“Get him out of the camp by tomorrow lunch-time,” he said curtly to the group round the fire-place. “If you’re his mates, you’ll see that he goes. And don’t get any ideas about ganging up on me, like you did on that Balt, because it’ll be a different tale. Savvy?”
None of them answered him, and there was complete quiet in the hut. In the pale-gold stillness it was as though the scene had been held for a million years in amber. Randolph turned quietly and pushed Murdoch down the steps, closing the door behind them.
“That’s that!” he said. “He can take care of that mob!” What Carmichael had done had awakened a feeling of elation in him that was strengthened by the realization that even if the manager had not avenged the Dummy there had been a dozen who would have. What it meant was that in the welter of horror and dishonesty and cruelty that made up most of Riverslake, there still survived the chivalrous instinct of the strong to protect the weak—that however lax the standards, there was still an action that would not be sanctioned and a point in bestiality past which no one might go unchecked. It was the germ that would survive anywhere if it survived in Riverslake; it was what Carmichael said would reappear after any holocaust to be the foundation of whatever was to be rebuilt.
Murdoch sucked in his breath.
“Cripes, he asked for it, and he certainly got it. The Bastard can go!”
“He got it, and he deserved it,” Randolph said curtly. “We’d better go over to the boiler-room and see Felix and the Dummy.”
“It’ll be a damned sight better place when Bellairs goes,” Murdoch said. “Fancy doing a thing like that to a poor little cuss like the Dummy. And he’s nearly sent Felix off his rocker with that spy business. It’ll be better if he goes.”
“He’ll go,” Randolph said grimly.
By this time they were at the door of the boiler-room. Randolph looked in, but could see only the hunchback, who was still seated on the box where Murdoch had propped him. As they looked in at the door, he raised his head and stared at them unseeingly; his gnarled hand dropped to the floor between his knees and searched for the cat that was not there. Randolph shook his head.
“Let’s go, Kerry. We can’t do anything here.”
“I think we’d better take a walk over to see Felix,” Murdoch suggested. “He was pretty steamed up when we left.”
“O.K.”
They had not walked far along the gravel path when Murdoch said abruptly, “I took Marika to the pictures, tonight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And down to the river after—we came out at interval, and we went down to the flats.”
“Must’ve been nice.” There was sarcasm in Randolph’s voice, but Murdoch ignored it.
“It was. She’s a nice girl.”
“But not too nice, eh? That the score?” Randolph was remembering Radinski on the night of the party at Mama Kasnik’s, and his shy deference towards the girl. “Don’t you ever think of Felix?”
“About as much as you think of Paul,” Murdoch countered without heat. Randolph felt the blood mount to his face. Yesterday he would have been able to give Murdoch the lie.
“Anyway, you’re on the wrong track,” Murdoch continued. “She is too nice—I tried but she knocked me back. Just like you’d knock back a kid who asks for too many lollies. I said what the heck did she come down there with me for, and she said because I had asked her to and because she liked me. She made me feel a bloody heel.”
“This is the way, isn’t it?” Randolph asked, peering along the darkened path. “I’m not too sure.”
“Yeah, this’s it. Number Seventeen, I Hut—that’s his room. She told me that she was going to marry Felix. She reckoned that she didn’t love him, but she knew that he loved her, and that later on she would learn to love him, too. She reckons he’s a wonderful bloke. We just sat there and had a smoke and a talk, and—God, it was nice.”
I can tell you all that, he thought, but I can’t tell you how the moon shone on the water, and how the frogs croaked, and how cool it was, and how the wind whispered in the willows and there was a wagtail chirping in the dark, and how I know now that I love her. You said once that it wasn’t love and it wasn’t war. Well, now you’re wrong.
“And yet, when she said good night———”
“There’s someone coming along the path,” Randolph observed. “Holy mackerel, he’s in a hurry!” The figure loomed closer in the shadows, and he pulled Murdoch aside. “Look out, he’ll bowl you!”
But instead of racing past them, as it appeared he would, the man pulled up panting beside them. He grabbed Murdoch by the arm.
“Mister, mister!” he choked. “Please, come! One man, maybe is dead!”
God almighty! Randolph remembered the night of his arrival at Riverslake. The full cycle.
“Dead? Where?” Murdoch demanded. But the man, a Balt, was already running back the way he had come.
“Get Carmichael, Kerry!” Randolph ordered crisply as he took off after the Balt. A horrible suspicion formed in his mind as he ran. Dead, one man. Why should it be Radinski? He shook his head unconsciously, denying his own thoughts.
The man ahead of him pounded up the steps of a hut and disappeared along the dark corridor. The building was all in darkness. As he leaped up the steps Randolph glanced quickly at the wall beside the door. A big letter I stood out in black paint on the woodwork. His heart contracted. Number Seventeen, I Hut, Kerry had said.
In the darkened corridor ahead of him the Balt had stopped before a closed door, a small torch in his hand directed on it, high up. When Randolph stopped beside him, and looked up, he saw the figures one and seven in black paint on the cream door. His horrified mind immediately took up its most ancient refuge, and balked at believing the import of what he saw. It was, of course, a mistake. He turned savagely to the man beside him.
“What the hell do you mean?” he demanded. “Where’s the dead man?”
The Balt dropped the beam of light to their feet. Randolph’s eyes followed and fixed in horror on the little pool of congealing blood in which he stood. A thin trickle, now dried up, led under the door and into Radinski’s room.
“Felix!” he shouted, throwing himself against the door. “Felix!”
“I live in next room,” the man beside him explained. “I am out, I come home. Is dark, I make light. This, I see!” He shuddered. “Bastard! Quickly I come for get some man for bring manager!”
“Get me a knife, quickly!” Randolph ordered him. “Knife, understand? Hurry, damn you!”
The man darted along the passage and in a moment returned with a table knife. Randolph snatched it from him and slid it between the edge of the door and the jamb, level with the lock. There was a click, and the door swung open.
The room was in darkness, but the wireless was switched on. The music whispered from it in a thin thread of sound, and the light from its dial fell softly on Radinski’s face that stared serenely from the floor at the two men who looked with horror through the doorway. With a smothered curse, Randolph hit at the light switch on the wall beside him. The cat Marika had been asleep on the foot of Radinski’s bed; she stood up as the light flooded the room, arching her back with tail extended stiffly, her claws gently kneading the coloured rug on which she had been lying. Randolph did not even see her.
Radinski lay on his back in a darkening pool of his own blood, his head lolling to one side, his blue eyes wide open. His pale hands were crossed in his groin, the whitened fingers of one clasped desperately on the wrist of the other. He had slashed his wrists with the opened razor that lay on the floor beside him, and then had tried to stop the flight of his life through the wounds.
Randolph had seen many men die, and had seen many more lie dead, but his whole body contracted with a shock of pity as he stared down at this one. Radinski had died, as he had lived, in terror and loneliness and despair. And it could
have been prevented.
Murdoch and Carmichael ran down the corridor with the Balt, who had gone to meet them.
“What is it?” Murdoch demanded breathlessly, while he was still a few yards away from the door. Before Randolph could answer, he looked into the room.
“Oh, God!” he breathed. “Felix! We’re too late!”
“By months,” Randolph said briefly. He stood aside, and Carmichael walked softly into the room.
It was after midnight when the ambulance left. Carmichael stayed in Radinski’s room to see it go, but Randolph and Murdoch left—Murdoch to his room and Randolph to walk slowly through the night to the office. He stood on the veranda looking out over the sleeping city. Riverslake was in darkness but for scattered lights where late home-comers prepared for bed. Only street lights ringed the pools of darkness below him in the valley. The rolling hills beyond Duntroon and the aerodrome were squeezed by the darkness into a single black smudge round the horizon, but as Randolph closed his eyes wearily, he saw it as it would appear by day—the red scar of a road winding up from the flats, slashing the paddocks of the dairy by Duntroon and flanked by tremendous old poplars that shimmered in the sunshine as though made of nothing more substantial than gossamer; the bulk of Russell Hill with the gory gash of the quarry on its green flank; the willow-fringed river that wound between the lucerne paddocks to the Murrumbidgee and the far away dream of the sea.
His heart swelled with a love he could not encompass, and tears gathered behind his closed eyelids. He shuddered. All the beauty of it, the power and the strength and the promise of it, had not been enough to stay Radinski’s hand as he opened the razor and drew it across his wrists. Only fear, at the last moment and too late, had prompted him to that last desperate act, when with one hand he had tried to stop the flow of blood from his other wrist.
Randolph opened his eyes and saw the headlight beams of the ambulance swing down the winding road and out of the camp. A few minutes later Carmichael’s crisp footsteps approached along the path to the office. Randolph wiped the back of a lean hand across his eyes.
The manager stopped at the bottom of the steps. From there he could see only the vague outline of a man above him, silhouetted against the slightly paler sky. It might be Bellairs, or one of his crowd.
“Who’s that?” he demanded sharply.
“Me—Randolph.”
“Oh.” Carmichael mounted the steps briskly. “Well, what a bloody awful show.”
“Yes—bloody awful. It’s been going on for a year, and you’ve had a ringside seat all the time,” Randolph said savagely. “Have you only just woken up to how awful it is?”
“They come and they go,” Carmichael said simply. “If I tried to wet-nurse every one of them I’d end up in the blasted rat-house myself.”
“God, things are bad for them, but suicide! Surely you’d think there’d be something to hold him?”
“Hold him?” Carmichael commented grimly. “He’s only one of half a dozen who’ve done themselves in in the last year. Rope, poison, razors—the bastards are mad!”
“But, God almighty, they left Europe to get away from that!”
Randolph’s eyes roved over the valley below him, seeking the evil that must live there, somewhere—or why would men who had crossed half the world to escape death in Europe welcome it here, in Australia? He found only the avenue of poplars that led up to Mama Kasnik’s, and he thought of Marika, who would have married Radinski, not because she loved him, but because he was a good man. He groaned softly.
Hidden in the darkness was the road to Linda’s—his mind travelled along it, opened the gate and entered the house, peered into the room where she and Paul lay, perhaps in each other’s arms. The picture failed to stir him. Bewildered, his mind sought out the lounge on the front veranda, and stood contemplating it, and remembering. His breath came a little faster for a moment, but steadied; it was as if he were looking through thick glass at a tableau of events from another life. What had happened since, though it might only be a few hours after, had robbed the past of its urgency. A new and more violent conflict was taking over the shape of his days. When he was forced to the utmost of his resistance against it, six dead men robbed him of the will-power or the excuse to turn his back.
“I’m going to leave tomorrow,” he said, in a strained voice.
Carmichael had opened the office door and switched on the light inside. Now he turned, silhouetted in the opening.
“Tomorrow—that’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? I thought it was going to be Wednesday?”
“I’d leave tonight, if I could,” Randolph said, still in the same strained voice.
Carmichael shrugged.
“Well, I can’t stop you, whatever you want to do. But you’ll lose a bit like this, going without notice———”
“I’ll lose a damned sight more if I stay!”
Carmichael understood what Randolph meant. He looked at the slight, shadowy figure that stood just outside the beam of light from the door.
“Not going to Queensland?”
“Not going to Queensland.” Randolph stepped across the yellow beam and walked to the top of the steps. “I’m taking up where I left off three years ago. I don’t expect it’ll make headlines, and I’m not going to be very happy doing it, but if I do it, and somebody else does it, and somebody else, it’ll all add up. Six men don’t kill themselves for no reason, especially when they’ve crossed the world to escape from the same thing. I’ve known all along that something was screwy, but I haven’t had the guts to admit it to myself. Tonight woke me up, and other things—you told me, and Kerry told me, a long time ago. To stop gnashing my gums about it if I didn’t intend doing something. He was right, then, but not now.”
He stopped talking and took a deep breath. He looked out over the valley and the city below him and knew with quickened heartbeat that suddenly his love for it and what it stood for was charged with hope, and not with despair. He had come back to the breast of his lover, and his strength swelled under the weight of the chains she fastened round him.
“I guess I won’t see you before I go, in the morning.”
“No, I guess not. Good-bye and good luck.” Carmichael extended his hand.
Randolph shook it.
“Good-bye.” He turned abruptly and ran down the steps. At the bottom, he turned and looked up at Carmichael. The manager seemed to tower into the black sky above them. “And thanks.”
The noise of his footsteps was deadened as he crossed the lawn, clattered again when he reached the road, echoed for a while and died away.
Carmichael entered the office and closed the door behind him. He walked over to the table and picked up the sheaf of typed lists that lay there. Mess-steward—he ran his finger down the column, paused and crossed out Radinski’s name. Kitchenmen—Gummow, Schmidt and the rest. Cooks—Verity, Zigfeld, Warner, Charlesworth, Paramor, Condamine, and Mancin. And last, Randolph. But not now.
He looked at the name for a long while, standing in the silence of his office. It called up a mental picture of Randolph’s face, his dark, deep-set eyes, his high nose and thin cheeks; strangely, it was superimposed in Carmichael’s mind on an outline map of Australia. He knew then that the two were inseparable, indivisible parts of the one whole, and that he would never again think of one without evoking the image of the other.
He drew his pencil through the name with sure, deliberate strokes, hiding all semblance of its sound and form.
“For good, I hope!” he said aloud. He walked to the door, switched off the light and passed through, banging it shut behind him.
ORIGINAL AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
T. A. G. Hungerford has had a varied career, having been journalist, commando, secretary to the Rt. Hon. W. M. Hughes, and kitchenman in a hostel, as well as short-story writer and novelist. He is now with the Federal Bureau of Information in Canberra. Early in 1
940 he joined the army and served with the 2/8 Australian Commando Squadron in New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville, rising to the rank of sergeant. He was mentioned in dispatches for his work in the Bougainville campaign. His first published novel, The Ridge and the River (see back of jacket), was awarded a prize in the Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competitions of 1950.
Copyright
Copyright © T. A. G. Hungerford 1953
First published in 1953 by Angus and Robertson
This edition published in 2021
by Ligature Pty Limited
34 Campbell St · Balmain NSW 2041 · Australia
www.ligatu.re · [email protected]
e-book ISBN 978-1-922749-00-0
All rights reserved. Except as provided by fair dealing or any other exception to copyright, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
The moral rights of the author are asserted throughout the world without waiver.
Riverslake Page 32