The Black Halo (19 page)

And suddenly I began to cry. I remember this quite clearly. I cried and cried. And even now I almost cry when I think of it. For I was crying because I would never know what had happened to Wild
Bill Hickok. I can still see him climbing the mountain in pursuit of the outlaws, his gun drawn, tall against the skyline, but I can’t see the end of the story.

Of course I know that he won, of course I know that he killed them all, but I can never be really sure since the ending of the story was torn. I can smell some plant, perhaps sage, I can see the
cactus and the mountain blue in the evening, but where has Wild Bill Hickok gone? Well, he is still preparing to cross the mountain after the outlaws but he will never catch them. He is caught in
mid-flight. And why should that torment me? And why in my fiftieth year should I remember the incident so vividly that it brings tears to my eyes? All I can say is that it happened. All I can say
is that that yellow paper is still rank and strong in my nostrils at this very moment as across the years we can remember certain tunes which have the power to raise for us whole areas of our past
in their pristine dew and agony or happiness. I write to my brother in Kenya and congratulate him on the birth of his children but, below all that, I remember this incident. And it was so trivial
that it ought not to be memorable. Yet all I can say is that if even now I could get the ending of that story on the cheap yellow paper I would give a great part of my real life in exchange for it,
even the photographs of his children playing cricket, even much that I myself have endured and enjoyed and gloried in.

For the past year he has been writing a book and for the past year he has been dying. In fact the disease, cancer of course, seems to have blossomed in harmony with the
progression of the book. He will not show it to me till it is finished. It is a book about existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and the rest. He has been reading them thoroughly for many years in his
spare time as a French teacher in the school where I myself taught. I have retired, in the natural order of things, and he has retired because of his illness though he has been keeping up a gay
battle to the end. I have not been surprised by this. He has always been a man of immense intelligence and courage, a rare combination. I have known for years that his marriage was not a happy one
(his wife did not understand his passion for research). She is a very ordinary common woman from England and he should never have married her. They met, I think, when he was at Oxford in the first
dew of his youth. (At that time I believe that he was a dedicated left winger, anti-Franco, and the rest of it. The transition from left wing politics towards absurdity must show something about
his life.) He has had to put up with a lot from her, not simply indifference but active malevolence and petty spitefulness. I have seen him humiliated by her in company though he smiled all the
time. The humiliations were constant and searching, and might take the form of suggesting that he had not done as well as he should have done financially, or even of questioning his intelligence
(he was not very practical), or of perfectly placed stab wounds with regard to money. When I have visited him I have treated her strictly as an enemy in whose custody a prisoner happens to be. She
hates me as much as she hates him and for the same reasons, that I am like her husband in that I genuinely do not care for material things, I cannot understand why people should need more than one
simple meal at a time. In fact the two of us have been unpopular with the staff of the school because at a certain meeting called to discuss possible strike action we spoke up against the greed of
the society in which we live. Naturally we failed to persuade our colleagues to adopt our principles (they genuinely seemed to think we were cranks since we talked of money as being a superficial
gloss), but our stand didn’t make us popular. Simmons in particular was our bitter foe. He is a devious though apparently bluff fellow who is not only his own worst enemy but everyone
else’s as well. I cannot tolerate his hyprocrisy, and he has the scorned woman’s ability to strike neatly at the underbelly.

Anyway we were both interested in our hobbies, he in his Existentialism and I in my literature. I mean in the novel and in poetry. He has always respected my mind and I have respected his. I
have never written anything creative of course. How could one have the temerity to add to what is already there, unless what one writes is necessary? And I have never felt the pressure of the
necessary. I listen to a great deal of music. I hear the note of necessity even in the flawed opulence of Wagner and overwhelmingly in the apparent simplicity of Mozart. But never within myself. I
even wonder why he has decided to write his book. It is in a way unlike him to commit his dreamed perfection to paper. I know that he has taken a certain pleasure in the composition of examination
papers and the preparation of notes on French writers but I never thought that he would actually write a book. Certainly not on anything as complicated as Existentialism.

More recently he has been moved to hospital where he has been getting intensive radiation treatment. I hate hospitals but I have been going to see him every Sunday afternoon. His bed is at the
far end of the hospital, in a very distant ward, and I pass old people staring into space with dull eyes. His table beside the bed has the usual assemblage of grapes and oranges: no one ever dreams
of bringing him a book to read. But in spite of the heavy atmosphere, relieved only by the sparkling presence of the nurses who know he is doomed, he has managed to finish his own book. We talk
about various things. Once we had a long discussion on Keats and wondered how far tuberculosis animates the creative soul. He seems to think it does, though I feel it almost blasphemous to think
that without the presence of tuberculosis Keats would never have been a great poet. Still, he lies there in all that white. He knows he is going to die. I suppose being an existentialist –
for he holds the beliefs that they hold – he will die in a different way from those who do not hold such beliefs. He sees neither priest nor minister. I sit in my rather shabby coat –
for the ward is sometimes rather cold – beside his bed. I do not think about justice or mercy. What use would there be in that?

His long haggard face, like one of those windows that one sees in churches, is becoming more and more refined each time that I visit him. The book, it seems, will be his last justification. It
may be that he thinks he will posthumously justify his life to his wife, if the book turns out to be a good one. I know that she couldn’t care less, as far as the content goes, but in his
strange way he loves her. What could she know of the literature of France? It is only people like himself who have shed the world who can know about literature. In fact he is beginning to look more
and more like a saint as the weeks pass. The pure bone is appearing through the flesh. One day I almost said to him, ‘What is it like to die?’ but I caught myself in time. In any case
the nurses are often hovering about. Some of them are pupils whom he has taught. He told me that one of them (one of the dimmer ones in fact) had gone to the trouble of speaking to him one day in
halting French. He felt that this was a compassionate gesture and so indeed it was. His eyes filled with tears as he told me about it. ‘And yet,’ he said wonderingly, ‘she
couldn’t do French at all.’ I don’t think he told his wife about the incident.

He was of course a perfectionist when he was teaching. ‘No, no, no,’ he would shout, ‘that is not how you say it. Not at all.’ I could hear him two rooms away.
‘Listen again. Listen. You must always listen. Listen to the voice.’ And he would say the word over and over. The inflexion must be exactly right, the idiom must be perfect. Perhaps it
was that lust for perfection that brought on his cancer. His own daughter had been one who had not flourished under his teaching (she was intelligent but rebellious), and his wife had never
forgiven him for that. ‘But,’ he would say to her, as he told me, ‘she isn’t as good as the others.’ However it happened that one of the others had been the daughter
of one of her bitterest enemies and how could one expect that she could reconcile herself to his honesty? ‘Women,’ he would say to me, ‘can’t be impersonal. You cannot ask
that of them.’ How much futile quarrelling was concealed under that statement. For his daughter was now working in a shop, Frenchless, resentful, single.

How and why had he taken up Existentialism? I don’t know. Was it perhaps that he was driven towards it by the absurdity of his own life? How can one tell why some writers and systems of
thought attract us and others don’t? (The other night I had a visitor from the chess club and there were two tarts on a plate, one yellow and one pink. I asked him which one he wanted and he
said the yellow one. I myself had preferred the pink one. How can one explain that?) He hadn’t of course been in the war either. And neither had I. (Yet I suppose the system of
Existentialism, if one can talk of it in terms of a system, emerged out of the last war.) We had that in common. But there are differences too. For instance he has a good head for figures. I
remember the marking system he once worked out in order to be fairer to candidates. The headmaster couldn’t understand it and so it was left in oblivion. I couldn’t understand it
either.

And so he is dying in this ward with the walls whose paint is coming off in flakes. And quite a lot of his former pupils visit him. It is surprising how many of them have done well for
themselves. I do not mean that they have done well materially (though many have done that as well). What I was thinking of more precisely was that they have kept their minds true to themselves. One
of them is now a Logic Professor in America and a leader of thought in his own field. I can’t say that all of them have done as well as that but at least they have kept their integrity. What
is even more striking is that they bring their wives along with them, however briefly they may be in town. He lies there like a medieval effigy, hammered out of some eternal stuff, and he listens
to them and they listen to him. He has a great flair for listening and they tell him a great deal. In his youth he used to take them on expeditions, sometimes to France, and he and his pupils would
talk into the early hours of the morning under other skies. Naturally, I wonder whether he did this because he wished to get away from his wife. I think this is partly true though perhaps he did
not realise it himself. He did far more of this extramural activity than I ever did. I have never liked people as much as he has done. I have never had any warmth of nature. It has always struck me
as strange that such perfectionism could be combined with such a liking for people.

He hasn’t really had much in his life, an embittered wife and daughter, and that is all, apart from his schoolwork. And his book. That is not really very much to bear with one into the
darkness of the absurd. Yet what else could he have done? How could he have known in those early days that his wife would turn out as she did? How could he have done other than take the side of his
inflexible perfectionism against his daughter? Some men are lucky and some are not. I think one may say that he was not. Though naturally he doesn’t believe in luck. I remember one revealing
incident. There was a boy who wasn’t able to get into university because his French was weak. He spent all his spare hours with him after school for weeks and months and managed to get him a
pass in the examination. A year afterwards, the boy was working in a bar, he had simply gone to pieces after he had reached university. He had done no work at all. That was bad luck. Or was it bad
judgement?

He is lying there and his book is finished. He has spent all his time on that book since his enforced retirement. He spent many years on it before that. He will take it with him into the final
darkness. It may perhaps be a present for his wife, his last cold laurel. He may hold it out to her with a final absurd gesture, his lips half twisted in a final smile. To leave such as her the
last product of his mind, the one least capable of understanding it! That would certainly be irony. Even now she may be thinking that she can make a little money from it. How else could one think
of a book, of anything, but in terms of money?

I have been reading it. In fact I have read it all.

Last night I did not sleep. I read and reread the book. I searched page after page for illumination, for a new insight. The electric light blazed into my tired eyes, the bulb was like one of his
sleepless eyes. Was it like a conscience? I revolved everything so slowly. O so slowly. After all we are human beings, condemned to servitude and despair. We are rags of flesh and bone though now
and again pierced by flashes of light. I looked round my own monkish room. After all what had I done with my life? I didn’t even have a wife or daughter. I thought of the world around me and
how people might condemn me if they knew. They would condemn me out of their own shallowness, precisely because they were committed to no ideal and walked swathed in the superficial flesh. In fact
at one time during the night while I was studying a page for the third or fourth time I heard on the street below the music of a transistor, though I could not make out the words of the song that
was being sung. I supposed it was something to do with love and had travelled here from Luxembourg.

But not merciless love. No, love with all the mercy in the world. Love that would forgive anything because there was in the end nothing to forgive. Love that had no knowledge of the knife. But
only of the tears. The light blazed on page after naive page. He had been too long in teaching. His mind had adjusted itself to immature minds. It was as if the book had been written for a Lower
Fifth Form. All had been explained but all had been explained away. Sartre and Camus had lost the spring of their minds, the tension, they had been laid out flat on the page as his own body had
been laid on its white bed. All was white without shadow. There was no battle. The battle had been fought elsewhere. The battle had been fought against his wife and daughter in the real world of
money and teaching and jobs. The energy had gone into that. I stared for a long time at the book. After all, were we not poor human beings? After all, what was our flesh against the absurdity of
the skies?