The Key of the Chest (2 page)

Throughout the book the mythic is brought in to deepen events, and as a balance to the abstractions of Mr Gwynn. In the minister's case, Gunn writes:

Dougald is said to be challenging the forces of the night', and is proven to be indeed ‘his brother's keeper'. Although he resents the vain sacrifice he made to send Charlie to Edinburgh, he will protect him not only against the community but against death itself.

Of Charlie's playing the pipes we hear that:

Again and again there are characterisations which depend
upon poetic force rather than intellectual clarity: ‘Death, dark and round-shouldered with hidden face'.

The total effect of the book is multi-layered, but it is an effect of unity, a unity established within the author's mind. The Highland community was failing throughout Gunn's lifetime (he died in 1973) because it had not come to terms with the economic organisation necessary to life in the twentieth century and because the psychological disruption of the Clearances had damaged the fundamental culture. But more than this, he had the sense that community was failing all over the Western world, and the strength of the State was no substitute, for community cannot be imposed from above. And community embodies values which as a species we cannot afford to lose. The comment is made about the Highland people:

But what is the meaning of social life in a dying community? The book charts how individual behaviour relates to communal values, and how the two balance. We cannot start from scratch, we must use what we have, and realise its meaning.

Charlie tells the doctor at the end: ‘Even if I had children, and grandchildren, they would still be known as coming from me, and beside me always… would be the strangled seaman and the money.'

It is the mythic, the symbolic, which he cannot overcome. Yet whenever the intellect makes all the secrets of a community and a way of life too clear and shallow, the community dies. A community lives by myth and legend as well as by morality.

The doctor reflects that human tragedy lies‘with the inevitable, in the things that cannot be “put right” ', and turns his eyes away to the wild duck arriving back to winter quarters:

Their arrival breaks the doctor's despondent mood. Life goes on, and his life must go on. But the long descriptive passage, with its profusion of commas and clauses, seems forced, as if the author is pressing too hard for a positive ending.

Is it indeed a positive ending? Is it enough for the doctor to live with his mother and tend the sick? Is the community more likely to flourish at the end rather than the beginning of the story? It's to the outsiders, Michael and Gwynn, that the doctor turns for conversation, not to the people of the community, and Michael and Gwynn are birds of passage. What is left?

Michael at one point says that he has had ‘a premonition of wholeness'. But this personal wholeness, if ever achieved, will be achieved elsewhere. What is ‘wholeness', anyway? Gwynn never defines it. If we don't know what it is, how can we attain it? How do we know it is worth attaining?

I think the word ‘premonition' is a good one here. The sense of wholeness – an experience of living fully in an accepted universe – although momentary is also timeless, and provides a premonition of a state of being which seems at once essential and perfectly natural. It is a matter of experience, not of theory, and to define it is to miss it.

For a community, of course, wholeness is an accepted way of life which provides a sense of meaning and fulfilment for its members, and may begin to break up when questioned and analysed.

Neither Gwynn nor Gunn is advocating a return to the primitive, which would be impossible as well as undesirable, for the realisation of individuality has been the greatest achievement of civilisation.

The Key of the Chest
is based on his knowledge of the Highland community when Gunn was a boy, and of the Highland community in decline, when he was writing the book. It cannot be said to have anything as straightforward
as a message. The integration of the individual helps a community to thrive, and one function of a thriving community is to help the individual towards wholeness, towards being able to stand on his own two feet and gain an understanding of the world. But if the individual must attain personal integration and then live in such a way that community is restored, the process will be so long and difficult that before anything is achieved the community itself may be swallowed by history and lost for ever, and if community were to vanish from the world, mankind would vanish with it.

The book leaves us with a sense that the search for meaning and integration will go on because it's essential for the human psyche that it does, and that whatever happens to a particular people in a particular place, community will restore itself because the species requires it. There is room for faith as well as hope.

J. B. Pick

All day the sea had boomed in the rocks from the storm outside in the ocean. Now the cliff rumbled under his feet and the grey sky flattened still more. Thrusting his red-bearded face over his shoulder, he stared at the approaching horizon. The wind came in a wild scurry among the heather. The lean intelligent black collie with the white star on her chest kept close to heel.

When next he glanced over his shoulder, the brow of the horizon had lowered and he saw the sea's teeth whitening in the storm's mouth. This time he stopped. But his cottage was lost to sight. His features closed in a sardonic twist as he saw his brother putting more peat on the fire and taking out his chanter. No doubt he would lift the tune onto the full stand of pipes now that he was alone. He liked playing to himself!

A solitary spit of rain hit an eyeball between the narrowed lids. The track was rough but he stumbled rarely, for the moor was native to his feet as a ship's deck to a sailor's.

Another hour, and his eyes focused on Cruime. It was a village or township with a huddle of houses in the middle and others thinning out along the curve of the shore and upon the slopes behind. They were mostly straw-thatched but two or three had slate roofs and a few more the black of tarred felt. Hummocky bents overlooked the sweep of brown sand with its high-tidal marks of old dark tangle. On the near side the strand finished in the low cliff root; on the far side, amid a welter of skerries, a few massive boulders in some olden time had been levered together into a primitive but useful jetty. Nine open boats of about fifteen feet were drawn up well beyond the dark tangle. They stood in a row, supported on even keels, their sterns to the sea and their dumb bows lifting to the land. In that
dream they had been for many years, though one or two of them still got a smearing of tar and even a lick of blue paint round the gunnels.

But lower down, four lay usefully on their sides. Round one of them six dark figures were grouping and heaving. The tide would be high enough to-night on top of the storm, though the stream was falling under a growing moon.

His eyes swept everywhere with little movement of the head. The more men about the boat, the less of them in the village. The smother of dusk went with him down past the near houses.

But first one little boy saw him and then another. A woman with a black shawl round her head straightened herself to look at him as he passed. He was on the hard public road and the scattered houses stood back from it, aloof under their brown curved roofs.

Two boys began whispering together as they followed at a respectful distance. Two little girls joined them, but in a moment stood by themselves, letting the boys go on. Another little boy came rushing up, then another. They began to chatter, but with repressed voices.

At last the houses gathered more confidently towards the public road, and here was the shop with the slate roof and the name K
ENNETH
G
RANT
on the long green signboard. It had a large window with shelves of goods, and between the shelves one could look into the shop and see the heads and shoulders of those serving and being served.

As the man stopped on the middle of the road all the boys stopped. The dusk was thickening quickly under the approaching storm, and the man stood detached and ominous as his low-set head twisted over his shoulder and stared at the window.

A match was struck inside the shop. The clink of a lamp funnel was thinly heard. A yellowish light pervaded the shop. The man looked round and saw the boys. They stood dead still. There was no one else about and the man went into the shop.

As the bell tinkled above the door, the shopkeeper paid no attention until he had satisfied himself that the round-
wicked lamp, suspended from the ceiling, was burning evenly. Then he turned, blinking a little from the strong light. When he saw his customer, he said in an expressive cheerful voice. ‘Hullo, Dougald, is it yourself?' He was a well-set-up fellow in his thirties, dark and energetic, with a keenness in his features. Now he was cheerful and friendly, putting his visitor at his ease. ‘And how are things out with you?'

‘That same way,' answered Dougald, taking a folded sack from a poacher's pocket.

‘I was east-the-country the day before yesterday,' said Kenneth, ‘and there's talk of the lamb sales improving still more.'

‘It was about time,' muttered Dougald.

‘It was indeed,' agreed Kenneth, briskly slapping his hands as if dusting them of the paraffin smell. ‘High time. That was a terrible snowstorm last spring in the high parts of the country. I met one flockmaster who lost fifteen hundred.'

‘A terrible loss, that.' Dougald stood staring before him.

Kenneth glanced at him. ‘It is. But we must take things as they come, and what may be one part of the country's loss may be another part's gain. Not that it would have been all gain for us had it not been for yourself.'

‘Och,' mumbled Dougald, with an abrupt movement of his body.

‘All the same, it was enough,' said Kenneth. ‘Our ground is low-lying and the sea around helps to keep the snow away, but we had it bad enough. A few of the Committee were just saying as much no later than last night, when I was telling them the news.'

‘Oh well,' said Dougald.

But Kenneth was not deterred, for he fancied that though Dougald could not readily find words, he might like all the same to get what news was going and even a word or two of genuine praise if they could be passed across naturally enough. Besides, it would all help the Sheep Club, of which Dougald was the shepherd.

Kenneth was secretary of the Club, in which all the crofters had a share. He, himself, had a large croft in
addition to the shop, but keener at the moment than his personal interest in his own portion was the thought of a favourable balance sheet for the annual meeting and share-out. Years of debt had given the whole undertaking a gloomy air.

So he talked on, teased a little, too, by the enigmatic presence before him standing like a slab of red sandstone, a little above medium height, with a short neck. The reddish whiskers were bushy, at the longest no more than two to three inches, but so natural a growth on his weathered face that they might never be trimmed. His eyes, of a greenish blue, were remembered as a glisten of light between narrowed lids. He was forty-five.

A flurry of rain hit the window panes.

‘You could hardly have used your weather lore to-day!'

‘I knew it was coming.' Dougald looked at the laden shelves.

‘Well,' said the shopkeeper, taking a pencil from his waistcoat pocket, ‘we'd better get a move on. Though I'm afraid you're going to have a nasty night.'

‘Four quarters of bread,' began Dougald.

Kenneth wrote down on a fold of wrapping paper each item of Dougald's order. Dougald never hesitated, not even over the final item, which was a brown earthenware teapot.

‘Been breaking the crockery?' asked Kenneth as he cheerfully thumped the loaves on the counter.

‘He broke the spout off it,' mumbled Dougald as he opened the sack and shoved in the bread.

Kenneth, about to say something, thought better of it. Perhaps Dougald had had a row with his brother Charlie.

After twisting the neck of the sack, Dougald deftly heaved it over his shoulder. More rain hit the window on a whine of wind.

‘Here,' said Kenneth, ‘I'll wrap some of the things up for you. Bread and tea—'

‘It's all right,' said Dougald, making for the door.

‘I'll give you another sack anyway—'

Dougald went on.

‘Good night,' called Kenneth.

‘Good night.'

The door rattled against the jambs, the bell tinkled.

Kenneth stood motionless looking at the closed door for a time. About to move away, he saw the pencilled order on the wrapping paper. He took the day-book from under the counter and began entering up the items.