The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  ‘You think so?’ asked Mr. Gwynn. ‘Purely the gratification of the will to power?’

  ‘On the whole, I’d say yes.’

  ‘Seems a bit obvious or easy?’

  ‘But why should truth necessarily be difficult or obscure?’

  ‘Outside arithmetic, it generally is. That’s the trouble. It’s a very old question: What is truth?’

  The doctor smiled also.

  ‘You say,’ continued Mr. Gwyn , ‘that a doctor wants to hang on to power. Does he?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ answered the doctor. ‘He is completely intolerant of the interference of old wives. He does his best to prohibit all sorts of practices which he considers inimical to general health. He does so because he believes his health system is the best. In the same way the minister believes that he knows the only path to heaven.’

  ‘Afraid I’ve merely introduced a red herring.’ Mr. Gwynn shrugged apologetically. ‘I agree with you, of course, in a superficial way. But it must go deeper than that. Much deeper.’

  The doctor remained silent. Michael eyed him. ‘You are,’ said Michael, ‘Highland and damned perverse.’ Then he laughed, as if, all the same, he enjoyed the perversity.

  ’I don’t see it,’ said the doctor, his expression apparently quite frank.

  ‘Perhaps we are a bit obscure,’ admitted Mr. Gwynn thoughtfully. ‘Michael and I have been on this topic, and once you’ve been on a topic it’s not always easy to go back clearly to the beginning. To show you how sincerely interested we are, let me put it like this.’ Mr. Gwynn paused and looked directly at the doctor. ‘Are you really interested?’

  ‘I am,’ replied the doctor.‘You must understand that I have not much opportunity of discussion with – with—’

  ‘With your intellectual equals,’ concluded Michael, getting up to fill the glasses. He glanced at the clock on the mantel-piece.

  ‘It’s an enormous subject,’ said Mr. Gwynn, ‘and you might naturally be sceptical of our interest in it. Perhaps you won’t be altogether if I tell you that I’m interested in a certain manifestation of modern painting sometimes called “primitive”. I am at present digging into this. Trying to get at the root of it. I was even unfortunate enough to have stayed in last night in order to jot down some notes, and so missed Michael’s remarkable experience – or hallucination! For Michael’s interest is creative, as you will have gathered, against my mere metaphysical or analytical interest. Now you mentioned the word totemistic. At once I was enormously expectant – and correspondingly disappointed when you switched to the simple commonplace of will-to-power. For in that early tribal or primitive state of society, with its totems and magic, life was completely integrated. It was completely integrated because it was lived within a dispensation that was magical, that is, imaginative. The signs and symbols, the totems, had power in that weird absolute way which we very occasionally experience in the work of our highest artists or poets to-day. The magic casements opening… on the light that never was on land or sea, if I may mix my poets. That kind of thing, in the sense that its nature was – and is – absolute. Am I making sense at all?’

  ‘Please go on,’ said the doctor.

  Mr. Gwynn hesitated. ‘I hardly know where to go first. If I were to follow these painter fellows, for example, I might find them hunting back to the primitive, not simply to start a new craze, or do something“different”, but to discover again that integration, that magical wholeness, which the modern world has so completely split, if not destroyed. There is thus about it at once an air of frustration and of re-creation. It is rather a profound entanglement and on its elucidation, in my view, depends nothing less than humanity’s future health of body and mind. That, I suppose you will agree, is a rather tall subject!’ The doctor smiled back. ‘I do.’

  ‘Yes?’ prompted Mr. Gwynn as the doctor hesitated.

  ‘This equating of art or poetry with the primitive – surely that’s going a bit far? I do not quite get your Shakespeare as a primitive.’

  ‘Naturally. He wasn’t. No modern person can be – though I’m beginning to think that there are persons in remote places – and perhaps in slums, not to mention certain high-art circles – who may be nearer it than others! What Shakespeare did do, possibly, apart from his magic which made him the supreme poet he was, was pose the whole question of the split mind in Hamlet and leave a host of followers, among whom a fellow like Dostoevsky stands out, to carry on the business. But that’s away near the end of my argument. Are you really troubled at the moment by my seeming to leave out the intellect, logic, scientific knowledge?’

  ‘Afraid I was,’ admitted the doctor.

  ‘Naturally, because in your profession you must come across any number of half-mad minds!’

  ‘Plus the one he has added to his collection from this house,’ said Michael. ‘And that was before you came, Gwynn. Words, words, words. By God, Shakespeare had it all!’

  ‘But not before he had used a few words himself,’ replied Mr. Gwynn. ‘To proceed. What I am trying to do is to show you a groping attempt at using the scientific method in this very elusive business. Let me illustrate with a homely example. Erchie, who attends to the outside affairs of this house, was waiting for me the day before yesterday to take me out to the Stormy Petrel. I took the oars and was turning the dinghy round when Erchie, who is a quiet man, all but yelled. I thought he had put his foot through her bottom. All that had happened was that I was turning her round against the sun, turning her widdershins, instead of turning her with the sun, what he called jeeshil – or so it sounded.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘That superstition is still alive.’

  ‘Now listen, doctor,’ said Mr. Gwynn. ‘I don’t mind what you call it, superstition or anything else. What interests me is not the label but Erchie’s state of mind. The conclusion I came to was this. And it is here you can definitely tell me whether I’m right or wrong. Had I continued turning her widdershins and gone on, then for the whole of our subsequent trip Erchie’s mind would have been ragged and he would have been, let us say, half-expecting something calamitous to happen. Whereas when I obeyed him, by turning jeeshil, his mind was set at rest, that is, he was whole within himself, properly integrated. Right or wrong?’

  ‘Perfectly right,’ said the doctor.

  ‘And what would have happened,’ asked Michael, ‘if we had run upon calamity after turning jeeshil. How do you spell that blessed word?’

  ‘D-e-i-s-e-i-l,’ spelled the doctor, ‘but your pronunciation is good.’

  Michael laughed as though he had expected a spelling oddity, and swept his eyes across the clock. ‘What would have happened, Gwynn?’

  ‘It would not, so to speak, have mattered then. For, of course, in any primitive society they have their logic of practical happenings. This coexists with the integral imaginative. Nothing would have overtly happened to raise a condition of conflict in the mind.’

  ‘Is it your contention,’ asked the doctor,‘that the minister is pulling the boat widdershins?’

  Mr. Gwynn looked at him steadily for a few seconds. ‘If I thought you were getting the full implications of that, I should not spoil so marvellous a picture by adding a single stroke.’

  The doctor automatically put his hand in his pocket, but Michael abruptly shoved the cigarette box across the small table. ‘Thanks,’ said the doctor, and then began tapping his cigarette with an air of reserve. ‘I shouldn’t go so far as that. And in any case, you seem to be putting a premium on superstition.’

  ‘Are you being obsessed by the label again? The psychological result – and that’s what we are being concerned about in the first instance – in Erchie’s case was that he became a whole-hearted seaman and therefore literally a more capable and efficient seaman, a more harmonious man. To become capable, efficient, and harmonious both within oneself and in relation to one’s environment, is surely the highest concept of a way of life. Can you suggest any other?’

  ‘No. But doesn’t thi
s instance presuppose that one believes in what one knows to be a superstition, that is, something contrary to scientific knowledge? An obvious contradiction, which surely therefore makes harmony impossible.’

  ‘For you and me, yes. This instance does not apply to us. So far as it goes, we are unbelievers. What our true instances may be – or whether we have become chronic unbelievers, with an absolute split in our personalities – is an ultimate to which our argument would have to rise. It is possible that when it did rise to it we might find a tremendous amount of light shed upon our present condition and the present condition of the world with its war scares and possible – in my view, highly probable – outbreak of universal war.’

  ‘Oh hell, you’re bogged now,’ cried Michael. He arose. The clock struck eleven.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said the doctor.‘I should like to know where you think the minister stands.’ He looked at Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘Haven’t you said it? He is pulling the boat widdershins. Erchie knows he is doing it. The minister himself knows he is doing it. He is doing it deliberately. He is going to smash the superstition. That’s his job. But the superstition stands for a whole way of life. He is therefore smashing that. And what is he offering in its place? Not a new way of life, here and now, on earth, in relation to sea and land, with the natural happiness and mirth which come out of a wholeness of living, magic, imagination, all the emotions and desires in the one integrated pattern – not that, but a quite other thing, namely, the salvation of the soul in a future life. Now I am not offering any moral reflection upon all this. I am only trying to see what is happening, what is happening in Erchie’s mind, and, in particular, what must be happening in the minister’s mind. Fear is the weapon. Thou shalt not is the commandment. Now in our no longer primitive world you cannot act like that without enormous consequences, which will be found at work not merely internally in the mind but externally in social relations.’ Mr. Gwynn, suddenly finding himself leaning forward, straightened up with his characteristic gesture. He laughed with soft humour. He cast a glance at the doctor as he nodded sideways towards Michael. ‘We have certainly given his adventure an airing!’

  ‘Are you coming?’ Michael asked.

  They both looked at him.

  Towards the end Michael had listened with mounting impatience.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘I am going out,’ said Michael in a flat factual voice, ‘to see if I can hear that pipe again.’

  ‘Oh, are you?’ Mr. Gwynn arose as if Michael’s notion was a perfectly normal one. ‘Feel like coming, Doctor?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the doctor, now also on his feet. Michael turned to the door. Mr. Gwynn looked meaningly at the doctor. ‘Unless you have anything urgent?’

  ‘Not as it happens,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Good! Come along, then.’

  They went out and put on their coats.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They were simply both giving in to Michael’s sudden ill-humour, thought the doctor, as he followed Mr. Gwynn, who followed Michael, in silence along the shore path from the house.

  The moon must be rising somewhere behind the mountains, for the night was growing brighter. The white hull of the Stormy Petrel lay very clear just inside the curving spit of land, her bow to the shore for the wind was in the northeast. The doctor kept looking at her for a little time. A boat at anchor had an air of peace, especially at night. Like a cow in a meadow. But more still than the cow, more lost in its wooden dream.

  An odd company, this that he had dropped into. And shrewd, very clever. There was something in them both that he liked. It was a frankness, an open way of discussing anything. The reserve was entirely on his part. And Michael, with that flashing look of his, sometimes spotted it. Something a little mad in him. It would not need much to push it over the rational border. It was almost possible to feel the fellow’s mood as he went stalking on there in front.

  The doctor became aware that he was arguing himself out of a hardening that had come over his own mood, a certain vague antagonism.

  What was it he resented? Assuming Mr. Gwynn had taken the usual visitor’s tack of smiling at the poor native’s superstition, then he, the doctor, would at once have taken the opposite point of view and supported it by specific instance of second sight and what not and based the whole on a real lack of scientific investigation.

  Instead of that, Mr. Gwynn had taken the scientific approach to the ganglion centre itself of the whole matter.

  And he had been acute. There was no doubt about that. The man was rationalizing in a pretty sound way. The doctor himself had felt the largeness of the issues involved; no one could feel them better, simply because of his contacts with the native mind when it faced the final issue of life or death… An incomplete relationship between the minister and his people, something ‘dark and weird’!

  Did he resent this subtle intrusion and almost automatically take the minister’s side, so that even at this very moment he felt more friendly to the minister than he had yet done, felt he understood him better?

  The doctor looked about him and smiled. The land was still and the inshore sea pale with the sky’s light. The way the two figures kept striding on in front was physically comical. Such silent determination on so utterly mad a quest! Somebody should speak. It was uncivilized. It was idiotic. A silence it would be wrong to break!

  But this was characteristic of them, too – to go on this totem hunt. They were not afraid of failing, of being laughed at. If nothing happened, Michael might be unbearable. But meantime he was going. And Mr. Gwynn was backing him up, and not merely loyally. For all his years, he was prepared for experience!

  Michael had heard a weird archaic music, he had said, played out of a wood-wind instrument that no orchestra had ever known. When he had crossed over the hollow to investigate – there had been nothing!

  Had he heard Erchie tell the legend of the music that sometimes haunted the midnight hour by the shore of Loch Geal?… Whereupon the doctor’s mind, lifting as it were to the far space of this legend, suddenly encountered what must obviously be the complete solution. Charlie had been playing his bagpipes at Sgeir, and the wind had brought the ‘weird archaic’ music in faint eddies! Certainly nothing of the orchestra about that! It was laughable, almost exciting. He would keep the solution up his sleeve until Michael, having failed, would need some backing!

  After about twenty minutes, Michael stopped. The other two closed in. ‘This is where we go up.’ Michael’s voice was lowpitched. ‘I think we should move as quietly as we can.’

  ‘Very well,’ agreed Mr. Gwynn. ‘And you can remember a man’s heart at fifty-seven is not what it was at twenty-seven.’

  Michael smiled. ‘Have I been forgetting again?’ His face turned to the doctor. ‘Enjoying your scepticism?’

  ‘Look here,’ said the doctor softly, ‘it’s a lovely night. There can only be the slimmest chance of a second performance. We’ve got to be careful. Where did it happen exactly?’ His voice carried conviction.

  ‘There’s a path here, little more than a sheep-path, that goes right to Loch Geal,’ answered Michael.

  ‘I know it,’ said the doctor.

  ‘It’s about half-way – less than half-way.’

  ‘Not at Loch Geal?’

  ‘No. Quite a new place I discovered all on my own.’ His voice was mocking but friendly, as if the night had sucked his bad humour away.

  ‘How did you discover it?’

  ‘I was at Loch Geal, in connection with these hides. Certain things I wanted to find out about what happens at night – not only to the birds. I was on the way back – a little later – not much – than this. It was an extraordinarily beautiful night. I had sat down. Then I heard it – as I told you. It seemed to be at some little distance – as if being played out of the earth – or by the earth.’ He paused, clearly to give the doctor the benefit of the moment. ‘As I got up, of course the earth saw me. The music
stopped abruptly. I tried to find it. I was tripped by the earth and went headlong. I said a few things upon the night.’

  ‘Was that the end?’

  ‘No. Then I was followed.’

  He must have felt the doctor’s sudden piercing glance, for he added,‘I thought that might surprise you!’

  The doctor waited.

  ‘I never got a clear glimpse. The thing was above me. Once I heard it, and once it started a boulder thudding down.’

  ‘How far did it follow you?’

  ‘At least half-way back the way we’ve just come.’

  ‘You didn’t make any effort to—’

  ‘To intercept it? No. I was afraid. That’s why I’m here now. And would have been whether you’d both come or not.’

  They stood in silence. ‘Why don’t you ask me why I was afraid?’ inquired Michael.

  ‘Well, why were you?’ asked the doctor directly.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Michael. ‘I had the feeling that the thing was a man – a man who had committed murder – perhaps long ago at Loch Geal. I felt the murder in him.’

  The doctor was silent.

  ‘No comment at all?’ probed Michael.

  The doctor was looking out to sea. Near at hand the water was bright, but far off it darkened under the wind. Then upon a darkened patch came a glitter. The moon must be looking over the mountains. He turned his head round.

  ‘When you strike a stone with your foot,’ said the doctor, ‘the sound carries a long distance to listening ears. We’d better go pretty quietly.’

  Michael stood a moment gazing at the doctor, then turned to the slope.

  In the same order, they now went carefully and much more slowly. Twice Michael stopped, clearly to let Mr. Gwynn have his wind. ‘You might have told me,’ whispered Mr. Gwynn at the second stop, ‘and I would have drunk nothing.’

  His two companions smiled. The doctor, who had dropped in on them some time after dinner, had had his own meal about six o’clock. The three whiskies – and Michael’s was a careless hand – were now inducing a certain empty bodiless feeling, with the forehead slightly cold and the mind abnormally clear.