Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/181

Rh The effervescence swayed, above all, the working population of the harbor.

Isolated conflicts had already broken out between Béjard and the Nations. At first there were disagreements over an account due from him to the America. The shipowner constantly refused to pay his bill. Then there arrived from Riga a grain ship with a cargo consigned to the recalcitrant debtor.

Béjard applied for the unloading of his merchandise to one of his creditor's rivals, but under such conditions the corporations made common cause, and the Nation sought by him refused the enterprise until he should have settled with their competitors. He applied to a third and a fourth Nation, meeting the same reply from both.

Obstinate and furious, he had dockers brought from Flushing, the nearest seaport. The Antwerpian dockers threw many of the Hollanders into the basins, and took them out half -drowned, only to plunge them in again, so that all of them took the train home for their country the same day, swearing that they never again could be forced to interfere with and oppose the the expeditious Antwerpians in their strikes. In truth, when these workmen, as even-tempered as they were vigorous, decided to become nasty, they did it in the fashion of felines.

Béjard, having heard of the desertion of the Hollanders after the treatment that had been inflicted upon them, foamed with fury and swore that sooner or later he would get even with Vingerhout and his insolent Nations. But since, as time went on, his grain threatened to rot in the bottom of the hold, he gave in to claims of the dockers.

A little later on, an occasion presented itself to