Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

THE last days had come. They were staying at Liverpool at the North Western Hotel: and Dyke, although as sweet to her as ever, was preoccupied with final business. He hurried to and fro about this new strange city unaccompanied by her now, talked in her presence of such abstruse matters as the charter-party, bills of lading, the ship’s clearance papers, and had no time to teach her what it all meant. In some mysterious manner the agent of the owners of the ship had “got upon his nerves,” as he said; but he was long-suffering and indulgent towards this gentleman, permitting himself no explosions; even asking him to dine at the hotel with Captain Cairns, the first mate, and other men. They had a round table in a corner of the big room, drank a great deal of champagne, and talked rather too loudly for the comfort of their neighbours.

Miss Verinder’s table was at a distance, right on the other side of the room, where she sat quite alone and ate her dinner with little appetite. Dyke came over to her once, bowed to her, and stood by the table; outwardly just a friend or an hotel acquaintance, a person upon whom she had no claims of any kind. But he looked down at her with eloquent eyes, and whisperingly told her how terrible it was to be separated from her for one of their last three evenings.

She understood. He was constant and loyal as ever; the only change in him was what every woman must fatally see in the man she loves when he begins to take up again a man’s job. She understood—only it made her heart ache; and while telling the waiter that she did not require any more of the dinner but would like a cup of coffee, she thought of the essential force of those two hackneyed and inexact words. A heartache! Of course her heart was not really aching, and yet it felt like that; the pain was mental, yet it seemed physical—this dull oppressive discomfort that had taken the taste away from the food, the colour from surrounding objects, the brilliancy from the electric light, suggested something primitive and instinctive that might be shared by dumb animals quite low down the scale; say the young sheep driven into a different gate from that through which its companion passed as they both approached the shambles; or, at highest, the sensations of a dog when it loses its master.

Separation. Anthony’s own word echoed itself as she sipped her coffee and glanced across the room to the corner where he was being jolly with an unexplained purpose to that agent of the shipowners. She was losing him by inches; every moment those men, that ship, the breezes of the wide estuary, the trackless ocean, and the call of plains and hills that she had never seen were taking him bit by bit even while he was still here. It was not like the end of a dance; or the falling of a curtain at the end of a play, or the blowing out of candles when the feast is over; it was like night slowly creeping into a lampless room, where you have to sit and wait, watching the walls fade and the window frames grow fainter, until it is quite dark. Her world would be such a room to her when the slow separation had been completed and she was finally alone.

Her brain and not her heart ached now, as for a few moments she allowed herself to think of what separation would really mean to her. Her eyes smarted, her throat grew hot, her head was full of the dully throbbing anguish. She could scarcely breathe. Then she drove thought away again, beating it from her with the verbal weapons she had prepared against this emergency; saying to herself, “It is wrong of me. I must not be selfish. I must look at everything from his point of view. I know very well that if it were in my power to keep him, I would urge him to go.”

And beneath the words and the thoughts and the pain, she had now the sense of unreality or impossibility. They could not be separated in this manner. Some chance would intervene; by no action of her own but by some eleventh hour leniency of fate, the consummation of the catastrophe would be prevented or at least retarded; nature itself would recoil from adding this one more to its tale of endless cruelties. It was with Miss Verinder, finishing her coffee, as with children when they think of death, believing that death is something that will certainly happen, and yet, owing to some failure of the thought-machine at their disposal, being unable to believe in its possibility.

It could not be that if on the fourth night from now she entered this great dining-hall, she would find apparently the same crowd of travellers, the swing-doors opening and shutting, the waiters going round asking people whether they wanted any liqueur with their coffee—and yet no Anthony Dyke to be seen or heard anywhere. It could not be that she should creep back to London, a broken useless thing wanted by nobody, and that her lover would have gone from her for years if not for ever. It must be impossible that so strong, so overwhelmingly real a thing as he, should fade out of her life and take his place among such weak impalpable things as ghosts or dreams or haunting memories; that he for whom she had forsaken and renounced her home, her parents, her friends, every precept of education, every habit of the mind, should become again scarcely more to her than he had been three months ago—a name in a newspaper.

She went out of the room, and a party of travellers at the nearest table to hers thought her a good-looking but hard sort of young woman—too proud and defiantly British for their taste—and, considering her youthfulness, too self-possessed and self-satisfied. Did you hear how she spoke to the waiter? “No, no liqueur, thank you.” Just like that—so off-hand.

Miss Verinder had the same air of hardness and resolution, together with a new and metallic form of gaiety, next morning when Dyke took her with him to visit the ship. The Mercedaria—a steamer of about three thousand tons—had come out into the river now, and she lay moored in the bright but soft sunlight towards the Birkenhead shore. With her one tall funnel and two raking masts, she looked, not only small, but a battered and rather disreputable kind of tramp, when compared with the lofty shining mass of a big liner a little higher up the river. But she loomed up high and solid, as their boat passed under her stern.