The Far Country (41 page)

He looked down at her, smiling gently. “I thought that I knew what you were like, what sort of a person you are,” he said. “I now find that I know nothing about you, nothing at all.”

“That’s what I said,” she replied. “But that doesn’t alter the fact that we might have been very happy if we’d married.”

He sat staring down at the river, rippling in the sun over the white stones, holding her in his arms. “I would like to think that we shall meet again before we are too old,” he said. “I know that what you have said is true, and that you are now to go twelve thousand miles away to the other side of the world. Perhaps it is not very likely that we shall see each other again. But I am older than you, Jenny, and I have learned this; that if you want something very badly you can sometimes make it happen. I want very badly to find you again, before we have both forgotten the Howqua valley and each other. May I write to you sometimes?”

She said, “If you do, Carl, I shall be nagging at you all the time about becoming a doctor again.”

“You may do that,” he said quietly. “A doctor in this country could save enough money to get to England.”

They sat almost motionless after that for a long, long time, perhaps a quarter of an hour; they had said all that there was to say. At last she stirred in his arms and sat up, and said,

“You’ll go on building your cabin here just the same, Carl, won’t you?”

He was doubtful. “I am not now sure. It will cost some money even if I get the timber very cheap from Mr. Forrest, and I may need all the money I can save.”

She said, “I think you ought to go on with it, Carl. You’ve got another nine months in the camp, and after that it will be somewhere cheap for you to come for a holiday. Write and tell me how you’re getting on with it, and what it’s like.”

“If I go on with it,” he said, “I shall always hold the memory of you, and of this day when first we found this place of Charlie Zlinter’s.”

She smiled faintly. “Go on with it, then. I wouldn’t like you to forget about me too quickly.”

Presently he asked her, “Before I take you back to Leonora, will you tell me some things about your home, Jenny? So that I can imagine where you are when I shall write to you?”

“Of course, Carl,” she said. “What sort of things?”

“This Leicester,” he said. “You told me once that it was rather ugly. Is it damaged by the war?”

“It didn’t get bombed very much,” she said. “Not like some places. Nobody could call it beautiful, though. It’s an industrial city, mostly boots and shoes. It’s rather ugly, I suppose. I don’t think anyone would choose to live there if they hadn’t got associations, or a job.”

“Is there beautiful country outside the city?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s all just farming country, as flat as a pancake, rather grey and foggy in the winter.”

“Do you live in the city, or outside it?”

She said, “We live in a house about a mile and a half from the centre of the city,” she said, “in a fairly good part, near the university. It’s a suburban street of houses in a row, all rather like the one next-door. It’s not far from the shops. I shall have nothing very interesting to tell you in my letters, Carl, because very interesting things don’t happen to women who keep house in Leicester. But I’ll do my best.”

“One other thing,” he said. “There is so much I ought to know about you, that I do not know. When is your birthday?”

She said laughing, “Oh, Carl! It’s in August, the twenty-fifth. And I’m twenty-four years old, in case you want to know. When is yours?”

“On June the seventeenth,” he said, “and I am thirty-six years old. I am too old for you, Jenny.”

“That’s nonsense,” she said quietly. “We’ve got enough difficulties without that one.” She paused. “There’s so much we ought to know about each other, and so little time to find it out. I can’t even think of all the things that I shall want to know.”

“It will be something to put into the letters from Leicester,” he said. “All the things you want to know about me.”

He stood up, and drew her to her feet. “I am going to take you home now, Jenny,” he said, “back to Leonora. We have said everything there is to say, and you are very tired. Tomorrow you must start and travel for six days across the world. Before we say goodbye, will you promise me two things?”

“If I can,” she said. “What are they?”

“I want you to go straight to bed when you get back to Leonora station and sleep.”

She pressed his hand. “Dear Carl. I’ve got some packing to do, but I think there’ll be time in the morning. Yes, I’ll go to bed. What’s the other one?”

“I want you to remember that I love you very much,” he said.

“I’ll always do that, Carl.”

He left her then, and took the spade and the pick down the hill to return them to Billy Slim; she watched his lean form striding down the hill. She was so tired that she could think of nothing clearly; she only knew that she loved him, and that he was much too thin. She sank down on the grass again and sat there in the dappled sunlight under the great trees, in a stupor of misery and weariness.

When he came back to her he was calm and matter-of-fact; he picked up the basket and the grill, and raised her to her feet. “I am going to take you home now, Jenny,” he said. “You have long travelling ahead of you, and I have very much work. We shall neither of us help ourselves or help each other by mourning over our bad luck.”

She smiled weakly. “Too right, Carl.” And then she said, “I’ve only been three weeks in this country, but I’m getting to speak like an Australian already.”

“We are both of us Australians by our choice,” he said. “Some day we shall be truly Australians, and live here together.”

They walked up the steep rutted track through the woods slowly, hand in hand, not speaking very much; his calm assurance comforted her, and now the years before her did not seem so bleak. They walked steadily, not hurrying, not pausing; at the end of an hour they came to the old Chevrolet utility parked in Jock McDougall’s paddock.

He put the basket in the back of the utility, and turned to her, and took her in his arms. “This is where we have to say good-bye for a little time,” he said. “Perhaps it will not be for very long. We are both young and healthy, and for people as we are twelve thousand miles may not be quite enough to keep us apart. We will not
stay here long, because we have said everything now to each other, and you are very tired. Other things we can say by letters to each other.”

She stood in his arms while they kissed for a minute or two; then he released her, and with no more spoken he put her into the utility, and got in beside her, and drove down the track towards the highway and Leonora station.

They came to the station half an hour later; she got out and opened the three gates; at the end they drove into the yard by the homestead. He stopped the car by the kitchen door. “We will make this very short now,” he said in a low tone. “Good-bye, Jenny.”

She said, “Good-bye, Carl,” and got out of the car, and forced a smile at him, and went into the house. He turned back to the car, expressionless, and took the basket and put it on the edge of the veranda, and got into the car again and drove it into the shed where it belonged. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should go into the house to see the Dormans, and decided against it; he would come in one evening in a few days’ time to thank them for the use of the car, after Jennifer had gone. He took his grill and the measuring tape and the wire pegs from the back of the utility and made for the yard gate. He turned the corner of the house, and Jack Dorman was there, sitting on the edge of the veranda, waiting for him.

He paused, and said, “I have put the Chev back in the shed, Mr. Dorman. It was very kind of you to lend it. I do not think that we shall need to borrow it again.”

“Jenny told you she was going back to England?” The grazier held out his packet of cigarettes; the Czech took one and lit it. “She has told me that,” he said.

“Too bad she’s got to go back after such a short stay in Australia,” Jack Dorman said.

“It is bad luck,” Carl Zlinter said, “but she is doing the right thing, and it is like her to decide the way she has.”

“That’s right,” the grazier agreed.

They smoked in silence for a minute. “What are you going to do yourself,” Jack Dorman asked at last. “Got another nine months in the woods, haven’t you?”

The other nodded. “After that, I will try to be a doctor again. I will go and see Dr. Jennings very soon, I think, and talk to him, and find if it is possible. If I may not be a doctor here, I will try other countries. In Pakistan I could be a doctor now, at once, but I do not want to live in Pakistan. I want to live here.”

“It’ld be quite a good thing to start off with Dr. Jennings,” the grazier said thoughtfully. “He thinks a lot of what you did with those two operations.”

“He was very friendly to me at the inquest,” the Czech said. “I will go and talk to him, for a start.”

The grazier got slowly to his feet. “Come along and see us now and then, and let’s know how you’re going on,” he said. “If you need a car to get around in, there’s the Chev any time.”

Carl Zlinter said, “It is very kind of you, but I would not like to use your car.”

“We’ve got three cars on the station now,” the grazier said, “and I’m getting a fourth, a Land Rover. We shan’t miss the Chev if you take it. If you’re going to be running in and out of town on this doctoring business, you don’t want to be stuck for a car.”

“It would be a great help, certainly.”

“You’d better get yourself a licence,” said Jack Dorman. “There’s no sense in running foul of the police. You can come and take the Chev when you want it.”

Next day, in the afternoon, he drove a white-faced rather silent Jennifer with his wife to Albury to catch the Sydney express, a matter of a hundred miles or so. He said good-bye gruffly to Jennifer at the station and turned his Ford for home. He got back to Banbury by five o’clock, hot and thirsty, and ready for a few beers; he parked under the trees and went into the saloon bar of the Queen’s Head Hotel.

It was full of his grazier neighbours, and old Pat Halloran, and Dr. Jennings. He crossed to the doctor and drank a beer or two with him, slaking the dust from his dry throat. Presently he said, “I had a talk with Splinter yesterday. Seems like he wants to be a doctor again after his time’s up.”

“He came to see me today,” the doctor said. “I told him that I’d write to the secretary of the B.M.A. in Melbourne about him, but I don’t know that I’ll do much good. The Medical Registration Board have made these rules, and that’s all about it.”

“It’s a pity,” said the grazier. “He tells me that he’s going to leave Australia if he can’t be a doctor here. Seems like he can practise in Pakistan on the degrees he got in his own place.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the doctor said drily. He paused, looking at his glass of beer, in thought. “He didn’t tell me that,” he said. “I could put that in my letter, perhaps.”

“How’s the chap with the fractured skull going on?”

“He’s getting on fine. Zlinter took the most appalling risks with him, operating under those conditions. I suppose he couldn’t do anything else. Anyway, the patient’s going on all right. He’s been conscious for some days now, and he seems to be completely normal mentally. I’m going to put that in my letter, of course.”

“We should have a job for a bloke like that,” the grazier said. “It seems all wrong that he should have to go to Pakistan.”

“Well, yes—with reservations,” Jennings said. “He’s probably a very gifted surgeon. That sort of skill seems to be born in people—either you can do it or you can’t, and if you can’t you’d better leave it alone. At the same time, there may be very
big gaps in his knowledge and experience that we don’t know about. There’s only one place to check up on that, and that’s in a teaching hospital.”

“It needn’t take three years, though,” said the grazier.

“Well, perhaps not. I don’t know much about it, Jack. Maybe they make exceptions in a case like this; maybe they don’t. I’m going down to Melbourne in a fortnight’s time, and I’ll look in and see the secretary.”

“I’d like to know how it goes on,” the grazier said. He paused, and took a drink of beer. “There’s another thing,” he said, “and that’s that he hasn’t got any money. I wouldn’t mind helping a bit if that was the only thing.”

The doctor glanced up. “That’s very generous of you.”

“Aw, look,” Jack Dorman said, “you know how it is with wool these days. The wife likes him, and Jenny likes him; he’s right. If everything else was set, I wouldn’t want to see the thing go crook because of the money. Keep that under your hat, though; I haven’t told him, and I don’t intend to for a while.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I told the secretary, though?” the doctor said. “It all helps to build a case up, if one can say that local people are prepared to put up money. It’s another thing.”

“You can tell him that,” the grazier said. “I’ll drop in and talk to him myself if they want any kind of sponsor. But don’t let Zlinter know, so long as you can help it. Much better let him manage it his own way, if he can.”

On Saturday evening, five days later, the doctor posted his letter to the secretary of the British Medical Association. In his overworked routine he had little time for correspondence, and he had little practice in setting out a careful, reasoned letter. He finished a draft on Wednesday; he rewrote it on Friday, and copied it out and posted it on Saturday, feeling that if he worked upon it any longer he would make it worse.

On Saturday evening, Carl Zlinter slept at Billy Slim’s house in the Howqua valley, tired with a day of strenuous work. He had driven out that morning in a truck belonging to the timber company to deposit his load of sawn lumber and a hundred bricks in Jock McDougall’s paddock. From there he had walked down to the forest ranger’s house to borrow a horse and sledge, and he had trudged up and down the hill all day transporting his building materials down to the flat where Charlie Zlinter’s house had been. He had driven himself hard for ten hours, haunted by the memory of Jennifer at each turn of the road, giving himself little time for grief. By nightfall he had got all his stuff down to the site, and he was glad to pack up, and go and grill his steak upon the forest ranger’s fire, and chat with him for a short time before the sleep of sheer exhaustion.