The Key of the Chest (21 page)

Smeorach smiled as he rose.

Dougald slung the bag on his back with a swirl that drew smoke from the chimney. Then he stood for a moment, filling the whole room. As he turned away, voices called good night after him.

Smeorach saw him round the corner of the house.

When he came back, they looked at him.

‘I don't know,' said Smeorach quietly and stood for a moment on the middle of his own floor.

Their minds lifted to the man striding darkly across the moor, the sack on his back, and, for a few seconds, only the tongues of flame stirred.

‘Ha, the very man! Just in time to save Gwynn's mind!' Michael gave the doctor a hearty welcome, turning away from him, hunting out another glass.

‘Good evening, Doctor. Glad to see someone. Have a cigar.' Mr. Gwynn was smiling. ‘Michael, as you will perceive, is cock-a-hoop.'

‘Another masterpiece?'

‘I shouldn't call it that, but it has a certain enigmatic quality,' admitted Mr. Gwynn.

‘And he can't find a word for it!' Michael spilled some of the liquor. ‘The subtle analyst of mental conditions is stumped. Floored. He's reduced to epithets, to German! Do you know what's the nearest he can get to it?
Primordial
innocence
.'

‘You are naturally a bit mystified,' said Mr. Gwynn. ‘But as a matter of interest, do the words
primordial innocence
convey anything to you?'

‘Well,' began the doctor doubtfully.

His expression of doubt was too much for Michael, as he lay back in his low chair and thrust his legs out.

‘I was about to say,' continued the doctor,‘that it does sum up a possible condition, but I should have thought that, in a state of nature, the word
innocence
hardly applied.'

‘Oh, the nail on the head!' cried Michael.

‘Pay no attention to him, please,' Mr. Gwynn begged. ‘Merely the usual creative frenzy.'

The doctor smiled and asked Mr. Gwynn lightly, ‘What sort of bird is it?'

Michael rolled in his chair, groaning, ‘O God!'

Mr. Gwynn glanced directly at the doctor.‘I beg your pardon, Doctor. How stupid of me! It's a woman's photograph. The photograph of Flora, the minister's daughter.'

There was a second before the doctor said ‘Oh,' and lifted his glass.

Michael's glittering eyes were on him. ‘That fairly got you!'

‘Well, naturally,' said the doctor.

‘You are so used to his birds, Doctor – and, by the way, he has done a beauty. Stalking a duck, he got a kittiwake. Heeling over, wings outspread. The parallel lines of the feathered quills and the
shadow
of the flesh from which they spring – like an X-ray photograph of pure motion. Marvellous!'

‘Yet he can't find one simple little word,' prodded Michael.

Mr. Gwynn's gesture acknowledged the remark.

‘And you can't help him out, Doctor,' Michael concluded in ironic appraisement of so unusual a situation.

‘How could he – when he hasn't seen the photograph?' suggested Mr. Gwynn.

‘But he has seen the girl,' replied Michael, settling deeper in his chair. His eyes flashed on Mr. Gwynn, and then shot round. ‘Haven't you, Doctor?'

‘All this is hardly fair, Doctor, I admit,' said Mr. Gwynn in his easy frank manner. ‘You see, Michael, who can stalk anything now, studies what he calls the habits of his prey, so there was no accident in that encounter the other day.'

‘The doctor was the accident,' said Michael.

‘After you had gone, he set about wasting a shot or two on the dog.'

‘Try it on the dog,' said Michael.

‘And then,' proceeded Mr. Gwynn, ‘it appears the lady got interested and sat for her photograph.'

‘She did really,' Michael cried, unable to contain himself. ‘With the most charming and shy innocence.
Not
primordial. Very conscious indeed. It was delicious.'

‘And then,' said Mr. Gwynn, ‘he got himself and myself invited to tea. Can you beat it – for sheer nerve? We were there to-day.'

‘And to-morrow night they dine with us.' Michael's sidelong glance steadied on the doctor. Then he suddenly sat up. ‘Would you like to come?' he asked impulsively. ‘Do.'

‘Afraid – not to-morrow night,' considered the doctor. ‘Thank you, all the same.'

‘Pity,' said Michael, lying back. ‘You have no idea how Gwynn here gets on with the father. You would positively think they were birds of the same feather. Perhaps they are! So I'll be left to entertain Flora. Couldn't you possibly arrange your sick list so as to help me out?'

‘Afraid not.'

‘Too bad.' Michael laughed.

‘He is really an extraordinary man, the minister,' said Mr. Gwynn thoughtfully. ‘It's as if his mind – which in its fashion is as sensitive – and hidden – as one of Michael's plates, had written on its darkness all that his people have come through from primitive times, all crushed down, hunted by landlords and other beasts, their way of life gripped by claws, economic claws, Calvinistic claws, and torn – like that.' (Mr. Gwynn made slow-tearing claws of his fingers, his face having come alive, vividly expressive. He was being carried away. He didn't mind.)‘You can see them, running to hide. Into dark corners. The dark corners of the mind. Their social pattern – getting torn. So they appear dark and gloomy, as individualists. Why? Because they are so intensely social. They prove, as no other people I know prove, that man can fulfil himself only in social life. And they have carried over this feeling for social life, almost pure, because they carry it over from the integrated imaginative life of the primitive world. When they gather together they tell stories, they laugh, they sing.' He paused and threw a hand up. ‘Oh, you wonder how I know? When Erchie tells me of “the times that were in it long ago” I know what he is getting at. I have been to one or two what they called “ceilidhs” in London. Very correct. Rather forced gaiety. Tartan and so on. Boring. But, in time, a drink or two and a few break away, who are now hungry for the real thing. They find a room, away, hidden somewhere. They sing. I was embarrassed – it seemed so without true singing or real music, maudlin, nostalgic. They swam in it. They laughed. They drowned in it. Terrible! But I know now what they were hunting. They were hunting the lost social life. The rhythm of it was in them. Class distinction
forgotten. The hunt for the classless expression of pure being through the social medium. The hunt' – Mr. Gwynn made his gesture –‘that the whole world will one day pursue.' He paused and then suddenly smiled. ‘Michael is getting bored. He thinks I ride my hobby horse! But you will forgive me, Doctor. For how else can I understand what moves in the mind of the highly sensitized, highly civilized, modern“primitive” painter?'

Michael shot to his feet. ‘Would you like to see the photograph?' He looked searchingly at the doctor.

‘Thanks,' said the doctor, getting up.

‘You always do sound enthusiastic!' Michael led the way.

The doctor found his feet heavy. He had to drag them against a dead weight of reluctance. Why had he come at all? He might have expected something like this. But he had been pursued by that growing foreboding that something terrible was about to happen. The black ring was closing in. The policeman. Closing in about Charlie – and Flora. Flora would be found out. By her father. It did not bear thinking about. A nightmare of night – and God alone knew what fatal and bloody act. Going to see her photograph… it made him feel slightly sick.

And there she was.

She was there, sitting with her hands in her lap, her head up, looking out of a background that gave an impression of immensity, facing past the camera to an immense distance, but with an air of… it was impossible to describe it. So simple, so natural, that it touched the heart with something perilously like pathos.

Yet the word pathos was idiotic. There was no pathos in that figure. Unless indeed something of pathos is the ultimate condition of humanity, and some exquisite poignant kinship of the spirit realizes it in a final moment.

Michael, alive in his showmanship, was waiting.

Out of a sudden perversity, believing the reaction was utterly personal to himself, the doctor, feeling he could thus secretly laugh at them, for he was bitter, said in quite normal tones, ‘A bit pathetic, don't you think?'

Michael's face hardened.

But Mr. Gwynn emitted a long soft breath through
pursed lips. Then he turned his face to the doctor. ‘That's an extraordinary word to use… Do you feel that it affects you – strangely – with a sense of tears?'

And the doctor knew, profoundly, that that was what it did.

He smiled, refusing Mr. Gwynn's quiet and genuine wonder. ‘I would hardly go as far as that! I certainly never saw any pathos in her. She is, I think, a rather solid, hefty lump of a girl, don't you?'

‘Why did you use the word pathetic?'

‘Merely a comment on the photographer's work, I suppose?' said Michael in so flat a tone that it held more searching irony than any laugh.

‘Possibly,' acknowledged the doctor.

Michael turned away swiftly. ‘Possibly you'll appreciate this better.'

‘Ah, that's good,' responded the doctor. ‘That's a speaking likeness.'

‘God!' Michael groaned.

‘That's really remarkable,' said the doctor. Actually he had never before seen a photograph like it. She was smiling directly into the camera. She was alive absolutely as in life, as in that moment when she had looked at him on the road before Michael had come up, only here she was amused, she was gay, with a hint of the wild shyness.

In the next one she had her hat on.

Michael, watching the doctor's face, said, ‘Yes, in time I got her to take her hat off.'

‘Uhm,' said the doctor. ‘Striking. Really attractive.'

There were two more.

‘That smiling one. Please let me see it again,' the doctor asked.

He looked at it and smiled back. It cheered him. He actually felt the gloom, the tiredness of spirit, falling from him. In some companionable way, it gave him courage. ‘I must say I like that.' He turned to Mr. Gwynn. ‘What do you think of it?'

‘Vivid, wonderful,' said Mr. Gwynn. ‘As you say – a speaking likeness.'

‘I'm glad you agree.'

Michael gave his harsh chuckle.

‘But also,' said Mr. Gwynn, ‘I find a trace of it – the pathos – there as well. Do you not?'

‘I'm not a critic,' replied the doctor.‘I always say what comes into my head – as Mr. Sandeman told me to do. He said that might help him. It gives him his laugh.'

‘All right. All right,' said Michael. ‘You needn't think you can drag anything out of him, Gwynn, if he doesn't want to let it go.'

‘Have I ever refused you?' asked the doctor.

‘No,' answered Michael. ‘And you're not going to refuse me now.'

Something in Michael's tone made the doctor glance quickly at him.

‘I want to take your photograph.'

The doctor's face went bleak. ‘No,' he answered with cool humour. ‘Not mine.'

‘And I'm going to take it,' said Michael, ‘in artificial light.'

The doctor turned away as if amused, but actually to cover the tremor that had come to his muscles. The flash of internal anger had been electrically fierce.

‘I am going to take Gwynn,' continued Michael, ‘sitting on a green meadow, like Buddha, but instead of contemplating his navel he will just have completed that gesture of finality – for which there is no word.'

Mr. Gwynn laughed softly and mockingly.

‘But I cannot think where,' said Michael, ‘I am going to place the minister. In the ravine up at the back there, with the black rocks and the water tumbling into its whirlpool. But that seems too obvious.' He added, after a moment, with sudden intensity, ‘Too damned literary!'

‘That, you will appreciate,' said Mr. Gwynn to the doctor, ‘is one for me.'

‘Yes,' said Michael, the pallor in his face, caring for no one's reactions. ‘The classical. The classical, hell! Gwynn, the classicist, hunting the primitive! The neoplatonic Christian philosopher searching for his roots – in totemism!' He didn't even laugh.

But Mr. Gwynn laughed, mostly in a movement of the
shoulders and the hands. But he was watching Michael. ‘Why the doctor in artificial light?'

They stared at each other, the doctor completely forgotten. Then Michael turned and looked at the doctor. His eyes went slowly over the doctor's face, over each feature, in a cool searching objectivity. They began to travel down, studied the hands, and, from the stance of the feet, lifted to Mr. Gwynn's face.

‘All the same, I am right,' he said, with complete conviction.

‘He disdains even to explain to us. The abounding vanity of the creator!' Mr. Gwynn's irony had its edge for the doctor's sake.

An extraordinary expression came to Michael's face, a sort of wild unearthly surprise. ‘The Creator never did explain! Christ! I
know
why He didn't!' He cried the words, his face flaming white, and took a stride or two about the easel.

Mr. Gwynn continued to stare at him, but his eyes had gone dark and his lips had parted. The room was held in Michael's private revelation, his moment of light. Gargantuan shadows of blasphemy were shot through with this light. Egoism had gone beyond itself.

The doctor was quite cold. He could have slashed this distorted arrogance, this sheer mental unbalance, but there was something now, something somewhere, beyond them all. He experienced an angered piercing bitterness, at the same time as he felt somewhere this wildness of light. Michael's eyes had stiffened him. He broke now out of his stance, and, as his head moved on his shoulders, the gallery's deliberate lighting drew his glance to the easel.

Flora's face, laughing in its gay shyness, vivid in the flesh, flesh and life, human and lovely, immediate, now secretly holding itself away from Michael, laughing in the green brown world.

Suddenly the doctor laughed back.

The others, startled, followed his look.

They, too, began to laugh. Michael rolled round the easel, laughing from the belly.

When the jest was exhausted, Michael had become normal, or sub-normal, almost physically weary.

‘Pathos!' he said. ‘At least she has disproved that now. As I told you, Gwynn, there is only one way of taking her, and that is stripped. Venus. The Highland Aphrodite!'