The Key of the Chest (19 page)

Mr. Gwynn shifted his stance, for it now looked as if that first great prayer were never going to end – it lasted twenty minutes – and discreetly let his eyes rove a little to each side.

The men's faces appeared completely stolid, utterly without feeling or subtlety. Earth and clay and stone. But curiously strong, enduring, and openly there. They were a marvellous array of masks. The individuality of each, the difference of one from another, was extremely striking. He tried to think of a city congregation but could vaguely call up only smooth pale faces of an indistinguished uniformity. The women had not the weathered openness of the men. They retired, seeming indeed to have their shoulders rounded by the pull of their black clothes towards the hidden breast over which their faces inclined in a still composure.

When the minister began to talk of ‘our sister' who had been called away that morning, Mr. Gwynn at once experienced a gleam of light upon this enigmatic undercurrent of being. Death, dark and round-shouldered, with hidden face – oldest of all the enigmas. He almost got a glimpse of it, like a presence in a crypt below them. He heard the intoning of the minister's voice and the worshipping silence.

Death.

He looked up at the minister (for he was only five seats back from the precentor, who sat under the pulpit) and studied the face with its closed eyes, the darkness of short hairs on the cheek bones, the clean-shaven jaw and sensitive upper lip, the clipped hair that grew down in front of
the ears, and the strong grey-dark growth of hair on the head. The closed eyes were smudges of shadow under the heavy eyebrows. The absence of a beard was somehow noticeable.

How apt his words were, how dignified, yet kindly and beseeching. This was no professional panegyric. The man, Mr. Gwynn decided, was moved, deeply moved, and only as his voice rose a little did Mr. Gwynn perceive that, with just propriety, he was making of her ‘an ensample' before his flock. There was a moment of suspense when it seemed he was going to introduce contrast, direct and forceful, but the short dramatic pause ended and the minister, with reverent reticence, went on. Mr. Gwynn detected the faintest stir in the congregation and was surprised that so elusive a moment should produce so delicate a response.

Moving his head slowly, he glanced at Michael and found him staring directly at the girl who was standing beside the housekeeper in the manse pew. It was a front pew and as his line of vision bore slightly to the left, Mr. Gwynn could see the right side of her face foreshortened.

Well made, rather, with a smooth grace of body; a navy-blue costume cut to lie on real shoulders; a personable young woman. Clothes would fit her with an easy naturalness. She no doubt saw they did! Strands of hair, with a brown glisten, curled over the pale nape of her neck. Her grey straw hat was large, and had a slight tilt which, when she moved her head, as if her eyes had wearied staring into the pitch-pine of the pulpit, gave her full profile so soft a surety in its line that Mr. Gwynn could have made a compliment to a summer day.

Smiling faintly – for it was an odd sort of feeling to have suddenly had – Mr. Gwynn, as she moved her head again, turned his own away towards a pointed window in the white-plastered wall. The panes of glass were small but transparent. There was not a square inch of coloured glass, or coloured anything, anywhere in the church.

Colour! A red, say; or a blue robe?

Utterly transparent glass, for the white light. Beyond it, the upcurled fingers of an elm, the extreme tips, bare and elephant-grey, swaying in an invisible wind.

Hardly a summer's day!… That cold moonlit midnight, and the figure walking down upon them. His eyes were drawn back to Flora. Very slightly now her head was bowed, with the pallor of the nape showing more distinctly, like a waiting, unconscious sacrifice.

Mr. Gwynn had his extravagant fancies. There was plenty of time for them, immeasurable time.

Very distinct, this feeling of unobstructed time, this movement of the free mind unhindered by colour, by scents, by emotion. When the voice in the pulpit, coming at long last towards an end, called for a blessing upon the King and the Queen and all the members of the Royal Family, Mr. Gwynn withdrew his eyes from the window with an expression of such innocence that he knew his face, too, was a mask.

Coughings and stirrings and scraping of feet. The body had its short interlude before settling down again.

The sermon lasted over an hour. The long narrow seat with its straight back was of pitch pine, varnished, and innocent of any covering. Normally, to have sat there for an hour would have been for Mr. Gwynn a fine exercise in physical torture. As it was, he had occasional aches and cramps and, after the great dramatic denunciation, experienced the ‘needles and pins' forgotten since boyhood.

The large open Bible on the pulpit cushion, the quiet but very effective reading of the verse:

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And
he said, I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?

With his left hand the minister slowly closed the great book in a final and authoritative small slap.

It was beautifully done, thought Mr. Gwynn. The beauty lay, of course, in the fact that the minister was not consciously acting the profound restraint behind that authoritative closing of the ‘Holy Word'.

Moreover, the words of the text had in themselves roused Mr. Gwynn, for at once he perceived their extraordinary aptness to the ferment of socialistic theories which stirred certain intellectual groups in London. The Fabians had produced nothing at once so compact and so dramatic! Here was not merely the theory, but also the actors. The
brotherhood of humanity and humanity itself. And also – also – God. It was terrific. And all inside a dozen words!
Where is Abel thy brother?… Am I my brother's keeper?

The fundamental questions, the questions which had to be answered first, if any subsequent theory of action were to fit! Fabianism, communism, socialism, anarchism… here was the starting point, poised on surely the shortest of all antiphonies between man and God, action and Justice, the human mind and That which it seeks. In that remote beginning, the curtain was lifted, the drama was set. The theme, the plot, was then as it was now, and as it would be ‘world without end'.

Oh, and here were the human actors reduced to their simplest economic terms! For machines may come and machines may go, but upon the man who tills his fields like Cain and herds his flocks like Abel, all human life finally depends.

The minister was in no hurry. He drew that picture of a primitive agriculture with homely illustration. They tilled their fields in Cruime and Ardnarie. For the fields were there before man was. And man came and worked the fields, and destroyed the weeds. Yes, he dug the weeds out of the soil, and gathered them into little heaps, and set fire to them, and destroyed them utterly. That was what had to be done with weeds – wherever they grew. Then he sowed the good seed, and he tended the crops, and if he did all this as a good husband-man, then he reaped of his seeds, some an hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thirty-fold.

He drew the parallel between the good tiller of the soil and the good man, between the field and the mind, those two fundamental elements given by God. He did it in simple language, going over the parallels, illustrating them, leaving nothing obscure, until all was unavoidably there before them. Then he began to rise to the implicit meanings, the higher questions. How were these elements given and why? What harvest was the human mind ultimately to reap and where?

And there, all the time, beneath his face, his words, silently beneath his extended hand, lay the great Bible, holding the answer.

He turned from Cain to Abel, and it was only now, when he uttered the Biblical words:
And Abel was a keeper of sheep
, that Mr. Gwynn began to feel a coolness run over his skin. At the same time he heard the great silence in the church.

A memory of the burial service of the dead seaman came back. Very very clearly the minister had time to work out the subtlest implications of his theme!

Abel was a shepherd. As the land had to be tilled, so the flocks had to be reared. The Bible had many references to shepherds and to sheep. Christ was known as the Shepherd and as the Lamb. Great sentences from Isaiah rolled over the congregation. God Himself, in His inscrutable insight, had preferred the offering of Abel the shepherd to that of Cain the tiller of the soil.

Mr. Gwynn had sometimes wondered as a little boy why God should have shown this preference for Abel's offering. Now he saw the minister use this very preference to enhance any sin that might be found in the shepherd. For it was not Abel the shepherd who had killed Cain. Abel had been the favoured of God.

The implications began to grow painful. Even Mr. Gwynn felt that the preacher should come to the point and be done with it. But the preacher was far from the point yet.

For when God asked Cain,
Where is Abel thy brother?
he answered,
I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

My brother's keeper. Are we all our brothers' keepers? To answer No would be for each man to have his hand secretly lifted against his brother in readiness to slay him. The world had borne this out in many a terrible crime and on many a bloody battlefield. To answer No is for man to destroy himself.

The brotherhood of man.

But this conception of the brotherhood of man and its inevitable necessity, the minister lifted into the brotherhood of man in the fellowship of Christ. Herein lay the ordering and the meaning and the sanction; herein lay the harvest and the completion; the final purpose; the ultimate, the eternal, end.

The sin is then not only against the brotherhood of man
but also against the fellowship in Christ, not only in life but also in death, not only in time but also in eternity.

And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him
should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the
Lord
.

The minister turned away and turned back, his voice quietened, and he spoke for a little time on the meaning of brotherhood and fellowship in terms of understanding and kindliness as they went about their daily tasks, each in his appointed place, of the manners that sprang from such understanding, of the sweet solace of courtesy.

Then he paused for some seconds and they knew it was coming.

He began quietly, telling how he had been prompted in the darkness of this very morning to visit the sick bed, and of how God, in His infinite grace, had seen fit that His servant should arrive in time to give consolation and assurance to one whose life had been so finely and wisely lived under the hand of God that he had ever considered it a high privilege to enter at her door, and from whose door he had never departed without feeling strengthened and refreshed. Then when all was over he had stood there looking down upon the houses of Cruime quiet in their Sabbath calm.

As he painted the picture of their native place so familiar to them and yet now so strangely beautiful, his hands opened the Bible and he read:

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had
made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which
he had made
.

And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because
that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and
made
.

And then the minister described how, shambling through this seventh day, which God had blessed, came one Dougald MacIan driving his sheep and making mock of the holy day, turning its ordained rest into the drunken riot of a common market.

The money-changers had gone before the thong of the Lord, but Dougald MacIan had turned against the Lord's ordained servant and struck him in the face.

Wrath in its streams and rivulets poured into the minister and Mr. Gwynn had the impression that he began visibly to swell as he took upon himself the powers of judgment and condemnation, under the avenging hand of God.

Something out of that ancient world came into the church, the world of the patriarch and the prophet, evoked almost bodily by words; and the words, crying in their powerful rhythm, threshed down upon the congregation as a wind upon a wood.

Dark and archaic words out of the mouths of prophets, with the power in them of the sign and the symbol. Not the power of daylight and order but the avenging power that hunts the fleeing heels of sin into death's uttermost abyss.

The last psalm was sung with a quietness as of exhaustion and the benediction had within it the calm that is the weary end of all thought.

Mr. Gwynn did not care to look openly at the faces as he came out with them and so saw many of them in a way which his memory would the more vividly recall. But once he was out among the tombstones, he turned to Michael – to find he was not there.

The folk flowed past him, and now here, walking by the housekeeper, came Flora, with a faint mantling of colour in her grave face, and light in her eyes, lovely eyes, and a glisten of pain, wakening and walking out of a dream of… Mr. Gwynn had no word, no image, for it, so that he became completely unconscious of his stare, and only when the housekeeper glanced sideways at him, and Flora's eyes passed across his face, did he come to himself fully and raise his hat.

Michael was now at his side. Mr. Gwynn looked at his face and saw the whitening of the skin and the dark glow in his eyes.

‘But I thought the thing was finished and done with,' said Kenneth Grant.

‘Oh no,' said the policeman.

‘But surely once a case has been decided, it can't be opened again?'

‘This case was never decided.'

Kenneth Grant looked at him, saw the conscientiousness of duty in the smooth face and the troubled but persistent eyes. He always thought of the policeman as an overgrown school-boy, simple and agreeable but capable of being very stubborn. Then Kenneth glanced at the doctor, but on that face found no particular expression.

‘Well, I'm dead against it,' Kenneth said flatly. ‘And – though it's none of my business – I'd warn you to think twice about raking all this business up again.'

‘It's hardly being left to me,' said the policeman. ‘Since Sunday the people are all talking. And what steps do I know the minister will be taking? Besides, it's my duty.'

‘Well, you know your duty best,' said Kenneth. ‘But before I started in, I'd be sure I had more evidence up my sleeve than folks' talk.'

‘That's what I've got to get,' said the policeman, looking at Kenneth.

Kenneth looked back at him directly. ‘Well, I've none to give you.'

The three of them were standing on a patch of green over from Kenneth's shop. The motor-cycle was on the edge of the gravel a few yards lower down. The doctor saw the lively dark-eyed Sarah standing back from the post office window staring out at them.

‘You can be asked to give it – if it's needed,' said the policeman.

‘Oh,' said Kenneth. ‘Who'll ask me?'

‘The law,' said the policeman. ‘The Crown can call anyone as a witness.'

‘What for?'

‘About how he got the money. He buys his messages at your shop. You're the secretary of the Club and he's the shepherd. He draws his wages through you.'

‘I see,' said Kenneth.

The policeman shifted his weight, feeling Kenneth's hostility.

‘What's your idea?' asked the doctor in simple tones, looking at the policeman.

His question surprised them.

‘Well, where did he get the money from?' asked the policeman. ‘Here's a man who could never buy any sheep for himself. Then suddenly – after what you know took place – he buys them.'

‘Your idea is that the way Dougald got his money has something to do with the strangling of the foreign seaman?'

‘I'm not saying it has. But the circumstances are suspicious. If Dougald can prove that he came by the money honestly, then that finishes it.'

‘And if he can't?'

‘Then surely it is my duty to investigate it. Anyway, they will come on me to do it. If anyone writes about it, the Inspector will be here on my top. I'm not wanting to force anyone to tell me anything. But – it may not be left to me. I'll have to show that I tried to do what I could.'

‘Naturally,' the doctor agreed. ‘Supposing Dougald just says that he had the money – had saved it up, let us say – what more could you do?'

‘There might be a lot more,' said the policeman. ‘There's some things might be followed up.'

‘You mean the money he paid out could be traced?'

‘Yes.'

‘Not the money itself,' said Kenneth. ‘And you already know that. It was ordinary money and you know them he paid it to. If that's all—' Kenneth smiled drily.

‘That's not all,' replied the policeman, nettled. They had
always been good friends, and this exasperated the difference now between them.

‘No?' said Kenneth sceptically.

‘No,' said the policeman with some heat. ‘There's also Charlie's trip south. I understand it was to Edinburgh, but that can be found out. If he changed any foreign money there – his visit to the place where he changed it may be remembered by them in it.'

‘I see,' said the doctor, taking out his cigarette case. ‘You mean that, without any evidence, you would be prepared to collar Charlie – charge him with – it would have to be a crime of some kind – and parade him before the – the money-changers of Edinburgh?' The doctor looked pleasantly serious.

‘We might get some evidence first.' The policeman was more nettled.

‘How?' asked the doctor simply.

‘Well,' said the policeman, plainly now feeling compelled to divulge what was his own secret idea, ‘we could make preliminary investigations in Edinburgh. We could find out if any Swedish money was changed with in a certain two or three days and we could have a photograph of Charlie to show.'

‘You mean you could compel Charlie to have his photograph taken?' asked the doctor, throwing the burnt match away.

‘I saw a very good photograph of him when I was at Ros Lodge concerning the dead seaman's photograph,' replied the policeman, shifting his weight again.

As the doctor lifted his cigarette to his mouth, his eyelashes drooped and his eyes crawled over the policeman's face.

‘Very interesting.' The doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘The only difficulty I see is this. On medical evidence, Dougald could have had nothing whatever to do with the death of the seaman. As you know, he wasn't there. There can therefore be no crime against Dougald – nothing, in fact, but that he spent some money.'

‘I know,' said the policeman. ‘But if the foreign money was changed—' He was troubled, for hours of meditation had shown him the difficulties.

‘Even if that could be proved – what about it? It would then be a simple matter of not having reported what was washed up on the shore. I understand that that is not regarded as a criminal offence – hardly even as a civil offence – on any shore!' The doctor smiled in a friendly way. ‘You'll have to be pretty careful.'

‘For myself,' said Kenneth, suddenly full of words, ‘you know I don't want not to help. But I always have a feeling against telling how I may help anyone. It's private. If I loaned a man some money and went blabbing about it – he would be hurt. You know you would be yourself. All I will say is this. There's no difficulty about where Dougald got the two lots of sheep and the kind of money he paid for them and the total amount of it. He was entitled to have that exact number of sheep for himself privately as the shepherd. That's the usual thing on every club farm. For the rest, I'll just say this – and you can take it down if you like – that before this happened Dougald owed me nothing in his dealings at my shop and everything was fair and square with the Club.'

‘Well, thank you for that,' said the policeman.

‘I must be getting back,' said the doctor. ‘If I can help – look in. So long!'

As he went along, he smiled to himself at Kenneth's mollifying speech – after the hostile reticence. What had taken place inside Kenneth's cunning mind while the talk went on was very simple. He would now tell Dougald, if questioned, to say that the money was all his own savings. Kenneth could be depended upon to work out the arithmetic of that all right! He would also tell Dougald to deny having found foreign money, either by Charlie or himself. If, however, foreign money was traced to them, then – and only then – Dougald might confess to its having been washed up on the shore. There need be no connection with the strangled seaman!

What was troubling the honest policeman was that Charlie and Dougald
had
suddenly got money. That was dead plain. Dougald could not have saved three or four years' total wages,
plus
what he had paid Kenneth for purchases, all at once! If he had saved it gradually he would
naturally have bought the sheep gradually – say two or three last year or the year before. Not in this way, all at once, and getting drunk, and driving them home by the old drove road, on a Sabbath, too, and – of all things – smacking the minister in the face! Before the simplest man would do all that, such obvious stuff crying out for detection, plainly a guilty conscience had played havoc with his mind. And whatever Mr. Gwynn might say about the primitive, its basic elements in a man like Dougald MacIan to-day were precisely cunning and suspicion, often in an extreme form. Such cunning could be overborne only by some shocking derangement throwing up an idiotic defiance. The minister was probably lucky to have got off with the one smack!

The doctor's mind steadied for a moment – and drew back to the old question. Could it be possible that Charlie had strangled the seaman on discovering the money in the chest – the seaman, lying on the bed, may have opened his eyes and seen Charlie rummaging in the chest – rolled off the bed – a fight? Charlie killed him – and then his nerve failed?

Charlie had looked as if he had come through some such experience. The psychological shock had been almost painfully evident in his face on that morning after the death. The body lying in the somewhat darkened bed, would be avoided, they would not think of looking for marks on it. The news of the strangulation had been a complete shock to Dougald. Charlie would have hidden that from him. He may have told it to him since – with devastating results.

The doctor's mind steadied – and this time contemplated the effect of the attack on the minister. The news would spread far beyond the district. Behind the policeman's attitude to his duty, there was also his self-interest. If he did nothing at all, how would his superiors take it when the rumours began to flow in? That was troubling him – very naturally. He would have to do something.

The doctor's mind slid from the minister's face to Flora, and his breathing quickened. It was an appalling vision – the girl being led into that dark and hellish mess. And being led she was! The scene on the moonlit hillside came back upon
him with a sudden effect of vast and tragic catastrophe, and blotted out his thought. The cycle bounded on some loose gravel. He was passing the manse. He would have to do something. There was no one about the manse. But what? As the cycle took the long gradient for Ardnarie, he saw a girl on the roadside, calling a dog out of the way. But Fraoch, wondering why he was guilty, paid no attention to the oncoming cycle. The doctor stopped his machine.

‘I'm very sorry,' said Flora, with a hot glance of apology, then she drew the bewildered Fraoch to one side.

‘I'm glad to stop this noisy contraption occasionally,' replied the doctor, resting on his machine. ‘Giving Fraoch a walk? Well, Fraoch?' He put down an inviting hand, and Fraoch politely twisted his body, flattened his ears, and showed his laughing teeth, but stayed a yard away. ‘He's taking no chances!'

She smiled. ‘He's often a very naughty dog,' she said.

‘How old is he now?'

‘He's nearly seven.'

‘Is he really?' The doctor looked up with an air of surprise. He had this trick of making conversation in a natural way about ordinary things. It dismissed all personal stress and left the mind free.

The colour which had come into her face was ebbing and gave the skin a delicate transparency. The light in her eyes, which had flashed hotly, was now a glistening pure light, alive, as things in nature are alive. Her body, with its full lines, swayed naturally. The daughter of the manse, the conventional lady – this innocent, naïve creature.

‘He's getting a few grey hairs about the mouth.'

‘Do you think so? What a shame!'

‘He enjoys himself.' A smile came into his eyes as he glanced up again, this time a trifle more directly. ‘One scent of a rabbit and the whole problem of life is solved.'

Women often blessed him for his cool friendly ease.

‘I know,' she said, looking at Fraoch, who was aware that he was being trapped by this interest.

The doctor, knowing what was in Fraoch's mind, said in a low hissing voice, ‘What is it?… Rabbits!'

At once Fraoch cocked his ears, glanced this way and
that, and shot off the road.

They laughed.

‘My mother,' he said, ‘is not a very good visitor. She finds a long walk a little tiring.'

‘I'm sure she does.'

‘So if ever you felt,' – and he looked at her now with a more intimate expression –‘like resting half-way, she would be pleased to see you.'

‘Thank you very much. I – I am always afraid of troubling anyone.'

‘You mean the manse has to be received?'

He knew she was not quick-witted intellectually, but his casual emphasis on the word
received
she caught at once, and was delighted as if a whole amusing social relationship had been made clear. She looked at him directly, at his half smile, and laughed, swaying back.

The direct look of her eyes in wonder, in communication, had been in some way a flash of illumination. The doctor experienced a distinct warmth.

All at once Fraoch set up his yelping. They glanced down the slope and saw Michael Sandeman coming up towards them. Fraoch's stern waggled from a burrow.

‘I must go,' she said.

‘Please don't.'

His tone drew her into the moment's conspiracy against Michael's appearance, and she instinctively obeyed it. She would be a faithful ally.

‘So if you care to drop in, you will be received,' he began again in his light voice, and now his eyes were bright with humour.

‘Thank you very much. I—' as she hesitated she looked directly at him, shyly smiling, her eyes burning, aware of herself between the two men, ‘I like your mother.'

Michael was now only a few paces away. This heightened the feeling between them.

‘Well, please do come,' he said, answering her look directly. Then the moment's expression was withdrawn inward, out of sight, and he turned to acknowledge Michael's greeting.

Michael could be a very fascinating fellow when he liked.
Now there was a lash of colour in his face. His teeth flashed. His smile was brilliant in a way that seemed to cover a fundamental shyness. Where he might have been, out of all his exhaustive experience of women and the world, rather casual and blasé or deliberately charming, he actually appeared excited, gay, like one to whom the world was still new and fresh. A camera in a brown case was slung over his back. He started talking at once, without personal greetings.