Liam O'Flaherty - The Black Soul

He coughed loudly, stepped into the kitchen, and advanced to the Stranger who was sitting on a form by the back door.

‘Say,’ he cried in a loud hearty voice, ‘I’m tickled to death to see a live man come into my house. Shake! Stranger. You must have a drink with me.’

As soon as the peasants saw Carmody welcoming the Stranger, they looked at one another and whispered: ‘He must be all right after all.’

For Mrs. Derrane had broadcasted the story of the night before, and with the quickness of peasants to believe harm of everybody, no matter how ridiculous the story might be, they all thought the Stranger possessed of a devil. The music started once more and a ragged fisherman with a dirty black beard got up to dance a hornpipe. He did a few whirls clumsily, but he was so drunk that he stumbled straight backwards trying to clap his hands under the crook of his left knee, and fell on his buttocks in a pot at the back door.

‘Oh, you God of all evil!’ he cried mournfully, amid a roar of laughter.

The Stranger, sitting beside Carmody on the form, laughed as loudly as the rest. He felt a strange joy in the association of these people. They appeared to him to be real. He felt the joy that the bad young man feels when he returns to the tavern after spending an evening with genteel and boring society in the respectability of his home. And he felt drawn towards Carmody in particular. He drank the bad brandy that was offered to him, and somehow it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk. Carmody began to talk at a great pace about the United States, where he had spent ten years of his youth.

‘A great country. None o’yer goddam superstitions there.’

The Stranger felt a sense of freedom creeping over him. The outspoken wanderer, Carmody was, he felt, an outcast from society like himself, at war with the world. He was a kindred spirit. ‘Ha, ha,’ he thought, it would be a great life to lounge around in Inverara, drinking and talking to Carmody, enjoying himself, abandoning himself, without any thought of the world outside, just living like a pig. It would be a revenge on the world. It would be far better than to kill himself. If he were dead he could not feel anything, whereas alive, his life would be a constant insult to civilization. Civilization? That cursed quagmire that sucked everything good into its bosom! That mirage that lures youth with promises that are never fulfilled! Sure. This was the ideal thing. To meet a few fellows like Carmody and drink with them and scoff at the world with them, laughing loudly to cheat the blackness in his soul. He would wear his body away until the damn thing fell to pieces. He would use up every ounce of it in wild debauch.

He felt himself getting drunk, and was glad. It was the first time he felt the exhilaration of drunkenness since he had come to Inverara. The whisky he had drunk in the shebeen only stupefied him. The company prevented him from getting drunk. Talking to a man like Carmody he could get drunk. He seized Carmody’s hand. Carmody turned his long bronzed muscular face towards him.

‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said, ‘I’ve been dying for somebody to whom I could talk.’

Carmody was about to reply when somebody stumbled against the barrel outside the door. There was a loud string of curses.

‘Another man fallen,’ shouted a peasant.

‘Blast ye, Michaeleen Grealish,’ shouted Carmody, ‘didn’t I tell ye to take away that - - - - barrel?’

‘Hey there, hey there,’ came the voice, ‘open the door. I can’t see my hand.’

Somebody raised the latch and a man flopped into the kitchen with his left hand held out in front of him. He began to talk as soon as he was within the house and he kept talking. His voice rang out loud and clear. He kept gesticulating with both hands and throwing his head back with a twist, like a dog shaking a rat. He had taken his hat from his head and his bald forehead shone in the light. The lumps on the white skin around the temples stood out distinctly. His grey bushy eyebrows twitched. His cheeks were blood red, with narrow blue veins showing through them. His nose was long and straight. Its ridge was as sharp as a lean horse’s spine. He wore a bushy grey beard, shaven on both lips. His chin showed red through the beard, and it had a dimple in the centre. His blue eyes gleamed like the bright blue dust that shines in granite. His grey trousers hung close to his thin legs, showing the outward bend in the left leg below the knee. His black coat hung loose about his body.

‘Somebody wants to kill me,’ he cried, his blue eyes glaring all around him fiercely. Yet everybody laughed. Then the man opened his mouth too and laughed. He had only five teeth in his upper jaw, scattered at irregular intervals.

‘Say, you must excuse me, Mr. O’Daly,’ said Carmody, coming up to him. ‘I told that fool Michaeleen –’

‘That’s all right, my good man, that’s all right. Good evening,’ he said, seeing the Stranger, ‘I heard you were staying at Red John’s. I meant to go and see you. Come on, look alive there, Carmody, and bring a bottle into the parlour. Bring a glass for yourself.’

‘A bottle of that best brandy, Mary,’ shouted Carmody to his wife as he respectfully went in front to open the parlour door. He placed chairs in front of the parlour fire and asked his guests to seat themselves, hitching his American trousers about his waist and spitting on his hands like a waiter in a New York bowery lunch room. His huge stature loomed over the two middle-sized men like the figure of a Praetorian guardsman protecting a Caesar.

‘Let me introduce you–’ he began.

‘I always introduce myself,’ interrupted O’Daly, leaning back with his two feet crossed on the mantelpiece until his chair stood on its hind legs. ‘My name is Matthew O’Daly of Lisamuc, Co. Sligo.’

He threw out his chest as he spoke and his eyes flashed. He made a gesture with his left hand in front of his face and then rubbed it along his left shin as he turned to the Stranger, his eyes gleaming aggressively as if he were challenging the Stranger to doubt his identity. The wrist above his hand seemed to be made solely of a square flat bone, covered with white hairy skin. In fact, all his body seemed to be made of one flexible bone like a steel sword.

The Stranger winced, and blinked his eyes under the unexpected stare. It was some time before he could get himself to give his own name. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was ashamed of his name, of his ancestry, that his father was an obscure schoolmaster, that he himself was a failure in life and a coward.

‘My name is Fergus O’Connor of Ashcragh,’ he said with an affected drawl.

‘Heh,’ said O’Daly. Then he made a noise at the back of his palate like a man urging on a horse.

‘I declare to Christ but you must be the son of John O’Connor the schoolmaster. Hell to my soul, that dog of a priest treated him badly. Shake hands.’

Carmody’s face beamed at hearing O’Daly abuse a priest, and he hit himself a great blow in the chest and laughed until his teeth seemed about to fall out. He hated priests as enemies of ‘all people who can think intelligent.’

‘Drink up,’ he said, handing them glasses from the tray that had been brought in. ‘You two will drink on me to-night. It’s seldom that three men –’

But O’Daly interrupted him again, and began to talk at a tremendous rate, denouncing the parish priest, the doctor, the district inspector of police, and all the people of note in Inverara, as scoundrels of the worst kind, inhuman rascals, low fellows, and men whose parentage was in doubt.

‘Since this new Government came into power, Carmody,’ he cried, ‘the country is gone to the dogs.’

The Stranger drank his brandy and felt the blood rushing to his head. Suddenly he began to lose his grip of everything. He became defiant and aggressive. He joined in the conversation and began to boast on his own account, boasting of his past life, of which he had been mortally ashamed an hour ago. Carmody began to boast, but O’Daly boasted loudest of them all. None of the three would listen to the others. Only snatches of their conversation rose above the volume of sound, amid the clinking of glasses and the gurgling of the brandy from the bottle. It seemed that the three of them had spent all their lives fighting, drinking, and breaking women’s hearts. O’Daly spent more nights of his sixty years of life in his boots than out of them. He had drunk more whisky ‘than they make now in the distilleries.’ He had broken a man’s hand in two places with a simple twist of his wrist. He had been all over Ireland, and knew every bishop, politician, racehorse-owner and athlete. In other words, he knew every body whom anybody cares to be known to know in Ireland. Carmody was not behindhand. In fact, he had once stood, it seems, as a candidate for the American Congress in the Socialist interest. He was known all over the American continent as a crack shot, and he had more love affairs than he could count. The Stranger had been one of the most gifted and promising geniuses in Europe before the war, drink and women laid him low.