Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

He listened, panting slightly, but for a moment or two he heard nothing. Then he heard something move, with the sound a duck makes walking on slippery wet flags. Then there came the sound of teeth chattering violently, and the kind of horrid mumbling a dumb man makes when in a rage. These sounds irritated without terrifying him and he struggled to a kneeling position and drew himself up to the entrance of the cavern. He stared in. His face was within three inches of Red John’s.

He lay crouching on his hands and knees, spellbound. Red John crouched facing him, kneeling on his right knee, his left hand, palm downward, embedded in the yellow sea-moss that grew on the side of a tiny pool. His right hand holding the open knife was stretched in front of him, with the point of the knife resting against the face of the cliff. Large drops of water pattered from the cliff on his naked back. And through the opening at the far end of the cavern, the sea, half-hidden by the mist, loomed up like an undulating plain that is set in imaginary motion by the shadows of a winter dawn. He looked like an uncouth monster risen from the black sea. His bloodshot eyes seemed to have been thrust out from their sockets by a violent shock that had jammed their mechanism and prevented them from getting back into their natural position. And when he breathed his whole body contracted, so that the skin lay in loose wrinkles between the ribs. His mouth and throat contorted violently, as he tried to speak. And the Stranger stared at him for several moments, speechless. Then he said in a low voice, as if afraid to hear himself, ‘Come on, Red John, follow me. You’ll catch cold there.’ And he began to edge backwards, keeping his eyes fixed on Red John’s face.

But he had barely moved when Red John roared and flung himself upon him. He fell in a heap over the Stranger’s shoulders and the two of them rolled out into the open plateau. The peasants watching on the cliff-top yelled. ‘The knife, the knife! he’ll kill him with the knife,’ came a scream from a woman, as Red John tore his right hand free and lunged at the Stranger’s chest. But the Stranger twisted around and struck Red John’s arm with his fist. Then he closed with Red John, grasping Red John’s body about the shoulders, so that he was only able to move his legs below the knees. The Stranger pressed with all his might, and Red John struck out with his feet and snapped with his teeth, trying to bite the Stranger’s left ear. Then suddenly his body stiffened. He planted his heels on the rock and raised his hips, so that his body rested on his shoulders and his heels. The Stranger, fearing that he planned a fresh attack, moved and threw his legs over him in order to crush him with his weight. But as his eyes came in line with Red John’s throat he drew back. The throat was shivering like the gills of a dying fish. The whole body had gone limp. The eyes were glassy. The lower jaw had dropped. Red John was dead. His heart had burst in the last effort of his madness.

‘On and on I wander endlessly. I am the lord of nature. I heal and kill heedlessly. I drive men to a frenzy and soothe others with the same roar of my anger. I am the sadness of joy. I am the ferocity of beauty.’ So murmured the sea, as the Stranger, crouching astride the stiffening corpse of Red John, held his hands aloft to the peasants on the cliff-top and mumbled cries for help. Then the sea seemed to take a short leap forward and struck the cliffs noisily. Gullies of wind eddied westwards from the Fort of Coillnamhan, whirling in and out under the cliffs like swallows. The mist rose before the wind and a cloud-racked sky appeared. The sun stared through a flimsy white cloud that had just parted in the middle. Advancing breakers buffeted by the wind began to turn somersaults. Sea-birds, roused by the sudden squall, soared aloft screaming. The peasants crossed themselves and said, ‘God save us, it is the magic wind.’ And the Stranger, listening to the chorus of sounds from nature that had a few minutes before been wrapped in mist and silence, started as he had been awakened from a nightmare by a bugle call. He looked at the corpse between his legs, and a sense of the reality of life, of his surroundings, of himself, became so vivid that it wiped out his fear of the death of which a few moments before he had accused himself in terror. Instead of fear of the future, of what men would say of him or do to him, because of the death of Red John, he experienced a feeling of anger that was born of a sudden access of strength. Instead of maudlin pity for the corpse beneath him, he looked upon it in anger, meaningless anger. Whence that anger? Perhaps it came from the sudden rush of the sea and wind to his assistance. Perhaps the presence of death made him lust for life. He stood up, exultantly watching Big Dick descend the cliff on a rope to his assistance, and he thought of nothing but his fierce desire to get to the cliff-top and fly with Little Mary to safety. He doubted no more. The nightmares that had haunted his soul had vanished. He feared life no more. He longed for it, with its ferocity of endeavour, of suffering and of happiness. Life as he had learned to understand it in Inverara, to the sound of the sea, strong like the hailstones that pattered on the crags, like the roar of the storm wind, like the lashing of the breakers against the cliffs. Inverara had rubbed the balm of her fierce strength into his marrows. She had purified his blood with her bitter winds. She had filled his exhausted lungs with the smell of her sea. And it was at that moment, when he came face to face with the reality of death, that the reality of life assumed a meaning for him.

Big Dick reached the plateau, and advanced towards the Stranger and the corpse, the legs of his yellow oilskin trousers clashing one against the other with a shuffling sound. ‘Mother of God!’ he said, crossing himself, ‘he’s dead.’ And he looked from the corpse to the Stranger with awe and fear.

They hoisted the corpse to the cliff-top and then the Stranger put the noose under his armpits and was hoisted up. As he ascended the cliff, he felt a wonderful exhilaration as if he were being raised aloft into a heaven of happiness. And for the first time since he had rounded the dangerous curve he thought of Little Mary. And with the thought of her, he felt a fiercer anger than before, like an animal whose mate is in danger. And then he felt hands about his shoulders, and he scrambled to the cliff-top into Little Mary’s arms.

For half a minute they lay clasped in an embrace that made them unconscious of their surroundings, of the angry mutterings of the men, arguing with O’Daly, who had arrived just then, of the screaming of the women, of the corpse of Red John, lying ghastly and naked against a green mound; unconscious of the wind that now tore up over the cliff-top with a savage roar. Red John’s uncle’s wife rushed at Little Mary, screaming, ‘She killed him, she’s enchanted, down with her, the whore!’ and the Stranger jumped to his feet, with Little Mary clinging to his waist. He had raised his arm to strike the woman, when O’Daly rushed in between them and pushed him back. ‘Go, run for your lives,’ he whispered; ‘run.’ ‘Keep back there,’ he shouted to the peasants, ‘or I’ll get every one of you shot.’ And as the Stranger and Little Mary hurried away from the cliff towards the village, the men cursed and threatened them and the women gathered around the corpse, screaming and wailing the death dirge. And Red John’s livid face frowned sardonically in death, as if he were conscious that he who in life was despised and persecuted were now in his death the centre of all interest.

O’Daly overtook them near the cabin. ‘Hurry! Get your things and come with me,’ he panted. ‘You want to leave the island immediately. Be quick. I’ll give you an address in Dublin … see you right … I’ll fix up everything here … magistrate, parish priest doesn’t want a scandal … all … everything, d’ye see? … all right.’