Godwin Baxter—Archibald McCandless

Godwin Baxter and Archibald McCandless are friends whose closeness is real but not equal in kind: McCandless loves Godwin with a passion Godwin does not return, while Godwin nonetheless comes to trust him with his household, his work, and his last hours. Their relationship moves between pursuit and withdrawal, professional alliance and personal devotion. Its final measure is not romantic reciprocity but the tenderness and confidence with which Godwin entrusts McCandless with the people and responsibilities he will leave behind.

First Attachment and Unequal Affection

McCandless first encountered Godwin in the university anatomy department, where Godwin gave demonstrations when the regular lecturer was ill. McCandless, described in Bella Baxter’s later account as small and awkward, fell passionately in love with him. Bella distinguishes this attachment from McCandless’s love for her: she believes he loved her partly as the female counterpart of Godwin, someone he could embrace, but that Godwin himself was the first great love of McCandless’s life. That love was not returned in the same form.

McCandless sought Godwin out beyond the university. He learned the routes Godwin took when walking his dogs on Sundays and repeatedly joined him. Godwin could not easily be unkind, but the pursuit crossed a boundary when McCandless accompanied him home and forced his way inside. On that occasion Godwin managed to tell him that he needed more privacy. McCandless then left him alone, except when they met by chance or Godwin invited him home. The pattern reveals both men’s limits: McCandless’s attachment could press too close, while Godwin’s gentleness made outright rejection difficult; after the boundary was stated, McCandless respected it.

Their renewed contact depended on Godwin’s invitations. Bella recalls that this intermittent welcome was how she first met McCandless. Later, when Godwin wanted respite from Bella’s demanding company, he asked McCandless to take her for a walk through West End Park. Bella interpreted the arrangement as possibly joining her to a useful, selfless husband who would not separate her from Godwin. In retrospect, she recognizes that Godwin also wanted peace. McCandless’s importance in their lives thus began within a complicated household arrangement, not a simple courtship: Godwin could trust him with Bella, even as he wanted space from both of them.

Friendship in Work and Public Defense

Godwin’s confidence in McCandless extended to his professional judgment. He knew of McCandless’s standing in the Glasgow medical profession and described his strengths in diagnosis, bacteriology, and hygiene. Godwin urged him to become a public health officer, arguing that preventing disease mattered more than curing it and that Glasgow needed better water, drainage, lighting, and housing. His recommendation had a personal purpose as well: he expected Bella eventually to run a clinic and believed that a highly placed local official could help her. McCandless accepted the argument. Their friendship therefore joined intellectual respect to practical cooperation, with Godwin using his influence to direct McCandless toward work that might serve Bella’s plans.

That loyalty became unmistakable when General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington and Blaydon Hattersley challenged Bella’s identity and her proposed marriage to McCandless. Godwin took charge of the confrontation, introducing himself as a wealthy practising surgeon who had operated on royalty. He explained that Bella had come to him three years earlier with no memories of her prior life, had lived with him as his ward, and was named in his will as his heir. He also stated that she had freely agreed to marry McCandless. Rather than let the dispute move immediately to a court, he invited the men to his home for rational discussion.

When a solicitor presented a mixture of fact and falsehood intended to portray Godwin as a sexual predator and McCandless as a weak-minded parasite, McCandless answered with an emphatic defense. He insisted that Godwin’s visible distress testified to his capacity for pain, not guilt. He described Godwin as kind and self-sacrificing, and defended the care he had given Bella, whose severe cranial injury, he said, would otherwise have left her worse than amnesiac. Godwin’s travels with her had been intended to reintroduce her to a forgotten world; he had opposed her elopement with Duncan Wedderburn and later provided her with the means to return. McCandless’s defense made their friendship public: he risked his own standing to reject the visitors’ attack on the man he regarded as his closest friend.

Trust in the Final Illness

The trust between them became most intimate as Godwin’s health failed. When McCandless arrived at Godwin’s final sickroom, he recognized the amplified rhythm of Godwin’s heartbeat in the thudding, buzzing, and twanging that filled the room. Godwin, gripping the table, called for an injection; McCandless gave it, and the vibration subsided. Godwin then told him that he was about to die. McCandless wept, unable to pretend that he misunderstood. Godwin welcomed those tears as evidence that he had mattered to McCandless.

Godwin explained that his body could not endure strong emotion. Sir Colin Baxter had warned him from childhood that his life depended on maintaining an even temper because intense feeling could fatally aggravate the incompatibilities in his organs. Bella’s engagement to McCandless had damaged his respiration; her return from Paris and a later confrontation with Blessington’s solicitor had further worsened his condition. He was starving, though his apparent bulk concealed it, and opium and cocaine derivatives had allowed him to maintain an appearance of ease during McCandless’s evening visits. Their friendship had offered company through illness, but Godwin’s affection for Bella and the strain of events had exacted a bodily cost.

Godwin refused McCandless’s offer to fetch Bella. He feared that if she begged him to continue living, he would be unable to refuse, and that she would then remember him in a state of helpless indignity. Instead, he chose to say goodbye to McCandless while he could still do so with composure. He proposed a final glass of his father’s port, recalling a decanter McCandless had once left half-finished. As they drank, Godwin told him that his will left everything to Bella and McCandless. He asked them to have children, teach them good behavior and honest work by example, avoid violence and preaching, care for Mrs. Dinwiddie and the servants when they could no longer work, and be kind to his dogs. The instructions turn private affection into a legacy of everyday care.

Farewell and Retrospective Meaning

Godwin’s death followed the shared drink. He laughed, and the sound swelled alongside the pounding and twanging of his heart until both stopped abruptly. McCandless found that Godwin’s neck had broken and that rigor mortis had set in. Because he would not break Godwin’s joints to lay him flat, he ordered a cubical coffin four and a half feet wide, with a shelf that allowed Godwin to be buried seated. The unusual burial preserves, in material form, the bodily presence that had shaped their friendship and McCandless’s account of it.

Bella later revises that account. She argues that McCandless envied Godwin’s famous father and loving mother, and especially the care and company Godwin gave her. She portrays McCandless as having imagined a world in which the three of them were equal, then reshaped their histories in his book to support that fantasy. Her interpretation does not erase his loyalty or the affection visible in his last vigil; it does, however, make the relationship’s imbalance central. McCandless loved Godwin deeply, but Bella’s account suggests that Godwin’s place in McCandless’s heart was also a source of envy and narrative invention. What the two accounts share is the force of the bond: Godwin’s final confidences, his trust in McCandless’s care for Bella and the household, and McCandless’s grief make their friendship consequential even where romantic love remains unreciprocated.