The Key of the Chest (13 page)

She looked at him for a long moment, smiling thoughtfully, then her eyes unconsciously slid away.

Some of the long bars of cloud above the western horizon were already catching a faint warmth. They were so arranged, one floating behind another, that the sky flattened and receded to an immense distance. Spaces and shapes and here and there an extra vividness gave variety, so that it became a sunset land of many provinces and far-travelled countries. One ocean of emerald, glimpsed through an arch of cloud as through a grotto, led beyond all temporal boundaries. Sails setting into those far seas would never return. The silver and the golden apples, and the last sound gone beyond the earth and beyond the sun.

The ultimates. Where no reason is any more.

One loses reason altogether. One doesn't care for anyone's opinion. She had been taken before the Principal of the college. She had been spoken to at length, more in sorrow than in anger, but very firmly none the less, for if the girls of this college were not to ‘set an example', then who would?

Flora had appreciated it all. She had indeed been so overwhelmed with shame that in the very moment of the interview it had hardly seemed to be happening to her at all, but rather to some numbed person in a dream.

She had not meant to be late, she said. She had not noticed the time.

‘But it was after midnight!'

‘I came back before, but when I found the door shut, I was afraid to— I didn't know what to do.'

‘Was the young man with you?'

‘Yes, Ma'm.'

‘Who is this young man?' Flora remained silent.

‘I cannot force you to tell me. But I have my duty to your parents who entrust you to my charge. I have a similar duty to all parents. I have the honour of the college to uphold. When a student forgets how to behave herself then it is my duty to inform her parents – and to ask them to withdraw her, if such a dishonouring course should be necessary.' The voice had hardened, the dark eyes caught a pattern of
severe and threatening dignity.

In the end, Flora had told everything. That Charlie was a divinity student, who had known her as a schoolgirl, was taken into account, and she was let off, but only after her solemn promise was given that she would never again transgress against the rules of the college. As for the young man, should there be further evidence of clandestine intercourse of any kind with him, then Flora's parents would at once be informed.

In the end, the Principal had spoken, firmly still, but kindly. It was this final thrust of explanatory kindliness that had preyed on Flora.

For a few days she remained in a quietened state, which even her inquisitive companions, forever secretly pestering her for details, could not dissipate. When at last she felt she must let Charlie know, she found she had never had his address.

Then Charlie's note came.

It started all over again, only, oh, a hundred times worse.

For Charlie was getting into a strange erratic mood. Something was happening to him. But he would not tell her anything. He laughed aside her reproaches. Occasionally there seemed something bitter, even cruel, in him. She caught it in the sound of his voice, especially when he laughed.

Also at other times – at other times – in an embrace. Then his protestation of sorrow, of regret. That was when he was most formidable. He had not meant to hurt her. She must understand that. He would not hurt her, hurt her feelings, would not hurt a hair of her head to save his life. The words did not matter. It was the way he said them. There was a warmth in him that got round the heart. A movement, a pliancy, a variety, a gay detachment, intimate and wholly unexpected little courtesies in a culminating moment that took the breath.

A madness. A walking beyond. She lived in this terrifying and enchanting dream even while she was doing her lessons. As a background, it accompanied her always. She mentioned it to no one, but her companions knew of it. They would have guessed, even had Elizabeth kept her
mouth shut. And Elizabeth could not quite do that. Oaths of secrecy and whispered tidings. On such fare the girls kept alive and even bloomed. Flora was not the only one, by any means. But the girls knew, with the intuition that begins where logic ends, that Flora was the only one upon whom the absolute had come. In a profound way they respected this and watched. The brilliant Sally Henderson changed her attitude and unobtrusively began to be friendly, to help.

For one final month, what an extraordinary life that had been!

The absolute stood back into the region where no sun shone. Dark tracks led to it as to some awful Loch Geal at midnight.

Whenever Charlie declared his religious scepticism, the source of his money would dry up. That thought brought shame on him, too, for even his brother Dougald was assisting him.

Flora's father had helped to get him one of his bursaries. There were others, who had written letters, signed papers. An uncle on his mother's side, an elder of the Free Church, had given fifty pounds. They had all been anxious to help a lad who showed promise, and whose parents had died, the father from drowning while lobster-fishing off the Stormy Isles and the mother following a simple accident by which she damaged her spine. His mother's illness had been prolonged, and during it she had shown so patient and cheerful a disposition that Charlie had grown more affectionate to her than ever before. It was during this period that he had said he might have gone in for the Church, had that been possible.

Then the important ones had made it possible. And their number – as if he had been a gift to the Church from a whole community – was what now haunted Charlie in those sensitive places which torture selects for its more delicate manifestations.

He got past the unwillingness to tell her, past the obscurities and dark if lightly-delivered hints, the slight air even of swaggering carelessness, past everything – because at last she realized that he had come to care for her. This was an extreme revelation, because it also
made clear that up to this point he had simply been enjoying himself as any lad will with a girl he likes. It had also made clear something in herself, made it terribly and finally clear.

In a way, she had become a different girl. In the back of her mind, she was really changed. The meaning of everything had altered. The college rules were still there. But she no longer stressed their difficulty to Charlie. She had to deal with them herself. They were obstacles that had to be overcome, while that queer and culminating debate went on.

The awful thing was that she was no good at argument. Sometimes this annoyed Charlie. He craved words from her, understanding, discussion. She was little help to him. Sitting there in the darkened world by a whin bush on the Blackford Hill, she must have seemed often little more than a deaf mute. He could have had no idea in the world of the intensity with which she lived those moments.

The burden of them occasionally did really grow so great that she became insensible and her hand lay so heavy that she could not have moved it. When he caught her then in some wild clearing mood of his own, she could not respond.

For to her, the situation, however tragic for Charlie, or for herself, was simple. If Charlie could not be a minister, he could not. That was all.

One knew, without words, when that dreadful truth was reached. In fact, she knew it before Charlie himself quite knew it. Before he had taken his decision, she was already wandering in the bleak regions beyond.

No one who has words ready, whose words come rushing forth or whose words are swift and logical, can understand what it is to perceive a situation so completely and fatally that nothing can be said, nothing can be added, nothing taken away.

Words then are noises and sounds that obscure, that cover up, that evade. For this reason they are warm and human and desired. But the point is reached when they won't come, and the breast chokes and feels like a dumb animal's breast. Room then in space only for simple words,
for simple statement of the fact.

‘It will make no difference to me,' she said.

From her own mind, the words went into all space and time. Hand in hand they sent her with him.

But they did not quieten Charlie's restlessness. And there were a couple of long desperate nights when she saw Charlie was trying to break with her. But he could not bring himself to do it. And in a way which she profoundly understood, but for which there could be no words ever, she saw Charlie torturing himself and torturing her deliberately, yet now hardly knowing himself why he did it. A little more, a little more of this mood now, and the break can be made, the inexorable departure can be taken, the obliterating laughter be indulged. She touches him with her hand. ‘Charlie!'

Until that last night when she was caught climbing back to Elizabeth at the window. Every girl in the place seemed awake. They all knew. They had been thrilled by the use of the window and the double rope with the knots which made a short ladder.

It was the sort of escapade so completely alien to Flora's nature, to the very movement of her body, that now, nearly seven years afterwards, it seemed quite unreal. It was like expecting some well-behaved young lady, innately conscious of the need for the social observances, suddenly to become a tight-rope walker in public. Not only grotesque, but physically impossible.

She could still remember, however, very vividly the swing round when she had got her right foot pushed in between the ropes over the first knot. Her body had thumped against the wall and her right leg had shot out. It was the first time she had tried to climb back. It had taken her an age to conquer eight feet; she had destroyed her shoes and her gloves completely, and had lain in Elizabeth's arms sweating and exhausted.

Never again! she had vowed. She could even remember how she had said her prayers that night! For days she had been painfully muscle-bound.

Next time Elizabeth dropped down the torn shoes and the patched gloves to her before she started the climb.

It was the third time that she got caught.

The humiliation was so absolute that she remained cool. For the girls, this was drama's master climax. She had the air of wearing her clothes on a special social occasion when one must be very correct. She had overheard an amusing conversation between two girls. One said in a somewhat awed voice: ‘Whoever would have believed it was in her?' And the other replied: ‘I always told you these Highland girls may look simple, but they're deep.'

During the days that followed, her brain would not work. She was kept under observation and denied class work while ‘her case was being considered'. There was nothing for her brain to work on. She simply had to wait. So she waited.

Then she was called to the Principal's room – and left with her father. That night they travelled north by train. That nightmare journey, all through the night.

She never heard from Charlie. She got it from her mother in time that he had gone to South Africa.

Over a year ago he had come back. Her mother had died. Her father had spoken to her in a way that left no doubt as to what he expected from her. There had been a hidden and terrible menace in his attitude to Charlie. Charlie's denial of religion had something to do with it – but not all. It began in that region of denial. But there wasn't any kind of words for it. It was like blasphemy and horror, and the figures of the night to which they give birth.

She could understand it in a way, too. Charlie had betrayed everything on earth and in heaven her father stood for. And he had betrayed it in a vile and ungenerous way. So much had been made clear to her in the Principal's room, for her father had seemingly made inquiries about Charlie before coming for her. And then Charlie had stepped beyond his own soul's betrayal to betray his benefactor's flesh and blood. There had been something dark in her father, full of flesh and blood, when he had said that. This was what went beyond religion and all things of the mind.

Charlie, so far as she knew, had made no effort to see her since he came back. And she, of course, had made no effort
to see him. There was a sense in which their love was like something that had happened long ago, and happened so terribly, that it had been completed, and could no more be stirred from its long brown grave.

Fraoch began yelping down in the hollow. He was tearing at a burrow. Her eyes rested on him incuriously, then lifted to the infinite regions of the west where colour heaped its living waves over the sinking sun.

The silence touched her heart.

Then, oh then, the silence became a footfall on her heart.

The breath heaved in her breast. She was stifled. She could not move. But her head, as in a story, turned slowly over her left shoulder, and there, coming down the path towards her, was Charlie.

Charlie had not far to come before he reached her. He wore a new grey mackintosh, a new tweed cap, and carried in his right hand a strapped gladstone bag.

Flora could not turn away. She could have turned away to call the dog, but it did not occur to her. Thought and movement were arrested outside her head and she stood in a kind of trance that was like an unbreathed breath falling infinitely slowly towards the ground.

On Charlie's face the smile was at once awkward and strangely bitter. He did not lift his cap: he touched it in what seemed a slow ironic salute. He stopped some three paces from her and said in a simple voice: ‘Well, Flora?'

She turned her head away but still could not call to Fraoch.

‘After the rabbits, is he?'

‘Yes,' she answered. Then suddenly released, she called,

‘Fraoch! Fraoch!' But the gutturals went harsh in her throat, and the name sounded ugly and meaningless.

‘Why grudge him his bit of sport?' But she could not turn her face round. The only thing to do was go down for the dog. She could not call again.

‘Leave him,' suggested Charlie.

‘Excuse me, I'll go for him,' she said over her shoulder and started off.

‘Flora!'

His calling of her name stopped her. She looked round. Against an immense compulsion to walk slowly back to him, she held to her course moving sideways a step and stumbling. Internally she was now in a complete wild tumult.

Fraoch, dodging to the other end of the rabbit burrow, saw her coming. But he went to the end and stuck his head
in. Realizing that there could be no immediate issue to this quest, he backed out and began to circle away, exhibiting all the usual signs of laughing guilt. She spoke random words of blame. His body performed the propitiatory rites while keeping at a safe distance. Then she turned and began walking back. Charlie was waiting. She went straight, if slowly, towards him.

The exercise and tumult had heightened her colour. She saw the acknowledgment in Charlie's eyes. His smile was paler, and caught in its faint lines was a troubling of bitterness that was like guilt. She was afraid of its hardness. He laid down the gladstone bag.

‘Well, and how are you, Flora?'

‘Fine, thank you.'

‘A long time since we've met, isn't it?'

‘Yes.' She kept her head up, though she did not now look at him.

‘We always were so very polite,' he said. ‘It's nice to see you again.'

She did not answer.

‘You have nothing to say to that?'

She had nothing to say.

‘You don't seem to have changed much – except that you have grown more beautiful. Have you changed?'

She could not face up to the mockery, with the awful denied warmth in it. The tribute to her beauty stole about her in an unbearable way.

‘What's the matter?' he asked.

Swiftly she looked straight at him, searching for the accusation.

‘Nothing,' she answered.

‘Quite sure?'

‘Yes,' she answered, looking away.

It moved him instantly, in the old way. She had nothing to say to words, but whenever the heart of meaning was touched she responded at once. It was as if in these last few words they had carried out a long explicit conversation about the dead seaman and Charlie's alleged guilt. It was extraordinarily delicate and enlivening. His breathing came a little faster.

‘You never got a long letter I wrote you from South Africa?' Her face came full upon him.‘No.'

‘I sometimes wondered.'

‘No, I never got it,' she said. And she looked at his features as if they might tell her why she never got it.

He turned his eyes to the west. ‘It must have got sunk – somewhere, I suppose.'

‘Where?'

He looked at her. ‘How do I know?' Then he added: ‘Perhaps it was as well.'

‘Do you mean – it got sunk at sea?'

‘Do you think that's what I mean?'

‘I don't know,' she murmured, and her eyes looked into a nearer thought, a nearer cause for the letter not having been delivered to her.

‘It was perhaps just as well,' he repeated. But she was not interested in this remark. She was interested in the letter, the concrete letter. For she knew that the letter would have told her something she would never now find out. Besides, it was her letter.

He laughed softly. ‘Flora. The same Flora.'

‘Why?' she asked, referring now to his repeated remark about its being just as well, as if she had just reached it. She did not want to ask the question, but the way he repeated her name was still more difficult to bear.

‘Why?… Well – it gave so much away… that could come to nothing. When we were in Edinburgh, I could always see you. During the whole time, I could always see you. You were there.'

They stood for a little in complete silence.

‘I don't know that I ever told you the real truth either,' he said.

She looked at him. He smiled in the same dry way. ‘Truth about my religious doubts and all that,' he said. ‘Not about anything else. There's an odd thing about us – I've had plenty of time to think this out – odd thing about us, who really belong to the Highlands. We're only moved really by personal things, personal relationships.'

The words helped her to get used to his presence. Both
their bodies could gather a certain ease behind the screen. The personal… personal… how well she knew!

‘It was that lecturer, Tommy Agnew,' he said.‘I could never explain to you how much he meant, how he worried me. I must have spoken of him often, but you did not understand.'

‘I did.' As she uttered them the words were somehow strangely out of character.

‘No, you didn't,' he answered.

She was silent.

‘I think he spotted that I saw he had his own doubts. For that reason he pursued me. A queer state of mind it bred in me. It worked like a poison. It obsessed me far more than anything else – far more than you. I could not sleep because of the arguments that twisted in my mind. It was not – I saw this clearly afterwards – it was not finally the doubts about religion. Most young fellows have doubts. But there are books that answer doubts. Make arguments about them anyway. It was when the doubts took on a human shape – like Tommy Agnew. Then they grew terribly real. It was Tommy Agnew who pursued you – and whom you pursued. He was the sheep-worrier.'

They were amazing words to be speaking there at that moment. They were like words in an old rite. And Tommy Agnew had not been in life quite as he drew him now. There had been another element, an element of sympathy, in which there had been an understanding, but an understanding which could never be admitted, so that the sympathy was like a strange and fatal bait.

And besides, Tommy Agnew may have been making himself a test, taking on the guise of the concealed doubter to find out whether the capacity for religious experience was innately in the student. Or he may have been doing this to justify himself to himself in that far region of the imagination which nihilism haunts. It was in that region the conflict took place.

But the mind had simplified all that in the long processes of time, and Tommy Agnew was now the human symbol of the sheep-worrying dog.

‘It took me a long time to see that,' he said. ‘It was as if I
had to go away in order to look back and see everything moving in its own place.'

They could not sit down. If they sat down, words would stop and their bodies be more awkward than the bodies of strangers. She was looking away very far toward the south. Every second her face became more known to him.

‘It was when I looked back like that that I saw you. Tommy Agnew now had no size. He was like a little thin black dog slipping away into the dark. He was of no interest to me at all and I wondered at the great trouble he had raised, that black fever.'

‘I always hated him,' she said.

He nearly laughed outright. ‘A voice like yours could never hate anything,' he said with dry detachment. ‘Never. It was things like that I saw.'

‘I always hated when you were going to talk about him,' she corrected herself, for she had never seen the lecturer.

He looked at her side face. ‘Did you?' he asked, with understanding.

She did not answer.

‘I suppose if you felt it enough, it would choke you against saying anything?'

She glanced at him swiftly and saw the speculative smile on his face. She stirred on her feet, because of the awful something with its pallor behind the smile.

‘I was just so taken up with myself and the grand drama I was going through,' he said with easy mockery. ‘But when I looked back, I saw you. You were the only real figure in that drama. But I thought perhaps you'll fade a bit too, given time. You didn't. You only grew more real. So in the end I wrote you.'

She stirred again.

‘Would you like to sit down?' he asked reasonably.

This ease in his voice was terrible to her.

‘That's really all I wanted to say to you,' he added, as if to end the burden ‘I wanted you to know that you were more real to me than anything else. I felt you were due that. I may have been thoughtless, but – you had all of me.'

She suddenly looked at him with her full face. There was pain in her face, a silent cry for forbearance. He saw the
hurt intimate light in her eyes. But he knew, too, that this was Flora's face, and in it that which had cried across space and haunted the long valley of time.

As he took the two steps towards her, he already saw her giving way. As his arms went round her, her weight fell forward, her face turned from him. He held her there firmly and still, without stirring, without movement of the mind, as though time, after its long journey, had gone to sleep.

The tide ebbs and turns. The first stirrings come with a tenderness. Her head moved, bringing the forehead against his shoulder. Her whole body firmed, and he knew she was going to lean back from him, and lift her face with all the courage she had and say what she had to say to him.

Her face came clear, all colour and light – and in an instant the colour drained and the light went out.

He turned his own head to follow her appalled gaze. Coming down towards them, tall in his dark clothes, was her father.

A wild gust of fighting life tore through Charlie. ‘Flora,' he said, ‘you'll meet me here – tomorrow night.' He was like a man getting ready to fight.

She broke away and began walking homewards. She went towards her father and passed him.

The minister stood looking down towards Charlie. Their faces stared, one at the other, then the minister turned and followed his daughter. A thin darkening wind came from the sunken sun.

‘God damn you!' muttered Charlie, deep in his throat. As he took a stride after the minister, he staggered.

Fraoch went shooting past him. When they had disappeared, Charlie gazed about him, at the gladstone bag, at his own hands, and sat down.