The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  Norman yelled to him not to move, then he backed away.

  The arranging of the rope took only a minute. Squatting men, with heels dug in, paid the rope out between their knees.

  Norman’s arm was helping his voice in directing Michael how to fix the noose of rope round him. Then the arm directed those behind.

  Lying back against the rope, Michael walked up the rock. When he stood among them, they could see, however, that he was not without pain. The right leg of his trousers was ripped, the back of his jacket split, there was blood trickling down both hands and down his right temple. His face was very white and his smile had a curiously writhen sharpness. Taking his left arm, Norman led him back into a sheltered

  hollow.

  To Norman and some of the others, who had often gone into real danger in rescuing a sheep, the incident was of the slightest. Had it happened to one of themselves, such a one would have been mercilessly chaffed.

  Meantime Michael became aware that eyes were concentrating in a fascinated way on his chest. He looked down and saw the movement of his jacket. Pushing a hand carefully under it, he brought forth a gull.

  No magic could have held them as did that gull. They gaped at it, at the strange white deadness which is sometimes caught in a living gull’s head. The head moved this way and that.

  ‘Its wing is broken,’ said Michael.

  Norman’s brows drew down. ‘Do you mean you risked your life to save that?’ Michael saw the cold disapproval in the face. He kept looking at it in a detached way. ‘Not exactly,’ he answered.

  ‘I wondered if I could get down. It was decided for me.’ The wry humour was about to be appreciated when suddenly the gull shot its beak into Michael’s wrist.

  In an instant the bird was flapping and tumbling among them. Hamish was third in the dive but he caught it. He brought it back to Michael.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Michael. Then he looked at Hamish a second time. ‘I think I have seen you before.’

  Hamish retired beside William, who nudged him secretly. Michael smiled with his eyes as Hamish’s head disappeared.

  ‘It was him who saw you first to-day anyway,’ said William.

  ‘Was it?’ Michael looked at William.

  ‘Yes,’ answered William. ‘Otherwise no one would have seen you.’ There was silence.

  ‘I am his uncle,’ said Norman. ‘If the boy has sometimes gone to the Ros, after a trout or whatever it may be, it’s not with our consent.’

  The words came with a simple gravity. Astonished laughter, his natural reaction, was furthest of any emotion from Michael. He looked upon their waiting faces, with their reticent understanding of the moment. He was feeling little pain, hardly anything at all except a very odd sensation of disembodiment.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked Norman.

  ‘Hamish,’ answered Norman. ‘Hamish Macleod.’

  ‘Then I wish publicly to declare,’ said Michael, ‘that so long as I am landlord of the Ros, Hamish Macleod will have free access to the Ros and to all its sporting rights.’

  A dozen brown faces broke into light laughter. Bodies swayed, trying to catch a glimpse of the hiding Hamish.

  ‘It’s very good of you to take it like that, Mr. Sandeman,’ said Norman, relieved.

  Michael looked at Norman again, and then looked down at the gull in his hands.

  But in a few moments his eyes were back on Norman’s face, as if it might be capable of further incredible oracles.

  ‘Do you think there’s any hope of finding them now?’ he asked.

  The question was unexpected and gathered heavily in Norman’s face. The others waited.

  ‘Since this morning, that has troubled me. There has been enough time now, wherever boat or oars were washed up, for word to have reached us. I will say frankly that I was waiting for that word. His boat could never have lived in that sea through the night.’

  ‘That’s certain?’

  ‘As certain as I know of anything in this world. She had neither the size nor the crew. We all agree on that.’

  ‘What about the Stormy Isles?’ Norman looked at him. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Cliff walls,’ interjected William.

  Hamish whispered something to William. William bent over, then straightened himself with a small smile.

  ‘What does Hamish say?’ asked Michael, fighting off a fainting weakness.

  ‘He said: The Roaring Cave!’

  There was a smile.

  ‘I think I’ll get home.’ As Michael stood up, the bird fluttered out of his hands.

  ‘You should kill it,’ said William.

  Michael slowly nodded.

  One of the men swiftly drew its neck and threw it aside.

  As Norman was watching Michael, who stood swaying, Kenneth Grant came riding up bare back.

  ‘Just in time, Kenneth,’ said Norman. ‘We’ll give you a leg up, Mr. Sandeman.’

  ‘I’ll walk across with you,’ said Kenneth, after he had had a look at Michael, ‘and then I can ride her home. We can wash that blood off in Loch Geal.’

  They all stood watching Michael ride slowly away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Behold, I come!’ said Michael.

  Mr. Gwynn, breathing heavily, looked at him.

  Michael was grey and swayed slightly but with dignity. From the pony’s back, he looked down tolerantly upon his friend.

  ‘The procession proceeds,’ said Michael to Kenneth, who thereupon led on the pony.

  He staggered as he got off and would have fallen but for Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘Come in and have a drink,’ said Michael to Kenneth.

  ‘No, thank you, I’ll be going.’

  ‘Come along!’ Michael looked at Kenneth’s face, then he turned for the door.

  From his low long chair, Michael took the glass. It shook a little in his hand and audibly clinked against his teeth.

  ‘You will perceive,’ he said to Mr. Gwynn, as he set the glass on the floor, ‘that I am acting the laird of the manor.’

  ‘What on earth happened?’

  ‘Merely fell over a cliff.’ He turned to Kenneth. ‘Your timing was unusually good.’

  ‘We were watching,’ said Kenneth, ‘through a glass.’

  ‘Ah!’ Michael nodded.

  ‘Their faces,’ he said to Mr. Gwynn. ‘Really remarkable.’

  ‘Whose faces?’

  ‘You must pardon this divine incorporeal feeling. I’m going to pass out presently. No one should drink whisky – except at such a moment as this. The faces of the men of Cruime – not forgetting one boy. They all rescued me with a rope.’

  ‘Only just, apparently.’

  Michael nodded. ‘And only by the skin of the boy’s eyes. Hamish… What’s his uncle’s name?’

  ‘Hamish’s uncle? Norman Macleod,’ answered Kenneth.

  ‘A profound fellow.’

  ‘Yes, he’s one of our best men.’

  Michael regarded Kenneth thoughtfully. ‘You are keen on – on doing things here?’

  ‘Well, I try to do what I can.’

  ‘Sheep Club and all that?’

  ‘I admit I fought for the Ros,’ said Kenneth.

  A glimmer of humour shone in Michael’s eyes. ‘If ever you have any other scheme, Mr. Grant, and I can help…’ The glass fell out of his hand. ‘Pray don’t mind it,’ he murmured to Kenneth.

  ‘You’re going to bed,’ said Mr. Gwynn decisively, ‘and you’re going now. Then I’ll get the doctor along to look you over.’

  ‘The doctor!’ Michael laughed softly, lolling his head.

  ‘Come! Get up!’

  The doctor turned up after supper.

  Michael was in a deep sleep, so they left him alone. From the answers to a few questions, the doctor was satisfied that no bones were broken.

  ‘Exhaustion. When he’s at it, he burns himself up pretty quickly.’

  Mr. Gwynn agre
ed. ‘That was always his trouble – living at an intense pitch when the mood is on.’

  ‘He has,’ ventured the doctor, ‘got rather a – distinct ego.’

  ‘Yes. Very. But it’s more than that, Doctor. If you don’t mind my saying so, I know he gets you a little on the raw occasionally. I – have admired your restraint.’ Mr. Gwynn smiled in understanding. ‘When the ego gets going like that, one feels in it – something destructive – a sort of teasing out that cares nothing for another’s feelings – a tearing down to the root, a tearing out. Do I make sense?’

  ‘Yet in his case, saved from being vicious, you think, because of the creative impulse in him?’

  ‘Precisely! Yet – for we should follow his frankness – not always saved. I’ve seen so much of it. Oh, so much! Brilliant young fellows. I don’t merely mean they lose what we call the moral sense. Promiscuous sexuality and all that – well!’ Mr. Gwynn’s gesture signified that that mightn’t matter so much. ‘It’s that their minds, their laughter even, becomes avid, sadistic. They squeeze the juice into a sort of poison. They pervert, destroy – themselves.’ Mr. Gwynn added: ‘I should know.’

  The doctor was silent for a moment, then reticently passing over Mr. Gwynn’s last sentence, said quietly, ‘I suppose they start off hunting for something – some sort of belief.’

  ‘And there’s no belief. That’s the essence of it. Between the period of belief that was and the new belief that may some day come again, there is this desert, this dark wood. It’s the land we inhabit.’

  The doctor lit a fresh cigarette. ‘I wonder if you are exaggerating? You see, the number of people who are destructive, or nihilistic, those brilliant fellows you talk of, they are really only a few. They have been probably in every age.’

  ‘Yes. But they don’t much matter in an age that has belief. In an age that has lost belief, they do matter. They may be few in number, but they ultimately destroy their society. Always. They are your symptoms.’

  ‘This word, belief?’

  ‘I know. It’s difficult. We don’t want to use the word religion, because it particularizes too narrowly. Denominational. But, for example, away back in your primitive world here you had absolute belief, a complete fusing of intelligence, of imagination, of all the faculties. They did not believe in belief. It was the breath they breathed, the life they lived.’

  ‘As an example, I see what you mean. But, after all, if it was as easy as that… I mean if the thing wasn’t conscious in them, was just like the breath they breathed, then did it amount to much? Was it really belief as we try to know it?’

  ‘Ah, now you introduce the word conscious, as we know it. When intelligence stopped being fused with their belief, it came apart by itself, it began to ask questions, to inquire – and so began scientific inquiry. So the split in the whole. The spontaneous belief that gave wholeness was gone. Now if we could grow a new whole out of scientific inquiry and material phenomena alone, then we could see our way ahead. But apparently we can’t. When a man is happily in love, or listening to a piece of music, or creating something, then he has the complete sensation of wholeness. Immediately he pauses consciously to inquire into it, he ceases having the sensation itself. By sensation, I mean the act of experiencing, the breathing of the breath.’

  ‘The conscious and the unconscious. They have got badly divided? I suppose this is science – applying psychic measurement to your philosophies!’

  ‘And the conscious and unconscious are very much divided in us moreover, so what?’

  They smiled and drank.

  ‘An odd thing happened to-day,’ said Mr. Gwynn. ‘You would have been amused. That a platform of rock should have been there and that it was level – the least incline to the sea and he would have bounced off it – was the sort of miracle Michael enjoyed. Then he was hauled up, and he sat among the people, as you know. Then he came home, conscious that he had been, not just among the people, but among his people. He was acting it all, of course, throwing out the hint that he was coming riding on an ass’s colt – but without the bitterness of blasphemy. It was all light-headed, but it also had for him a light and delicious feeling of reality.’

  ‘The laird of his people?’

  ‘No, no. That was the humour, the play-acting, based certainly on the fact that he is the laird. It was beneath that, the sense of having been one with them, of knowing them simply, in a moment that, after all, must have been for him a heightened, even revealing moment.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr. Gwynn.’ The doctor shook his head. ‘I can’t take it in. Half an hour with them, trying to get them to talk – for they can’t talk as you or he does – and he would be irritated, bored stiff.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Mr. Gwynn. ‘No doubt. But he gets bored with me, with you, with himself. That’s the trouble. You miss my point. The storm, the cliff, the sea, the bird, the men, the men’s faces, death missed by a hair’s breadth, life. He got life. Not an intensification of the split, but unconscious wholeness in simply breathing and not feeling alien among these men.’ Mr. Gwynn shrugged.‘I make too much of it. A trifle, that you’d really have had to see to appreciate.’

  ‘Perhaps I can see. Anyway, as you tell it, it’s a nice distinction.’ The doctor smiled through a slow exhalation of cigarette smoke, amused, as if the picture were there before him.

  Mr. Gwynn smiled also, almost quizzically, at the doctor. ‘Odd that one should smile or laugh when vision suddenly does its work.’

  The doctor laughed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Makes you feel good.’

  The doctor glanced at him.

  Mr. Gwynn nodded with the same humour. ‘How pregnant the colloquialism! Makes you feel good. Interesting?’

  ‘It is, when you think of it that way.’

  ‘The old primordial goodness of the human heart,’ said Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘You believe that’s there?’

  ‘Always. Basic. And you can measure its strength by its evil opposite, its perversion – and the one hell’s broth it brews. The need to feel good must in nature have an outlet. When it doesn’t get it – when it gets dammed back for any one reason or another, economic, theoretic, intolerant, religious, witch-doctorish – then it bursts through, with mad scaldings and bloody wars.’

  ‘It’s a hopeful philosophy!’

  ‘Or a scientific assessment. But our only hope, definitely.’

  The talk went on for a long time, then, finding Michael still asleep, the doctor left.

  Immediately he was alone in the storm, under the threshing trees, all words left him. Not much primordial goodness, here, in the black destroying heart of the night! Nothing but sheer nihilism!

  He leaned against the outside gate, staring into the storm, sheltered from it, staring up in the direction of the manse.

  Curiosity and something calling out of the heart of the storm drew him towards the manse – as it had drawn him the night the boys got lost.

  That night he had been in Cruime and had formed one of the scattered search party. Once alone, he had argued that the boys, afraid of the thundering cliffs, would probably have struggled back inland and so might easily land about the manse.

  One excuse was no doubt as good as another if it took him down the manse way! He had already rationalized the half-incestuous dream – or rather its explanation had suddenly leaped upon him when actually engaged in delivering the head stalker’s wife. It had been motivated by his unconscious anxiety, his anxiety while he slept, for a difficult case. He had transferred the woman’s flesh to Flora, for in his dream he had seen Flora’s flesh, the small of the back, the buttocks, the part that was going to be voluptuously thrashed.

  His unconscious had done this for him, simply because it had apprehended, in its own odd fashion, that the black wrath of the father – desire that was dammed – would be visited upon the daughter.

  The unconscious acted in this completely irrational way. That’s all that need be thought about it. If there was any cause for shame or alarm
anywhere, it was in his own dreaming mind!

  Yet – something was going to happen. Charlie and Flora could not go on meeting as they were doing and nothing come of it. Life did not work in that way.

  He had come down that night by the cemetery wall, through the trees, feeling his way. Emerging from the blackness of the trees, he had seen the vague bulk of the house. His eyes had lifted for its outline against the sky, then shot down to something like a human figure moving across the lawn. He thought he was deceived, but waited, holding his breath, then crept nearer.

  Movement within the house. A momentary glimpse of a light. He waited.

  The key turned with a sharp scream in the front door. The doctor flattened himself against the wall. The minister came out, shut the door, and started across the lawn. Fraoch barked inside. The barking passed into a high whining. The doctor slid away from the wall, across the lawn. Flora must have come out by the window!

  The doctor’s eyes were extremely wary. The darkness, the swaying and noisy trees – it was very difficult to be sure of a movement, a sound. Once he thought he heard a cry and quickened his steps – and fell into the fence.

  There were cries about, cries from the moor of the search party for the boys. For those he was following, the night must have been suddenly haunted!

  After the trees, the moor path was almost distinct for a yard or two ahead. Every now and then he stopped and listened. Charlie was bound to have come and met Flora. Where were they? He kept going on.

  Then he heard voices, not the crying voices of the moor, but two men’s wild voices, and then Flora’s cry: ‘Father! Father!’

  When he reached the spot there was no one there. He cast about, crying in a low voice, searching for a body, for someone left behind in the heather.