A Painful Case

Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the
city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean,
modern, and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house, and from his windows he could
look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built.
The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought
every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron wash-stand, four cane
chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons, and a square table on which lay a
double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood.
The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A
little hand-mirror hung above the wash-stand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood
as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were
arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end
of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the cloth cover of a
notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In
the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann's Michael Kramer, the stage directions
of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin.
In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the
headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting
the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped - the fragrance of new cedar-wood pencils or a
bottle of gum or of an over-ripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.

Mr Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medieval
doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years,
was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black
hair, and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. His cheekbones also
gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at
the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet
a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his
body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical
habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself
containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave aims
to beggars, and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he
came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke's and took his lunch a
bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o'clock he was set free.
He dined in an eating-house in George's Street where he felt himself safe from the society
of Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His
evenings were spent either before his landlady's piano or roaming about the outskirts of the
city. His liking for Mozart's music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these
were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without
any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the
cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake, but
conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself
to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances
never arose, his life rolled out evenly - an adventureless tale.

One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. The house, thinly
peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of failure. The lady who sat next him looked
round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:

`What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It's so hard on people to have to sing to
empty benches.'

He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so little
awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory. When he learned
that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger
than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent. It was an
oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their
gaze began with a defiant note, but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the
pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil
reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and
her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance
more definitely.

He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace and seized the
moments when her daughter's attention was diverted to become intimate. She alluded once
or twice to her husband, but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning. Her
name was Mrs Sinico. Her husband's great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. Her
husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they had
one child.

Meeting her a third time by accident, he found courage to make an appointment. She came.
This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and chose the most
quiet quarters for their walks together. Mr Duffy, however, had a distaste for underhand
ways and, finding that they were compelled to meet stealthily, he forced her to ask him to
her house. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking that his daughter's hand was in
question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not
suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her. As the husband was often away and
the daughter out giving music lessons, Mr Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the
lady's society. Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was
conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her
books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost
maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full: she became his confessor.
He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party,
where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by
an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own
leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen's
discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was
inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude
which was the produce of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her,
would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.

She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what? he asked her, with careful
scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty
seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its
morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?

He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings alone.
Little by little, as their thoughts entangled, they spoke of subjects less remote. Her
companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic. Many times she allowed the dark to fall
upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their isolation, the
music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union exalted him, wore away the
rough edges of his character, emotionalized his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself
listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an
angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more
closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own,
insisting on the soul'S incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our
own. The end of these discourses was that one night, during which she had shown every
sign of unusual excitement, Mrs Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her
cheek.

Mr Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him. He did
not visit her for a week; then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As he did not wish
their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they met in a
little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they
wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break
off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the
Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble so violently
that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few
days later he received a parcel containing his books and music.

Four years passed. Mr Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness of
the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the
lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra
and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. One
of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs Sinico, read: Love
between man and woman is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and
friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.
He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of
the bank retired. And still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening
walked home from the city after having dined moderately in George's Street and read the
evening paper for dessert.

One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth his
hand stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on a paragraph in the evening paper which he had
propped against the water-carafe. He replaced the morsel of food on his plate and read the
paragraph attentively. Then he drank a glass of water, pushed his plate to one side, doubled
the paper down before him between his elbows and read the paragraph over and over again.
The cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to
ask was his dinner not properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls
of it with difficulty. Then he paid his bill and went out.

He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick striking the
ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer
overcoat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his
pace. His stick struck the ground less emphatically, and his breath, issuing irregularly, almost
with a sighing sound, condensed in the wintry air. When he reached his house he went up at
once to his bedroom and, taking the paper from his pocket, read the paragraph again by the
failing light of the window. He read it not aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he
reads the prayers Secreto. This was the paragraph:

DEATH OF A LADY AT SYDNEY PARADE

A PAINFUL CASE

Today at the City of Dublin Hospital the Deputy Coroner (in the absence of
Mr Leverett) held an inquest on the body of Mrs Emily Sinico, aged forty-three
years, who was killed at Sydney Parade Station yesterday evening. The
evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to cross the line,
was knocked down by the engine of the ten o'clock slow train from Kingstown,
thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.

James Lennon, driver of the engine, stated that he had been in the employment
of the railway company for fifteen years. On hearing the guard's whistle he set
the train in motion and a second or two afterwards brought it to rest in
response to loud cries. The train was going slowly.

P. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he
observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and
shouted, but, before he could reach her, she was caught by the buffer of the
engine and fell to the ground.

A juror. `You saw the lady fall?'

Witness. `Yes.'

Police-Sergeant Croly deposed that when he arrived he found the deceased
lying on the platform apparently dead. He ha-the body taken to the
waiting-room pending the arrival of the ambulance.

Constable 57 corroborated.

Dr Halpin, assistant house-surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that
the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe
contusions of the right shoulder. The right side of the head had been injured in
the fall. The injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal
person. Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden
failure of the heart's action.

Mr H. B. Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his
deep regret at the accident. The company had always taken every precaution
to prevent people crossing the lines except by the bridges, both by placing
notices in every station and by the use of patent spring gates at level crossings.
The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at night from
platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of the case, he
did not think the railway officials were to blame.

Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave
evidence. He stated that the deceased was his wife. He was not in Dublin at
the time of the accident as he had arrived only that morning from Rotterdam.
They had been married for twenty-two years and had lived happily until about
two years ago, when his wife began to be rather intemperate in her habits.

Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going out
at night to buy spirits. She, witness, had often tried to reason with her mother
and had induced her to join a League. She was not at home until an hour after
the accident.

The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence and
exonerated Lennon from all blame.

The Deputy-Coroner said it was a most painful case, and expressed great
sympathy with Captain Sinico and his daughter. He urged on the railway
company to take strong measures to prevent the possibility of similar accidents
in the future. No blame attached to anyone.

Mr Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless
evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a
light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her
death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he
held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words
of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his
stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid
tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul's companion! He thought of the
hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman.

Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose,
an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared. But that she
could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He
remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever
done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The
shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his
overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into
the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in
and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six
working-men in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman's estate in County Kildare.
They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor
and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr Duffy sat on
his stool and gazed at them without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and
he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The
proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram
was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which
he now conceived her, he realized that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she
had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he
have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have
lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now
that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night,
alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a
memory - if anyone remembered him.

It was after nine o'clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered
the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the
bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the
darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He
stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death?
He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards
Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the
slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures
lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his
life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast. One human being had seemed to love
him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death Of
shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and
wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He turned his eyes
to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods
train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the
darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his
ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He
began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the
rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his
ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly
silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone