Page:Twilight of the Souls (1917).djvu/301

Rh and still so young, a young woman! . . . Done for. . . like a defective machine: Lord, how rotten! . . . No, he couldn't give that photograph. . . of all his children. . . to a light-o'-love. . . . He couldn't do it. . .If she had only asked for a necklace or some such gaud. . . he would have managed somehow, out of his poverty, to buy her a nice keepsake. . . . Whew, how raw and cold it was! . . . The will-o'-the-wisps of all sorts of images shone in front of him; and, through them, through the flames, the flying Paris express. . . with the compartment, the coffin, Van der Welcke, Constance, two motionless figures. And yet it was bitterly, clammily cold; he was chilled to his marrow; and a great hairy dragon split its beastly maw to lick that chilled marrow with a fiery tongue. How big the filthy brute had grown! It was no longer inside him, it was all around him now: it filled the air with its wriggling body; it lifted its tail among the wintry boughs; and its tongue of fire licked at Gerrit's marrow; and under that marrow—how strange!—he was simply freezing. . . . Brrr, brrr! . . . Lord, how he was shivering, what a fever he was in! . . . Home. . . home. . . to bed! . . . Oh, how good to get into bed. . . nice and warm, nice and warm! . . . Still better to be nice and warm in women's arms. . . no kissing. . . just sleeping, nice and warm! . . . Brrr, brrr! . . . Lord, Lord, Lord, the water