The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  He shunned all grown-up people, but he would sit among the children and play with them at marbles or making fences with mud, chattering foolishly. And sometimes, when they made fun of him, he would grin evilly and try to entice them to follow him away from the village, desiring to kill them. That was the only persistent desire, to kill somebody. He felt that desire especially at night when he lay awake, breathing heavily. His hands would grasp his own throat and crush until the gasping of his lungs filled him with terror and he listened anxiously for the beating of his heart. But he pulled out all his front teeth and found great pleasure in the pain it caused. Then he hid them in an old mug in his barn.

  He only stayed in the cabin to sleep a short while at night and to eat his meals. He never spoke to either his wife or the Stranger. He never looked at them. But he twitched spasmodically, and sometimes laughed aloud suddenly. He would open his mouth and utter a loud peal that was more like a yell than a laugh, and then shut his mouth just as suddenly, with a despairing look in his eyes as if he had resigned himself to a terrible death. Both the Stranger and Little Mary knew now that he was mad, but they never spoke of it. It made each of them miserable. Each pitied Red John, and blamed the other for being the cause of his illness. Little Mary often had fits of weeping and melancholy, when she wanted to drown herself. All sorts of fancies oppressed her. Not even her love offered her any solace. Instead of appealing to the Stranger for comfort, she shrank from him. Something seemed to have arisen between them that drove them apart. It was as if the languorous silence of nature exposed them on a wild desert, and each hated the other for being the cause of the exposure. And the neighbours, seeing the state of affairs in the cabin, whispered to one another that something should be done about it. But they did nothing but whisper, for in summer at Rooruck nobody does anything but look at the vast empty sky and whisper and dream about vast things that are unfathomable.

  The Stranger used to lie in his bed at night smoking and think, ‘Ah, how short-lived is happiness. Now everything is lost again. The devil take it.’ He felt sure now that the past few months had been a heaven of delight, untainted by the slightest sorrow, that he had been madly in love with Little Mary, and that the future had been pregnant with happiness. Now everything was changed and he blamed Little Mary for it. ‘She has driven that poor man mad,’ he would say to the ceiling. ‘She is driving me mad too. What is going to be the end of it?’ And he would wander off cataloguing all the most dreadful fates that could befall the three of them. But each night, before going to sleep, he would determine, with tears at the back of his eyes, to have an explanation with Little Mary the following morning, to get Red John to see a doctor and to go away to the mainland with Little Mary. And yet in the morning, somehow it was impossible to speak. There was the same sleepiness in the brain, the same irritation in the heart, the same silent downpouring of heat from the sun without. It was impossible to do anything with Little Mary fidgeting about, breaking a cup one morning, sweeping the dust from the floor in his face another morning, her face wet with tears another morning. And Red John always sat immovably by the hearth, twitching spasmodically and laughing at nothing.

  ‘Ah, something terrible is going to happen,’ the Stranger would say as he left the cabin. And yet, before he had gone far, he would sink into a melancholy yet comfortable torpor, where even the most dreadful prospect did not terrify him.

  He no longer went to the pier at Coillnamhan. He was ashamed to meet the tourists who now crowded the pier and the beach and everywhere along the road from Kilmurrage to Rooruck. Their happy laughter (laughter of which tourists and priests alone are capable), their gay dress, made him shun them. So he said they were vulgar, and in order to be alone he went along the south to the Yellow Cliff, midway between Rooruck and Kilmurrage. It was the most deserted spot in Inverara in summer and the most beautiful because of its majestic solitude. There indeed the silence was so great, and the emptiness so vast, that one might dream of reading the meaning of the universe, staring at the sky or looking down along the faces of the sheer cliffs into the still sea.

  At the summit of the Yellow Cliff was a niche cut by nature during some great storm, aeons before, into the crag in the shape of a chair without any legs. They called it Myles’s chair, after a peasant who fell down from it into the sea some hundred years before. He sat on that chair for hours at a time thinking, without moving a muscle. The perfect solitude, away from everything that even suggested men and cities and civilization, made the limbs as restful as the walls of the cliff itself. Nobody passed there excepting a solitary peasant woman who daily tended her sheep on the crags, and she merely shaded her eyes with her hand to look at him and went on in silence. The cliff stretched down from his feet, bulging in the middle so that he could not see its base. A circular bay stretched eastwards, locked by sheer cliffs, and the cliffs were intersected by three rows of cavernous slits, where rock-birds and seagulls lived and other birds with long red beaks whose names he did not know.

  Sitting there his fears only made him happy. A great wave of delicious sorrow rose up within his breast, and he smiled and said: ‘Ha, it is worth while to be alive and be here. Just to sit here for a time and then die.’ And, inspired by his sorrow with a creative frenzy, he wanted to write a great poem about the cliffs and the sea. He felt that he knew something that nobody else knew, that he was scratching at the door behind which the secret of life lay hidden. His poem would be about that, not about the secret, but about the scratching. Nobody had ever even scratched before. He was assured of that when he recalled all that had ever been written about the sea or nature or life. It appeared superficial to him. ‘They never felt what I feel. I understand. I … I … I.’

  But then what did he understand? Looking at the sea, trying to give voice to what he understood, he found that he knew nothing. There was a pain in his heart as if something moved within him, trying to come out, and yet nothing came out. It was impossible to write anything about the sea. It was too immense. It would laugh at him. He could hear it laugh. And then he would cast aside the idea of writing a great poem, saying, ‘Poetry is all very well for those who do not know the sea and nature. For those like myself, who know the sea and nature, poetry is trivial nonsense.’ Shrinking from everything that oppressed him, the world, Red John and Little Mary, he clung to nature, humbly, as if appealing to it for protection. He became intimate with every ledge and slit and boss and weather-stain on the cliffs, with every wave on the bay, with every rock that jutted from the water, with its red wet mane of seaweed floating around it. He even felt kinship with the fishes prowling in the depths. He believed in the existence of the mermaids and elfs and sea-horses with golden manes who were said to live in the caverns at the base of the cliffs, where the waves sounded at high tide like cargo shifting in the bowels of a ship during a storm. The tide coming in and going out was a living thing to him. He felt that he was a component part of this complex life, that he could rest in peace, that he was free from care and danger and sorrow, that even death could not touch him.

  But when he left the stone chair and the shadows of evening were falling, reality pressed in on him as blinding and heavy as a dark night on a man lost in a forest. He met groups of girls walking along the cliff-tops flirting with the young men who were out fishing in their boats, calling to the girls and singing love songs at the tops of their voices, full of the joy of summer and of life. And he passed along, gloomily conscious that the only laughter of which he was capable was the harsh laughter of sorrow. A shapeless cloud gathered around his mind, and he became again conscious of the cabin and Little Mary and Red John who was mad. It seemed so insoluble and dry and parching, that problem that lay before him in the cabin. There were three lives so intricately bound together that there was no conceivable way of arranging things. And the fear that something dreadful was going to happen grew more vivid every evening. As he came within earshot of the cabin he always expected to hear the sound of wild weeping. And when he entered the dim kit
chen and heard nothing in the silence he wished that he could blow it up with dynamite and finish the torture. It was terrible, waiting for he knew not what.

  Then one evening, as he was coming along the cliffs wrapped in melancholy, he suddenly came upon Kathleen O’Daly, just at the foot of the slope, where the Hill of Fate dropped to the shore at Rooruck. She was sitting on a rock, reading a book, while her father lay on his belly some hundreds of yards to the west, just at the western angle of the island, shooting cormorants. She sat up when she heard his rawhide shoes swishing along the short slippery grass coming down the slope.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. He stopped dead and saw her. She was the last person on earth that he wanted to meet just then, when he felt sure that everybody could read in his face the sordid and disgraceful story of his life in the cabin. But looking into her face for a fleeting moment as he replied to her salutation, he saw an expression in it that made him forget the cabin in a still greater horror. Her checks were flushed. The muscles of her neck, her whole body, in fact, trembled slightly. And her eyes stared steadily, softly into his without wavering. She wanted him. It flashed on his mind that she did, and for a moment he began to wonder what had he done to her to make her look at him like that. A violent repulsion seized him. He looked around as if seeking some means of escape, and he saw her father lying out on the extremity of the rock. He started perceptibly. ‘Sit down,’ she said slowly. He sat down, wondering what had come over her, or whether she was really Kathleen O’Daly, or whether he was suffering from a delusion. Surely she would not … He looked at her as if to reassure himself. And just then O’Daly fired at a cormorant. They both started and stared westwards at the little column of smoke that was rising vertically on the still air. They kept looking at it in silence until it vanished. Another five minutes and more they sat without speaking. Then Kathleen suddenly flung her book on the ground and stamped on it. ‘Oh, go away,’ she said, without looking at him.

  He walked away in silence, with his hands behind his back. ‘Now everybody has deserted me,’ he mumbled. ‘Now I’m alone. Good God, have I a friend nowhere! Nobody wants me for myself, but to satisfy curiosity or passion or something. I am accursed.’ A cold breeze was blowing from the sea, bearing with it the smell of wet seaweed. It seemed to him to be like the smell of the balm that Egyptians rubbed into dead bodies, although he was totally ignorant of what that smell was. But death seemed to be in the air, stalking in front of him. He could smell it and feel it and fear it, but he could not see it. A horrible feeling of being utterly alone and deserted on the eve of a great danger grew intensely, until it numbed his desire to live and he felt very weak. The sun was setting, and he sat on a hillock just above the village to watch it. The sun had begun to sink into the sea to the west. He could look into its red face without blinking. Then across the sea towards Inverara the sun shadow swept in a silvery streak. It touched land and became red for a moment, then blue as it reached the tilled fields, then ending on the crags in a blaze of light that was all the colours of the rainbow. Then, as if the sun made a last dying struggle to keep back the approaching night, a flood of light poured out from it, carried on myriads of bright shafts, like the bristles of a hedgehog. The whole of Inverara and of the sea, and the flanks of the mountains on the mainland, gleamed for a minute in the staggering light, and then slowly dimmed again as the light crept away westwards towards the sinking sun, and the shadows of night pursued them and the sun sank lower and lower. The air became cooler. The wind began to make dark ripples on the sea. Stars tottered out. Then the sun disappeared.

  And looking at the point where it disappeared, he shuddered and thought that somebody who had been sick for a long time within his breast had died.

  Autumn

  1

  They were opening the bowels of Inverara. The potato stalks, once green, flower-decked and beautiful, were withered. They crackled as the women tore them from the ridges. The men rooted up the earth avariciously with their spades to gather the fruit that had matured in its womb during the heat of summer. Rain-bleached potatoes lay in rows on the flattened ridges. There were only bristles left in the ryefields. Inverara was being stripped naked.

  The horses, carrying home the crops, no longer galloped as they did in spring. They moved slowly with downcast heads, their baskets creaking on the canvas of their straddles. There was a melancholy silence in Inverara, broken only by the bleak whine of the autumn wind, chanting the death song of the year. Cattle were driven southwards each day from the parched plains to the long hill grass in the valley between the crags. The flowers were dead. And the blackberries had ripened, the enchanted fruit that were eaten by the black devils that rode on the storm of winter.

  Inverara was like an old man groaning with his years and talking of death. Rain fell each day, drowning summer. The air was damp, and heavy mists hung by day and by night over the ridge of Coillnamhan. Sometimes the mists shut out the sea, and only its sad murmur could be heard, coming through the fog like the wheezing of an old man sick with pleurisy. The shore at Rooruck was strewn with offal, rotting timber, torn seaweed, heads of dogfishes, worthless refuse after the joyous debauch of summer. The broad grey crag of Rooruck shone sombrely, washed by the ceaseless rain mist. And water gushed from the crevices in the faces of the cliffs, falling with sad sounds in zigzag courses down the cliffs to the sea, as though autumn were washing Inverara. The sun shone dimly through the dun clouds on Rooruck, dimly as if it perpetually frowned. Hosts of shadows continually flitted along the Jagged Reef southwards towards the cliffs, like spirits shielding something that fled. The men working in the harvest fields often stood erect, caressing their sore backs and cursing the laggard sun, for work that was joyous in spring was now painful, and the time dragged slowly, like a dying man’s breath. For time is a measure of pain.

  Suddenly, through the autumn fog, a noise came to Red John’s ears. It came to him in the early morning. He was sitting by the fire, waiting for Little Mary to come in from the cow with the milk. The flood tide had just made. There was a fever in the air. The sea was fermenting. The noise buzzed in his ears and he got up and left the cabin. It was as if somebody had uttered a command and he had to obey it. He walked swiftly, without thinking, quite calmly, down to the shore, just south of the Jagged Reef. He threw out his right hand in front of his face as he walked, with the fingers extended and making signs at some invisible thing in the air. His red and white gums were bared in a grin. He was amused because he had suddenly felt that he must wash his feet in the sea and that if he did not do so he would die before night. He sat by a pool of sea-water and washed his feet in it without taking off his shoes and stockings. Then he walked back again to the cabin calmly as if he had just done a daily task.

  The cabin was still empty. The Stranger slept. Little Mary was at the cow. He sat by the fire and tried to sink back into his usual idiot’s dreams. But he could not. Again the buzzing came into his ears and then a pain shot across from his ears to his eyes, so that he had to jump to his feet with his eyes closed and stagger around the floor, clawing the air with his hands like a man suddenly stricken with blindness. Then he opened his eyes and there was nothing the matter with them. And the buzzing had stopped. But his head was very heavy and the backs of his calves were perspiring with weakness. He began to take off his clothes, as if to relieve his body of their weight. There was, too, a peculiar irritation all over his skin. But he had ceased thinking. His head was too heavy for thought.

  It was not until he had stripped himself naked that he began again to think. He shut his mouth with a snap and his whole body went stiff. Then something began to gurgle, going down from his throat to his bowels. ‘Ohé, ohé,’ he muttered, laughing. ‘Oh, Red John, the son of Stephen, what are you doing now?’ Looking down at himself, he saw the bones sticking through his hips like spear-points and his thighs as narrow as a consumptive’s wrists, and he shuddered. His body suddenly appeared to him to be shrinking and falling to pieces. He kept drawing in his
breath, trying to keep it together until he almost burst. And when he allowed his breath to rush out again he began to tremble violently so that he kept jumping from leg to leg as if the floor were hot. Visions now began to crowd his brain pell-mell, in chaotic disorder, until at last he seized his head between his hands and crushed it, trying to keep his brain steady. He held his breath too. Gradually the whirling within his skull ceased and he became conscious of a desire that grew greater and greater, until he had to say aloud, ‘I’ll kill the Stranger.’ Then he was calm again. At least he thought so himself, but his arms and his legs below the knees were totally beyond his control and kept jerking and twitching as if they had separate lives and were engaged on some mysterious occupation of their own. But his mind was calm, determined to kill the Stranger. He stood with his back to the wall behind the door of the Stranger’s room, waiting until he should come out. But soon the silence and the tension of waiting drove the thought of killing the Stranger out of his brain and he wanted to run away. But it was impossible for him to run. He had lost the use of his limbs. He was seized with terror. He thought that he was hiding from the Stranger, that the Stranger was mad and was looking for him with a gun. He tried to stretch out his right foot in an effort to get to his clothes, but the foot did not move. It would not obey his will. Even his face was creased in a foolish grin, in spite of the terror in his brain. And the sweat that stood in swelling drops on his forehead looked white against the ashy greyness of his skin. He began to knock the back of his head against the wall, keeping time with the alarum clock that ticked on the dresser beside him.