Anna Wetherell and Edgar Clinch

Anna Wetherell and Edgar Clinch are joined by an attachment that is intimate in its daily acts but never mutual in the way Clinch hopes. When Anna arrives in Hokitika, he offers her lodging, food, and small attentions with the fervour of someone who believes care can make a home around another person. Anna accepts these provisions without recognizing them as declarations of love. Her reserve leaves Clinch suspended between tenderness and hurt, and the relationship eventually reveals the cost of his belief that generosity should secure affection.

A welcome at Gibson Quay

Clinch meets Anna at Gibson Quay after she has been brought ashore from the Godspeed. She is pregnant, though her condition is not yet visible, and wears a hired purple gown that he later learns came from Dick Mannering. The details of her arrival fix themselves in Clinch’s memory: her bonnet and wind-tossed ribbons, ankle-boots, gloves, and reticule. He finds her radiant despite the gown’s unflattering colour, welcomes her, takes her arm, and escorts her along Revell Street as if honouring a queen.

Clinch has been in Hokitika for less than a month and has met Anna without arrangement. He has not yet met Mannering, who is delayed in Dunedin. The welcome is therefore not a negotiated service: Clinch’s attention begins as a spontaneous response to Anna herself. He offers to buy her luncheon, and her acceptance gives him a sudden sense of redemption. He then places his best and largest room at her disposal. Anna pays with a promissory note from Mannering, which Clinch accepts without question in the first rush of his generosity.

Only afterward does Clinch understand that Anna belongs to the old profession. By then, his affections are already fixed. When Mannering arrives and identifies himself as Anna’s employer, he arranges her weekly fee and the terms of her protection, surveillance, meals, and bath. Clinch is willing to provide these comforts, but his attention exceeds the terms of Mannering’s arrangement: the lodging has become the setting for an attachment he does not know how to make known.

Care, longing, and silence

Clinch’s love takes a mothering form. His own mother died when he was an infant, and in his imagination she became an ideal figure of shining virtue, her face indistinct as if seen through a fogged window. He longs, in turn, to give the kind of care he most wishes to receive. His pattern is self-reinforcing: he provides for the people he loves, wants their approval for that provision, feels ashamed of needing it, and responds by providing still more. The care is genuine, but it also carries an unspoken request for recognition.

That request goes unanswered. Anna is polite, keeps her rooms in decent order, and limits their conversation to trivial subjects; she does not seek Clinch’s company or understand that he loves her. His efforts nonetheless continue. He fills the copper bathtub every Sunday, lays out linens, and takes pleasure in glimpsing Anna freshly bathed or catching the scent of soap when she passes through the dining room. When Mannering proposes ending the costly weekly bath after Anna has been established in Hokitika, Clinch simply stops listing it on her monthly bill and keeps drawing the water.

Anna’s indifference does not cool his attachment. It intensifies it, even as it makes him lonely. Clinch is distressed by the dangers of her work and grieved when he learns she takes opium nearly every day, but neither her profession nor her drug use makes him withdraw. He compares her smoking opium with his own use of laudanum when he cannot sleep, and interprets the painful parts of her life as reasons to wish more urgently for her happiness. His love is thus neither detached admiration nor simple benevolence: he wants to relieve her suffering, while remaining unable to read what she does—and does not—offer him in return.

The imagined family

When Clinch realizes that Anna is expecting another man’s child, his sadness takes on an anxious edge. He considers telling her what he feels and wonders whether he might offer marriage. He even imagines adopting the baby and caring for it as his own, forming a family with Anna. These possibilities remain his private hopes; the evidence does not show Anna sharing them or receiving such an offer.

The contrast between his imagined family and their actual relationship is central to the imbalance between them. Clinch treats Anna’s acceptance of practical help as a bond whose meaning is plain to him, while she continues to keep their exchanges within ordinary, courteous limits. He is prepared to organize his life around her and a child who is not his, but the depth of that willingness does not create reciprocal intimacy. His tender acts give the relationship a shape that Anna has not chosen.

Wealth and the turn to resentment

The pattern changes when Clinch discovers that Anna’s wardrobe contains dresses with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds sewn into them. After a hostile exchange with Aubert Gascoigne, Clinch regrets that he lost his temper with Anna, but his regret is mixed with accusation. He believes she lied when she said she had no money and sees the dresses as evidence that she has concealed extraordinary wealth while he has been paying her daily expenses and soothing her troubles. He checks periodically to make sure the gold remains in the dresses.

The discovery alters the emotional meaning he gives to his own care. What had been offered as devotion now becomes, in his bitterness, an expense he should not have borne; Anna’s silence and secrecy appear to him as ingratitude and conspiracy. Months of feeling unnoticed have left him ready to interpret the hidden fortune as a personal betrayal. His generosity does not disappear, but it is no longer separable from his demand to be seen and repaid in affection.

Even after the confrontation, Clinch does not want to be left alone. When Gascoigne prepares to go, Clinch is disappointed that their conversation is ending and puts out a hand to delay him. He wants to continue discussing Anna’s debt, though he had initially met the subject with hostility, and wants to repair the uncivil note on which the exchange has ended. The gesture makes visible the same anxious movement that shaped his courtship: anger gives way to a wish for company, just as resentment grows out of care that has gone unacknowledged. Anna and Clinch’s relationship remains unreciprocated, but it is not emotionally simple. His solicitude is sincere; its dependence on approval makes it vulnerable to disappointment, and the hidden gold turns that vulnerability into grievance.