Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/269

Rh "Yes, boys, I'm going back myself in a few days. As sure as there is a God I shall never again be able to live in our little Europe!"

And the jolly fellow wheedled them, urged them, and took them all in. Sometimes, in order to emphasize his talk, he would roll, with pretended carelessness, a handful of gold upon the table, sticky with the slops of many glasses. They were foreign, enormous coins. Over there one paid only in goldpieces as large as our wretched five francs silver coins. At the clinking of the gold, the little cowherd's eyes would sparkle; he already saw himself a conquistador; his mistress would order about hundreds of servants, clothe herself only in laces, and sprawl upon a bed of down.

When they reached home, the young fellows ruminated these visions; if they slept, they found them again in their dreams. Husbands talked it over in bed with their wives; at first grumbling and refractory, their wives allowed themselves to be convinced and fascinated.

In the fields, beneath a sullen sky, in the midst of flat, broken fields, while they disembowelled the earth that seemed more recalcitrant than ever, the mirage returned to haunt them and, sluggish at their work, their elbows and chins resting on the handle of the hoe, or idly whistling their oxen, the laborers recalled the fabulous lands, and dreamed of the crimp's promises.

And the gold that he toyed with! One of those yellow disks alone represented triple the value of the white coins that they earned from their baes …

And that is why, on this January morning, the bowels of The Gina—that big craft, once so rakish, but long since painted the uniform black of a poor