The Key of the Chest
Page 32
‘Seems to have given her his blessing,’ said Michael.
‘Looks like it.’
‘Must have been pretty grim without it. Gwynn will be glad they’ve made it up. Wholeness once more!’ As Flora dipped out of sight, the doctor said lightly, ‘I’ll go and make sure she’s not coming this way.’ And he walked out of the hide but not over the flat ground, instead he took the slope to the right and disappeared over its crest.
Michael’s brows gathered. What exactly was the doctor’s idea? Where was she going?…
Flat in the heather, the doctor waited. Far at the point of the Ros, he could see Charlie’s cottage in the sun.
In time Flora appeared over the western shoulder of the valley. When the valley was shut off, she paused and the doctor decided she could see the cottage. She stood quite still for a while, gazing in its direction, then slowly looked about her. All at once there were a few sharp eager yelps. They drew her attention. In a moment she was running, her skirt pulled up. He heard her rounded golden cries. She was stooping over Fraoch. She was on her back in the heather, Fraoch aloft and struggling in her hands. They frolicked wildly. Then she got up, straightened herself, raised an admonitory finger at Fraoch, and continued on her way with proper decorum.
He watched her as she went across the moor towards Charlie’s cottage, space about her and a light that ran and lifted clear over the Ros and the sea beyond to the remote horizon line of the west.
There was a strange final certainty in her going. Behind the movement of her upright figure, he knew that words had been spoken between her father and herself, words and silences that swept the dark places, cleansing them, and so at last there she went, carrying her father’s submission, his blessing, lightly, already forgetting it as one forgets the sunlight and the air, in the delicious turmoil of the adventure ahead.
But he also knew, in this moment of watching her, more than she knew or her father, for his mind brought Charlie into the wide design – and all Charlie’s secret thoughts as he had learned and listened to them no later than last night. Now she would sit and listen to Charlie as the grey light came, and then, Charlie being unfit, Dougald would see her home.
The moor was translated to a distant land, to the African veldt, to a plain in Canada, and Charlie was by her side, and they were walking along, golden and laughing…. That was the certain end.
She was going away. They were both going away. He felt something draining out of his heart, draining out of the land itself, leaving an imponderable shadow.
Leaving the shadow on the land. The shadow from the passing of the bright ones. Always… going away… driven away…. Leaving her shadow on his heart.
There, where she walked, he had had, in the ghost light from yesterday’s dead day, his vision of morality. Now he realized there was one thing deeper and older than his vision, and it was walking over the vision on two light feet.
Out of the bright air, first like a silent singing and then with a whirr of wings, came the wild duck in a wide circle, heads out-thrust on long necks, eager, out of the heart of life, in a lovely swift sweep, downward, flattening out, wings pressing back the air, webbed feet thrusting forward, breaking the mirror of the loch into running dancing ripples and shaking the reeds.
About the Author
THE KEY OF THE CHEST
for Peter and Ena
Neil Miller Gunn (1891–1973) was born in Dunbeath, Caithness, one of the nine children of ‘bookish’ Isabella Miller, ambitious for her sons, and James Gunn, a fishing skipper of local renown. At thirteen, Neil was sent away to live with a married sister in Galloway. At fifteen, he went to London as a boy clerk in the Civil Service. In 1911, he began 26 years as an excise officer, many of them at whisky distilleries in the Highlands and Islands. When the Great War broke out, two of his brothers were killed and one died later of war-related injuries. Gunn was particularly close to his brother John, who was badly gassed, and in later years John’s war experiences were incorporated into Highland River. In 1921, Gunn married Jessie Frew. Tragically, their only child was still-born.
Gunn’s duties in Inverness (1923–1937) left ample time for writing and for activity as a leader in Scottish Nationalist politics. The first of his 21 novels, The Grey Coast, appeared in 1926. The fourth, Morning Tide (1930), was a Book Society choice in 1931. In 1937, the acclaim won by his seventh, the prize-winning Highland River, encouraged him to resign his excise post and write full-time.
Notable among his other novels are The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944), The Well at the World’s End (1951), Bloodhunt (1952), and four epic recreations of Highland history, with Sun Circle (1933) for ancient times, Butcher’s Broom (1934) for the Clearances, the hugely successful The Silver Darlings (1941), and from modern times The Drinking Well (1946). Gunn also published short stories, essays and plays. His last book, The Atom of Delight (1956), is an autobiography which reflects his lifelong and Zen-like fascination with the elusive spirit of life, wisdom, and delight.
Gunn’s wife died in 1963, and he lived alone in the Black Isle until his death in January, 1973. Since then, his standing as one of Scotland’s great novelists has grown even more firmly established, and the Neil Gunn International Fellowship was founded in his honour.
Copyright
First published in 1945 by Faber and Faber Ltd
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1998,
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Introduction copyright © J. B. Pick, 1998
All rights reserved
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific
grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 496 8
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