The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  ‘Absolutely,’ said the Stranger, swallowing his whisky. ‘I quite agree with you,’ he repeated with gusto, though an hour before he had told himself exactly the opposite. ‘I feel as if I never wanted to leave Rooruck again.’

  ‘Proper order,’ said O’Daly, and he swallowed another glass. ‘By God, this talk about pure ideals gives me the colic. None o’ that in my time. Fellahs’d be ashamed to talk like that. May the devil swallow them and their ideals. Begob, yer a poor drinker. Hold yer glass over here. Woa, I’m spilling it, “the precious fluid,” as old Father Mulligan used to say, God rest his soul.’

  Now and again a subdued laugh came to them from the sitting-room as they drank. O’Daly, already half-drunk, had forgotten all about the party in the sitting-room, but the Stranger listened to every sound eagerly. It was as if he was eavesdropping on the civilized life that he once knew. He had forgotten about his pretended love for Kathleen. She again took her proper position in his mind, merely as a symbol of the life after which he hankered. And as usual, when he was listening to the voice of civilization, he told himself that he didn’t want it. In fact, he pitied O’Daly, who was forced to live in such surroundings, and he kept drinking eagerly. Then the guests went away.

  Kathleen came into the kitchen looking for her father. She was about to begin to scold him when she saw the Stranger and she stopped short.

  ‘Hallo! my treasure,’ said O’Daly, ‘ye got-eh-rid of them at last.’

  Kathleen stared at the two of them blinking with drunkenness, and then she turned on her heel and went out.

  ‘Huh!’ said O’Daly. Then he laughed and fell asleep in his chair.

  The Stranger jumped to his feet and ran into the hall, shouting, ‘Miss O’Daly, Miss O’Daly.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said sharply, coming up to him in the hall.

  Under the influence of the whisky he felt quite brave and gallant.

  ‘I hope I have done nothing to irritate you,’ he said; ‘I can assure you that –’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ she said coldly; ‘I don’t like to see men make beasts of themselves in my presence. Good night,’ and she walked into the sitting-room.

  ‘Oh, good Lord, what a razor tongue!’ he murmured, going down the road. ‘Now I see what she’s like. My word, wasn’t I lucky to have found her out. I bet Little Mary is as bad. But they won’t catch me. I’m going to live my life freely.’ Then he felt sure that all the women in the world were engaged in a conspiracy to trap him. He thrust out his chest and drew deep breaths and swung his arms, very proud of himself. He felt his muscles as he walked along and patted his thighs. His body was strong and supple after the wind of spring, good food and healthy living. His bodily strength made him feel independent and selfish. But on the top of these discoveries he suddenly felt a desire for Kathleen and he stopped in the road, vexed with himself.

  ‘I’m becoming coarse,’ he muttered disgustedly. ‘After all, my only hope is to be faithful to Little Mary if I want to keep straight.’ He was passing the Monks’ Well, where all the ghosts were seen. A stream ran across the road. They said that if a sinner stepped in the stream that the devils would devour him immediately. He stopped, looking at the dark rivulet. ‘Wait now,’ he said, ‘I’ll see whether I’m a sinner or not,’ and he waded through it. Nothing happened, and he walked on quite cheered.

  The guests were returning home noisily from Bartly’s wedding as he passed through Rooruck. Men were singing songs and quarrelling. He vaulted over the fence into Red John’s yard, and then he heard screams coming from the cabin. He stood still, looking at the curtained kitchen window where a candle was flickering. Then he heard Red John yell and a banging sound followed the yell, as of something being hurled against the door. Then Little Mary’s shriek reached him. He rushed to the door and tried to open it. It was bolted on the inside.

  ‘Hey there, hey there, open the door,’ he shouted.

  There was a moment’s silence and then Little Mary screamed ‘Help, help!’

  He thrust his shoulder against the door. The wooden bolt smashed, the door swung open with a bang and he stumbled into the kitchen.

  For a few moments he was dazed by the light and the excitement. Then he saw Red John standing near the fire, clothed only in his trousers and a strip of his woollen shirt on his right shoulder. There was froth on his red beard. He grinned savagely and gripped a tongs in his left hand. Little Mary was crouching in the corner by the back door, barefooted, with a red frieze petticoat thrown over her shift about her shoulders. Her teeth chattered with fright and shame.

  Red John had come back from the wedding mad with whisky, and had attempted to embrace her. He sat by the fire mumbling that he would no longer let her treat him like a dog, trying to screw up his courage to take her. At one moment he feared her strength. At the next moment he forgot everything in his passion. Then he went into her room. She was asleep. He rushed to the bed and seized her. She jumped up with a scream and clawed at him. He drew back snarling. But when she saw his face, her strength and courage deserted her. Catching up her petticoat she fled into the kitchen. Seeing that she was afraid of him he pursued her and caught her in his arms as she was entering the Stranger’s room. They struggled. She tore at his clothes and beard, while he tried to embrace her, growling like a dog. Then she broke from him and he fell on his back on the floor. She crouched at the back door, unable to escape in her terror. He got to his feet and hurled a sod of turf at her. Then he had grabbed the tongs from the hearth, when the Stranger came to the door.

  The Stranger and he looked at one another in silence. They both trembled with passion, yet each feared the other. The Stranger felt that he was guilty of having stolen Red John’s wife, and on the other hand felt that he must defend Little Mary. Red John was afraid that he had committed a crime by assaulting his wife, and yet he was enraged against the Stranger, whom he suspected of having seduced her. So they stood facing one another, each afraid to attack. They each tried to terrify the other. They curled up their lips. They expanded their chests and clenched their fists. They stepped about the floor threatening one another with their heads. Then the Stranger suddenly realized that the situation was ludicrous. He told himself that he was afraid of Red John and that he was in the wrong. Red John saw him hesitate and rushed at him. Then the Stranger forgot his reasoning, and shot out his hands to preserve himself. He was just in time to prevent the tongs from smashing his skull. Then he closed with Red John. Their faces were close together as they strained against each other. Then Red John thrust his head forward and tried to grip the Stranger’s throat with his teeth. He missed the throat and tore at the coat lapel. Letting go his hands from the Stranger’s waist he gripped at the throat like a dog. Then the Stranger, terrified into an equal fury, swung out blindly with both hands at Red John’s head. Red John began to scream with pain. Gradually he let go his hold and then tried to stagger away. Another blow sent him down to the floor in a heap. ‘Let me alone, let me alone,’ he gasped, ‘don’t kill me, I didn’t mean any-uh-harm to anybody.’ And the Stranger, feeling disgusted with himself for having hurt the poor fellow after stealing his wife, staggered to a stool in the hearth corner, and hiding his face in his hands he wept.

  He fell into a kind of thoughtless stupor. He heard Little Mary put Red John to bed. Red John was still whining ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone, I’m not hurting anybody.’ Then he felt Little Mary’s arms about his waist and her lips to his cheek. ‘My darling,’ she kept saying, as she pressed him to her bosom.

  Summer

  1

  Inverara lay in the bosom of the sea, like a maiden sleeping in the arms of her lover. As the sun rose each morning, the night mists rolled away before it to the West in pale blue columns. They rolled up the steep slope of Coillnamhan Fort, and then banked along the high ridge that runs athwart Inverara from south to north between Rooruck and Coillnamhan. They lay there at dawn, a pale blue wall dividing the east from the west. Then the sun rose clear above th
e Head of Crom, and they vanished into space as it shone through them.

  A million rays then danced on every crag. The tall clover grass in the fields beneath the crags sparkled, each blade an emerald. The roof of the old church at Coillnamhan could be seen for miles, a pool of light lit up by the sun. The trees behind O’Daly’s cottage were in bloom, an oasis in a treeless desert. Each tilled field was big with crops. The dark green potato stalks were covered with pink and white and red blossoms, and tall poppies and sunflowers waved above the stalks, scattered here and there like soldiers on sentry. Each glen along the south of Inverara was a flower garden. Sheltered by the ivy-covered hills where the sparrows chirped, the valleys were covered with pure simple little flowers, primroses, bluebells, daisies and buttercups. On the cliff-tops over the sea, where the salt air smelt like an elixir from a fairy-land, other flowers grew, whose names nobody knew. They were tender little flowers; they grew in a night and died in a day. They were as delicate to the touch as a butterfly’s wing, and as multi-coloured as a rockbird’s egg. Down in the crevices among the crags, where the wind never came and where the sun was only reflected by slanting dim shadows, the maidenhair ferns grew from the black earth. Their roots were moistened by water from the very heart of Inverara. Their green heads stood silent and beautiful like living poems.

  All over Inverara the air was heavy with sweet smells. The wind, making slow sensuous music as it drifted slowly in from the calm sea, mixed all the smells together. It blew so tenderly that the bluebells hardly waved their heads under its caress.

  Around Inverara the sea lay calm and vast like a great thought. The waves rolled slowly in on the sands at Coillnamhan. They rolled sleepily, playfully making deep channels in the sand. Then they crept back again, murmuring, ‘Summer, summer, summer.’ There was not one speck of seaweed along the whole stretch of sand. It was clean and spotlessly white, like the seagulls that strutted about it, with their heads stuck low on their shoulders, or scratching their breasts with their beaks. The sea stretched around Inverara, its back silvered by the sun, the waves so small that they seemed to be strokes drawn by a child’s finger. Beneath the cliffs on the south there was never a wave at all. The sea there was a mirror reflecting the colours of the cliffs, yellow and black and grey. Round rocks stuck from its bosom near the cliffs, and shoals of birds scurried around in it, teaching their young how to catch fish.

  The sweet languorous odour of summer permeated every living thing in Inverara. The cows standing knee-deep in the brackish pools in the meadows above the beach at Coillnamhan, chewed their cud with half-closed eyes, their tails whisking at the gadflies. Horses stood in the shade of the fences, their tails to the sun, their heads drooping and a hind leg limp, dozing through the day. The men watched their crops growing. Lying in the shade, they stretched themselves languidly and said, ‘Laziness is a devilish thing.’

  Nowhere in Inverara had summer so changed the face of nature as at Rooruck, and nowhere was summer so beautiful. It appealed more to the mind than to the senses, because even summer’s beauty was wild and fierce at Rooruck. It was the colour of a snake, with the snake’s ferocity. The great broad crag that stretched west and south from the village to the sea was so uniformly grey that at a distance Red John’s black sheep, licking salt from the dried shallow pools at the summit of the Hill of Fate, looked grey too. Rooruck was like the back of a giant tortoise lying in the sea. Beneath it were the tilled fields, square and oblong, and triangular patches of green potato stalks and whitening rye, surrounded by grey stone fences. While around its shores the sea swept even in summer with mighty motion. It swept in vast hollows and unbroken smooth ridges from north to south and from south to north with the tides. Like a great work of art, wrought with a few strong strokes, it lay tremendous and beautiful. It was fierce even in its languorous silence, as if it might rise any moment without warning and lash into a fury, like a caged lion that dreams suddenly of a vast forest.

  In Rooruck the leap from cold gritty spring into languorous summer was the change from northern winter to southern skies. It filled the strong with lusty force. It made the weak melancholy. When the heat came, and the cuckoo’s spits were lying of a morning on the green blackberry bushes and the starlings were scurrying about with their young, Red John withdrew more and more into himself. His outburst of passion, the night of Bartly’s wedding, seemed to have robbed him of strength. He did not weed his crops. He left his pony without water or grass in a bare scorched field among the crags, until the poor animal, mad with hunger and thirst, tried to jump the fence and broke its neck. One of his sheep died eaten by maggots. Donkeys broke into his rye field and trampled the growing rye. The neighbours shook their heads and said, ‘It’s that woman has brought a curse on him. What did I tell you in the beginning?’ The whole village noticed him going about talking to himself, but neither the Stranger nor Little Mary paid any attention to him. Little Mary was growing irritable. She felt that life in Rooruck was becoming unbearable to her. Every day when she awoke she hoped that somehow the evening would see her flying to the mainland with her lover. The drear black crags maddened her. The cheerless monotony of always doing the same things, and of having her idiot husband near her, set her nerves jangling. And instead of deliverance approaching, it seemed to recede. For the Stranger, with the coming of summer, seemed to be getting cooler towards her. She saw him smile at young peasant women in the village. When he embraced her he did so without passion. He hardly ever stayed in the house, but spent the day wandering around, bathing and lying in the sun. And she would sit on a stool in front of her door, knitting with furrowed brows, wondering whether he had ceased to love her. Every time she passed a young woman of the village she would look into her face angrily, suspecting that some one of them had taken away her lover. Her sleep became troubled. She had weird dreams in which she saw her lover parted from her. And she would wake up in the middle of the night stricken with horror, thinking herself pregnant and deserted.

  Every morning she intended to talk to the Stranger seriously, but now Red John would sit by the fire until the Stranger went out after his breakfast. He would do the same at dinnertime, and in the evening, when the languorous fragrance of summer was in her blood, Little Mary felt too overcome by her love to take her lover to task even when he casually embraced her. Then one morning she awoke more vexed than usual. ‘I will talk to him to-day,’ she said to herself, ‘to-day or never. I can’t go on like this. He must take me away from here or I will drown myself.’ Red John had already gone out when she got up. He always got up at dawn now, since the spring tide came, and rambled about, nobody knew where or why. But when she had kindled the fire, and smoke began to rise in a curling blue column from the cabin chimney, and she had gone to the little field below the house to milk the cow, Red John sneaked in again and sat by the fire. When she came in, he was drinking tea from a tin mug and eating a piece of oaten bread that crackled when he chewed it. While she was preparing the Stranger’s breakfast, she could see him picking the crumbs from the yellow long teeth in his upper jaw, and swallowing something in his throat. The apple in his throat, covered with greyish-red hair, protruded and receded over the ivory button at the neck of his blue frieze shirt. She would pause in the middle of the floor, passing from the table to the dresser, and look at him with hatred. The ashy colour of his cheeks, instead of arousing pity in her breast, almost made her sick with disgust. She called the Stranger to his breakfast. She heard his answering grunt, and then the water splashing in the basin as he washed his face. She became very excited, feeling certain that something definite was going to happen that day. Perhaps it was the spring tide in her blood too. The Stranger came into the kitchen, sleepily murmured ‘Good morning’ to both of them, went to the door yawning and looked out. Then he sat down to his breakfast. Red John was toying with one of his teeth that was loose, moving it from side to side, with his eyes staring vacantly at the fire, but he was saying to himself cunningly, ‘I’ll spoil their little pass-the-tim
e-away.’ At last, when the Stranger had finished breakfast and was rising from the table, she could contain herself no longer. She turned on her husband furiously.

  ‘You lazy, idle lout,’ she said, ‘why don’t you go out and do something? Am I to do everything in this house? Get out and fill the watertub for the cow, before the sun splits its sides and the lathes fall off it. Get out, you vagabond, and weed your potatoes.’

  But she stopped, shivering and miserable. Red John had taken no notice. He was still toying with his tooth, and the Stranger had gone out shrugging his shoulders. Then Red John, with a foolish laugh, got up and followed him. He leaned over the fence, watching the Stranger going westwards towards the shore. Then he chuckled, and taking his fishing-basket and his line he went up the crags to the Hill of Slaughter to fish.

  The Stranger had forgotten about them when he paused at the stile leading from the end of the road to the shore. The hot sun stood high in the heavens. The tide was out and in front of him the broad-bladed seaweed growing on the outer stretch of the Jagged Reef glistened in the sun. With his foot on the stile he swelled out his chest and drew in a deep breath. Spring had put flesh on his bones. The hollows in his checks had filled. They were ruddy with health after the manner of people living in Inverara. His eyes were clear and far-seeing. His full-grown brown beard was glossy and smooth. The muscles of his thigh, as his foot rested on the stile, showed big through his clothes. He looked around him, breathing delightedly, revelling in his good health. Then he threw his arms over his head, uttered a low cry and jumped the stile on to the shore. He skipped along the crags out towards the sea. He didn’t stop until he reached the wet slippery seaweed on the Jagged Reef, and the sea swayed blue and mysterious at his feet. He looked down into it, his eyes wondering with a child’s wonder, sleepily, as men do when they are healthy and their minds sleep. Then suddenly, sleepily, he began to think. His eyes stood still. His body relaxed, and he let one foot go limp like a horse resting. He felt the sun beating on every muscle of his body through his clothes, warming and loosening the joints. His lungs were full of the invigorating smell of the sea, that itself was a mixture of many smells, seaweed, salt, and spices perhaps wafted by the breeze from distant lands where the sun always shone as in summer at Rooruck. He expanded his nostrils to drink in the scent and sat down on a high saddle of rock that was already dried by the sun. He thought that he had been transported into another world where sorrow was unknown, where the brain was a clear crystal reflecting the absolute beauty of nature, where the body was a perfect organism, impervious to disease, reacting only to joy, where the voice was only capable of song and laughter, where … And then just as suddenly his train of thought snapped like a cord that is pulled too taut. His happiness was shattered as his Black Soul began to smile scornfully at his thoughts. As soon as he tried to abandon himself to nature his cynical intellect jeered at him. He stared at the sea, listening to its languorous deep sounds that were so silent. ‘What a cursed thing is intellect!’ he groaned. He put his head between his hands and bit the little finger of his right hand. Intellect, not content with the present, must peer into the unfathomable future. Not content with enjoying the surface of nature or the beauty of a woman, it must look down into the depths beneath the fair surface, probing the depths with futile shafts of thought, discovering nothing, blinded by the chaos it causes and which it cannot control.