In the golden summer of 1909 she had the wanderer with her for a long while.
She knew that he was coming, but had not been prepared for his actual advent. It was after luncheon, the room full of sunlight, and she sat in a corner busily typewriting; with a tray of papers on a table at her elbow and slips of printers’ proofs lying on the floor by her feet. Louisa shouted in the passage, and when Emmie heard his voice she jumped up, knocking down the tray and its papers as she did so. She nearly sent the typewriting machine after the tray as she sprang forward to meet him at the opened door. Then something brought her to a dead stop.
He was grey. His beautiful dark hair had lost its black lustrousness; it was the dull colour of a grey silk dress. She gave a little shiver, and then took his hand and looked into his face as if not noticing any difference.
“Emmie! Let me look at you.”
As always, he held her arms apart before drawing her to him, studied her with adoring eyes; and she knew without the possibility of doubt that he could not or would not see the slightest change in her. So far as she was concerned, she need never fear the years or their marks; always he would see not what she was really, but the girl that she had once been.
Soon they laughed together at the new colour of his hair, and Emmie said it was an improvement. It gave him greater dignity. He would look very handsome in the portrait that a famous artist was going to paint. Truly the grey hair did not make him look any older; although now fifty-one he was wonderfully, almost incredibly young; sometimes making her and Louisa feel, as they had felt long ago, that they were hiding in the flat an overgrown schoolboy and not a middle-aged public character. He chaffed and teased Louisa; he took the parrot out of its cage and could not get it back again; he spent one whole day in teaching the new white cat to jump from between his knees over his clasped hands.
He was cheerful and gay; yet beneath the high spirits Emmie detected his occasional sadness. After running down to Devonshire for a few days he returned to her; and never had he been so entirely sweet or more absolutely devoted; and yet, nevertheless, she understood that he was restless in mind and, except for the comfort of their love, unhappy. It would pass—as all signs of weakness passed from him—but she knew that he was feeling the smart of disappointment. It was more than his own failure in the fourth cruise, it was the knowledge that his province had been invaded. That ocean which he had come to consider as belonging to Anthony Dyke had been attacked by so many others. The hidden mystery of its continent was imminently threatened not by him, Dyke, but by the new men.
He was still generous in his praise, trying hard to conceal the touch of bitterness caused by personal considerations. “Nansen is a splendid fellow. Take it from me, Emmie, he deserves all that is said of him—and they have made a deuce of a fuss, haven’t they? He has been lucky, of course—devilish lucky. Mark my words; the North Pole will be reached”; and walking about the room, he paused to make a widely magnanimous gesture, as though giving away the North Pole. After all, the North Pole was nothing to him; he had never marked it down; anybody might have it—that is, anybody who deserved it. “They are wonderful people, the Norwegians, Emmie. I suppose you know they are fitting out the Fram for a third voyage. Yes, Roald Amundsen will be in command—topping chap, Amundsen—he’ll get there.” Then she saw him wince as he went on to speak again of things relating to the other Pole, the South Pole, his Pole. “That was a tremendous performance of Shackleton’s, Emmie. Great. Lucky beggar, Shackleton. Scott too. I take off my hat to Scott.” And he sighed. “Scott ought to be invincible—sent out as they mean to send him—with all that money behind him. You remember what Sir Clements Markham said about Antarctic exploration—he wanted a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to send a man in proper style.” Then, after looking ruefully at Emmie, he laughed and snapped his fingers. “Poor old Dyke never scraped together a tenth part of that sum, did he?”
When she suggested that they should hire a motor-car, cross the channel, and go for a tour in Brittany, he eagerly embraced her idea, vowing that it was an inspiration. Those three weeks on wheels were idyllic—rest in motion, quiet introspective joy with a changing outward panorama of pleasant images. He seemed perfectly happy, scarcely once mentioning the South Pole; and she, watching him as a mother watches a son who has been crossed in love, hoped that he was not secretly grieving.
As soon as they were back in London he grew restless. He would sit looking at her, pretending to listen to her, and then suddenly go and ask Louisa to see if the coast was clear, because he wanted a walk. He walked by himself on these occasions, fast and furiously, “blowing off steam,” as he explained to Emmie. At other times he would stand by the window, with his hands in his pockets, motionless for an hour and more, staring down through the foliage of the plane tree as if trying to look through the whole globe and see what was happening down there at the antipodes.