Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/189

Rh denounced a last-minute manoeuvre of his adversary, and uttered a final, laconic and vigorous proclamation. Nearly all these manifestos began with the phrase: "Voters! You are being deceived!" Newsboys were crying the latest extras. On each side of the poll a ne'er-do-well was standing, wearing a signboard inviting people to vote for one or the other ticket. The blue cockades in one group exchanged defiant glances with the orange rosettes of another; people who were ordinarily quite inoffensive assumed a belligerent air, and hands feverishly tormented the handles of canes. They talked a great deal, but in low voices, like conspirators.

However, each booth having been provided with a chairman and two watchers, the voting began. Answering to the roll-call in alphabetical order, the voters brushed a passage through the crowd, passed behind a partition, and presented themselves before the three grave men. The latter sat behind a table, covered with the traditional green cloth and bearing an ugly black, cubic box, pompously called the urn. The voter pushed his ballot, folded four times and stamped with the arms of the city, for a brief second beneath the eyeglassed and suspicious nose of the chairman, and then let it fall into the urn as if it were a poor-box, a money-box, or a letter-box. There were some upon whom this simple action made a profound impression; they lost their wits, dropped their canes, became confused in their bows, and persisted in trying to put their ballot into the watcher's inkwell.

On the partition, on the side of the waiting room, were displayed the lists of candidates; nearsighted men put their noses right up to it; dirty fingers travelled all over it as over the timetable posted up in