The Key of the Chest (17 page)

The doctor automatically put his hand in his pocket, but
Michael abruptly shoved the cigarette box across the small table. ‘Thanks,' said the doctor, and then began tapping his cigarette with an air of reserve. ‘I shouldn't go so far as that. And in any case, you seem to be putting a premium on superstition.'

‘Are you being obsessed by the label again? The psychological result – and that's what we are being concerned about in the first instance – in Erchie's case was that he became a whole-hearted seaman and therefore literally a more capable and efficient seaman, a more harmonious man. To become capable, efficient, and harmonious both within oneself and in relation to one's environment, is surely the highest concept of a way of life. Can you suggest any other?'

‘No. But doesn't this instance presuppose that one believes in what one knows to be a superstition, that is, something contrary to scientific knowledge? An obvious contradiction, which surely therefore makes harmony impossible.'

‘For you and me, yes. This instance does not apply to us. So far as it goes, we are unbelievers. What our true instances may be – or whether we have become chronic unbelievers, with an absolute split in our personalities – is an ultimate to which our argument would have to rise. It is possible that when it did rise to it we might find a tremendous amount of light shed upon our present condition
and
the present condition of the world with its war scares and possible – in my view, highly probable – outbreak of universal war.'

‘Oh hell, you're bogged now,' cried Michael. He arose. The clock struck eleven.

‘Wait a bit,' said the doctor.‘I should like to know where you think the minister stands.' He looked at Mr. Gwynn.

‘Haven't you said it? He is pulling the boat widdershins. Erchie knows he is doing it. The minister himself knows he is doing it. He is doing it deliberately. He is going to smash the superstition. That's his job. But the superstition stands for a whole way of life. He is therefore smashing that. And what is he offering in its place? Not a new way of life, here and now, on earth, in relation to sea and land, with the
natural happiness and mirth which come out of a wholeness of living, magic, imagination, all the emotions and desires in the one integrated pattern – not that, but a quite other thing, namely, the salvation of the soul in a
future life
. Now I am not offering any moral reflection upon all this. I am only trying to see what is happening, what is happening in Erchie's mind, and, in particular, what must be happening in the minister's mind. Fear is the weapon.
Thou shalt not
is the commandment. Now in our no longer primitive world you cannot act like that without enormous consequences, which will be found at work not merely internally in the mind but externally in social relations.' Mr. Gwynn, suddenly finding himself leaning forward, straightened up with his characteristic gesture. He laughed with soft humour. He cast a glance at the doctor as he nodded sideways towards Michael. ‘We have certainly given his adventure an airing!'

‘Are you coming?' Michael asked.

They both looked at him.

Towards the end Michael had listened with mounting impatience.

‘Where now?' asked Mr. Gwynn.

‘I am going out,' said Michael in a flat factual voice, ‘to see if I can hear that pipe again.'

‘Oh, are you?' Mr. Gwynn arose as if Michael's notion was a perfectly normal one. ‘Feel like coming, Doctor?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said the doctor, now also on his feet. Michael turned to the door. Mr. Gwynn looked meaningly at the doctor. ‘Unless you have anything urgent?'

‘Not as it happens,' said the doctor.

‘Good! Come along, then.'

They went out and put on their coats.

They were simply both giving in to Michael's sudden ill-humour, thought the doctor, as he followed Mr. Gwynn, who followed Michael, in silence along the shore path from the house.

The moon must be rising somewhere behind the mountains, for the night was growing brighter. The white hull of the
Stormy Petrel
lay very clear just inside the curving spit of land, her bow to the shore for the wind was in the northeast. The doctor kept looking at her for a little time. A boat at anchor had an air of peace, especially at night. Like a cow in a meadow. But more still than the cow, more lost in its wooden dream.

An odd company, this that he had dropped into. And shrewd, very clever. There was something in them both that he liked. It was a frankness, an open way of discussing anything. The reserve was entirely on his part. And Michael, with that flashing look of his, sometimes spotted it. Something a little mad in him. It would not need much to push it over the rational border. It was almost possible to feel the fellow's mood as he went stalking on there in front.

The doctor became aware that he was arguing himself out of a hardening that had come over his own mood, a certain vague antagonism.

What was it he resented? Assuming Mr. Gwynn had taken the usual visitor's tack of smiling at the poor native's superstition, then he, the doctor, would at once have taken the opposite point of view and supported it by specific instance of second sight and what not and based the whole on a real lack of scientific investigation.

Instead of that, Mr. Gwynn had taken the scientific approach to the ganglion centre itself of the whole matter.

And he had been acute. There was no doubt about that.
The man was rationalizing in a pretty sound way. The doctor himself had felt the largeness of the issues involved; no one could feel them better, simply because of his contacts with the native mind when it faced the final issue of life or death… An incomplete relationship between the minister and his people, something ‘dark and weird'!

Did he resent this subtle intrusion and almost automatically take the minister's side, so that even at this very moment he felt more friendly to the minister than he had yet done, felt he understood him better?

The doctor looked about him and smiled. The land was still and the inshore sea pale with the sky's light. The way the two figures kept striding on in front was physically comical. Such silent determination on so utterly mad a quest! Somebody should speak. It was uncivilized. It was idiotic. A silence it would be wrong to break!

But this was characteristic of them, too – to go on this totem hunt. They were not afraid of failing, of being laughed at. If nothing happened, Michael might be unbearable. But meantime he was going. And Mr. Gwynn was backing him up, and not merely loyally. For all his years, he was prepared for experience!

Michael had heard a weird archaic music, he had said, played out of a wood-wind instrument that no orchestra had ever known. When he had crossed over the hollow to investigate – there had been nothing!

Had he heard Erchie tell the legend of the music that sometimes haunted the midnight hour by the shore of Loch Geal?… Whereupon the doctor's mind, lifting as it were to the far space of this legend, suddenly encountered what must obviously be the complete solution. Charlie had been playing his bagpipes at Sgeir, and the wind had brought the ‘weird archaic' music in faint eddies! Certainly nothing of the orchestra about that! It was laughable, almost exciting. He would keep the solution up his sleeve until Michael, having failed, would need some backing!

After about twenty minutes, Michael stopped. The other two closed in. ‘This is where we go up.' Michael's voice was lowpitched. ‘I think we should move as quietly as we can.'

‘Very well,' agreed Mr. Gwynn. ‘And you can remember
a man's heart at fifty-seven is not what it was at twenty-seven.'

Michael smiled. ‘Have I been forgetting again?' His face turned to the doctor. ‘Enjoying your scepticism?'

‘Look here,' said the doctor softly, ‘it's a lovely night. There can only be the slimmest chance of a second performance. We've got to be careful. Where did it happen exactly?' His voice carried conviction.

‘There's a path here, little more than a sheep-path, that goes right to Loch Geal,' answered Michael.

‘I know it,' said the doctor.

‘It's about half-way – less than half-way.'

‘Not at Loch Geal?'

‘No. Quite a new place I discovered all on my own.' His voice was mocking but friendly, as if the night had sucked his bad humour away.

‘How did you discover it?'

‘I was at Loch Geal, in connection with these hides. Certain things I wanted to find out about what happens at night – not only to the birds. I was on the way back – a little later – not much – than this. It was an extraordinarily beautiful night. I had sat down. Then I heard it – as I told you. It seemed to be at some little distance – as if being played out of the earth – or by the earth.' He paused, clearly to give the doctor the benefit of the moment. ‘As I got up, of course the earth saw me. The music stopped abruptly. I tried to find it. I was tripped by the earth and went headlong. I said a few things upon the night.'

‘Was that the end?'

‘No. Then I was followed.'

He must have felt the doctor's sudden piercing glance, for he added,‘I thought that might surprise you!'

The doctor waited.

‘I never got a clear glimpse. The thing was above me. Once I heard it, and once it started a boulder thudding down.'

‘How far did it follow you?'

‘At least half-way back the way we've just come.'

‘You didn't make any effort to—'

‘To intercept it? No. I was afraid. That's why I'm here
now. And would have been whether you'd both come or not.'

They stood in silence. ‘Why don't you ask me why I was afraid?' inquired Michael.

‘Well, why were you?' asked the doctor directly.

‘That's better,' said Michael. ‘I had the feeling that the thing was a man – a man who had committed murder – perhaps long ago at Loch Geal. I felt the murder in him.'

The doctor was silent.

‘No comment at all?' probed Michael.

The doctor was looking out to sea. Near at hand the water was bright, but far off it darkened under the wind. Then upon a darkened patch came a glitter. The moon must be looking over the mountains. He turned his head round.

‘When you strike a stone with your foot,' said the doctor, ‘the sound carries a long distance to listening ears. We'd better go pretty quietly.'

Michael stood a moment gazing at the doctor, then turned to the slope.

In the same order, they now went carefully and much more slowly. Twice Michael stopped, clearly to let Mr. Gwynn have his wind. ‘You might have told me,' whispered Mr. Gwynn at the second stop, ‘and I would have drunk nothing.'

His two companions smiled. The doctor, who had dropped in on them some time after dinner, had had his own meal about six o'clock. The three whiskies – and Michael's was a careless hand – were now inducing a certain empty bodiless feeling, with the forehead slightly cold and the mind abnormally clear.

At the third stop, Mr. Gwynn's breath was audibly wheezing. The doctor gestured downward with his open hand, then sat down. Mr. Gwynn at once flopped beside him. Michael stooped and whispered. ‘Not far now. Another hundred yards or so.'

‘Sit down,' whispered the doctor.

Michael sat down. The doctor bent to his ear. ‘If we keep to leeward…'

Michael nodded. The wind was blowing down past them
and now, away from the shelter of the shore, it was a fair breeze.

Mr. Gwynn began to button his coat round his throat. The weather was mild for late October, but the wind was searching. The doctor cast about him and saw a sheltering bluff up a little and to the right. Their heads came together and he pointed. ‘For shelter. Otherwise our hot skins will have us sneezing like donkeys.' Having to keep his voice low induced a near feeling of friendliness. Laughter issued softly from their nostrils. They followed him, stooping slightly, and came under the shallow bluff where it was quite windless when they sat down.

‘Ah-h,' breathed Mr. Gwynn.

‘Sit on your gloves,' breathed the doctor.

When they had made themselves comfortable, the doctor whispered: ‘This is the moment when I believe in your “primitive”!' Something of boyhood had come back upon him in this freedom of the night, this nocturnal adventuring with all day-light responsibility gone.

Mr. Gwynn jerked up his head in silent laughter. ‘It doesn't matter what happens now?'

‘Not a bit,' whispered the doctor.

‘Shut up, you blithering toughs!' whispered Michael.

‘He's actually expecting something,' the doctor informed Mr. Gwynn.

Mr. Gwynn tilted his head again. With the doctor, he entered into fathomless conspiracy. ‘He does not understand yet!'

‘Not he,' agreed the doctor.

‘I suppose you call this primitive mirth,' murmured Michael sardonically.

‘B' the holy powers an' he's got it!' declared Mr. Gwynn, and from the control of his voice, the sudden Irish brogue, and the slight but perfectly finished gesture, the doctor knew that this man had once been an actor.

Suddenly the whole outing was a delight. Mr. Gwynn, with a careless confidence, swayed on top of his form. He quoted lines from Shakespeare of at once an exquisite beauty and idiotic aptness. And all was suppressed, suppressed by Michael, until it cried out silently upon the
night, and the doctor, like one in truth half drunk, swayed with shut mouth and husky throat, while Mr. Gwynn half shrugged a shoulder or lifted a spread palm and breathed out his immortal magic on the air.

There was an extraordinary charm about the little man at that moment, a natural gaiety, an exquisite yet controlled inconsequence.

This went on for quite a long time, but it had its natural end, conquered by the night, by the moon, by the smooth heather breasts, by the black shadows, by the chill that searched for the heart even within their windless horseshoe of shelter.

Mr. Gwynn shuddered softly and stared over his knees. Then in a voice that for the first time firmed beyond soft syllables to the monotone of the wind moaning round this bleak tumbled land, this barren haunted place, he said very very slowly as if he had forgotten his companions, forgotten everything:

These lines from Coleridge left a hollow of silence around them and deep within their marvelling minds, and upon this hollow, without any warning, came a flurry of piped notes.

The suddenness, the complete clarity, of the piping, its weird archaic character, so gripped Mr. Gwynn that his face hardly rose from his clasped knees, it only tilted upward a little to let the mouth fall open.

A harsh sound in Michael's throat held an immensity of triumph and relief.

The player could not be more than a hundred yards away, above them but to the left; though it was difficult to be precise. There was a bubbly floating sound in the notes and yet at the same time an inner thin buzzing of a reed. Not of any reed, not a dry reed, but a reed wet as the tender green corn stalk which the schoolboy cracks between his lips before blowing its low shrillness.‘Archaic' was the very
word; and ‘weird'. It ran all about the ground, rushed away on the wind. It had abrupt pauses, as if for breath. It had a curious compressed quality of frolic. Then suddenly it went slow and intensely sad. The theme notes were held, but between each two intolerably drawn-out notes there was still a rush of short swift notes.

Mr. Gwynn had an involuntary vision, quite extraordinarily vivid. The mouth that blew the pipe was as wide as the face, with the deep upper lip curving over. The eyelashes curved over the eyes in the same way, like drawn hoods. The skin had the pallor of clay. Perhaps the face of a frog-like leprechaun out of some long-forgotten story book of childhood.

Michael was the first to come to himself. He leaned towards their heads. ‘Let us rush it,' he whispered.

And at once the doctor replied: ‘For God's sake, no!' The intensity in his whisper made them stare at him.

Michael had not been interested in receiving any impression from the music. The fact of its being there intoxicated him; justified him in so wild and magnificent a way that he could have rushed it and grappled with it, though it were murder itself that played.

But upon the doctor the effect was very different. Whether or not there was anything in Mr. Gwynn's talk of the ‘ancestral unconscious', certainly his ancestors had a hold on the doctor now. It did not matter that he knew the theme of the slow piece being played. That only intensified his emotion, gave it shape and somehow an appalling knowledge. When an old pipe tune was so profound in its revelation of human experience, of inexpressible sorrow, that its creation was clearly beyond human power, the folk knew then that the master could have got it only from some other power, and they talked of magic chanters and the fairies, the small wise people of the green hills. There is a defeat that is bitter in the mouth beyond all bitterness of the bitterest herb; a sadness that has agony and the breaking of the heart in one's own hands. This is the music the doctor heard, and his mind was charged with a dreadful unknowable foreknowledge.

He knew the two were staring at him, but he paid no
attention to them behind the chill mask of his face. Their words and theories were less than noises in a spent wind; a prattling of clever children long ago; but their presence here was a mortal danger and he had got to get them away somehow.

Slowly he raised his head and peered towards the place whence the music came, taking care to keep the rough old heather on top as a shield, though he knew the moon, behind him, would not shine on his face. When he heard Michael rising, he at once gripped his shoulder, keeping him down, and felt the shoulder wriggle in pain. He forced Michael down and sat beside him. ‘Hush!' he breathed, shaking his head in warning but looking at neither of them.