The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I don’t know where Frothy stayed (some teachers stayed in the Hostel, but I don’t think he was one of them). I think he would have lodged with a landlady in the town: he certainly didn’t own a car, or a bicycle, and I think he walked home from school to where his home was.

  I myself had a great love for geometry in those days. I adored the inflexible order of the proofs, the fact that parallel lines never met, that triangles were always composed of 180 degrees. One knew where one was with geometry, it was a world of security and happiness, which sprang no surprises, and I always associated it with summer and the warm sun shining on the desk. That such a settled world should exist beyond the tangle and whirl of adolescence was an unexpected gift. It was as if when one had finished a geometry problem one was locking a safe, hearing a satisfactory click.

  For this reason I got on well with Frothy, and I liked him though in common with the other boys I considered him eccentric and comic: one could however never admit that one had any feelings at all for a teacher. So there I would sit at my desk in my shorts and Frothy would glance at the proof I had so elegantly created, and find it good. In fact I think I must have entered that world of geometry as a shelter against the difficulties which I had at home at the time, though these are irrelevant to my story. At any rate what I remember best is the safety of those days: Frothy pacing about in his torn gown, the windows bright with light. In a strange way I felt that such days would never come again, and that I owed Frothy their harmony and richness.

  There is one thing I forgot to say and that is that during his paroxysms Frothy would cough a lot, his face reddening, and then after the bout of coughing was over, he would pop a pill into his mouth, though none of us knew what this pill was for.

  However, one afternoon, he told me to come with him outside the room, and there with great secrecy asked me if I would go on a message for him to the chemist’s and get him some Beecham’s Powders. It seemed to me odd that a teacher should ask a pupil to do this, it was a confession of bodily weakness that came queerly from a teacher who by definition was a being without illness or frailty. After all, teachers were invincible beings who appeared at the beginning of a period and left at the end of it: in a sense their gowns suggested that they were not human beings at all, like the rest of us. Nor did they ever ask if there was anything wrong with us. The flesh had nothing to do with teaching, one never saw a teacher who was really ill.

  However I did go for the powders to the chemist’s and all the time I was walking along the street, now and again giving a sudden little skip, I giggled to myself. What a story I would have to tell the others. Frothy sending me for Beecham’s Powders. What an extraordinary thing, how essentially funny it was. Nor did it occur to me to wonder why Frothy had sent me rather than anybody else. Had he perhaps thought that I would be different from the other boys and keep my story to myself? If he had thought that he was very much mistaken. And also I took my time on the errand, for I believed like all the other boys that one should never do anything for a teacher with any enthusiasm. I therefore walked slowly down the street, passing the shop where I used to buy Titbits and Answers. I waited outside the chemist’s for a while watching a yacht in the harbour riding up and down on the waves, tethered to its anchor.

  When I had got the Beecham’s Powders, I put them in my pocket along with the change that I had received from the chemist, who wore a white gown and had an abstracted air like a busy doctor. I didn’t have a watch in those days and I kept looking at the clock which was fixed on top of the Town Hall. I wanted to make sure that the period was up before I got back, not because I didn’t like geometry, but rather because it was what the boys would have expected of me.

  When I got back to the school, the period was over, as I had calculated, and Frothy had left the room. I walked along to the staff-room to find out where he was. All along the corridor the windows were open and the fresh breeze was blowing in. And then I suddenly noticed that at the far end of the corridor, and just outside the staff-room, Frothy and Miss Simpson were standing. I stopped and waited, for I didn’t want to intrude on them. As a matter of fact, Frothy’s back was turned to me and I could hear him talking in a low passionate voice to Miss Simpson. They were so engaged in their conversation that they didn’t notice me. Miss Simpson, like Frothy, was wearing a gown which was white with chalk: she looked like an old splay-footed bat. Frothy’s quick speech continued, but Miss Simpson didn’t appear to be listening. I couldn’t move and pretended to be looking out of one of the windows while at the same time I was thinking that I could gain some information which I would tell the other boys from my class. Their voices were now raised and finally Miss Simpson strode away in the other direction, her gown flying about her. Before she did so she flung something on the stone floor of the corridor, and it rolled along till it came to rest against the wall. I looked down. It was a ring, and it had a red stone in it. It was not unlike those rings that I used to see in Woolworth’s when I visited it at the lunch break in order to see if there were any good books I could buy. The sun flashed from the gold of the ring, from its circle.

  I went up to Frothy who still had his back to me and said,

  ‘Please, sir.’

  He turned on me a face bereft of all expression, a totally empty face, and one which was deathly pale.

  It was as if he didn’t recognise me.

  ‘Please, sir,’ I said again.

  Then it was as if his face assumed expression, became firm and set, knowledge returned to the eyes, and he said,

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Turner.’

  ‘Yes, sir, please, sir.’ And I handed him the Beecham’s Powders and he took them and waved away the change which I offered from my sweaty hand. It seemed to me at that moment that he was not like a teacher at all, and that his lips were trembling.

  I nearly said to him that the ring was lying on the floor and that if he wanted me to I would retrieve it for him but I didn’t say anything. I moved away from him, as from something irretrievably stricken, and ran with the light steps of youth to my next class. I suppose he must have bent down to get the ring, for no one found it later, but I didn’t see him doing it.

  I was trembling with excitement all through the next class which was Latin, and where I wrote down a long list of irregular verbs. After the period was over I told the others my story. They would hardly believe me, and my news ran through the whole school: the engagement had been broken off. That, I was told, was the significance of the thrown ring. In any case pupils later noticed the abstraction and bad temper of the two protagonists. What a story – a broken romance, a romance that was finally over. And so it proved. They were never seen together again. And never again did Frothy send anyone for Beecham’s Powders, as far as I know.

  Some hope that he had nourished finally died that day and he became fiercer and fiercer. No, he did not love us any longer, he hated us, he was determined that we would learn about algebra and geometry, not for our own sakes but for his own. The number of passes increased and, as they did so, so we grew to hate him more and more. Then as I climbed the school, shedding my shorts and wearing trousers, I forgot about him, for we now had a different teacher.

  Today I opened the paper and read that Frothy had died in an old people’s home in the town where he had taught. I had heard vague stories about him, that he had become odder and odder, his rages more and more incoherent, the pupils uncontrollable and hostile. No one however dared to be unruly in Miss Simpson’s class. I thought of him sitting in a chill breeze outside the old people’s home, shadows shaped like parallelograms at his feet while his hands trembled under a red blanket. I often wondered what the quarrel had been about but I never found out. I despised myself for the horrid little squirt that I had been and decided to go to his funeral.

  It was a fine summer’s day again, and there were only a very few people there, not even Miss Simpson, whom I would certainly have recognised even after all those years. I had hoped that there might have been a representatio
n from the school but there wasn’t. The only person I met there whom I knew was Soupy who had been in the same class and was now a reporter on the local paper. As the coffin was being lowered into the ground I said to him,

  ‘Tragic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Then he glanced at me in a peculiar way and said, ‘It was you who found the ring on the floor, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That was the day they broke off the engagement. I heard you handed it to him and he burst out crying. He had sent you for a tonic or something, isn’t that right?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘He didn’t burst out crying.’ And I was suddenly angry with Soupy for getting all the facts wrong.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said catching up with me. ‘Do you know that he had a stroke the year before he was due to retire. Miss Simpson never went to see him. She’s still quite fit, I saw her the other day. She was striding along the front looking like a boxer. She wore tweeds and had a dog with her. Are you coming for a drink?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got time.’ And I left him.

  The chemist’s I had bought the Beecham’s Powders from was no longer there. In its place was a grocer’s shop.

  It seemed to me that the best thing about geometry was it never lied to you, which is why I myself am a mathematics teacher as well. It has nothing to do with pain or loss. Its refuge is always secure and without mythology.

  Greater Love

  He wore a ghostly white moustache and looked like a major in the First World War which is exactly what he had been. On our way to school – he being close to retiring age – he would tell me stories about the First World War and the Second World War, for he had been in both. As we were passing the chemist’s shop he would be describing Passchendaele, walking along, stiff and erect, his eyes glittering behind his glasses.

  ‘And there I was crouched in this trench, with my water bottle empty. I had somehow or another survived. All my good boys were dead, some of them up to their chests in mud. The Jerries had got hold of our plans of attack, you see. What was I to do? I had to wait till night, that was clear. When the sun was just going down I crawled along the trench and then across No Man’s Land. I met a Jerry and the struggle was fast and furious. I am afraid I had to use the bayonet. But the worst was not over yet, for one of my sentries fired on me. But I eventually managed to give him the password. After that I was all right.’

  He would pause and then as we passed the ironmonger’s he would start on another story. He taught chemistry in the school and instead of telling his pupils about solutions or whatever they do in chemistry, he would spend his time talking about the Marne or the Somme. He spoke more about the First World War than about the Second.

  Once at a school party there was a quarrel between him and the Head of the English Department, who also had been in the First World War and believed that he had won it. He questioned a statement which Morrison had made. It was, I think, a question of a date, and they grew more and more angry, and wouldn’t speak to each other after that for a year or more. As I quite liked both of them, it was difficult to know whose side to take.

  The headmaster didn’t know what to do with him, for parents came to the school continually to complain about his lessons, which as I have said consisted mostly of accounts of his adventures in France and Flanders. The extraordinary thing was that he never repeated a story: all his tales were realistic and detailed and one could almost believe that they had happened. Either these things had been experienced by him or they formed part of a huge mythology of legends which he had memorised, but that had happened to others. I was then Deputy Head of the school and it was my duty to see the parents and listen to their complaints.

  ‘He will soon be retiring,’ I would tell them soothingly, ‘and he has been a good teacher in his time.’ And they would answer, ‘That’s all very well but our children’s education is being ruined. When are you going to speak to him?’ I did in fact try to speak to him a few times but before I could start he was telling me another of his stories and I found, somehow or another, that there was no way in which I could introduce my complaint to him.

  ‘There was an angel, you know, at Mons and I saw it. It was early morning and we were going over the top and we saw this figure with white wings bending over us from the sky. I thought it must have been an effect of the sun but it wasn’t that. It was as if it was blessing us. We had our bayonets out and the light was flashing from them. I was in charge of a company at the time, the colonel – Colonel Wilson – having been killed.’

  This time I was so interested that I said to him, ‘Are you quite sure that it was an angel? After all the rays of the sun streaming down, and you I presume being in an excited frame of mind . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t that. It was definitely an angel. I am quite sure of that. I could actually see its eyes.’ And he turned to me. ‘They were so compassionate, you have no idea what they looked like. You could never forget them.’

  In those days we had lines and the pupils would assemble in the quadrangle in front of the main door, and Morrison loved the little military drill so much that we gave him the duty most of the time. He would make them dress, keeping two paces between the files, and they would march into the school in an orderly manner.

  A young bearded teacher called Cummings, who was always bringing educational books into the staff-room, didn’t like this militarism at all. One day he said to me, ‘He’s teaching them to be soldiers. He should be stopped.’

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Twenty-two. What’s that to do with it?’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ I said. ‘Run along and teach your pupils French.’

  He didn’t like it but I didn’t want to explain to him why his age was so important. Still, I couldn’t find a way of speaking to Morrison without offending him.

  ‘You’ll just have to come straight out with it,’ my wife said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What else can you do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  I was very conscious of the fact that I was fifteen years younger than Morrison.

  One day I said to him, ‘How do you see your pupils?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you see them?’ I repeated.

  ‘See them?’ he said. And then, ‘They are too young to fight, yet, but I see them as ready for it. Soon they will be taken.’

  ‘Taken?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just as we were taken.’

  After a silence he said, ‘One or two of them would make good officers. It’s the gas that’s the worst.’

  ‘Have you told them about the gas?’ I said, seizing on a tenuous connection between the First World War and chemistry.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was horrifying.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘explain to them about the gas. Why don’t you do that?’

  ‘We never used it,’ he said. ‘The Jerries tried to use it but the wind was against them.’ However he promised that he would explain about the gas. I was happy that I had found a method of getting him to teach something of his subject and tried to think of other connections. But I couldn’t think of any more.

  One day he came to see me and said, ‘A parent called on me today.’

  ‘Called on you?’ I said angrily. ‘He should have come through me.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘He came directly to me. He complained that I was an inefficient teacher. Do you think I’m an inefficient teacher?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I have to warn them, you see,’ he said earnestly. ‘But I suppose I had better teach them chemistry after all.’

  From that time onwards, he became more and more melancholy and lost-looking. He drifted through the corridors with his white ghostly moustache, as if he was looking for a battle to take part in. Then he stopped coming to the staff-room and stayed in his classroom all the time. There were a
nother three months to go to his retirement and if he carried on this way I knew that he would fade away and die. Parents ceased to come and see me about him, but I was worried.

  One day I called the best chemistry student in the school – Harrison – to my room and I said,

  ‘How is Mr Morrison these days?’

  Harrison paused a moment,

  ‘He’s very absent minded, sir,’ he said at last. We looked at each other meaningfully, he tall and handsome in his blue uniform with the gold braid at the cuffs of his jacket. I fancied for a terrible moment that I saw a ghostly white moustache flowering at his lips.

  ‘I see,’ I said, fiddling with a pen which was lying on top of the red blotting paper which in turn was stained with drops of ink, like flak.

  ‘How are you managing, the members of the class, I mean?’ I said.

  ‘We’ll be all right, sir,’ said Harrison. Though nothing had been said between us he knew what I was talking about.

  ‘I’ll leave you to deal with it, then,’ I said.

  The following day Morrison came gleefully to see me.

  ‘An extraordinary thing happened to me,’ he said. ‘Do you know that boy Harrison? He is very brilliant of course and will certainly go to university. He asked me about the First World War. He was very interested. I think he will make a good officer.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘He has a very fine mind. His questions were very searching.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, doodling furiously.

  ‘I cannot disguise the fact that I was unhappy there for a while. I was thinking, “Here they are and I am not able to warn them of what is going to happen to them.” You see, no one told us then there would be two World Wars. I was in Sixth year when the First World War broke out and I was studying chemistry just like Harrison. They told us that we would be home for Christmas. Then after I came back from the war I did chemistry in university. I forgot about the war, and then the Second one came along. By that time I was teaching here, as you know.’