The Key of the Chest

by Neil M. Gunn

  They walked on for a few paces in silence.

  ‘I don’t think that sort of thing should be done in a hurry,’ said the doctor at last.

  ‘I hesitate to ask your reason – but at least let me assure you it’s not mere curiosity,’ replied Mr. Gwynn soberly. ‘Do you mean you would rather resent the intrusion – on yourself?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s – in the circumstances – hardly a professional matter.’

  ‘I entirely agree.’ Mr. Gwynn nodded. ‘And thank you for being so frank.’

  They had to go single file for a little way, and then they came to the brink of the descent down the little gorge.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ said Mr. Gwynn. He stood, breathing in the pale gold of the small birches that seemed to grow out of the boulders and rocks. ‘Extraordinary country. You think there’s nothing but bleak brown mountain and moor, then all of a sudden – this.’ He made his slight characteristic gesture, the palm of the right hand finishing upward. Something foreign and charming and detached about it, the doctor thought.

  ‘The path is quite clear.’ The doctor was pointing. ‘You’ll just have to watch your step.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Doctor – and not only for introducing me to this.’ His eyes were merry.

  The doctor looked at him, and shook his head with a smile. ‘I’ve done nothing. You see, actually I feel this mental business is very difficult. We all can help with analysis now and then. But it’s a difficult, and perhaps treacherous business – for the inexpert.’

  ‘You mean when it really goes down into consideration of – the split mind – and so on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I agree. Apparently they can do fairly wonderful things to the mind nowadays – the experts.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘You are very cautious?’ suggested Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘It’s not that really. One can often have some idea of the trouble. Just as you feel you know what’s pretty well wrong with Michael. Then there are psychopathic conditions which have to be analysed very very carefully – often with surprising results. But not all conditions are psychopathic in that way. There’s not always the hidden trigger, so to speak, that you can ultimately find, and pull, and so clear the gun barrels.’

  ‘What precisely are you getting at?’

  ‘This set that Michael moved among – what would you say was wrong with them?’

  ‘Lord, that would take a time to tell! These were the regions I inhabited.’

  ‘In that case – we’ll postpone it!’

  ‘Shall we?’

  At once all air of urgency was dispelled, as if Mr. Gwynn had suddenly realized the hopelessness of talk – with this country doctor. A freshness died out of his expression, though he was charming and friendly as ever.

  The doctor’s response was curious. He said: ‘I rather fancy that if Michael unloaded himself on me, he might then feel somewhat empty – and resentful. He might suddenly, indeed, dislike me very much. That may not be the usual result, I know. However, if the main trouble in all this is a loss of faith, a sort of nihilism, then what is needed is an integrating process, something that will bring the split bits together. The technique for doing that might have to be pretty subtle, and very individual.’ The doctor’s face wore its easy professional mask.

  Mr. Gwynn looked searchingly at him. Then his face broke into a smile. But before he could speak, the doctor said,‘I must be off or I’ll have the dark on me.’ As he turned his head away, he paused. Well up the slope, and proceeding in the direction of the manse, went Flora, followed at about ten paces by her father. Even as he stared, he saw a movement behind Flora’s heels. It was Fraoch, with his head down.

  The sun had set and there was a darkening over the withered heath.

  ‘Is that the parson?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered the doctor without turning round.

  ‘Rather intense sort of man, isn’t he?’

  ‘Actually,’ said the doctor, ‘he’s a kind man. Helps his flock in unobtrusive ways quite a lot. Most of the old folk swear by him.’ He had turned and was talking casually.

  ‘We heard him at the burial service,’ said Mr. Gwynn.

  ‘Oh. In religious matters, well – he believes.’ The doctor took out his cigarette case.

  ‘So we are back at belief?’ said Mr. Gwynn with humour, as he refused a cigarette.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said the doctor, and he smiled through the cigarette smoke.

  ‘Do come down and see us soon. I wish you would.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I will.’

  After a few more courtesies, the doctor started back, casting his eyes along the slope and seeing the ominous procession pass into the trees.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  His dream wakened the doctor, it was so vivid. In an endless minute, he lived it all over again, and so complete was the illusion that he had not to hunt for a forgotten part, did not feel, as normally happened, that it was already fading. On the contrary, it so troubled him that he had deliberately to repel it, to make himself realize it was still dark, to wonder what time it was.

  Listening, he heard a movement in the kitchen. He came fully to himself and thought: There she is! There was no need for his mother to get up. Iosbail, the maid, could have got all he wanted. Striking a match, he looked at the time, lit the candle, and swung out of bed.

  To his mother he said,‘I told you I didn’t want bacon. You needn’t have bothered getting up.’

  ‘You do need bacon,’ his mother answered positively. ‘You know very well you don’t know how long you’ll be: perhaps all day.’

  He did not answer, feeling irritated. Turning away, he got his medical gear into the brown bag.

  He made no comment when the plate of bacon with two fried eggs was placed before him. He just sat waiting until his mother had poured him a cup of tea. Slowly and somewhat noisily, for it was very hot, he began drinking the tea. Finally he ate one of the eggs and a rasher of bacon.

  Outside it was still dark but with a suggestion of the grey of the morning. He did not think of lighting his acetylene lamp, and waddled off into the gloom. There was a slight decline for twenty yards and when he dropped the exhaust valve the engine fired. This pleased him.

  The dawn grey was quite distinct by the time he was above the manse. It was a perfectly still and chill morning, and the manse roof and the trees were very quiet. This dark-grey of a motionless world had the quality of pure dream, the arrested stillness, the absolute quality.

  An irrational impulse came over him to stop his machine, look at the manse, and listen.

  He did not obey this impulse but he looked at the manse until his machine swerved.

  The extraordinary thing about his dream was its air of earthly actuality. Usually there is a strangeness in a dream, odd symbols to disentangle and recognize. However vividly real it may appear, it has its own dimensions of time and space. This dream of his so belonged to normal earthly dimensions that it was still completely clear as if it were in simple fact the record of an actual happening.

  Normally he could satisfy himself as to the starting point or cause of a dream. This time he was baffled, and there was something about the dream so horrible that it necessarily cast an odd light into the dark recesses of his own mind.

  He had seen the minister’s face as he walked restlessly and softly, like a caged animal, had seen it with that kind of clarity which Michael sometimes got in his photographs. Up and down his study; pausing, going on; listening, going on; swallowing his spittle, hesitating by the door, coming back.

  Completely horrible, because he had known to its last quiver of feeling what was in the minister’s mind. The dead of the night and this same stillness on the world, with a deeper waiting stillness in the manse, the stairs, about the doors.

  The minister should have been in bed hours ago, but this had been working on him, gradually working up to a fever, this now frenzied desire to go into his da
ughter’s bedroom and chastise her.

  For the doctor knew, what the minister did not know, that beneath this desire to chastise her flesh there was not merely a father’s outraged authority, not only those promptings to sadism which at bitter moments affect most of mankind, but also a very deep incestuous motive.

  And what was horrible was that the doctor should find this motive even while he was certain that the minister would neither find it nor act upon it. As the minister’s hand closed stealthily over the door knob of his study, the doctor awoke.

  Soon Cruime was there before him in its deep twilight. Here and there a gable-end showed white as a sheep’s face. The sea had the sky’s dim reflection and the skerries were black. A dog began to bark. Old women would turn in their beds and as they listened to the sounds of the motor-cycle fading away into the forest they would wish the gamekeeper’s wife an easy delivery, poor thing.

  At an early hour like this, one lived with humanity in a curious detachment. And despite his dream, perhaps even because of it, the doctor was aware of humanity in its age-old, childlike simplicity of sleep. The symbols and the terrors of sleep, the distant calm death-sleep, the sweating terrors out of primitive religions, ancient myths. Children all. So that the minister himself is like a child wandering and weeping in the night.

  This disembodied, translating quality of the grey dawn twilight! How often he had known it, how intimate and faintly unearthly it was! To get it in its fullness, one needed to be worn-out and empty, with its grey chill on the skin.

  The road into the forest of Garuvben was narrow but smooth except for two thin green lines where the grass was beginning to grow. The bare glen wound round to the left, with flowing mountain lines against the sky. Down where the burn ran there were low bushes, but elsewhere all was heather, broken by occasional boulders and outcrops of rock. The head stalker’s house, hidden by the near mountain, was some three miles away. The rise in the road was gradual and continuous and the doctor opened throttle. He was just a little anxious about his patient, for she had been developing lately (her husband had hinted it with a touch of embarrassment) odd fancies about the mountains. However, the nurse would be there. He had needed a few hours’ sleep. Work came occasionally in a spate.

  He was now travelling at speed with his eyes on the road directly in front, for he had to watch the slight green ridges which lay between the track of the horses’ hoofs and the wheel-tracks. He certainly anticipated no traffic at that hour and was among the sheep before he quite noticed them. There was a harsh yell which he heard even above the sound of the engine. But he was so used to the unexpected on these roads that his thumb closed the throttle and his foot jammed on the brake automatically and he found himself sitting still while the sheep took the hillside. He had hit none of them, though one collided with his front wheel now in passing.

  The sheepdog had set up a half-nervous barking but was already on the slope after the sheep, while the shepherd stood and glowered. It was Dougald MacIan.

  ‘On the road early, Dougald,’ called the doctor.

  In that half-light Dougald certainly did look like a wild apparition of himself. Had he appeared out of some hole where he had been drunk for days, he could hardly have bettered that hairy glowering. The doctor felt its animosity touch him. Then Dougald broke out of his stance and took to the hillside after his dozen ewes. As he stepped on the heather, he staggered.

  The cool smile was still on the doctor’s face, but now it developed a hard humoured twist as he started on the tiresome business of getting his machine going against the gradient. Half a mile farther on and just short of the house, he was stopped by the head stalker.

  ‘Oh I’m glad to see you, Doctor.’ The warm voice was full of urgency and distress.

  ‘How are things going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Oh, I’m glad you’ve come.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll soon have her all right. The nurse is with her?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ And in his eagerness he was helping the doctor to pull back the cycle onto its stand.

  Andrew Mackinnon was a man of the hills, straight, strongly built in a spare way, with weathered face, brown moustache, and steady blue eyes. The eagerness of an over-anxious boy was now struggling against the reserve of the man. As they approached the door, there were some scarcely human cries. The doctor glanced at Andrew whose cap had got tilted in his effort to help with the cycle, and saw that the hair over his forehead was licked smooth with sweat.

  As the doctor unslung his bag, he said, ‘What were you doing to Dougald MacIan so early in the morning?’

  Andrew looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is he drunk?’

  ‘Maybe he is a bit.’ He tried to smile, in agony that the doctor could stand there making a joke.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Oh hurry!’ said Andrew, and he turned away, pursued by the cries. Some two hours later, Andrew stood with the doctor who was pulling on his gauntlet gloves beside the motor-cycle.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you, Doctor.’

  ‘A healthy boy. And she’ll be all right.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Andrew, the sibilants hissing in his mouth. The doctor saw that reaction had produced a jerkiness in the man’s muscles.

  ‘But she’ll need to take things carefully. I’ll say a word to the nurse.’

  ‘If only you would, Doctor. Yes, yes.’

  ‘And, by the way, you were right in what you said about the mountains.’

  ‘Do you think that yourself, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes. They’re getting her a bit down.’ He remained thoughtful for a moment while Andrew, who was several years older, stared at his face as a boy at a master’s. ‘When did this – fear of hers start?’

  ‘It’s some time now. Maybe when the boy first started coming. I had some difficult times – particularly when the light would be going – in the evening.’

  His words, almost painfully dug out of him, were extraordinarily pregnant with image for the doctor.

  ‘Hasn’t she been happy here, then, the last year or two?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Before, there would be comings and goings with the girls up by at the big house, for they were girls from the district. But the year before last they started taking the whole staff from the South… it’s different.’

  ‘There was some trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know that it was anything much. But there came upon her – a loneliness. And then the hills…. She was brought up on the east coast.’

  ‘How would you like a place on the east coast?’ Andrew looked at him. ‘Yesterday I promised her that, before my Maker. Though indeed she didn’t ask.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do some time, Andrew. Come down on your bicycle one evening to Ardnarie and have a talk with me. We’ll get to the bottom of this and put the whole thing straight. It’s important.’

  ‘I will, Doctor. Thank you indeed. You’re very kind.’ Then he gave a deep smile. ‘Some of us will be cursing the new engines like that one at times,’ and he cast a glance at the motor-cycle, ‘but never did I hear sweeter music out of a chanter than the sound of her coming this morning on the road.’

  The doctor gave a quiet laugh. ‘I wouldn’t say that Dougald MacIan thought it sweet.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Andrew in a rush, ‘didn’t I just stop him coming in at the door. It still makes me cold.’

  ‘Why, where was he?’

  Before the doctor’s steady look, Andrew, rapidly becoming his normal self, now said, ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t taking him all in. He was wanting to give me a dram and to go in and give the mistress a dram. I had a great job with him.’

  ‘Where did he come from with the sheep?’

  ‘He came,’ said Andrew, clearly only now realizing the enormous fact, ‘he came over the old drove road across the mountains.’

  ‘The old drove road,’ repeated the doctor.‘But that would take him days.
No one ever goes that way now?’

  ‘No. And if the old Brigadier at the big house had seen him he would have given him what for. He’ll be giving the same this morning to myself for being so late!’ Humour was now seeping into Andrew. ‘He must have started off drunk. Though that’s not like him at all. I never thought about it till this minute. It is queer.’ His voice sounded as if it wanted to laugh – but it didn’t.

  ‘I happen to know he didn’t come back with Kenneth Grant from the sheep sales. Kenneth lost him.’

  ‘I wondered myself,’ said Andrew. ‘And to tell the truth I remember now saying to him, “Who’s buying sheep at this time?” For, of course, I was thinking of the Club, and I knew the Club wouldn’t be buying sheep.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He got a bit angry. “Why wouldn’t I be buying sheep for myself?” he asked. “Isn’t it more than high time?” ’

  ‘For himself?’ repeated the doctor, with a quiet searching emphasis.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Andrew. ‘That’s what he said. But I didn’t want to argue with him. I didn’t care who he was buying the sheep for. And I never saw Dougald before prepared as you would say to argue. I thought it was the drink entirely.’

  Andrew was still not fully conscious of what he was saying. Relief from the awful night through which he had wandered, hardly able to sit in one place ten minutes at a time, was now fully upon him.

  ‘He had a grievance?’ said the doctor.

  ‘He had indeed,’ replied Andrew, almost merrily. ‘Here he was, he said, with the right to have twenty – or was it twenty-five? – on the ground, and not a sheep of his own there. Wasn’t it high time for him to have some? I told him it was indeed and that he was lucky to have the money to buy such a nice lot of ewes. But there was no pleasing him. Why was he lucky? he asked in a threatening voice. At that, damn me, Doctor, if you’ll excuse me, I lost my temper with him. I told him I did not give a curse for his damn sheep. I told him my wife was at death’s door.’ Andrew suddenly paused, with a half-shamefaced expression. ‘I’ll always think well of him for what followed. I was a little beyond myself. If he had gone against me, I – I wouldn’t have been responsible. It would have been a terrible thing.’ Thought of it suddenly silenced him.