Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/328

300 and slow locution. The raciness of this underworld of the flourishing metropolis seasoned his life, for so long past merely insipid. He adapted himself to his surroundings. On certain days he clad himself in old leather breeches and mangy coat, opened his old wide-skirted overcoat above his short docker's blouse, donned a sailor's cap with a saucy peak, or the pear-shaped silk balloon dear to rural corn-chandlers, or a picaresque wide-brimmed felt, or a comically shaped straw.

Clad in this topical rig he lounged about, disordered, untidy, shuffling his feet along, knocking one shoe against the other. Leaning against the wall of some warehouse, his cheek swollen with a quid, his arms bare, he caressed his biceps with the air of an itinerant tumbler, or, with his hand on the flap of his trousers, pulled up his perpetually falling socks with a cynical gesture, or, looking for some blackguardism, mused and gazed for hours at the stream of passers-by.

Fights were no longer distasteful to him; he scuffled in the streets with a comrade, suffered and distributed blows at random, he provoked and continued scraps that ended in tumbles head over heels. When he came out of these tourneys one would have taken him for the muddy carter whom he had just been rolling about in the gutter.

During the day the runners usually went their own ways. Stretched out upon a pile of bales, upon a light truck, upon a heap of boards or in the bottom of a launch, they slept with one eye open. Toward dusk the decks were suddenly cleared for action, and they came together, as if by scent or instinct, at the same gathering places. Squatting down, looking like a crop of mushrooms sprouting on a misty and dark night,