Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

He peered across over his red beard at his wife’s bosom. The right side of his face distorted, and his right hand shot into the pocket of his waistcoat for his knife. He longed to drive a knife down to the hilt in that breast. He often pictured to himself that thrust and the upward gush of red blood. He would lick his lips as if he were drinking it. But he was afraid. He was afraid. He, deformed himself, was afraid of touching such a beautiful thing, such well-moulded breasts, and red cheeks, and a neck like clear foam, and grey eyes that were always looking long distances, and black hair, straight black, rolled in a huge pile on her head. She was so different from any other woman in Inverara. ‘Curse the night I went to Ballycalla,’ he muttered. He had gone to the fair at Ballycalla on the mainland with his uncle, Sean Mor of Coillnamhan, and Michael the Drake of Kilmillick. Little Mary’s mother was then living among the peasants after Sir Henry’s death in France and the sale of his property, and they persuaded Red John to ask her for her daughter’s hand in marriage. ‘Curse the lips that said “yes,” ‘he muttered; ‘don’t make your house on a hill; don’t marry a beautiful woman; don’t … don’t … don’t … may the devil mince her bones.’ He was thinking of the wedding night. All the guests had departed drunk and singing, and he had tried to embrace her, but she hit him on the forehead a blow that sent him reeling against the kitchen wall. Then she went to bed alone, forcing him to sleep on a pallet in a corner of the room. And in all the five years he had never possessed her.

‘Huh,’ he cried, gathering fury, as he recalled the whole weight of his contumely. ‘What are you sitting there for like a dead one? Why can’t you speak to a man?’

Little Mary smiled scornfully without replying. Then she raised the hem of her red petticoat to allow the flames to warm her shins, or perhaps with feminine spite to madden her husband’s lust with the sight of her well-shaped calves.

‘You’re not a man,’ she said carelessly with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders.

Red John fumed and chattered impotently.

She bared her white teeth, threw back her head slightly, nearly closed her eyes until the tips of the long lashes almost touched her cheekbones.

‘Um-m-m-m,’ she said.

Thousands of little snakes chased up and down her full white throat. Then her lips closed over her teeth and, opening wide her eyes, she looked again into the fire, thinking.

Men, men, men. How she wanted men, never having had any but this miserable lout of a husband, already beyond his youth when he married her, and never shapely. The blood of her father, Blake, the aristocratic gallant, and of her adventurous, fierce grandfather, Le Cachet, made it impossible for her to love a peasant like her husband, or any of the peasants she saw around her in Inverara. They were too coarse. They drank whisky to arouse their passion, and then mated like pigs in their drunkenness. And the longing for love burned as fiercely within her during those five years that it broke through everything, shame, fear, modesty. So when a painter had come from the mainland to paint the breakers beneath the Hill of Fate, she had smiled at him. She was gathering seaweed on the shore with her husband when she saw him sitting on a rock with his easel. She went up to him silently and looked over his shoulder. Then she laughed. ‘Paint me too,’ she cried, ‘I am more beautiful than the sea!’ But he was a stupid Catholic and fled from her. And then, unable to find love, she longed for a son. She would sit by the fire and imagine that a son was drinking at her breast. It soothed the aching within her. She actually felt the impress of his toothless gums on her nipples. And the blood would course madly up her neck, swelling the veins as she shivered with passion. Often she rushed from the cabin on a summer evening, her bodice open at the neck, her light shawl across her shoulders, seeking love, but the young men who smiled at her when they met her repelled her. They were yokels like her husband. There was a salt smell from their bodies and their breath was fetid. Even Father S –, who tried to touch her shoulder once in the confessional, with the queer light in his eyes that all men had when they looked at her, repelled her. He was not a yokel, but … Ah! she wanted a fierce man and …

A great wave rolled to the beach at the rear. Its wash sent a shower of water flying against the cabin. It fell with a great noise against the door, and the cabin shook slightly. Then a great falling sound came like thunder, followed by a tinkling reverberation like silver coin dancing on a plate: another rock had been torn by the sea from the Hill of Fate. Red John started and rose to his feet.

‘The cabin will be swept away before morning,’ he said.

Little Mary shrugged her shoulders. She did not care. Then Red John went to the door and opened it, and she saw the pitch darkness all around. A blast of wind rushed in with a querulous shriek, spilt a jug of milk on the dresser, and then died with a gasp as the door shut. She started and, bending her neck backwards, listened to the steady roar outside, the sea, the wind, the dogs, the birds, the falling walls, the driven rain.

Red John was bolting the door. ‘He is out in that storm,’ thought Little Mary. Then she peered at the chimney, her eyes gleaming, the tip of her tongue licking her lower lip. Her bosom and neck heaved as if somebody were trying to choke her. The hardness left her face, as if she were eager to be choked. She was thinking now of the man who had been in the cabin for the last seven days. That night week he had come with her husband from Kilmurrage. ‘I want to be left alone,’ he said, as he threw two suitcases on the kitchen floor. Great God, what a man he was! They said that the doctors had told him to come to Inverara as a cure for his nerves. He had been in the wars. At least so the people said. He had never spoken to her yet, or even looked at her except as an automaton who served his meals and made his bed. Everybody called him the ‘Stranger,’ but Seameen Derrane’s daughter, who worked in Shaughnessy’s hotel in Kilmurrage, where he had stayed the first three days after his arrival in Inverara, said that his name was Fergus O’Connor, and that he belonged to Ashcragh on the mainland, the little town south of the Head of Crom. They said too that he was mad, and had no religion. But she did not care what they said. He was the kind of man she wanted. His great black eyes pierced her like a wolfhound’s, when he bent his forehead into furrows and his eyebrows contracted. And what a mouth he had! O God of the thousand battles, it was the kind of mouth she had kissed in her dreams, kissed until her lips were bruised. Long straight quivering lips! Of course he was thin and haggard, but all men were thin and haggard who lived hard. Why should men not live hard? Her own people had always lived hard. Her father had lived hard. Was not her grandfather, Le Cachet the Breton, shot during a drunken orgy in a brothel in the South of France? All real men lived hard, not slothfully, like pigs, as her husband lived, but wildly, like the storm that has no morals and recognizes no laws, but ruthlessly rushes forward and yet is beautiful in its ferocity.

Once she had touched his right hand below the wrist while handing him a cup of tea, and … Virgin Mary, what a sensation! She had to turn away her head to hide her blushes. Would he never notice her? Perhaps he despised her as a peasant. Of course he was different. His hands were smooth and refined, and his face, in spite of the brown beard he was growing, was like her father’s face. It had that peculiar expression in it that peasants did not have, as if it were concealing something. ‘I will make him look at me,’ she panted. ‘There will be wreckage to-night,’ said Red John, jumping to his feet. ‘Get me my things ready. Sean Mor said he would come for me to go to the shore. Get my things, I say, woman,’ he shouted, stamping on the floor.