The Key of the Chest (29 page)

The night fell quickly, and before Dougald got back to his cottage it was dark, the thin rain whipping his face out of the rising wind. There was no light in the window. Charlie must have stayed in bed. When, however, he found the door standing open, a grunt came out of him. He shut it behind him and saw the kitchen filled with smoke. He went straight for the hand lamp, lit it, and turned into Charlie's room, slowing his steps to peer over the light with a controlled expression. The bed was empty and in disorder. There was no one in the room. His expression opened. The lamp shook in his hand. ‘Charlie!' There was no answer.

He went back to the kitchen and looked in the kitchen bed. Charlie was not in the house. His expression grew congested with wrath and fear. Stock still he stood on the middle of the floor, the lamp in his hand lighting up his angry-red bushy face. Then he set down the lamp on the table, his collie looking up at him from the corner behind the peat basket.

Suddenly he lumbered out, pulling the door after him, and went along to the byre. ‘Charlie!' He lit matches. The cow mooed at him, the chain rattling on her neck. Charlie was not anywhere about the outhouses. He came back to the kitchen and stood on the middle of the floor.

‘God damn him, where has he gone now?' His voice was harsh and defiant and the force of emotion in him thrust his feet about the floor. Then he stood again, listening. The wind whined about the house, coming in from the west. Rain beat across the small window. He saw the reflection of the lamp, outside, ghost-like in the night.

All day he had hung about the house. Then Charlie had quietened and seemed ready for sleep, his eyes shut, breathing in little gusts out of exhaustion. The storm
was plainly coming and there were a few ewes in poor condition that would have been the better of sending away for wintering with the hoggs. He had known that, but also knew he could pull them through or, at the worst, make the crofts take them for a while. The cost of wintering was the heaviest charge on the Club. He would have been back earlier had he not, after rounding up the ewes into a sheltered valley, started out for the doctor. As Charlie had refused absolutely to see the doctor, Dougald had had to struggle against Charlie's will every yard of the road. Within sight of Ros Lodge, Charlie's will had fought him to a raging standstill. Then Erchie, driving home a couple of strayed stirks, had come on him. ‘If you see the doctor,' called Dougald, ‘tell him Charlie is not well.' Turning abruptly, he had made back.

The wind came in a gust again. The storm was rising. Then through the whine of the wind, he heard another whine, a dog's whine, at the door. The sound of it ran cold down the small of his back. His eyes swept the floor. Nell uncurled and, twisting, whined uneasily, her eyes showing the whites as she glanced up at him from lowered muzzle. The other dog he had deliberately left with Charlie.

He pulled the door open and Tang came in, tawny as seatangle, slunk across the floor, and flattened behind Nell, but restlessly, as if beaten and fearful.

‘Curse you!' roared Dougald. ‘Get up!'

Tang avoided him and slunk under the table. Dougald was already at the door. ‘Come on!' he roared. The wind blew into the kitchen and sent the smoke in whirls and the flame leaping in the funnel of the lamp. Maddened, he returned and swept his boot under the table. Whimpering, Tang ran out before him.

Dougald thought he saw the dog making for the cliff path beyond the unblinded window light.

He could have found his way down the cliff path in pitch dark. Even when he slipped, his body knew how to twist over, his hands where to grab and hold. Now he went down it without any clear sense in the order of his going. For horror of what he might find – or not find – was already
coiled round the root fibres of his life.

The seas were spouting over the skerries, lashing and seething on the narrow beach, for they were coming straight in from the west. The stones rolled from his feet as Dougald strode heavily down till the withdrawn water came again and rushed over his feet, up to his knees.

There was nothing there. Nothing. On the cliff wall of the Point to his left, the sea smashed and burst. Into faults and caverns beyond, the water boomed and choked, glutted. But there, coming into him, curling round the skerries, were black lumps of water, like black heads. The beach came alive in storm and wreck.

Dougald lifted his head in mad defiance. Roaring out of his throat came challenging sounds, eager for battle. The sounds cursed the sea and the black heads and dared them and damned them. ‘Damn you to hell!' he roared into the teeth of the rising storm, the stones crashing under his feet as the water swept over them and staggered him.

He turned and stumbled up the stones – and saw against the black hole of the low cave into which Charlie thrust his gear for shelter, a pallor like a vague moon, like a piece of newspaper, and Dougald's rage ebbed from him in a coldness colder than the sea, for he knew it was a face.

He drew towards it. It was making sounds, but hardly human sounds. He went right up to it and stooped. It was Charlie.

‘What are you doing here?' asked Dougald, in a voice gone strangely simple.

Charlie slid back on his haunches.

‘Come on up home,' said Dougald.

Charlie sat staring at him.

‘Come on,' said Dougald and put a hand out.

Charlie scrambled to his feet and hit the lip of the cave with his head. This released him and in a moment they had come to grips.

They staggered as they fought, Dougald trying to pin his arms. Charlie began to yell, but his voice broke into a scream, into a wild vicious gibberish. When Dougald felt Charlie's fingers at his throat, a great strength came upon him, a bear's strength, that crushed Charlie's arms and
body until they suddenly fell limp against him.

Dougald laid him out on the stones.

For a little Dougald stared down, his chest heaving noisily, then he looked over his shoulder at the sea, and a cry came from him, of defiance still, but broken. He picked Charlie up in his arms, shoved his body over his left shoulder as the cliff path grew steep, eased it at the cliff-top so that the blood would not choke the head, and so bore it into the house and laid it on the kitchen bed.

He unfastened the shirt at the neck and then stopped and stared. Charlie's head had fallen over loosely. It never moved.

‘Charlie!' called Dougald. ‘Charlie!' His hand came like a searching paw on the chest. ‘Charlie!'

His voice broke. He turned away from the bed and put on the kettle, moving quickly but in a kind of blindness, like a wounded animal.

The doctor was heading across the moor, for Erchie had intercepted him on his way home at the junction of the roads, and he turned away at once from the meal that was waiting for him, riding his motor-cycle right past Ros Lodge and on over the rough sea track as far as he could.

He had been expecting this message, indeed had been hoping for it and growing uneasy when it wasn't coming. There had been that withdrawn dignity about Charlie, that air of keeping one at a distance, which neither Norman nor anyone else had dared to intrude upon.

This dignity of the human individual that so fascinated Mr. Gwynn! This primal wholeness on its two feet with its two eyes!

The doctor smiled, lowering his brow against the stinging rain in a certain humoured warmth, a satiric mirth, where the satire gave strength and was healthy.

So many of his trips were like this, to the individual between whom and his fellows death had shadowily slipped in.

He could suggest a different kind of portrait gallery for Michael, very different, and much more revealing of his ‘human comedy'! Faces came before the doctor's inward eye, came out of the storm into which he thrust himself,
and lay each in a momentary pool of quietness, faces on their death bed.

It was when the struggle was over and the money was made, when age had to take leave of the struggle and the money, the struggle and the meanness, the cunning little cruelties, the tricks of ‘success' – what a desert was there then in the face on its death bed! He was looking upon the face of the trader who had died last week in Badloan.

Other faces. For there is no concealment now. This is the judgment hour, the lonely hour of self-judgment, and all one's fellows fall away, and all one's possessions fall away, and the hour and the place are naked as the body, stripped as the body will be at the hour's end.

This was no fantasy. He had seen it. Seen it often. The human picture gallery in this our age. The end of the strife and the conflict, when greed had lain as prime motive at the core of self. What doth it profit a man… Profit!

Profit that ravaged the face like a desert and made the eyes, the glassy eyes, stare in knowledge from its waste, in that last knowledge, with the lips already desert-dry and salted.

The beds they lay on tilted the faces and bodies into the dark howl of the wind and, invigorated by his satire, the doctor struggled on, in a hurry to get at Charlie.

For somehow it was not really remarkable that Charlie was still alive. All along, at the back of his mind, the doctor had had the odd feeling that Dougald would have been Charlie's watchdog. Dougald had an instinct for Charlie's sickness, not his body's sickness so much as his spirit's. Dougald would have had a surer cunning about it than any of them. Dougald would know it in the pining sheep that left its fellows for the lonely spot, the stag that set out on his last trek, alone, for the sanctuary. Charlie had only got to begin to drift in a certain direction for Dougald to follow.

But the doctor was hardly prepared for the scene he came upon. It held him just outside the unblinded window of the cottage and gathered an extraordinary power because he could not hear what was said.

Charlie's white face was mad-eyed on the pillow. His hands were clutching at the bedclothes. There came a roar
of rainwind which made the doctor thrust a supporting hand against the wall. Charlie's fingers went up to his own throat. Dougald's red fists gripped them. Charlie struggled and the bedclothes heaved and tossed. Now the doctor heard Charlie's piercing yells. Presently Charlie fell back and his mouth opened for the breath to snore through. Dougald smoothed the bedclothes, folded them down from the top, and with the slow gentleness of a woman placed Charlie's hands upon his body, and drew the clothes back to the chin. After standing a little while looking down upon his brother, Dougald turned away. Another blatter of high wind stopped him mid-floor. He stared straight at the window, and the doctor thought he was being seen. The wind howled round the walls and the doctor saw Dougald's mouth move. In an instant, the doctor knew he was not being seen, or was certainly not being recognized, for Dougald's shoulders hunched with a terrific suggestion of fighting power. He was challenging the forces of the night. He was prepared to meet all the forces from the sea and from hell beyond it. He was his brother's keeper.

A small shiver went over the doctor, and he leaned back against the wall for a moment, and stared into the rising fury that came from the sea, challenging it also with his smile, challenging it and defeating it, out of something magnificent in Dougald's stand.

Rattling the door, he entered and closed it behind him. Dougald was swift to meet him – then stopped dead.

‘How is he?' asked the doctor, watching the body in front of him losing its stiffening.

‘Come in.'

The doctor entered, took off his coat and leggings, and unslung the brown leather-and-canvas bag from his back. Then he went and warmed his hands at the fire. The kettle was lazily spouting its steam. He asked for a clean bowl.

‘No, no!' said Charlie from the bed.‘No you don't!' His breathing began to rise. His hands came clear.

‘Keep hold of him,' said the doctor.

Charlie did not recognize them, of course, but he was fighting. The doctor saw that. His face was hard and bitter. Scared in a wild wide-eyed way, but not broken.‘By God,
you don't!' roared Charlie, and his fist smashed into Dougald's face.

The doctor, with the body spent and quivering, thrust a needle into the flesh and pressed the shot home. ‘That'll keep him quiet. How long has he been like this?'

‘Since the darkening.'

The doctor nodded, satisfied. ‘I'll look him over. Meantime, I'll tell you what you might do for me.'

Dougald waited.

‘You might make me a cup of tea.'

Dougald's mouth fell open and he stared at the doctor.

‘Yes,' he muttered and turned to the fire.

From the corner of his eye, the doctor saw Dougald's body getting busier and busier and moving now with remarkable lightness. He went out and came in, white bread, oatcake, butter, jam, cup and saucer….

The doctor folded his stethoscope. ‘I couldn't take four eggs,' he said.

Dougald looked at him solemnly, gaping a little.

‘He'll pull through, I think.'

Dougald sat down and then leaned over to find a small pan. Gripping it, he looked again at the doctor. ‘Is he – is his reason—?'

Then the doctor realized that Dougald thought Charlie had lost his reason, had gone mad.

‘No, no,' said the doctor. ‘He has been delirious. Delirium. He didn't know what he was doing.'

Dougald looked past the doctor and then back at his face again.

‘His mind is all right,' the doctor made it clear. ‘If he has the will to get better, I think he'll get better, and fairly quickly.'

‘Oh.' It was no more than a curious wondering breath. All the features softened. He put the four eggs in the pan.

‘When did you have food last yourself?' asked the doctor.

‘I don't remember,' answered Dougald correctly.

‘Well, we'll have tea together,' said the doctor firmly, ‘then I must ask you to go with a message from me, stormy as the night is.'