by Nevil Shute
She heard nothing more until she got an air-mail letter from Port Said nearly a month later. His ship had called for fuel at Colombo. “We do not go very fast,” he said, “and although we have gone steadily all the time it has taken us thirty-four days to get to this place. I think we shall arrive in London in about another fortnight, and I must then find a place cheap to live near to the hospital. As soon as it is possible I will come to Leicester, but I cannot say what day that will be on.”
He came to her on a Friday evening at the end of November. She had walked down to the chemist to pick up a parcel for her father; it was a fine, starry night with a cold wind that made her walk quickly. She was fighting her way back head-down against a freezing wind in the suburban street. She raised her head as she got near the house and saw a man peering at the houses in the half light of the street lamps, trying to read the numbers, perhaps looking for the doctor’s plate upon the door. He was a tall man, rather thin, dressed in a foreign soft felt hat and in a shabby raincoat.
She cried, “Carl!” and ran to meet him. He turned, and said “Jenny!” and took both her hands. She dropped the parcel and something in it cracked as it fell; it lay unheeded at their feet as he kissed her. She said presently, “Oh, Carl! When did you get to England?”
He held her close, “We arrived on Tuesday,” he said, “to the London Docks. I have found a room to live in, in Coram Street, in Bloomsbury, and I have been to the hospital yesterday, and I am to start working on Monday. I do not know how long it is that I shall have to work, but I think that it will be for one and a half years. I do not think it will be longer than that.”
She said, “Oh, Carl—that’s splendid! What are you doing now? Have you come for the week-end?”
He said, a little diffidently, “I did not know if it would be convenient if I should stay. I have brought a bag, but I have left it at the station in the cloak-room. Perhaps I could take a room at the hotel, and see you again tomorrow.”
“Of course not, Carl. We’ve got a spare room here—I’ll make up the bed. That’s where we live,” she said, nodding at the house. “Daddy’s in there now—he wants to meet you.” She stood in his arms, thinking, for a moment. “We’ve got such a lot to talk about,” she said. “Daddy’s got a meeting of the committee of the Bowls Club in our house tonight; he’s the chairman or the president or something. Don’t let’s get mixed up in that. Would you mind if we go out and have a meal, some place where we can talk? They finish about nine o’clock generally. We can come back then, and you can meet Daddy.”
He smiled down at her. “Of course,” he said. “Whatever you will say is good for me.”
“Wait here just a minute,” she said. “I’ll go in and put this parcel down, and tell Daddy what we’re doing.” She vanished into the house and he stood waiting for her on the pavement. In the dining-room her father was laying out the table with paper and pencils before each chair for the Bowls Club meeting; when this happened they had their evening meal at the kitchen table.
She came to him in her overcoat, flushed and bright-eyed. “Daddy,” she said. “I got this parcel, and I dropped it and heard it crack; I believe I’ve bust whatever’s in it. Carl Zlinter’s here, and I’m going to make up the spare room for him. I’m going out to dinner with him now, and we’ll be back when this committee meeting’s over. Could you get your own meal, do you think? It’s sausages; they’re in the frig, and there’s half of that jam tart we had for lunch the day before yesterday on a plate in the larder.”
He smiled at her excitement, his concern over the parcel half forgotten. “That’s all right,” he said. “What have you done with him?”
“He’s outside waiting for me.”
“Well, bring him in, and let’s say how-do-you-do to him.”
“Not now,” she said. “I’ll bring him in when your committee’s over, when you’ve got time to meet him properly. We’ll be back about half-past nine or ten.”
She whisked out of the room, and the front door slammed behind her. She left her father unpacking the parcel and smiling thoughtfully; changes were coming to him again, whether he liked it or not. Jennifer joined Zlinter underneath the street lamp. “I know a little place where we can get a meal,” she said. “Not like we’d have got in Australia, of course, but good for here. It’s quiet there, and we can talk.”
She took his arm and they went off together down the street, walking very close to each other. She took him to a café near the station, a frowsy place undecorated for some fifteen years, but reasonably warm inside, and cheap: she knew that he was short of money and she knew that he would never let her pay for her own meal. There was no meat on the menu, so they ordered fish pie and cabbage, with apple tart and custard to follow. And then they settled down, and talked, and talked, and talked.
They sat so long over their meal that the bored waitress began turning out the lights; they woke up to the fact that it was eight o’clock and the place was closing. Jennifer said, “We’ll have to go, Carl.”
He paid the bill, and helped her into her coat. He said, “Shall we go back to the station and get my bag, and take it to your house?”
“It’s too early,” she objected. “That blasted meeting won’t be over yet, and there’s no fire in the drawing-room …” She thought for a moment. “There’s a little picture theatre, Carl,” she said. “It’s a bit of a bug-house. It’s showing one of those pictures the Americans make for South America, all gigolos and black-haired beauties dancing with tambourines—a perfect stinker. The house’ll be half empty. If we go in there we can talk quietly, at the back of the Circle.”
They went there, and the flick was as she had described it, a noisy picture with plenty of orchestra and raucous singing. In the warmth of the circle, seated very close together, they gave no attention whatsoever to the screen. “Tell me one thing, Carl,” she said when they were settled down, “what are you doing about money? You told me once that you wouldn’t be able to get to be a doctor again because you’d never have enough money. Are things very difficult?”
He pressed her hand between his own. “I must be very careful,” he said. “I have now about one thousand one hundred pounds, and on that I must live till I am qualified. Then I shall ask if you will marry me, and by that time I shall be quite broke.”
“We’ll manage somehow, Carl.”
“I have not asked you yet,” he observed. “I am only warning.”
“And I’m warning you that if you don’t look out, I might say, yes.”
He leaned a little from her and undid his overcoat; he fished in an inside pocket and pulled out a little object. He put it in her hand. “It is for you,” he said, “one day. Perhaps not yet.”
She held it up to the reflected light from the Technicolor scene; it was a ring formed heavily of reddish gold with curious, cable-like markings around it. “Oh, Carl!” she said, “is this a wedding ring?”
He took it from her, “You go too quickly,” he said. “It is an engagement ring, but it is not for you just yet. Not till I have met your father and he has said that he agrees.”
“Well, let me see it, anyway. I promise I won’t put it on.”
He gave it back to her. “It’s just like a wedding ring,” she said. “It’s gold, isn’t it?”
“I know that an engagement ring, it should have precious stones,” he said. “I could not afford to buy precious stones to put in it, Jenny. But this is solid gold, gold from the Howqua.” He smiled down at her. “I know that it is very pure gold, because I made it myself.”
She stared at him in the dim light from the screen. “You made it?”
“I made it,” he replied. “Harry Peters showed me how to make a ring like this, or a bracelet of gold, or a pendant. He is the man who had the broken head, on who we did trephine. It is very lucky that we managed to save his life, or he could not have taught me how to do these things.”
“But, Carl, where did you get the gold from?”
“It is Charlie Zlinter
’s gold,” he told her quietly. “It would not be good for you to talk about this, perhaps, even here in England and on the other side of the world.”
In the stuffy half light of the Midland cinema she stared up at him. “I won’t say a word, Carl. Charlie Zlinter’s gold?”
“There was a box,” he said. “The box that Mary Nolan told you she had seen, a tin box that he called his ditty box. In this box he kept his valuables.”
“That’s right,” said Jennifer. “When she went back to the cabin the morning he was drowned, the door was open, and she looked for the box to put it away for him, and she couldn’t find it.”
He nodded. “Charlie Zlinter had put it away before. He was not too drunk to look after his money.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Where did he put it?”
He smiled at her. “He had a very simple place for his box, a place that would be safe from forest fires and thieves and anything. Perhaps only a very simple man, a sailor and a bullock driver, would have thought of such a simple place to keep his box, and yet that was so safe.”
“Where was that, Carl?”
“Under the stone,” he said. “The stone that weighed four hundredweight, that only he could lift. You remember the big stone we found together, on our last day in the Howqua?”
She could remember every detail of that day, and the sheer grief of it, and the sunshine, and the clean scent of the eucalypts, and the flashing reflections from the river down below, and the brilliance of the parrots in the woods. “Of course I do,” she said. “Was the box under that?”
“It was under the stone,” he said. “I found it only one week after you were gone to England, but I did not dare to say that in a letter. I think if it was known I had found gold it would be taken by the police, perhaps in England also, so you must not talk about it. I think that it is better that I use it to become a doctor.”
“I won’t say a word, Carl. How much gold was there?”
“There were fifty-two coins of one pound,” he told her. “Sovereigns, they are called. Also, there was just over five pounds in weight of washed river gold, the gold dust that they find in the river beds, Billy Slim has told me that in Howqua this gold dust was used for money. The hotel would take it for payment, and they had little scales in the bar to weigh the gold with, how much it was worth. I think also the bullock driver, he took gold for payment, too, because in the box were little brass scales also. His gold dust was in two leather bags, one large bag and one small bag.”
“Was he a relation of yours, Carl? Were there any papers to say who he was?”
He shook his head. “I do not know. The water had been lying in the hole beneath the stone, and the box was eaten away with rust. There had been papers once, but nothing was left, nothing that I could read. There was only the rusted sides and bottom of the box, and the two leather bags, rotten and with the gold spilling out from them, and the fifty-two gold coins lying in the rust, and the little scales.” He paused. “I do not think that we shall ever know who Charlie Zlinter was.”
“What a shame!” She sat thinking about it for a time, absently watching the coloured mime upon the screen. Presently she turned to him again. “You must have had a job lifting that stone, Carl,” she said. “Did you have anyone to help you?”
He shook his head. “I was quite alone.” He hesitated. “I might have had Billy Slim to help,” he said. “It was lucky. It was the first time that I had been there since we said good-bye, and I was sad, and I went there to work very hard and to be quite alone, because it is good to work very hard when everything seems bad.” She pressed his hand. “I had the timber for the house, and I borrowed Billy’s crowbar, and I levered up each corner of the stone and put underneath a wedge of wood. It took nearly all the day to move it four feet back and make the new place for it, and then when it was moved away from the old hole I saw the box.”
She asked him, “What did you do when you saw it, Carl? Were you terribly excited?”
He said quietly, “I was very sad that we had not found it together. I stood looking at the rusty pieces and the things in the hole, and I thought, ‘That must be the box that Mary Nolan talked about,’ and I was not at all excited. I was very sad that you had had to go away, and that you were not there to share the discovery with me.”
She put her face up impulsively, and he leaned forward in the half light and kissed her. Presently she said, “What do you do with gold dust when you’ve got it, Carl? If you can’t tell anybody about it?”
He smiled down at her. “There are several things that you can do with gold dust,” he told her, “but they are all very wicked and if you are discovered you will go to prison. One way is that you can take out a licence to be a prospector for gold. Then you go camping up the river in deserted places, washing the gravel in a little pan to try to find gold. Presently you find it, and come back with it, and sell it to the bank.”
She laughed. “Did you do that?”
“No,” he said. “I thought that it would become complicated if they ask where I had found it.”
“It might,” she agreed. “Well, what did you do?”
“Another way,” he said imperturbably, “is to build a little hut in the middle of the woods where nobody would ever think to go.”
“Like the Howqua,” she laughed softly.
“It could be like the Howqua,” he agreed. “And you must have a friend, a good friend who thinks he has a debt to you, who understands metallurgy and how metals can be melted.”
“Like Harry Peters,” she observed. “I wondered why on earth you took him to the Howqua.”
“It could be like Harry Peters,” he agreed. “And there in the hut you make a little furnace with a cylinder of gas to heat a little crucible, and these things have to be hidden very carefully from Billy Slim.”
“Oh, Carl!”
“And then,” he said, “you bring many candles and you melt the wax, and you carve a bracelet out of candle-wax, or it could be a ring like this ring. And you put the wax bracelet in a pan of soft plaster of Paris and you let the plaster set till it is hard. And then you heat the plaster and the wax melts and runs out of a small hole you make, and so you have a mould in the middle of the plaster where the wax bracelet was. Then you pour in the melted gold and let it cool, and break the plaster away, and there is your bracelet or your ring, made of solid gold.”
She looked up, laughing. “Is that how my ring was made, Carl?”
He pressed her hand. “I made that ring and a hundred and five bracelets, all in four week-ends.”
“A hundred and five bracelets! What on earth did you do with them?”
“It is very tedious,” he said. “You must take one bracelet and go to a jeweller in Melbourne, and to him you say that your Aunt Catherine has died who lived in the goldfields fifty years ago, and you have found this bracelet in her jewel box. And then you ask if he will buy it for the weight of the gold. The proper price is fifteen pounds for each ounce of the weight, but he will only give nine or ten pounds.” He paused. “It is very slow and difficult, because it is not safe to go to more than two or three jewellers in each town. There is a better way, that I discovered very soon.”
“What’s that, Carl?”
He said, “This third way is very simple and very easy. You must wait till a ship from India, with an Indian captain, comes to Melbourne, and you wait until the captain comes on shore. You go then to the captain in the hotel and you say, Can I sell you my gold? In Bombay he can get thirty pounds for each ounce, but he must smuggle it out of Australia and into India.”
“How much did he give you, Carl?”
“Eighteen pounds an ounce.”
“And that’s where the eleven hundred pounds came from?”
He nodded. “I think that it was worth the risk,” he said, “because I wanted to come to England to see you, Jenny, and to be a doctor again.”
“It was worth it, Carl,” she said softly. “We’d better forget all about it now, and
never talk of it again. We don’t want anybody else to get to know about that gold.”
They sat talking together in low tones till half-past nine, not paying the slightest attention to the picture. Then Jennifer stirred and looked at the clock by the screen, and she said, “Let’s go home, Carl. That meeting must be over now, and Daddy will be waiting for us. We’ll go round by the station and pick up your bag. Is it heavy to carry?”
He shook his head. “It is only for the night. I have not many clothes in any case. I must now buy some, but they must be cheap.”
They went out of the theatre; in the vestibule they stopped to do up their coats. She took his arm and they went out into the street; in the darkness the freezing wind hit them with a blast. She felt his sleeve, and said, “Is this the thickest coat you’ve got, Carl?”
“I must get a thicker one,” he said. “I had not thought that England would be cold like this. It is as cold as Germany.”
They bent against the wind and walked quickly, arm in arm, to the London Road station. “Will you tell me one thing truthfully, Carl?”
“If I know the answer, Jenny,” he said.
“Did you really have to come to England, Carl, to do your medical training? Couldn’t you have done it in Australia, possibly?”
He looked down at her, smiling. “What questions you do ask!”
“You said you’d tell me.”
“I could have done it in Australia,” he said. “They grew so tired of seeing me in the office that at last they would have given me whatever I should want. I came to England because I wanted to find you again.”
They turned into the bleak, shabby, covered cabway of the railway station, dimly lit for gas economy. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “It was very sweet of you to do that, Carl. To give up everything Australia has to offer and come back to Europe—after getting away once.” She paused, and looked around her at the stained and dirty brickwork, at the antiquated building, at the wet streets in the blustering, windy night.