Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

Then the women appeared at the door, pushing one another and threatening. He rushed at them with a yell and they fled. Then he came back to Little Mary and began to console her. She sobbed without tears in his arms. They both at last felt the calmness of love without its passion, the solidarity of love. The last barrier was broken down between them, the barrier of his intellectual pride. He was in need of somebody on whom to lean for support. She needed some one to protect her. They leaned one against the other. And they looked into one another’s eyes; they pledged their lives together in silence. They had found the enduring love of mutual necessity.

They left the cabin together to join in the search for Red John. The whole village had gathered for it, but even then they were still arguing as to whether a man should be sent for the police or not. Then at last Big Dick ordered a man to go to Kilmurrage for the police and they started off for the beach. The people set off after him, saying, ‘In the name of God let us go,’ all in as great an excitement as if they were setting out on a campaign against a desperate enemy. They advanced in a long straggling line to the shore, with the women coming behind. They talked in whispers and walked as slowly as possible, stopping now and again to look about them carefully, their faces set in a stare of respectful sympathy, but their eyes gleamed with suppressed pleasure and with intense fear and dread when anything stirred on the crags or a bird shrieked suddenly over their heads.

When they reached the shore they halted for another consultation. Several men spoke at the same time at the top of their voices, but nothing came of the talk. They seemed in fact to be debating plans for the mere purpose of dragging the affair out to the greatest possible length. Then three boys who had gone on ahead down to the rocky beach beneath the Hill of Fate came running back screaming, ‘We saw him, we saw him.’ They had seen Red John clothed in his shirt and his rawhide shoes going along the boulders towards the Hill of Fate. ‘Ha!’ they cried, ‘he’s making for the caves.’ But nobody moved. They began to talk again and gesticulate. They were incapable of taking any action in face of the phenomenon they did not understand. Any one of them would have risked his life in the wildest storm. Yet now they were stricken with fear of Red John, whom the day before they despised as a weakling. Just as if some ancient tradition forbade them to interfere with a fellow-man who had become suddenly possessed of a strange and magical spirit. Then, still talking, they moved along to the juncture of the shore and the Hill of Fate. The shore, strewn with small boulders, stretched to the west. To the east the Hill of Fate began to rise gradually in massive layers of rock and slate. It ran southwards for about fifty yards, and then curved sharply eastwards, shooting up to a majestic summit beyond the curve. At the curve the sea lapped its base, but there was a passage eastwards across its face, about fifty feet above the sea level. Huge boulders, some of them five hundred tons weight, lay in a chaotic mass westwards of the curve in the angle of the cliff. They formed immense and tangled caverns, and the sea, running in on the flat cracked rock on which they rested, roared dismally in the dark caverns even on a calm day.

Red John had disappeared among these caverns, and the peasants stood facing them, listening to the savage murmuring of the sea among them, like the barbaric welcome of a horde of pythons to a returned fellow. The Stranger now came up with Little Mary. He had followed the crowd, drawn by the same force that was outside of himself, some instinct that forced him to join the herd in pursuit of a lost one. He had followed it mechanically, only half-conscious of what was happening, not daring to think of what was going to happen to himself and to Little Mary. And Little Mary, walking beside him, followed him without thinking, in perfect confidence that all would be well with her as long as he was there to protect her. It was as if they were rushing headlong to the summit of a ridge, unable to stop themselves, ignorant of what lay beyond, whether a deep chasm leading to death or a level plain to safety.

And then when he reached the crowd and saw them standing chattering stupidly, he underwent another change, like a man who has been a long time cooped up in a jail and is let loose on a mountain-side where the clean wind is blowing among heather and across dark lakes and through rocky passes, filling the heart with courage and the limbs with energy and the mind with daring. He came up close to them and looked at them. In their excitement and fear their ape likeness was apparent. He lost all fear of them. Their mouths were open, as if their weak minds had fled through their mouths in awe of the unexplainable. Their strong bodies were like crippled machines without a motive power. They were like wild beasts in a cage. ‘Ha!’ he thought, ‘I am superior to them. I have a brain.’ And for the first time in his life he understood the real value of his intellect. And immediately he took command, without speaking. He just moved forward and they looked at him without speaking, as if they had been waiting all that time for him to come and give them orders. He felt a delicious thrill at having men suddenly look to him for guidance, to him, a wreck. The feeling of having power over his fellows seemed to expand him to twice his size.

He beckoned to them to follow him with a wave of his hand, as he moved forward towards the boulders. He was not conscious of any emotion, but elation at having these men follow him at his command. The power to make them move at his bidding shut out the consciousness of everything, of Red John, of his own position, even of Little Mary waiting behind, waiting in dull submission for whatever fate and her lover pleased to do for her.

The tide was coming in. The waves simmered around the bases of the boulders in the black pools that countless tides had worn into the rock. And along the wide ragged reef that dipped into the deep sea afar out, advancing and retreating waves in confused echelons flitted endlessly, their white manes looking grey through the rain mist that fell slantwise, westwards on the breeze. The breeze was hardly audible. The sky was covered with black clouds, banked in headlong confusion, so closely that the mist seemed to be perspiration oozing from their crushed bodies. There was no sound but the dreary mumbling of the sea among the boulders, the slow fall of the breakers on the Jagged Reef to the south-west and the hoarse cackling of a flock of seagulls who had discovered the carcase of a sheep floating in a mat of seaweed away out to the south.

They went in among the boulders, crawling on their hands and feet. They shouted to give themselves courage. The cliff towered above them now, rising sheerer and higher as they approached the curve. The black layer of slate in the cliff face shot out through the mist, like a vast cincture around its loins. The Stranger kept in the lead until they reached the base of the cliff. Still there was no sign of Red John. ‘Search the caverns,’ shouted the Stranger. ‘Yes, search them, you,’ everybody cried to his neighbours, but nobody moved. All feared to go down into the dark abysses on that bleak misty day, with a madman prowling in their depths. The huge masses of limestone, blackened by the mist, their sides covered with limpets, looked like living monsters sprawling on top of one another, slimy monsters that had been born thousands of years before. The peasants began to shout and babble, but they did not descend.

Then somebody shouted, ‘There he is. Look out!’ Red John had sprung up in front of them, just by the curve in the cliff. He was running along the ledge that led eastwards. As he was about to turn out of sight he halted and looked back over his shoulder. His grey flannel shirt was torn at the back so that his spine and thighs were bare. One of his feet was clad in a rawhide shoe. The rest of him was naked, except for the strip of shirt. There was a bloody gash on his left thigh above the knee. In his right hand he held a knife. He waved the knife and his face contorted. ‘Ha-a-a-aw!’ he yelled. Then he turned his head and stooped to pass eastwards on the narrow ledge. The sea lay about a hundred feet beneath him. The ledge was about eight inches wide at the curve. And the belly of the cliff swelled out almost over it. But he ran along it carelessly and disappeared. ‘He is going to drown himself,’ whispered the peasants. They gaped and crossed themselves. The women in the rear began to weep aloud. Red John’s uncle’s wife threw herself flat on a boulder, with her shawl over her head, and began to chant the death dirge. The men stood in silence, looking at the Stranger. Little Mary sat on a boulder and covered her face with her hands. ‘He is going to drown himself.’ The Stranger, watching the spot where Red John had disappeared, heard the sentence repeated again and again, and it seemed that each repetition was a blow struck at the elation he had just experienced, of commanding men. That Red John was going to kill himself struck into his consciousness like a heinous sin remembered after an opium dream. If Red John killed himself it was because of … ‘I’d be a murderer,’ he thought. And the thought shot him forward towards the curve before he had time to judge the reason of his action. ‘Where are you going?’ yelled the peasants. ‘You will get killed as sure as Christ was crucified,’ roared another in his ear, as if he were a mile away in a storm. The Stranger brushed him aside and advanced.