Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/229

Rh Come, run, fly, miserable tools of Fortune! The wheel is turning; catch at a spoke, try and control its movement! Watch them jostle and clamber over each other to grip the fatal wheel, cling to it with the stubbornness of birds of prey, today on top, tomorrow underneath! The wheel turns and turns, and the axle grinds and creaks … And the creaking has a sinister echo! Crash!

Since early in the morning brokers and hangers-on have been coming and going, meeting each other in the street, busy, excited, not stopping, barely exchanging a greeting as dry as the ticking of their watches: Time is money! Before evening the best friends do not recognize each other. ''To buy or not to buy? That is the question!'' drones the sordid Hamlet of commerce. They see the universe only from the point of view of "bid" and "asked." Produce or consume; that is all!

One o'clock! Come, let the pack, avid for flesh, be swallowed up by the four doors of the beautiful palace. With its magnificent arches bearing the emblems, symbols and shields of all lands, beneath its arched iron nerves, this Gothic monument, varied by Moorish and Byzantine memories, half Aryan, half Semitic, presents a compromise well worthy of the temple of the god Commerce, the most furtive and versatile of gods.

The rites have begun. The dull murmur of incantations rises at times to an uproar. Standing up, their hats on their heads as if in a synagogue, the faithful are herding together and chattering. And gradually the atmosphere becomes vitiated. One can hardly see the metals or the coloring of the mural decorations; the massive beams are drowned in a dense,