In the pitch blackness, so hot and stifling, I stood there trying to think, but my room seemed full of the roar of cannon, and I experienced a queer sensation as though I was losing consciousness in the sea, under the loud beat of waves.
"I mustn't turn up the light," I said to myself, "or they will see where I am! That's the one thing I mustn't do."
Again I tried to think what to do, and then suddenly I found myself listening, with a sub-consciousness of immense and utter content, to the wild outcry of those cannons and muskets, and I felt as if I must listen, and listen, and listen, till I knew the sounds by heart.
As for fear, there was none, not any at all, not a particle.
Instead, there was something curiously akin to rapture.
It seemed to me that the supreme satisfaction of having at last dropped clean away from all the make-believes of life, seized upon me, standing there in my nightgown in the pitch-black, airless room at Antwerp, a woman quite alone among strangers, with danger knocking at the gate of her world.
Make-believe! Make-believe! All life up to this minute seemed nothing else but make-believe. For only Death seemed real, and only Death seemed glorious.
All this took me about two minutes to think, and then I began to move about my room, stupidly, vaguely.
I seemed to bump up against the noise of the cannons at every step.
But I could not find the door, and I could not find a wrapper.