The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  ‘The minister,’ repeated her daughter, a little louder. ‘He’s just coming.’

  The veined wrinkled hands stirred, their long nails faintly scratching the hard texture of the counterpane.

  ‘Aren’t you glad?’

  ‘The minister,’ breathed the spent voice of the woman, whose death they had been awaiting all night.

  ‘Yes, the minister himself. Aren’t you the proud woman to be having him calling on you on the Sabbath morning? Whoever had the like before?’

  The daughter straightened the pillows and smoothed back the white hair from the worn forehead and tucked it under the goffered linen cap. ‘You look like a picture,’ she said, on a rush of feeling. As she turned away, there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Go to the door, one of you,’ said the other sister in a harsh voice.

  Robbie went out again. The minister came up to him, breathing a trifle heavily, for the croft lay on the high slope above Cruime village.

  ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘She is still with us,’ replied Robbie.

  They spoke quietly as they shook hands.

  Robbie made way for him.

  The minister went into the room and shook hands first with Robbie’s brother, Callum, because he was nearest to him, and then with the two sisters, Ellen who had tidied the room, and Martha who had spoken to her mother.

  ‘I awoke thinking of your mother while it was yet dark,’ he said and turned to the figure in the bed.

  Martha hurried to place a convenient chair for him, but he stood looking down on the dying woman, a smile on his face. He caught her right hand gently. ‘And how are you to-day, Mrs. Ross?’ She did not answer, but her eyes were on his face. ‘Not feeling very strong to-day?’ He pressed the cold hand firmly. ‘I thought you might like to see me. We are very old friends.’ He felt the fingers of her left hand creeping over the back of his own. Then she held his hand in both of hers. She could not speak, for the emotion that was just capable of showing itself in her expression took all her strength. ‘It came to me to come and see you and I am very glad,’ he concluded.

  The head moved in a small slow nod which was all that courtesy and weakness could manage. She had always retained the old-fashioned grace, the traditional manners, of her Gaelic folk. This grace was most deeply expressed when the heart was touched, for then it caught a warmth and a welcoming. Its light was in her eyes.

  Martha, understanding all, put her hand to her mouth and turned away. It was as if, in some strange way, the minister had brought death with him, and the long-sealed fountains of emotion felt the final pressure. Ellen threw her a sharp glance and turned to the peat fire, where she swept the pale yellow ash noiselessly back along the hearth stone. As she had done this recently, there was little to sweep. She then felt the weight of the iron kettle and retired with it, walking softly. The brothers heard the two tin jugs of water being poured quietly into the kettle from the covered buckets which stood just inside the front door. Then she returned with the kettle and hung it over the fire. She would have liked to have gone out with the brown earthenware teapot, as she had done several times during the long night, but now the minister had sat down on the chair by the bed. Martha had handed him the family Bible and was setting the wick to its highest point. Ellen, watching her – for Martha was the younger – saw that the funnel had become discoloured. Martha had turned the wick a little too high in the middle night when Robbie had read a chapter.

  But nothing more could be done now and Ellen, sitting on a small hard chair, dropped her hands in her lap and stared into the fire.

  Martha thought that perhaps the minister was reading passages her mother specially liked, for her mother had been living here alone for many years, ever since her father had died. The four members of the family now present were all married, two brothers were beyond the seas, and one sister dead. Callum worked the croft along with his own. That two brothers of the one family should have remained in their birth district was very unusual. Martha had arrived two days ago from the east country. She was the youngest of the four, being only forty-three.

  But already the minister’s words were stealing their senses away. From long habit, his voice took on its pulpit intonation, and once more Robbie felt himself being translated, not now into the intimate scenes of his own boyhood, but distantly to places that were places of pilgrimage, far lands, and towns that, seen from a plain, were Nazareth or Nineveh or the City of David. No voice could be familiar with those names. The voice had to be translated a little, too.

  Yet the minister’s voice was more familiar than it was in the pulpit, it was nearer to them and softer in its cadence, so that all was seen in a more intimate light. The resounding force, which held authority and therefore fear, fell away from it. Here in this house now they were at one, and the oneness came upon them, and came upon the minister, too. The intonation caught a strangely poetic or imaginative quality, and Martha heard the voice of her grandmother, dead these thirty years, telling her a story at the end of the day, in the listening twilight, when the eyes grow large, and the sudden clucking of the hens outside, or the arrogant kok-kok-kok of the cock, or the lowing of a cow across the fields, or the distant barking of a dog, takes on a significance that is inexpressibly known and will for ever haunt the mind.

  Robbie and Martha had the dark eyes of the dying woman, but Ellen was thin and had the assessing grey eyes of her tall brother Callum, yet all four of them now became as children again, under the minister’s voice and the potency of the mother who had been firm in her kindness, reprimanding and guiding them, gentle and laughing often, but with that calmness in hard circumstance, that providing of their endless needs, which now, as parents themselves, they acknowledged to be the wisdom they could never hope to attain.

  ‘Let us pray,’ said the minister. He stood up, clasped his hands in front of him, and bowed his head. They all stood up and bowed their heads.

  The oneness now grew upon them more strongly. For Martha, somehow, this was not ‘religion’. She had always had an instinctive repugnance – in earlier life not unmixed a little, perhaps, with fear – for the dolefulness of religious observance. But now when the minister in his eloquent, strongly felt prayer came to the part where he referred to the dying woman in terms of her goodness as an exemplary mother and lifted up his face with its closed eyes to bring his pleading more directly ‘on high’, Martha opened her own eyes, for her love was all for her mother, and looked at her mother in a great quickening of love, and cried inwardly: ‘Oh, it would be lovely if she died now!’ This was a shattering cry within her, but it gave her face a great sweetness.

  When the prayer was ended, the minister sat down, and turned the leaves to one of the Psalms of David, not yet looking at the woman in the bed.

  They all joined in the singing, knowing the familiar words, all except the woman in the bed, who had so often led it. Martha had her mother’s voice, and as it poured through her like an eternal stream, she looked at her mother directly as if she would draw her, too, into it.

  Her mother’s head turned slowly on the pillow and the dark eyes looked at the singers and came to rest on Martha’s eyes. Martha smiled to her, crying silently: Mother! Mother! even as she sang. Then a smile went over her mother’s face, a faint tired smile, and the head, as though what held it had suddenly let go, fell flat against the pillow and the chin sagged. This time Martha cried aloud.

  It was full daylight outside when the minister, having shaken hands with the four soft-voiced sorrowers, turned the corner of the barn and looked far upon the morning sea and then more closely upon the houses of Cruime spread away below him. Not a smoke yet ascended from any chimney, and would not for another hour. This was the Sabbath day when no work was done and even early rising would have shown an indecent haste in worldly affairs. The day of rest for man and beast. The boats were drawn far up on the beach and the houses were quiet and seemly.

  The effect of communion in the death service was exceptionally s
trong upon the minister, cleansing and cooling his mind, and giving it a renewed assurance. He was glad now that he had obeyed the urge to go and see Mrs. Ross with whom he had had many a quiet and pleasant hour, and allowed himself only half consciously to think of it as divinely inspired. He could still feel its wondrous healing power and was content to leave it thus within the miracle of God’s grace to His servant.

  He stood looking down upon the familiar scene, broad-shouldered and powerful. Then suddenly something made him turn his head, and in a surge of incredulous amazement he saw a man driving sheep along the slope above the arable fields, as if it were an ordinary weekday and he were driving them from a market. There was something in the very gait of the man that was like a curse. It was Dougald MacIan.

  A faint darkness from a flush of blood came over the minister’s vision. Rage at what he saw, black hatred of its abominable desecration, had him in an instant. That a man, accursed already, should so dare!

  As Dougald altered course to cut in below the dead woman’s croft and so open out on a direct drive for the Ros, the minister bore down upon him.

  ‘What’s this you’re doing, Dougald MacIan?’ cried the minister.

  Dougald looked round, and staggered, and stood.

  ‘What’s this you’re doing on the Lord’s Day?’

  Dougald glowered at the minister as if his wits were struggling back to him like black sheep.

  The wrath in the minister’s face gave it a wild and piercing power. The hairy eyebrows stood out stormily. He was half a head taller than Dougald and overbore him from the slope.

  Dougald’s expression narrowed dangerously; the mouth parted and the under jaw shot out a little showing the tips of the small strong teeth.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ cried the minister, and in the quiet morning his voice was heard by those stirring in near cottages. From the gable-end of their childhood’s home, Robbie and Callum looked down upon the naked scene.

  ‘Huh!’ grunted Dougald, and from the wind of his onward bodily thrust came the smell of whisky to the minister’s nostrils.

  Swiftly the minister overtook him and barred his way. ‘You will answer for this!’ he cried.

  Again Dougald stopped.

  ‘You will answer for this before God, you desecrator of His holy day. You will not carry on like this, making foul His very air with your vile breath. I will not have it. Do you hear me?’

  The minister was now shouting, and here and there a halfclad figure appeared by a door-jamb or a gable corner. As his denunciation rose, his very words could be made out.

  ‘… You, treading our holy earth to mire with your sheep’s feet and your own drunken feet! I tell you, Dougald MacIan, that a day will come upon you when the wrath of God will burn you up. Burn you up, you—’

  Dougald suddenly lurched forward to pass the minister, but as he did so his left arm shot out. It was the shepherd’s gesture to his collie when he wanted the dog to round up sheep on the left flank, and it was accompanied by the shepherd’s cry, now a harsh half-choked brutal cry, but in the same instant the two brothers in the croft above heard the clear skelp of the back of Dougald’s hand against the minister’s face.

  The minister staggered and stood as Dougald lurched on.

  It was often afterwards conjectured in Cruime what might have happened next, for the minister was a very powerful man and he started after Dougald, but Robbie Ross, running down the slope, called in his sea voice: ‘Minister! Minister!’ and the minister stopped and looked up. He was trembling when Robbie spoke to him.

  There was a full congregation in the church that day, including for the first time Michael Sandeman and his guest Mr. Gwynn, who had come innocently enough, or at least with a strong desire on the part of Michael to look at the girl Flora and with a general interest in his peculiar theories on the part of Mr. Gwynn.

  And Mr. Gwynn had a lot to think about that seemed mysterious enough. That they should sit for the singing and stand during the minister’s prayer had its interest, but something portentously quiet about the minister’s bearing and voice and an air of expectancy in the congregation which he could feel somehow surprised him. Here was an inward as well as an outward unity which he had not quite anticipated, and clearly the unity was not one of easy acceptance, of purely religious peace, not anyhow as Mr. Gwynn had hitherto understood acceptance and peace. Underneath it all, something was curiously, avidly, alive.

  Mr. Gwynn shifted his stance, for it now looked as if that first great prayer were never going to end – it lasted twenty minutes – and discreetly let his eyes rove a little to each side.

  The men’s faces appeared completely stolid, utterly without feeling or subtlety. Earth and clay and stone. But curiously strong, enduring, and openly there. They were a marvellous array of masks. The individuality of each, the difference of one from another, was extremely striking. He tried to think of a city congregation but could vaguely call up only smooth pale faces of an indistinguished uniformity. The women had not the weathered openness of the men. They retired, seeming indeed to have their shoulders rounded by the pull of their black clothes towards the hidden breast over which their faces inclined in a still composure.

  When the minister began to talk of ‘our sister’ who had been called away that morning, Mr. Gwynn at once experienced a gleam of light upon this enigmatic undercurrent of being. Death, dark and round-shouldered, with hidden face – oldest of all the enigmas. He almost got a glimpse of it, like a presence in a crypt below them. He heard the intoning of the minister’s voice and the worshipping silence.

  Death.

  He looked up at the minister (for he was only five seats back from the precentor, who sat under the pulpit) and studied the face with its closed eyes, the darkness of short hairs on the cheek bones, the clean-shaven jaw and sensitive upper lip, the clipped hair that grew down in front of the ears, and the strong grey-dark growth of hair on the head. The closed eyes were smudges of shadow under the heavy eyebrows. The absence of a beard was somehow noticeable.

  How apt his words were, how dignified, yet kindly and beseeching. This was no professional panegyric. The man, Mr. Gwynn decided, was moved, deeply moved, and only as his voice rose a little did Mr. Gwynn perceive that, with just propriety, he was making of her ‘an ensample’ before his flock. There was a moment of suspense when it seemed he was going to introduce contrast, direct and forceful, but the short dramatic pause ended and the minister, with reverent reticence, went on. Mr. Gwynn detected the faintest stir in the congregation and was surprised that so elusive a moment should produce so delicate a response.

  Moving his head slowly, he glanced at Michael and found him staring directly at the girl who was standing beside the housekeeper in the manse pew. It was a front pew and as his line of vision bore slightly to the left, Mr. Gwynn could see the right side of her face foreshortened.

  Well made, rather, with a smooth grace of body; a navy-blue costume cut to lie on real shoulders; a personable young woman. Clothes would fit her with an easy naturalness. She no doubt saw they did! Strands of hair, with a brown glisten, curled over the pale nape of her neck. Her grey straw hat was large, and had a slight tilt which, when she moved her head, as if her eyes had wearied staring into the pitch-pine of the pulpit, gave her full profile so soft a surety in its line that Mr. Gwynn could have made a compliment to a summer day.

  Smiling faintly – for it was an odd sort of feeling to have suddenly had – Mr. Gwynn, as she moved her head again, turned his own away towards a pointed window in the white-plastered wall. The panes of glass were small but transparent. There was not a square inch of coloured glass, or coloured anything, anywhere in the church.

  Colour! A red, say; or a blue robe?

  Utterly transparent glass, for the white light. Beyond it, the upcurled fingers of an elm, the extreme tips, bare and elephant-grey, swaying in an invisible wind.

  Hardly a summer’s day!… That cold moonlit midnight, and the figure walking down upon them. His eyes wer
e drawn back to Flora. Very slightly now her head was bowed, with the pallor of the nape showing more distinctly, like a waiting, unconscious sacrifice.

  Mr. Gwynn had his extravagant fancies. There was plenty of time for them, immeasurable time.

  Very distinct, this feeling of unobstructed time, this movement of the free mind unhindered by colour, by scents, by emotion. When the voice in the pulpit, coming at long last towards an end, called for a blessing upon the King and the Queen and all the members of the Royal Family, Mr. Gwynn withdrew his eyes from the window with an expression of such innocence that he knew his face, too, was a mask.

  Coughings and stirrings and scraping of feet. The body had its short interlude before settling down again.

  The sermon lasted over an hour. The long narrow seat with its straight back was of pitch pine, varnished, and innocent of any covering. Normally, to have sat there for an hour would have been for Mr. Gwynn a fine exercise in physical torture. As it was, he had occasional aches and cramps and, after the great dramatic denunciation, experienced the ‘needles and pins’ forgotten since boyhood.

  The large open Bible on the pulpit cushion, the quiet but very effective reading of the verse:

  And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?

  With his left hand the minister slowly closed the great book in a final and authoritative small slap.

  It was beautifully done, thought Mr. Gwynn. The beauty lay, of course, in the fact that the minister was not consciously acting the profound restraint behind that authoritative closing of the ‘Holy Word’.

  Moreover, the words of the text had in themselves roused Mr. Gwynn, for at once he perceived their extraordinary aptness to the ferment of socialistic theories which stirred certain intellectual groups in London. The Fabians had produced nothing at once so compact and so dramatic! Here was not merely the theory, but also the actors. The brotherhood of humanity and humanity itself. And also – also – God. It was terrific. And all inside a dozen words! Where is Abel thy brother?… Am I my brother’s keeper?