Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/335

Rh that night, and dreamed of the great white church against the sky …"

The chances of birth, education, and of manners, as well as the inconsistency of nature offered Paridael many comparisons for his discouraging philosophy.

Before a building under construction he became indignant at seeing plastic and decorative youths breaking their backs and wearing themselves out as plasterers and mason's assistants in order to erect a palace for some gouty old reprobate. The owner conferred phlegmatically with the architect and the obsequious builder, without according the slightest attention to the workmen who were barely able to carry their loads. But as much as the rich man reeked with self-sufficiency, showed himself to be grotesque and vulgar, so much did these artisans, trampled down and oppressed though they were, display a simplicity and courage, carrying their coarse clothes with fine grace.

And Laurent imagined the mason's assistant brought up after the fashion of rich people, dressed like an English "swell" or "masher," hurried into the wholesome and eurythmic fatigue of sports, and his superiority, thus transformed, over the young Saint-Fardiers and the weak, undersized striplings of their group. Often the whim seized him to empty his purse into the hands of an apprentice and say: "Here, you fool, save your strength, preserve your youth, and fresh face, laze, dream, love, abandon yourself!"

From his youth, at the house of the Dobouziez', he had condemned unhealthy arts, too heavy and too exclusive labor, work that brought only one side of the body into play, operations depending upon an unchangeable motion of the back or shoulder, the