The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  LIAM O’FLAHERTY

  The Black Soul

  Contents

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Winter

  1

  In winter all things die. So roared the sea around the shores of Inverara. To the west beyond Rooruck it was black with dim fountains of white foam rising here and there as a wave formed and came towering to the beach. To the north, between Inverara and the mainland, it was white, like the waters of a mountain torrent, white with wide strips of green as if it had got sick and vomited. To the south it was black with a belt of white along the shore beneath the cliffs, where the breakers lashed the rocks. To the east beyond Kilmillick, where the north and south met in the narrow channel athwart the Head of Crom, it was a seething cauldron, hissing like a wounded snake. And around Rooruck it roared in mad delight.

  Winter had come. The sea was wrecking all that had generated in spring, flowered in summer and borne fruit in autumn. It tore huge rocks from its bosom and sent them rumbling through the deep. It hurled weeds shorewards in a tumbling mass. They lined the beaches in mounds mixed with sand and the carcases of dogfish. It struck the cliffs monstrous blows that shook them and sent the rockbirds screaming from their clefts. They soared wildly out, their eyes searching the foam for fish.

  In winter all things die. So shrieked the wind coming over the sea from the west. It rose from the sea and whirled upwards over the land. It mounted the wall of boulders that protected Rooruck on the west. It skirted the Hill of Fate that guarded Rooruck on the south. It swept eastwards, flying straight in its fury between earth and sky, blasting the earth. The grass was plucked up by the roots. Sheep fled bleating, seeking shelter among the crags. Horses neighed and ran in terror, their nostrils red. The goats wandering on the cliffs snorted and ran eastwards to the hollow beyond Coillnamhan. The fowls in the crops cackled and hid their heads among their feathers. Dogs howled. Pigs grunted and then huddled close together in their straw, whining. Old men sitting by the fires in their cabins shivered and felt that their death was near.

  In winter all things die. The rain carried on the wind fell in great black drops that pattered on the crags and rose again in a blue mist. It came from the darkened sky sparse and scattered as if the clouds had been disembowelled in mid-air and only fragments of them had reached the earth terrified. There was no moon. It was hidden by the torn clouds. And the stars shone dimly in twos and threes, scattered over the firmament.

  Between two hills, sheltered from the wind and from the sea, lay the seventeen cabins of Rooruck. Their thatched roofs, bound with thick ropes and laden with rocks, shivered but remained intact. The whitewash on their stone walls was blackened. Their doors were buttressed with stones and strips of sacking. Boards nailed into the wooden frames covered the windows. Here and there men stood at their gables leaning against the wind, their legs wide apart, their red lips opened outwards, their yellow teeth bared, their oilskin hats bound around their heads with strings. They shouted to one another from long distances, talking of the storm. Then they would shrug their shoulders, look at their thatch, and go indoors to their fires. Women with their red petticoats thrown over their heads hurried to the well for water. They stopped for a moment with their arms akimbo and their heads bent sideways close together, like birds, talking in awe of the storm and praising God who had not already destroyed them. Then night advanced and the hamlet was still, but for the barking of the frightened dogs.

  At the most western point of the hamlet, nearest the shore and the sea, Red John’s cabin lay huddled against the bluff of the hill. Around it the wind only sighed and moaned, for none but stray blasts reached it, blasts that had wandered from the storm, fallen in weariness from the whirling coils that rushed eastwards without pausing for breath. But the sea-spray sometimes struck the door, with a slow falling swish, as of a mountain of loose silk being crushed. The cries of the sea-birds that whirled about it sounded dismally. It was as if the lid were wrenched from the mouth of hell and the wailing of the damned came floating up from the distant caverns. But within there was warmth and peace, heightened by the storm without. In the kitchen a paraffin lamp burned dimly on the wall, its flame smoked with the draught that struck it from the chimney, discolouring the whitewashed wall behind it. On the open hearth a great turf fire burned, fanned by the draught. Its blaze was brighter than the lamp. Sometimes a blue snaky column shot up to lick the soot, that withered before it. The delf on the dresser gleamed in the half-light. Among the sooty rafters, where the earthen covering beneath the thatch hung down in dried lumps, there was darkness. And in the corners shadows seemed to lurk.

  Red John sat on a three-legged stool in a corner to the left of the hearth, lighting his clay pipe with a coal that he had taken from the fire in a tongs. His red sunburned cheeks, seen through his red beard, were puffing in and out like a bellows as he sucked at the pipe. Then he dropped the coal into the fire and hit the dog that lay beside him on the hearth with the tongs. The dog whined and looked at him. But presently he sidled up again and stuck his nose in the yellow ashes. He sighed, and the outrush of his breath blew the ashes up on the legs of Red John’s trousers. Red John cursed and struck the dog on the side with his rawhide shoe. The dog yelped and went to the dresser in two bounds. There he curled up and dug his snout into the spot where he had been kicked as if he had a flea, while his little eyes looked at Red John viciously.

  Red John’s wife sitting in the opposite corner looked at her husband and curled up her lips. Then she turned to the dog, cracked her fingers and said ‘Poor doggie.’ She did not feel compassion for the cur which she often beat herself, for it was a mangy mongrel. But she favoured it because her husband had kicked it. The cur rose and crept over to her almost on his belly, looking sideways at Red John. He lay by her lap wagging his tail and whining.

  ‘Huh!’ said Red John as he struck the turf fire with his shoe. His lips opened again to speak, and the tendons of his fingers rose in ridges on the back of his hands as if he were about to strangle his wife, but he neither spoke nor moved. He was afraid to strangle her, afraid even to speak to her. They hardly ever spoke during the five years they were married. And when they spoke, they spoke in hissing monosyllables. Sometimes they sat a whole winter’s evening in silence, peering into the blaze. They hated one another. Red John, crabbit, weak-featured and bandy-legged, hated and feared Little Mary his wife; and Little Mary (so called because she was the tallest woman in Inverara) hated her husband and despised him.

  Little Mary looked at her husband again, curled up her lips and opened wide her nostrils.

  ‘Fcha,’ she hissed, her hate boiling within her. She hit the dog and sent him away from her to the dresser, and gathering her black cotton shawl around her well-moulded breasts she looked into the fire, thinking.

  ‘What is she thinking of now, the sorceress?’ muttered Red John to himself. She was always thinking that way, sometimes showing her white teeth in a smile. That is why he feared her so. One could never know what was passing behind her high forehead. Red John huddled himself down to his knees and brooded on his folly in marrying her. Was she not the illegitimate daughter of Sir Henry Blake’s housekeeper, of Blake Castle on the mainland? And the housekeeper herself was the illegitimate daughter of a Breton smuggler. The peasants knew it too, and often twitted him with taking a bastard woman to wife, one, too, with Blake blood in her. Often, when he was drinking in Mulligan’s shebeen in Kilmurrage, a man would whisper in his ear, ‘Is it true that woman of yours has dirty Blake blood in her, Red John?’ Then Red John would pull off his blue woollen shirt and dance around the tavern floor, offering to fight the whole of Inverara, spitting on his hands between oaths. But he was so weak and incon
sequent that everybody laughed at him. Even the small boys, when he passed them on his shaggy red mountain pony, shouted after him ‘Empty Breeks,’ the deadliest insult to a man in Inverara, where to be childless was to be impotent.

  He peered across over his red beard at his wife’s bosom. The right side of his face distorted, and his right hand shot into the pocket of his waistcoat for his knife. He longed to drive a knife down to the hilt in that breast. He often pictured to himself that thrust and the upward gush of red blood. He would lick his lips as if he were drinking it. But he was afraid. He was afraid. He, deformed himself, was afraid of touching such a beautiful thing, such well-moulded breasts, and red cheeks, and a neck like clear foam, and grey eyes that were always looking long distances, and black hair, straight black, rolled in a huge pile on her head. She was so different from any other woman in Inverara. ‘Curse the night I went to Ballycalla,’ he muttered. He had gone to the fair at Ballycalla on the mainland with his uncle, Sean Mor of Coillnamhan, and Michael the Drake of Kilmillick. Little Mary’s mother was then living among the peasants after Sir Henry’s death in France and the sale of his property, and they persuaded Red John to ask her for her daughter’s hand in marriage. ‘Curse the lips that said “yes,” ‘he muttered; ‘don’t make your house on a hill; don’t marry a beautiful woman; don’t … don’t … don’t … may the devil mince her bones.’ He was thinking of the wedding night. All the guests had departed drunk and singing, and he had tried to embrace her, but she hit him on the forehead a blow that sent him reeling against the kitchen wall. Then she went to bed alone, forcing him to sleep on a pallet in a corner of the room. And in all the five years he had never possessed her.

  ‘Huh,’ he cried, gathering fury, as he recalled the whole weight of his contumely. ‘What are you sitting there for like a dead one? Why can’t you speak to a man?’

  Little Mary smiled scornfully without replying. Then she raised the hem of her red petticoat to allow the flames to warm her shins, or perhaps with feminine spite to madden her husband’s lust with the sight of her well-shaped calves.

  ‘You’re not a man,’ she said carelessly with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders.

  Red John fumed and chattered impotently.

  She bared her white teeth, threw back her head slightly, nearly closed her eyes until the tips of the long lashes almost touched her cheekbones.

  ‘Um-m-m-m,’ she said.

  Thousands of little snakes chased up and down her full white throat. Then her lips closed over her teeth and, opening wide her eyes, she looked again into the fire, thinking.

  Men, men, men. How she wanted men, never having had any but this miserable lout of a husband, already beyond his youth when he married her, and never shapely. The blood of her father, Blake, the aristocratic gallant, and of her adventurous, fierce grandfather, Le Cachet, made it impossible for her to love a peasant like her husband, or any of the peasants she saw around her in Inverara. They were too coarse. They drank whisky to arouse their passion, and then mated like pigs in their drunkenness. And the longing for love burned as fiercely within her during those five years that it broke through everything, shame, fear, modesty. So when a painter had come from the mainland to paint the breakers beneath the Hill of Fate, she had smiled at him. She was gathering seaweed on the shore with her husband when she saw him sitting on a rock with his easel. She went up to him silently and looked over his shoulder. Then she laughed. ‘Paint me too,’ she cried, ‘I am more beautiful than the sea!’ But he was a stupid Catholic and fled from her. And then, unable to find love, she longed for a son. She would sit by the fire and imagine that a son was drinking at her breast. It soothed the aching within her. She actually felt the impress of his toothless gums on her nipples. And the blood would course madly up her neck, swelling the veins as she shivered with passion. Often she rushed from the cabin on a summer evening, her bodice open at the neck, her light shawl across her shoulders, seeking love, but the young men who smiled at her when they met her repelled her. They were yokels like her husband. There was a salt smell from their bodies and their breath was fetid. Even Father S –, who tried to touch her shoulder once in the confessional, with the queer light in his eyes that all men had when they looked at her, repelled her. He was not a yokel, but … Ah! she wanted a fierce man and …

  A great wave rolled to the beach at the rear. Its wash sent a shower of water flying against the cabin. It fell with a great noise against the door, and the cabin shook slightly. Then a great falling sound came like thunder, followed by a tinkling reverberation like silver coin dancing on a plate: another rock had been torn by the sea from the Hill of Fate. Red John started and rose to his feet.

  ‘The cabin will be swept away before morning,’ he said.

  Little Mary shrugged her shoulders. She did not care. Then Red John went to the door and opened it, and she saw the pitch darkness all around. A blast of wind rushed in with a querulous shriek, spilt a jug of milk on the dresser, and then died with a gasp as the door shut. She started and, bending her neck backwards, listened to the steady roar outside, the sea, the wind, the dogs, the birds, the falling walls, the driven rain.

  Red John was bolting the door. ‘He is out in that storm,’ thought Little Mary. Then she peered at the chimney, her eyes gleaming, the tip of her tongue licking her lower lip. Her bosom and neck heaved as if somebody were trying to choke her. The hardness left her face, as if she were eager to be choked. She was thinking now of the man who had been in the cabin for the last seven days. That night week he had come with her husband from Kilmurrage. ‘I want to be left alone,’ he said, as he threw two suitcases on the kitchen floor. Great God, what a man he was! They said that the doctors had told him to come to Inverara as a cure for his nerves. He had been in the wars. At least so the people said. He had never spoken to her yet, or even looked at her except as an automaton who served his meals and made his bed. Everybody called him the ‘Stranger,’ but Seameen Derrane’s daughter, who worked in Shaughnessy’s hotel in Kilmurrage, where he had stayed the first three days after his arrival in Inverara, said that his name was Fergus O’Connor, and that he belonged to Ashcragh on the mainland, the little town south of the Head of Crom. They said too that he was mad, and had no religion. But she did not care what they said. He was the kind of man she wanted. His great black eyes pierced her like a wolfhound’s, when he bent his forehead into furrows and his eyebrows contracted. And what a mouth he had! O God of the thousand battles, it was the kind of mouth she had kissed in her dreams, kissed until her lips were bruised. Long straight quivering lips! Of course he was thin and haggard, but all men were thin and haggard who lived hard. Why should men not live hard? Her own people had always lived hard. Her father had lived hard. Was not her grandfather, Le Cachet the Breton, shot during a drunken orgy in a brothel in the South of France? All real men lived hard, not slothfully, like pigs, as her husband lived, but wildly, like the storm that has no morals and recognizes no laws, but ruthlessly rushes forward and yet is beautiful in its ferocity.

  Once she had touched his right hand below the wrist while handing him a cup of tea, and … Virgin Mary, what a sensation! She had to turn away her head to hide her blushes. Would he never notice her? Perhaps he despised her as a peasant. Of course he was different. His hands were smooth and refined, and his face, in spite of the brown beard he was growing, was like her father’s face. It had that peculiar expression in it that peasants did not have, as if it were concealing something. ‘I will make him look at me,’ she panted. ‘There will be wreckage to-night,’ said Red John, jumping to his feet. ‘Get me my things ready. Sean Mor said he would come for me to go to the shore. Get my things, I say, woman,’ he shouted, stamping on the floor.

  She rose without speaking. It was as well to obey him. In Inverara all women obeyed their husbands, even though they hated and despised them. It was a custom, and customs are stronger than desires. She took a pair of old patched frieze trousers from a nail on the back door and threw them in the c
entre of the floor. On top of them she threw a heavy blue frieze shirt, an oilskin hat, a pair of raw-hide shoes, a waistcoat, a pair of woollen socks and a red muffler. She put half an oaten loaf in a handkerchief. She made tea and put it in a tin can. She tied a flannel cloth around the can to keep it warm. Then she sat again by the fire.

  Red John took the clothes and went into the room on the right to dress himself. Little Mary was listening now for the sounds of footsteps. She was expecting the Stranger to come in any moment. How delicious it was to be expecting him. And she would be alone with him to-night while her husband was away. She started as a loud knock came to the door. She jumped up eagerly and unbarred it. But it was only Sean Mor, her husband’s uncle. The great bulk of the fisherman stalked into the middle of the kitchen, shaking the rain from his clothes and stamping on the floor, crying that it was the worst night for forty years. He shuffled to a stool by the fire, leaving wet footprints on the earthen floor. Then he began to talk in a loud voice to his nephew who was still in the room.

  Little Mary sat by the fire again. She knew Sean Mor was looking at her with his mind as he talked with his lips, leering with those small eyes of his. He was fifty, but strong and hardy, living on the sea, and his wife was a thin consumptive woman. Once he had tried to seize Little Mary, crying with a coarse guffaw, ‘Now, if it were I who were living with you, there would be little voices in the house.’ How hateful he was, with the tobacco stains on his beard and the black dirt beneath his gnarled nails.

  ‘Well,’ said Red John, coming from the room and taking his can of tea, ‘in the Name of God, let us go.’ They sprinkled holy water on themselves and said ‘In the Name of the Father’ as they crossed their breasts. The rain swept sideways into the kitchen as they went. Then the door banged, the lamp flickered, and there was silence. The dog smelt the door and then curled up by the fire on Red John’s stool.