The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘That’s because you talked about it,’ I said. From the closed grave the soul rose fluttering. When the stone moved.

  After some time he left looking much happier. But he left me thinking hard.

  The hermit would have to leave the village, that was certain. I would have to save the village. And no one else could save it except me. No one else knew the extent of the threat, the potential damage. It wasn’t that I was concerned with the minister. Much of what he said seemed to me false and irrelevant. But what if this happened to others? If the silence of the dead descended on the village? If people grew too tired even to speak to each other, if language, that necessity of the human being, failed? No village, no society, could survive that. I didn’t need the minister but others did. His words for them were significant and important. And what if they failed? It was as if the influence of the hermit extended outwards like a cold ray without his knowing it. Or perhaps he did know it.

  Truth lay perhaps in silence but it was not a human truth. Human truth lay in lying speech. And who in the village knew this except me? Who would be able to deal with this but me? Only I saw what was happening because it was what I mistakenly wished to happen. Dougie didn’t understand it with his talk about democracy. This had nothing to do with democracy, this was a fight to the death. The silence of death. Snow falling over the village dulling its traffic. The roads that joined us together slowly being throttled.

  After the minister had gone I sat for a long time thinking. I couldn’t think what to do but I knew that something must be done. And I would have to do it myself. Even if I passed the limits of morality, even if I struck deep at my own image. The monster of silence would have to be driven out of the village, even by corrupt means. Later perhaps someone might understand why it had been necessary but more probably no one would: there would be no biographer to tell of my achievement since the people for whom I was acting as benefactor didn’t themselves understand the problem. This was a metaphysical question, and they lived in the physical world of stone and corn and hay and houses.

  But no solution came to me. The hermit had apparently harmed no one. I couldn’t hire the policeman to drive out a metaphysical criminal. I thought of that opening chapter in Frazer’s book where one prince hunts another one in the dark wood, the new god taking over from the old, while the moon poured down its equal rays.

  But I felt so tired. And there was no one I could talk to. Not to Murdo, not to Kenneth John, not to Dougie. Not even to Kirsty. Her narrow brutal mind would be of no use here. This needed much greater fineness, much deeper cunning.

  And I thought too, Why shouldn’t I leave him where he was? After all when he left what would I have to think of? That black silence of his, so attractive to me, would perish with his disappearance and I would be alone. The moon was now rising in the sky. O my Greek volumes, why don’t you bring me an answer to this unanswerable question, with your brimming knowledge, your endless fertility? Why don’t you bring me your manifold gifts? But this question went beyond those texts. There was a deep loch and there was a thought which needed to take the bait but the thought wasn’t rising to the surface clear and strong. Still, it might come to the surface eventually.

  It would have to. I stared directly into the face of the moon which was as pure and direct and strong as Janet’s face and that was the last vision I had before I fell asleep, still searching for that thought, that solution which would permit me to rid the village of the hermit who was to a great extent myself, and yet more dangerous and much stronger than me.

  18

  And as I slept I dreamed of my childhood. It returned to me in all its clarity and fullness. I saw again my father and my mother, my father so silent and large and my mother so quick and busy and demanding. She seemed always to be running about the house with a duster, or washing, or drying dishes, or sweeping the floor. A vivid insect presence in her blue gown with the white flowers printed on it. And always saying to me, Keep at your books. You have to get on in the world. What is there here for you? Look at all those other boys. What are they doing but wasting their lives fishing and crofting? You keep at your books.

  While my father, slow and silent, said nothing and did nothing to protect me from this quick demanding presence which wouldn’t leave me alone, which would not let me ripen in my own darkness but was always shining its sharp little torch on me. Always without cease. And my father was so slow and heavy and perhaps lazy and silent. It seemed to be an effort for him to speak, as if he had allowed my mother to speak for both of them. It was she who was proud and small and quick, who was alert to insults, even imagined ones, from the villagers who didn’t like her because of her ambition. He on the other hand seemed to have no sense of honour but he got on better with them than she did. In a way he was like Murdo Murray but deeper, more vulnerable. He wasn’t at ease in his environment but perhaps more so than she was. She saw her environment as something hostile, she confronted it with her quick agile mind and her quick body: she was always improving it, cleaning it up, tidying it. And my father would sit by the fireside reading the paper and he didn’t protect me at all. He would hardly touch me except that now and again he might lay his hand on my head absently in passing, but he would say nothing.

  Eventually he withdrew to a shed where he kept his loom and there he would play his ancient dark music among a smell of oil, his feet on the treadles, his hands busy. He was like a big composer in the half darkness, a sort of Beethoven, heavy and silent and dull. I would go there and watch him and marvel at his quick skill as he made the cloth, but in the house he was so quiet.

  And my mother would say, Keep at your books. And I wasn’t allowed out at night hardly at all in those years. All the other boys of the village including my brother whom she had given up as far as education was concerned would play football and shinty and go bird nesting but I stayed in the house reading and writing. She didn’t understand what I was studying but had a superstitious reverence for it all and made sure that I kept at it. And all the time my father would sit by the fireside sometimes sleeping, sometimes looking at a newspaper, or at other times he would be down at the shed or sometimes he would stand at the door gazing outwards perhaps at the sky, perhaps at some imagined land of his own. And this quick insect hummed about me and would not let me alone. It cleaned everything up and tidied my life and kept it on course. And I brought home all the prizes from school and she would place the cups on the sideboard and show them to visitors till I grew tired of her as they did too. They disliked her for her ambition, they much preferred my father, he was much more like themselves than she was. She was like a sliver of wood in a fingernail, never resting. And my father would play the music of his loom, dark and silent and dull, till one day he had a heart attack while he was in the shed. His body toppled off his seat and he lay under it, his eyes sightless and gazing upwards and it was I who found him. And I remember the humming of the large black flies about the shed on that summer day with the door open to the fragrance of flowers outside.

  He was buried, and I was left to the mercies of my mother who became very religious. She would even look in the Bible for texts which would prove to me that study was important. It was as if my father had never been, as if that dark music was buried forever in the dark earth.

  And the world passed me by with its perfume for others but for me nothing but books. My mother’s small sharp beak was always probing at me. Till one day she also died. Before she died I used to sit at her bedside listening to the business of her breath which was like an accelerating train. She was very brave. Even then she told me to keep at my books lest, I suppose, she should feel betrayed in eternity. She told me that death dues were in a drawer in a dressing table and that there was money there for her coffin as well. She wasn’t afraid to die, she thought that she had done her work in the world by bringing me up to study books which she did not understand, though her faith was great. ‘I am going to that place where there is rest and calm,’ she said.

  And I
thought that perhaps there too she would be going about dusting heavenly tables and making sure that the saints kept at their theology.

  I was then twenty years old and in university. While home one Christmas I had taken a girl to the house but after she had left my mother said, ‘She won’t do for you. She smokes.’ And after that I never brought anyone home. I cried when she died. I cried more than I had cried for my father. I hadn’t really known my father, that dark musician of the flesh. My mother’s quick agile spirit had however sustained me, she had taught me the way to go though at times I hated it. And after all but for her would I ever have read the Greek authors? Would I ever have listened to great music, would I ever have seen great works of art? And that, in spite of the pain, is something. And also in spite of the fact that she herself had never looked at a painting in her life nor ever listened to Mozart or any other composer. Her favourite magazine was the People’s Friend where after a great struggle the nurse eventually married the surgeon who had never noticed her till finally she had helped him in that Great Operation. But her will was indomitable and her ambition without end.

  So I wept for her more than my brother did, for he knew that she had found him wanting and therefore he resented her.

  And my mother is always clearer in my mind than my father is, he who had never shielded me from her remorseless light, who sat in his dumbness and his hopelessness. At least she had been optimistic. She had looked into the future and made me a schoolmaster. But at least she had been conscious of a future. My father had only been conscious of a past.

  Once in Edinburgh I went to the zoo and in it I saw in a corner of a cage a great hulking bear lying down in its dark stink. In another cage I saw a leopard or perhaps a panther pacing restlessly up and down. And I wished to say to the bear, Why don’t you get up from there? Why do you accept the darkness and the stink and the servitude? And I far preferred the leopard with its restless proud pacing. And also I liked the birds with their quick movements and their colourful plumage and their beaks that seemed to question the world around them. All that perhaps was dreams. But I did not like the dark bear. I wished to be like the leopard, optimistic and angry and agile.

  For the bear had never used its strength but the leopard used all its energy without surrender to the end.

  When I woke up I knew perfectly well what I must do. The idea came to me in my sleep.

  19

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Dougie.

  ‘You heard what she said, that she was . . . ’

  ‘Attacked. I heard her and I don’t believe it. The man is, was, quite harmless.’

  ‘We have to believe her,’ I said, ‘and anyway after that the villagers wouldn’t have allowed him to stay.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Dougie. His eyes were cold and hard and hostile. ‘Did you see his eyes?’

  ‘His eyes?’

  ‘Yes. When he set off on that bicycle of his again. It was like watching a refugee that I’d once seen in Europe. The same expression on his face.’

  I didn’t tell Dougie, but I did remember his expression when he set off again, upright on his bicycle in his dark clothes with the belt of rope around his waist. And the villagers standing watching him, hostile and threatening. The hermit’s eyes had turned for a moment to look at me as if by strange magic the hermit had recognised his true enemy. After all, really, he had done nothing to me. And that perhaps accounted for his expression.

  ‘I must say again,’ said Dougie, ‘that I don’t believe it, that she was attacked. That man would never attack anyone. He has no possessions at all, did you notice? That was the hellish thing. He had nothing. He set off again. With nothing. And where was he going? And if he goes somewhere else will the people there also put him out? And we never,’ he said, ‘found out anything about him. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He could be a fool or a genius – he could be anybody.’ And he looked at me with horror.

  Well, I had used the corrupted to get rid of the corrupted, I thought. Sometimes such things are necessary, sometimes ethics themselves have to be poisoned in order to create health.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Janet that I could see,’ Dougie repeated. ‘She seemed to me self-possessed enough.’

  ‘Why should she say she had been attacked unless she had been?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘I don’t know but I have an idea,’ he said. And there was the glitter of hate in his eyes.

  The village would now be silent. It would now return to its ancient ways, it would not be disturbed. The mirror image of myself would have left it, expelled forever.

  ‘What the hell is he going to do?’ said Dougie again. ‘I can’t stand thinking about it. Wandering about forever on that bicycle.’ I thought for a moment that he would weep.

  But what in fact he did was to turn away.

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea if you came to the house again,’ he said.

  I didn’t say anything but watched him go. Now I myself was truly alone, but then loneliness was something to be suffered in the service of one’s kind. I knew that Dougie would be relentless and that his sense of fairness might not let him rest. But Janet wasn’t going to talk. After all she had plenty of money now.

  I looked at Murdo’s unfinished house, I heard the music of the sea. I turned back into the house, feeling as if I didn’t wish to talk to anyone. I thought of my wife, then of Janet, sitting in the chair by the fire, as I poured myself a whisky. No one understood what had happened. Not even Dougie understood that. It was true that like him I saw the figure of the hermit setting off into nothingness on his old bicycle. But it was true that it was necessary to make a refugee. I had saved them from silence at the expense of my own silence. I laughed bitterly as I sat down by the fireside. Even Kirsty would congratulate me. Even the minister. And yet I had a frightening feeling of emptiness as if I were suffering from a strange disease. What else could I think about now, now that that hut had no inhabitant, now that questions of metaphysics had been removed from me?

  As I sat there for what seemed to be hours the day became dusk and then slowly the moon rose in the sky. I looked at it. It was dazzlingly white and clear, a brilliant stone, it was the eye of a Greek god or goddess. It was the stunning beauty of the mind, it had no physical beauty. It no longer reminded me of Janet, it was pure intellect. For Janet had been only an evanescent being, a sparkle of moonlight on the water. It was the cold stony mind that illuminated its own dead world remorselessly, its own extinct craters. I imagined the hermit cycling along in its light forever.

  The house was extraordinarily peaceful as if by an act of will I had banished all the fertile ghosts. It had an unearthly calm as if I were floating on a dumb sea of solitude. I found myself humming to myself as if I had come to the silence of myself. I went to the bookcase and took out a book and began to read. Strangely enough I didn’t realise at first what book it was. Then I saw that it was the Bible. I turned to the New Testament and began to read,

  ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’

  The Impulse

  Yesterday morning a most odd thing happened to me. I was walking down one of the streets of our small town – which has a population of 7,000 or so – when just as I approached the paper shop . . . or rather as I was about to approach the paper shop which is quite near the police station but on the other side of it, I saw on the window of the police station a large notice which read, Wanted for Murder. Now this is the extraordinary thing. I stopped, and I was just about to walk into the police station to give myself up when I thought for some reason that as it was Sunday the police station would not be open, and therefore I did not go into it. (I was in fact on my way to get the Sunday papers.) But the strange thing is that at that moment when I saw the notice I thought it applied to me, and, as I said, I nearly went into the police station to give myself up as a murderer, though I didn’t know what sort of murder it was or who had murdered whom.

  And I have been thinking
about this for a whole day and night while my wife has been doing what she always does on a Sunday, that is, cooking the dinner and resting and sometimes reading a paper or a book.

  And my problem is: whom am I supposed to have murdered? Now I consider this not only an interesting question but more deeply an alarming question. For I have never murdered anyone, that is to say, I have not shot or strangled or poisoned or in any way physically attacked any human being in my life. And yet I nearly surrended myself to the police as a murderer. How is this to be explained?

  It was a fine warm spring day – one of the best spring days we have had yet this year – and I was in fact perfectly happy and I was whistling as I walked down the street, and then I came to the police station and what I said happened happened.

  Now most people would, I think, describe me as an ordinary person and I would call myself so. For instance, I am not very intelligent: I find the simplest crosswords and puzzles in the Sunday papers difficult. I have an ordinary job, that is to say I own a small grocery shop, and my wife works there with me. We have run this shop for the past thirty-four years. Naturally we have felt threatened by the new supermarket in the town but we have survived by working very hard. I met my wife at a dance many years ago and shortly after this we were married. She was then nineteen years old and I was twenty-three but this was all right as I have always believed that the husband should be older than the wife and if possible wiser. I had never slept with anyone before I met her. I thought her beautiful and sensible and this she has turned out to be. She is a good cook, she is extremely practical, she has brought the children up to be well-mannered and quiet in the presence of strangers, she works hard in the shop though it is in fact I who do most of the paper-work. It is true that sometimes I have seen her standing behind a counter as if lost in a dream, such that I have had to wake her up with a brisk word. When she falls into these dreams she seems to look younger and she is invariably looking out of the window at the time. Our window looks out on to the bay. At nights too when she is in bed with me I have heard her murmur strange names which might be the names of people or of places. But when I mention them to her in the morning she does not appear to know what I am talking about. Naturally this does not take place every night. It is very often during the summer that this happens, when the nights are warm, and the moon is shining brightly and there are perfumes of flowers from the neighbouring park.