The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  Down on her left, towards the inner end of the wide bay, Flora saw the roofs of Ros Lodge among its plantation of pines. Far beyond and in the same direction lay Ardnarie with its croft houses and small coloured fields. Across the calm air came the rapid barking of a motor-cycle and the slow barking of two collie dogs.

  The white launch lay to its red buoy in the unruffled blue-green water, which broke in lazy impacts on the shore. Someone was sitting on the slipway below the boathouse with its dark-green roof. The sun was sliding down the sky and already the sea far to the west was gathering the silver that presently would become a molten glitter.

  Flora continued along the breast of the gentle slope. It was going to be a wonderful sunset. The long bands of marmoreal cloud above the western horizon were waiting in their dream for the glory that would descend upon them.

  It was a land of sunsets, of a beauty that, dying, could be too much for what is born in loneliness. Yet she loved it, too. It brought in its aftermath the relief – which she now experienced after her storm of tears, a strange detached relief in which the body lightened and in some way passed out, with its own light-headed gaiety, upon the air. But delicate, too delicate, and vulnerable, yet defiant, too. At any moment, under an uncontrollable waywardness of impulse, it could cry out or cover its head.

  Those impulses, those wayward moods, that in the moment of their being were all life, all and everything!

  She knew their surge too well, the formless beginning of the wave, its oncoming, that awful suspense of the faculties, the flight of reason, of control, the waiting, the terrible intolerable waiting.

  Fraoch shot past with little urgent yelps, his back no higher than the heather. The purple had faded but not completely. She picked a sprig on which the florets were wide open, no longer reserved and bud-pointed but flat open in a starry eagerness, a radiant maturity, a giving-up.

  She called Fraoch but he ignored her. No sooner had he rushed one scent to earth than he flushed another. Though normally an obedient dog, in his hunting he seemed actually not to hear the human voice, the cry of command. A thrashing made no difference. Once the scent and himself were joined, nothing could part them short of brute force. But he had no interest in wild game or sheep. Only in rabbits, which he continued to hunt in his sleep.

  She so understood this law of his being, that it had become a bond between them. Sometimes she teased him about it, tickling his pads as he dreamt on the hearthrug and whispering, ‘Rabbits!’ When he wakened up and found there were no rabbits, she accused herself: ‘What a shame!’ and laughed and pushed away his more urgent demonstrations of affection.

  The Lodge sank out of sight as the slope curved round upon the wide broken expanse of the Ros. Away on her right lay the inland mysterious region of Loch Geal, full of tales, and some said there was still a ghost. She herself had known its silence in a summer noon.

  Mostly these tales had to do with lovers, though there was one, bitter with the harsh violence of murder and the evocation of the murderer’s pale face in the night. Her father, in one of his interesting playful moods of long ago, had tried to explain it all by saying that it was the place between the two coasts of the Ros where folk would go when they had secret things to tell or to do. Thus it had always seemed to her that before a girl would dare the terrors of the night in order to meet her lover here, she must have had upon her the hand of Fate. She would have moved under that curious compulsion which could still be felt in the ballad about her or the song. Even the voice has changed, and her simple acts and her words can be reduced no further and so have upon them the fatality of the end.

  Flora did not reason thus about it. Or rather, even while her father had been speaking or the song was being sung, her reason produced its own profound logic in the form of images, visualizations. She saw reason happen, and it had bearing and dignity. This kind of reason permits no shadow of misunderstanding as it moves to its inevitable conclusion.

  At the end of the Ros lay Charlie’s cottage…

  She visioned the inside of the cottage, still and disrupted. Charlie’s room gaped in the silence. Things that he had left behind lay twisted.

  Dougald might root about like an animal in a den, but the den was not listening to him. Charlie was gone.

  She did not ask herself questions about Charlie’s going. The why? crying in her mind dissolved about the figure of Charlie who was leaving the Ros, who was walking away into that far world, where neither eye nor cry could follow.

  Passionately she had told herself that Charlie had never done the foul deed, the awful unthinkable act. But these were just words crying in her mind. Behind them were the human bodies, the bodies of men, and the minds of men, stalking through the possibility of all deeds and of all crimes. In that dim hinterland they moved and struck out of the compulsion of the fatal mood.

  When she herself had disobeyed all the rules, she had not thought about crime. She knew she was doing wrong, she knew she would bring disgrace on herself and on her parents, but these were thoughts that merely tied the feet and the arms; and all the resources of her mind, with an unthinkable calm and cunning, had set about trying to break clear. She had hoped, of course, that she would not be found out. She had made herself believe she wouldn’t. Actually, in a way she didn’t understand, she didn’t care what happened – once she had broken through and reached Charlie.

  How astonished the other girls had been! And some of them so clever, too, that in comparison she was stupid. They had looked upon her as simple, as one with so small an endowment of brains that she could hardly explain in words an obvious affair of history or geography. She had had to learn her school tasks by a process of continuous repetition. True, once the lesson had come alive in her mind, and her voice, which some of the girls so frankly admired, expressed it with assurance, then she was for that moment redeemed even in her teacher’s opinion. In this fashion, she had struggled on. In the polite arts, like drawing, she had held her own, though again without facility and therefore in a characteristic manner. In the use of watercolours, for example, the art-mistress always said that her drawing was over-simplified and her use of colour altogether too primitive. She herself had known they were childish. Secretly she was very ashamed of them. But when she tried for shadings and clever perspectives, she merely smudged. So she stuck to her simple lines and her clean colours. And, at least, her colours always had been good. When class work was being inspected by an outside examiner, it was always a certainty that Flora’s work, for whatever reason, would command most attention.

  But her sole personal triumph among her fellow students in that Edinburgh girls’ college, lay in the way she carried her two tweed suits on special occasions. When they asked who her tailor was, she laughed. When they asked where she got the fascinating tweed, she mentioned a remote country weaver. One was a soft green, with yellowish flecks in it when closely examined. The other, a dun brown. But her particular friend, Elizabeth Cameron, a dark stumpy girl, knew why Flora’s clothes fitted her so perfectly, because she knew that had she herself been the tailor she would have been inspired by Flora’s figure and style. It was bliss for Elizabeth to walk with Flora along Princes Street at a certain hour on Saturday afternoon.

  And on Princes Street she had first met Charlie. She had known him, of course, as a schoolboy at Cruime, but as he had been four years older, naturally there had been no communion between them. None. Charlie had been one of the ‘big boys’, and little girls merely talked about their fights or other desperate doings. Charlie had been her particular hero. That was all.

  And then there he was on Princes Street, and with him the places which she loved, the Ros, and Cruime, the paths, the little burns, the sea. And Charlie sees that she is all grown up.

  Charlie is shy and very polite, so he talks and laughs quite a lot to show how much he is at his ease. They have their college manners, their Edinburgh savoir-faire. They are not yet near each other at all. They are laughing across whole wastes of the Ros. The old nam
es are talismans in their speech. She completely forgets about Elizabeth, who is coming behind with Charlie’s friend. They are walking along together. And she knows that Charlie, too, has this subtle thing called style. It is all about him, in his movement, in his manners. An easy grace of the body, a flowing on. They breasted Princes Street and felt its passing eyes upon them. Oh, it was exciting!

  Fraoch appeared, panting, brown earth on his whiskers and forehead.

  ‘Where have you been, you rascal?’ she asked.

  But he made only a half-hearted attempt at laughing. There was clearly no need to propitiate her. ‘What a face!’ she cried. She laughed. ‘Come here till I clean you.’

  She looked about for a place to sit down. Her own world was now left behind, and the cool intimacy that inhabits lonely places was suddenly with her. Seated on a heather cushion, she called him, but instead of coming, he began ploughing a grassy verge with his head. Then flat on his stomach, tongue hanging out, he looked at her. She admitted he had improved his appearance. At her gentle words, he made all the motions of approach without, however, advancing more than a foot.

  She looked at him for a long moment, smiling thoughtfully, then her eyes unconsciously slid away.

  Some of the long bars of cloud above the western horizon were already catching a faint warmth. They were so arranged, one floating behind another, that the sky flattened and receded to an immense distance. Spaces and shapes and here and there an extra vividness gave variety, so that it became a sunset land of many provinces and far-travelled countries. One ocean of emerald, glimpsed through an arch of cloud as through a grotto, led beyond all temporal boundaries. Sails setting into those far seas would never return. The silver and the golden apples, and the last sound gone beyond the earth and beyond the sun.

  The ultimates. Where no reason is any more.

  One loses reason altogether. One doesn’t care for anyone’s opinion. She had been taken before the Principal of the college. She had been spoken to at length, more in sorrow than in anger, but very firmly none the less, for if the girls of this college were not to ‘set an example’, then who would?

  Flora had appreciated it all. She had indeed been so overwhelmed with shame that in the very moment of the interview it had hardly seemed to be happening to her at all, but rather to some numbed person in a dream.

  She had not meant to be late, she said. She had not noticed the time.

  ‘But it was after midnight!’

  ‘I came back before, but when I found the door shut, I was afraid to— I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Was the young man with you?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’m.’

  ‘Who is this young man?’ Flora remained silent.

  ‘I cannot force you to tell me. But I have my duty to your parents who entrust you to my charge. I have a similar duty to all parents. I have the honour of the college to uphold. When a student forgets how to behave herself then it is my duty to inform her parents – and to ask them to withdraw her, if such a dishonouring course should be necessary.’ The voice had hardened, the dark eyes caught a pattern of severe and threatening dignity.

  In the end, Flora had told everything. That Charlie was a divinity student, who had known her as a schoolgirl, was taken into account, and she was let off, but only after her solemn promise was given that she would never again transgress against the rules of the college. As for the young man, should there be further evidence of clandestine intercourse of any kind with him, then Flora’s parents would at once be informed.

  In the end, the Principal had spoken, firmly still, but kindly. It was this final thrust of explanatory kindliness that had preyed on Flora.

  For a few days she remained in a quietened state, which even her inquisitive companions, forever secretly pestering her for details, could not dissipate. When at last she felt she must let Charlie know, she found she had never had his address.

  Then Charlie’s note came.

  It started all over again, only, oh, a hundred times worse.

  For Charlie was getting into a strange erratic mood. Something was happening to him. But he would not tell her anything. He laughed aside her reproaches. Occasionally there seemed something bitter, even cruel, in him. She caught it in the sound of his voice, especially when he laughed.

  Also at other times – at other times – in an embrace. Then his protestation of sorrow, of regret. That was when he was most formidable. He had not meant to hurt her. She must understand that. He would not hurt her, hurt her feelings, would not hurt a hair of her head to save his life. The words did not matter. It was the way he said them. There was a warmth in him that got round the heart. A movement, a pliancy, a variety, a gay detachment, intimate and wholly unexpected little courtesies in a culminating moment that took the breath.

  A madness. A walking beyond. She lived in this terrifying and enchanting dream even while she was doing her lessons. As a background, it accompanied her always. She mentioned it to no one, but her companions knew of it. They would have guessed, even had Elizabeth kept her mouth shut. And Elizabeth could not quite do that. Oaths of secrecy and whispered tidings. On such fare the girls kept alive and even bloomed. Flora was not the only one, by any means. But the girls knew, with the intuition that begins where logic ends, that Flora was the only one upon whom the absolute had come. In a profound way they respected this and watched. The brilliant Sally Henderson changed her attitude and unobtrusively began to be friendly, to help.

  For one final month, what an extraordinary life that had been!

  The absolute stood back into the region where no sun shone. Dark tracks led to it as to some awful Loch Geal at midnight.

  Whenever Charlie declared his religious scepticism, the source of his money would dry up. That thought brought shame on him, too, for even his brother Dougald was assisting him.

  Flora’s father had helped to get him one of his bursaries. There were others, who had written letters, signed papers. An uncle on his mother’s side, an elder of the Free Church, had given fifty pounds. They had all been anxious to help a lad who showed promise, and whose parents had died, the father from drowning while lobster-fishing off the Stormy Isles and the mother following a simple accident by which she damaged her spine. His mother’s illness had been prolonged, and during it she had shown so patient and cheerful a disposition that Charlie had grown more affectionate to her than ever before. It was during this period that he had said he might have gone in for the Church, had that been possible.

  Then the important ones had made it possible. And their number – as if he had been a gift to the Church from a whole community – was what now haunted Charlie in those sensitive places which torture selects for its more delicate manifestations.

  He got past the unwillingness to tell her, past the obscurities and dark if lightly-delivered hints, the slight air even of swaggering carelessness, past everything – because at last she realized that he had come to care for her. This was an extreme revelation, because it also made clear that up to this point he had simply been enjoying himself as any lad will with a girl he likes. It had also made clear something in herself, made it terribly and finally clear.

  In a way, she had become a different girl. In the back of her mind, she was really changed. The meaning of everything had altered. The college rules were still there. But she no longer stressed their difficulty to Charlie. She had to deal with them herself. They were obstacles that had to be overcome, while that queer and culminating debate went on.

  The awful thing was that she was no good at argument. Sometimes this annoyed Charlie. He craved words from her, understanding, discussion. She was little help to him. Sitting there in the darkened world by a whin bush on the Blackford Hill, she must have seemed often little more than a deaf mute. He could have had no idea in the world of the intensity with which she lived those moments.

  The burden of them occasionally did really grow so great that she became insensible and her hand lay so heavy that she could not have moved it. When h
e caught her then in some wild clearing mood of his own, she could not respond.

  For to her, the situation, however tragic for Charlie, or for herself, was simple. If Charlie could not be a minister, he could not. That was all.

  One knew, without words, when that dreadful truth was reached. In fact, she knew it before Charlie himself quite knew it. Before he had taken his decision, she was already wandering in the bleak regions beyond.

  No one who has words ready, whose words come rushing forth or whose words are swift and logical, can understand what it is to perceive a situation so completely and fatally that nothing can be said, nothing can be added, nothing taken away.

  Words then are noises and sounds that obscure, that cover up, that evade. For this reason they are warm and human and desired. But the point is reached when they won’t come, and the breast chokes and feels like a dumb animal’s breast. Room then in space only for simple words, for simple statement of the fact.

  ‘It will make no difference to me,’ she said.

  From her own mind, the words went into all space and time. Hand in hand they sent her with him.

  But they did not quieten Charlie’s restlessness. And there were a couple of long desperate nights when she saw Charlie was trying to break with her. But he could not bring himself to do it. And in a way which she profoundly understood, but for which there could be no words ever, she saw Charlie torturing himself and torturing her deliberately, yet now hardly knowing himself why he did it. A little more, a little more of this mood now, and the break can be made, the inexorable departure can be taken, the obliterating laughter be indulged. She touches him with her hand. ‘Charlie!’

  Until that last night when she was caught climbing back to Elizabeth at the window. Every girl in the place seemed awake. They all knew. They had been thrilled by the use of the window and the double rope with the knots which made a short ladder.

  It was the sort of escapade so completely alien to Flora’s nature, to the very movement of her body, that now, nearly seven years afterwards, it seemed quite unreal. It was like expecting some well-behaved young lady, innately conscious of the need for the social observances, suddenly to become a tight-rope walker in public. Not only grotesque, but physically impossible.