Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “Thanks, chum.”

  The dark man produced a bottle of Australian whisky from the cupboard and poured out half a tumbler-full. The patient took it and sat drinking it neat in little gulps while the other worked. “What is your name?”

  “Fred. Fred Carter.”

  “Where did you do this, Fred?”

  “Up on the shoulder.”

  “And how did it happen?”

  “Loading two-foot sticks on a ten-wheeler.” He meant, tree-trunks two feet in diameter on to a trailer truck. “The mucking chain broke and the stick rolled back. Whipped me crowbar back ‘n pinched me mucking hand on to the next stick down.”

  The dark man nodded gravely. “Now, this will hurt you. I am sorry, but it must be done.”

  Presently it was all over, the hand bandaged and in a sling. The injured man sat white-faced, the shock gradually subsiding as he smoked a cigarette given to him by the doctor and finished the whisky. “Say, chum,” he asked, “what’s your name?”

  “Zlinter,” the dark man said, “Carl Zlinter. Most people call me Splinter here.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I am from Czechoslovakia. In Pilsen I was born.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “It is fifteen months that I have come to Australia.”

  “Where did you learn doctoring?”

  “I was doctor in my own country, at home.”

  “A real doctor?”

  The dark man nodded. “In Prague I qualified, in 1936. After that I was in hospital appointment, in Pilsen, my own town. And after that, I was doctor in the army.” He did not say which army.

  “Cripes. Then you know all about it.”

  The Czech smiled. “I am not doctor any longer. I am timberman. In Australia I may not be a doctor, unless to go back to medical school for three years. So I am timberman.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and got up, and went to the cupboard and shook out some white tablets into the palm of his hand. “Go back to your camp and go to bed,” he said. “I will tell Mr. Forrest for you, that you cannot work. Go to bed, and take three of these tablets, and the pain will go away. If it comes back in the night, take these other three. Come back and see me after tea on Sunday, and I will change the dressings for you.”

  “Aw, look,” the man said. “I was going down to the Jig tonight to get pissed.”

  Carl Zlinter smiled. “It is your hand. It will hurt very bad if you go down to the Jig, because you will hit it without knowing, and it will hurt very bad. If you go to bed it will not hurt.”

  He turned to the cupboard; the bottle of whisky was about one-third full. He gave it to the man. “Take this,” he said, “and get pissed in bed. But go to bed.”

  “Aw, look, chum, I can’t take your grog. And say, how much is it?”

  “There is nothing to be paid,” the Czech said. “Mr. Forrest, he pays for the dressings and the disinfectant. The whisky — you can shout for me down at the Jig one day, but not tonight.” He smiled. “See you Sunday.”

  Fred Carter went away with the bottle, and Zlinter wondered if he would go to bed, or whether he would drink the bottle and go down to the pub at Merrijig just the same. The labour camps were by the sawmills at Lamirra, four miles from Merrijig and seventeen miles from Banbury, the nearest town. By Victorian law the hotel was supposed to close its bar at six o’clock in the evening; in fact, it stayed wide open day and night, and the police connived at it. They knew that few of the timbermen would pass an open bar to go twelve miles further on to Banbury; driving past in the dark night the police would see the blazing lights, and hear the songs, and see the trucks parked outside the solitary wooden building, and they would smile as they drove past, congratulating themselves upon the simple stratagem that kept the drunks out of town.

  It was a Friday evening; the timbermen worked a forty-hour week on five days, and Saturday and Sunday were holidays. Carl Zlinter was a fisherman, and December was the finest month in the year for trout-fishing in the deserted mountain streams. When Fred Carter had gone away, he set to work to prepare for the week-end; he had a spinning rod and a fly rod, but the rivers were too shallow and too swift for spinning, and he preferred to fish wet fly. He cleared away the litter of his dressings, sterilised his instruments again in the electric jug, and washed out the basin, and then set to work to make up a cast of flies, and to pack his rucksack.

  The Delatite River flowed past Lamirra near his camp, but it was too small and too overgrown to fish just there, and down by Merrijig it was fished by many others. Zlinter had developed a week-end of fishing which took him into very wild, almost untrodden forest country, which he loved. His rucksack was a big, shabby thing with a light alloy frame which he had picked up in Germany in 1945 and had carried ever since; it held everything that he required for a week-end in the bush. His habit was to start out from the lumber camp early on Saturday morning and walk eight miles or so on half obliterated paths through the forest over a dividing range down into the valley of the Howqua River, untouched by any road. Here the fishing was first-class.

  There was a forest ranger living in the Howqua valley, a man called Billy Slim, rather over forty years of age, who lived alone with a few horses and was glad of any company; when the solitude became oppressive he would ride out to the hotel at Merrijig and spend the evening there. Billy had a bed for anyone who came his way, and Carl Zlinter was in the habit of fishing down the Howqua to Billy’s place on Saturday, staying the night with him, fishing up the river again on the Sunday and so back to the camp by the way that he had come.

  So far, he was delighted with Australia. He had to work for two years in the woods in return for his free passage from the Displaced Persons’ camp in Germany, and he was enjoying every minute of it. He had nobody to consider but himself. His father and mother had been killed in the Russian advance that surged through Pilsen late in 1944. He had heard nothing of his brother since 1943, and he believed him to be dead. He had never married; the war had begun soon after he was qualified, and he was not a man to marry unless he could see, at any rate a little way, into the future. He had remained unattached throughout his service in the German Army and through the long ignominy of the peace, when he had worked as a doctor in various Displaced Persons’ camps. When finally the reduction of the D.P. camps gave him the chance to go to Australia with one of the last batches of emigrants, he was almost glad of the condition that he should not practise as a doctor; he would have to work for two years as a labourer wherever he might be directed, and then if he still wished to be a doctor in Victoria he would have to repeat the last three years of his medical student’s course. Medicine had brought him nothing but the most intimate contact with the squalor and distress of unsuccessful war; when the time came to choose his labour he elected to be a lumberman because he loved the deep woods and the mountains, and he put medicine behind him.

  On landing he had been sent to a reception camp for a few days, but as he was unattached and spoke tolerable English he had been sent on quickly to Lamirra, and he had been there ever since. He knew a good deal about camps and how to be comfortable in them, and he settled down quite happily to work out his two years in the woods he loved.

  He had little regret for the loss of his medical profession. After his two years in the woods were over he would have to do something else; he did not quite know what, but in this prosperous country he was confident that he could earn a living somehow or other. In the meantime he was well clothed and fed, paid highly by the European standard, and given so much leisure that he could get in two days’ trout fishing every week. Better than lying dead and putrefying in the Pripet marshes or the fields round Caen, where he had left so many of his friends. That was the old world; he was glad to put it all behind him and enjoy the new.

  He left the camp at about seven o’clock that Saturday morning before the day grew hot, with his rucksack on his back and his fly rod in his hand in its cloth case. He got to the river soon after
ten and put up his rod and began to fish down-stream, wading in the cool water in his normal working boots and trousers.

  He caught a rainbow trout after ten minutes’ fishing, a good fish about two pounds in weight that leaped into the air repeatedly to shake the fly out of its mouth. He kept his line taut and played the fish out, and landed it upon a little shoal with one hand in its gills; he never burdened himself with a net. He caught a brown trout a few minutes later; then, as the day warmed up, the fish went off the feed, and he caught nothing more.

  He got to Billy’s place about midday. The forest ranger lived in a clearing by the river, in a long single-storeyed building with a veranda, built, of course, of timber with an iron roof. There was a living-room which was the kitchen, with a harness room opening out of it, which in turn communicated with the stable; in winter when the snow was lying in the valley Billy Slim could feed his horses without going out into the snow. His own bedroom opened out of the living-room, and there were two bunkrooms off the veranda. He kept his house very neat and clean, having little else to do.

  In one corner of the living-room there was a radio telephone set run off a large battery, with which the ranger could communicate with his headquarters in case of forest fires or similar disasters. When Carl Zlinter walked in, Billy was seated talking to the microphone; he raised a hand in greeting, then knitted his brows and bent again to his work. Giving his weekly time sheet to the girl operator on Saturday mornings was always a trouble and a perplexity to him.

  “Aw, look, Florence,” he was saying. “Tuesday ... Oh, yes — look — Tuesday I went up-stream to Little Bend and then over the spur to the Sickle, that’s down on the Jamieson River. There was a party went in there last week from Lamirra.”

  “Know who they were, Billy?”

  “Naw — I didn’t see them. There was four of them on horses, and two pack-horses, and one of the horses was Ted Sloan’s blue roan, so Ted must have been there. One of the horses dropped a shoe and went lame on the way out. They shot a few wallabies and camped three nights. They lit fires which they didn’t ought to; I’ll see Ted about that.” He paused. “Wednesday I had to go into the Jig to pick up a couple of sacks of horse feed. Thursday I stayed home; I wasn’t feeling too good. Got that, Florence? Over.”

  The loud-speaker said, “Thursday’s a working day, Billy. What’ll I tell Mr. Bennett? I don’t like to put down you got sick again. Why can’t you do your drinking at the week-end? Over.”

  “Aw, look, Florence,” the ranger said, “I didn’t drink nothing down at the Jig. You know me — I wouldn’t of a Wednesday. I got one of my bad goes on the Thursday, in the stomach, terrible griping pains. Real bad I was. Over.”

  “I don’t like to put it down, Billy. Didn’t you do anything about the house that we could say? Over.”

  “Aw, right ... look, Florence. I did a bit on the paddock fence in the afternoon. Put down, Repairs to homestead and stockyards, for Thursday. Yesterday, that’s Friday, I was out all day. I went up around Mount Buller as far as the Youth Hostel hut and then down to the King River and along by Mount Cobbler and the Rose River; I didn’t get back till after nine last night. Today Jack Dorman’s coming out with Alec Fisher from Banbury, and there’s Carl Zlinter here, one of the lumbermen from Lamirra. Over.”

  The loud-speaker said, “That’ll be right, Billy — I can make it up from that. That’s all I have for you. Over.”

  “Bye-bye, Florence,” said the ranger. “Closing down now. Out.”

  He shut the set off with a sigh of relief, and turned to Carl Zlinter. “Come fishing?”

  “If I may, I would like to spend the night.”

  “You’ll be right. Put your stuff in the end room; I got Jack Dorman coming over, with Alec Fisher. Know them?”

  Zlinter shook his head. “I do not know them.”

  “Aw, well, Jack Dorman, he’s got a property just by the Jig. Thought maybe you might know him. Alec Fisher, he’s agent for the Australian Mercantile in Banbury. They’re coming out to do a bit of fishing.”

  Zlinter smiled. “We shall crowd you out tonight with a large party.”

  “Too right. Makes a change to have a bit of company now and then.”

  “Will they come on horses?”

  “Might do. Alec Fisher’s got a Land Rover; they can get over the track with that. I’d never sit astride a bloody horse if I’d got a Land Rover to ride in. I’d have thought that they’d be here by now.”

  Carl Zlinter left his rucksack in the end room and went down to the river, cleaned the two fish, and left them in Billy’s larder for the evening. He had brought a sandwich lunch with him from the camp canteen; he went down to the river again and fished on down-stream for a little. No fish were moving in the heat of the day; he gave it up after half an hour, and found a shade tree standing in the middle of a grassy sward by the river, and sat down under it to eat his lunch.

  It was very quiet in the forest; a hot, windless day. A cockatoo screamed once or twice in the distance, and near at hand there was a rippling noise of water from a little fall in the river. Presently the quiet was broken by the low grinding of a vehicle coming down the horse track into the valley in low gear; he guessed that it would be the Land Rover. It passed along the track a few hundred yards up-stream from him and he heard the water as it went splashing through the ford; he heard it breast the rise up from the river to the ranger’s house, and then the engine stopped, and there was quiet again.

  He went down to the river and drank from it after his meal, cupping up the water in his hands; then he went back and sat down under the tree again, and lit a cigarette. What a good country this was! It had all the charm of the Bohemian forests that he had loved as a young man, plus the advantage of being English. He had not learned to differentiate between English people and Australians; to him this was an English country, and England had the knack of being on the winning side in all her wars. He disliked and distrusted Russians, and his own land was gone for ever into the Russian grip. He liked south Germans and got on well with them and spoke the language fluently, more fluently than he spoke English. The Germans, however, had an unfortunate record for starting wars and losing them, which made Germany a bad country to live in. Australia had everything for Carl Zlinter; the type of country that he loved, freedom, good wages, and no war; he would willingly forgo his medical career for those good things. He revelled in the country, like a man enjoying a warm bath.

  He stubbed his cigarette out on a stone, or what he took to be a stone, in the meadow beneath the tree. He looked at the stone curiously, and it was not a stone at all, but a piece of brick.

  He looked about him with interest. Half buried in the grass was a low rubble of brick. Beside it, on the level grassy sward, was a series of rectangular patterns, hardly to be described as mounds, more like discolorations of the pasture. He studied these for a minute while his mind, accustomed to the solitude of the Howqua, refused to accept the evidence. Then he woke up to the realisation of the fact that there had been a house there at one time.

  Even when he appreciated the evidence, it still seemed incredible, and for a very definite reason. He knew that this part of Australia had been first explored barely a hundred years before; he had found out sufficient of the history of the country to have become aware that it was most unlikely that the Howqua valley had seen any white man before 1850. If the evidence upon the ground before him were to be believed, a house built wholly or partly of brick had been built and lived in, and deserted, and so entirely ruined that only a bare trace upon the sward remained, all in less than a hundred years. It did not seem possible. He stood looking at the grass for a time, deeply puzzled; then he put it out of his mind for the time being, and walked over to the stream, and stepped out into the shallows and began to cast his fly. He would ask Billy Slim about it that evening.

  He fished on down the river; he caught no fish and hardly expected to until the sun began to drop. He stopped presently and smoked a cigarette, and lay on his bac
k under the gum trees, and slept for a little. When he woke up it was about five o’clock; he began to fish back up the river towards the forest ranger’s house, and at once he began to catch fish, mostly small undersized brown trout that he tired as little as possible and put back into the river. Then he caught a couple of takeable fish, each about a pound and a quarter, and with that he gave up, and took down his rod, and walked back along the forest path in the gloaming.

  When he got to the shack the two newcomers were there, a heavy man of fifty-five or sixty that was Jack Dorman, and a younger man, perhaps of forty-five, Alec Fisher. They greeted him shortly; they were not unfriendly, but waiting for this New Australian from the lumber camp to disclose himself before showing themselves particularly cordial. They represented the permanent population of the countryside, the men with an enduring stake in the land. The lumbermen were here today and gone tomorrow, frequently drunk and a nuisance to the station people; many of them were New Australians who came for their two years’ sentence on arrival from Europe and fled to the towns as soon as they got their release, and anyway the camps themselves were transient affairs, to be moved on to some other district as soon as all the ripe timber from that forest had been taken out.

  Carl Zlinter raised the matter of his discovery with the forest ranger over supper. “I have found what seems to have been formerly a house,” he said. “In a pasture, where two horses are. There is a big tree, and under there are bricks, all in grass and very old. Was there a house at one time?”

  The ranger said, “You mean, where the river makes a turn under a big granite bluff? About a quarter of a mile down?”

  “That is the place. There is a fast, dark pool.”

  “Too right, there was a house,” the ranger said. “That was the hotel. My dad kept it, but that was before I was born.”

  Jack Dorman said, “Your dad kept the hotel, did he? I never knew that.”