Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/305

Rh was inseparable from a mixture of paschal incense and of filthy mixture, like the odor of day upon which this remarkable fact had been told him.

With this impression was closely linked that of a morning spent in the pasture with a crowd of cowherds and milkmaids. A large hoydenish girl commanded the tattered band and supervised the cooking of the frog's legs, for the dressing of which she had requisitioned all the butter in the group. Alert little hands heaped up under the pot faggots and dead wood as though in a camp. The roasting of the stew seemed an artificial murmur of the leaves.

Paridael frisked that day like a savage; he had even forgotten his mourning and his rancor, but this rare gaiety fell away in less than an instant. One of the children, glutted with gin by a waggoner, slept against the hedgerow; in vain they shook him, he only snored, slobbering and besotted as an alcoholic; shaggy caterpillars produced a little quiver beneath his red skin, and raging, moist gad-flies that, a little way off, were making a troop of chickens sneeze and squawk, drew from time to time a little drop of blood, the color of crushed mulberry, from the sleeper, or a squeal that cried to heaven for vengeance.

Many times Paridael ascended or descended the long, straight Flemish canals on canal-boats. He lived the life of the lightermen, partook of their meals and slept in their cabins, small and neat as a doll's boudoir, lent a hand to his hosts, but spent the greater part of his time doing absolutely nothing, tasting the joy of wasting time and of gliding with the stream without moving and of being, in his turn, the immobile, passive, irresponsible thing before which filed the willows, bowed the osier beds, trooped the villages and belfrys.