Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

That picture vanished. There was a hum in his ears, and another picture stood out like a little red star. He saw himself as an infant, sprawling naked in his mother’s lap. Black clouds were forming far away from his eyes, and then they approached nearer and nearer until they became little red spots. He was crying from fear. He was afraid of his mother. He could see a queer look in her eyes above him as he lay on his back. She was fondling his naked toes, but she was laughing boisterously at the same time and talking shortly to an old woman who was mixing punch at the table. Then that picture merged into another, in which he himself did not figure. It was his home, a square grey building, with a garden in front, white blinds drawn on the upper windows, and the yellow chimney-pots discoloured with black soot. Voices were coming from the dining-room. His mother was shrieking, ‘Oh then, oh then, oh then! Are you going to murder me, John? Can’t I take a drop of brandy for my rheumatism? Oh then, oh then, oh then!’ Then his father came out and banged the door behind him. He walked down the gravel path to the gate, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand stroking his brown beard, his grey cloth hat pulled down over his eyes, a melancholy expression in his face, his full red lips twitching. Next came a vision of himself, at seventeen, standing over his mother’s corpse. His father’s hand was on his shoulder, the fingers clasping the shoulder-blade spasmodically. ‘Fergus,’ said his father, ‘promise me now that you will never forget how …’ And then the voice faded as he heard the parish priest denounce his father from the altar as an atheist, ordering his parishioners under pain of excommunication to keep their children from Mr. O’Connor’s school.

‘I should love to see that priest dying of cancer,’ the Stranger muttered aloud.

Then came his father’s death. It was a back room, in one of those drab streets off the South Circular Road in Dublin. He himself, then an enthusiastic youth of twenty, a brilliant student at the University, chaste, studious, supporting his father by clerical work in the evening in a newspaper office, while he maintained himself at college with scholarships, was holding his father’s hand, comforting him, telling him he would be happy and prosperous yet. And the old man shook his head and said, ‘I wonder, Fergus, is their hell as cruel as life?’

‘Oh, damn it!’ cried the Stranger, striking his forehead with his clenched fist.

Little Mary started and looked at him tenderly.

‘Keep away from the fire,’ she said, ‘until you have eaten your supper. Food will settle your stomach. The heat goes badly with whisky.’

Ha! Now the visions became more comfortable. He could recognize himself as he was now. He was alone in the world, scoffing at the world. There was his first night at a music-hall. What a strange effect that had on him! When he saw the women, half-naked, displaying their plump limbs sensuously as they glided up and down the stage, he almost went mad with suppressed passion. He was then twenty-one and had never touched drink or knew women. That night after the theatre he tasted both.

‘Of course. Why not?’ he said aloud.

‘What’s that?’ said Little Mary, as she laid a cup and saucer on the table.

‘Oh, nothing,’ grumbled the Stranger.

Little Mary shuddered and thought that it might have been the wind she heard. It sometimes seemed to talk with a human voice when it whistled around the western gable of the cabin, where the thatch rubbed between the two round stones that held the manilla ropes to the roof. Or it might have been the Wave of Destiny that roared distantly off the Fountain Hole. People said there was an underground palace there, submerged for thousands of years. Dead warriors feasted there in winter, and the sound of their banquet music was carried by the wind over the sea, to drive lonely women crazy with longing for love. She sighed and brushed the Stranger’s elbow as she passed him to the fire.

The Stranger shivered inwardly as he felt her body touch his. He turned his head slowly to look at her. As she bent over the fire, with the fire-glow on her cheeks, she looked beautiful to him. But she did not arouse his passion. For him it was like looking at a statue.

‘Women are a curse,’ he muttered. ‘No, no. Not a curse, but the playthings of folly, disused. ....’

With a snap the motor in his brain began to purr again. Again a picture eddied out of the mass of memories and stood still. It was the picture of the night with his first woman. She became distinct for a moment, beautiful eyes burning like coals in the wreck of a beautiful face, a loose soiled dressing-gown with a fleshless collar-bone showing at the open neck. Then the woman vanished as she held out her thin hands and said, ‘Are you leaving me so soon, dearie?’ He himself became distinct, wandering through back streets, tearing his hair, cursing himself, feeling his body unclean, begging the earth to open up and devour him. Then a whole series of pictures came with a rush, crowding one over the other. That was his year of debauch before he joined the army. At last the pictures joined together and formed into one. He saw himself standing outside a recruiting office, down at heel, in a tattered coat, with sunken cheeks. Then a monstrous picture came, distorted like a madman’s fancy. It was a vast plain without a tree or a blade of grass, pock-marked with shell holes, covered with rotting corpses. He could see the vermin crawling on the dead lips. And he smiled. That picture did not accuse himself. It accused the world that he hated. ‘Just think of it,’ he muttered, ‘I spent three years in that hell. Great God!’

He smiled as he saw himself wandering around the world for two years after the war, trying to find somewhere to rest – Canada, the Argentine, South Africa. ‘What a blasted fool I was! As if there were any rest for a man in this world!’ And then, worse still he saw himself back again in Dublin, burrowing in the bowels of philosophy, trying to find consolation one day in religion, next day in anarchism, next day in Communism, and rejecting everything as empty, false and valueless. And at last, despairing of life, flying from it as from an ogre that was torturing him, he had come to Inverara.

He jumped to his feet, and with his hands behind his back he began to stalk up and down the floor, muttering disjointedly:

‘Honour, civilization … eh … all rot … culture be damned … all the culture in the world … prostitution and hypocrisy … only thing is to live like a beast without thought … not to give a damn …’

‘Your supper is ready,’ said Little Mary.

He had forgotten his supper, and he felt no desire to eat. Still, he had no energy to refuse it. What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether he ate or did not eat? ‘In the world men make revolutions in order to eat. How ridiculous!’ He took a seat at the deal table. He broke an egg and tasted it.

‘Drink the tea first,’ said Little Mary. ‘It will do you good.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, let me alone. How do you know what’s good or bad?’

Mary almost dropped the kettle she was taking from the hearth. She whirled around like a tigress. Her eyes blazed. He had sworn at her. Her lips went white. Her husband had often sworn at her. The men around Rooruck always swore at their women and often beat them. But she had expected that this man would have been refined. He had insulted her! She forgot that she was a peasant. Her father’s blood boiled in her. The hand holding the kettle shivered. Then her anger fled in a flash. Instead she felt a throbbing of her breast. It hurt her, as fire hurts a numbed hand. The Stranger had looked at her fiercely, and before his stare her anger had changed into the hunger of love. She felt a physical pain as if he had beaten her with a stick. It was more cruel than that. He had burnt her with his tongue and his eyes had drawn the sting from her body, leaving it numb. She sighed. Her breast heaved and her eyes dimmed with sadness looking into his. They said, ‘Come, you may kill me. I am yours.’