Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

He passed the day quietly thinking by the fire, flying from one field of thought to another sleepily. At one moment he felt happy and certain of everything; at another moment he felt gloomy and in doubt. He reacted to every sound that he heard from outside. At one moment it was a boy riding a donkey down the lane; the wild yells of the boy rose triumphantly after each hissing lash of a dried sea rod across the donkey’s flank. And the donkey’s hoofs tipped the ground slowly in jingling succession as if he were not being hit. A flock of seagulls whirled screaming over the village. A peasant woman called out ‘Ho-e-e-e-e White Anthony, what news have you got?’ Then all sounds would die, except the sounds of the sea, thr-r-up, flup, hsssss. Then a cock would crow sadly. And he wove trains of thought about all these sounds. Night brought him sound sleep. His mind was shrouded by a kind of birth bag that shut out the world. The past was becoming unreal and distant. The sea was singing a crooning song in his ears that lulled him to sleep. It was a sad song, like the songs that mothers sing to their babes in Inverara, where all joy is the depth of sadness in winter. It was the joyous sadness of those who grow to despise joy in their sorrow. There was a half-smile on his lips as he was falling asleep. The wind coming down the slope of Coillnamhan Fort from the east was the last sound he heard. It played somnolent music on the grey smooth crags, epics of races dead a million years, a moment in its ageless life. It sang them with a jeer at the end of each blast, jeering at effort and ambition. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet and slept.

Next morning he sat once more by the fire. He had no energy. He wanted to sit quietly and listen to life moving about him. He shuddered when he saw Red John come in after a night hunting for wreckage, drenched to the skin by the ice-cold sea-water. He had been fighting the other peasants for two barrels of paraffin oil that had been washed ashore and he had got nothing. Red John walked up and down by the door stamping his wet feet and saying ‘huh’ now and again viciously. He began to curse the other peasants, gesticulating.

‘That son of a wanton, Patch the son of Bartly, prevented me from getting the second barrel,’ he cried, spitting out of the door. He crouched around the floor describing the struggle for the barrel. He had gone out to his waist to meet a huge wave. He had his hand on the barrel as it was carried past him. Then the wave swept the barrel and himself fifty feet along the weed-covered rocks. He was knocked into a pool. The barrel was sweeping back again towards him on the backwash of the wave, when Patch the son of Bartly, his eyes starting from his head with greed, rushed in front of him. Clinging with one hand to a ledge of rock Red John was about to grasp the barrel with the other hand when Patch threw himself upon it with a yell, shouting, ‘Let go, let go, it’s mine!’ And then they both struggled and the barrel was carried out along the rocks until Michael the son of Littie Michael grappled it with a hook. ‘I’ll have his life yet, the son of a wanton,’ cried Red John furiously. Then without changing his clothes he took a pitchfork and went out to gather seaweed on the pebbly beach that stretched along the north of Rooruck towards Coillnamhan.

Little Mary was at the well beetling clothes, and the Stranger sat by the fire shivering, glad that he did not have to go out to fight for barrels. It made him afraid of life, that fierce struggle on the wild beach.

‘I wish Little Mary would come,’ he muttered. He felt lonely. He listened to the splashing sound of her beetle falling on the clothes and counted the strokes, wondering when she would have finished and come back to him. ‘Why do I want her?’ he cried angrily. ‘I’m all right, eh? I don’t want anybody.’ He began to excuse himself for wanting her near him. Yes, it was nothing more than her company. Nothing more. It would be utterly disgraceful falling in love with her. ‘Love?’ he cried aloud. Then he laughed harshly. ‘Go on, O’Connor! You are a fool. An utter idiot. I just want to talk to the woman. I must talk to somebody.’ He waited until she came back. ‘Sit down, Little Mary,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ Little Mary took her knitting and sat near him quietly. Her face bore the expression of a man preparing for confession.

He began to talk, listening to his own voice excitedly. He debated abstruse problems. He asked himself questions as he talked. He threw out theories as his own and began to refute them as if they were set up by an enemy. Now and again he asked Little Mary, ‘Do you understand that?’ She nodded her head in silence and looked at him with a smile from under her lashes. But she never understood a word of what he was saying. She was watching the play of his lips as he spoke, feeling that she wanted to kiss them. She was debating with herself what would put ‘some flesh on his body.’ She was wondering how he would make love to her if she could only arouse his passion. She smiled instinctively in the right place or nodded her head or shrugged her shoulders, in order that he might think she was listening to him and be pleased with her. Then the Stranger disarranged the pillows under his back in the heat of an argument with himself and she jumped up to settle them comfortably. The Stranger paused suddenly with open mouth. He had reached what he thought was a marvellous climax to a chain of reasoning. He was denouncing the cupidity of an American millionaire who had rushed from success to success, until at last the dreary accumulation of his satisfied mercenary desires drove him to … And just then when he expected Little Mary to be waiting eagerly for the climax she jumped up to arrange his pillows. ‘Bah!’ he thought, ‘she is a stupid peasant. She doesn’t understand me. I must go and have a talk to O’Daly. I can talk to him. He is a man of the world.’ But he sat moodily by the fire for another hour, unable to rouse his energy.

Then the wind began to sigh more loudly. Cows lowed. The sea crashed heavily against the southern cliffs. The dim shadows of day crept up closer to the door of the cabin. Night was falling. He jumped to his feet. ‘Get me an oilskin coat, Mary,’ he said, ‘I want to go to Coillnamhan.’

She started, afraid that he was going to Carmody’s public-house.

‘Oh, don’t go drinking again,’ she said beseechingly, standing near him.

‘Go on, get me the coat,’ he said angrily.

She forgot her shyness of him and caught him by the breast. She pressed close to him and looked fondly into his eyes. He felt her hot sweet breath on his face. Unconsciously he put his arms about her and kissed her red lips. But even as his lips touched hers, his mind was far away contemplating a million men kissing a million women aimlessly. The soft suction of her lips burying themselves in his repelled him. He put her from him and stroked her hair. She stood motionless. Then he snatched his coat from its peg and went out. And as he strode away down the lane he felt proud of his conquest of her, and he smiled. But coming out on the highroad he halted and bit his lip. His conscience pricked him for having kissed her. He cracked his fingers and frowned. ‘She’s an excellent woman to me, I must look after her,’ he said, and walked on, as if he were an omnipotent God who could perform a miracle or blast a kingdom with the snapping of a finger.

But still the kiss pursued him. He kept wiping his lips with his handkerchief as if it were a physical injury. He had kissed a hundred women, in cabarets, in cafés, even in brothels. He had made love sometimes with passion, sometimes boredly, always carelessly, forgetting the women nonchalantly after he had left them. Yet he now felt conscience-stricken after kissing this peasant woman. ‘It’s this damn island,’ he growled. ‘It’s enchanted. Ugh!’ Nature seemed to be leering at him viciously. He thought spirits were watching him among the black crags that loomed sombrely out of the darkness on either side of the white road, warning him against violating the mating law of nature. The sea was running sibilantly in and out on the sandy beach at Coillnamhan. It was cutting narrow deep gashes in the sand. He felt it was showing him how sharp its claws were. The wind came in little fawning rushes about his ears, like a cat tapping a mouse with furred claws before it suddenly drives its sharp teeth through the neck and growls as it hears the bones crunch. He said ‘Phew’ and walked faster. Then he cried aloud querulously, ‘But, Great Scott, it was she herself … but oh to hell with it, I’m going crazy. Ha, ha, ha!’ Then he forgot about her and began to array in his mind the pet subjects that he wanted to discuss with O’Daly.