Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

In this manner the last living relative of Dyke’s wife became a humble pensioner on the bounty of the lady whom he was precluded from marrying.

He knew nothing about it, and perhaps would never know. He was busy. The good ship Commonwealth with all the scientific gentlemen on board was skirting the northernmost fringe of the pack-ice. The last letter that Emmie received from him for many many months contained a photograph taken on deck just before they left New Zealand—Anthony, looking enormous, in the middle, Mr. Wedgwood, the physicist, on his right; Mr. Cleeve, the biologist, and Mr. Hamilton, the geologist, on his left; Lieutenant Barry and the rest of the officers with their names written underneath them, and the crew unnamed. She put it away carefully with her collection of similar pictures.

And she went on with her work. He had left her all the materials for the short volume that was to appear later on under the title of The Third Cruise. All those studies of hers, the classes in logic and rhetoric and composition, at which Mrs. Bell and others smiled indulgently or contemptuously, had been undertaken in order to render herself capable of helping him with his books. Dyke, as often happens with authors of his character, had no notion of style or of construction. When he first honoured her with the task of knocking his stuff into shape for publication and she found herself confronted with the mass of manuscript, the muddle and tangle of it threw her into such despair that she, the assistant, called for assistance, and the publisher sent her a real literary person to put the opening chapters into literary form. It was the book called Sand and Sunshine, and the expert strongly objected to Dyke’s initial sentences, condemning them as naïve and childish. “Sand and sunshine,” Dyke had begun, “are very nice things in their way, but you can’t eat them.” She herself did not much care for this turn of phrase, and she connived at very large modifications. But when the proofs of those early chapters were sent out to Dyke, then eleven thousand miles away, he almost went mad with indignation; so that the explosion of his wrath, even at that great distance, made the flat in Oratory Gardens tremble and shake. He said he would break the bones of the literary man. He cursed his impertinence, for tampering with “a document.” She finished the book herself; and then, and afterwards, Dyke allowed her to take any liberties she pleased. He would accept anything from that hand—in fact he never appeared to observe that she had changed things; and she always, with great tact, minimised what she had done. “A word here and there, Anthony, and of course the punctuation; but my effort is simply to make your meaning clear—never to alter it in the slightest degree.”

Each year becoming more skilled, she altered just as she chose, anything or everything—except the titles of the books. Those she dared not touch. They were idiosyncratic. A certain arrogance or assumption in the sound of them had meaning for her, although the rest of the world might not understand. They linked themselves in her mind with that other mannerism, the habit of speaking of himself in the third person—“Dyke will be heard of again; Anthony Dyke is not conscious of failure,” and so on; speaking as he wished the universe to speak of him. Thus the bare simplicity of these titles—The First Cruise, The Second Cruise, The Third Cruise—meant that they were chosen for posterity rather than for the passing hour. In future generations when people saw these words, The First Cruise, they would be in no doubt as to whose cruise it was. They would all know that the cruises made by Dyke were the only ones that had really counted in the century-long siege of the South Pole.

So skilled was she now that she saw The Third Cruise through the press without submitting the proofs to anybody, but not without those fears and agonies from which all very conscientious people suffer when they feel that they are engaged upon a task of supreme importance. She had nightmare dreams about the maps and the illustrations, dreaming once that three photographs of herself and Dyke, taken years ago at Buenos Ayres, had crept into the binding; and she woke early in the morning after she passed the last revise with a cold certainty that she herself had made some such abominable slip as saying seven hundred degrees South Latitude instead of seventy degrees. But everything was correct. She had done her work well, and the book was so favourably received that she soon had a fine batch of press-cuttings laid by for Dyke’s gratification on his return.

That fourth cruise was a long business. Throughout one year she thought he was coming home, and waited full of hope. In that year she did not see him; he never came. Then during the next year she saw him once—for half an hour.

In a letter despatched from New Zealand he told her what she had already learnt by reading the telegraphic news. The fourth cruise had not been very successful. Those scientific gentlemen had squabbled among themselves and Dyke had squabbled with all of them; at a certain point he wanted to let science go hang and push boldly south, while each of the others wanted special facilities for his own line of research—ocean-sounding, magnetic observation, dredging, scraping, altitude-measuring, or whatever it might be. Dyke, making his southern dash, soon got the ship tight-locked; provisions ran scarce, scurvy appeared, one of the scientists died; then when the ice set them free and he reluctantly turned northward, they encountered terrible weather. Moss scraped off rocks, stuff dredged up from the bottom of the sea, and other treasures, were lost; the dead man’s diary was destroyed by salt water; the homeward voyage of the battered ship became a chapter of accidents.

Dyke wrote with the best attempt at cheerfulness that can be made by a sick man who is heavily bruised in spirit. He was ill—he had to confess it—and as soon as the ship reached Brisbane they would put him into a hospital. He said he knew he would get well again directly, but, oh, how he wished that he had his little Emmie there to console him.

Of course he had not meant that she was to go to him; but she sent off a cable message and started next day. At Marseilles she overtook and caught a steamer of the Orient Line. Many people on the vessel noticed her and several talked with her—that old maid who used to sit out on deck knitting, always knitting, looking up with a pensive smile sometimes while her fingers continued to move the needles busily.

At Brisbane she found him strong and well, entirely recovered, but in the very act of departing for New Guinea, whither he was being sent again on government work. Delay was impossible. They had thirty minutes together in an hotel drawing-room.