Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/334

306 little peasant, rosy and neat, brawny, with a free and easy figure, great, pale, limpid, blue eyes, his cheeks sprinkled with a light down, a fairly large nose with refined nostrils, a wilful mouth, fine blond hair parted at one side,—a rebellious tuft bristling above the ear;—dressed in a coat and breeches of reddish corduroy, shod in cowherd's boots, a red silk kerchief knotted like a cord around his neck; the awkward manner of a choir-boy surprised while stealing apples.

Laurent bought him a drink and made him tell the details of the crime, relishing the contrast between the horrible adventure and the candid air of the ravisher. That sorrowful, sweet voice of a penitent at confession gave him gooseflesh. The curious fellow entered upon the most bestial details without a pang, without a single contraction in his throat, as if he were reciting the plaint of some one else, and not himself, and concluded thus:

"The strangest thing was that, the affair being over, we did not dare leave each other, my comrades and I. And, nevertheless, their voices made me ill. Willeki having proposed to return there and finish the wretched girl off, so as to close her mouth for good, I scampered away at full tilt … A dog was howling to wake the dead. 'It's Lamme Taplaar's Spitz,' I said to myself. In the distance, between the trees and above the moor, the city lights outlined the immense dome of a church, luminous against the black sky. And this thought of the too close city did not bring to my mind any fear of the police. A fine drizzle was falling. My head was on fire, my temples throbbing; I kept in my nose, in my clothes, beneath my nails an odor of flesh and of butchery that drove me sick as does the smell of food after a gorge. I slept