The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  At the third stop, Mr. Gwynn’s breath was audibly wheezing. The doctor gestured downward with his open hand, then sat down. Mr. Gwynn at once flopped beside him. Michael stooped and whispered. ‘Not far now. Another hundred yards or so.’

  ‘Sit down,’ whispered the doctor.

  Michael sat down. The doctor bent to his ear. ‘If we keep to leeward…’

  Michael nodded. The wind was blowing down past them and now, away from the shelter of the shore, it was a fair breeze.

  Mr. Gwynn began to button his coat round his throat. The weather was mild for late October, but the wind was searching. The doctor cast about him and saw a sheltering bluff up a little and to the right. Their heads came together and he pointed. ‘For shelter. Otherwise our hot skins will have us sneezing like donkeys.’ Having to keep his voice low induced a near feeling of friendliness. Laughter issued softly from their nostrils. They followed him, stooping slightly, and came under the shallow bluff where it was quite windless when they sat down.

  ‘Ah-h,’ breathed Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘Sit on your gloves,’ breathed the doctor.

  When they had made themselves comfortable, the doctor whispered: ‘This is the moment when I believe in your “primitive”!’ Something of boyhood had come back upon him in this freedom of the night, this nocturnal adventuring with all day-light responsibility gone.

  Mr. Gwynn jerked up his head in silent laughter. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens now?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ whispered the doctor.

  ‘Shut up, you blithering toughs!’ whispered Michael.

  ‘He’s actually expecting something,’ the doctor informed Mr. Gwynn.

  Mr. Gwynn tilted his head again. With the doctor, he entered into fathomless conspiracy. ‘He does not understand yet!’

  ‘Not he,’ agreed the doctor.

  ‘I suppose you call this primitive mirth,’ murmured Michael sardonically.

  ‘B’ the holy powers an’ he’s got it!’ declared Mr. Gwynn, and from the control of his voice, the sudden Irish brogue, and the slight but perfectly finished gesture, the doctor knew that this man had once been an actor.

  Suddenly the whole outing was a delight. Mr. Gwynn, with a careless confidence, swayed on top of his form. He quoted lines from Shakespeare of at once an exquisite beauty and idiotic aptness. And all was suppressed, suppressed by Michael, until it cried out silently upon the night, and the doctor, like one in truth half drunk, swayed with shut mouth and husky throat, while Mr. Gwynn half shrugged a shoulder or lifted a spread palm and breathed out his immortal magic on the air.

  There was an extraordinary charm about the little man at that moment, a natural gaiety, an exquisite yet controlled inconsequence.

  This went on for quite a long time, but it had its natural end, conquered by the night, by the moon, by the smooth heather breasts, by the black shadows, by the chill that searched for the heart even within their windless horseshoe of shelter.

  Mr. Gwynn shuddered softly and stared over his knees. Then in a voice that for the first time firmed beyond soft syllables to the monotone of the wind moaning round this bleak tumbled land, this barren haunted place, he said very very slowly as if he had forgotten his companions, forgotten everything:

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon lover!

  These lines from Coleridge left a hollow of silence around them and deep within their marvelling minds, and upon this hollow, without any warning, came a flurry of piped notes.

  The suddenness, the complete clarity, of the piping, its weird archaic character, so gripped Mr. Gwynn that his face hardly rose from his clasped knees, it only tilted upward a little to let the mouth fall open.

  A harsh sound in Michael’s throat held an immensity of triumph and relief.

  The player could not be more than a hundred yards away, above them but to the left; though it was difficult to be precise. There was a bubbly floating sound in the notes and yet at the same time an inner thin buzzing of a reed. Not of any reed, not a dry reed, but a reed wet as the tender green corn stalk which the schoolboy cracks between his lips before blowing its low shrillness.‘Archaic’ was the very word; and ‘weird’. It ran all about the ground, rushed away on the wind. It had abrupt pauses, as if for breath. It had a curious compressed quality of frolic. Then suddenly it went slow and intensely sad. The theme notes were held, but between each two intolerably drawn-out notes there was still a rush of short swift notes.

  Mr. Gwynn had an involuntary vision, quite extraordinarily vivid. The mouth that blew the pipe was as wide as the face, with the deep upper lip curving over. The eyelashes curved over the eyes in the same way, like drawn hoods. The skin had the pallor of clay. Perhaps the face of a frog-like leprechaun out of some long-forgotten story book of childhood.

  Michael was the first to come to himself. He leaned towards their heads. ‘Let us rush it,’ he whispered.

  And at once the doctor replied: ‘For God’s sake, no!’ The intensity in his whisper made them stare at him.

  Michael had not been interested in receiving any impression from the music. The fact of its being there intoxicated him; justified him in so wild and magnificent a way that he could have rushed it and grappled with it, though it were murder itself that played.

  But upon the doctor the effect was very different. Whether or not there was anything in Mr. Gwynn’s talk of the ‘ancestral unconscious’, certainly his ancestors had a hold on the doctor now. It did not matter that he knew the theme of the slow piece being played. That only intensified his emotion, gave it shape and somehow an appalling knowledge. When an old pipe tune was so profound in its revelation of human experience, of inexpressible sorrow, that its creation was clearly beyond human power, the folk knew then that the master could have got it only from some other power, and they talked of magic chanters and the fairies, the small wise people of the green hills. There is a defeat that is bitter in the mouth beyond all bitterness of the bitterest herb; a sadness that has agony and the breaking of the heart in one’s own hands. This is the music the doctor heard, and his mind was charged with a dreadful unknowable foreknowledge.

  He knew the two were staring at him, but he paid no attention to them behind the chill mask of his face. Their words and theories were less than noises in a spent wind; a prattling of clever children long ago; but their presence here was a mortal danger and he had got to get them away somehow.

  Slowly he raised his head and peered towards the place whence the music came, taking care to keep the rough old heather on top as a shield, though he knew the moon, behind him, would not shine on his face. When he heard Michael rising, he at once gripped his shoulder, keeping him down, and felt the shoulder wriggle in pain. He forced Michael down and sat beside him. ‘Hush!’ he breathed, shaking his head in warning but looking at neither of them.

  The music stopped.

  The doctor sat for a little time without moving, his whole being listening to the night, then, motioning them to remain as they were, he slowly rose again. He remained standing so long and so still that Michael began to stir.

  As he sat down, the doctor laid a strong detaining hand on Michael, who whispered intensely, ‘Is he gone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know who it is?’

  The doctor’s expressionless face looked at Michael’s face, looked beyond it, and made no answer. ‘Hsh!’ he warned.

  The music started again, and clearly the player had come under the fatal spell of the one theme. The same notes, the long-held and intolerable cries with the swift notes between bubbling like blood in the heart.

  ‘I’m going to have a look,’ whispered Michael.

  The doctor held him for a moment. ‘All right. But listen. Keep your face hidden behind the heather.’ Then his voice dropped two full tones. ‘Don’t let your head be seen. And whatev
er happens, don’t move. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Mr. Gwynn.

  The doctor started at Michael.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Michael quietly.

  There was nothing to be seen but the night as they had already seen it, the dark heather, the frozen movement of the earth, and the lines that ran against a sky pale blue in the east and passing by imperceptible gradation to a deep blue in the west.

  Mr. Gwynn knew that, as never before, he was held in thrall to the living night, and as the marvel of this was something that could not be exceeded, he turned his head away from the invisible source of the magical notes, to look, as he had so often looked, at the moon. It was a carelessness, beyond fear, of the secret spirit in a new dimension, and in this weird dimension he wanted to see how the lady moon walked.

  She was walking now above the hill-tops of Garuvben deer forest, and a trail of passing cloud going in her direction set up the familiar illusion of her walking the opposite way. Her light came on the breast of the near slope passing upward on his right hand and as his eye ran along the slope – his breath caught, and in the same moment the doctor’s fingers closed over his arm.

  By an odd chance, the head of the approaching figure passed across the moon. The whole figure was completely silhouetted and in the same moment the three watchers knew it was a woman.

  She looked very tall upon the hillside and came slowly and without sound. The doctor had no need to press down his companions. Anxiety not to be seen was purely instinctive, and balanced by the instinct which dared not release the eyes.

  They saw her stop when she heard the music. She stood quite still, as if she might stand like that for ever. But in a little while she was coming on again, only more slowly, as if each footstep now were an adventure not on the breast of the hill.

  She was almost opposite them, barely thirty yards away, when the music stopped abruptly as if the pipe had been struck from the player’s mouth.

  She stood again, and now they knew she was waiting and would never go on.

  They heard him coming, heard the reckless thrust of his feet, and there he was, the moon shining on him, swiftly approaching, coming close to her, with the cry ‘Flora!’ in his mouth. Without another word – no cry had come from her – they stood locked in an embrace, his face fallen over her shoulder, without the slightest movement, clearly without thought, lost at the end of an experience that needed blindness and rest.

  His voice began whispering, softly and hidden. They heard her sighing breath and voice smother against him in a small cry. He put his arm round her and, leaving the right of way, by which she had come, they began walking into the heart of the Ros, towards Loch Geal. Within fifty yards, they had passed from sight.

  Upon the silence came Michael’s low voice:

  ‘So that was the murderer!’

  The doctor did not move.

  Mr. Gwynn looked up at the doctor and was held by the tense immobility of his body and face.

  ‘Charlie!’ Astonishment and wild humour raked out of Michael’s throat. ‘Hell, could you beat it!’

  ‘Hsh!’ said Mr. Gwynn, feeling Michael was about to laugh wildly upon the night.

  ‘Let us go,’ said the doctor in a drained voice. He stood for a moment or two perfectly still, then turned away. Mr. Gwynn followed him, with Michael behind.

  They went on in silence, and not until they had reached the shore path was a word spoken. There Mr. Gwynn expelled a loud breath. ‘I’m tired,’ he said and sat down.

  ‘It was Charlie, wasn’t it?’ Michael asked the doctor, both of them standing.

  The doctor turned his head and looked at him. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Of course it was!’

  The doctor moved his head and looked about the ground.

  ‘Don’t you?’ persisted Michael.

  ‘Here,’ said the doctor to Mr. Gwynn, ‘the low ground at this time of year is always damp and treacherous. I shouldn’t advise you to sit long.’

  Mr. Gwynn got up. ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘We’d better keep going,’ said the doctor like one automatically offering medical advice.

  Michael gave a small laugh as he followed. Presently he said, ‘It’s up there that he dislodged the stone.’ His voice, being raised to a natural pitch for the first time since they had started out, sounded astonishingly loud. ‘What the hell was Charlie’s game, following me?’

  Neither of the two in front replied.

  ‘Have you no idea, Doctor?’

  ‘None,’ answered the doctor.

  Michael laughed. ‘You sound so bloody mysterious.’ The amazing justification of his previous experience, which had been so doubtfully received, the fabulous happenings of the night with their new and incredible implications, had induced in him a vast and unconquerable gaiety. Perhaps the doctor had gone all quiet and non-committal because of the rather obvious way, now that things about money and what not were leaking out, in which the magnificent Procurator-Fiscal and himself, not to mention the policeman, had mishandled the affair of Charlie and the throttled seaman! Though it was hardly fair to bait the doctor – that’s the way Gwynn would put it – because he was professionally involved! Hell beneath, it was laughable!

  And that a girl should be in it! That tilted the whole applecart! No city civilization could ‘produce’ a show like this. It hadn’t the background, the backcloth sub specie aeternitatis! His mind roared upon the night. They – haunters of hotel lounges and night dives – said nothing ever happened in the country beyond the birth of a cow.‘They’ flashed through Michael’s mind, their known faces, their eternal hectic laughter, their swift movement and gabble and glitter of faces in artificial light. Their languorous moods. He knew them all. He cheered to them derisively.

  Christ, these women! he thought, his teeth on edge but only in the moment’s spasm.

  A girl walking somnambulistic upon a tilted heath. It couldn’t be ‘produced’. By God, a man daren’t produce it. The rotten world wouldn’t believe it. Imagination was dead, choked, damned.

  A girl’s head passing across the gibbous moon! It had become artificial, poetically made-up! Michael shook with silent laughter that ran in a shiver over his skin. A girl… what girl?

  Gehenna, it must be a girl in the place!… Flora! The cry came back upon Michael. Flora! The minister’s daughter! The thought, like a fist against his chest, stopped Michael in his tracks.

  He saw the other two go on, go steadily on. Gwynn was taking short quick steps, trying to keep up with the striding doctor. The small figure seemed to waddle in its urgency, purposeful as ever, but waddling a little.

  An intense imaginative bout in Michael often reached a sudden satiety, when his mind refused to function. Stress fell away and exhaustion flowed softly over the brain. The eyes of the imagination closed and sank; sometimes his physical eyes closed for a few seconds also.

  Now he simply could not move, and he stood, letting the other two walk on. They rounded a rocky bluff, and he stood alone.

  They were waiting for him at the gate.

  ‘The needs of the night,’ explained Michael. ‘Come in, Doctor, and have a drink.’ His voice was friendly.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said the doctor quite firmly. ‘I must get home.’

  ‘I was asking him,’ said Mr. Gwynn, ‘what was the instrument. It’s called a chanter, the pipe which a piper practises on.’

  ‘Was it?’ said Michael incuriously. ‘Sorry to disappoint you over the supernatural.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ said Mr. Gwynn, ‘that it’s far more marvellous than any supernatural.’ His imagination was not yet exhausted, perhaps because it dealt now so much in theories. ‘That there should be a pipe like that! That’s where the imagination—’

  ‘Staggers and reels,’ suggested Michael as Mr. Gwynn paused.

  Mr. Gwynn made his gesture and rolled his head a little.

  ‘I must go,’ said the doctor. Then he added, ‘It might be a
s well if we kept this to ourselves.’

  ‘Good God,’ declared Michael, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘Right!’ said the doctor, backing away a pace or two. ‘Good night.’ Then he went along the path between the plantation wall and the sea.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Robbie Ross came out of the door of his mother’s cottage to take the air of the morning. Yes, dawn’s twilight was creeping over the land. He looked at the sky and decided it was going to be a fresh but broken day. The wind was still asleep and the small fields lay quiet. As he slowly scratched his whiskered chin the familiar scene was translated into a far past through which his boy’s feet went running and his boy’s mouth cried sounds that no mortal ear now would ever catch. The final moment of parting had come, the severing with all that had been.

  His hand fell away from his beard but only a few inches as if it, too, were affected by the moment’s vision, while his eyes stared at the little barn. Then they were staring past the barn, and only when they focused of their own accord on a figure coming into view beyond it, was the past pulled away like a grey translucent veil. His brows gathered over the small black eyes; he backed a couple of steps into the doorway; then turned and entered the room which he had just left.

  ‘The minister is coming up the field,’ he said quietly.

  The faces of two women and a man were turned to him in the yellow lamplight. They stared for a little while as if they had not heard aright. Then one of the women, with a small cry, got to her feet and began tidying the room, removing dishes and fragments of food, whisking this away and arranging that. The other woman, smoothing back her hair, went to the box-bed and leaned over.

  ‘Mother,’ she said, putting a glad earnest note into her voice, as if she were talking to a child, ‘the minister is coming to see you.’

  The old woman, who was eighty-one years of age, lifted her eyes to her daughter’s face but did not speak.