Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

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.

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.