Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/86

74 at Lisbon, and leave me there alone, I think I should die or lose my reason. I know I should be unable to get out. I should fall in a heap, shut my eyes and try to crawl to the edge on my hands and knees, filled all the time with a panting terror. A man who finds himself compelled to cross a glassy ice slope which, twenty feet below, drops over a precipice, could not feel worse than I do if left adrift, nor pray more fervently to be clear of the abhorred space and safe. My husband says that this is all nonsense. I suppose it is, but it is such nonsense as would be sense if the jester were Death.

The knowledge that I have to go to a dinner party fills me with unutterable alarm. By the time I am dressed and ready to start I am chilled, shaking all over and gasping for breath. The drive to the house is almost as full of horror as the drive of the tumbril to the guillotine. By the time I arrive I am so ill I can hardly speak and am convinced that I shall fall down, or be sick, or shall have to cry out. More than once I have insisted upon being driven home again, and my husband has gone to the dinner alone after much outpouring of language.

Possibly my most direful experiments have been at the theatre, to which I have been taken on