"Who was blue?" bellowed Gerrit.
"A woman, sir. . . . A woman who drowned herself, last night, in the Kanaal. . . ."
"A woman?"
"Yes, sir. My mate here was the first to see the body, when it was floating with the face out of the water. Then he came and told me; and we went and fetched the drag. It was a young woman. . . ."
"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
