The Key of the Chest (30 page)

Dougald looked at him expectantly.

‘My mother won't know I'm here. I'll write a note, and you'll take it, and bring back one or two things.'

‘Yes, Doctor.' The prospect of such action clearly relieved him. But he gave the doctor a curious beseeching glance. ‘Will you wait till I come back? I won't take long.'

The doctor looked at him.‘I am going to stay here all night.'

Then something happened to Dougald's features. He got up and went into the passage as if searching for a lost pan. The doctor listened and heard one or two thick gulps. Plainly he was doing his best to choke them.

There came some days of good weather, when the land lay quietly under the sun and the sea glittered. This often happened in November, and the dreaming mood that fell upon the earth had at once a memory of summer in it and a thought of spring. Violence lay asleep in the coils of the sea, and the brows of the cliffs were smooth and far-sighted. Loch Geal had the shimmer of a shield, and the outlines of the mountains, rising from the Garuvben deer forest, flowed far upon horizons which limited the illimitable skies. The wind ran about the heather like a soft-mouthed spaniel seeking a scent.

With twilight, in this month not yet fallen asleep, an ear listens and a mind is free to speculate and even to gather odd apprehensions of lost magics. Very intimate these apprehensions are, very near the bone, and the face can afford to stare like a cliff-head.

‘Dougald was always like that,' said Charlie, staring through the small window of his own room at the twilight.

The doctor, on the chair by the bed, was also staring out through the window.

‘So you can imagine,' Charlie went on, ‘What he felt like when I came back home.'

‘Yes,' replied the doctor.‘I hadn't thought it meant to him so much as that.' His voice was quiet and contemplative. ‘I see it now. When you failed to fulfil his hopes it must have been a pretty deadly blow. He was father and mother in one.'

‘I don't know if that's it quite,' said Charlie. ‘He was my brother. And this feeling of a brother to a brother – it is a queer blood feeling. It goes – deep. I haven't it as Dougald has it, but I know it.'

The doctor was silent for a little. ‘I think that is profound.'

‘All the money he could gather, every penny he had saved, it all went on me. Only a few months ago did he pay off the last of his debt to Kenneth Grant. I had helped there, of course. But still – it was all his doing. And it had meant that he never got out of the bit, never got his sheep – or much else.'

‘I understand,' said the doctor.‘I can also see that it was, in the altered circumstances, a bit tough on you. Did he show it much?'

‘Not a great deal. You know him. But even in one of his rages, when he might look at me as if he might kill me, it was still the rage of an elder brother. And then – then it got into his mind that it was him and me against the world. He doesn't say much.'

‘Did you find it difficult?'

‘Very – often enough. But, you see, I had come back.'

The doctor was silent, for the fatal quietude of Charlie's voice had evoked Flora. A faint bitterness from the voice ran through the twilight, but did not stain it. This mood, this hour, had opened like an evening flower, after the fight against death in which the doctor had not spared himself, nor spared his patient Charlie. The fight was over, and they both knew the hour had been won. But one false word, rising from the wrong kind of curiosity, and the hour would fade before the eye, without disturbance, quietly but irrevocably.

‘Well,' remarked the doctor, ‘you had to do what you had to do.'

‘I have wondered,' said Charlie. ‘However, it happened.' Then in the same voice, he went on: ‘When Dougald came back that morning and found the notes of foreign money in the seaman's chest, he took them. He was in that mood.'

The doctor had the feeling that Charlie's eyes had switched on him, but he did not look round. His breathing became a conscious operation, but he controlled it. ‘I see,' he said slowly. ‘Dougald was against the world, so he was taking his dues.' His smile of irony passed beyond the window. ‘Naturally, you understand, I wondered if anything of the kind had happened,' continued the doctor with frankness, trying to answer the silence. ‘Afterwards, I
mean, when Dougald bought the sheep. The way I reasoned it out was this. Here, we look upon taking what Providence washes up on the shore as being more our own than even a smuggled drop of whisky or a poached salmon. The old laws of our land. Up in the Orkneys and Shetlands, I understand, they have still a recognized legal claim, under the old Udal system, to anything cast up on their shores. But usually, as with the smuggled drop, we hide it. Dougald did not hide it. He bought his sheep and to blazes with them. He was simply in rebellion against the forces that had defeated him. That's what I felt about it.' For one moment, the doctor wondered if he had spoken too much, if he had taken Charlie's confession too lightly.

‘I suppose so,' said Charlie and was silent.

Dougald passed the window. They listened to his footsteps. They did not come in.

‘I'm not blaming him,' said Charlie. ‘It's just what happened.'

The doctor, feeling he had said too much, remained silent. But at last he had to speak, so he said, ‘The key of the chest was on the sailor?'

‘Yes,' answered Charlie. ‘Some time during the night – long after he was dead – I opened the chest. I don't know why. I think I was still trying to do something. I had been up and down the cliff – and to other places. I wanted to save a life this time – perhaps to make up for the one I had strangled.'

The doctor did not move.

‘I don't know what I expected to find in the chest that would help. There was nothing anyway. Dougald came home. The key was in it. He found the notes. He took them out. He locked the chest. I asked him what he was going to do with them. “Keep them,” he said. I was beyond caring what he did with them. But, somehow, whether he was trying to get something back on me or not, God knows, but it all came out, and we wrangled. In the ordinary way, just because it belonged to a dead man, he would never have touched the money. But everything – everything that had happened – for years – came to a head then. It came to a head – on money. I told him not to take it. I went a little
beyond myself. There was a moment when the brotherly feeling turned to poison in the blood. I don't know yet how he forbore to strike me. Had he struck me at all, he would have killed me. His face…' Charlie paused. ‘I am aware it is no more than a figure of speech, talking of poison in the blood.'

And now for the first time, the twilight was stained.

The doctor began to feel for his cigarette case, but left it in his pocket. ‘It must have been pretty bad,' he said.

‘It was,' said Charlie. ‘Another odd thing, too, was this. Dougald could not apparently smash me. I think he might have – had he not somehow been diverted by the key in his hand. I have thought about it. It suddenly became something more than the key of the chest. It became – everything – in his hand. That's not much sense, I'm afraid.'

‘Uhm,' said the doctor. ‘It's extraordinarily difficult to put words to it. Symbol of triumph, perhaps, with terrific meaning for that moment.'

‘Something like that,' agreed Charlie. ‘The past. Money. His triumph over me. Over laws and churches. Anyway, he shouted that he would settle it all. He walked out of the house and threw the key over the cliff.'

‘That certainly settled it,' said the doctor.

‘It did,' said Charlie. ‘It committed us.'

The doctor, after a moment, turned and looked at Charlie. ‘How are you feeling?'

‘Fine,' answered Charlie. ‘Floating a bit, but fine.'

The blue eyes regarded the doctor with a faint objective smile. The face was pale and thin, with a stubble over the jaw and upper lip. Something of the outcast was there, as it had been when they saved him from the Roaring Cave, but now Charlie was more securely himself. The talking was taking little out of him. They both knew they were committed to it. A quick surge of fellow-feeling, of warm friendliness, came to the doctor's eyes before he turned to the window. Charlie was like one remembering a sequence of events that had found, in this twilit detachment, their recording hour, before he passed on.

‘If Dougald had not thrown the key away then, he would have given it to the policeman?'

‘Yes. Not, perhaps, if we had only found the chest. But – the owner was there – and there in the strongest of all shapes.' Charlie was silent for a moment. ‘You see, Dougald's whole action was irrational. There wasn't much money in the chest. I actually got less than eight pounds for it. And it was foreign money. Perhaps that made it more symbolic, as you say, than ever.'

The doctor also smiled in irony. ‘It makes it clear anyway,' he said.

‘The rest of the money he did actually find on the shore. I think in a kind of kit-bag. It was wrapped round and round in fine oilskin and quite dry. An odd find, wasn't it? But I expect someone tried to bring it in – and gave up. Perhaps it belonged to one of the two bodies found near Glaspool. But who can say?'

‘No. Not with life gone.'

Life gone
. The doctor's mind lapsed for a moment in which life became a formless something of deep significance, penetrating the twilight to far fields.

‘There were some English notes among them,' continued Charlie, ‘but mostly Swedish. I found no difficulty in cashing them. The young fellow behind the counter plainly took me for a foreigner. He spoke slowly so that I should understand him. When I was going he said good morning in German.'

The doctor laughed quietly. ‘That would ease any strain?'

‘It did.'

‘Had you tried Gaelic on him?'

‘No. Not actually. Though I did feel – and it affected my speech – I did feel at that moment a foreigner. My voice eet was ferry peculiar. It went that way all on its own.'

Charlie's detachment was almost absolute. ‘It wasn't that I was trying to act a part. There was no need for that anyhow. Though perhaps you think there was?'

‘Perhaps you may have been doing it unconsciously, making a good job of it,' suggested the doctor, ‘when you were at it.'

‘Perhaps.' The humour dying out of his face, Charlie looked through the window at the outcrop of lichened rock. ‘I certainly
did not want to placate anybody, and certainly not the fellow behind the counter. I don't know why I did it. But it had its effect on me. When I went out, I could not help smiling to myself. Often that night, I smiled away, hearing my acting voice, seeing the eager look on his face as he tried his German. And suddenly angered I thought: I'll go back home.'

‘You hadn't meant to come back, then?'

‘No. The money was Dougald's parting gift. I was going abroad. There was nearly forty pounds of it.'

‘I see,' said the doctor.

‘You'll perhaps see better if I remind you of the funeral of the dead seaman and of the minister's sermon… and of the way Dougald and I had to turn away from our people.'

Charlie's tone had not altered but the doctor's eyes winced as from the lash of a very fine thong.

‘That threw Dougald and myself together, if in a queer bitter way. We hadn't much to say. Nothing. Then one night he put all the money on the table before me. “You better clear out,” he said. So I went.'

The doctor did not speak.

‘We're a queer people, I suppose. Or perhaps it's only myself. Eyes, many eyes, looking round corners. We've got like that. At college in Edinburgh chaps who wanted to feel stylish, a bit grand, said they didn't know Gaelic –“Oh, perhaps a word or two” – when all the time it was their native tongue.'

‘I know,' said the doctor.

‘When your heritage is denied like that – what's left?'

‘Not much.'

‘No… It's a sensitiveness, I suppose. Want to forget simple origins and be on top of the world with the best. It's easy to be sarcastic about it. But it doesn't help. Something went wrong. We lost something.'

‘Mr. Gwynn at the Lodge says we have all lost something. Belief, he calls it. For our case, belief in the actual culture we had. And, though it was poor in worldly gear, it was rich in other things.'

‘What things?'

‘A belief in a common life among ourselves, working happily, in having our traditions, our language, our songs –
and so on. Did you think I was going to use the word spiritual?'

Charlie met the humoured challenge in the doctor's eyes. ‘In that case, we can afford to use it,' he answered, making the avowal with some harshness, as if his mind had been switched to the local church and all it stood for to him.

‘But it's the worldly gear that matters. Finally, I doubt if we have any other standard now,' said the doctor.

‘I agree,' said Charlie. ‘And the thought of it for some reason made me mad, and there and then I decided to return. To hell with them, I thought, to hell with them all. I suddenly realized, too, the goodness of my brother Dougald. He may not be a brilliant specimen, but—Anyway, it was his money. I had robbed him long enough.'

‘What did Dougald say when you came back?'

‘Nothing. But I spoke to him. Brothers can get terribly reticent. But I spoke out. I planted the English money in front of him. I told him to buy his sheep. I said that he had been very good to me, and that henceforth we'd hang together. It was not easy. He was moved.' A touch of arid humour came back into Charlie's face. ‘He did not quite understand it. Perhaps I didn't myself. But he understood all right the bit about our being against them who were against us. He got drunk and took his own road – even over the mountains.'

‘The old drove road of his people,' reflected the doctor.

‘The instinct was still sound!'

‘But I could see he was worried. There was still something. We never discussed the thing, because he had heard all I told you and the policeman about the seaman, the strangling. Still – he wondered.'

The doctor left the silence alone.

‘I suppose you wonder, too – and all the rest of you. I'll never live that down. Never. I know that now. I knew it before I came back, but in the mood I was in I didn't mind. Now I
know
it… However, the thing itself has worried me also. Damnably. I did not give you the full details. You see, when I waded out to get a grip of him, I had to go too far, lost my feet, and when my hand fell on his head – I suppose he thought someone was attacking him. It was dark, remember,
and the storm roaring like worlds falling on your top. A hand lifted, over-arm, gripped me and pushed me under. I had to fight. It was a hellish foaming struggle. We fetched up against the skerry. The back eddy took us there. I had just hit him in the face. The only thing to do with a man like that is to knock him out. I hadn't knocked him out. But I had got a grip of the skerry with one hand. The other had him by the back of the neck. Up to this point we had been sort of face to face, like dogs, but now, whether he had lost grip of his chest and taken both hands to grab it or whether the eddy had sucked him past me – anyway, the back of his head was to me, as if he had turned over to swim on his back – and I had the straight pull on his throat.'