The Key of the Chest (16 page)

Now she could hear Johan's voice and her father shouting that someone was about the house.

Fraoch knew he couldn't be seen and could therefore afford to ignore an order.

Her father was outside, calling the dog in an intense voice, thick with anger.

Presently the kitchen door banged and the lock shot home. ‘He can stay out!'

Swiftly Flora got into bed. She felt she was safe now. Her father's steps came heavily up the stairs. His door slammed shut. Flora breathed, and presently, slipping to her feet, began undressing.

Trembling a little, she lay in her bed, thinking of the night, wondering if it was Charlie who had walked round the house.

But somehow all stress was now eased, as if even her failure to meet Charlie was no longer of tremendous importance.

She accepted her defeat. It could not be helped. Almost, in a way, life was easier now, curled here in her bed, with its wave of exhaustion and sadness washing her softly. The wave came over her in a languor, in a soft, sad, drowning sleep. She gave way to it, letting it come, but just when it was about to wash her away altogether, it began to recede.

In the region that lies behind closed eyes, pictures formed and faded without any volition on her part. Then one formed and stayed. It was Charlie's face.

She tried to turn away from it, because it had that same
pallor of guilt. It's not that the face was pale. It was a whiteness of guilt coming through, straining the features a little, making small thin creases. This expression naturally searched for its own satire, its bitter dryness.

She turned over on her face. Oh, she did not care about crime or guilt or anything. It wasn't that. It was Charlie. Her heart was wrung.

The only meaning of life on earth for her was to help him. Compared with doing that, nothing else had any meaning at all. She should be there, out there.

When this emotion ebbed, she began to think again, and her real thinking, as always, was concerned with doing. The torturing hours started weaving their fantastic schemes.

Towards the morning she fell asleep, and was awakened by the housekeeper knocking on her door.

So astonished was she at this unusual summons – for she was always down in good time to tidy the study while breakfast was being got ready – that she leapt out of bed. She knew at once she had overslept. As she pulled up the blind, she saw her father, fully dressed, standing by a rose-bed, examining the imprint of a man's boot in the black earth.

The doctor looked at Michael Sandeman in that objective way he had. But now there was the suggestion of an incredulous humour about his eyes.

‘You doubt it?' challenged Michael, holding the look.

‘There is the possibility that you may have been deceived.'

‘Just how?'

The doctor took up his glass. ‘In the way we all deceive ourselves at times.' He drank, set the glass on the low table and shoved it away a little with the tips of his fingers.

Michael laughed abruptly. ‘I can hear the same thought creaking in your head as in Gwynn's. Do you imagine,' and he gave the doctor a piercing glance, ‘that I am incapable of estimating the possibility of a hallucinatory experience?'

‘Surely not,' said the doctor simply. ‘As an educated man, you naturally are aware of the possibility.'

Mr. Gwynn smiled.

‘Damn you both,' said Michael, his voice rising. ‘I tell you I heard the playing. I
know
I heard it. I listened to it for God knows how long. That's a
fact
.'

‘I am not doubting that.'

‘Then what the hell are you doubting?' Michael's voice was getting its intolerant lash. The doctor saw the affair was really serious. ‘The only place – and you must excuse me for putting it like this – the only place we hear a thing is inside our own heads. Normally we can establish its cause outside our own heads.'

‘Blast you, why not say I was deluded and be done with it?'

‘As you like,' answered the doctor calmly.

‘You simply don't believe,' suggested Mr. Gwynn, ‘in – well, in—'

‘In the supernatural?' said the doctor. ‘No.' He shook his head.

Mr. Gwynn looked at him thoughtfully.

‘Who said I thought it was supernatural?' demanded Michael of the doctor.

‘Well, what do you think it was?' asked the doctor directly.

‘How the hell should I know? I'm only telling you what I heard.'

‘So I gather,' agreed the doctor.

Michael jumped up. ‘Blast you two bloody people,' he said. ‘Don't you think it's bad enough for me to have to doubt myself?'

The doctor got to his feet with a responsive courtesy. ‘And how am I to know that you are not pulling my leg? You make statements and hurl questions at me. If you sit down and tell me frankly all that happened, then I'll tell you equally frankly what I think of it.'

Michael threw himself into his chair. ‘I know.' He was silent for a few moments, then all at once went on: ‘It was such an odd bloody experience. Gwynn and I were up in the Loch Geal region. A fair number of woodcock there and a marvellous assortment of duck. That was yesterday forenoon. I have ideas about them and want to put up one or two hides. There's something about the shape of a woodcock, about its head, and there's a duck – but never mind that. Though, by God, it's marvellous, if I can just get it. I am satisfied that in wild nature there are certain shapes – I
mean
shapes – certain physical forms – that touch the unconscious – no, no, that's not it. I mean this: these shapes touch something in our ancestral unconscious, what Freud calls the archaic heritage, and this touch is literally magical in the way that it creates a sort of responsive image, something that we have the feeling we knew before, and that, by God, we did know before, as the psychologists, the scientific ones, may yet prove. Hell, there I'm off!' He lay back, as if this kind of effort exhausted vital energy, and laughed.

‘I think,' said the doctor, in his normal voice, ‘that that's very interesting.'

Michael's mouth twisted. ‘Thanks very much.' Then he looked at the doctor challengingly. ‘Why do you think it's interesting?'

‘That's difficult,' replied the doctor.‘But your words somehow suddenly caught – how can I put it? – not caught but evoked a sort of totemistic response. The bird – the totem – the tribe – the clan. Very vague, I'm afraid!'

Michael's look held and sharpened.

‘Interesting, yes,' said Mr. Gwynn, who had continued drinking port against their whisky. ‘Tell me this, Doctor. We realize we are outsiders here – at least, I am. The people here are no doubt as normal and ordinary to themselves, as we all are to ourselves, in London or elsewhere. But to us they seem to have a lot in them of this primitive nature – using the word in its anthropological sense – in the way that Michael is searching it out – or even you yourself just now … You don't mind my question?'

‘Not at all,' said the doctor. ‘Please do not think I'd be touchy about anything real like that, even if I am one of them. I'm afraid, then, my answer would be that, on the whole, you come with the outsider's eye.'

‘I flatly deny that,' said Michael.

‘One minute,' said Mr. Gwynn. ‘And we may not really be wandering from the point of Michael's experience. Take your parson, by way of instance. And it's an important instance because it deals with religious belief, with what is, in other words, the development of that old totem system which you have just mentioned. Christian philosophers admit as much themselves – if not perhaps in such simple terms! Now am I wrong in having an impression that this man is – it's something more than intolerant, harsh – it's something in a certain sense dark and weird. It's as if there was somehow an incomplete relationship between him and the people. Something hasn't been bridged over somewhere. Does that make any sense to you?'

‘I don't know about sense,' answered the doctor.‘I think, if I may say so, I feel what you're getting at. But would a single instance be worth discussing – in a general way?'

‘Of course it would,' said Mr. Gwynn.‘He may be the
one instance left! However, I understand that he is in this respect rather typical of his brethren in these remote Highland places. I gather – and it's wonderful how you gather information when you're hunting it – I gather that they have, in their no doubt efficient Presbyterian way, for a long time now exercised a gloomy power, frowning on concerts and dances and similar expressions of communal gaiety. And not merely frowning, but denouncing and prohibiting. Is that fairly true on the whole?'

‘There are exceptions, but on the whole perhaps yes.'

‘You mean definitely yes,' said Michael.

‘Well?' said the doctor.

‘Why?' asked Mr. Gwynn.

‘Because, no doubt like men in every walk of life, like, say, landlords and doctors, or kings and tyrants, they want to hang on to power.'

‘You think so?' asked Mr. Gwynn. ‘Purely the gratification of the will to power?'

‘On the whole, I'd say yes.'

‘Seems a bit obvious or easy?'

‘But why should truth necessarily be difficult or obscure?'

‘Outside arithmetic, it generally is. That's the trouble. It's a very old question: What is truth?'

The doctor smiled also.

‘You say,' continued Mr. Gwyn , ‘that a doctor wants to hang on to power. Does he?'

‘Of course he does,' answered the doctor. ‘He is completely intolerant of the interference of old wives. He does his best to prohibit all sorts of practices which he considers inimical to general health. He does so because he believes his health system is the best. In the same way the minister believes that he knows the only path to heaven.'

‘Afraid I've merely introduced a red herring.' Mr. Gwynn shrugged apologetically. ‘I agree with you, of course, in a superficial way. But it must go deeper than that. Much deeper.'

The doctor remained silent. Michael eyed him. ‘You are,' said Michael, ‘Highland and damned perverse.' Then he laughed, as if, all the same, he enjoyed the perversity.

'I don't see it,' said the doctor, his expression apparently quite frank.

‘Perhaps we are a bit obscure,' admitted Mr. Gwynn thoughtfully. ‘Michael and I have been on this topic, and once you've been on a topic it's not always easy to go back clearly to the beginning. To show you how sincerely interested we are, let me put it like this.' Mr. Gwynn paused and looked directly at the doctor. ‘Are you really interested?'

‘I am,' replied the doctor.‘You must understand that I have not much opportunity of discussion with – with—'

‘With your intellectual equals,' concluded Michael, getting up to fill the glasses. He glanced at the clock on the mantel-piece.

‘It's an enormous subject,' said Mr. Gwynn, ‘and you might naturally be sceptical of our interest in it. Perhaps you won't be altogether if I tell you that I'm interested in a certain manifestation of modern painting sometimes called “primitive”. I am at present digging into this. Trying to get at the root of it. I was even unfortunate enough to have stayed in last night in order to jot down some notes, and so missed Michael's remarkable experience – or hallucination! For Michael's interest is creative, as you will have gathered, against my mere metaphysical or analytical interest. Now you mentioned the word totemistic. At once I was enormously expectant – and correspondingly disappointed when you switched to the simple commonplace of will-to-power. For in that early tribal or primitive state of society, with its totems and magic, life was completely integrated. It was completely integrated because it was lived within a dispensation that was magical, that is, imaginative. The signs and symbols, the totems, had power in that weird absolute way which we very occasionally experience in the work of our highest artists or poets to-day. The magic casements opening… on the light that never was on land or sea, if I may mix my poets. That
kind
of thing, in the sense that its nature was – and is – absolute. Am I making sense at all?'

‘Please go on,' said the doctor.

Mr. Gwynn hesitated. ‘I hardly know where to go first. If
I were to follow these painter fellows, for example, I might find them hunting back to the primitive, not simply to start a new craze, or do something“different”, but to discover again that integration, that magical wholeness, which the modern world has so completely split, if not destroyed. There is thus about it at once an air of frustration and of re-creation. It is rather a profound entanglement and on its elucidation, in my view, depends nothing less than humanity's future health of body and mind. That, I suppose you will agree, is a rather tall subject!' The doctor smiled back. ‘I do.'

‘Yes?' prompted Mr. Gwynn as the doctor hesitated.

‘This equating of art or poetry with the primitive – surely that's going a bit far? I do not quite get your Shakespeare as a primitive.'

‘Naturally. He wasn't. No modern person can be – though I'm beginning to think that there are persons in remote places – and perhaps in slums, not to mention certain high-art circles – who may be nearer it than others! What Shakespeare did do, possibly, apart from his
magic
which made him the supreme poet he was, was pose the whole question of the split mind in
Hamlet
and leave a host of followers, among whom a fellow like Dostoevsky stands out, to carry on the business. But that's away near the end of my argument. Are you really troubled at the moment by my seeming to leave out the intellect, logic, scientific knowledge?'

‘Afraid I was,' admitted the doctor.

‘Naturally, because in your profession you must come across any number of half-mad minds!'

‘Plus the one he has added to his collection from this house,' said Michael. ‘And that was before you came, Gwynn.
Words
,
words
,
words
. By God, Shakespeare had it all!'

‘But not before he had used a few words himself,' replied Mr. Gwynn. ‘To proceed. What I am trying to do is to show you a groping attempt at using the scientific method in this very elusive business. Let me illustrate with a homely example. Erchie, who attends to the outside affairs of this house, was waiting for me the day before yesterday to take
me out to the
Stormy Petrel
. I took the oars and was turning the dinghy round when Erchie, who is a quiet man, all but yelled. I thought he had put his foot through her bottom. All that had happened was that I was turning her round
against
the sun, turning her widdershins, instead of turning her
with
the sun, what he called
jeeshil
– or so it sounded.'

The doctor nodded. ‘That superstition is still alive.'

‘Now listen, doctor,' said Mr. Gwynn. ‘I don't mind what you call it, superstition or anything else. What interests me is not the label but Erchie's state of mind. The conclusion I came to was this. And it is here you can definitely tell me whether I'm right or wrong. Had I continued turning her widdershins and gone on, then for the whole of our subsequent trip Erchie's mind would have been ragged and he would have been, let us say, half-expecting something calamitous to happen. Whereas when I obeyed him, by turning
jeeshil
, his mind was set at rest, that is, he was whole within himself, properly integrated. Right or wrong?'

‘Perfectly right,' said the doctor.

‘And what would have happened,' asked Michael, ‘if we had run upon calamity
after
turning
jeeshil
. How do you spell that blessed word?'

‘D-e-i-s-e-i-l,' spelled the doctor, ‘but your pronunciation is good.'

Michael laughed as though he had expected a spelling oddity, and swept his eyes across the clock. ‘What would have happened, Gwynn?'

‘It would not, so to speak, have mattered then. For, of course, in any primitive society they have their logic of practical happenings. This coexists with the integral imaginative. Nothing would have overtly happened to raise a condition of conflict in the mind.'

‘Is it your contention,' asked the doctor,‘that the minister is pulling the boat widdershins?'

Mr. Gwynn looked at him steadily for a few seconds. ‘If I thought you were getting the full implications of that, I should not spoil so marvellous a picture by adding a single stroke.'