And he answered:
"Yes ... yes ... I'm coming...."
And he, the man heaving up and down, down and up, on the mighty swaying of the storm, down and up, up and down, he, this heaving, wrestling man, one with the beast and the beast one with him, saw a woman, between the faces of children and women, saw two women, two women belonging to him: his wife and his sister. But in between them crept a third woman; and her eyes mocked like golden eyes of mockery ... until suddenly they ceased to mock and died away in sadness, in unutterable sadness, as though really they had always been sad and had never mocked or laughed.
"Gerrit ... dear Gerrit ... are you coming?"
"Yes ... yes ... I'm coming...."
"He's delirious," whispered Constance.
The room around the sick man had now become as glass, but not transparent glass. For he no longer, through the walls of the room, saw the universe and the beast: he saw nothing now save the room; but so brittle was that room, so brittle all the things which it contained that it seemed to be all of glass—the room, the bed and he—all glass, all brittle glass, which a single incautious movement might shiver into dust. Yes, now that the beast had sucked up all his marrow with that voluptuous licking, it had let him go, left him lying exhausted on his bed; and he lay, his glass body lay powerless to move; and, now that, after a long time, he had laboriously opened his eyes and saw his room around him as glass and felt himself as glass, he knew that the beast would no longer dart the fiery shafts of his tongue, because it had eaten the whole of him up. His body lay lifeless, like a glass husk; and he asked himself if he wasn't dead. He did not know for certain that he was alive. He saw that the room was very quiet; beside him, in the glass atmosphere of his room, sat a man, who also seemed made of brittle glass; and the man sat motionless: he seemed to be sitting with a book in his hand, reading in the glassy twilight that filtered through the close-drawn window-curtains....
The sick man laboriously closed his eyes again; and it seemed to him that he sank away very slowly, into a great, downy abyss, lower and lower, a very depth of down, into which he sank and went on sinking, sank and went on sinking....
"There's less fever now," said the military doctor. "He's asleep."
"Is he out of danger?" asked the pale little wife, who sat with Constance' arms around her.