The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘No,’ said Mr Trill, ‘that isn’t all there is, surely. Discontent everywhere. Discontent and smallness where one had thought was greatness.’

  ‘I should not have stayed so long in my study,’ said Vergil. ‘I should have gone out into the world that Homer knew. I should have lived off the justice of the moment. Do you understand?’

  He was silent at the water, and then turned to Mr Trill.

  ‘It is not that I wish to be impolite. How could I wish that? You too have had your life. Perhaps you have lived off the justice of the moment more than me though perhaps you aren’t a poet. So few of us have the nerve and the power to do what I have just said we should do. A line a day, that is all I wrote, perfecting, perfecting. And all the time I had a vision that I should follow the curve of the human heart. All my work was but a feeble approximation to my ideal. As we stand here, by this dark water, what are empire and bronze to me? I have thought about this for a long time while I have been here. Up above, the empire no longer exists and when it did exist it was only a shade. My greatest terror is that I shall meet Dido. What should I say to her? Tell me, whose side was I on? I betrayed myself because I made a case for Aeneas when there was no case for him at all. None. What has the king to do with the poet, what has the empire to do with him? Nothing. What has power to do with him? I tell you I should have burned that book with my own hands.’

  As Mr Trill sat side by side with Vergil and gazed into the dark water it was as if he saw that all effort is vain, that all endeavour is without sense, that beyond statues and paintings and books there is the shadow of the dark stream which reflects nothing, thinks nothing and only is it itself.

  ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘it is not true. Not true.’ And his eyes flashed as they had once used to do when he had entered the classroom with a copy of the Aeneid open in his hand while outside the window the traffic roared by. ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘there is something left. Something remains.’

  ‘What is it that remains?’ said Vergil turning towards him his pale tormented face. ‘All that can remain is the human heart and how have we treated it? How have we written of it? We set up systems and so we avoid writing of it. We do not attend to the trembling, the fear, the music of the human heart. I was seduced by armour and war because I myself was unwarlike, and I did not see the trap into which I had been led. I forgot about the terrors of the living. Rome was a curtain that hid the truth I should have seen. The human soul, that is what is important, the infinite tenderness.’

  ‘And that you had,’ said Mr Trill. ‘Of all the poets that is what you had. The tears of things.’

  And he thought that in one way he at least was like Vergil, he had never married, he had suffered the silence and the dispossession, like a tree that stands by itself without leaves, bare to the wind.

  ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘you have not failed. How could you have failed when so many centuries later I still read your works?’

  But the figure, fatigued and insubstantial, had faded away into the mist and Mr Trill could no longer see it. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘what now is there left to me when even the author whom I loved best thinks that he has failed, when the heroes of my childhood turn out to be simple and egotistical men, when the monsters abuse the heroes for being hateful and aggressive. What is there left for me to do or say?’

  And he sat with his case beside him on the bank of the river gazing deep into the dark water where no reflections were visible. Is the dark water the end of everything, he asked himself. Is that really true? The dark water where no fish lives, where no wave moves, where there is only motionlessness without end.

  He gazed deep into the dark water and it changed as he looked, and he was lying in his bed again.

  Mr Trill lay in his bed in the hospital staring at nothing. An old woman with a hoover was humming like a hornet round the ward. After a while Mr Trill began to study her. She had a scarf wrapped round her head and she wore a blue uniform and her nose was narrow and long. Where have you come from, thought Mr Trill, do you have children? When did you begin to work here? For some strange reason she reminded him of his mother, busy, distant, forever creating noise among the silence. Across the floor lay bands of sunlight, which streamed in through the window and among them the dust sparkled and moved as if it were alive. Through the windows he could see trees with golden leaves, and in the distance a moor which was turning brown. He lay in his bed knowing that he was going to die.

  It all happened very suddenly. One moment he was reading in his room, the next his chest was a battlefield of pain which threatened to kill him. He had enough energy to knock on the wall before he fell. The next thing he knew he was in an ambulance and the next thing after that he was being operated on. A doctor was bending over him while he gazed upward at the ceiling. In a short while he was asleep.

  The woman had now passed his bed and was hoovering the space in front of the next one. Mr Trill stared at the red blanket, at the man with the gaunt face who was lying under it, at the black grapes which lay beside him on the table. The man got visitors regularly, and Mr Trill got none except that his landlady came now and again. He would have liked visitors, even some of the pupils he had taught, even some of the teachers who had once been his colleagues, but no one came. It was as if he had already dropped into a big hole from which he could see no one, through which light would never again escape as the ring of gravity tightened.

  So this is what death will be like, thought Mr Trill, and he was not frightened, only tired as if all the work he had done during his life had at last caught up with him. In fact sometimes he felt peaceful and content as if what was happening was happening to someone else, and not to him at all. Sometimes it was as if he was gazing down at himself from a position above the bed, and wondering what he was doing there. At night he could hear coughing, and nurses moved quietly through the dim light. Sometimes he would hear a man talking in his sleep, as if arguing with his wife or his employer.

  There were bowls of flowers everywhere, not brought by visitors but donated by gardeners. There they stood brilliantly blossoming from the sparkling crystal, among the reds and white of the blankets and sheets. Now and again a nurse would pass with a trolley, and he would see her as a saviour among all the spit, blood, urine. At nights the nurses would laugh and shout as they entered a taxi on their way to a dance. Well, why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves, how else could they remain sane, in a world of death and dying.

  But now at this particular moment on this serene morning Mr Trill didn’t feel at all frightened. It was as if like the season itself he was poised between growth and decline, blossoming and withering, as if his mind and soul were in balance, calmly accepting the justice that was about to come. I am about to die, he thought to himself, and this woman with the hoover will live, not forever, but perhaps for a long time yet. Perhaps her whole life has been spent like this, cleaning and hoovering. She has never aspired to anything else. I on the other hand wanted more, I aspired to train minds in the great poetry of the ages. And what use was it after all? Now I am alone and no one comes to see me. Of all those thousands I have trained no one comes to visit me. Well, let it be, let it be. The sunlight is indifferent to us all. We are who we are and that is all that can be said about us. He watched an old man, slightly healthier than himself, being helped by two nurses out of his bed to sit in the lounge and watch the colour television. He would sit there all morning, sometimes dozing off, sometimes staring ahead of him.

  The old man tried to push the nurses away from him as if he thought that he could manage quite well on his own. His face was stern and bitter, as if he had not accepted what had happened to him, even though he was old. Shall I be a coward, thought Mr Trill, when I am about to die? Shall I thresh about on the bed? He had never seen anyone die, not even his father or his mother, and he didn’t know what to expect. He wanted to die quietly and tranquilly, like a Greek or Roman hero who dispensed with life as if with a sword for which he no longer had any use.

  St
eadily the hoover hummed and brightly the sun shone on the floor. I never had time to notice this before, thought Mr Trill. How did I not notice how the dust moves like insects, how even the clearest sun contains a proliferation of dark grains? Perhaps this very day will be my last, this serene autumn day whose calmness is like that of great art, when all passion falls away and only the essential fullness of things is left behind. On this morning there was no ‘tears of things’, no ‘lacrimae rerum’, there was only an almost holy calm.

  I have never made a will, he thought. What will happen to my money? I have no one to leave it to. But he didn’t care, the survival of his money after him didn’t seem to matter. And he had saved a lot of money for he hardly ever spent any. There it lay, symbols and signs in his bankbook, and he didn’t care. It was almost a joke, to leave all that complication behind. He felt like an exile who was looking back at the world as at a strange distant shore. The woman was now at the far end of the ward, the flex of the hoover trailing behind her like a black snake.

  Mr Trill looked at the bed opposite. Above and behind it on the wall there was a brass plate which said that the bed had been donated by William Mason. Who now remembered him, whoever he had been? Perhaps he had once been a rich man, enthusiastic, competitive, red-faced, but now all that was left of him was the name, read by an ignorant man. Our ignorance is total, thought Mr Trill, our achievements minimal. We move about the world as if we were important, we fight and squabble over trivial things, we feel slighted when we are seated at the wrong table, and yet in the end all these things are unimportant. The universe is a huge, unimaginably huge, organism, in which we are as important as the dust in the sunbeam, flickering slightly and then fading from sight.

  The hoovering had ceased and the ward was silent. I am lying here like an effigy, thought Mr Trill. Should I try to get up or not? But he did not wish to get up. He wished to lie where he was, resting, happy. The boy with the hole in his heart lay sleeping peacefully opposite him, his fair hair strewn over the pillows. It seemed unjust that he should suffer when he was so young.

  Mr Trill looked out of the window which was open. He saw two boys throwing stones up into a tree so that the chestnuts would fall down. When they did so they put them in a bag which they were carrying. A minister with long hurrying strides passed the window. The sky was perfectly blue without a cloud in it. Early November was exact and accurate and clear. I am dying, he thought, and I have never loved anyone and there is no one who will grieve for me. My funeral will be bare and diminished.

  Yet I am not frightened. Isn’t that odd? It is as if all the time I was thinking not about myself but about someone else. He felt his heart pattering, and listened to it as to an old friend who was finally letting him down. Patter patter, hammer hammer, beat beat. They say that the heart is the centre of love, but I have never felt that. I never used to notice it much, it was there when I needed it. Now when it is failing me I notice it. How much we take for granted in this world, that we shall live forever, that our bodies will remain our indefatigable servants. He remembered the oxygen tent, the hard serious breathing, but again it was as if he was thinking of someone else, as sometimes one may look at an early photograph of oneself standing on a sideboard and one may not for a moment recognise it. He felt his face which was stubbly and unshaven, like a field of autumn corn. He wondered what he looked like. His pyjamas felt larger than they had previously done, so presumably he had lost weight. The watch had disappeared from his hand. None of his clothes were to be seen anywhere. It was as if he had arrived in the final place where all must be confiscated, where the only values are physical, how much of flesh and bone and blood can still survive.

  The ward was beginning to waken up. Now he could see a nurse examining a thermometer, thin and silver in the sunlight. Very faintly he could hear laughter from the lounge where the colour television was. Soon perhaps they would get him out of bed and he would sit with the others staring at that oddly distant screen. The nurses would smile and laugh and joke, they would walk about with such great energy and speed, as if they did not wish their patients to have any time to think.

  The world would assume the noise and din of normality. Nevertheless his heart was beginning to hammer again, as if a blacksmith were forging some new iron thing on an anvil of deep black, as if a train were accelerating steadily on an autumn day when the flowers are tall and red and wasteful beside the rusty rails. It was as if he was rocking from side to side down a forgotten siding. I am feeling dizzy, he thought, something is happening to me. Is this it then? Is that unimaginable pain going to pierce me again?

  He waved frantically as no words would come out. The nurse continued to regard the thermometer as if it were a tiny silver fish she had caught and which she was studying for size. The rackety old train was bouncing up and down. Somewhere down there was a black tunnel which, when he entered it, would make the carriage dense and thick and dark so that he could no longer see the pictures on the wall, the blossoming flowers in their sparkling vases.

  He waved again and someone came. Then they were all about him. A face was bending over him, fresh and young and inquiring. His face and that other face were very close, close enough almost to kiss. A hand was clutching at his own: he hung on as if he were clinging to the side of a raft. How marvellous, he thought, that we should help each other, that in spite of hatred and insult and anger there are those who rush to one’s side when it is necessary. How marvellous that they are not simply professional people but that they expend their own precious store of love and pity on perfect strangers. How truly amazing the world is, how bad and how good, and how, in spite of all, more good than bad. It was now as if he was seeing flashes as from a tall lighthouse searching a dark sea. Steadily they came, then faster and faster.

  At that moment it was as if he were a well full of water, of love, as if a full tide were rising inside him. I love you all, all you fallen ones, all you autumn ones. We are all in the same boat, but the lighthouse is sending out its flashes, mortal meagre hands are blessing me, hands which have curved round the handle of a hoover, examined a thermometer, emptied bed pans. We do not deserve such care, such love. In spite of their petty quarrels, their envies, the unambitious ones help one at the end. He felt tears slowly trickling down his face, and in front of him the young stunned inquiring face was also wet with tears. He wanted to say, It’s not as bad as that. Though I’m dying I feel quite happy. Don’t worry. The eyes were so dear and so fresh and so filled with light. They should not be seeing this, he thought. Then they were no longer there. There was nothing at all. And Mr Trill passed over into Hades.

  Mr Trill was aware that the baying of the dogs across the other side of the water had ceased, and that a small boat was being rowed towards him across the water. When the boat had reached his bank, a figure signed to him to enter it. Mr Trill looked around him to see if the invitation was to someone else, out the figure, still without speaking, signalled to him more impatiently and, with his case in his hand, Mr Trill stepped into the boat. It did not take long to cross to the other side, and when they arrived the figure, unspeaking as before, led the way to the large building that Mr Trill could see crouched in the vague prevailing mist. They passed a quadrangle and entered the building by a large creaking door. As Mr Trill stood in the hall where the notice-boards were covered with notices, the figure silently slipped away.

  As if knowing where he was, Mr Trill climbed the stair to the door of an office on which he knocked, hearing from an adjacent room the sound of typewriters. After a long pause a voice asked him to come in, and when he did so he saw that seated behind a desk there was a small harried man in a black coat.

  ‘Ah, Mr Trill,’ said this man, ‘my name is Dubbins. I’m very glad to see you.’

  Mr Dubbins rose from his seat and strode forward, putting out his hand. Mr Trill laid his case down and shook the hand extended to him.

  ‘You may go along to the staff-room in a minute,’ said Dubbins. ‘We are happy to have you
. Very happy.’

  I have been here before, thought Mr Trill, or if I haven’t it is very like a place which I have visited.

  ‘You are surprised,’ said Dubbins, ‘but you need not be. We have various alternatives to offer you.’

  ‘Alternatives?’

  ‘Naturally. You may stay with us which is one alternative.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Another is to go back to your earlier life and continue your work there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The other is to go back where you came from.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There seems to have been a flaw in our organisation. We should have picked you up earlier. Still, that can’t be helped.’

  ‘What did the others do?’

  ‘Most chose to stay.’

  ‘And what is done here?’

  ‘Done? My dear fellow, nothing much is done. We read and discuss.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I think the best thing would be if I took you along. Do you not think so?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  The headmaster looked round the office as if to make sure that he had forgotten nothing, and then the two of them walked along a corridor till they came to another door on which the headmaster knocked. When they entered, the occupants of the room stood up as if they were flustered by the unexpected honour of the headmaster’s visit.

  ‘This is Simmons,’ said Dubbins, ‘and this Morrison, this is Andrews and this Burbridge.’ The names followed each other like a roll call, and finally Mr Trill ceased to listen. All of them had been reading books when he entered and he noticed that all the books were classics such as The Iliad or Catullus’ poems.

  Suddenly a small bald man began to speak. ‘Headmaster, I don’t think this is right. The place is becoming overcrowded already. Why are we bringing in another candidate? Soon we shall not have enough room for ourselves and our books.’