Crosbie Wells’s alcoholism

Crosbie Wells’s alcoholism is presented as a quiet but persistent feature of his life at home: spirits are close at hand, and drinking alters how others experience his company. The novel shows him moving between pensive warmth and anger without claiming that drink alone explains his conduct.

Drinking at home

After Crosbie Wells’s unexpected return, he spends much of his time on the first floor of 35 Cumberland Street, where decanters are refilled daily. Anna Wetherell likes him best in the late afternoon, when three or four glasses of whisky have made him pensive but not yet sad. Her observation captures both the ease that drinking can bring to his company and the sadness that seems to lie just beyond it.

Wells has no wish to return to the Dunstan goldfields. Having made a valuable strike the previous year, he considers investments in Dunedin and elsewhere, studies local papers, compares gold prices, and tracks stocks. This attention to prospective uses for his fortune sits alongside a domestic routine in which liquor is continually available; his drinking is not confined to a single crisis or social occasion.

Drink amid conflict

During a confrontation with Lydia Wells, Crosbie slaps her after she begins to answer him. The room falls silent. He turns away, pours a measure from the decanters, drinks it, and immediately pours another. Anna keeps her eyes on the rope wreath in her hands and does not dare look at Lydia. The sequence makes the drinking part of the scene’s aftermath: Wells withdraws from the silence into another measure, while those around him remain exposed to the violence that has just occurred.

The passage does not present alcohol as an excuse for the assault. Instead, the repeated access to drink, and Wells’s deliberate pouring after the blow, place his consumption within a household already marked by strain and distance between husband and wife.

A recurring presence

In another scene, Wells lies on a bolster with a bottle of spirits on his chest while talking with Te Rau Tauwhare, who also nurses a bottle. Wells recounts a story about a man who lost an arm in the floods at Dunstan and grieved that a ship tattooed on it had been lost. The bottle’s placement makes drink part of the scene’s ordinary physical setting, rather than an exceptional interruption.

The conversation turns from the lost tattoo to the shock of seeing oneself after a long absence from a mirror, and to whether the self can be forgotten. The text does not explicitly connect this question to Wells’s drinking, but the image of him reclining with spirits close at hand gives the reflective exchange a context of habitual consumption. Across these moments, alcoholism registers through repetition and atmosphere: the replenished decanters, whisky that shapes Anna’s impression of him, and the bottle accompanying him as he speaks with his friend.