The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Doctors, doctors, he thought, why didn’t you cure that too when you cured the plague?

  The next room was full of books. He bent down and looked at them, as they lay against each other untouchably on their shelves. He studied the frail copy of the Solemn League and Covenant, trapped in its case, trying to distinguish the familiar words in the ancient fading script. A letter from Charles I to his friend Lord George Murray wished him to supply him with men for the defence of the kingdom. And there was a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots just before she had put her fair hair on the block with such unflinching nerve. She talked, of all things, about sewing. And the letter was in French. His wife was looking at it now, with her frowning wrinkled brow. Of course she knew French just as he did himself, but the writing was so crabbed, so small . . . How could one ever distinguish it? The headman stood behind her for a moment there with his axe and his black mask, and the black clock of history ticked on . . .

  His wife’s fair hair streamed over the ancient page, her pale narrow neck exposed, showing the blonde hairs at the back. We are perpetual students, he thought, listening to a Frenchman talking volubly to his son, explaining something to him. A costumed American woman leaned down with a pince-nez . . .

  My love, my love, this is history and it has all to do with us. From this we have come, we were servants – or rather I was a servant – of these impermeably stupid people, dying and fighting in their mess of blood. I don’t want that to happen to you. But secretively and profoundly we waited, we the servants, till the time came, and then we shoved them off their seats and thrones with one big heave. Even your class, he thought, even yours.

  He heard her voice from the past screaming at him. What is this business of class that you’re always on about. Can we not just be human beings?

  And himself. It’s easy to say but we served them for centuries and what did we get? Their absent stupid stares like those of peacocks or pheasants.

  Now they were standing in front of a portrait of Lord George Murray, dead at Loos, having fought bravely to the end at the head of his small company, with his chestful of medals dangling. There he stood with his big moustache, his sword stiff at his side, while the new machine guns were ready to mow him down. But he had his horse, hadn’t he? And he had his sword and his invincible belief in himself and in the lady who waited at home, sewing, sleeping beside her dressing table with the coroneted brushes. How the stupid unwinking eye of the moon stared down at her.

  Oh they had courage, right enough. Certainly they had courage, the courage of the dinosaur. He glanced at the scorched bullet mark in a red uniform and admitted that at least about them. They had taken the salmon and the deer, they had stared through their servants as if they were panes of glass, but they had certainly fought. One must give them that. They had been stupid and fearless and masculine. They were big stones in the torrent of history. Even Claverhouse whose pitifully thin armour was on show had been that, daring, romantic, idiotic, irrational. Those petty quarrels, those shrieks and screams, those terrible bleedings, how they had faded into the past. They were in the end trivial.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I have to go to the toilet. I’m bursting.’ She looked at him with her swimming blue eyes, saying nothing. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right.’ But on his way to the toilet he couldn’t resist going into one or two other rooms, feeling free now that he wasn’t with her. In one of the rooms he examined a beautiful self-sufficient pistol of an earlier age, its perfect lines exciting him, well-preserved and oiled as most of the things in the castle were. Why, they must still have an army of servants. He rushed into the next room and had a quick look round. Here there were fans with Chinese women bending towards each other in a sky of deep black, wide sleeves on their arms, their hair black, their necks willowy and white.

  He ran to the toilet pushing his way past the tourists. And there he was standing in front of the mirror, his face gaunt and haunted. Beside him standing above the white tile was a large American whose camera banged against his side. They glanced at each other and then looked away. Trevor washed his hands carefully over and over and then dried them in the draught of warm air, waiting till all the drops had faded and his hands were clean and fresh. Then he walked back the way he had come. He found the room with the documents in the glass cases but she wasn’t there, though there were many foreigners – descendants of the duke’s enemies – leaning down to read the indecipherable script.

  He turned back and went into all the other rooms between the one with the documents and the toilet, but she wasn’t in any of them either. She must have gone back then to see something she hadn’t had time to study properly. What could it be? Her image became confused in his mind with that of Mary, Queen of Scots, that of the strutting peacocks on the lawn. O my God he thought something must have happened to her. She may have fainted. Her voice echoed in his head, ‘You’re always going on about class. Nothing but class all the time. Can’t we live in peace?’ In peace, in peace. Images of royalty, of aristocracy were all about him. The stupid heads gazed from their frames. The willowy necks bent over streams. The salmon bodies wriggled in nets. Coronets everywhere, everywhere lances and swords and guns, evidence of death, of violence. If only she is safe, he thought, if only . . . Because I love her with my gaunt unforgiving face, and my sharp weasel mind. The scorched bullet hole leaped in front of his eyes. So the thin armour had not been enough to keep the enemy out. It had worked its way through the aristocratic trappings.

  And then he entered the room where the bed and chairs were. He had to fight his way through a crowd of tourists, shouting and screaming inside his head, Get away, you bloody American, what are you doing here anyway? Get back to your own country, to your pseudo-democracy and take your filthy pictures with you or take the castle with you stone by stone in your temporary luggage which has crossed a million frontiers.

  There seemed to be hundreds of people and they were all quiet. When he got to the front he saw her. She had crossed the rope and was lying on the bed, her head on the pillow, the coroneted headboard above her, and she was clutching in her hand – what? A letter. Had she broken the glass cases as well? But when he looked he thought he recognised his own handwriting. Probably one of his love letters to her from their courting days when each had written to the other, ‘I’ll never leave you,’ a sort of promise. There she was lying staring up at the ceiling, perfectly at peace, the letter in her hand, as if she were an effigy in an untouchable armour, and the tourists stared at her in perfect silence as if she belonged to the bed, in her wrinkled stockings (for she had thrown her shoes off) an image almost of the Sleeping Beauty. My God, he thought. My God what shall I do now? And he stared helplessly with the others at her who was so beautiful and distant, almost as if she were a perfect stranger, a frozen historical woman. Only a pulse in her throat beat and her breast rose and fell quietly. That was all that told him she was alive and that she was his wife.

  The Missionary

  The missionary walks through Africa

  thinking of God above.

  Everything here is black but God is white

  The waterfalls have distant leonine faces

  but God is near and warm.

  Sometimes he doesn’t know why he is there –

  in Africa in Africa

  with every particular star

  shining on his head

  But he has faith O he has faith enough

  that in that bush in that resplendent bush

  there is no snake with diamond head

  and quick unchristian fangs

  And so the missionary walks through Africa

  and all around him grow the hectic leaves

  pulpits of violent green.

  And all around him he is watched by eyes

  that never heard of Paradise

  How cool and white his collar is

  that circle of white bone.

  For the missionary lies at last

  in that huge untitled waste


  As if he wasn’t there

  the trees that haven’t heard of God

  grow about his bony head

  and all his pale ideas die

  in Africa in Africa

  where every thought is green.

  One day the Reverend Donald Black decided to leave the ministry and go as a missionary to Africa. When he was living in Scotland he was always writing letters to the newspapers asking why the Sabbath was not being kept, why planes flew about the sky on Sunday, and why the ferries were operating. He believed that Sunday was truly God’s day, the day on which the Lord had rested, as if in a manse contemplating the elegance and beauty of His creation. As a matter of fact the manse he lived in was old and damp, and the ground around it, which could hardly be dignified with the name of garden, was choked with wildflowers. Here the unmarried minister would write his sermons, which usually dealt with obscure points of doctrine that his parishioners found great difficulty in following. In spite of that the minister read diligently in thick books, many of them ancient and discoloured, and written in double columns.

  He was a small sturdy man with quick alert eyes. When he visited his parishioners in his old car he liked to argue with them, and then after he was finished put up a prayer for all the inhabitants of the house. His prayers were usually long and difficult to listen to, for he had the unfortunate habit of stopping in the middle of sentences, unable to think what the next words should be. In fact he had no eloquence at all, and sometimes felt that God was unfair to him, since after all he believed firmly in the Bible and contended that every word in it was true. Why then had God not endowed him with flowing speech? Even when he was preaching from the pulpit, tall and bare below the long transparent windows through which in summer a greenish light penetrated from the leaves outside, these halts and stoppings would embarrass him. It was probably because of his lack of eloquence that he decided to become a missionary. In moments of despair he would remember Moses who according to the Bible had been something of a stutterer, but who nevertheless had led his people out of the corrupt lands of Egypt.

  In fact he thought of Britain and Scotland as corrupt. The pure milk of the Gospel had gone sour, the houses were dens of iniquity, the streets dark with sin and blood. He dreamed of a place where the children would be well-behaved, the people upright and innocent, the blandishments of civilisation absent, the soul without taint. He thought that God had abandoned his country, that there was disorder everywhere, and the law itself cracking under the strain.

  Since he was unmarried, he would sacrifice himself to the uncorrupted natives of Africa who had been saved by distance from the Sodom and Gomorrah of the west. One dark dismal day he left Scotland behind him and on a fine hot day arrived at the village where he was to be a missionary. There he found waiting for him a small church and a small congregation. Noticing that the church was surrounded by foliage and vegetation, the first thing he did was to cut down as much of it as possible so that the church could be seen, white and bare, in its fated place.

  He had learned the language of the tribe before he had left Scotland, for he considered that such knowledge was of the greatest importance. Hadn’t Luther translated the Bible into German? Perhaps, he thought to himself, I shall learn eloquence in another simpler language which has the freshness of novelty and not the staleness of advertising.

  The first night he slept in the church he felt a little homesickness but this did not last long and after a few days Scotland was to him as distant and hazy as its bluish mountains seem on a misty day, insubstantial, vague, almost incoherent. But the heat of Africa beat on him like a hammer.

  When he rose from his bed on the first day he went off to see the chief of the tribe, who was sitting outside his hut on a chair which had once been European. He wore on his head a sort of leafy crown, and carried in his hand a stick which the missionary assumed was meant to be a sceptre. He had calm, merry eyes which regarded the missionary as only one of many who had come to his tribe. If he thought Donald rather small in stature he didn’t say so but was courteous and benign.

  Toko – for that was the chief’s name – greeted him in his own African dialect and Donald replied in the same language.

  ‘How many Christians have we here,’ he asked him.

  Toko began to count serenely on the fingers of his hands and after a while said,

  ‘Twenty.’

  Donald was surprised at this small number for he thought that there would have been more.

  ‘That is so,’ said the chief gravely, ‘and I myself am one of them. I know about Adam and Eve and about the snake and also about John the Baptist whose head was cut off at a dance.’ He flashed his teeth in a wide white smile and laughed. ‘I also know about heaven and hell,’ he added.

  This won’t do, thought Donald. They know all about the violent parts of the Bible but they do not know the pure milk of it. He looked inside the large hut and saw a number of women sitting cross-legged there in an attitude of eternal patience. They were naked to the waist and in the half-darkness he could see their drooping breasts like pale fruits. They were however wearing grass skirts.

  How shameful, he thought. But though the heat was almost unbearable he himself didn’t remove his collar which he considered to be a symbol, and a defence against the laxity of the people and the vegetation.

  A few children were playing on the road but they unlike the women were totally naked and completely brown.

  ‘Isn’t it time that these women wore clothes,’ he asked the chief. ‘Especially as you yourself are a Christian.’

  ‘That would be impossible,’ said the chief serenely, ‘because it is very hot and also they have no clothes to wear.’

  Donald didn’t say any more about this, and left the topic lying there ticking away like a watch that he must later adjust.

  All around him there were other huts and sitting in front of them men and women who regarded him with the same profound eternal look, as if they had been there forever and would be there after he had gone.

  ‘I shall expect the Christians tomorrow in church,’ he said and turned away.

  What am I going to do here, he asked himself, and he looked at the trees which were heavy with their fruit. His collar was biting into his neck which was wet with sweat as was his whole body encased in its black clothes. Thinking that he was the only person there who was really black, he walked among the sheaves of shadows till he arrived at his church. Once he looked back, only to see that Toko was still sitting in his European chair clutching his sceptre which was only a curved stick. The shepherd of his flock, thought Donald. But he could have sworn that the chief was secretly laughing at him.

  The following day, arrayed in his robes, Donald climbed into the pulpit and stood looking down at his black congregation, their faces calm and shining and impenetrable, their breasts naked.

  ‘There are two things we must remember,’ he said. ‘One is the Law and the other is the Grace. Christ said that he came to fulfil the law which the Pharisees had made intolerable.’ He stopped, for it occurred to him that they might not have heard of the Pharisees, and in the blatant unhypocritical light of this country they seemed very far away.

  ‘At any rate,’ he continued, ‘there is only the one God. He exists in the heavens and also in our own souls.’ They regarded him with kind uncomprehending eyes.

  ‘God is like a judge. He commands us not to make graven images, not to steal and not to commit adultery. You know all these things already for my predecessor must have told you.’

  Hearing shouting outside the church he asked them what it meant. A small sturdy man with sad eyes told him that some of the youth of the village came to the church regularly to mock the Christians and call them ‘the white ones’. The missionary left the pulpit and strode out of the door into the unabated sunlight. He saw in front of him a group of tall gangling boys who had been throwing stones and pebbles at the door. ‘Get out of here,’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here at once,’ and his f
ace was so red and his whole body so bristling and hostile – as if he were swelling like a cockerel that crows with inflated breast at dawn – that they ran away at great speed, not once looking back. Then he returned to the church.

  When the service was over the small man who had told him about the boys stood up and said that the previous missionary had allowed them to ask questions after the sermon.

  ‘Do you have any questions then,’ asked Donald who loved argument of any kind.

  ‘I have a question,’ said the small man. ‘My name is Banga. A man belonging to the tribe has taken my wife away from me. I would like to cut his throat but I wanted to ask you first since you are a Christian.’

  ‘The Bible tells us that killing is forbidden,’ said Donald, ‘and that what we must do is turn the other cheek. Christ did not struggle when he was crucified, even though he wept a little in the Garden of Gethsemane. I am sure that God will punish that man in his own good time. Where is your wife now?’

  ‘She is with him in his hut and she has put me to shame.’

  ‘Well,’ said Donald, ‘I will speak to that man. What is his name?’

  ‘Tobbuta.’

  ‘She will return to your house, never fear,’ Donald said with great resonance and conviction. ‘For it is the law that whom God has joined together no man dare put asunder. It tells us that in the Bible, and it is the teachings of the Bible that I have come to instruct you in. If necessary I shall myself drag her home to you.’

  ‘But,’ said Banga in the same even sad voice as before, ‘I should cut his throat anyway.’

  ‘I will put the matter right,’ said Donald firmly. ‘You leave it with me. There will be no killing. Everything will be settled according to the law.’