The Black Halo (74 page)

Also he is a brute. He eats like a brute, slurping his food, and he talks like a brute and he walks like a brute. He has the physique of a brute and I am ashamed to belong to
the same race as he does. It is amazing to me that he can write at all.

Now that I know where he is I crawled towards his hut but he wasn’t there. I left a stone with a note tied round it: he can’t expect to have it all his own way. I didn’t wait
to see him read it. When I got back to my own hut he had removed the bolt from the door and he had urinated against the walls.

I have a vision of Jim Merrick in a large cage and I am feeding him till a ship comes. I see him pecking at his food with his large beak and I watch myself dressing him in coloured clothes. I am
teaching him how to spell my name correctly: when he succeeds in doing so, I give him some more seed. What an extraordinary vision: I must be going out of my mind.

I caught a fish today. At night I left my hut and watched him under the large yellow moon but he did not appear.

He is sitting outside his hut on a large boulder carving some wooden object. I think it is a model of a ship that he is making, a ship with wooden sails. Perhaps in his dim way he liked that
ship, perhaps he misses his authority over the crew. His head is bent over his model and he is muttering to himself: I have a feeling that he knows I am near. Suddenly he turns round and looks
directly at the place where I am standing hidden by the foliage. And then he laughs, a dry delighted laugh.

Last night I slept in the trees again in case he came to the hut. He did come to the hut though I didn’t see him and carved on the door, ‘Not now. Sumtime.’ I know what is
happening: he too in his dim way has worked it out. He’s playing a cat-and-mouse game in order to pass the time: at least it gives us something to do for if we didn’t have that we
wouldn’t have anything. But he had deteriorated. I think. His face is hairy, he walks in a stooping manner like an ape, or like a scholar. Ha, ha. He always, like me, carries a knife.

On board the ship he always sang for he was happy to be a master of a kind: here he never sings, and neither do I. My lips are becoming stiff, and my mouth is closing like the grave.

Yesterday we pursued the same animal. We tugged at the flesh, one from each side, each with his knife. But we did not attack each other: we agreed wordlessly to divide the flesh in two parts.
His face has become like that of a beast: I wonder if mine is the same. We dragged the half-carcases back to our huts. I think he sometimes sleeps in a tree too lest he should be caught off
guard.

I have worked out that it is Christmas Day but it is not cold and snowy and icy as it used to be in that home that I once knew. Perhaps we should have a truce for we are both
growing tired. But I’m sure he doesn’t know that it is Christmas, so there would be no point.

He is building a boat. If he succeeds in that he will kill me. Last night I went and smashed it. I don’t know what he will feel like when he sees the results of my handiwork. Maybe he will
try to build one somewhere else, hidden among the foliage. But I must say that I haven’t felt such joy for a long time as I did when I smashed that boat: my hammer flew about the wood with
joy and exhilaration.

I started to build a boat myself but the same thing happened to mine: he smashed it.

So we are back to where we were before. The weather holds well, unchanging, blue. There have been no storms. I am sustained by the Bible which I think is on my side.

I have begun to talk to myself. Once I heard myself addressing myself as Merrick. That’s very odd and I can’t understand it. I wonder if he is doing the same, that is addressing
himself as Robinson Crusoe.

Perhaps Merrick doesn’t exist. Perhaps he was never on the island at all and I scrawled these messages myself, though they appear to be from him. But surely that’s
not possible. Would I misspell my own name? Could Jim Merrick write at all? But he must have been able to, otherwise how could he have scrawled on the ship’s mirror?

His name was certainly Merrick. I must write it on the flyleaf of the Bible so that I will remember it. Jim Merrick. It sounds right enough, it sounds as if he existed. I am frightened. I have
thought, what would happen if I went blind on a desert island. I have succeeded in making a bow and arrow, but so has he: I heard an arrow whistling past me today while I was gutting fish. But he
must have intended to miss me. Tonight I shall fire one through his window, not to kill, as a warning merely.

I have a parrot in a cage. I speak to it and it answers. I say, ‘Kill Merrick, kill Merrick,’ and it imitates me in a rasping almost incomprehensible voice.

Yesterday when I came back to the hut the parrot had been killed. I know that he won’t kill me. It isn’t time yet. The parrot had been strangled and all the colour had drained out of
the body. I wasn’t at all angry, and that frightened me.

I waited till he had left his hut, and then I got hold of the carving of the ship with its wooden sails and masts and I threw it into the sea. I watched it float away so bravely, so almost
freely. I also smashed a mirror I found in his hut: perhaps he is superstitious and my action will shake him. I wish his face had been inside it.

Yesterday we sat fishing about three hundred yards from each other. We did not speak. Murder on a desert island, that would be odd, I wonder if he would bury me, I wouldn’t bury him. The
thing is that he would be on his own if he killed me, and I would be on my own if I killed him. That is why we are playing with each other: but which is the cat and which is the mouse? I like
nothing better now than banging the heads of fish against stones when I catch them, and yet I didn’t used to be a cruel man. Am I turning into a Merrick?

He is a beast. He ought to be killed. He is an unjust brute and I am the Hand of God. I have seen his death written in letters of flame.

A Voice is telling me that I must kill him, he is polluting the earth. This place would be pure and innocent without him. I shall fly over him on wings of flame, on coloured wings. I cannot be
harmed but he is the devil. He looks like the devil shambling along with his head bent, reading the ground, the signs of the day. Without him I would be able to sleep, the sky would be bluer, the
day more secure. And yet . . .

Hear ye, hear ye. The prophet goes out armed. He speaks to the people, he brings the word of God. The unclean and the sinful and the brutish must be killed and sacrificed. The
wrath of God shall be upon them. The heathen must be extirpated from the earth.

He is growing old. I can see that now and my triumph is complete. His hair is growing grey. He stoops as he walks along, like a philosopher, an ape, and a philosopher. It is an effort for him to
work. He can no longer run after the animals, he moves at a stately almost rotund pace, like a large grey egg. I move slowly after him, and sometimes he moves slowly after me.

He is an old man. Who would have believed that Merrick would have become so old, who once shouted from the deck at the seamen in the rigging? He no longer attempts to build a boat, he has
surrendered to reality and the place where he is will be his final place. Sometimes he sits on a rock staring into space. We stare at each other, we are old men, but it will be worse for him, for
he has no inner life, he is simply a sick animal. His shadow follows me, his lips move soundlessly for he has nothing to say. Soon we shall die for no ship will ever come.

All day yesterday we sat and stared at each other, our knives in our hands. I think I fell asleep. I know he did. His beard reaches to his feet and so does mine. We are drawing
closer to death. Who will die first and who will bury whom?

Night is falling. It must be thirty years now since we landed on this island resentful and burning with hate, but at least we were young. Now we are shadows of the evening. Soon we shan’t
be able to catch anything, not animals, not fish. Soon we shall just sit and die.

Today I found him unconscious by the water. He had been trying to drag a plank ashore and it floated in the salty brine in front of him, dancing. I looked down at him. There was no ship on the
horizon. I could have killed him then. He was meat, just grizzly meat, tough and wrinkled, uneatable. His closed eyes and his pale flashes of flesh among the stubble and old rags made him look
defenceless.

After a while he opened his eyes and looked up. I helped him to his feet and threw both knives into the sea where they sparkled briefly in the rays of the sun. We turned away from the water,
crooked bent old men together. There was no help for it. We started to hack aimlessly and weakly at the wood to make a boat. We shall cook the food in turns.

One day the old man and the old woman stopped talking to each other. They sat for a lot of the time in the same room but they didn’t speak. She would make the breakfast
and the dinner and the tea and lay them at regular times on the table and they would both sit and eat but they remained silent. Neither would pass anything to the other, but each would stretch
across to get the salt or the pepper or whatever was required. At night they would go to bed and turn their backs on each other and go to sleep.

And yet in their early days they had been lovers. They had married young and gone through life together as other couples had done. They had a house of their own and in those days they would
discuss what furniture they should buy for it. They would go out and visit and talk to other people. They had a garden where flowers grew every summer and withered every autumn. They were the same
age, grew up together and no one was surprised when they married, as they seemed destined for each other. They had children and he worked at his work and came home every night. They sometimes joked
and sometimes quarrelled and sometimes they took life very seriously.

Then one day in their old age ceased to speak to each other. It was as if they had no longer anything to say to each other, as if they had run out of thoughts, and so their minds became
secretive and inward. They each had dreams of what they might have done differently but they concealed these dreams from each other. He would sometimes read the newspaper and she would sew and they
wouldn’t speak. And in a strange way they felt comfortable with each other, their silence was not bristling and hostile, it was a silence of emptiness. It was as if they were waiting for the
grave into which they would be lowered. Nothing particular had happened to cause this, they hadn’t had a major quarrel. They were like clocks which had run down.

When someone came to visit them, which was rare, they spoke to the visitor but wouldn’t speak directly to each other. The visitors noticed this and stayed away in order not to embarrass
them. They didn’t know what to make of it all since they themselves couldn’t imagine a world without speech. Who could imagine it?

It was a most peculiar situation and yet after a while it became natural to the two of them. They would brush past each other on their way to a room and ignore each other as if each were a
wardrobe or a chair or a table. They had in fact become like pieces of walking breathing furniture. And they did not feel this as an emptiness or a tragedy. The world had long become opaque to
them. It had gone past the stage of significance or even of being a game. It simply was and they simply were. Perhaps after all they were closer to being plants. They almost ceased being aware of
each other. And in a sense they gained a kind of freedom from this silence, though it was not a fruitful or creative silence. It was a silence of surrender. Speech had made them tired and they
simply ceased being tired. This silence would have gone on for a long time except for a strange trivial accident, if accident it was. The old man always wore a jacket with three buttons on it. It
was a grey jacket and he had worn it for thirty years. It was frayed in places and it had been repaired here and there. One day the old woman noticed that one of the buttons was hanging by a
thread. For some reason this disturbed her and she wished to sew the button on again. The trouble was however that her husband wore the woollen jacket to bed as it was winter time and he never took
it off. He even left his shirt on and sometimes his tie. Every day and every night she would see this button which was a black one hanging by the single thread and it became an obsession with her.
She was afraid that the button would fall off and she would never be able to find it again. She would follow him about looking down at the floor or at the ground to make sure that it hadn’t
fallen. She almost spoke to him in order to point out the danger to the button. But in fact he seemed completely unconscious that the button was about to fall off. He had always been like that, not
caring what condition his clothes were in. Often in the past she had to tell him to wear a fresh suit when he went out visiting. For he really genuinely didn’t care how he was dressed. The
button, black and round, became an obsession. She could see it in her dreams. It expanded and filled her consciousness. And sublimely ignorant of her thoughts he went about, not caring what
happened to the button. She grew angry and simmered quietly. Why on earth couldn’t he pay attention to important things like that? If he had only two buttons instead of three he would look
untidy and people would think that she wasn’t looking after him. But even that was not what bothered her. What really bothered her like a toothache was the lack of symmetry. It was the lowest
of the three buttons and he would look silly walking about with the lower part of his jacket spread wide. The black button became as large as a globe. It became a whole earth, round and fatal and
trivial. It hung from a single thread and at any moment the thread might snap. The button would fall to the ground and she would never see it again. There would never again be found a button
exactly like that one. Also, her sight wasn’t very good and if the button fell she would probably never find it again. Sometimes she had the greatest difficulty in not stretching forward and
seizing hold of the button and tearing it off so that she could keep it and sew it on later in the summer months when he might shed the jacket. In the morning she would look for the button in case
it had fallen off in the bed at night. And sublimely indifferent to what was happening to him, her husband would continue in his sloppiness, making the silence untidy and incomplete. What could one
say about him except that he was insensitive, that he did not understand her feelings, that no matter how hard she looked at the button he didn’t seem to notice, that he didn’t
appreciate the importance of the button in the universe but carried on reading his newspaper? Of what importance was the newspaper in comparison with the button? It was like an aching tooth whose
pain could not be relieved. The world went by as an accident without speech but the button belonged to the past, it had a position in space, it demanded this position in space, it agonised and
throbbed in this position. It was more important to her than anything in the whole world. She watched it as she might watch a sick child, she thought about it sleeplessly all night as her husband
slept, or turned so extravagantly and thoughtlessly in his bed. She hung on the button as on the speech of a lover. No, it was no good, it would drive her mad.