The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  Three times she dipped the stone in the water and three times she pressed it to the Stranger’s lips, praying to Crom. And strangely enough, after the third pressure he stirred, then turned on his side and opened his eyes. She hastily hid the stone in the little embroidered packet that hung between her breasts, suspended by a silk string. As she buttoned her bodice she turned to him and smiled. He smiled too, fleetingly, as if he had been dreaming. Then the smile died quickly, like a gleam of sunshine followed by rain on a wet day in spring. He started. His limbs quivered, and he clutched at the clothes.

  ‘What noise is that I hear?’ he cried with a wild look in his eyes.

  ‘It is nothing,’ said Little Mary, ‘but the high tide beating on the Jagged Rock. Perhaps it is the noises of your dreams you hear.’

  ‘The noises of my dreams? What do you mean? What happened to me?’

  She began to tell him. Her voice had a ringing sweet sound totally different to her usual voice when talking to Red John. The resonance of each word seemed to stand in the air for a moment after she had spoken the word. So it seemed to the Stranger. He listened to that after-sound without hearing the words she was uttering. His imagination, strained by the fit that was upon him, thought that she was a spirit.

  ‘Ha,’ he said to himself, ‘I don’t believe in spirits.’

  Then suddenly he felt a queer sensation in his head, as if something were going to snap within the roof of his skull, just inside. He sat up in bed and strained out his hands to the full extent of his arms. He was afraid something was going to happen. He did not know what. Death? The thought came suddenly and he screamed with fright.

  ‘What is it?’ cried Little Mary, her face white with fear.

  She rushed to his side, clutched him about the waist, and put her face up to his. He clutched her in turn, but his eyes wandered over her body without seeing her. The vision of death was before his eyes. He could see his own corpse lying stiff and naked. He was waiting for that thing to snap within his skull. Where would he go then? What was there beyond? He had mocked death. He had told himself that he was eager to end the misery of existence. Death, death, yes death, but not like this. Like what then? With his boots on? In battle? But his memory, clear and scornful in that dread moment of waiting, taunted him with the fact that he had feared it just as much in battle. He had trembled with fear when the shells burst near him, and at night when he heard the dull sound of tunnelling under his feet. Christ! where was his philosophy?

  ‘Little Mary,’ he moaned, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  As he uttered the words ‘to die’ his voice rose almost to a shriek, as if he were afraid even to hear himself talk of death.

  ‘You will not die,’ she said calmly. But she clung to him more closely, for she too was afraid. She was not afraid of death, but of life without her lover. Her strong healthy body could not imagine death.

  ‘No, I will not die,’ he said, but even as he said it, he felt more afraid. The fright spread all over his limbs as if he had conscious nerve-centres everywhere. The soles of his feet itched. His feet and shins felt as if needles were being thrust rapidly into them. He thought his heart was going to burst. Then his lungs were expanding. Then his throat swelled. Then his eyes commenced to move straight forward from his head. Then there was a complete stoppage of all his organs. His body went rigid. There was a tense moment of waiting, wondering when it would happen, his death. But just when he reached that point his reason began to work again. It began to work like a clock that stops mysteriously for a moment in the stillness of the night and begins to work again of its own accord. Thought flashed across his mind, cool and cunning. It mocked his fear. ‘Bah,’ he said with a laugh, ‘what was I talking about? Get me a drink!’

  While she was away for the drink, he lay on his back thinking. His reason kept tormenting him. ‘There you are,’ it said. ‘You wanted to die, but now that death threatens you, you are afraid to die.’ He tried to deny that. His vanity said that he did not fear death itself, but the uncertainty of what came after it, that he hated to die because he had not done any of the things he might have done. ‘With my ability I could have done … oh damn it.’ Again he began to reason out what would happen to him if that thing did snap in his brain and he died. By the time Little Mary came back with the drink he had forgotten about himself altogether and was debating whether the Monistic conception of the Universe were the correct one. He had just decided that ‘that idea,’ he did not know very clearly what it was, was far more terrible than complete annihilation, when Little Mary put her hand under his head and held a drink to his lips.

  ‘Drink this,’ she said.

  He gulped down the hot milk and then suddenly he felt grateful to her. He became clearly conscious of her presence beside him and it gave him a peculiar sense of cleanliness. It was the first awakening of his clean youth in him, of the Fergus O’Connor who lived a clean life before his father’s death turned him towards cynicism and debauchery. He had always been that way, a prey to impulses. He could contemplate with equanimity the destruction of a race, and yet he would remember the generosity of a tramp and to hurt a fly caused him physical pain.

  He looked up at her and touched her hand. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. His throat went dry and he flushed. He saw her beauty as a pure thing, too, for the first time. It made him feel ashamed of himself, her beauty. He let go her hand hurriedly.

  While he held her hand Little Mary blushed deeply. Until then she had been as cool and collected as a hospital nurse. But the pressure of his hand sent a warm thrill through her body. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes. The fierceness of passion that filled her while he was unconscious of her presence left her. As soon as he noticed her with even a glance of the eye and a pressure of the hand her womanly instincts forced her to shrink from him, blushing. She retired to the chair at the head of the bed and sat down; her hands trembled as she fastened the neck of her bodice she had left undone when she hurriedly put back the charm. Her face shivered spasmodically as if she were swallowing something indescribably sweet.

  They waited in silence until the doctor came. Shy even to think of him now, she listened in rapt attention to the noise of the water dripping into the barrel placed at the gable, to catch the water that dripped from the roof. He lay thinking of many things. His weary brain stared at this new sensation, so different to any he had felt before, this sensation of being purified by the presence of a beautiful woman, of being cared for, of being protected spiritually. Like wild nature outside, lying bare in its winter sleep, his soul rested. So they waited, resting, he, she and nature, as if they were waiting in silence together for the beginning of life.

  The noise of horse’s hoofs came to them from the lane. The sounds were uneven as of a horse ridden by an unskilled rider. Then loud shouting was heard and Little Mary ran out. The pony was standing at the door. He was champing at the bit and kicking his belly with his right hind leg, for never in his life before had a saddle touched his back or a bit been in his mouth. In Inverara it was considered unmanly to use anything on a horse but a rope halter, and a rough blanket to protect the crutch from the horse’s spine. The new doctor sat on the pony’s back, Dr. Cassidy’s successor (Dr. Cassidy had been forced to retire in his eightieth year because of a petition being lodged with the County Council by the islanders). The new doctor was from Dublin. He considered himself an important person and therefore always insisted on riding a saddled horse to visit a patient. Being too mean to buy a horse and feed it, he bought a cheap saddle and reins instead and compelled the islanders to bring him their horses for his use. He sat on the pony’s back, a white muffler wound many times around his neck, in brand-new russet riding-breeches and gaiters like an English sportsman in a film picture. He wore a hard bowler hat perched on his square head. The trimmest of clipped moustaches covered his upper lip. He cracked his whip timorously, taking care not to touch the mare with it. He sat there waiting, either because he was unable to dismount withou
t assistance or because he considered it proper for a gentleman to wait until somebody held the stirrup. They called him Dr. Aloysius Rogan at the post office and on Government papers, but the peasants called him ‘the Son of the Potman,’ because they said his father kept a public-house in the Dublin slums.

  Little Mary helped him to dismount. He leaned against her more heavily than was necessary. In his own estimation he was ‘a devil among the girls,’ and he had ‘his eye on Little Mary’ for a long time. A group of peasants that had rushed out of their cabins as soon as the arrival of the doctor was reported by a dirty boy who had been digging for a rat in the fence beside the road, gathered around Red John’s Gate, spitting from their throats needlessly and rubbing the backs of their hands across their mouths. The doctor paused a moment to inquire the name of the village, although he knew it quite well, and then entered the cabin. The peasants leaned over the fence and passed disparaging remarks on the doctor, the saddle, and on Red John for not tightening his mare’s hind shoes.

  ‘Does he think a horse is a donkey, the son of a lame monk?’ said one.

  ‘Who the devil is sick, God forgive us?’ said another.

  ‘It’s the Stranger, and no wonder God would stiffen his blasphemous tongue,’ said another.

  ‘No, no, curly Stephen,’ said another, ‘sure it’s the war has stricken the poor man. He bought me a drink the other night. He is good-natured and God-fearing.’

  ‘Begob,’ said a large-eared man with a coarse laugh, ‘I thought it was how Red John had brought his boat into port at last,’ meaning that he thought Red John was about to become the father of a family. They all laughed.

  The doctor stood for fully a minute in the kitchen taking off his gloves. He smelt the walls all round like an excise officer smelling for illicit whisky. He handed his gloves to Little Mary and looked at her deeply as she took them. Then the Stranger’s voice came from the room harshly.

  ‘Who the devil is that, Little Mary?’ he cried.

  The doctor arched his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. He went to the door of the Stranger’s room and thrust in his head and right foot like a man going to visit a prize sow in a pigsty. He saw the Stranger lying on the bed, the long pale hands lying over the coverlet, the black eyes gleaming, looking fiercely at him, the brown beard giving the face the expression of a beachcomber. He shrugged his shoulders again and advanced into the room. His face was set in an expression that he had studied in the Dublin hospitals when he realized that his abilities would never allow him to aim any higher than a practice among peasants or in the slums. It was a disdainful, condescending expression.

  ‘Well, my man,’ he said, ‘how do you feel?’ Then without waiting for an answer he turned to Little Mary and said, ‘Does the sea ever come down as far as this from the beach? What did you say the village was called? Ro-ro-rooy, oh! Funny name.’ Then immediately he forgot Little Mary and his question, began to whistle ‘Over the waves,’ took from his shoulders the shooting-bag that held his instruments and began to open it on the table. Little Mary stared at him with a brooding expression in her eyes, as if he were a dangerous animal. The Stranger turned on his side and glared at him. He was fuming inwardly against ‘this impertinent fellow,’ but he was afraid to say anything. He was more afraid of death than he was insulted by the attitude of the doctor. Would the doctor be able to assist him? Would he be able to cure that catching in the chest, when the heart beat too quickly? Would he be able to stop the trembling of the limbs when fear struck him? Would he be able to dispel the visions from the brain? He was ashamed too of the position in which the doctor found him, lying in the cabin of a peasant. He struggled between shame and fear and hope and anger on the bed, until at last the doctor approached him with a stethoscope. Then he felt a desire to jump up and strangle the doctor, in order to rid himself of this complex tangle of emotions by some sudden physical act. But that impulse vanished immediately. He felt a kind of careless resignation, much the same as the soldier feels when he is being court-martialled and he knows that no effort of will or of body or no strength of evidence will have any effect on the stupidity of his judges or on the mighty machine that they control.

  The doctor sounded his chest and back. He tapped his knees. He put his hand before his eyes, ordering him to look at a point on the wall in a voice one would use talking to a stone man. He looked at his tongue and put a lens down his jaws and peered at it. He tapped the teeth casually with the lens. He pressed his finger against the cheekbones and watched the blood crawling back over the whitened space. He felt the pulse and whistled like an engine thudding and tapped his foot in time with the tune as he took the count. He felt his loins and asked him did he ever have venereal disease. Then he threw the clothes back over the body with a sigh, went to the table and laid down his instruments. The Stranger lay trembling, resignedly accepting all this contumely in his fear of death. He stopped breathing, waiting for the doctor’s verdict.

  ‘Nothing the matter with you that I can see,’ said the doctor, lighting a cigarette. ‘Been drinking too much and you are suffering from acute indigestion. Just come back from the United States? A relative of these people?’ He waved the match in Little Mary’s direction.

  The Stranger, having discovered that there was no danger of immediate death and that his fears were all fantasies, now boiled with rage against ‘this lout of a fellow.’ He grew choleric. His lips twitched and his nostrils curved upwards like a dog going to snarl. But he could say nothing. Still the doctor was absolutely unmoved.

  ‘Sorry, my man,’ he said. ‘One gets irritable in a place like this. That sea must be lonely at nights. Dreadful place. Wonder the Government doesn’t … Ah yes, this will be … yes, h’m … Let’s say ten shillings. I’ll send you a bottle. A spoonful three times a day. The – er – your husband, I believe, my good woman, will – er – take it over to you. And by crikey, I’d advise you to stop drinking.’

  ‘Get me my purse,’ said the Stranger to Little Mary. ‘You’ll find it in the portmanteau there. There, there, that black one. Quick.’ He snapped his fingers, eager to pay the doctor and get him out of the room before he should lose control of himself and strangle him. ‘The ass,’ he muttered to himself, sitting up in bed, twitching his toes and gripping the blanket with his hands, waiting for his purse. ‘To think that I must be insulted by a fellow like that. Great Scott, is this the way they treat everybody? Great Christ, if I could only beat his face into a pulp.’ He took a ten-shilling note from his purse with trembling hands and threw it to the doctor without speaking. The doctor caught it deftly between his fingers as it fluttered to the floor. He carelessly packed his bag, slung it on his shoulder, said ‘Good morning, you’ll be all right in a few days,’ and left the room, followed by Little Mary.

  The Stranger lay on the bed without moving, with the notecase in his hands. He suddenly took out the notes and counted them. As he was not going to die, he had an interest in his material wealth, and he put his hand to his chin.

  ‘Wait now,’ he mused; ‘I have paid for a year’s board and lodging to Red John. Good job I did that. I’m safe for a year. And let me see: twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, forty-five, fifty, fifty-three pounds … ten and there are a few shillings in my trousers pockets.’ He put the notes back and gripped the purse between his fingers. He must look after that money. Life was sweet after all. It would be all right living in Rooruck … away from the world. Just living without any effort. God knows what he might not discover about life sitting up there on the Hill of Fate. ‘Say, supposing I was sent here by fate to discover something wonderful!’ He became enthusiastic.

  Then Little Mary came in and he handed her the purse. She was smiling, glad that he was not seriously ill. The white streaks in her grey eyes were shining brightly as she smiled.

  ‘Thank God, you’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘He told me to get you a drop of brandy for the pain in your stomach. He said it was wind. I’ll run down to Derrane’s and see have they got any.
’

  ‘Don’t be long away, Mary,’ he called after her as she went. He was afraid of being alone. As soon as she had left the house he became worried again. His enthusiasm vanished. He suspected that the doctor had told him a lie. What did the doctor care? He recalled stories he had heard of doctors letting people die without making the least effort to save them. He felt that he was deserted by the world, that nobody cared whether he lived or died, that he was unable to help himself, that there was nobody bound to him by ties of blood. He heard the sea rumble. He felt a morose satisfaction in the thought that it was licking its jaws, preparing to devour him. Then the thought came to him that he would die at night, alone in his room. The wind would sing a cunning hissing song, trying to calm his fears so that the sea would crawl up unawares and devour him. Then all those black cormorants that he had seen on the jagged Reef would strain out their twisted long necks and tear pieces from his carcass. They would swallow the pieces without chewing them and tear again. Then he discovered himself counting the number of cormorants that were tearing at his body and he tried to shout. But he was too agitated to shout. He crept down under the blankets and commenced to cry. He felt sorry that he couldn’t pray to God without losing his self-respect. It would be such a comfort to throw himself on the mercy of some Being that was stronger than nature. There was no use appealing to nature. Nature was too strong and just to be influenced by prayer. Then he remembered Little Mary. ‘Great God,’ he murmured, ‘that woman is good to me.’ Then to hide from himself the fact that he wanted her near him because he was ill and helpless, he told himself that he was very fond of her and he became jealous of her husband.