by Nevil Shute
It was a bright river scene with a fine blue sky and white clouds, and a riot of golden wattles on the bank, making a delicate harmony of colour. “So ...” said Carl Zlinter. “This you should show her. The others, they are beautiful in a different way, but this, or something like this, is what she wants.”
“I can paint anything she wants,” the artist remarked, “but usually they cannot say.”
The Czech stood back, and looked critically at the river scene. “I do not know pictures,” he said at last. “But I would think that this is very good.” He paused. “You must have had a great deal of experience.”
“I studied in Paris and in Rome,” the platelayer replied. “I was Professor of Artistic Studies in the University of Kaunas.”
There did not seem to be anything to say to that. Zlinter stayed a little while and had a cup of tea. “I will tell Mrs. Dorman about you,” he said. “If she wants a beautiful picture, she does not need to go to Melbourne for it. She can find it here, in Banbury. I will tell her this evening.”
He went off presently, and caught a bus out on the Benalla road. Twenty minutes later he was walking up to the Halloran homestead. A small girl came to the kitchen door and he asked for Mr. Pat Halloran. She turned and called into the house, “Ma, there’s a feller asking for grandpa.”
“In the wood shed.”
“He’s in the wood shed,” she said. “Round there.”
In the wood shed Zlinter found a red-haired old man splitting sawn logs with a sledge-hammer and wedges, doing the work with the skill of a lifetime rather than with any great muscular effort. “Please,” he said. “May I speak to you?”
The old man rested on his sledge. “An’ who might you be?”
“My name is Zlinter, Charlie Zlinter,” the Czech said. “I work in the timber camp, up at Lamirra.”
“Sure, an’ you can’t be Charlie Zlinter. Charlie Zlinter’s dead these fifty years.”
“I am another one with the same name. I am trying to find out about the one who died.”
“An’ what made you come here, may I ask?”
“Mr. Jack Dorman, he said you were talking about Charlie Zlinter in the Queen’s Head, on Thursday.”
“Who’s this Jack Dorman? Jack Dorman at Leonora? Sure, an’ I haven’t set eyes on the man these last six months.”
“Perhaps you do not remember,” the Czech said diplomatically. “He helped you up into the jinker on Thursday.”
“Would that be so! Well, Glory be to God, I didn’t know a thing about it! Would you believe that, now?”
He evaded the rhetorical question. “Jack Dorman said that you were speaking of this Charlie Zlinter. I have seen the grave.”
“Ye have not. Charlie Zlinter was buried in the Howqua, and the fire went through. There’s nothing left there now.”
“The headstones are left,” the other said. “They are stone, and so they did not burn. The headstones are there now, all of them, in the forest by the river, where there was the cemetery.”
“Do ye tell me that!”
He had gained the old man’s interest, and he held it while he explained the position to him. “This Charlie Zlinter, he was from Pilsen in Bohemia,” he said at last. “That is on the stone. I am another Charlie Zlinter, also from Pilsen in Bohemia. I am trying to find out what I can about him.”
The old man leaned on his sledge. “He was a bullocky,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t be able to say at this distance of time if he worked for himself or if he worked for Murphy. He drove a wagon with a team of bullocks, six bullocks, or eight would it have been? Holy Saints above, I’m losing all my memory. I couldn’t say at all if it was six or eight. I was just a bit of a boy myself. I came out to this country in 1895 while the old Queen was on the throne, God rest her soul. I worked two years in the stables for Jim Pratt that had the Queen’s Head in those days, and then I joined the police. There was work for a policeman in this country then.”
“Do you remember Charlie Zlinter?” the Czech asked.
“Sure, I do that. He was a German and he drove a bullock team in and out of the Howqua, from the railway here to Howqua and back again. There wasn’t a fine broad highway then, with the motor-cars all racing along at sixty miles an hour. There wasn’t hair nor hide of a made road at all, at all. Bullocks were the only teams to get a wagon up over the spur and down into the Howqua, passengers and machinery and food and drink and everything, all went by bullock team. Will ye believe what I tell you, the bullock drivers were the boys that made the money! The miners, they never did much in the Howqua, and in the end the company went broke. What gold there was went into the pockets of the bullock drivers. Not a breath of it did the shareholders ever see.”
“What was Charlie Zlinter like?”
“Ah, he was a fine, big fellow with dark curly hair, and he spoke English in the way you speak it. He was one for the booze, and he was one for the girls, Holy Saints above! He had a cabin in the town at Howqua, for he went there as a miner first of all, and then he had the wit to see he’d make more money with a wagon and a team. By the Mother of God, I’d think shame to repeat all that went on in that cabin. He was a big, lusty man, and drink and women were his downfall. That’s the truth I’m telling you.”
He paused. “Drink and women, drink and women,” he said. “It’s a sad, sad thing.” He shot a humorous glance at Zlinter. “He used to drive in here the one day and back the next, twenty-two miles each day; he’d come in here the one evening and then he’d be away up to the Howqua the next day. Ten hours or so it might take him, and he had two teams, one resting and one working. He used to come to the Queen’s Head Hotel, and hobble the bullocks on the green outside and feed them hay, and then he’d come into the hotel and get drunk, and he’d sleep in the wagon and away off out of it next morning, back to the Howqua. And as like as not there’d be a young girl going to the Howqua for a barmaid in Peter Slim’s hotel, a girl no better than she should be, or she wouldn’t be going to the Howqua ...” He thought for a minute. “They were fine, noble days, those times, when we were all young.”
“What did he die of?”
“Drink and drowning,” the old man said, “drink and drowning, and his dog with him, only, the dog wasn’t drunk, though it might have been at that, the company it kept. It was August, and the river was running full with the melting snows. There was a girl living in the Howqua by the name of Mary Nolan, oh, a wicked girl, I’d think shame to tell you all that that girl did, and she so soft and well spoken, and pretty, too. She lodged on the other side of the river from the Buller Arms Hotel that Peter Slim kept, Billy’s father, him that’s the forest ranger in the Howqua now. And Charlie Zlinter, he stayed in the hotel till close on midnight, and then he made to go across the river to see this girl. Well, most parts of the year ye’d cross the Howqua and never wet your feet by stepping on the stones, but in August and September, with the melting of the snows on the high mountains, it runs five or six feet deep. There was a cable bridge, a bridge of two wire ropes with planks across the way you’d walk on them, and a third one to hold on to, and Charlie Zlinter, drunk the way he was, must go across this bridge to see this girl. Ye’d think, now, for a man as drunk as Charlie to go on a bridge like that at midnight would have been enough, but he must take the dog with him. He had this heeler dog he kept for rounding up the bullocks and to guard the wagon when he was in Banbury, and he must take it with him over the river. And when he came up to the bridge the dog wouldn’t go upon it, and so Charlie picked it up in his arms and started off across the bridge in the dark night, with the dog in his arms and the bridge swaying and going up and down with every step he took, and he as drunk as a lord. And that was the end of it.”
“He fell off the bridge into the water?”
“He did that. They found him half a mile down stream come the morning, him and the dog together. There was never a priest there to say a mass for him, and they buried him and the dog in the one grave, which the priest would never have al
lowed.” He paused. “Aye, it was a sad thing; he was a fine, noble boy. It made a great wonder in the countryside, for he was well known on account of coming in and out of Banbury and people riding with him. And they put a poem in the paper about him, ah, a lovely, lovely poem. Did ye never hear it?”
The Czech shook his head.
The old man declaimed,
“Charlie Zlinter and his heeler hound
Fell into the Howqua and unhappily drowned.
Be warned, fellow sinners, and never forget
If he hadn’t been drunk he’d have been living yet.”
“Ah,” he said, “it was a lovely, lovely poem.”
“This Charlie Zlinter was almost certainly some relation of my own,” said the Czech, “because he came from my own town. Did you ever hear anything about him — who his relations were, or who he wrote to? Did he leave any papers to say that?”
“Sure, an’ I wouldn’t know a thing like that at all,” the old man said. “I was a policeman in those days, and on other duties; I only knew about him from the gossip of the time. I wouldn’t know what happened to his gear. It was soon after that the mine closed down and Howqua came to an end; within the year there were only a few people living in the place. I wouldn’t say that anyone took on the bullock team after he passed away. I wouldn’t know. The Howqua was going down, and there wasn’t the work there had been in the beginning.”
Carl Zlinter asked, “You do not know what happened to his papers?”
“Ah, I wouldn’t know at all. There’s only one person left might know about a thing like that.”
“Who is that?”
“Sure, Mary Nolan herself.”
“Mary Nolan! Is she still alive?”
“Ah, she’s alive. She was a wicked girl, and Father Geoghegan, he was the priest here then, he would have nothing to do with her until she came to the confession, and that she would not do, and Holy Mother of God, it’s not to be wondered at. And so when the mine closed down and everybody left the Howqua what must she do but go for a barmaid at Woods Point in the hotel there, and very strict she came to be, so that there was no loose talk or dirty jokes in Mary Nolan’s bar. I did hear that she made her peace with Father O’Brian from Warburton who went to Woods Point in those days, and like enough he didn’t know the whole of it. And then she married a man called Williams who lived on an allotment out by Jamieson, and they lived there until he died at the beginning of the second war. And then she sold the place, and went to live at Woods Point with her brother-in-law’s family; I’d say she’d be living there yet. I haven’t heard she died.”
“She must be old now,” said the Czech.
“Seventy-five, maybe,” the old man said indignantly. “She’d not be a day older than seventy-five. That’s not so old at all. Sure, there’s many a man fit and hearty at the age of seventy-five.”
“Do you think that Mary Nolan might have kept Charlie Zlinter’s papers, or know what happened to them when he was drowned?”
“Ah, I wouldn’t be saying that at all. She’s the only person living in the district now that might know something, though it’s a long while ago. I’ll say this now, she knew Charlie Zlinter better than anyone else, and better than she had any right to as a single woman.”
Carl Zlinter left him presently, and walked back into the town and got there in time for dinner. He went to a different café for his meal where they were kinder to the New Australian, and got a lift out halfway to Merrijig in a truck driven by George Pearson on his way to Buttercup. He walked for two miles then, for it was Saturday afternoon and there were few people on the road, and finally got picked up by the storekeeper from Lamirra driving out of town in his utility. He got down at the gate of Leonora and walked across the paddocks to the homestead.
He was just in time for tea, and they made him welcome. He said to Jack Dorman, “It is quite correct, what you have told me about Mr. Pat Halloran and Charlie Zlinter. I have learned a great deal of my relative this morning.”
“What did you find out?” asked Jennifer.
He cocked an eye at her. “I found out that he was a very bad man. I do not think that I can say all that he did with ladies in the room.”
Jane and Jennifer laughed. “You can keep the juicy bits to tell Jack afterwards,” Jane said. “Tell us the rest.”
Jennifer asked, “What did he do for a living?”
“He was a bullock team driver,” said the Czech. “He drove a wagon and a team from the railway at Banbury to the town at the Howqua River.”
“Is that what he did!” Jack Dorman exclaimed. The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall together now; a bullocky driver would have been well known in Banbury and his death would be remembered longer than if he were a transient miner. The verse that Pat Halloran had declaimed would not have been composed except for a man of some local reputation, good or bad. “Did you find out anything else about him?”
Zlinter told them the story as they sat at tea. “Mrs. Williams,” Jane said thoughtfully. “Old Mrs. Joshua Williams, would that be? Used to live at Sharon, out past Jamieson?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I did not hear the name of the station. Only that she married a man called Williams.”
“I think that must be the one.” She turned to Jack. “You remember old Mrs. Williams, the one who used to breed geese when we came here first. You remember — we got six goslings from her, and they all died but one, the first year we were here. Didn’t her husband die, and she went to Woods Point?”
“I remember those bloody goslings,” Jack Dorman said emphatically. “They were no good when we bought them, and she knew it. I’d have made a row and got my money back, but we were new here then and I didn’t want to start off with a row.”
“She went to live at Woods Point, didn’t she?”
“I don’t remember. Easily find out.”
“I’m sure she was the one.”
They finished tea and washed the dishes, and went out on the veranda and sat down. Jack Dorman gave his guest a cigarette. “Inquest’s on Monday morning,” he said. “You’ll be there, I suppose?”
Carl Zlinter smiled, a little wryly. “I shall be going with Mr. Forrest,” he said. “I think he will come back without me, because I shall be in prison.”
“That’s not going to happen. The doctor’s on your side, and it’s what he says that counts.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I would not care a great deal if I went to prison,” he said, “so long as it should stop at that. But in my state, if I should do a crime in this two years, I think they can send me back to Germany, into a camp. That would be very bad.”
Jennifer said, “They’d never do that, Carl. It’s not going to be like that at all.”
He shrugged his shoulders gloomily. “It could happen.”
She laughed. “They’d have to send me too, because I helped.”
He turned to her. “Will you be at the inquest?”
“I’ll be there. The police rang up this morning and said they wanted me.”
“It would be different for you, if this went badly,” he said. “The worst that they could do for you would be to send you back to England, and that is your home. This place is now the home for me, and this is where I want to stay.”
“Nothing like that’s going to happen,” Jack Dorman said shortly. “They’ve got more sense.”
“I hope that that is true ...”
It seemed to Jennifer that he was taking this very badly, but in his position that might be inevitable. She did not like to think of him brooding all the week-end over possible deportation back into the displaced persons’ camps of Europe. “You promised that you’d take me to see Charlie Zlinter’s grave some time,” she said. “I want to see the Howqua. What about tomorrow?”
He glanced at her, smiling; it seemed too good to be true. “I would like to take you there, ver’ much,” he said. “But I think it is too far for you to walk.”
“Jack said he’d lend us the util
ity — the Chev. Could we go tomorrow, Mr. Dorman?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sunday’s the best day to take the Chev.” He turned to Zlinter. “Say, can you drive a car?”
The Czech smiled. “I can drive. Before the war I had a little car, an Opel, in my own country, and in the war I drove many cars and trucks. I have not driven in Australia, and I have not got a licence.”
“Ah, look — it don’t matter about the licence, not up here. You can take the Chev tomorrow, if you want it.”
The dark man beamed, “It is very, very kind. I will be ver’ careful of it, Mr. Dorman.”
“You won’t be able to be careful of it, not up on that Howqua track. But it’ll take you there all right, up on to the top, that is, by Jock McDougall’s paddock. I wouldn’t take it down the other side, not down into the Howqua valley — I was telling Jenny. But that cuts it down to a two-mile walk instead of ten.”
He said again, “It is very, very kind ...”
Presently he said, “There is one other thing, Mrs. Dorman. This morning, I visited a New Australian who can paint pictures, a man called Stan Shulkin. Do you know about him?”
“No?”
“I know about him,” said her husband. “Chap who works on the railway.”
“That is the man. Have you seen his pictures?”
Jack Dorman shook his head. “I remember someone saying in the pub one day there was a New Australian who can paint.”
Carl Zlinter turned to Jane. “I think it might be interesting to you to go down to his small house and see what he can paint,” he said. “I went there this morning. I think perhaps that he could make the sort of picture that you want.”
She laid her sewing down. “I want a really good picture, Carl, done by a proper artist. I don’t want anything done by an amateur. I want a good picture.”
“I do not know very much about pictures,” he replied. “I saw some very fine oil paintings this morning that this man had done. I think that he could make a picture that you would enjoy.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Has he ever studied anywhere? I mean, it might be difficult if I went there and his pictures were too bad for what I want. You do see what I mean?”
