After the evening walk she used to sit at her desk, with only her reading lamp to make a bright circle of light and with all the rest of the room in darkness. If not writing a letter to him, she read his old letters to her. The thin paper rustled and shook in the lamp-light; and it seemed to her that the man whom all the world believed to be dead was standing close behind her; that at any moment he might step forward, put his hand upon her shoulder, and speak to her.
Did she still truly believe that he was alive? She went on writing to him. In some oppressively hot weather during the month of August she suffered from great lassitude; her head ached day after day, and noises in the head bothered her. Louisa wanted her to see a doctor, but she resolutely refused. Alone in the room, with the sides and corners of it all vague and shadowy, where the light of her single lamp did not reach them, she distressed herself by imaging that she could hear voices—not his voice ever, the voices of other people, strangers, talking about Anthony. It was not an illusion; because she knew perfectly well that she was merely imagining it. This imagined talk was just a translation of her own thoughts. But she could not stop it; for a little while it was quite beyond her control.
These unknown imaginary people were saying that he was alive and they had seen him. They had met him in Bond Street. “Yes, I didn’t recognize him at first. I thought, there’s a thundering big man. Where have I seen those big shoulders before? Then I saw it was Dyke. You know, the man they said had perished five hundred miles on the other side of the Pole. Anthony Dyke. Dyke. Dyke. Dyke!”
And suddenly she began to laugh and beat upon the desk with her open hand. A thought had come to her that seemed to be at once tragic and ludicrous. “Am I going mad?” she asked herself; and for perhaps a minute she laughed unrestrainedly. “That would be too bad,” she said, aloud. “No, I won’t go out of my mind, Tony. It wouldn’t be fair—for you to have had a mad mistress as well as a mad wife”; and she became quite quiet again. Then, looking round, she saw that Louisa had entered the room.
“I’ve nothing to do,” said Louisa. “May I sit in here with you till you go to bed?”
“No,” said Emmie. “Leave me alone, please.”
“I fancied I heard something—as if you were making a noise.”
“Don’t believe what you hear,” said Emmie, with a faint smile, “and only half that you see”; and the smile vanishing, her face became rigid.
On another night she suddenly sprang up from her desk, hurried across to the door, and turned on all the light switches. Every lamp glowed and grew bright. She had been on the point of starting a letter when an agony of horror and dread took possession of her. She stood now clinging to the back of a chair, her teeth chattering, her face ghastly. He was dead—while the horror lasted she seemed, in this brightly-lit room, to have visions of him. She saw him lying stiff on the snow, a huge black form stretched upon the dazzling whiteness. And she saw him seated, staring at her, with his hands clasped about his knees—like those frozen figures in the Andes—dead now for many months.
She made no noise. She fought the hallucination, she fought the abominable mind-destroying thoughts that had produced it; she fought, as if for her own life and his. And gradually the horror passed, the anguish lessened. Finally they were gone.