She might as well have strummed on the keyboard of a wireless piano for all the reaction she could produce from the lax representative that lay before her, but her own verbal image returned to her with another question.
Come back? From where? Where was he now—the individuality she addressed as “you”? Was that essential personality of his buried deep in this spiritless automaton, or was it away somewhere in the void, unaware both of its fleshly anchor and of her? Could she not reach that spirit of his, poised out of time and space, by the powers of her own love and longing, since they, too, surely were able to transcend the limitations of the purely physical? But to do that she must not sit and gaze at this empty replica on the bed; she must think not of his image, but of him, not of the representative, but of the spirit.
Nevertheless, when she began to pace the length of the room, she found that when the sight of her husband’s placid face was hidden some stimulus to concentration was removed also. While she stared at him her thought was held and focused, now she was distracted by her vision of the familiar things that were associated with her past life in his company. She was thinking, not of him, but of the things he had done, the man he had been.
Perhaps darkness might help her, she thought, and she laid herself down on the bed and once more quenched the obedient light.
For a time she lay still, staring into the blackness, clenched in a vivid effort of concentration, and then her eyes closed, and even as she protested that she would not sleep, she had a vision of herself lying inert and pale on her own bed, even as he was lying.
Then she seemed to be rising, baffled and half-unwilling, through wreaths of a palpable darkness that clung about her with a dragging, suffocating weight. And then it seemed to her that she was wandering, lost and perplexed, on a gaunt and arid plain that might once have been the bed of a now vanished sea.
She was not alone. Other figures, wraiths of humanity, also wandered here and there. But none noticed her. They moved as if they were searching for something they could never hope to find. They peered vaguely downwards, passing her with bent heads and eyes that sought the ground with a reluctant determination....
She found herself trembling, not with horror, but with a rapture of expectancy. She had become aware that one among these drifting wraiths was moving definitely towards her, drawn by the power of her longing. And she had command of the power, so that it was ecstasy to wield it. Almost she was tempted to withhold her amazing strength in order to taste again the pleasure of its renewed exercise.
Then with a sense of some lost interval she found herself face to face with him. But he looked at her without a sign of recognition. His eyes, too, were full of that aimless intention, as though he was under an eternal command to search for some unknown thing that was hidden he knew not where.
“Paul!” she cried to him.