The Cone Gatherers: Key Scenes

The Cone Gatherers: Key Scenes

1. The Deer Drive

   • Duror insists to LRC on Calum and Neil taking part in deer drive - he sees it as his opportuinity to bring harm to Calum
     • Tulloch's defense of CGs shocks LRC as she is being talked back to by an inferior
     • believes anything that Duror says about CGs because she does not see them as people.
     • She refuses to give Neil and Calum a lift home in the rain etc. She listens to Duror when he tells her to keep them in a hut in the wood rather than the beach house where there is heat etc.
     • not bad but she is only as good as she makes herself out to be – she surrenders in the end.
   • clear visible indications of Duror’s evil and decline
   • Foreshadowing of climax – destruction of innocence e.g deer
   • “His going therefore must be a destruction, an agony, a crucifixion.”
     • The reference to the crucifixion here hints at the fact that innocence will be sacrificed in order for goodness to prevail.
   • Calum runs with the deer as if he is one; This is contrasted with Durors behaviour – he projects his own hatred onto the deer.
   • “Duror seemed possessed by a fury to rise up and attack the hunchback”
   • Deer hunt viewed by gentry as symbol of status and duty yet turns into a ‘shocking demeaning spectacle’
   • When Calum flung himself, in sympathy, upon a wounded deer at the dramatic climax of the deer drive, further illustrating his harmony and empathy for all living things, Duror came leaping out of the woods.
     • “He seemed to be laughing in some kind of berserk joy. There was a knife in his hand.”
     • Duror’s actions (he slit the deer’s throat, then appeared to stay crouching beside it) were those of a man completely out of control. He seemed to believe he had been attacking his wife
   • Duror blames Calum for incident
   • Roderick – represents hope.
     • just and perceptive who, throughout the novel, pricks his mother’s Christian conscience.
     • dislikes Duror and recognises something bad in him. He has greater vision than his mother.
     • has a sense of what’s right or wrong at the deer drive. He recognises the struggle between good and evil that is always going on

2. The Beach Hut

   • Neil and Calum sit in the beach house, sheltering from the rain. They inspect some abandoned toys and discuss how attitudes towards them differ between the classes.
   • Calum wants to take home and repair a broken doll but Neil sees this as stealing. Lady Runcie Campbell arrives and demands that they leave.
     • "What is the meaning of this?... For God's sake get out!"
     • The doll being broken is representative of innocence being destroyed.
   • LRC is denial of her wrongful actions
     • "Men in their job must be accustomed to rain"
   • LRC determine that the CGs must leave the estate that weekend
   • LRC now concerned over Duror and his Deer Drive actions
     • Now faces inner confilct of good vs evil: wants CGs gone, but isnt convinced by Duror's story
   • Duror accuses Calum of taking doll for perverted uses
   • Roderick:
     • "Didn't somebody say on the wireless that in the war-time everybody's equal?"
     • "There was room for us all, mother."
   • Leads directly to Roderick getting stuck up a tree
     • Neil refuses to help retrieve him
       • "She can not one day treat us lower than dogs, and the next day order us to do her bidding!"
       • This refusal sets Duror over the edge leading to Murder of Calum
         • LRC's realisation of all of her wrongfullness
           • "She could not pray, but she could weep; and as she wept pity, and purified hope, and joy welled up in her heart."