Only a few minutes later the corner of the little shack remote from me was smashed by the terrifying impact of a falling tree. And I found that once more danger had brought salvation in its train. In the fallen tree – in this tree, it must have been, among thousands – the wild bees had been building. I was master of many pounds of honey.
I had come from some great solitude to the fringes of settlement; I had only to find the sea once more and continue east to reach safety. And that night when the storm had passed I heard the murmur of the waves. I found the cliffs again no more than a mile away.
Where the great gum trees grew the soil retained no virtue for the nourishment of an undergrowth and the ground was tolerably clear. But when I left the trees behind me I found the scrub growing denser every mile; soon it presented an almost impenetrable barrier that ran to the very edge of the still stretching and unbroken cliff. Below me, between cliffs and sea, ran a narrow valley of sand hills that seemed to promise the possibility of water, and beyond this – save at high tide – there lay once more a highway of firm sand. I resolved to descend by the first practicable route, risking the chance of the cliffs again converging on the sea and forcing a tedious return journey.
I was confident and impatient; at the same time my nerve was wavering and my judgement, I suppose, beginning to fail. I took the first route that offered. It proved exceedingly hazardous; all the way down I had to fight both for foothold and against the premonition of approaching dizziness. And at length – it must have been near the bottom – I fell.
Of what happened after that I have only fragmentary memories. I remember walking without any sense of direction or of a goal along the endless beach. I remember a flock of sandpipers, rising and settling in their oblique and beautiful flight before me – perhaps leading me on when I should otherwise have fallen. I believe I had lost both billy and water-bottle: I remember finding water, retained from the storm, in a natural cistern of limestone rock. Vividly I remember a long nagging debate with myself as to whether I had heard the barking of a dog. And finally I remember lying in the dark and knowing I was in a delirium – knowing this because all round me warm night air was heavy with the scent of carnations.
The boy was bending over me. His face, golden-browned by the sun, had the massive quality, the more than natural concreteness and weight, of a great painting. He laid down the pannikin among the carnations in the little garden won from rock and sand and called out joyfully to someone in the shack beyond: ‘Dad – he’s come round!’
Then again he lifted the pannikin to my lips. ‘
You nearly did a perish that time, mister. But you haven’t run your final yet.’
I must have murmured something about being lost for weeks. His eyes grew round. Then he smiled, and his smile was like a sudden sunlight on a brown highland pool.
‘Yeah? Things do get a bit quiet west of Desperation Bay.’ I think he was ten or eleven; and his voice had all the pride of the pioneer.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet and gazed towards the sea. Then he cried out in an excitement in which I was quite forgotten: ‘Dad, dad – the Anson cutter’s over the bar!’
2
I shall not here write at length of the humanity and eccentricity of Richard Anson. He took me to Port Lincoln and listened on the way to the strangely brief story I had to tell. I was a grown man – of twenty, perhaps, or twenty-one – with no history save one of a fortnight’s wandering by the shore of the Great Australian Bight. I had not as much as a name; and it was as we rounded Cape Catastrophe that Anson took the whim to give me the surname of the first navigator to chart those waters. Thus, in that February of 1893, was Richard Flinders born.
I can see now that Anson believed finding to be keeping; that his plans, in the innocence of subconscious motivation, were directed to keeping me. I had been found on what was then the south-western fringe of settlement in South Australia: from Port Lincoln we sailed to Port Augusta and travelled thence to the largest of the Anson stations in a farther corner of the state; the doctors who attended me were brought – it must have been at great expense – from Sydney on the eastern verge of the continent. Had Ian Guthrie’s disappearance continued a mystery I should certainly, despite my own obstinate loss of memory, have been discovered and identified. But within a few weeks, as I now know, that lonely body had been found stretched beside the ashes of its signal fire, my haversack with its few identifiable belongings lying nearby. All doubt as to the fate of Ian Guthrie ceased; his only existence was at some unavailable level of Richard Flinders’ brain.
In the Anson home and way of life I recognized a tradition not alien to me. The life of the land, the rambling house with its dark surfaces of old furniture, its worn and faded fine fabrics, its shadowy lines of Anson portraits watching the present fleeting generation from the walls: these were things that stirred at my mind more effectively than any psychologist’s technique. Anson was a childless and unmarried man, and I saw a future opening to me that I yet had to reject. I had no wish for the life of a pastoralist; perhaps because of the experience I had been through, more probably because of hidden factors in my early years, I found the immensities of the ranges depressing and at times terrifying. I was absorbed moreover in the mystery of my own clouded mind and this gave rise to an overpowering desire to study medicine. Years later I was to publish, with certain necessary excisions and disguisements,
The generosity of Mr Anson extended not only through my years of undergraduate study at Adelaide but through the long, lean and often fatal period that waits on the young specialist. He made Richard Flinders; and it was partly an impulse of piety, of which I cannot find it in me to be ashamed, that made me decide, when the time came, that Richard Flinders should not die.
It was in my final year. I was walking one spring afternoon from the medical school to my lodgings, which lay some two miles away beyond the park lands that encircle the heart of the little city. A horse-tram drew away from in front of me and I became aware of a little crowd of people standing about a draped pedestal. They were unveiling a statue to some Scottish explorer – it may have been McDougal Stewart – and at the moment that I looked there came a skirl of bagpipes.
I walked for some yards as if in a great darkness and then I saw before me, like the tour de force of an illusionist, the figure of my brother Ranald. I saw him standing on some eminence, gazing over the endless bush. And I heard him recite, with all the dark passion of his thwarted poet’s nature:
‘From the lone shieling on the misty island,
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;
Yet still the blood is strong…’
Voice and picture faded and I walked on with no more knowledge than before. But that night, as I looked out over the city drenched in moonlight in its lovely setting between hills and sea, I found veil after veil slipping from my mind. I knew that I was Ian Guthrie and I knew that, whatever accident had befallen, in the face of that bush fire Ranald had deserted me.
Inquiry revealed that by the death of our elder brother’s children and by my own supposed death Ranald had inherited Erchany. I had always been the rudely healthy member of the family; the indecisions that mark the neurotic personality and which distinguished Ranald are unknown to me; and I remember it took me just two hours to reach my resolve. I was conscious of injury and injustice but did not think that these feelings should weigh with me. I had no desire for the life of a Scottish laird; I was already planning almost in full technical detail the steps of my medical career; I had no confidence in Ranald’s honesty and I saw only vexation and distraction in the possibility of a contested claim. Australia had already given the world the Tichborne Case and I told myself ironically that in it there had been sufficient of that sort of thing for a couple of generations. In addition I had my affection for Mr Anson, who was planning with me my career as an Australian surgeon. And I saw that it must be all or nothing; if I admitted my survival a score of embarrassments would appear and almost force me to claim the headship of my family.
So it was that I came to live out my life as Richard Flinders – mostly in my adopted country but sometimes in England and once for a long period of time in the United States. I have never been the wealthy man that the regular practice of surgery would have made me; most of my own earnings, together with a generous bequest from Richard Anson, have been devoted to the costly business of radium research. I do not know that much of the world’s money
