The Far Country (29 page)

Pat Halloran turned bellicose. He checked in the passage; he was still a powerful man, and brought them to a standstill. “What was that you would be saying? Who was Charlie Zlinter? Haven’t I heard with my own ears you two talking all the while of Charlie Zlinter? Is it a fool that ye’d be making of me, just because I’m having drink taken? Will ye fight me, now?”

“Nobody’s making a fool of you, Pat, and I won’t fight you,” said the grazier. “Come on—let’s find the jinker. Tell us about Charlie Zlinter when you knew him, and I’ll tell you what I know about him, and there’ll be a pair of us. What did Charlie Zlinter do?”

“He got bloody drunk,” the old man said. “I got bloody drunk. You got bloody drunk. Sure, we’re all bloody drunk.”

They came into the stable yard and there was the jinker, the horse patiently waiting to take his master home. Jim Forrest untied the reins from the tethering ring, tried the girth, and looked the harness over while Jack Dorman steadied the old man. “She’s right,” he said.

The grazier said, “The jinker’s right, Pat. Can you get up in it?”

The old man grabbed the splashboard and the seat-rail, put one foot upon the step, and swung himself up into the seat, the habit of fifty years undefeated by alcohol. He took the reins, and lifted the whip from the socket. “I’ll be right, boys,” he said. “Sure, an’ I’ll be wishing you a very good evening.” Now that he was in his vehicle he seemed to be at home, indeed, he looked almost sober.

The grazier stood for a moment at the wheel, looking up at the old man. “What else did Charlie Zlinter do, Pat, besides getting drunk?”

The old man stared down at him. “Charlie Zlinter …” And then he stood up in the jinker and recited, with dramatic flourishes of the whip that made the grazier retreat hurriedly,

He touched the horse skilfully with the whip and drove out of the yard; the grazier was left facing Jim Forrest, who was laughing. “What the hell was all that about, Jack?”

The grazier scratched his head. “Charlie Zlinter,” he replied. “But I reckon it’s a different Charlie Zlinter to the one we know.”

C
ARL
Z
LINTER
arrived in Banbury at about nine o’clock on Saturday morning, riding in the back of a utility that had picked him up upon the road. In that sparsely-populated district where trucks and utilities were the normal transport it was not difficult to get a ride into town in something or other; he had never had to walk more than half an hour in the direction of the town without getting picked up. He had not breakfasted, and he went and had it in a café, bacon and two eggs and coffee. They gave him a Melbourne paper two days old to read, and he sat smoking a cigarette after it, enjoying the leisure.

When he paid his bill, he said to the girl who had served him, “Do you know a family called Shulkin? They are New Australian. The man works on the railway.”

She looked at him blankly; she came of a family of Australians that had been casual labourers for generation after generation, bad stock and mentally subnormal. She and her family were bitterly hostile to all immigrants, especially the European ones who worked too hard and were guilty of the social crime of saving money, thereby threatening the Australian Way of Life. “Never heard of them,” she said scornfully.

He looked at her with clinical interest as he paid his bill, wondering if she were tubercular; in spite of his decision to abandon medicine he could not rid himself of interest in symptoms. A Wasserman test would be interesting, and probably positive. He smiled at her, and went out and walked down the long, wide tree-lined avenue of the main street towards the railway station.

The booking office was closed because upon this single-track line there were only two trains a day, but the stationmaster lived beside the station in a weatherboard house, and he asked there for Mr. Shulkin. The stationmaster said, “Aw, look, Stan Shulkin, he’s not working today. There’s a green-painted shack, the third house down this road, with an old railway coach they use for sleeping in alongside. You’ll find Stan there, unless he’s in the town.”

He found the shack and railway coach, a poor sort of habitation. There was a man digging in the garden, a man of about forty-five or fifty, with black hair going bald on top. Behind the railway coach he saw a fresh-faced woman with a dumpy, peasant figure hanging out some washing, and there were a couple of children playing in the background. He opened the gate and went in, and spoke to the man. “Are you Stan Shulkin?”

The man straightened up, and said with an equally marked accent, “I am Stanislaus Shulkin.”

The Czech said in German, “My name is Carl Zlinter, and I work in the timber camp at Lamirra. Do you prefer to speak English?”

“Always,” the man said. “Always I speak English. It is better for the children. The wife, she speaks it very bad. She does not try.”

Carl Zlinter said, “You must excuse, but I have heard that you can paint very good pictures.”

The man smiled shyly across his broad face. “I paint pictures only now one or two each year,” he said. “There is not time and people here do not want pictures. When I came first to this place three years ago, I said, Now I will paint pictures and we shall make much money. But it did not happen in that way. Now I paint only a little.”

“You work upon the railway?”

“In the platelaying gang. It is very hard work, and not good for the hands, for painting. I do not think that I shall paint many more pictures.”

“You are Esthonian?”

“Lithuanian,” the man said. “I am from Kaunas.”

“I am from Pilsen,” Zlinter said. “In my country I was a doctor, but now I am a labourer.” The man nodded in comprehension. “I have friends who want a picture. They are not artistic, but they have much land and plenty of money. They are more educated than some, and they have bought all the motor-cars that they can use, and now they want an oil painting.”

“So?” said the Lithuanian. “I would have thought it would have been a radio or a washing machine.”

“They will have those also,” said Zlinter, “but the woman wants an oil painting. She has seen exhibitions of ugly pictures in Melbourne, and those she does not want. She is simple, and she wants a beautiful picture that will give pleasure to those who do not understand about pictures. There is a man called Spiegel in the camp who told me you can paint such pictures.”

“I can paint such pictures,” Shulkin said. “I can paint any sort of picture.”

“May I see?”

Shulkin led the way into the railway coach. It had been an open coach without compartments at one time; now it had been roughly converted into three rooms with match-boarding partitions. Much of the seating still remained unchanged, and each of the three rooms still had two doors upon each side. The end room that they went into was furnished with a bed, an easel, and a great litter of old canvases and frames stacked along one side. “I buy old canvases and frames at the sale,” the artist said. “It is cheaper so.”

He pulled out a canvas from the heap, a beautifully executed still life of two herrings on a plate, a loaf of bread, a pat of butter, and a glass of beer, laid out in strong light on a soiled table-cloth with
a dark background. “This I did in the camp. I call it, Lithuanian Fisherman’s Breakfast.”

He plucked another canvas from the heap and set it on the easel in place of the still life. “This—a portrait of my mother.” The stern old face glowered at them from the canvas, a powerful picture finely executed. He whisked it away, and planted another canvas on the easel. “This, the Delatite River.”

It was a bright river scene with a fine blue sky and white clouds, and a riot of golden wattles on the bank, making a delicate harmony of colour. “So …” said Carl Zlinter. “This you should show her. The others, they are beautiful in a different way, but this, or something like this, is what she wants.”

“I can paint anything she wants,” the artist remarked, “but usually they cannot say.”

The Czech stood back, and looked critically at the river scene. “I do not know pictures,” he said at last. “But I would think that this is very good.” He paused. “You must have had a great deal of experience.”

“I studied in Paris and in Rome,” the platelayer replied. “I was Professor of Artistic Studies in the University of Kaunas.”

There did not seem to be anything to say to that. Zlinter stayed a little while and had a cup of tea. “I will tell Mrs. Dorman about you,” he said. “If she wants a beautiful picture, she does not need to go to Melbourne for it. She can find it here, in Banbury. I will tell her this evening.”

He went off presently, and caught a bus out on the Benalla road. Twenty minutes later he was walking up to the Halloran homestead. A small girl came to the kitchen door and he asked for Mr. Pat Halloran. She turned and called into the house, “Ma, there’s a fella asking for grandpa.”

“In the wood shed.”

“He’s in the wood shed,” she said. “Round there.”

In the wood shed Zlinter found a red-haired old man splitting sawn logs with a sledge-hammer and wedges, doing the work with the skill of a lifetime rather than with any great muscular effort. “Please,” he said. “May I speak to you?”

The old man rested on his sledge. “An’ who might you be?”

“My name is Zlinter, Charlie Zlinter,” the Czech said. “I work in the timber camp, up at Lamirra.”

“Sure, an’ you
can’t
be Charlie Zlinter. Charlie Zlinter’s dead these fifty years.”

“I am another one with the same name. I am trying to find out about the one who died.”

“An’ what made you come here, may I ask?”

“Mr. Jack Dorman, he said you were talking about Charlie Zlinter in the Queen’s Head, on Thursday.”

“Who’s this Jack Dorman? Jack Dorman at Leonora? Sure, an’ I haven’t set eyes on the man these last six months.”

“Perhaps you do not remember,” the Czech said diplomatically. “He helped you up into the jinker on Thursday.”

“Would that be so! Well, Glory be to God, I didn’t know a thing about it! Would you believe that, now?”

He evaded the rhetorical question. “Jack Dorman said that you were speaking of this Charlie Zlinter. I have seen the grave.”

“Ye have not. Charlie Zlinter was buried in the Howqua, and the fire went through. There’s nothing left there now.”

“The headstones are left,” the other said. “They are stone, and so they did not burn. The headstones are there now, all of them, in the forest by the river, where there was the cemetery.”

“Do ye tell me that!”

He had gained the old man’s interest, and he held it while he explained the position to him. “This Charlie Zlinter, he was from Pilsen in Bohemia,” he said at last. “That is on the stone. I am another Charlie Zlinter, also from Pilsen in Bohemia. I am trying to find out what I can about him.”

The old man leaned on his sledge. “He was a bullocky,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t be able to say at this distance of time if he worked for himself or if he worked for Murphy. He drove a wagon with a team of bullocks, six bullocks, or eight would it have been? Holy Saints above, I’m losing all my memory. I couldn’t say at all if it was six or eight. I was just a bit of a boy myself. I came out to this country in 1895 while the old Queen was on the throne, God rest her soul. I worked two years in the stables for Jim Pratt that had the Queen’s Head in those days, and then I joined the police. There was work for a policeman in this country then.”

“Do you remember Charlie Zlinter?” the Czech asked.

“Sure, I do that. He was a German and he drove a bullock team in and out of the Howqua, from the railway here to Howqua and back again. There wasn’t a fine broad highway then, with the motorcars all racing along at sixty miles an hour. There wasn’t hair nor hide of a made road at all, at all. Bullocks were the only teams to get a wagon up over the spur and down into the Howqua, passengers and machinery and food and drink and everything, all went by bullock team. Will ye believe what I tell you, the bullock drivers were the boys that made the money! The miners, they never did much in the Howqua, and in the end the company went broke. What gold there was went into the pockets of the bullock drivers. Not a breath of it did the shareholders ever see.”

“What was Charlie Zlinter like?”

“Ah, he was a fine, big fellow with dark curly hair, and he spoke English in the way you speak it. He was one for the booze, and he was one for the girls, Holy Saints above! He had a cabin in the town at Howqua, for he went there as a miner first of all, and then he had the wit to see he’d make more money with a wagon and a team. By the Mother of God, I’d think shame to repeat all that went on in
that cabin. He was a big, lusty man, and drink and women were his downfall. That’s the truth I’m telling you.”

He paused. “Drink and women, drink and women,” he said. “It’s a sad, sad thing.” He shot a humorous glance at Zlinter. “He used to drive in here the one day and back the next, twenty-two miles each day; he’d come in here the one evening and then he’d be away up to the Howqua the next day. Ten hours or so it might take him, and he had two teams, one resting and one working. He used to come to the Queen’s Head Hotel, and hobble the bullocks on the green outside and feed them hay, and then he’d come into the hotel and get drunk, and he’d sleep in the wagon and away off out of it next morning, back to the Howqua. And as like as not there’d be a young girl going to the Howqua for a barmaid in Peter Slim’s hotel, a girl no better than she should be, or she wouldn’t be going to the Howqua …” He thought for a minute. “They were fine, noble days, those times, when we were all young.”

“What did he die of?”

“Drink and drowning,” the old man said, “drink and drowning, and his dog with him, only the dog wasn’t drunk, though it might have been at that, the company it kept. It was August, and the river was running full with the melting snows. There was a girl living in the Howqua by the name of Mary Nolan, oh, a wicked girl, I’d think shame to tell you all that that girl did, and she so soft and well spoken, and pretty, too. She lodged on the other side of the river from the Buller Arms Hotel that Peter Slim kept, Billy’s father, him that’s the forest ranger in the Howqua now. And Charlie Zlinter, he stayed in the hotel till close on midnight, and then he made to go across the river to see this girl. Well, most parts of the year ye’d cross the Howqua and never wet your feet by stepping on the stones, but in August and September, with the melting of the snows on the high mountains, it runs five or six feet deep. There was a cable bridge, a bridge of two wire ropes with planks across the way you’d walk on them, and a third one to hold on to, and Charlie Zlinter, drunk the way he was, must go across this bridge to see this girl. Ye’d think, now, for a man as drunk as Charlie to go on a bridge like that at midnight would have been enough, but he must take the dog with him. He had this heeler dog he kept for rounding up the bullocks and to guard the wagon when he was in Banbury, and he must take it with him over the river. And when he came up to the bridge the dog wouldn’t go upon it, and so Charlie picked it up in his arms and started off across the bridge in the dark night, with the dog in his arms and the bridge swaying and going up and down with every step he took, and he as drunk as a lord. And that was the end of it.”