The Far Country

by Nevil Shute

  Mr. Shulkin was working in his garden; he stopped and came to the gate as the utility drew up. “So,” he said, “the model has arrived. You have come to make another sitting?”

  “She has not,” said Carl Zlinter. “She has come to ride in this utility with me to Woods Point. She has told me that you make a portrait of her, and I have come to see if it is good enough.”

  Mr. Shulkin said, “I do not think that any portrait will be good enough when you have her with you. A portrait is for when you cannot see the sitter. But you may see if you want. It is not finished.”

  He led the way into the railway coach and they followed him. The picture stood upon the easel. He had given more space to the background than is usual in modern portraits, using rather a wide canvas and placing the head to one side. For the background he had chosen a part of Leonora station, with the Delatite River, the paddocks, and the wooded slopes behind. He had made it a spring scene when the tips of the gum trees take a tinge of orange-red, so that the colour motif of the Leonora scene repeated the bronze lights in Jennifer’s hair.

  “It is not a portrait,” said Mr. Shulkin, as they looked at it in silence. “It is an order for a beautiful picture with quiet colour and good drawing, that the lady will like to live with. The portrait is nothing, nothing, only a detail of the whole picture—you understand? A bunch of flowers would have done as well, but they would not have had the fine drawing and the delicate colour of the head of this young lady.”

  “It is a very lovely thing,” the Czech said quietly. The artist had painted Jennifer in profile with lips slightly parted and a faint colour in her cheeks as if a blush was just beginning; as he had said, the portrait was subordinated to the colour values of the picture as a whole, and so became the more impressive by a type of understatement.

  “It’s going to be a very lovely picture,” the girl said, “but I don’t believe I really look like that a bit.”

  “I have seen you look like that,” the surgeon said. “I have seen you look like that many times. It is very true of you.” The girl coloured a little, and looked very like the portrait.

  Zlinter turned to the artist. “You must do something else for Mrs. Dorman,” he said. “She has not seen this, no? I will buy this one.”

  Mr. Shulkin smiled broadly. “That is not possible. I have three pictures that I must paint for Mrs. Dorman, and she will choose the one that she will like the best. Already she has paid me for the materials for all the three, so this canvas is her canvas and this paint is her paint. If she will not choose this picture and she wishes to have one of the other two, or none at all, then I will sell you this picture if you can pay enough money. I am ver’ expensive. I gain more than ten pounds each week on the railway; I am ver’ expensive man.” He grinned.

  Carl Zlinter said, “You must now paint two more pictures, very, very good, much better than this one, so she will choose one of those. Perhaps you need not show her this one at all.”

  Jennifer laughed. “She knows all about it, Carl; I told her. You don’t want it, anyway. What on earth would you do with it?”

  “I would sell it to a manufacturer of soap,” he said, “because it is so beautiful.” He paused. “Or, I would hang it in the house that I am going to build in the Howqua. I do not know.”

  “It would be better to sell it to the manufacturer of soap,” the artist said, “because then you would have money to build the house. But I do not think that I shall sell it to you if that is what you are going to do with it.”

  Jennifer said, “What about me? Don’t I have any say in this?”

  Carl Zlinter said, “You will get the soap.”

  “What soap?”

  “The soap that the manufacturer will give so you will say it is the best soap in the world, and he can put it underneath the picture.”

  “Don’t sell it to him, Stan,” she said. “I don’t want it used as a soap advertisement.”

  “I would not sell it to him in any case,” the artist replied. “He is a bad man and not serious, only when he cuts off people’s legs and they die. I do not know why you go out with him.”

  They left him presently, and got going on the road to Jamieson and Woods Point. It ran through pastoral, station country to begin with, an undulating, well-watered country in a bowl of hills, the pastures becoming dried and brown in the hot sun. The road climbed slowly and became more wooded; presently they came upon a considerable river, a wide river running in a series of pools and shallows on a rocky bottom.

  Carl Zlinter said, “My word. I did not know that there was such a river here.”

  He stopped the car by the roadside and they got out and looked at it; it ran completely deserted, winding through the woods and pastures, rippling in white foam at the little falls and rapids, with deep brown pools between. “It must be full of fish, this river,” the Czech said.

  “What is it, Carl? What’s it’s name?”

  “I do not know. I think that it is perhaps the Goulburn. But I did not know the Goulburn was like this.”

  The English girl asked, “Can anybody go and fish there, Carl, or is the fishing preserved?”

  He shook his head. “It is all free fishing here. There must be very many fish in this river. I will come and fish here one day.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anybody fishing,” the girl said.

  “It is not like Europe, this,” he replied. “Here, in this country, there are not very many people, and so not many fishermen. It is another reason why I am happy to be here.”

  She turned to him. “You’re very fond of Australia, aren’t you, Carl?”

  “I have lived here fifteen months,” he said, “and I have seen only this little corner of this big country. But now I should be sorry to live anywhere else.” He glanced at her. “Are you happy to be here, and not in England?”

  “I think so, Carl,” she said slowly. “There are so many things, though. I’ve lived in towns most of my life—one does in England—and all this is strange to me. I like it. I think I’d rather live here than in an English town.” She hesitated. “One has so many ties with England, and it’s so far away. I’ve been getting air-mail letters from my father all this week about my mother. She’s very ill. I’ve been wishing I was back in England all this week.”

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “What is it that is the matter with her?”

  She told him all about it, standing there with him above the Goulburn River; it was a relief to be able to tell somebody everything she thought. “They’ve been a very self-contained pair, my father and mother,” she said. “I had two brothers, but they were both killed in the war, one in a corvette and one in Bomber Command. Daddy and Mummy had so many interests that they shared, I was always a bit out of it after the war. That’s why I didn’t mind going away from home to work in London, and why it didn’t seem too bad to come out here. But now I wish I was back. I don’t know who’ll be running the house for Daddy, or how he can be getting on. If Mummy were to die, I think I’d have to go back. I don’t know what Daddy would do, all on his own.”

  “It would be very sad for me, if you went back,” he said quietly.

  “It would be very sad for me, too,” she replied. “I’d rather stay here.” She turned to the car. “Perhaps it won’t happen. The winter will be getting on now, back in England, and that’ll make it better for Mummy.”

  They drove on through a tiny village and crossed the river, and went on for ten miles or so through the woods along the valley by the river. The sun was hot and the trees made dappled overhung patches of shade upon the road, and the same brilliant parrots with crimson bodies and blue wings flew in the woods ahead of them. They were delighted with the day and with the old car and with each other; twice they stopped to walk down to the river and look at its desolate grandeur, and they hardly stopped talking all the time. They laughed a great deal about silly little things that were not really funny, but they wanted to laugh.

  They passed Gaffney’s Creek and a small
gold mine shut down for the week-end, the first that Jennifer had ever seen. From there the road wound upwards through the woods, till they came out at the summit of a col, the road going down into another valley ahead of them.

  “This is Frenchman’s Gap, I think,” said Carl. “Woods Point will be about five miles further on. Shall we have our lunch here, with the gold grill?”

  She laughed again at the little joke. “It’s very lovely here.” She got out of the car and looked around. “Can we do a grill here, Carl, without setting the whole country grilling too?”

  “There is here a fireplace,” he said, and he showed her the blackened stones. “I think it will be safe if we shall make it here.”

  He set to work to grill the steaks while Jennifer laid out the rest of the meal on a clean cloth upon the grass in the shade of a gum tree. “Carl,” she said, “tell me a bit more about Mary Nolan. Was she Irish?”

  “I think perhaps she was,” he said. “There were very many Irish people in this country at that time.”

  She paused, considering her words. “Did she have a job in Howqua, or how did she come to be there? I mean, a job apart from being a naughty girl?”

  He laughed, and she laughed with him. “I do not know if she had another job,” he said. “I have thought perhaps that she came to Howqua as a barmaid in the hotel, or perhaps she was to help one of the women with the children. I do not know, and I do not know how she happened to be living on the other side of the river. Perhaps she will tell us today.”

  “Perhaps she won’t,” the girl said. “I think we’re going to have a job to get anything out of her at all.”

  They cooked the steaks and ate them hot from the grill, sitting on the warm grass in the shade of the trees, looking out over the blue, misty lines of hills. “It’s so different here to anything I’ve ever known, Carl,” she said once. “People with so much money that they don’t have to worry, who can afford to be generous if they want to, and all made honestly in farming. In this lovely, empty place. I’ve always lived where people were hard up, even good, clever people. It’s all so different here to England.”

  He nodded. “I know. I feel like that also. I live in a camp and I must live so for nine months more, but sometimes I wake up early in the morning, and I look around, and I think of all the fine things in this country that I can do in nine months, the things that I could never do in Europe.” He looked at her a little shyly. “I have a calendar upon the wall,” he said, “and each day when I get up out of bed I cross off one day with a pencil, the day that has gone.”

  Her eyes moistened a little. “Oh, Carl! Do you do that?”

  He nodded. “It is a stupid thing, but that is what I do. In nine months now I shall be out of the camp life, out of it for ever, a free man.”

  “When were you a free man last, Carl?” she asked. “When did you last live a normal life, with a home?”

  “In 1938,” he said. “I lived then at my father’s house, just after I became a doctor. Then came the Germans, and I joined the army.”

  “It’s a terribly long time,” she said softly. And then she looked up at him, and smiled, and said, “Were you ever married?”

  He smiled back at her. “No,” he said. “I was never married. I was spared that complication.”

  She said quietly, “You must have been very lonely, all those years.”

  “I do not think so, not in the war years,” he said. “So much was happening, so much of grief and work and pain, I think that one had no time to be lonely. After the war, in the camps, in Germany,” he shrugged his shoulders, “perhaps one had got out of the habit of being lonely. Perhaps in Germany, where life was very hard, there was so little happiness in married life that one did not want it. I do not know. It is only in the last year, since I came here to Australia and I have seen men living happily with wives and with their children, and with no war in the country—it is only since the last year I have been a little lonely in the evenings sometimes.”

  She said, “So then you go out and catch a fish.”

  He laughed. “Yes, then I go out and catch a fish.” He got to his feet and began to put the remains of their lunch together. “Now we must go down to Woods Point and catch Mary Nolan.”

  They got back into the utility and ran down the long road into the valley before them. Woods Point proved to be a little town of wooden houses at the bottom of a valley, rather a straggling little town that had been wiped out from time to time with forest fires and so was built of fairly modern houses; these houses stood about amongst the trees around two working gold mines. There was not very much of it, a hotel, a bakery, a store or two strung haphazard along the main street; there seemed to be no reason why anyone should live there but for the gold mines.

  Carl Zlinter stopped the Chev at the hotel and went in to ask where old Mrs. Williams lived. He came out presently and got back into the car. “It is just a little way,” he said. “We must turn round.”

  Jennifer said, “You’ve had a beer.”

  “I have found where Mary Nolan, Mrs. Williams lives,” he said. “It is not right for you to say such things.”

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “It is a part of the woman’s burden in this country,” he remarked, “that they are not allowed in the bar.”

  They left the utility by the roadside three hundred yards back and walked down a grassy lane, asked at a house, and were directed to the right one. A middle-aged, sandy-haired woman came to the door. Carl Zlinter asked, “Does Mrs. Williams live here, please?”

  She looked at him with interest at his accent. “That’s right,” she said. “Auntie lives here with us.”

  “Would it be possible if we should have a talk with her a little?” he asked. “My name is Carl Zlinter, and this is Miss Morton.”

  To Jennifer the woman said, “How d’you do? I’m Elsie Stevens—Mrs. Stevens. What d’you want to talk to Auntie about? She’s pretty old, you know, and she don’t have to do much talking to get tired.”

  Jennifer said, “We’ve come over from Leonora station, out past Banbury. Mr. Zlinter works in the timber at Lamirra. He’s trying to find out about a relation of his who was in the Howqua in the old days.”

  “Leonora?” The woman wrinkled her brows. “Would that be Jack Dorman’s place?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, I know.” With contact established she became more friendly. “Did you say it was about the old days in the Howqua?”

  “That’s right,” the Czech said. “There was a man there of the same name as me, who died and was drowned and buried there; I have seen the stone at the grave with his name carved upon it. It is the same name as my own, Charlie Zlinter. I was told that your aunt was living in the Howqua at that time, and I have thought that she could tell me about him, who he was and where he lived.”

  The woman stood in silence for a minute, “Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,” she said at last. “Auntie was in the Howqua for a bit before she came here, but she wouldn’t remember anything about that now.”

  Jennifer said, “Could we have a talk with her, do you think? Just for a few minutes? We don’t want to tire her.”

  The woman said slowly, “Well, I don’t mind asking her. What did you say the name was?”

  “Charlie Zlinter.”

  The woman stood staring at him for a moment, while the elusive memory of a local jingle scattered through her mind. “I’ve heard that name before …” She paused. “Some rhyme about a dog?”

  “That’s right,” said Jennifer.

  “Charlie Zlinter and his heeler hound

  Fell into the Howqua and unhappily drowned …”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “We used to say that when we was children, at the Sunday school. Just wait here a minute, and I’ll ask Auntie.” She turned to Zlinter. “Did you say your name was Charlie Zlinter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Like in the rhyme?”

  “That’s right. I am c
alled Charlie Zlinter.”

  “Well, isn’t that funny? Just wait here a minute, and I’ll tell Auntie.”

  She went indoors, and they stood in the lane, waiting. Presently she came out again to them. “Auntie wants to see you,” she said. She hesitated. “You mustn’t mind her if she talks a bit queer. And I wouldn’t stay very long.”

  They went into the living-room of the house. A very old woman was sitting in a chair before the fireplace with a shawl round her shoulders; she wore rather shabby black clothes. Her features were lean and long, and she was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles; her white hair was parted in the middle and done in a bun behind her head; there was still plenty of it. Her niece said to her, “These are the people come to see you, Auntie. This is Charlie Zlinter.”

  The old woman raised her head and looked at them. “He is not,” she said, and there was still a touch of the Irish in her voice. “He’s nothing like Charlie Zlinter.”

  The Czech said, “My name, it is Charlie Zlinter like the man who lived in the Howqua and was drowned there, with his dog.” She turned towards him, and fixed him with her eyes. “I do not know if he was a relation of me or not.”

  She said, “You talk like him. Where do you come from, the same place as he did?”

  “That is right,” he said. “I come from the same town in Bohemia.”

  “Who’s this?” she asked, indicating Jennifer. “Your wife?”

  “No,” he said. “Just a friend.”

  She snorted a little, as if in disbelief. “I wouldn’t know anything about Charlie Zlinter, no more than any of the other men,” she said. “He got drowned. That’s all I know.”