In those few moments, while she bought a paper and opened it, she believed that it was her man. Her man—the blood beat at her temples, her lungs were full of fire, and a wild passionate joy possessed her. It seemed as if the station walls were falling, the lofty roof bursting open and floating away; vistas showed themselves, filled with vast pressing throngs; triumphant music swelled in her ears, and the voice of whole nations shouting echoed and re-echoed the loved name. Dyke, Dyke, Dyke! He had done it. Nothing could stop him, he had beaten them all—her man. She held the paper high to read the message.
It was Amundsen.
She refolded the paper and looked at the large clock above the door. Ten minutes past seven. When she got safely into her bedroom at the flat the pretty little Sèvres clock on the chimney-piece showed that it was now twenty minutes to eleven; and, except that she had been walking, she never knew why it had taken her so long to get home from Euston.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Louisa, helping to put her to bed. And she spoke again, in the grumblingly affectionate tone that trusted faithful old servants often permit to themselves. “You don’t take proper care. You overdo it—and then you make yourself ill, like this.”
“I am quite all right,” said Emmie. “But I have had a rather agitating day”; and she turned her face to the wall.
CHAPTER XIV
IN due course the stories of the various expeditions arrived. Each had done nobly good work, but in the splendour of the achievement of Amundsen and Scott all else paled to insignificance. National sorrow for the death of its glorious representative made England at first almost impatient of listening to the voices of those who remained alive. Dyke, it seemed, had performed valuable services to science—he had cleared up a good deal; although behind the illustrious two, he had crossed their tracks, and he had also struck into the Japanese and the Germans. But who now could care about discoveries of mountain ranges, charting of coast-lines, or correction of surmises as to land and water? The praise he received in the British press was pitifully small; and one American paper was cruel enough to say that “Comic relief had been given to the tragic drama by the antics of elderly Dyke, who had been fooling around all the time like the clown of the Antarctic Circus.”
He was in England during the summer of 1914; a man forgotten, not given a single newspaper interview, not once bidden to a public dinner. The birthday list of honours was announced in advance as including recognition of all who of late years had served the state usefully or ornamentally; yet neither in forecasts of those to be thus honoured nor in the list itself was the name of Dyke mentioned. He did not say a word to indicate that he even noticed this neglect. Emmie, however, thinking she understood what he must necessarily feel, took him away from London into the country, where he could no longer hear the noise and fuss about recognition and national gratitude.