The Black Halo (18 page)

I sat trembling. After a very long time I brought myself to look at the Gaelic pages. They said in prose stronger than my English:

I listened and as I listened it was as if the whole flat came alive with sounds. These sounds it is difficult to describe. Partly they were of music that I thought I had
forgotten, fragments of songs about sailing ships and men exiled from their own land. Partly they were the sounds of cows mooing on early, almost forgotten, moors. Partly they were the sounds of
human voices at street corners. Partly they were voices telling stories. Partly they were my own voice heard so long ago. And the night darkened and lengthened. The curtains shivered in the
draught. My mind was a mosaic of different sentences, some in English, some in Gaelic. My whole body was sweating as if with an incurable fever. I remember getting up and for no reason shifting the
position of the green-faced clock on the mantelpiece. There was a dreadful coldness all around me, though the two bars of the electric fire were on. I looked at the telephone as if it were a snake
about to strike. For some reason or other I thought of all the family photographs I had destroyed.

And I sat on my throne in the middle of the night. And as I sat there listening to the sound of feet on the road I clearly heard steps which seemed much more purposeful than the ones I had heard
earlier on. I can’t describe why I felt this. It was something to do with the fact that the sounds made by the feet seemed to reinforce each other as if three people were walking along
together, and as if they were making for a predetermined rendezvous. But at the same time the sound seemed curiously alien and echoing. The footsteps were purposeful and foreign and hollow, and
they were, I was sure, making for my door. In a sudden panic I arose from my chair and pulled the bolt across the outer door, which was already locked. I don’t know why I did this since I
knew that locks and bolts would not keep these beings, familiar and fatal, out. But I did it anyway and went back to my room and shut that door as well. I waited by the fire, shivering. I was alone
and afraid. There was no question of that.

When I happened at that moment to glance at the page still in the typewriter, the machine began to move of its own accord. I may say at this point that I had been so terrified by all the things
that had happened that I almost accepted this strange event. I had once seen a teleprinter almost supernaturally receiving messages from a different place, miles and miles away, and as I accepted
that so I accepted this. The typewriter was writing in capital letters
WE ARE COMING FOR YOU JOSEPH WE ARE COMING TO TAKE YOU HOME
. I cannot describe the menace that these
simple words seemed to contain. What did
HOME
mean? The grave? The words leapt out at me in their large threatening capitals. They seemed to emanate from a different world,
one far from mine. And simultaneously I heard drunken voices coming from behind my door. The drunken discordant voices were singing a Gaelic song or what seemed to be one. I can’t wholly
describe that song. It was, I thought, Gaelic and yet there were cadences in it of another country, an oriental country. I could almost have thought that the cadences might have been Egyptian. They
were aureate and intricate and yet below them I could hear quite clearly the words of the Gaelic song, just as I had heard them many years before in my own home. It was a Gaelic song and yet the
words seemed to come not through mouths but rather through snouts. I imagined at the door, just outside, three snouts raised to the moon. At the same time I sensed a menace such as one might feel
– not from an animal but from a being other than animal or man, a being from another world, a world that existed long ago with its irrational gods and stiff hieratic clothes.

I stared at the door which was painted a bright yellow. My room is painted in two colours: two walls are black, the other two are yellow. When I looked at the yellow door it was as if I was
looking at a screen that divided me from another world. It was as if the door was not made of wood but of a fine delicate skin which blazed with the power of the sun. And it was a skin that I knew
would not survive if those beings, alive and barbarous and drunken, were to decide to burst through it. Their song was a lament and a song of triumph. It was menacing and despairing and fruitful.
Suddenly, as I looked, words began to appear on the door, some in Gaelic and some in English and some in a strange language that I did not know. It was like the writing on the wall that had
appeared to Belshazzar.

Then there was silence for a while. The drunken voices ceased. I knew that they were giving me time, and I did not know what I was going to do with that time they had given me. They had come
down from their hills and they were waiting for me to act. They were waiting for a gesture from me. What would that gesture be? For I knew that these were not my real brothers, not the brothers I
had been brought up with, not the brothers whose toys I had shared or smashed, not the brothers with whom I had bedded in that cramped house so long ago. These were other brothers. And their song
was a menacing song.

I looked down at my clothes and found, to my surprise, that I was wearing not my cloak of many colours but a coat of pure yellow, the colour of the door. If I wanted to save myself I knew what I
must do. Did I want to save myself? And was it only an instinct for self-protection that drove me to my action? That in itself would not be enough. No, it wasn’t wholly that, perhaps not that
at all. It wasn’t just that, for as I listened I heard the Gaelic tune again, and my blood seemed to move with it, warmly and purely. I walked slowly to the door but it was as if I were
dancing. A strange perfume seemed to fill the entire room. It wasn’t however the perfume of the east, it was more local perfume, such as I had smelt so long ago. It was the perfume perhaps of
heatherbells, of brine. It was harsh and pure and severe and it suffused my whole body. It was a perfume that I seemed almost to remember.

As I moved towards the door the words on it changed their shape and became not fragmentary but wholly Gaelic. I knew that outside the door my brothers were waiting. I knew that I must welcome
them not with hauteur but with deference. I must not be the successful Egyptian but the humbled Hebrew. I knew that it was I who was the sinner. My eyes pierced the door which was like skin and on
the other side I saw my brothers broken by defeat and starvation but still human and rustic and brave. It was to them that I must offer myself, not to the alien kings and an alien land. It was to
them that I must, if necessary, be the sacrifice. In the silence of the night which trembled with so many stars I walked towards the door and felt my body gain energy and power. It was as if I was
a king, a real king, because I had ceased to think like one. I reached the door. It had ceased to be skin and was wood again. I opened it but there was no one there.

I looked around me. The typewriter sat on its own in the moonlight. I sat down at it in the peaceful night and began to type. The words were Gaelic and flowed easily and familiarly, as if I were
speaking to my brothers who had sung drunken songs outside my door. I looked down at my clothes and found that they were all one colour. I dreamed as I wrote and my dream was reflected easily in my
words. I seemed to see faces, worn and lined, and they were more beautiful than any other faces I had known. I seemed to hear their language and it was their language that I wrote. It was rough and
yet it was my own. It was their voices speaking through me, maimed and triumphant and without sophistication. I seemed to see the moonlight shining on the corn, ripe and yellow, the colour of the
door. To their starving faces I brought joy as I wrote. And inside me was their song. I sat in my yellow robe at my yellow typewriter in the yellow room. And I was happy. I overflowed with the most
holy joy.

Why do I remember the incident so clearly, even in my fiftieth year? I throb with rage and rancour when it wells up in my mind. No, not my mind, my soul rather. It took place
between my brother and me, my brother who is now at the other end of the world, in Kenya to be precise, married with five children, photographs of whom he sends regularly. The cottage where we grew
up seems almost like a fairy hut in a dream, struck sometimes by thunder and lightning and at other times ringed by daisies. It has a slightly slant look and in winter time I think of it mounted by
waves of snow.

And yet I don’t suppose it was like that at all. My brother was older than me and most of the time we got on well together. For instance I remember him bringing to me from the town a
chocolate with twenty-four squares in it and we ate it together in the one bed, for there were only two beds in the house. Another time I remember him sitting side by side with a redhead in a house
in the village, and thinking how slatternly and vulgar she looked. But of course he was much more responsible than me. I dreamed and read, and he acted. I mean he acted in the world. He was the one
who scythed the corn, and gathered the peats. He was the one who took apart, the very first night, the gun he had been issued with in the Home Guard (or LDV) during the last war. Later he became an
officer in the army.

My life is a string of these incidents which stick in my mind like a row of beads, lights across a bay which I have never really seen but which I continually imagine. For instance, did I imagine
a Santa Claus in red hood and fur coat who visited our house? Did I imagine that I once dressed up at Hallowe’en as a beast with a green face? Probably I have imagined it all. Have I even
imagined this incident? No, I don’t think so. For surely it would not return to me so often if it was purely imaginary. Anyway, I must tell you that I was a great reader of books. How often
have I looked out through the dripping window panes of our cottage across to the sea which was slate grey and menacing, thinking of some book or other which I was immersed in! He, I am sure, has
completely forgotten the incident even if he ever remembered it. His gaze on the contrary is fixed on the future and the ladder by which he climbs ever upward. My gaze is fixed on the past. I
search for a flash from a stone or a leaf and that scrutiny is my whole life. That is why I so often return to my origins and why he has never written to any of his cousins or friends. I
don’t suppose I really like him.

Sometimes I think of myself bringing two pails of water home, and I also apply this image to the artist, who brings home from wells, where the cows stare at their reflected horns, his stories
and legends, making sure that not a drop spills. My brother was much more daring than me. One night we waited for him, my mother and I, as he made his way across the moor from a neighbouring
village in a storm of quick bitter lightning. Yet it didn’t seem to frighten him. I could never climb to the roof of the house but he could. Even in the army he did daring things, daring
direct things, because he felt the responsibility for doing them. I have always avoided responsibility.

And as I say, if I were to remind him now of this incident he wouldn’t even remember it, it is so utterly trivial. And yet isn’t it these incidents, so trivial in themselves, that we
remember, that perhaps shape our destiny? We go up a road that we hadn’t intended taking and we catch a glimpse of a red dress, or a car disappearing into the distance. And these moments are
defined forever, engraved indeed on our minds. I have seen that happen, often and often. For instance, not so long ago I saw a boy’s anguished face as he was taken into an ambulance whose
blue light was flashing. I remember that, but I can’t remember what I read in newspapers or in journals.

As you can see, I’m trying to create a philosophy, to define the importance of the incident even though it is trivial. I have a feeling it has shaped my whole life since it always returns
to me, and that puzzles me. Why should something so minute become such a perpetual nagging pain? Why should it, at moments when I am involved in thought or our ambiguous relations in the world,
flash out to me so startlingly?

It was a summer morning, or at least I think it was a summer morning. I have an impression of light. On summer mornings I used to get up early and walk about the house, my feet cold on the
linoleum. It was as if I was waiting for someone, some guest. Such joy, such inexpressible joy. Walking about my crooked cottage where sometimes a mouse squeaked among the barrels of meal. It is
therefore a summer morning, and I am reading a book. No, it is not exactly a book, it is a magazine, it is one of those yellow magazines which have such a strange distinctive smell. To the cheap
paper there clings a yellow smell, for each colour has its own smell. It is a Western. It tells the story of Wild Bill Hickok. My brother is beside me in bed and he is leaning on his elbow looking
at my book. He is not reading it, he is just looking at it. And it is a summer morning full of light.

I have reached the point where Wild Bill Hickok is pursuing outlaws across a mountain range. I don’t know and I can’t remember what American state it was, it might have been Kansas
or Montana. Perhaps it was Montana. Anyway the mountains are covered with sage perhaps and they are blue for it is evening. Sometimes from our own house I could see a blue mountain and in the
evening the sun setting behind it. The mountain was blue changing to black and sometimes it was purple. And slowly the sun would set behind it.

Anyway my brother began to fight with me for no reason at all, simply because of an unpredictable energy which had something to do with the summer morning. I have often such strange impulses
myself. For no reason. As for instance in childhood one would be walking along the road and suddenly one would break into a run, flashing one’s bare feet along the grassy verge as if one were
competing against someone. But who? So he began to fight with me, no, not fight, tussle rather. And that was all it was at first, a tussle. Then as the tussle continued it became more serious, it
swelled into a struggle for supremacy. We rolled over and over, each trying to get the other underneath and pinion the other’s arms so that he would lie crucified below one. And our teeth
would grit themselves, and we would breathe heavily, and we would say, Do you surrender? And a lot of the time I did surrender. For I knew this was my vocation in life, to surrender. I didn’t
have as much pride as my brother. And on this particular morning he tore the magazine into little pieces. Otherwise I might have been able to put it together again. But he tore it into very small
pieces which drifted across the floor like snow.