The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  Little Mary, her soul strong like the fierce soul of winter, was happy. She had found a man to love. He had spurned her. What of it? So did the sea spurn in winter and caress in spring and love in summer. What of it? She sang as she milked her cow in the morning. She sang as she went to the village well for water. The peasant women noticed her joy and began to whisper among themselves and point fingers at her. ‘O wife of Red John,’ they would say to her, with mock anxiety and a vicious gleam in their eyes, ‘what kind of man is he who is lodging in your house?’ ‘They say he is mad from the wars; beware of him,’ whispered another. ‘How handsome he is! Does he talk to you nicely?’ whispered another. And they would all laugh. And Little Mary, careless of their chatter, would throw back her head and laugh, her throat swelling like the throat of a singing thrush. Her husband began to look fearfully at her and say to himself, ‘What has come to the woman? Eh, Red John, what has come to her?’

  To the Stranger those days were a torture. Afterwards they remained only as a blur on his memory, the blur that rises before the mind when the fumes of chloroform are sucked up the nostrils as if mountains were crowding up to crush one’s life, with loud awe-inspiring sounds. In the morning he would walk up and down the crag overlooking the Hill of Fate. His figure stooped. His head was thrust forward between his shoulders. His lips were compressed. There was a scowl on his face that terrified people who saw him. Often the small boys of the village peeped at him through the holes in the stone fence that runs parallel to the cliff. But their mothers would drive them away saying, ‘Lord have mercy on us. It’s a curse is on his soul. Father Shannon, may God be good to the poor man, was the same way after they unfrocked him.’

  Then another terrific night of storm came. A Norwegian barque was wrecked off the Head of Crom and all her crew were drowned. Sheep and goats were killed on the crags by the storm. The bleak morning saw the peasants of Rooruck quarrelling on the shore, up to their necks in the huge breakers, grabbing at the planks and spars of the wrecked ship. The Stranger watched them, horrified, watching the living looting the house of the dead. Then he strode eastward to the cliffs. The storm of the night still raged. The salt spray whirled past him, climbing the two hundred feet from the sea in one light leap. The thundering waves rolled beneath madly. They rolled gaily, advancing, retreating, rising and falling with the rhythm of an orchestra. He was seized with their madness. He walked up and down the cliff revelling in it. The sea and the wind were mad, and he felt that he too was mad with them. They were committing suicide in their madness. So would he. But as soon as the thought came it terrified him. When he looked down through the spray at the white foam on the dark heaving bellies of the sea, he thought they were grinning at him. And he fled back to the cabin.

  He locked himself in his room all the day, lying on the bed on his back looking at the ceiling. Little Mary called him to his midday meal, but he growled at her to leave him alone. Then when darkness began to fall he left the house and went into Derrane’s shebeen at the eastern end of the village. Derrane’s kitchen was empty that night. All the people were at the shore salving the wreck of the Norwegian ship. He sat in a corner by the fire drinking glass after glass of potheen. Derrane’s wife, an inquisitive, loose-tongued woman, tried to draw him into conversation, asking him what did he think of the women of Rooruck. He did not reply, but she kept on talking after the manner of women.

  At last she was saying, ‘And sure it’s the hand of God …’ when the Stranger flung his glass into the fire and jumped to his feet.

  ‘May the devil devour both you and God,’ he yelled, frothing with rage. The woman screamed, and he danced around the room shouting, ‘Yes, to hell with God. To hell with Him, I say. What do you know about the fool?’ Then he rushed out of the house and staggered up the boreen to Red John’s, shouting. Little Mary came running down to meet him and dragged him indoors.

  A group of women gathered outside the gate of Red John’s yard listening to the sounds of quarrelling that came from the house.

  ‘Lord save us, it’s murder,’ said one.

  ‘Let somebody go to the shore for the men,’ said another.

  Then Red John came rushing from the cabin, his forehead bleeding from a long cut that reached from the right eye to the right temple. The women shrieked and crowded about him.

  ‘What has come to you?’ they gasped.

  Red John stood for a few moments spluttering and waving his hands in the air.

  ‘Police, police,’ he yelled. ‘The son of misfortune came in blaspheming and I tried to send him from the house and the loose woman on whom I put a ring gave me this. Police, police.’ And he rushed away for his pony. He rode madly into Kilmurrage for the police, but passing the schoolmaster’s house he got afraid. He dismounted from his pony and let it wander home alone. Then he went across the crags to Branigan’s shebeen in Kilmillick. He spent the night there drinking. The first streaks of the grey dawn were beginning to light the crags about Rooruck when he crept into his cabin and sat by his bed, shivering. He could hear his wife crooning in the Stranger’s room, as if she were rocking a child.

  ‘Ho-wa, ho-wa my pulse, white love of my heart. Ho-wa, ho-wa, brilliant gem of gladness. Ho-wa.’

  He listened with open mouth.

  ‘Ha,’ he said fearfully, his hand on the white bandage that covered his wound, ‘he has put a spell on her. So he has.’ Hurriedly he put an oaten loaf in a cloth and left the cabin to look for wreckage.

  The Stranger slept through the day. It was his first refreshing sleep since he had come to Inverara. Little Mary moved noiselessly about the cabin. Now and again she stood at her cabin door and looked longingly out towards the mainland. She could see it distantly when the mist broke, scattered by the breezes that blew intermittently over the green sea. She would go into the darkened room where he lay and look at his face, gentle and childish in sleep. Once she bent down and caressed his hair and his forehead with her lips.

  The Stranger, sleeping, dreamt that a fairy had touched him. He kept dreaming a long time of beautiful women, with roses entwined in their black hair, kissing his lips. Then he awoke and saw only a peasant woman standing by his bed. The consciousness of his degradation swept back to him. He swallowed a cup of hot tea, dressed and went out. Night was falling in a thick mist that coloured everything pale blue. He felt a dryness in his throat.

  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I must get somebody to talk to. It’s awful being alone like this among yokels who only stare with open mouths when a man talks to them. I wish I hadn’t come here.’ But trudging along the wet road, the ends of his oilskin coat swishing damply against his legs, he shuddered as he thought of staying in Dublin ‘among so many people that don’t seem to care a damn.’ He could see that evening he went to Dr. McCarthy and said that he couldn’t sleep. ‘Hey, my boy, can’t sleep, eh?’ cried McCarthy, his fat stomach puffing in and out as he paced up and down the hearthrug. ‘You say you are working in the library. Like the work?’ ‘I hate it.’ ‘Any money left?’ ‘About two hundred.’ ‘Well, get to blazes out of Dublin then. Go out to the west and catch fish. Do you more good than cataloguing books. Out with ye, as quick as lightning.’ The tramcars sounded in his ears that evening as he rushed away from the doctor’s as loud as an artillery barrage. He hardly breathed peacefully until he left the Broadstone Station next morning. And now …

  ‘Damned if I’m going back again,’ he muttered. ‘Some day I’m going to throw myself down from that cliff and be done with it. By all the gods, I will. You see if I don’t.’

  Then he heard the sounds of music as he was approaching John Carmody’s public-house at the cross-roads above the beach at Coillnamhan. He stopped dead in the road and listened.

  Night had fallen. It was bitterly cold, but there was no wind. The wind was drowned by the wet fog, that came like a great blight from the mountains on the mainland to the north. He could dimly see the lights of the publichouse, a squat one-storied concrete building on a slope a little back from
the road. John Carmody had built it the year before. It looked as incongruous in the surroundings as the electric railways at Niagara Falls. And the sounds of wild music came through its windows. The music had a peculiar effect on the Stranger. Music of any kind always maddened him with a sad happy madness. It affected him in the bowels. He often cried with the sadness of the thoughts that it inspired within him. At other times it made him want to kill. Now as he listened to the rough twanging of the accordion he was wrapped in an ecstasy of sadness.

  He walked up a bypath to the house over trodden grass, avoiding the road, lest he should lose the sound of the music. He tripped over an empty barrel and fell against the door. The music stopped suddenly. Somebody jumped to his feet within and shouted, ‘God with you.’ Then the door opened and he entered the kitchen.

  The kitchen covered half the floor space of the house. To the right was a counter cut into the partition, and behind the partition was a room lined with shelves of black-brown bottles and green bottles. Several barrels were pushed back, their round heads over the counter. On the counter John Carmody was leaning smoking a pipe, while his wife wiped a pint mug behind him. Around the fire on the hearth and on wooden forms by the wall a number of peasants sat drinking and smoking. Two of them had been dancing when the Stranger entered. Another group had been listening to John Carmody discussing politics. For the good man, even though he was now nearing middle-age and had become, as he himself said, a ‘bourgeois’ (a word the peasants understood to mean ‘an enemy of God’), he still liked to preach Socialism when he was in a good humour and slightly intoxicated.

  ‘I’ll make you fellahs drink out of a trough,’ he would say, ‘if you don’t get busy and organize to socialize the land and industry, and do away with the priests.’

  And the people just thought that he was a harmless poor man and well-meaning.

  There was silence when the Stranger entered.

  ‘Who is that fellah?’ said John Carmody to a man who stood beside him.

  The man bent his mouth close to Carmody’s ear and whispered:

  ‘That’s Red John’s lodger. They say he’s gone in the head. We call him the Stranger.’

  ‘Go away, you galoot,’ said Carmody. ‘I heard about him. If you fellahs were as cracked as he is you wouldn’t be the bloody fools you are.’

  He coughed loudly, stepped into the kitchen, and advanced to the Stranger who was sitting on a form by the back door.

  ‘Say,’ he cried in a loud hearty voice, ‘I’m tickled to death to see a live man come into my house. Shake! Stranger. You must have a drink with me.’

  As soon as the peasants saw Carmody welcoming the Stranger, they looked at one another and whispered: ‘He must be all right after all.’

  For Mrs. Derrane had broadcasted the story of the night before, and with the quickness of peasants to believe harm of everybody, no matter how ridiculous the story might be, they all thought the Stranger possessed of a devil. The music started once more and a ragged fisherman with a dirty black beard got up to dance a hornpipe. He did a few whirls clumsily, but he was so drunk that he stumbled straight backwards trying to clap his hands under the crook of his left knee, and fell on his buttocks in a pot at the back door.

  ‘Oh, you God of all evil!’ he cried mournfully, amid a roar of laughter.

  The Stranger, sitting beside Carmody on the form, laughed as loudly as the rest. He felt a strange joy in the association of these people. They appeared to him to be real. He felt the joy that the bad young man feels when he returns to the tavern after spending an evening with genteel and boring society in the respectability of his home. And he felt drawn towards Carmody in particular. He drank the bad brandy that was offered to him, and somehow it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk. Carmody began to talk at a great pace about the United States, where he had spent ten years of his youth.

  ‘A great country. None o’yer goddam superstitions there.’

  The Stranger felt a sense of freedom creeping over him. The outspoken wanderer, Carmody was, he felt, an outcast from society like himself, at war with the world. He was a kindred spirit. ‘Ha, ha,’ he thought, it would be a great life to lounge around in Inverara, drinking and talking to Carmody, enjoying himself, abandoning himself, without any thought of the world outside, just living like a pig. It would be a revenge on the world. It would be far better than to kill himself. If he were dead he could not feel anything, whereas alive, his life would be a constant insult to civilization. Civilization? That cursed quagmire that sucked everything good into its bosom! That mirage that lures youth with promises that are never fulfilled! Sure. This was the ideal thing. To meet a few fellows like Carmody and drink with them and scoff at the world with them, laughing loudly to cheat the blackness in his soul. He would wear his body away until the damn thing fell to pieces. He would use up every ounce of it in wild debauch.

  He felt himself getting drunk, and was glad. It was the first time he felt the exhilaration of drunkenness since he had come to Inverara. The whisky he had drunk in the shebeen only stupefied him. The company prevented him from getting drunk. Talking to a man like Carmody he could get drunk. He seized Carmody’s hand. Carmody turned his long bronzed muscular face towards him.

  ‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said, ‘I’ve been dying for somebody to whom I could talk.’

  Carmody was about to reply when somebody stumbled against the barrel outside the door. There was a loud string of curses.

  ‘Another man fallen,’ shouted a peasant.

  ‘Blast ye, Michaeleen Grealish,’ shouted Carmody, ‘didn’t I tell ye to take away that - - - - barrel?’

  ‘Hey there, hey there,’ came the voice, ‘open the door. I can’t see my hand.’

  Somebody raised the latch and a man flopped into the kitchen with his left hand held out in front of him. He began to talk as soon as he was within the house and he kept talking. His voice rang out loud and clear. He kept gesticulating with both hands and throwing his head back with a twist, like a dog shaking a rat. He had taken his hat from his head and his bald forehead shone in the light. The lumps on the white skin around the temples stood out distinctly. His grey bushy eyebrows twitched. His cheeks were blood red, with narrow blue veins showing through them. His nose was long and straight. Its ridge was as sharp as a lean horse’s spine. He wore a bushy grey beard, shaven on both lips. His chin showed red through the beard, and it had a dimple in the centre. His blue eyes gleamed like the bright blue dust that shines in granite. His grey trousers hung close to his thin legs, showing the outward bend in the left leg below the knee. His black coat hung loose about his body.

  ‘Somebody wants to kill me,’ he cried, his blue eyes glaring all around him fiercely. Yet everybody laughed. Then the man opened his mouth too and laughed. He had only five teeth in his upper jaw, scattered at irregular intervals.

  ‘Say, you must excuse me, Mr. O’Daly,’ said Carmody, coming up to him. ‘I told that fool Michaeleen –’

  ‘That’s all right, my good man, that’s all right. Good evening,’ he said, seeing the Stranger, ‘I heard you were staying at Red John’s. I meant to go and see you. Come on, look alive there, Carmody, and bring a bottle into the parlour. Bring a glass for yourself.’

  ‘A bottle of that best brandy, Mary,’ shouted Carmody to his wife as he respectfully went in front to open the parlour door. He placed chairs in front of the parlour fire and asked his guests to seat themselves, hitching his American trousers about his waist and spitting on his hands like a waiter in a New York bowery lunch room. His huge stature loomed over the two middle-sized men like the figure of a Praetorian guardsman protecting a Caesar.

  ‘Let me introduce you–’ he began.

  ‘I always introduce myself,’ interrupted O’Daly, leaning back with his two feet crossed on the mantelpiece until his chair stood on its hind legs. ‘My name is Matthew O’Daly of Lisamuc, Co. Sligo.’

  He threw out his chest as he spoke and his eyes flashed. He made a gesture w
ith his left hand in front of his face and then rubbed it along his left shin as he turned to the Stranger, his eyes gleaming aggressively as if he were challenging the Stranger to doubt his identity. The wrist above his hand seemed to be made solely of a square flat bone, covered with white hairy skin. In fact, all his body seemed to be made of one flexible bone like a steel sword.

  The Stranger winced, and blinked his eyes under the unexpected stare. It was some time before he could get himself to give his own name. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was ashamed of his name, of his ancestry, that his father was an obscure schoolmaster, that he himself was a failure in life and a coward.

  ‘My name is Fergus O’Connor of Ashcragh,’ he said with an affected drawl.

  ‘Heh,’ said O’Daly. Then he made a noise at the back of his palate like a man urging on a horse.

  ‘I declare to Christ but you must be the son of John O’Connor the schoolmaster. Hell to my soul, that dog of a priest treated him badly. Shake hands.’

  Carmody’s face beamed at hearing O’Daly abuse a priest, and he hit himself a great blow in the chest and laughed until his teeth seemed about to fall out. He hated priests as enemies of ‘all people who can think intelligent.’

  ‘Drink up,’ he said, handing them glasses from the tray that had been brought in. ‘You two will drink on me to-night. It’s seldom that three men –’

  But O’Daly interrupted him again, and began to talk at a tremendous rate, denouncing the parish priest, the doctor, the district inspector of police, and all the people of note in Inverara, as scoundrels of the worst kind, inhuman rascals, low fellows, and men whose parentage was in doubt.