The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  His brain became hot and wearied with these thoughts. Little binding red lights came before his closed eyes. His body twitched. It was degrading to be feeble and neurasthenic on that beach, in the presence of that cold fierce strength, that enthralling beauty! He clasped his hands together and said, ‘I must do something.’ Activity would banish thought.

  He looked down into a round pool at his feet, that was half-filled with smooth stones and growing seaweed. He set himself to examine the forms of life that grew there, as if he were a natural-history student on an outing with his professor. Limpets clung to its sides, their serrated, pale grey shells like cones, their yellow flat faces dimly visible as the shells rose from the rock now and again. Scores of little fishes scurried hither and thither. They would stand for a moment, sniffing and wagging their tails. Then without apparent cause they would dart under a plant of seaweed with only their watching snouts visible. Soft blue fatty lumps grew on the sides of the pool near the bottom in little circular cups cut into the rock. Long threads waved from their mouths, trying to catch food. Then a crabfish tumbled along slowly from the far corner. It walked sideways and stopped now and again to roll its eyes around. The Stranger watched it half-asleep, so calm had he become watching nature. Then the crab disappeared under a stone and he began to think again.

  How futile life was! Here was he, a man, with a brain capable of wonderful thought, and yet he knew nothing definite about anything. The fishes and those soft jellies and the crab clung to life just as eagerly. Men, crabs, limpets, jellies, were all the same. There was no sense or purpose in any form of life more than in another. All life was futile. Cities and books and armies and religions were of as little importance as one of those limpets that heaved wearily, trying to live. They were of as much importance as the tortuous and stupid march of the crab from one end of the pool to the other. They were searching for something just as the crab was. ‘What was he seeking, I wonder?’ he said aloud. Bending down, he raised the stone under which the crab had disappeared. The crab had found a mate. They lay in a ball. They never moved when he touched them with a sprig of seaweed. They were in a love-swoon, careless of their lives. ‘So that is love,’ he said.

  Then he said ‘Je-sus Christ’ as he looked back at the world from that lonely shore at Rooruck. Two crabs lost in a love-swoon made him look at love from an altogether different angle. He had often argued during his university days, when he was very young and very sure of himself, that love was purely sensual. In Irish fashion he had argued with equal conviction at other times that it was purely spiritual, and at other times that it was a combination of both. Now he understood that his arguments had been nonsensical, ‘like all argument.’ He had talked like everybody else who discusses insolulable questions, just to hear himself talk, like a priest explaining a mystery. ‘Quite so,’ he said, ‘people are very fond of explaining anything they themselves cannot understand.’ He felt contemptuous of the civilized attitude towards love. ‘Conceit and hypocrisy! Deifying a natural form of life, crucifying men on its account, making laws to rob it of impurities, taking it out of the natural scheme of things and making it moral and immoral, giving it a purpose, as if nature had a purpose! What the devil is there behind the embrace of those crabs? And Little Mary? Was his love for her no different, or her love for him? Lascivious Summer answered, “No.” “Love,” said Summer seductively, “is but an expression of life, the desire to keep living, to make other things live with you, to protect you against, against, against …” ‘ And the thought faded away into emptiness as he remembered that he had heard it somewhere a very long time ago, and that it was ridiculous and meaningless. It died in a singing sound that wafted itself out of his brain, away over the sea. It ended in the back-wash of a wave that was flopping back into the sea from the edge of the Reef. He felt weak and helpless. ‘Damn women,’ he said, feeling it necessary to blame something tangible for his inability to reason things out to a conclusion.

  He looked down again at the crabs. They were locked in an embrace. The sight did not repel him. They looked natural there. They were a part of nature. ‘But damn it, I am different,’ he said. ‘But how? Now tell me that, how am I different?’ His intellect hungered after the meaning of things. He wanted to find something tremendous and binding, whose meaning he would be afraid to question, something that he could accept blindly, like Catholics accepted the Pope. But he had nothing. Religion was too gross and puerile. Of love he had had formerly only sickly visions: and love was based on self-deceit and fear of reality. And of his life in Inverara there were only memories of his spring lust. Now summer made things look different. Little Mary appeared different. In summer one had time to examine critically. He pictured all her defects, the pimple on her neck, the repulsive softness of her lips as she lay in his arms, the stupid look in her eyes when he said something that she did not understand. And her husband Red John! Good God, she had lain with him. She had felt his tobacco-stained lips against hers. She must have done so since he was her husband. It was like loving a prostitute. Faugh! He blew out his breath and jumped to his feet.

  He walked down to the brink of the Reef, gripping the seaweed with his feet. He stood on the brink looking out into the sea. The thought of suicide came to him now seriously, as the result of the hopelessness of thought. It came not from the brain, but from the heart that could not find anything to love or reverence. It permeated his whole body, without touching his brain. His brain seemed to stand aside, indifferent. Down below him the sea waited, luring him. Behind him lay the world repelling him. It appeared to be full of strange shapes, and each shape was trying to grasp him. He could not possibly escape from those shapes other than by plunging into the sea. And yet they were all illusory. That was the worst of it. If he could only catch them and argue with them he would have no fear. But they were monstrous and intangible. There was nothing real in the cavern of his experiences. Life had been a nightmare. Now, presently, when he disappeared beneath the waves, he would awake in the reality of death.

  There in front was forgetfulness. He began to bend his body forward from the hips to plunge, but as soon as he tried to move, his brain became active. He straightened himself again and his toes itched with fear. ‘I wonder what it is like?’ he said, assuming a tragic posture. He clasped his hands across his breast and looked out wildly. His nostrils dilated: his forehead furrowed. He was seized with such a terror of the sea and of death that he could not even scream. The sea seemed to draw him down towards its bosom. He wanted to fly, but he was numb with fright. Then his anger swelled against it. It was a siren trying to lure him, an accursed siren that devoured men and ships ravenously, a ravisher that sucked into its lustful bowels toothless old hags and beautiful young women indiscriminately, a mad giant that devours its own offspring the earth. The eternal motion of it awed him. He wanted to strike it. But where could he strike it? Where was its heart? Where its bowels? Where its head? It was the same everywhere. It resisted nowhere to the touch, like a vast mass of protoplasm. It was so confident of its power that it opened every pore of its vast face, and ships, rocks and whole continents could sink into it down to its inmost depths, and yet it moved on sardonically. It always moved. It moved. It moved. It moved. ‘Stop,’ he cried suddenly, ‘stop, sea!’ He had stretched out his hands, but they fell back again by his sides, as the sea took no notice of him. And he felt particles of the salt air clinging to the insides of his lips, and an empty feeling at the roof of his mouth, caused by the hunger-inspiring smell of the sea.

  Hunger drove away his anger and his desire for death. How could he die while the sea moved that way, taking no notice of him? There was nobody to take any notice of him. The world would never hear of him. Then why die if the world never heard of his death? It would be no revenge on the world. It would be different if he shot himself with a revolver in O’Connell Street in Dublin. But even then he would be forgotten in a week, especially in that city where a dog-fight is more interesting than a score of suicides or murders.
Even Little Mary would forget him and embrace the next man she met who aroused her passion, just as he had seen the crabs do. Ah! There was nothing eternal but the sea. ‘Ah, beautiful fierce sea,’ he cried aloud, as if he were speaking to a mistress, ‘you are immortal. You have real life, unchanging life.’ And just as one morning in Canada when he had seen the reflection of a vast pine forest at dawn in the eastern sky, he had stood in awe, his imagination staggered, thinking that a new world had suddenly been born before his eyes, so now, looking at the sea, the meaning of life suddenly flickered across his mind. It flashed and then vanished, leaving wonder and awe behind it.

  He sat down, looking at the sea. His eyes roamed out over it, from the hollows beneath him by the jagged Reef, southwards along its glistening back beneath the Hill of Fate, then westwards where it grew bluer and vaster with silvery streaks of sunlight on it, until it joined the pale rim of the sky. He looked back again to his feet. He could see tiny ridges on every patch of water, like the muscles on the body of a giant, who was doing an eternal task, for ever without purpose. ‘Oh, to have strength like the sea,’ he thought. ‘Just to go on fearlessly until one dropped. To be ruthless. Damn conscience, honour, everything! Nothing is worth while but ruthless strength. Happiness is for the strong. I wonder did anybody ever say that?’ And he jumped to his feet.

  He turned his back to the sea and kicked at the seaweed that grew at his feet on the rock. A starfish skidded from his foot and fell on its back on a little bunch of yellow moss. A piece of periwinkle-shell fell on top of it, in the centre where its four legs joined. It looked so funny and helpless that he had to laugh. It was like a compass with millions of little whitish legs sticking from its surface. It lay still for a moment, stunned by the fall. Then the little legs began to bend towards the piece of periwinkle. They gripped it. Their movement was as slow and calculated as that of hired labourers working in a State factory. Then the periwinkle began to move. The little legs appeared so minute and futile that the periwinkle seemed to crawl of its own accord. The legs, like ants, were passing it from one to another. Scores of them united to move it an eighth of an inch. At last they brought it to the brink of a leg, and a hundred or so gave it a final push over the side. It lay still immediately, like a vast rock heaved on a level plain by a thousand men. Then the legs lay still again. ‘Just so the Egyptians built the Pyramids,’ he mused. ‘Shivering, senseless life! Men, starfish, crabs, motion without purpose. But it is motion. Nothing wants to die. It is cowardly to want to die.’ He pushed the starfish back into the pool with his foot and walked up the shore, elated and gloomy. For the life of him now he could not understand why he wanted to die. But of course his scheme of values had been all wrong. It was clear to him now that the only real thing in the universe was life itself, the act of living. Nothing else mattered. No particular expression of life was important, but life itself. All expressions of life were transitional and ephemeral, like the starfish fighting the periwinkle, or the embrace of the crabfish, or the building of the Pyramids, or the death of Christ, or the conquest of Gaul by Caesar. The struggle of the Greeks against the Persians at Marathon was of no more importance to life than the struggle of the starfish against the periwinkle. The expression of life was important only to the individual since … ‘Oh, that’s all rot,’ he cried, snapping his fingers, just at the climax of his chain of reasoning. ‘What’s the matter with me? I feel fit. The sun shines. Why worry about the world? Eh? The world is all right.’

  He began to swing his arms as he reached the sun-baked, flat limestone crags above the wet shore. He struck the ground fiercely with the sole of his hard rawhide shoes. It was a pleasure even to tread the earth in his exuberant joy at having conquered his melancholy and being satisfied with life again. Then he thought of Little Mary and stopped short. ‘I want her,’ he thought, ‘but how am I going to get her? There’s Red John.’ A snail was crawling across a dried-up shallow pool in the crag at his feet. It left a shiny trail on the spongy black bladders that grew on the black mud at the bottom of the pool. He smiled, looking at the snail. ‘Yes, to hell with the yokel,’ he said, walking on. ‘Why should I let a miserable peasant stand in my way? A strong man would let nothing stand in his way.’ Yet Red John still troubled him. He remembered now having seen Red John look at him a few mornings ago with murder in his eyes. He had paid no heed to it at the time, but now he remembered with a shudder that it was a cunning murderous look, the look of a madman.

  He was still worrying about that look when he entered the cabin. Little Mary was sitting on a stool within the door, carding wool. A little pile of carded wool lay beside her on a mat. Her hands were covered with grease, scraping the wool between the cards. The sunshine coming in the door made an oblong shadow on the floor across her lap and her bent head. Countless little particles of matter shone like a fog of silver dust through the shadow. She looked up dreamily as he entered, and dropped her cards.

  ‘Where is Red John?’ he said, speaking aloud his thoughts unintentionally.

  Little Mary flushed and jumped to her feet. Wiping her hands on her apron she moved towards the hearth and beckoned to him.

  ‘What is it?’ she said excitedly. ‘Have you seen him? Has anything happened to him?’ She was not feeling any anxiety about Red John, but she wanted to break through the Stranger’s apathy.

  ‘Why, what on earth are you talking about, Mary?’ he said anxiously, seeing the look of fear in her eyes. ‘I just asked where he was casually. Why, what’s troubling you?’ and he put his arms about her.

  Little Mary shivered, and nestled her head against his breast. ‘I think he’s going mad,’ she said, entwining her hands in the lapels of his coat. ‘I’m afraid of him.’ She was not afraid of Red John at that moment, not even conscious of his existence, although she was speaking of him. But she was afraid that her lover was no longer hers, so she was trying this scheme to win him back again.

  ‘Rot,’ he said, ‘he’s all right. I don’t notice anything the matter with him. Eh?’

  ‘Oh, do take me away with you,’ she said gently, as she darted her head backwards and looked him in the eyes. Her eyes caught his in a flash, and then they looked over his shoulders as if she were ashamed of having spoken. But she was watching him without looking at him. She watched him with every muscle of her body that touched his. She pressed against him seductively to arouse him. And in the languorous silence of summer about them, the beating of their hearts sounded loud as she looked across his shoulder and he looked over her head at the wall beyond, his forehead wrinkled.

  ‘Take you with me?’ he said at length. ‘Eh? Where could I take you? Good Lord, you don’t know what you are talking about!’ And the thought of appearing in Dublin with a peasant woman made him shudder.

  ‘Yes, do take me,’ she said again. She purred like a cat. She looked him straight in the eyes now. Her head was thrown far back so that her long lashes almost covered her eyes, and he could see the insides of her half-open red lips. Then she uttered a low cry, and hugged him closely, sweeping her hands slowly over his face and shoulders, and pressing her cheek against his neck. ‘Ha, you are ashamed of me,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘you think I am not good enough for you. But I am Sir Henry Blake’s daughter, do you hear? And my grandfather was – oh, don’t hurt me.’

  He had suddenly held her from him, gripping her shoulders fiercely. He crushed her shoulders, looking into her eyes savagely. ‘What do I care whose daughter you are? You think it matters to me who you are? Do you think I am a man like that?’