Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

The Stranger had arisen and was putting on his boots when he heard the knocking. He went to the door hurriedly and shouted: ‘Why don’t you stop that noise? Who is making that noise, I say?’ Red John heard and tried to stop his head from banging against the wall, but could not do so. His head, too, was beyond his control. The Stranger dashed out of his room in a fury and had just begun to shout abuse when he saw Red John standing naked by the wall. He stood with wide-open mouth and staring eyes. His face got cold and then turned white. His nostrils distended. He stared into Red John’s eyes and Red John stared into his.

He was not afraid of physical hurt from Red John. He was not startled by seeing him standing naked against the wall. It was not that made him horror-stricken. It was a sudden thought that flashed across his brain when he looked into Red John’s insane eyes. It was the thought that there was a kinship between his own soul and that of Red John, that he himself was mad like Red John. It was like seeing a photograph of himself taken during a nightmare. Now the terrors and excitements of the past years, since the night in France when the shells falling about his ears filled his head with red demons, gathered together with a lightning rush and formed into a word that he read, horrified, ‘Insanity.’ ‘I am insane,’ he muttered. And he was seized with a frenzy that made him stiffen against the grinning idiot opposite him, who had torn this devilish secret from his breast. He raised his hands and hissed, about to grasp Red John by the throat.

Then Red John yelled and tore his jaws wide open to the utmost with his two hands, as if trying to vomit his fear in the intensity of the yell. He drew up his right leg to his buttock and struck at the wall with its sole. ‘Go away,’ he screamed, clawing the air, ‘go away; you are going to kill me. Help me! help me! he’s going to kill me!’ He yelled again and was seized with a convulsive fit of trembling. His body hopped against the wall as if it were on springs. The Stranger recovered himself at the yell. His brain cleared and he drew a deep sigh of relief. His heart throbbed loudly; he had stood on the brink of a vast abyss, staggering, and had only just by accident been hurled back to sanity, by a madman’s yell. Another moment and he had been tearing at Red John’s throat, a madman.

Choking with the horror of his situation he ran out into the yard to draw breath. He stood for fully half a minute in the yard, breathing in gasps. Then again he remembered Red John. He must get help. ‘Help, help!’ he shouted. ‘Red John is mad.’ He listened. A peasant thrust out his head from the door of a cabin to the right. The Stranger, looking at him dazedly, noticed that his beard was the same colour exactly as his own.

‘Ohé,’ cried the peasant. ‘What is it?’

‘Red John is mad,’ shouted the Stranger as if he were repeating a formula, thinking that a dark beard would suit him better. The peasant crossed himself and disappeared. The Stranger kept on shouting ‘Help! Red John is mad,’ until he completely forgot all about Red John and help and the peasants and everything. He was staring at the ground with a fixed stare, wondering whether primitive men had beards, or what was the origin of the beard, since it did not seem to serve any purpose and was dangerous in battle. Wrapt in his meditation, he walked into the kitchen, but stopped with a scream, as the tongs flew past him within an inch of his jaw and rattled against the open door. He fell to the ground in terror. Red John flew out over his body, carrying his clothes in his hands. He looked up to see Red John vaulting naked over the fence of the yard on to the road. There was a black patch of dirt on his left shoulder and his backbone stood out clear under his skin as his body bent in jumping. Then he disappeared around the corner, running southwards towards the crags.

The peasants, men, women and children, rushed to the cabin. The Stranger stood at the door babbling disconnectedly, describing to each as he came up how Red John stood by the wall, threw the tongs and ran out. Then when the first excitement wore off he began to notice the silence of the peasants. They stood about saying nothing, looking at him as if they suspected him of being the cause of Red John’s madness. So it seemed to him, though nothing of the kind was in the minds of the peasants. They were silent and open-mouthed merely because they were trying to realize what had happened and endeavouring to derive as much satisfaction as possible from the excitement. Their crude, undeveloped intelligence, unable to understand that one of themselves had lost his reason, surrendered itself to enjoyment and fear, like women listening to a tale about pirates or malignant ghosts. And he, unable to understand that their silence was born of stupidity, thought they were accusing him and became afraid of them. Their very number awed him. He could have fawned on them for sympathy. And his mind was vexed, for even then his Black Soul seemed to stand apart, scoffing at him for his lack of courage, his lack of being able to stand alone. His Black Soul, like a dying aristocrat beset by revolutionaries whom he had oppressed, fumed scornfully, desiring to maintain his pride to the last. His heart wanted to move up close to the simple peasants and gape with them in horror at the unknown, to babble with them and gesticulate and be vulgar. He felt there was a wonderful comfort in being vulgar, in jumping off the pedestal of cold aristocratic intellectuality and plastering himself with the mud and dirt of the loud-mouthed mass. And he jumped down. A loose-limbed man, with far-seeing and tender blue eyes, stood beside him. They called him Big Dick. He turned to him and said:

‘What are we to do? Hadn’t we better go after him?’

The peasant spat and shrugged his shoulders.

‘What is, is,’ he said, ‘and must be.’

‘Aye,’ said another, crossing himself, ‘there is cure in death, so there is.’

For madness to them was a sacred thing, a mysterious manifestation of the power of the ancient gods long forgotten, but who still roamed the air and the sea malevolently playing with the people who had forsaken them for the mighty promises of the Christian heaven.

‘Let what’s to be done be done,’ cried Big Dick; ‘get yourselves ready.’ And they all went away to their cabins.

The Stranger went into the cabin and sat by the fire wringing his hands. He thought this was the end of everything. He wanted to hide somewhere where no one could find him. He was stripped now of everything, of even the self-respect that his Black Soul had still kept glimmering within him. Now he had even lost his Black Soul. He was defeated. He had even lost the power of despising himself. And then through his stupor came the noise of women shouting outside. For a moment he listened carelessly, thinking that the mob were coming to lynch him for having driven Red John mad. ‘Let them come,’ he muttered, ‘it is the end.’

But then a woman shrieked in a shrill voice, ‘Little Mary, you whore, it was you drove him mad. Let us tear her eyes out, the evil one.’

He jumped up, just as Little Mary dashed into the kitchen. She staggered against the door exhausted, as if she had run a long way from death. Her light shawl, thrown over her shoulders, was torn at the edge where somebody had grasped it. Yet looking at her it seemed to him that he had never seen anything so beautiful as her eyes that looked at him startled and beseeching.

‘Mary,’ he gasped, and opened his arms.

‘Protect me,’ she cried, and staggered to him, dropping the can she held in her hand. It fell on its side and the milk from it streamed along the earthen floor under their feet as they embraced. And as soon as he felt his arms about her he lost all fear. The problem of life became suddenly simplified. She had made a demand of him that had caused some new cell in his brain to come to life. It gave him a wonderfully clean sensation, the desire to protect her.