"And she was quite blue, you say?..."
"Yes, sir, and all bloated: she'd swallowed a lot of water.... We took the body to the cemetery near the Woods and we're on our way to the commissary."
"To the cemetery?..."
"Yes, sir...."
The men saluted:
"Sir."
"She was quite blue," Gerrit repeated to himself.
And he hurried on at a jog-trot. Brrr, brrr! Oh, to be in bed ... he wanted to get to bed! He was as cold as that woman must have been last night, floating in the water until her face blossomed up like a phantom flower of death.... Brrr! Icy cold water: wasn't he walking beside icy cold water twenty minutes ago? Hadn't it seemed to him that the whole tame landscape, in its wreath of dunes, had melted away into a hazy unreality, with those ghostly villas and trees ... and the ponds like tragic pools, in which were mirrored the motionless, low, grey skies, full of the wriggling of his giant worm ... until the faces of mermaids, with wet, plastered hair and gold-gleaming eyes had risen up like dead flowers, water-lilies of death, and ogled him with the last quiver of their dying eyes?... Oh, the Paris express!... Oh, what a fever he was in!... He must go quick to bed now ... but, before he went, he would just call in at the Kerkhoflaan and ask if there was no telegram from Van der Welcke and Constance.... But how cold he felt and how he was shivering: brrr, brrr!...
It was as though his legs moved independently of his will, propelled by alien instincts, by energies outside himself; for his legs moved healthily, sturdily and quickly, with the click-clack of his sword knocking against his thigh, while, above those sturdy legs, his body shivered in the clutch of the monster, which licked and licked with fiery dabs of its tongue. And, above his body, towered his head, colossally large, with vertigos whirling like tangible circles around the huge head in which he seemed to be carrying a heavy lump of brains. From it there shot forth the strangest dreams; and these dreams, together with the contortions of the monster, filled the whole grey sky until everything became one great dream: all that town of unknown streets; houses; people who bowed and nodded to him; a couple of hussars, who saluted; a couple of officers whom he knew and to whom he waved:
"Bonjour!"