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.
My hands went out into the darkness, grabbing, reaching.
But all the while I was listening with that deep, undisturbed content to the terrific fire that seemed to shake the earth and heaven to pieces.
All I could get hold of was the sheet and blankets.
Well, I must turn away, I must look elsewhere.
And then I quietly and unexpectedly put out my hand and turned up the light in a fit of desperate defiance of the German brutes outside.
In a flash I saw my suit-case. It was locked. I saw my powder puff. I saw my bag. Then I put out the light and picked up my powder-puff, got to my bag, and fumbled for the keys, and opened my suit-case and dragged out a wrapper, but no slippers came under my fingers, and I wanted slippers in case of going out into the streets.
But by this time I had discovered that nothing matters at all, and I quietly turned up the light again, being by then a confirmed and age-old fatalist.
Standing in front of the looking-glass, I found myself slowly powdering my face.
Then the sound of people rushing along the corridor reached me, and I opened my door and went out.
"C'est une bataille! Ce sont les Allemands, n'est-ce-pas?" queried a poor old lady.
"Mais non, madame," shouts a dashing big aeronaut running by. "Ce n'est pas une bataille. C'est le Zeppelin!"
The Zeppelin had come, for the second time, to Antwerp! And the cannons and musketry were the onslaughts upon the monster by the Belgian soldiers, mad with rage at the impudent visit, and all ready with a hot reception for it.
Down the stairs I fled, snatched away now from those wonderful moments of reality, alone, with the noise of the cannons in the pitch-blackness of that stifling bedroom; down the great scarlet-carpeted stairs, until we all came to a full stop in the hotel lounge below.
One dim light, shaded half into darkness, revealed the silhouettes of tall, motionless green palms and white wicker chairs and scarlet carpets and little tables, and the strangest crowd in all the world.