Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

‘Hey there! hey there!’ came Red John’s voice in a thick whisper; ‘is there nobody in this kip of a place?’ He kicked at a chair and upset it.

The Stranger went into the kitchen and asked him what was the matter.

Red John, his clothes spattered with mud, and his beard matted with porter froth, clung to the dresser with his right hand.

‘Ho! ho! there, my fine fellow,’ he chuckled, ‘so there you are, you son of a loose woman. You spawn of a dogfish. You –’ He uttered a wild yell, and began to tear his shirt from his back when Little Mary came rushing at him from her room, and he dropped on his knees in a trice. ‘Don’t strike! merciless woman,’ he whined; ‘they wouldn’t give me a spade. They wouldn’t open the shop to me, I tell you, so I had to drink in Mulligan’s while I sent a boy to look for one. I declare by the cross of the Crucified One that I couldn’t get a spade. What’s all this noise now about a spade? Haven’t I got a good spade already?’ He kept babbling as he crawled to the hearth and sat down glaring at the two of them like a wild animal. Little Mary shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

‘Good God, what sent me to this place?’ thought the Stranger. He became filled with such a violent disgust at his sordid surroundings that he wanted to rush away and leave them. But where should he go? He stayed in his room all day trying to think out a plan. Impossible! The very coldness of the air outside was a barrier against going anywhere. He avoided Little Mary’s eyes. He never spoke to her. He wanted to go to the O’Dalys and ask their advice. But how could he tell them that he had seduced Red John’s wife? And all day he heard Red John shouting and screaming in the other room.

‘They’ll eat me alive,’ he screamed; ‘blue devils and little red ones with clay pipes in their mouths.’ It was like being in hell, listening to the man’s drunken babble.

‘I wish a devil would choke him and be done with it,’ he thought. He went into the kitchen for his supper and saw Little Mary calmly knitting by the fire as if nothing in the world troubled her. ‘Huh!’ he thought, ‘she’s an unnatural woman. Good God, she has ruined me,’ forgetting her kindness to him in winter, and her love that made her give him herself.

He scowled at her fiercely, but she never looked. All day she was in a cloud of happiness that nothing could pierce. Since the night before, when she had abandoned herself to her love, she was unable to think of anything but the consummation of her womanhood. It was the beginning of life. If even it were the end of life, it had at least been worth while to have lived for those moments. Like an opiate her satisfied love made her insensible to her surroundings, even to the object of her love. Not a single shadow of gross conventions or cowardly morality darkened the cloud of her happiness. She was not tortured by the desire that civilized women have to demand a price for their affections by marriage or otherwise. She had given freely like nature. She received from nature the clean gift of satisfied womanhood.

But his own vanity and the philosophy of degenerate fools filled the Stranger with the wind of remorse. That night as he lay down to sleep he said to himself, ‘I will keep aloof from the two of them. It is wrong for an educated man to lower himself to the level of peasants.’ For a fortnight he did so. He roamed around Rooruck restlessly, speaking to nobody. He pretended to be quite at his ease in his gloomy solitude, but he was most unhappy. At night he slept well. He ate his meals with relish. He felt himself getting stronger every day, and his returning strength was detestable to him. It aroused his passion. It made him want to exercise his hands and his mind in doing something. Each day was a perpetual struggle between his resolution to be miserable and the urge of spring and returning strength urging him to love and activity.

‘O God of the valiant deeds, what a ghoul of a fellow!’ the peasants would say as he passed them in silence with a cold stare. The young women of the village, who were all out in the fields or on the shore, would glance at him giddily and say, ‘Hist! why the hurry?’ but he would take no notice of them. Then they would whisper loud enough for him to hear, ‘He’s not a man at all, I believe. They say he was badly wounded in the big war. What a pity!’ And their jibes maddened him.

Those days Little Mary spent in trembling anxiety, afraid that he was lost to her. She would look at him, sometimes sadly and wearily, with wide-open eyes in which the hidden tears were glistening. Sometimes she looked at him with hatred in her eyes and her nostrils quivering because he scorned her. Each night she lay awake a long time thinking furiously of what she should do if he looked at her no more. She would listen savagely to the sea beating against the cliffs, and picture her own body washed away on its bosom. And then she would say, through her clenched teeth, as she clasped her throbbing throat, ‘I will make him love me. I will, or I will kill him.’ For her primitive soul was as merciless as nature itself. The tender growth of civilization had never taken root in her mind. Her love raged mightily. Like an ocean wave there was nothing either within her or without her to stay its progress. It must satisfy itself or shatter itself in death.

Then nature turned the Stranger towards her again. Nature routed his body from its winter apathy. It left his mind, which was not of nature but of civilization, wriggling in the clutches of his fantastic reasoning, but his body, nourished by the exhilarating breath of the sea and hardened by the wind, was drawn by an overpowering force to a mate. The most ferocious castigations prescribed by the Christian Church for the unsexing of its cherished saints would have been of no avail to silence the demands of nature in Rooruck in spring. That spring at Rooruck, when strong men live greedily every moment from the grey cold dawn to the mist-laden dusk! Life there is only to the strong and to the ruthless. Oh, strong, beautiful sea! Hunger-inspiring! Life-giving! Oh, the icy clasp of the wind, like the stern command of a proud father. Even when it numbs the limbs at dawn the heart throbs joyfully, loving life. So even though his weak mind remained helpless, his body grew daily fonder of life. Two personalities grew within him side by side. One embraced Little Mary and loved her bodily with the love of nature. The other hated her and kept hidden behind a gloomy silence. And she tried her utmost to gain access to those caverns where his Black Soul lurked.

‘Talk to me,’ she would say as they sat together in the kitchen. ‘Tell me about the places you have been, about the war, and all the strange countries you saw. Do tell me’ She was eager to learn what he knew of life, so that she could interest him by talking and make herself more attractive to him.

For many days he refused to talk, saying to her, ‘What is the use of my talking to you, you would not understand me.’ Then at last his loneliness became so oppressive that he had to speak. He talked furiously as he walked about the kitchen, forgetful of what he was saying or to whom he was speaking. He talked fiercely, like spring, of conquest, of great deeds. He felt, in the ecstatic pleasure of talking to some one, that he could achieve wonders.

She listened to him breathlessly. A new vista of happiness opened up before her eyes. Oh, to have words like those spoken to her! Her love that was before but the creation of her own fancy, now swelled within her torrentially as she realized that he had her respect. She fell in love with his mind that could conceive those words. How sweet they were, those fierce words, and the gleaming eyes through which the mind peeped and disappeared flashing, like sunbeams through a cloud. With her arms folded on her breast, and her head turned sideways to hear better, she sat rocking herself like a nun in a spiritual ecstasy.