The Far Country (14 page)

She moved towards it, and stood staring at the mass of masonry. This was the sort of thing that Australia would never have to show her, this masterpiece of Wren. If she left England she would be leaving this for ever, and a hundred other beauties of the same kind that the new country could never show her. She stood there thinking of these things, and two devastating little words came into her mind—so what?

She had been taken inside St. Paul’s once as a schoolgirl. She remembered it as the biggest building that she had ever been in, and for that alone. She knew that she was probably foolish and ignorant, because there must be much more to St. Paul’s than that, but she stepped back till she could see the whole bulk in the fleeting moonlight as the swift clouds passed and re-passed. She would be leaving this for ever, and she must be honest with herself about it.

Would she miss it very much? She tried to examine her own feelings, and she said to herself, “Well, there it is. Now am I getting a great thrill out of it?” She had to confess within her own mind that she wasn’t. The enormous, inert mass of masonry meant little to her; there was nothing in those great columns of stone to affect her decision one way or the other.

She turned back towards the West End, rather thoughtful. A bus came rattlingly by and stopped near her; she ran and got on to it, and rode back up Fleet Street. She got off at Charing Cross and
walked on to Trafalgar Square. She stood by St. Martin-in-the-Fields for a time looking round her, at the National Gallery, the Nelson Column, the Admiralty Arch, the long broad way that was Whitehall. Here was the very centre of her country, the very essence of it. Here were the irreplaceable things that she would have to do without if she left England. Surely, that would be unbearable?

She felt that there must be something wrong with her, because she knew that it wouldn’t be unbearable at all. In fact, she didn’t much care if she never saw any of them again.

She had a queer feeling now that she was becoming a stranger in her own country, that she no longer fitted in. She had to consult her parents in Leicester about this matter of the passage, and there was so little time. She thought for a few minutes and then went diffidently into the Charing Cross Hotel and spoke to the girl at the desk, and ordered coffee and biscuits in the writing-room, and sat down to write a letter to her father and mother.

She put the matter very simply to them, and asked them to telegraph her to advise her what to do.

Then she went by Underground to St. Pancras station and posted her letter in the special box upon the platform, so that it would get to them next morning.

She got a telegram from them in answer when she returned from work next day. It read,

“Think you had better go but come home for a few days first our dearest love.

“D
ADDY AND
M
UMMY.”

She sailed a fortnight later for Australia in the
Orion
.

T
HE
man with the crushed fingers got down awkwardly from the cab of the rickety, dust-covered truck into the timber road; his mate climbed over the tailboard and dropped down into the road beside him. He raised a hand to the driver. “Thanks, Jack. We’ll be all right.” The door of the cab slammed to, the engine roared, and the truck moved on, swaying and lurching down the unmetalled road in a great cloud of dust.

The two men stood together at the entrance to the timber camp. The wooden hutments stood in a forest in a valley. A little river ran beyond the buildings and a mountain climbed up steeply beyond that, covered in eucalyptus gum trees, full of brilliantly-coloured parrots. The buildings stood among the trees for shade from the hot Victorian sunlight, blazing down out of a cloudless sky. “This way,” the well man said. “Down here, fourth hut along.”

They turned into the camp; the hand of the injured man was wrapped in a blood-stained rag, and he walked with it thrust into his open shirt as in a sling. He asked, “What’s the bastard’s name?”

“Splinter,” said his mate. “He’ll fix you up.”

“What’s the bastard’s real name?”

“Splinter—that’s all the name he’s got. He’s right, as good as any doctor.”

“Company ought to keep a mucking doctor here,” the injured man said. “They’ve got no mucking right to carry on with just a first-aid box. One day some bastard’s going to cop it proper, and I hope it’s Mr. Mucking Forrest.”

“Hurting bad?”

“Like bloody hell. I’ll go down to the Jig tonight; get mucking well pissed.”

They went into the fourth hut by the door in its end, and into a central corridor of bare, unpainted, rather dirty wood. The uninjured man opened a door at random and said to a man inside, “Say Jack—which is Splinter’s room?”

“Last on the left, down by the wash-room. Someone hurt?”

“Too right. Fred here got his hand under a log.”

“Aw, look—he may be in the canteen. See if he’s in the room—if not, I’ll go find him.”

The two men went down the passage to the last room and opened the door. There was a man inside sitting on the bed reading an old
newspaper, a lean, swarthy, black-haired man about thirty-five years old. He looked up as they entered.

“Aw, Splinter,” said the uninjured man, “this is Fred.” The dark man smiled, and nodded slightly. “He got his hand mucked up.”

The man got up from the bed. “Let me see.” He spoke with a pronounced Central European accent.

The other turned to go. “I’ll get along Fred. You’ll be right.”

The injured man withdrew his hand from his shirt and began to unwrap the bloodstained rags carefully, with fingers that trembled a little. The man called Splinter noted that, and stopped him. “Wait, and sit down—on the bed.” He switched on the current to a china electric jug and dropped a few instruments into it to boil. Then he rolled up his sleeves and took a white enamelled bowl and a bottle of disinfectant from the cupboard and went out to the bathroom; he came back with his hands washed and sterile and with warm water in the bowl. He moved the bare wooden table to a convenient position in front of the man and waited till the water in the jug boiled, opening a packet of lint while he waited, and adding a little disinfectant to the water in the bowl. Then he sat down facing his patient with the table between them, arranged the hand in a relaxed position, and began his work.

Presently, “This is a bad injury,” he said softly. “It must hurt you a great deal. Now, let me see if it possible that you can move the fingers. Just bend a little, to show that you can move them. This one … so. And now this one … so. And this one … so. That is good. It hurts very much now, but a fortnight’s holiday and it will soon be well.”

“Cripes,” said the man, “is it going to hurt like this a mucking fortnight?”

“It will not hurt when I have done with it,” the dark man said. “Not unless you make a hit—unless you hit it. You must wear it in a sling till it is well, and keep it carefully. I must now hurt you a little more. Will you like whisky?”

“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.