his grazier neighbours, and old Pat Halloran, and Dr. Jennings. He crossed to the doctor and drank a beer or two with him, slaking the dust from his dry throat. Presently he said, “I had a talk with Splinter yesterday. Seems like he wants to be a doctor again after his time’s up.”

  “He came to see me today,” the doctor said. “I told him that I’d write to the secretary of the B.M.A. in Melbourne about him, but I don’t know that I’ll do much good. The Medical Registration Board have made these rules, and that’s all about it.”

  “It’s a pity,” said the grazier. “He tells me that he’s going to leave Australia if he can’t be a doctor here. Seems like he can practise in Pakistan on the degrees he got in his own place.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the doctor said drily. He paused, looking at his glass of beer, in thought. “He didn’t tell me that,” he said. “I could put that in my letter, perhaps.”

  “How’s the chap with the fractured skull going on?”

  “He’s getting on fine. Zlinter took the most appalling risks with him, operating under those conditions. I suppose he couldn’t do anything else. Anyway, the patient’s going on all right. He’s been conscious for some days now, and he seems to be completely normal mentally. I’m going to put that in my letter, of course.”

  “We should have a job for a bloke like
that,” the grazier said. “It seems all wrong that he should have to go to Pakistan.”

  “Well, yes—with reservations,” Jennings said. “He’s probably a very gifted surgeon. That sort of skill seems to be born in people—either you can do it or you can’t, and if you can’t you’d better leave it alone. At the same time, there may be very big gaps in his knowledge and experience that we don’t know about. There’s only one place to check up on that, and that’s in a teaching hospital.”

  “It needn’t take three years, though,” said the grazier.

  “Well, perhaps not. I don’t know much about it, Jack. Maybe they make exceptions in a case like this; maybe they don’t. I’m going down to Melbourne in a fortnight’s time, and I’ll look in and see the secretary.”

  “I’d like to know how it goes on,” the grazier said. He paused, and took a drink of beer. “There’s another thing,” he said, “and that’s that he hasn’t got any money. I wouldn’t mind helping a bit if that was the only thing.”

  The doctor glanced up. “That’s very generous of you.”

  “Aw, look,” Jack Dorman said, “you know how it is with wool these days. The wife likes him, and Jenny likes him; he’s right. If everything else was set, I wouldn’t want to see the thing go crook because of the money. Keep that under your hat, though; I haven’t told him, and I don’t intend to for a while.”

  “You wouldn’t mind if I told the secretary, though?” the doctor said. “It all helps to build a case up, if one can say that local people are prepared to put up money. It’s another thing.”

  “You can tell him that,” the grazier said. “I’ll drop in and talk to him myself if they want any kind of sponsor. But don’t let Zlinter know, so long as you can help it. Much better let him manage it his own way, if he can.”

  On Saturday evening, five days later, the doctor posted his letter to the secretary of the British Medical Association. In his overworked routine he had little time for correspondence, and he had little practice in setting out a careful, reasoned letter. He finished a draft on Wednesday; he rewrote it on Friday, and copied it out and posted it on Saturday, feeling that if he worked upon it any longer he would make it worse.

  On Saturday evening, Carl Zlinter slept at Billy Slim’s house in the Howqua valley, tired with a day of strenuous work. He had driven out that morning in a truck belonging to the timber company to deposit his load of sawn lumber and a hundred bricks in Jock McDougall’s paddock. From there he had walked down to the forest ranger’s house to borrow a horse and sledge, and he had trudged up and down the hill all day transporting his building materials down to the flat where Charlie Zlinter’s house had been. He had driven himself hard for ten hours, haunted by the memory of Jennifer at each turn of the road, giving himself little time for grief. By nightfall he had got all his stuff down to the site, and he was glad to pack up, and go and grill his steak upon the forest ranger’s fire, and chat with him for a short time before the sleep of sheer exhaustion.

  On that same Saturday evening, Jennifer Morton drove in the coach from London Airport to the airways termini at Victoria, dazed and unhappy in the London scene. A thin February drizzle was falling, and the air was damp and raw after the hot Australian summer. She had bought a copy of the Evening Standard at the airport and had glanced at the headlines, after which the paper lay unheeded in her lap. The meat ration was down to matchbox size, and was to be increased in price, the Minister for War had made a foolish speech, and the Minister for Health an inflammatory one, full of class prejudice. She knew it all so well, and she was so tired of these people, tired, tired, tired of everything that she had come back to. It was a terrible mistake, she felt, to go out of England if you had to come back. It was far better to stay quietly at home and do the daily round, and not know what went on in other, happier countries.

  She was too tired to go on to Leicester that night although she could have done so, too miserable to face her father in his grief till she had mastered her own troubles and grown more accustomed to the English way of life. She took a taxi from the airways terminal to St. Pancras station and got a room for the night at the St. Pancras Hotel, a clean, bare impersonal hotel room, but warm, and with a comfortable bed. Her head was still swimming with the vista of the countries she had flashed through, her stomach still upset with irregular meals served at strange hours and in strange places. She could not eat anything; she threw off her clothes and had a bath and went to bed, and lay for a long time listening to the clamour of the London traffic, crying a little, mourning for the brown foreigner she loved and for the clear, bright sunlight of the Howqua valley.

  On Sunday morning Carl Zlinter got up at dawn and went up early to the flat among the gum trees, and stood for a few minutes planning his work. He decided that it was not practical to place his house exactly where the other one had been; he would move it laterally about a foot to clear the charred stumps of the old posts. He came to the conclusion that he would build the brick chimney first and make the wooden house to suit the chimney; for an inexperienced builder it would be easier that way. He marked out the foundations for the chimney with thrusts of his spade and considered the stone slab, reputed to weigh four hundredweight. It now lay more or less where the fire was to be; it would have to be moved back about three feet, and to one side. He went back to the forest ranger’s house to borrow his crowbar, resolved to work all day and exorcise his troubles with fatigue again.

  On Sunday morning Jennifer Morton came by train to Leicester station and left her two suitcases in the cloak-room for her father to pick up in the car, and walked in a fine, misty rain up the grey length of London Road to her home by Victoria Park. She pushed the familiar front door open and walked into the narrow hall; it now seemed small and rather mean to her. She opened the drawing-room door and caught her father just getting up out of his chair at the sound of her step, and realised that he had been asleep. He looked older than when she had gone away about ten weeks before, and the room was dirty, and the tiny fire of coal was smoking.

  His face lit up when he saw her. “Jenny!” he cried. “I was waiting by the telephone, because I thought you’d ring from London.”

  She crossed to him and kissed him. “Poor old Daddy,” she said softly. “I’m back now, anyhow. I wish to God I’d never gone away.”

  Eleven

  JENNIFER soon found that she had a full-time job ahead of her in Leicester. In the last fortnight of her mother’s life the house had been in complete confusion, with a nurse living in; because of the extra work the domestic who came in each morning had given notice and left, and it had proved impossible to replace her. The hospital nurse, as nurses will in an emergency, had done cleaning and housekeeping for her patient, jobs which were no part of her duties; since she had left, little had been done within the house. Jennifer’s father had been greatly overworked in that grey winter season, and in the crisis he had taken all of his meals out to ease the burden. He had gone on taking his meals out after the funeral and the house had been let go; it was dirty and uncared for, and her mother’s bedroom was still full of all her clothes and personal belongings. On top of that her father was working fourteen hours a day and requiring meals at irregular hours, and every day at surgery hours Jennifer had to monitor innumerable patients who came for a prescription of a few tablets of aspirin on the Health Service, or a certificate from her father exempting them from work. Until she came to do the job herself, Jennifer had not realised how great a burden can be thrown upon a doctor’s wife in the English system of State medicine without staff and buildings adapted for the crowds of patients.

  As she had realised, the loss of his wife had made an enormous gap in her father’s life. She found him distracted and morose, and with a morbid interest in her mother’s grave, and the choice of the tombstone, and the text to go on it. At first she fell in with these interests because they seemed to be the only ones he had, but presently she came to feel that the continual walks up to the cemetery were not good for him, and
started to try to get him interested in other things. They dined several times at a hotel and went to the pictures, but neither of them enjoyed these evenings very much. Edward Morton wasn’t greatly excited by the cinema, and both of them disliked the poorly-cooked and standardised meals at the hotel.

  Presently she found that when her father managed to get free from patients to go to his club for a game of bridge before dinner he came back relaxed and cheerful from good company and whisky, and she began managing the patients to contrive that he should get at least two of these evenings a week. She came to look with some resentment at the surgery patients with their trivial requirements for free medicine and their endless papers to be signed. The bottom was reached, for her, when a man came for medicine and a certificate exempting him from work because he couldn’t wake up in the morning.

  Presently she extended these activities, and by disciplining the patients with a sarcastic tongue she managed to free her father for lunches of the Rotary Club, for dinners of the organisations he belonged to, and even for an occasional game of bowls as summer came on. Patients began to shun this cynical, bad-tempered, red-haired girl who thought so little of their rights to free aperients and said rude things about the forms that they brought to be signed by the doctor, and they began to transfer their allegiance and their capitation fees to more accommodating practitioners, which Jennifer thought was a very good thing. With the closer insight that she now had into her father’s finances she was coming to the conclusion that he could do a good deal less work and still be comfortably solvent. She was distressed to find how much he had been saving for her mother in case he had died first, and how restricted his own life had been in consequence. She was staggered to find how much her mother’s illnesses had cost, how much her father had been paying out in life insurance premiums for her security.

  She got him to surrender two of the policies in June.

  She had no close friends in Leicester, having worked in London for some years. The two or three girls with whom she had been intimate at school had married and gone away, and though she had a number of school acquaintances in the district she did not bother much with them. She felt herself to be a transient in her own home town, and though she had only been in Australia for about a month, she felt herself to be far more Australian than English in her outlook. Controls that she had once accepted as the normal way of life now irritated her; it infuriated her when she neglected to order coal before the given date and so lost two months’ ration of the precious stuff. Studying to make meals more interesting for her father, she thought longingly of the claret that Jack Dorman bought in five-gallon stone jars for seven shillings a gallon, and of unlimited cream; the ration books perplexed her, and meat was a continual, bad-tempered joke.