Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/267

Rh have a hundred thousand Belgians, and we shall have them in six months!" had declared Béjard, Saint-Fardier and Vera-Pinto. And their hired crimps set to work with a will. Go it, impostors! To the prey, vampires! The commission is worth taking some trouble for. It is fifteen to twenty francs, according to quality, for each Flemish head turned over to the shipper of human flesh.

But the beaters and their subaltern trackers were carefully silent about their profits. To listen to them, they were the most disinterested of apostles, purely philanthropic, particularly devoted to the peasantry.

Their clap-trap speeches gushed with gold and sunshine. The brokers in lies led their hearers through the promised land, gardens of paradise and palaces of faery. The warmth and the brilliant sun of the tropics kindled and illumined the melancholy horizons of these visionaries; it was as if a magic fire-screen had appeared in a dark room. Ripe corn, crowned with ears as large as their golden wigs, lifted its sheaves to the height of the roofs; trees were bent beneath the weight of gourds that were apples. The sands yielded tobacco; rivulets of milk irrigated the newly-opened land; the chimney smoke rose gently toward a sky more blue than the garb of the holy Daughters of Mary; and that purple, suddenly burnished and scintillant, which clothes the hill-sides until they are lost to view, is not that of your heather, oh, stout drinkers of beer, but the purple of your vines, oh, future bruisers of grapes!

From time to time the charmer interrupted himself, as much to catch his breath as to give the simple folk, whom he was heaping with promises, time to sniff and to taste the perfumed visions he had conjured up.