The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  ‘Since this new Government came into power, Carmody,’ he cried, ‘the country is gone to the dogs.’

  The Stranger drank his brandy and felt the blood rushing to his head. Suddenly he began to lose his grip of everything. He became defiant and aggressive. He joined in the conversation and began to boast on his own account, boasting of his past life, of which he had been mortally ashamed an hour ago. Carmody began to boast, but O’Daly boasted loudest of them all. None of the three would listen to the others. Only snatches of their conversation rose above the volume of sound, amid the clinking of glasses and the gurgling of the brandy from the bottle. It seemed that the three of them had spent all their lives fighting, drinking, and breaking women’s hearts. O’Daly spent more nights of his sixty years of life in his boots than out of them. He had drunk more whisky ‘than they make now in the distilleries.’ He had broken a man’s hand in two places with a simple twist of his wrist. He had been all over Ireland, and knew every bishop, politician, racehorse-owner and athlete. In other words, he knew every body whom anybody cares to be known to know in Ireland. Carmody was not behindhand. In fact, he had once stood, it seems, as a candidate for the American Congress in the Socialist interest. He was known all over the American continent as a crack shot, and he had more love affairs than he could count. The Stranger had been one of the most gifted and promising geniuses in Europe before the war, drink and women laid him low.

  Then they became slightly maudlin. The Stranger felt that he was enjoying himself as he had never done before. He kept laughing boisterously for no reason in the world. He felt sure that he would live happily for ever in Inverara in this society. Suddenly death appeared to him to be a menace that he must avoid.

  ‘Hey,’ he hiccupped, leaning over to O’Daly, ‘what do you think of the next world?’

  O’Daly made a noise again like a man urging on a horse.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘it’s only the young that can afford to waste their time thinking of the next world. As far as I know, this world is too short and it’s seldom Carmody offers us free brandy. Drink to life and damn the next world. Let’s have a song before we go.’

  Hot and foolish with drink they began to sing some ridiculous thing out of tune. Before the first verse was finished, each was singing a different song. Then Carmody suddenly dropped his head on the table and fell asleep. O’Daly shook him and tried to wake him. Carmody raised his head and stuttered:

  ‘Come in here every evening … talk about Karl Marx.’ Then he dropped asleep again.

  ‘Hell to my soul,’ said O’Daly, ‘who is this fellow Marx he’s always talking about? Must owe him some money. Tight-fisted fellows, these publicans, between the two of us. Come on up to my house and let him sleep.’

  The two of them got into O’Daly’s jaunting car that was waiting in the yard. The hardy mountain pony, careless of the freezing mist, had been contentedly chewing bad hay there for two or three hours. They drove up through the village at a walking pace. O’Daly explained that he had been into Kilmurrage to attend a meeting of the local court.

  ‘This new Government made me a magistrate,’ he shouted. Then he began again to denounce everybody, and the cruelty of bad fortune that had pursued him and his family for generations. He lashed the mare furiously as he spoke, but the mare’s hide was obviously as tough as his own, and she never changed her gait. ‘I have to live up here in a little cottage with my daughter and an old woman who looks after the place. She’s even too old to sleep with. And my daughter has to teach these brats in the school for a living. Everybody has to work for a living nowadays. The world is changed. So it is. I remember in my time … Begob, my daughter is a poor specimen of a woman compared to her mother. In my time they were as wild as the men, strong, hefty women. Ah well’ … And he went on to tell stories of his youth, and of the glory of his ancestors, stories which were for the most part lies, for the days when the O’Dalys of Lisamuc were people of importance were too distant to be remembered by anybody.

  The cold mist was scattering the exhilarating effect of the brandy from the Stranger’s mind. He began to be melancholic and dissatisfied again. He grew jealous of O’Daly’s strength, of his coolness and strong nerves.

  ‘Ah,’ he said to himself, ‘he has no intellect. That’s what it is.’ And he cursed God for having given himself a strong intellect until he remembered that there was no God and became still more depressed because he had nobody to blame for his sorrow. Then, in order to ease the pent-up volume of his sadness, he began to tell O’Daly his troubles, but O’Daly paid no attention to him. He continually interrupted with his own reminiscences.

  ‘You’re a young man,’ he would say, ‘and you don’t understand the world. Now, in my time, the young men feared nothing. Not even the devil in hell. Is it that measly war you’re talking about? Sure that was only a cockfight compared to what I’ve seen in my young days.’

  They reached O’Daly’s cottage. The Stranger, irritated because O’Daly would not pity him, wanted to go home immediately, but O’Daly would have none of it. He stood in the middle of the road, one hand holding the reins, the other hand grasping the Stranger’s shoulder.

  ‘See that house of mine,’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There’s a hovel for an O’Daly to live in! Hell to my soul, but the world is gone to the dogs. Listen to me’ – he panted loudly and wheezed –‘listen to me. The O’Malleys used to live here in the old days. And now where are they? Gone to hell. Gone and forgotten. There isn’t a trace of them. The last of them, devil take him, he had queer notions in his head, I hear; ran away to America with a slip of a flighty woman. And there you are. Wait there till I put the mare in the stable.’

  The Stranger stood leaning against the gate leading up to the cottage. He became ashamed of having been fond of life an hour before. He felt as a monk might feel after being seduced by a woman. Blackness gathered again around his soul. ‘I made a fool of myself,’ he muttered.

  The mist seemed to stick like icicles to his cheekbones. He wanted to run away, but he hadn’t the energy to make up his mind to do anything. His stomach became as hard as a ball. It robbed him of all energy. Weakness crept through the extremities of his hands and feet. Then O’Daly came along breathing loudly. The Stranger felt that he could kill the man for his very power to breathe so loudly.

  ‘Come on in,’ said O’Daly gruffly. ‘Make as little noise as ye can,’ he added. ‘I don’t want to wake Kathleen. The poor girl has to go to that damn school in the morning. The shame and disgrace of it is killing me.’

  They crept on tiptoe up the path and into the kitchen by the back door. O’Daly was staggering a little. He lit a candle and placed it on a table in the centre of the room. Then he got a bottle from somewhere and two empty cups without handles. They set to drinking again. O’Daly became maudlin, crying about the fallen fortunes of his family. The Stranger suddenly became afraid, afraid of O’Daly, afraid of the dark kitchen with the dim flickering candle standing in the centre of it like a warning of death, afraid of the dark silent night outside, with the sound of the sea coming from a distance. He drank hurriedly, but the drink seemed to evaporate impotently in his throat. It tasted like water. Strange shadows began to gather before his eyes. He started at every sound. He couldn’t see O’Daly, but he could hear his quavering voice. The sea rolling on to the beach at Coillnamhan reminded him of the ‘keene’ women at wakes over dead bodies. It was as if one heard a pot boiling a million miles away. And to the south against the cliffs it sounded like a great weight falling swiftly into a deep cavern. Then he jumped to his feet as he heard O’Daly snore.

  He listened for a full minute, breathing gently, perfectly motionless. In that minute he felt that he was a pure soul being judged by wicked demons. Then his mouth gaped as the picture of the night he was buried by a shell in France flashed before his mind. A cormorant called dismally passing over the house. He listened to the swishing wings. Then his right knee began to tremble. His left foot began
to tap the ground. He bent down carefully to hold it steady.

  ‘Hold on there,’ he muttered, trying to laugh.

  Then his whole body trembled. Beads of cold sweat poured out through his forehead and neck. With an oath he shot out his hands and made for the door. He felt sure that he would be dead before he reached the open air. The round ball in his stomach was stifling him.

  The night air revived him. He laughed at his fears. He straightened himself when he got into the road and said, ‘Pooh, I’m all right.’ But at that moment the wind rose suddenly. A squall came from the south over the crags. It came with a swoop. He gasped and his eyeballs started. As he ran headlong forward, fantastic visions crowded into his mind. He saw millions of dying men, worlds falling to pieces, continents being hurled into the air, while he himself wandered among the chaos, the only living atom in the wrecked universe. He ran faster, trying to escape the vision, but they pursued him, crowding on one another, cries of the wounded, shrieks of the damned, corpses piled mountain-high, races wandering across deserts, chasms opening everywhere, devils grinning, wild animals with gory jaws rushing hither and thither in dark forests, myriads of men talking in strange languages, gesticulating, shouting furiously, the wails of women, the bodies of children transfixed on spears. Over all came the noise of the guns, millions of guns, rising and falling and intermingling. Their sound was like a millrace. It made beautiful music that enthralled him and made him want to kill. Then the music died and dread spectres returned. They were bare grinning skulls now and fetid smells. His body was rising into space and flying away, headed for the moon. But there was a great weight tied to the stomach that held it back. His brain began to expand. It covered the earth and then the universe, and then it burst, hurting his forehead.

  He had fallen against the door of Red John’s cabin. He was unconscious when Little Mary threw herself on his neck. Folly, folly, folly, what is folly?

  2

  At Rooruck winter sleeps in its depths. But it’s a troubled sleep, sad, weary, and full of nightmares. It is the sleep of a wanton who is hiding from the wreckage she has caused.

  After a month of storm and fury, the sea lay frothing about the Hill of Fate, licking its grey base as a lion licks his wounds. It stretched out for leagues white with foam, coloured here and there with wreckage and masses of straying seaweed, with planks, weeds, and dead bodies of birds. Strewn amid the rocks to the north, along the shore at Rooruck, where the cliff fell away into a long uneven battlement of huge boulders, there was more wreckage. It was said that three mangled corpses were seen tangled among the rocks at Firbolg’s Point. Sean Mor, who saw them, fled in fear, and when the villagers came they were washed away again by the tide. Farther north again, just south of the point where the waters of the north and south joined to travel eastwards, where the swift current seemed to suck the waves downwards to some cavern in the depths, three horses lay on a rock, lying on their sides, their stiff legs extended hairlessly, their bellies expanded, their nostrils full of sand.

  The people feared the resting bilious sea as a soldier fears the silence of the guns in an interval between two engagements. When it raged, churned by the wind, it showed its might, but now the huge claws of its breakers were hidden in its frothing back. And they might shoot forth any moment. The sea might rise suddenly far away to the west and come towering in, each forked wave-crest a magnet that drew the sea before it into its hollow breast, until the Giants’ Reef lay bared for a mile and the slimy insects clinging to its back stared gasping at the awe-inspiring sky, before the retreating sea again enveloped them in accustomed darkness. For the battle is not as fearsome as the waiting for it, nor is the sword as terrible as the fire in the eye that guides it. So the peasants feared the sea, and fearing it blessed it as their generous mother, who wrecked ships afar off to give them planks and barrels of oil and manila ropes and bales of cotton. They prowled about the shores and among the boulders beneath the Hill of Fate looking for wreckage.

  By day the sun shone fitfully on Rooruck, coming laggardly over the high cliff of Coillnamhan Fort. Its shadows glistened through the mist and through the clouds that pursued it. By night the hoar-frost covered the earth, eating into the gashes that the wind had made. Wild starry nights were those nights in Inverara. Boys sat by their windows, shivering in their shirts, afraid to sleep because of the strange noises of falling seas that came from the Fountain Hole, where the mermaids were said to weep for lost lovers as they combed their long golden hair, dipping the combs in the black brine that dripped from the roof of their cave into the Purple Pool beneath. Wild starry nights, when men dream of death and stillness, as they watch the shivering moon fleeing through the scratched sky. Death, death, death, and drear winds blowing around frozen dead hearts, that once throbbed with love. Inverara in winter is the island of death, the island of defeated peoples, come thither through the ages over the sea pursued by their enemies. Their children sit on the cliffs dreaming of the past of their fathers, dreaming of the sea, the wind, the moon, the stars, the scattered remnants of an army, the remains of a feast eaten by dogs, the shattering of a maniac’s ambition.

  The Stranger, lying on his bed in Red John’s cabin, was near to death. He had fallen into Little Mary’s arms when she opened the door, roused by the noise of his fall against it.

  ‘Ah, Mother of Christ,’ she gasped once, seeing his white face with the hair streaming over it, soddened by the rain, as if he were dead. She thought he was dead. She raised him in her strong arms like a child and ran with him to his room, panting. Throwing him on the bed she ran her hands wildly over his body, searching for life in him. And then when she felt his heart beating she raised her hands to heaven and thanked God and wept with joy. She put him to bed and chafed his limbs with turpentine. Then she rolled the blankets about him and sat with her arm under his head, watching until he should regain consciousness.

  Dawn had just broken. Red John got up and came into the kitchen in his bare feet.

  ‘Where is that – ‘ he began when he saw his wife through the open door of the Stranger’s room, her arms around the Stranger’s neck, her cheek to his lips. His small eyes narrowed and he clenched his hands. He moved stealthily to the door and looking in grinned viciously. ‘Ha, now I have you, adulteress,’ he hissed. But when she looked up at him he crept back terrified. There was no fear or shame or anger in her look. There was a sadness in her eyes, a distant look of sadness, as if she were no longer conscious of her relationship with him as a wife, as if his memory had died and been forgotten in her fear for her lover who was ill.

  Red John shut the door and held on to the latch with his two hands to keep away from the look in her eyes. His superstitious mind thought she had gone mad or had been ‘taken by the fairies,’ just as Sarah Halloran had some years before. A sea-serpent had leered at her as she was washing bags in a pool beneath the Hill of Fate, and ever afterwards she sat there all day watching the spot where the serpent disappeared, until one day, tearing her hair, she threw herself headlong from the cliff. So they believed in Rooruck, for who could not believe in magic by that drear sea in winter, listening to its moaning at night?

  Red John ran to the hearth as he heard his wife come to the door.

  ‘Get the doctor, Red John,’ she said.

  Her voice was as gentle as the voice of a mother talking to her first-born. It was the first time he had heard her speak gently to him since they were married. Then she went back again to the Stranger without waiting for his reply. She felt a power within her that would make an army obey her command.

  Red John stood by the hearth in his shirt, barefooted, scratching his thigh. He was struggling with two impulses, fear and jealousy: fear of the look he had seen in her eyes, and mad jealousy of her sitting with her arms around the Stranger’s neck and her cheek to his lips.

  ‘Let the bastard die,’ he mumbled.

  But again the memory of Sarah Halloran came to his mind and the ghost he himself had seen at the Monks’ Well comin
g one night from Kilmurrage. He sat by the fire hugging his armpits, and became so much afraid of his wife being enchanted that he was unable to do anything. He didn’t even hear her come rushing at him from the room until her hand was entwined in his hair and she hissed in his ear:

  ‘Get the doctor quickly, or I will brain you.’

  ‘Don’t strike, woman,’ he whined. ‘I’m going.’

  She watched while he dressed and left the cabin to get his pony. Soon he was riding down the rocky boreen through the village on to the road to Kilmurrage, waving the ends of the halter around his head and yelling to the mare like a madman. Little Mary stood at the door listening to the dying rattle of the horse’s hoofs and she shuddered.

  ‘Oh, cruel God, don’t take him from me,’ she cried, clasping her throat.

  The sound of racing hoofs suggested to her her lover’s death. That sound is the harbinger of death in Inverara in winter, heard at dawn or in the dead of night, when the sea is always devouring some one or shattering their limbs, and horses gallop in haste into Kilmurrage with froth on their flanks, hurrying for the doctor and the priest. Women rush to their windows in their shifts and whisper, ‘Lord between us and all harm, who is it has been drowned or who is hurt?’

  Then she shut the door and went on tiptoe to the Stranger’s bed, looking about her as if she were going to commit a shameful crime. She took a charm from her breast. Her mother had given it to her on her marriage day. It had been in her mother’s family for countless generations. Her ancestry on the mother’s side had all given their love freely and were superstitious, like all women who ask nothing of the world and are scorned for so doing. She laid the charm on the bed. She filled a cup with water and laid it on a chair beside the bed. Then she pressed the charm to her heart and kissed it. It was a square flat piece of yellowish stone covered with inscriptions, supposed to be written in Ogham Craombh, the old Druidic writing. Her mother had told her that the charm itself had originally been given to a Firbolg princess as the price of her love by a Tuatha De Danaan warrior, and that it had power to save its owner’s lover from death or the designs of the devil. And who knows? One thing is as certain as another and nothing is reasonable. All men and women fashion their own gods, and they are all omnipotent.