Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

But he felt none of her happiness. He suddenly stopped talking, and without casting a glance at her went out. A terrible weariness seized him. He always felt that discontent when he had talked a great deal, as if there were something he wanted to do and couldn’t do. Night was falling as he walked down the village towards the beach. A bitter wind blew fitfully, almost drowned by a dirty grey mist that seemed to be rolling up before it the rays of the sinking sun. It was as if the sun, like a sick man recovering from a long illness, were giving up its feeble attempt to warm the earth and the dregs of winter were putting it to flight. Through the mist he could see dim grey forms coming towards him, peasants coming wearily homewards after their day’s work, with spades on their shoulders. They were talking idly and laughing. They talked of women. There was a lewd ferocity in their tired voices. Now and again one of them would yell and scrape his spade along the stone fence as if seized by a drunken frenzy. In spite of himself he felt his blood rush hotly at their remarks and they disgusted him.

‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘how coarse I am becoming! I, an educated man!’ But his body revolted against this priggishness of his mind. Said spring within him: ‘You know very well educated men are far worse than these poor peasants in matters of the kind, but they are too cowardly to express them only. Vice is born of repression.’ ‘That’s right,’ he thought, and suddenly he became aware that the reason he had kept away from Little Mary for the past fortnight was because she had given herself to him. And he had thought Kathleen O’Daly superior to Little Mary. Why? Obviously because she was better dressed, respectable, and had been to a university. Fancy setting a woman like that above Little Mary, a shallow conceited woman, just like the artificial unsexed ladies who haunt the suburbs of large cities, full of sham intellectual vanities, the mainstay of society doctors, spiritualists, psychoanalysts, and freak writers. He recounted all Little Mary had done for him in winter when he was ill. He felt the warm fragrance of her body lying within his arms. He saw the wild love-light in her half-closed eyes turned up to his, and he shuddered, hating himself for having slighted her in his mind. But even as he did so his morose intellect sardonically recalled the wondrous music of Kathleen’s violin, the refined hands, the ripple of the curls on her cheeks. He struck his forehead heavily and swore. The blow brought him back to his senses, and he stopped with a start and looked about him.

He found himself standing half-way out on the Jagged Reef, absolutely alone in the dark night. He could hear the low rumbling of the sea in front, coming up to him through the mist. The rocks at his feet were covered with yellow sea moss, slippery and glistening. White froth oozed from it, where his feet rested. Birds ran screaming along the rocks. He could just see their long, bright, red legs. Their bodies, the colour of the grey mist, were invisible. Cormorants, flying close to the ground, their gullets heavy with the day’s fishing, side-stepped with a whizzing sound as they passed him. And overhead there was nothing visible but the black fat belly of the mist. The sharp biting wind made him shiver. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what a night!’ Oppressed by nature that was black as his own soul, he began to walk out hurriedly towards the sea, pretending to himself that he could endure life no longer, and that he was going to drown himself. The tide was nearly at a low ebb, and he seemed to have been walking for hours before the mighty vastness loomed up suddenly at him out of the mist. Its vast, dark, moving face leered. Aghast at the thought of jumping into the belly of such an appalling monster, he wheeled about sharply and slipped on the moss. He fell on his knees in a pool. His teeth began to chatter. He scrambled to his feet and ran back madly over the rocks. He stumbled among the pools. He thought an army of ghosts surrounded him. He felt sure that a huge animal was hurtling along behind him trying to catch him by the heels. When he reached the cabin he sighed with delight and broke into a walk. He was perspiring. He looked around cautiously lest anybody should have seen his hurried flight, and then began to whistle nonchalantly and swing his arms as he walked towards the cabin. He kept shaking his head and saying to himself, ‘By God, never again will I slight Little Mary.’ He wanted her to comfort him, so he persuaded himself that he was a fine fellow and loved her.

He saw two great mastiffs standing outside Red John’s door, wagging their tails and smelling each other’s noses. Red John’s cur was lying on its back at their feet, whining and shivering when the mastiffs sniffed at it contemptuously. He recognized the dogs as O’Daly’s, and jumped over the gate, eagerly chuckling to himself. ‘Jove, I’ll have a great talk with him.’ The two mastiffs made a snarling rush at him. He was always afraid of dogs, but he joyously kicked at them as if the great hairy things with jagged fangs were timid sheep. He opened the door and entered the kitchen.

‘How are you, Mr. O’Daly? Delighted to see you.’

O’Daly made a noise as if he were urging on a horse, as he turned around on the stool in front of the fire. With one hand stroking his beard and the other hand on his right knee, he looked at the Stranger with his peculiar ferocious look that never inspired fear or embarrassment, but love for the strange old fellow.

‘Well,’ he said, shaking his head like a horse, ‘you are a queer person. Upon my soul, you are as unsociable as an Englishman. Why don’t you come to see the people? Sit down and tell us what devilment you’ve been up to. Sit down here and talk to the people.’

‘Wait until I change my clothes,’ said the Stranger, laughing; ‘I’m wet to the neck.’ He went into his room.

‘How are you getting on with your sowing, Red John?’ said O’Daly, taking out his pipe and looking from Red John and Little Mary, who sat in opposite corners, back and forth, fiercely as if he were interrogating them at the Petty Sessions in his capacity as a magistrate.

Red John drew his legs up under him and sniffed. ‘Oh, well enough, well enough,’ he said with a sigh.

‘My soul from the devil’ cried O’Daly, ‘what a miserable fellow you are. You’re the most’ – he pulled at his pipe – ‘miserable fellow I ever met. So you are.’ He cracked his fingers, wagged his head, and blew clouds of tobacco smoke from his mouth. ‘My soul from the devil, but you have the most beautiful woman in Inverara, and yet you are a miserable fellow. How do you explain it? What do you say about it, my good woman?’ He began to talk to Little Mary, subtly flattering her, until she almost cried with laughter and enjoyment, while Red John’s forehead twitched as he looked from one to the other of them. He would look at Little Mary’s beautiful face and flashing eyes and say to himself, ‘My woman, eh? May the devil rape her.’ Then he would look at O’Daly with hatred. He hated him because he was big and strong, and was able to talk freely to women. His eyes would roam over O’Daly’s brown patched suit that hung loosely about his lean body, and he imagined that even the stuff of the cloth was a living enemy. The game bag that hung on O’Daly’s shoulder assumed the properties of an enemy. It was associated with the things that he never knew, that he never possessed. Even the blood-stained head of a curlew that protruded from a hole in the side of the bag leered at him. It said, ‘There you are, you miserable peasant, you never could kill a curlew. You are a poor oppressed wretch. You are a worm. You are only fit to be kicked like a cur.’ And the gun that lay on the ground beside O’Daly, its barrel gleaming in the firelight, seemed to threaten him with instant death if he dared to lift a finger in order to assert his manhood. As he sat in his corner his soul shrank to a trembling point in his breast. The whole range of his understanding cowered within that point in awe of everything that moved about him. Not a solitary being, not even a dog or a bird, watched with him in sympathy. He was alone, without even the knowledge of a God to comfort him. His reason was slowly dying like a plant suiddenly stricken with drought under a scorching sun. He sat still without thought, lest a movement or a thought would betray his presence to all these enemies that were eager to overwhelm him. Slowly, fearfully, his soul fled backwards, dragging his body with it into the vast unconscious emptiness of the primeval life from which his ancestors had arisen. For in Rooruck in spring life is only to the strong and the ruthless.