The Black Soul

by Liam O'Flaherty

  The Stranger had arisen and was putting on his boots when he heard the knocking. He went to the door hurriedly and shouted: ‘Why don’t you stop that noise? Who is making that noise, I say?’ Red John heard and tried to stop his head from banging against the wall, but could not do so. His head, too, was beyond his control. The Stranger dashed out of his room in a fury and had just begun to shout abuse when he saw Red John standing naked by the wall. He stood with wide-open mouth and staring eyes. His face got cold and then turned white. His nostrils distended. He stared into Red John’s eyes and Red John stared into his.

  He was not afraid of physical hurt from Red John. He was not startled by seeing him standing naked against the wall. It was not that made him horror-stricken. It was a sudden thought that flashed across his brain when he looked into Red John’s insane eyes. It was the thought that there was a kinship between his own soul and that of Red John, that he himself was mad like Red John. It was like seeing a photograph of himself taken during a nightmare. Now the terrors and excitements of the past years, since the night in France when the shells falling about his ears filled his head with red demons, gathered together with a lightning rush and formed into a word that he read, horrified, ‘Insanity.’ ‘I am insane,’ he muttered. And he was seized with a frenzy that made him stiffen against the grinning idiot opposite him, who had torn this devilish secret from his breast. He raised his hands and hissed, about to grasp Red John by the throat.

  Then Red John yelled and tore his jaws wide open to the utmost with his two hands, as if trying to vomit his fear in the intensity of the yell. He drew up his right leg to his buttock and struck at the wall with its sole. ‘Go away,’ he screamed, clawing the air, ‘go away; you are going to kill me. Help me! help me! he’s going to kill me!’ He yelled again and was seized with a convulsive fit of trembling. His body hopped against the wall as if it were on springs. The Stranger recovered himself at the yell. His brain cleared and he drew a deep sigh of relief. His heart throbbed loudly; he had stood on the brink of a vast abyss, staggering, and had only just by accident been hurled back to sanity, by a madman’s yell. Another moment and he had been tearing at Red John’s throat, a madman.

  Choking with the horror of his situation he ran out into the yard to draw breath. He stood for fully half a minute in the yard, breathing in gasps. Then again he remembered Red John. He must get help. ‘Help, help!’ he shouted. ‘Red John is mad.’ He listened. A peasant thrust out his head from the door of a cabin to the right. The Stranger, looking at him dazedly, noticed that his beard was the same colour exactly as his own.

  ‘Ohé,’ cried the peasant. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Red John is mad,’ shouted the Stranger as if he were repeating a formula, thinking that a dark beard would suit him better. The peasant crossed himself and disappeared. The Stranger kept on shouting ‘Help! Red John is mad,’ until he completely forgot all about Red John and help and the peasants and everything. He was staring at the ground with a fixed stare, wondering whether primitive men had beards, or what was the origin of the beard, since it did not seem to serve any purpose and was dangerous in battle. Wrapt in his meditation, he walked into the kitchen, but stopped with a scream, as the tongs flew past him within an inch of his jaw and rattled against the open door. He fell to the ground in terror. Red John flew out over his body, carrying his clothes in his hands. He looked up to see Red John vaulting naked over the fence of the yard on to the road. There was a black patch of dirt on his left shoulder and his backbone stood out clear under his skin as his body bent in jumping. Then he disappeared around the corner, running southwards towards the crags.

  The peasants, men, women and children, rushed to the cabin. The Stranger stood at the door babbling disconnectedly, describing to each as he came up how Red John stood by the wall, threw the tongs and ran out. Then when the first excitement wore off he began to notice the silence of the peasants. They stood about saying nothing, looking at him as if they suspected him of being the cause of Red John’s madness. So it seemed to him, though nothing of the kind was in the minds of the peasants. They were silent and open-mouthed merely because they were trying to realize what had happened and endeavouring to derive as much satisfaction as possible from the excitement. Their crude, undeveloped intelligence, unable to understand that one of themselves had lost his reason, surrendered itself to enjoyment and fear, like women listening to a tale about pirates or malignant ghosts. And he, unable to understand that their silence was born of stupidity, thought they were accusing him and became afraid of them. Their very number awed him. He could have fawned on them for sympathy. And his mind was vexed, for even then his Black Soul seemed to stand apart, scoffing at him for his lack of courage, his lack of being able to stand alone. His Black Soul, like a dying aristocrat beset by revolutionaries whom he had oppressed, fumed scornfully, desiring to maintain his pride to the last. His heart wanted to move up close to the simple peasants and gape with them in horror at the unknown, to babble with them and gesticulate and be vulgar. He felt there was a wonderful comfort in being vulgar, in jumping off the pedestal of cold aristocratic intellectuality and plastering himself with the mud and dirt of the loud-mouthed mass. And he jumped down. A loose-limbed man, with far-seeing and tender blue eyes, stood beside him. They called him Big Dick. He turned to him and said:

  ‘What are we to do? Hadn’t we better go after him?’

  The peasant spat and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘What is, is,’ he said, ‘and must be.’

  ‘Aye,’ said another, crossing himself, ‘there is cure in death, so there is.’

  For madness to them was a sacred thing, a mysterious manifestation of the power of the ancient gods long forgotten, but who still roamed the air and the sea malevolently playing with the people who had forsaken them for the mighty promises of the Christian heaven.

  ‘Let what’s to be done be done,’ cried Big Dick; ‘get yourselves ready.’ And they all went away to their cabins.

  The Stranger went into the cabin and sat by the fire wringing his hands. He thought this was the end of everything. He wanted to hide somewhere where no one could find him. He was stripped now of everything, of even the self-respect that his Black Soul had still kept glimmering within him. Now he had even lost his Black Soul. He was defeated. He had even lost the power of despising himself. And then through his stupor came the noise of women shouting outside. For a moment he listened carelessly, thinking that the mob were coming to lynch him for having driven Red John mad. ‘Let them come,’ he muttered, ‘it is the end.’

  But then a woman shrieked in a shrill voice, ‘Little Mary, you whore, it was you drove him mad. Let us tear her eyes out, the evil one.’

  He jumped up, just as Little Mary dashed into the kitchen. She staggered against the door exhausted, as if she had run a long way from death. Her light shawl, thrown over her shoulders, was torn at the edge where somebody had grasped it. Yet looking at her it seemed to him that he had never seen anything so beautiful as her eyes that looked at him startled and beseeching.

  ‘Mary,’ he gasped, and opened his arms.

  ‘Protect me,’ she cried, and staggered to him, dropping the can she held in her hand. It fell on its side and the milk from it streamed along the earthen floor under their feet as they embraced. And as soon as he felt his arms about her he lost all fear. The problem of life became suddenly simplified. She had made a demand of him that had caused some new cell in his brain to come to life. It gave him a wonderfully clean sensation, the desire to protect her.

  Then the women appeared at the door, pushing one another and threatening. He rushed at them with a yell and they fled. Then he came back to Little Mary and began to console her. She sobbed without tears in his arms. They both at last felt the calmness of love without its passion, the solidarity of love. The last barrier was broken down between them, the barrier of his intellectual pride. He was in need of somebody on whom to lean for support. She needed some one to protect her. They leaned one
against the other. And they looked into one another’s eyes; they pledged their lives together in silence. They had found the enduring love of mutual necessity.

  They left the cabin together to join in the search for Red John. The whole village had gathered for it, but even then they were still arguing as to whether a man should be sent for the police or not. Then at last Big Dick ordered a man to go to Kilmurrage for the police and they started off for the beach. The people set off after him, saying, ‘In the name of God let us go,’ all in as great an excitement as if they were setting out on a campaign against a desperate enemy. They advanced in a long straggling line to the shore, with the women coming behind. They talked in whispers and walked as slowly as possible, stopping now and again to look about them carefully, their faces set in a stare of respectful sympathy, but their eyes gleamed with suppressed pleasure and with intense fear and dread when anything stirred on the crags or a bird shrieked suddenly over their heads.

  When they reached the shore they halted for another consultation. Several men spoke at the same time at the top of their voices, but nothing came of the talk. They seemed in fact to be debating plans for the mere purpose of dragging the affair out to the greatest possible length. Then three boys who had gone on ahead down to the rocky beach beneath the Hill of Fate came running back screaming, ‘We saw him, we saw him.’ They had seen Red John clothed in his shirt and his rawhide shoes going along the boulders towards the Hill of Fate. ‘Ha!’ they cried, ‘he’s making for the caves.’ But nobody moved. They began to talk again and gesticulate. They were incapable of taking any action in face of the phenomenon they did not understand. Any one of them would have risked his life in the wildest storm. Yet now they were stricken with fear of Red John, whom the day before they despised as a weakling. Just as if some ancient tradition forbade them to interfere with a fellow-man who had become suddenly possessed of a strange and magical spirit. Then, still talking, they moved along to the juncture of the shore and the Hill of Fate. The shore, strewn with small boulders, stretched to the west. To the east the Hill of Fate began to rise gradually in massive layers of rock and slate. It ran southwards for about fifty yards, and then curved sharply eastwards, shooting up to a majestic summit beyond the curve. At the curve the sea lapped its base, but there was a passage eastwards across its face, about fifty feet above the sea level. Huge boulders, some of them five hundred tons weight, lay in a chaotic mass westwards of the curve in the angle of the cliff. They formed immense and tangled caverns, and the sea, running in on the flat cracked rock on which they rested, roared dismally in the dark caverns even on a calm day.

  Red John had disappeared among these caverns, and the peasants stood facing them, listening to the savage murmuring of the sea among them, like the barbaric welcome of a horde of pythons to a returned fellow. The Stranger now came up with Little Mary. He had followed the crowd, drawn by the same force that was outside of himself, some instinct that forced him to join the herd in pursuit of a lost one. He had followed it mechanically, only half-conscious of what was happening, not daring to think of what was going to happen to himself and to Little Mary. And Little Mary, walking beside him, followed him without thinking, in perfect confidence that all would be well with her as long as he was there to protect her. It was as if they were rushing headlong to the summit of a ridge, unable to stop themselves, ignorant of what lay beyond, whether a deep chasm leading to death or a level plain to safety.

  And then when he reached the crowd and saw them standing chattering stupidly, he underwent another change, like a man who has been a long time cooped up in a jail and is let loose on a mountain-side where the clean wind is blowing among heather and across dark lakes and through rocky passes, filling the heart with courage and the limbs with energy and the mind with daring. He came up close to them and looked at them. In their excitement and fear their ape likeness was apparent. He lost all fear of them. Their mouths were open, as if their weak minds had fled through their mouths in awe of the unexplainable. Their strong bodies were like crippled machines without a motive power. They were like wild beasts in a cage. ‘Ha!’ he thought, ‘I am superior to them. I have a brain.’ And for the first time in his life he understood the real value of his intellect. And immediately he took command, without speaking. He just moved forward and they looked at him without speaking, as if they had been waiting all that time for him to come and give them orders. He felt a delicious thrill at having men suddenly look to him for guidance, to him, a wreck. The feeling of having power over his fellows seemed to expand him to twice his size.

  He beckoned to them to follow him with a wave of his hand, as he moved forward towards the boulders. He was not conscious of any emotion, but elation at having these men follow him at his command. The power to make them move at his bidding shut out the consciousness of everything, of Red John, of his own position, even of Little Mary waiting behind, waiting in dull submission for whatever fate and her lover pleased to do for her.

  The tide was coming in. The waves simmered around the bases of the boulders in the black pools that countless tides had worn into the rock. And along the wide ragged reef that dipped into the deep sea afar out, advancing and retreating waves in confused echelons flitted endlessly, their white manes looking grey through the rain mist that fell slantwise, westwards on the breeze. The breeze was hardly audible. The sky was covered with black clouds, banked in headlong confusion, so closely that the mist seemed to be perspiration oozing from their crushed bodies. There was no sound but the dreary mumbling of the sea among the boulders, the slow fall of the breakers on the Jagged Reef to the south-west and the hoarse cackling of a flock of seagulls who had discovered the carcase of a sheep floating in a mat of seaweed away out to the south.

  They went in among the boulders, crawling on their hands and feet. They shouted to give themselves courage. The cliff towered above them now, rising sheerer and higher as they approached the curve. The black layer of slate in the cliff face shot out through the mist, like a vast cincture around its loins. The Stranger kept in the lead until they reached the base of the cliff. Still there was no sign of Red John. ‘Search the caverns,’ shouted the Stranger. ‘Yes, search them, you,’ everybody cried to his neighbours, but nobody moved. All feared to go down into the dark abysses on that bleak misty day, with a madman prowling in their depths. The huge masses of limestone, blackened by the mist, their sides covered with limpets, looked like living monsters sprawling on top of one another, slimy monsters that had been born thousands of years before. The peasants began to shout and babble, but they did not descend.

  Then somebody shouted, ‘There he is. Look out!’ Red John had sprung up in front of them, just by the curve in the cliff. He was running along the ledge that led eastwards. As he was about to turn out of sight he halted and looked back over his shoulder. His grey flannel shirt was torn at the back so that his spine and thighs were bare. One of his feet was clad in a rawhide shoe. The rest of him was naked, except for the strip of shirt. There was a bloody gash on his left thigh above the knee. In his right hand he held a knife. He waved the knife and his face contorted. ‘Ha-a-a-aw!’ he yelled. Then he turned his head and stooped to pass eastwards on the narrow ledge. The sea lay about a hundred feet beneath him. The ledge was about eight inches wide at the curve. And the belly of the cliff swelled out almost over it. But he ran along it carelessly and disappeared. ‘He is going to drown himself,’ whispered the peasants. They gaped and crossed themselves. The women in the rear began to weep aloud. Red John’s uncle’s wife threw herself flat on a boulder, with her shawl over her head, and began to chant the death dirge. The men stood in silence, looking at the Stranger. Little Mary sat on a boulder and covered her face with her hands. ‘He is going to drown himself.’ The Stranger, watching the spot where Red John had disappeared, heard the sentence repeated again and again, and it seemed that each repetition was a blow struck at the elation he had just experienced, of commanding men. That Red John was going to kill himself struck into his
consciousness like a heinous sin remembered after an opium dream. If Red John killed himself it was because of … ‘I’d be a murderer,’ he thought. And the thought shot him forward towards the curve before he had time to judge the reason of his action. ‘Where are you going?’ yelled the peasants. ‘You will get killed as sure as Christ was crucified,’ roared another in his ear, as if he were a mile away in a storm. The Stranger brushed him aside and advanced.

  He saw in front of him the narrow ledge of grey limestone, shining with moisture, as slippery as a glass floor. A fossil stuck up from a boss on the ledge just at the curve. It showed yellowishly through the mist. And above, the cliff towered with such tremendous strength that without touching it he felt its contact, thrusting him outwards. And he looked from it to the sea, that murmured fiercely beneath; he could see lines of white foam through the mist crawling about like snakes. For a moment the horror of the danger that lay in front of him, crossing that ledge, almost petrified him, just as that little yellowish figure on the ledge had been petrified. He shuddered. But his mind was firmly set on going across the ledge. He did not know why he was going across. As he took off his shoes he remembered that Red John was a very miserable fellow, utterly worthless, that his death was a matter of absolutely no importance to the world, and that he himself in cold reason was in no palpable way responsible for that death. Then why go across that ledge, to almost certain death, in a foolish attempt to save an idiotic yokel who was better dead than alive?

  As he put his trousers inside his socks, lest the ends might catch in a spur of the cliff, he recalled the obvious fact that even if he were responsible for Red John’s death and even if Red John were a genius and of importance to society, his death would be of no consequence, since nothing in the universe mattered but life itself, purposeless motion. It was perfectly futile to save life. It would not even be saving life. One might as well talk of saving death. Death was just as positive, more positive in fact, than life. Ha! But then death in each case was just as positive. It was as positive in his own case as in the case of Red John. Ah! but why seek it? Why seek anything? What was the use of any effort?