The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  She could still remember, however, very vividly the swing round when she had got her right foot pushed in between the ropes over the first knot. Her body had thumped against the wall and her right leg had shot out. It was the first time she had tried to climb back. It had taken her an age to conquer eight feet; she had destroyed her shoes and her gloves completely, and had lain in Elizabeth’s arms sweating and exhausted.

  Never again! she had vowed. She could even remember how she had said her prayers that night! For days she had been painfully muscle-bound.

  Next time Elizabeth dropped down the torn shoes and the patched gloves to her before she started the climb.

  It was the third time that she got caught.

  The humiliation was so absolute that she remained cool. For the girls, this was drama’s master climax. She had the air of wearing her clothes on a special social occasion when one must be very correct. She had overheard an amusing conversation between two girls. One said in a somewhat awed voice: ‘Whoever would have believed it was in her?’ And the other replied: ‘I always told you these Highland girls may look simple, but they’re deep.’

  During the days that followed, her brain would not work. She was kept under observation and denied class work while ‘her case was being considered’. There was nothing for her brain to work on. She simply had to wait. So she waited.

  Then she was called to the Principal’s room – and left with her father. That night they travelled north by train. That nightmare journey, all through the night.

  She never heard from Charlie. She got it from her mother in time that he had gone to South Africa.

  Over a year ago he had come back. Her mother had died. Her father had spoken to her in a way that left no doubt as to what he expected from her. There had been a hidden and terrible menace in his attitude to Charlie. Charlie’s denial of religion had something to do with it – but not all. It began in that region of denial. But there wasn’t any kind of words for it. It was like blasphemy and horror, and the figures of the night to which they give birth.

  She could understand it in a way, too. Charlie had betrayed everything on earth and in heaven her father stood for. And he had betrayed it in a vile and ungenerous way. So much had been made clear to her in the Principal’s room, for her father had seemingly made inquiries about Charlie before coming for her. And then Charlie had stepped beyond his own soul’s betrayal to betray his benefactor’s flesh and blood. There had been something dark in her father, full of flesh and blood, when he had said that. This was what went beyond religion and all things of the mind.

  Charlie, so far as she knew, had made no effort to see her since he came back. And she, of course, had made no effort to see him. There was a sense in which their love was like something that had happened long ago, and happened so terribly, that it had been completed, and could no more be stirred from its long brown grave.

  Fraoch began yelping down in the hollow. He was tearing at a burrow. Her eyes rested on him incuriously, then lifted to the infinite regions of the west where colour heaped its living waves over the sinking sun.

  The silence touched her heart.

  Then, oh then, the silence became a footfall on her heart.

  The breath heaved in her breast. She was stifled. She could not move. But her head, as in a story, turned slowly over her left shoulder, and there, coming down the path towards her, was Charlie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Charlie had not far to come before he reached her. He wore a new grey mackintosh, a new tweed cap, and carried in his right hand a strapped gladstone bag.

  Flora could not turn away. She could have turned away to call the dog, but it did not occur to her. Thought and movement were arrested outside her head and she stood in a kind of trance that was like an unbreathed breath falling infinitely slowly towards the ground.

  On Charlie’s face the smile was at once awkward and strangely bitter. He did not lift his cap: he touched it in what seemed a slow ironic salute. He stopped some three paces from her and said in a simple voice: ‘Well, Flora?’

  She turned her head away but still could not call to Fraoch.

  ‘After the rabbits, is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. Then suddenly released, she called,

  ‘Fraoch! Fraoch!’ But the gutturals went harsh in her throat, and the name sounded ugly and meaningless.

  ‘Why grudge him his bit of sport?’ But she could not turn her face round. The only thing to do was go down for the dog. She could not call again.

  ‘Leave him,’ suggested Charlie.

  ‘Excuse me, I’ll go for him,’ she said over her shoulder and started off.

  ‘Flora!’

  His calling of her name stopped her. She looked round. Against an immense compulsion to walk slowly back to him, she held to her course moving sideways a step and stumbling. Internally she was now in a complete wild tumult.

  Fraoch, dodging to the other end of the rabbit burrow, saw her coming. But he went to the end and stuck his head in. Realizing that there could be no immediate issue to this quest, he backed out and began to circle away, exhibiting all the usual signs of laughing guilt. She spoke random words of blame. His body performed the propitiatory rites while keeping at a safe distance. Then she turned and began walking back. Charlie was waiting. She went straight, if slowly, towards him.

  The exercise and tumult had heightened her colour. She saw the acknowledgment in Charlie’s eyes. His smile was paler, and caught in its faint lines was a troubling of bitterness that was like guilt. She was afraid of its hardness. He laid down the gladstone bag.

  ‘Well, and how are you, Flora?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’

  ‘A long time since we’ve met, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She kept her head up, though she did not now look at him.

  ‘We always were so very polite,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

  She did not answer.

  ‘You have nothing to say to that?’

  She had nothing to say.

  ‘You don’t seem to have changed much – except that you have grown more beautiful. Have you changed?’

  She could not face up to the mockery, with the awful denied warmth in it. The tribute to her beauty stole about her in an unbearable way.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  Swiftly she looked straight at him, searching for the accusation.

  ‘Nothing,’ she answered.

  ‘Quite sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, looking away.

  It moved him instantly, in the old way. She had nothing to say to words, but whenever the heart of meaning was touched she responded at once. It was as if in these last few words they had carried out a long explicit conversation about the dead seaman and Charlie’s alleged guilt. It was extraordinarily delicate and enlivening. His breathing came a little faster.

  ‘You never got a long letter I wrote you from South Africa?’ Her face came full upon him.‘No.’

  ‘I sometimes wondered.’

  ‘No, I never got it,’ she said. And she looked at his features as if they might tell her why she never got it.

  He turned his eyes to the west. ‘It must have got sunk – somewhere, I suppose.’

  ‘Where?’

  He looked at her. ‘How do I know?’ Then he added: ‘Perhaps it was as well.’

  ‘Do you mean – it got sunk at sea?’

  ‘Do you think that’s what I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured, and her eyes looked into a nearer thought, a nearer cause for the letter not having been delivered to her.

  ‘It was perhaps just as well,’ he repeated. But she was not interested in this remark. She was interested in the letter, the concrete letter. For she knew that the letter would have told her something she would never now find out. Besides, it was her letter.

  He laughed softly. ‘Flora. The same Flora.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, referring now to his repeated remark about
its being just as well, as if she had just reached it. She did not want to ask the question, but the way he repeated her name was still more difficult to bear.

  ‘Why?… Well – it gave so much away… that could come to nothing. When we were in Edinburgh, I could always see you. During the whole time, I could always see you. You were there.’

  They stood for a little in complete silence.

  ‘I don’t know that I ever told you the real truth either,’ he said.

  She looked at him. He smiled in the same dry way. ‘Truth about my religious doubts and all that,’ he said. ‘Not about anything else. There’s an odd thing about us – I’ve had plenty of time to think this out – odd thing about us, who really belong to the Highlands. We’re only moved really by personal things, personal relationships.’

  The words helped her to get used to his presence. Both their bodies could gather a certain ease behind the screen. The personal… personal… how well she knew!

  ‘It was that lecturer, Tommy Agnew,’ he said.‘I could never explain to you how much he meant, how he worried me. I must have spoken of him often, but you did not understand.’

  ‘I did.’ As she uttered them the words were somehow strangely out of character.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ he answered.

  She was silent.

  ‘I think he spotted that I saw he had his own doubts. For that reason he pursued me. A queer state of mind it bred in me. It worked like a poison. It obsessed me far more than anything else – far more than you. I could not sleep because of the arguments that twisted in my mind. It was not – I saw this clearly afterwards – it was not finally the doubts about religion. Most young fellows have doubts. But there are books that answer doubts. Make arguments about them anyway. It was when the doubts took on a human shape – like Tommy Agnew. Then they grew terribly real. It was Tommy Agnew who pursued you – and whom you pursued. He was the sheep-worrier.’

  They were amazing words to be speaking there at that moment. They were like words in an old rite. And Tommy Agnew had not been in life quite as he drew him now. There had been another element, an element of sympathy, in which there had been an understanding, but an understanding which could never be admitted, so that the sympathy was like a strange and fatal bait.

  And besides, Tommy Agnew may have been making himself a test, taking on the guise of the concealed doubter to find out whether the capacity for religious experience was innately in the student. Or he may have been doing this to justify himself to himself in that far region of the imagination which nihilism haunts. It was in that region the conflict took place.

  But the mind had simplified all that in the long processes of time, and Tommy Agnew was now the human symbol of the sheep-worrying dog.

  ‘It took me a long time to see that,’ he said. ‘It was as if I had to go away in order to look back and see everything moving in its own place.’

  They could not sit down. If they sat down, words would stop and their bodies be more awkward than the bodies of strangers. She was looking away very far toward the south. Every second her face became more known to him.

  ‘It was when I looked back like that that I saw you. Tommy Agnew now had no size. He was like a little thin black dog slipping away into the dark. He was of no interest to me at all and I wondered at the great trouble he had raised, that black fever.’

  ‘I always hated him,’ she said.

  He nearly laughed outright. ‘A voice like yours could never hate anything,’ he said with dry detachment. ‘Never. It was things like that I saw.’

  ‘I always hated when you were going to talk about him,’ she corrected herself, for she had never seen the lecturer.

  He looked at her side face. ‘Did you?’ he asked, with understanding.

  She did not answer.

  ‘I suppose if you felt it enough, it would choke you against saying anything?’

  She glanced at him swiftly and saw the speculative smile on his face. She stirred on her feet, because of the awful something with its pallor behind the smile.

  ‘I was just so taken up with myself and the grand drama I was going through,’ he said with easy mockery. ‘But when I looked back, I saw you. You were the only real figure in that drama. But I thought perhaps you’ll fade a bit too, given time. You didn’t. You only grew more real. So in the end I wrote you.’

  She stirred again.

  ‘Would you like to sit down?’ he asked reasonably.

  This ease in his voice was terrible to her.

  ‘That’s really all I wanted to say to you,’ he added, as if to end the burden ‘I wanted you to know that you were more real to me than anything else. I felt you were due that. I may have been thoughtless, but – you had all of me.’

  She suddenly looked at him with her full face. There was pain in her face, a silent cry for forbearance. He saw the hurt intimate light in her eyes. But he knew, too, that this was Flora’s face, and in it that which had cried across space and haunted the long valley of time.

  As he took the two steps towards her, he already saw her giving way. As his arms went round her, her weight fell forward, her face turned from him. He held her there firmly and still, without stirring, without movement of the mind, as though time, after its long journey, had gone to sleep.

  The tide ebbs and turns. The first stirrings come with a tenderness. Her head moved, bringing the forehead against his shoulder. Her whole body firmed, and he knew she was going to lean back from him, and lift her face with all the courage she had and say what she had to say to him.

  Her face came clear, all colour and light – and in an instant the colour drained and the light went out.

  He turned his own head to follow her appalled gaze. Coming down towards them, tall in his dark clothes, was her father.

  A wild gust of fighting life tore through Charlie. ‘Flora,’ he said, ‘you’ll meet me here – tomorrow night.’ He was like a man getting ready to fight.

  She broke away and began walking homewards. She went towards her father and passed him.

  The minister stood looking down towards Charlie. Their faces stared, one at the other, then the minister turned and followed his daughter. A thin darkening wind came from the sunken sun.

  ‘God damn you!’ muttered Charlie, deep in his throat. As he took a stride after the minister, he staggered.

  Fraoch went shooting past him. When they had disappeared, Charlie gazed about him, at the gladstone bag, at his own hands, and sat down.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That same sunset also attracted Mr. Gwynn as he walked upon the high road.

  Near the manse he saluted the doctor, who was on his way to Cruime. The doctor stopped his motor-cycle and acknowledged remarks about the evening colour. Mr. Gwynn was on his way back to Ros Lodge, after an expedition into the forest that had taken him a little farther than he had meant to go.

  ‘Don’t you know the short cut down here?’ asked the doctor.

  Mr. Gwynn didn’t, and in no time the doctor had his machine on its stand and was conducting the politely protesting Mr. Gwynn through the lower trees of the manse plantation and onto a path that ran directly down towards a small gorge, from which it issued upon the pines that sheltered the Lodge.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am glad to have this chance of a few words with you,’ Mr. Gwynn admitted as they walked along.

  An odd thought struck the doctor’s mind. It was that Mr. Gwynn stood the daylight better than he had expected. The dark-green felt hat was well down on the head; the light overcoat and muffler were comfortable without being hot. There was fresh air about him and even a suggestion of adventure. Though he had perhaps over-walked himself, his eyes were bright and alive.

  ‘It’s about Michael,’ continued Mr. Gwynn. ‘I won’t excuse myself for mentioning it, because I was so relieved at finding the friendly relations between you. I think the photographic business was a stroke of genius.’

  ‘I hope you’re not implying I’m due any credit for that.’ />
  ‘No. Not altogether. Let us call it a stroke of chance or fortune.’ He gave the doctor a glance. ‘I suppose a good doctor may not always be aware of – of—’ he hesitated and made a slight gesture, ‘even of how his own mind may work at certain critical moments.’

  The doctor smiled.

  ‘You were not to know,’ continued Mr. Gwynn,‘that Michael was really interested in the stage, in theatrical production – in, of course, a very highbrow super-realist way!’

  ‘Did he ever do anything at it?’ asked the doctor.

  Mr. Gwynn appreciated the question. ‘You would not expect him to?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the doctor.‘I would.’

  ‘Good!’ said Mr. Gwynn and he laughed pleasantly.

  ‘That is very good. The only trouble is, of course, the lack of theatres and audiences for that sort of stuff. Naturally. Not to mention money.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the doctor thoughtfully.

  ‘So it develops into – well, I mean when that kind of thing is frustrated in a group – you follow?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said the doctor.

  ‘But you have studied psychology?’

  ‘In the sense of psychiatry, no.’

  ‘Please don’t think I have either,’ said Mr. Gwynn, in his frank way. ‘But you can appreciate generally what might take place, how minds of a certain kind, denied an outlet, might express themselves by turning what is called normal healthy living into a somewhat shocking process, deliberately shocking?’

  ‘Yes – generally. But without the practical detail, it is not always easy to get the picture.’

  ‘He never told you anything?’

  ‘An odd detail, perhaps, that slipped out.’

  ‘You never encouraged him to—?’

  ‘No,’ said the doctor at once.

  Mr. Gwynn looked at him. ‘Why?’