‘Good God, what sent me to this place?’ thought the Stranger. He became filled with such a violent disgust at his sordid surroundings that he wanted to rush away and leave them. But where should he go? He stayed in his room all day trying to think out a plan. Impossible! The very coldness of the air outside was a barrier against going anywhere. He avoided Little Mary’s eyes. He never spoke to her. He wanted to go to the O’Dalys and ask their advice. But how could he tell them that he had seduced Red John’s wife? And all day he heard Red John shouting and screaming in the other room.
‘They’ll eat me alive,’ he screamed; ‘blue devils and little red ones with clay pipes in their mouths.’ It was like being in hell, listening to the man’s drunken babble.
‘I wish a devil would choke him and be done with it,’ he thought. He went into the kitchen for his supper and saw Little Mary calmly knitting by the fire as if nothing in the world troubled her. ‘Huh!’ he thought, ‘she’s an unnatural woman. Good God, she has ruined me,’ forgetting her kindness to him in winter, and her love that made her give him herself.
He scowled at her fiercely, but she never looked. All day she was in a cloud of happiness that nothing could pierce. Since the night before, when she had abandoned herself to her love, she was unable to think of anything but the consummation of her womanhood. It was the beginning of life. If even it were the end of life, it had at least been worth while to have lived for those moments. Like an opiate her satisfied love made her insensible to her surroundings, even to the object of her love. Not a single shadow of gross conventions or cowardly morality darkened the cloud of her happiness. She was not tortured by the desire that civilized women have to demand a price for their affections by marriage or otherwise. She had given freely like nature. She received from nature the clean gift of satisfied womanhood.
But his own vanity and the philosophy of degenerate fools filled the Stranger with the wind of remorse. That night as he lay down to sleep he said to himself, ‘I will keep aloof from the two of them. It is wrong for an educated man to lower himself to the level of peasants.’ For a fortnight he did so. He roamed around Rooruck restlessly, speaking to nobody. He pretended to be quite at his ease in his gloomy solitude, but he was most unhappy. At night he slept well. He ate his meals with relish. He felt himself getting stronger every day, and his returning strength was detestable to him. It aroused his passion. It made him want to exercise his hands and his mind in doing something. Each day was a perpetual struggle between his resolution to be miserable and the urge of spring and returning strength urging him to love and activity.
‘O God of the valiant deeds, what a ghoul of a fellow!’ the peasants would say as he passed them in silence with a cold stare. The young women of the village, who were all out in the fields or on the shore, would glance at him giddily and say, ‘Hist! why the hurry?’ but he would take no notice of them. Then they would whisper loud enough for him to hear, ‘He’s not a man at all, I believe. They say he was badly wounded in the big war. What a pity!’ And their jibes maddened him.
Those days Little Mary spent in trembling anxiety, afraid that he was lost to her. She would look at him, sometimes sadly and wearily, with wide-open eyes in which the hidden tears were glistening. Sometimes she looked at him with hatred in her eyes and her nostrils quivering because he scorned her. Each night she lay awake a long time thinking furiously of what she should do if he looked at her no more. She would listen savagely to the sea beating against the cliffs, and picture her own body washed away on its bosom. And then she would say, through her clenched teeth, as she clasped her throbbing throat, ‘I will make him love me. I will, or I will kill him.’ For her primitive soul was as merciless as nature itself. The tender growth of civilization had never taken root in her mind. Her love raged mightily. Like an ocean wave there was nothing either within her or without her to stay its progress. It must satisfy itself or shatter itself in death.
Then nature turned the Stranger towards her again. Nature routed his body from its winter apathy. It left his mind, which was not of nature but of civilization, wriggling in the clutches of his fantastic reasoning, but his body, nourished by the exhilarating breath of the sea and hardened by the wind, was drawn by an overpowering force to a mate. The most ferocious castigations prescribed by the Christian Church for the unsexing of its cherished saints would have been of no avail to silence the demands of nature in Rooruck in spring. That spring at Rooruck, when strong men live greedily every moment from the grey cold dawn to the mist-laden dusk! Life there is only to the strong and to the ruthless. Oh, strong, beautiful sea! Hunger-inspiring! Life-giving! Oh, the icy clasp of the wind, like the stern command of a proud father. Even when it numbs the limbs at dawn the heart throbs joyfully, loving life. So even though his weak mind remained helpless, his body grew daily fonder of life. Two personalities grew within him side by side. One embraced Little Mary and loved her bodily with the love of nature. The other hated her and kept hidden behind a gloomy silence. And she tried her utmost to gain access to those caverns where his Black Soul lurked.
‘Talk to me,’ she would say as they sat together in the kitchen. ‘Tell me about the places you have been, about the war, and all the strange countries you saw. Do tell me’ She was eager to learn what he knew of life, so that she could interest him by talking and make herself more attractive to him.
For many days he refused to talk, saying to her, ‘What is the use of my talking to you, you would not understand me.’ Then at last his loneliness became so oppressive that he had to speak. He talked furiously as he walked about the kitchen, forgetful of what he was saying or to whom he was speaking. He talked fiercely, like spring, of conquest, of great deeds. He felt, in the ecstatic pleasure of talking to some one, that he could achieve wonders.
She listened to him breathlessly. A new vista of happiness opened up before her eyes. Oh, to have words like those spoken to her! Her love that was before but the creation of her own fancy, now swelled within her torrentially as she realized that he had her respect. She fell in love with his mind that could conceive those words. How sweet they were, those fierce words, and the gleaming eyes through which the mind peeped and disappeared flashing, like sunbeams through a cloud. With her arms folded on her breast, and her head turned sideways to hear better, she sat rocking herself like a nun in a spiritual ecstasy.
But he felt none of her happiness. He suddenly stopped talking, and without casting a glance at her went out. A terrible weariness seized him. He always felt that discontent when he had talked a great deal, as if there were something he wanted to do and couldn’t do. Night was falling as he walked down the village towards the beach. A bitter wind blew fitfully, almost drowned by a dirty grey mist that seemed to be rolling up before it the rays of the sinking sun. It was as if the sun, like a sick man recovering from a long illness, were giving up its feeble attempt to warm the earth and the dregs of winter were putting it to flight. Through the mist he could see dim grey forms coming towards him, peasants coming wearily homewards after their day’s work, with spades on their shoulders. They were talking idly and laughing. They talked of women. There was a lewd ferocity in their tired voices. Now and again one of them would yell and scrape his spade along the stone fence as if seized by a drunken frenzy. In spite of himself he felt his blood rush hotly at their remarks and they disgusted him.
‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘how coarse I am becoming! I, an educated man!’ But his body revolted against this priggishness of his mind. Said spring within him: ‘You know very well educated men are far worse than these poor peasants in matters of the kind, but they are too cowardly to express them only. Vice is born of repression.’ ‘That’s right,’ he thought, and suddenly he became aware that the reason he had kept away from Little Mary for the past fortnight was because she had given herself to him. And he had thought Kathleen O’Daly superior to Little Mary. Why? Obviously because she was better dressed, respectable, and had been to a university. Fancy setting a woman like that abov
e Little Mary, a shallow conceited woman, just like the artificial unsexed ladies who haunt the suburbs of large cities, full of sham intellectual vanities, the mainstay of society doctors, spiritualists, psychoanalysts, and freak writers. He recounted all Little Mary had done for him in winter when he was ill. He felt the warm fragrance of her body lying within his arms. He saw the wild love-light in her half-closed eyes turned up to his, and he shuddered, hating himself for having slighted her in his mind. But even as he did so his morose intellect sardonically recalled the wondrous music of Kathleen’s violin, the refined hands, the ripple of the curls on her cheeks. He struck his forehead heavily and swore. The blow brought him back to his senses, and he stopped with a start and looked about him.
He found himself standing half-way out on the Jagged Reef, absolutely alone in the dark night. He could hear the low rumbling of the sea in front, coming up to him through the mist. The rocks at his feet were covered with yellow sea moss, slippery and glistening. White froth oozed from it, where his feet rested. Birds ran screaming along the rocks. He could just see their long, bright, red legs. Their bodies, the colour of the grey mist, were invisible. Cormorants, flying close to the ground, their gullets heavy with the day’s fishing, side-stepped with a whizzing sound as they passed him. And overhead there was nothing visible but the black fat belly of the mist. The sharp biting wind made him shiver. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what a night!’ Oppressed by nature that was black as his own soul, he began to walk out hurriedly towards the sea, pretending to himself that he could endure life no longer, and that he was going to drown himself. The tide was nearly at a low ebb, and he seemed to have been walking for hours before the mighty vastness loomed up suddenly at him out of the mist. Its vast, dark, moving face leered. Aghast at the thought of jumping into the belly of such an appalling monster, he wheeled about sharply and slipped on the moss. He fell on his knees in a pool. His teeth began to chatter. He scrambled to his feet and ran back madly over the rocks. He stumbled among the pools. He thought an army of ghosts surrounded him. He felt sure that a huge animal was hurtling along behind him trying to catch him by the heels. When he reached the cabin he sighed with delight and broke into a walk. He was perspiring. He looked around cautiously lest anybody should have seen his hurried flight, and then began to whistle nonchalantly and swing his arms as he walked towards the cabin. He kept shaking his head and saying to himself, ‘By God, never again will I slight Little Mary.’ He wanted her to comfort him, so he persuaded himself that he was a fine fellow and loved her.
He saw two great mastiffs standing outside Red John’s door, wagging their tails and smelling each other’s noses. Red John’s cur was lying on its back at their feet, whining and shivering when the mastiffs sniffed at it contemptuously. He recognized the dogs as O’Daly’s, and jumped over the gate, eagerly chuckling to himself. ‘Jove, I’ll have a great talk with him.’ The two mastiffs made a snarling rush at him. He was always afraid of dogs, but he joyously kicked at them as if the great hairy things with jagged fangs were timid sheep. He opened the door and entered the kitchen.
‘How are you, Mr. O’Daly? Delighted to see you.’
O’Daly made a noise as if he were urging on a horse, as he turned around on the stool in front of the fire. With one hand stroking his beard and the other hand on his right knee, he looked at the Stranger with his peculiar ferocious look that never inspired fear or embarrassment, but love for the strange old fellow.
‘Well,’ he said, shaking his head like a horse, ‘you are a queer person. Upon my soul, you are as unsociable as an Englishman. Why don’t you come to see the people? Sit down and tell us what devilment you’ve been up to. Sit down here and talk to the people.’
‘Wait until I change my clothes,’ said the Stranger, laughing; ‘I’m wet to the neck.’ He went into his room.
‘How are you getting on with your sowing, Red John?’ said O’Daly, taking out his pipe and looking from Red John and Little Mary, who sat in opposite corners, back and forth, fiercely as if he were interrogating them at the Petty Sessions in his capacity as a magistrate.
Red John drew his legs up under him and sniffed. ‘Oh, well enough, well enough,’ he said with a sigh.
‘My soul from the devil’ cried O’Daly, ‘what a miserable fellow you are. You’re the most’ – he pulled at his pipe – ‘miserable fellow I ever met. So you are.’ He cracked his fingers, wagged his head, and blew clouds of tobacco smoke from his mouth. ‘My soul from the devil, but you have the most beautiful woman in Inverara, and yet you are a miserable fellow. How do you explain it? What do you say about it, my good woman?’ He began to talk to Little Mary, subtly flattering her, until she almost cried with laughter and enjoyment, while Red John’s forehead twitched as he looked from one to the other of them. He would look at Little Mary’s beautiful face and flashing eyes and say to himself, ‘My woman, eh? May the devil rape her.’ Then he would look at O’Daly with hatred. He hated him because he was big and strong, and was able to talk freely to women. His eyes would roam over O’Daly’s brown patched suit that hung loosely about his lean body, and he imagined that even the stuff of the cloth was a living enemy. The game bag that hung on O’Daly’s shoulder assumed the properties of an enemy. It was associated with the things that he never knew, that he never possessed. Even the blood-stained head of a curlew that protruded from a hole in the side of the bag leered at him. It said, ‘There you are, you miserable peasant, you never could kill a curlew. You are a poor oppressed wretch. You are a worm. You are only fit to be kicked like a cur.’ And the gun that lay on the ground beside O’Daly, its barrel gleaming in the firelight, seemed to threaten him with instant death if he dared to lift a finger in order to assert his manhood. As he sat in his corner his soul shrank to a trembling point in his breast. The whole range of his understanding cowered within that point in awe of everything that moved about him. Not a solitary being, not even a dog or a bird, watched with him in sympathy. He was alone, without even the knowledge of a God to comfort him. His reason was slowly dying like a plant suiddenly stricken with drought under a scorching sun. He sat still without thought, lest a movement or a thought would betray his presence to all these enemies that were eager to overwhelm him. Slowly, fearfully, his soul fled backwards, dragging his body with it into the vast unconscious emptiness of the primeval life from which his ancestors had arisen. For in Rooruck in spring life is only to the strong and the ruthless.
The Stranger, dressing in his room, heard Little Mary laughing merrily in response to O’Daly’s bantering, and he became madly jealous of her. He was jealous not because he suspected that she did not love him – he took that for granted – but because she could laugh with another man. ‘Nonsense,’ he said to himself, ‘O’Daly is an old man, and I don’t love her anyway. What does it matter to me what she’does?’ But he was furious, nevertheless. Every time she laughed, the ringing sound with a ripple in the middle of it, as if it caught in her throat, struck at his chest like the flat base of a hammer. He finished dressing and sat on his bed pettishly, saying to himself that he wouldn’t go into the kitchen. Sitting there he discovered that he had never been jealous of any other woman in his life, and he decided that he must be becoming very weak-minded. ‘It’s this miserable existence that’s –’
Just then O’Daly shouted to him.
‘Oh, lawdy, lawdy dah! you take as long to dress as a woman.’
He laughed with pretended gaiety and strolled into the kitchen. He took a seat away from the fire so as to remain hidden from the light.
O’Daly eyed him up and down appraisingly.
‘Begob, yer putting on flesh,’ he said. ‘Now, what d’ye think o’ that. We’ll soon make a man of ye. And sure yer father, Lord have mercy on him, was a fine man … as good as the best.’
The Stranger shot a sharp glance at Little Mary and saw her smiling happily. He fumed and turned to O’Daly with a smile. He felt himself intensely flattered by O’Daly’s remarking his returning strength. He w
as, after all, a strong man. Fancy a strong man concerning himself about a miserable woman! Yes, he would put her out of his head.
‘I met your daughter Kathleen the other day,’ he said, laughing; ‘I am afraid she is trying to convert me.’
‘Upon my soul, she will before she finishes, although she made a poor job of myself. Mind ye, don’t fall in love with her. They all do. Although in my time we looked for a different kind. When I was young –’
The Stranger heard Little Mary make a movement, and forgot O’Daly immediately. His first impulse was joy at the success of his effort to make her jealous. Then immediately he despised himself for his meanness. She was smiling weakly at the fire, but her throat was throbbing, and the fingers of her right hand tapped her knee restlessly. Then she rose hastily and went into her room. She thought she would never get across the floor to her room. She threw herself face downwards on her bed and burst into tears.
‘So he is in love with Kathleen O’Daly,’ she gasped; ‘that skimpy girl, that empty-headed doll! Oh, if I had her head between my hands!’ Then she puckered up her lips and swept her hair back tightly from her forehead with her right hand. Her wet eyes hardened as she tried to arouse hatred against the Stranger. He had talked of Kathleen purposely to hurt her. She knew he had. She tried to persuade herself that she hated him and despised him, and did not want him any more. But then, as soon as she imagined life without him, she was seized with horror. Her mind, like a butterfly flitting among barren flowers, rushed terror-stricken from one thing to another trying to attach itself to some interest, but in vain. A black shroud descended on everything with a jeering rush as soon as she told herself that she didn’t want him. And a flood of tears gushed afresh from her eyes in her misery. Then, sobbing, she dried her eyes, her jealousy washed out by her tears. ‘No, no, I love him, whatever he does,’ she panted. ‘What else have I got?’ And she began to beseech heaven, the sea and Crom Dubh to blast everybody that ever bore the name of O’Daly. She poured out a torrent of mad words endlessly, until she had to stop breathlessly. Then she was satisfied.
The Black Soul Page 9