Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/377

Rh drays, their dexterity, their watchfulness and the intelligence of their horses were such that the trucks passed each other and rubbed against each other without ever becoming tangled.

Laurent could not help admiring the strong horses and their magnificent drivers; he even stopped still in the middle of the road and would have been run over had not an imperative crack of the whip or a guttural onomatapoeia not warned him to watch out.

Drunken with the springtide, he splashed about with delight in the thick mud, the black and permanent sweat of a pavement constantly trampled down by the heavy rolling of traffic; he trespassed upon the railroad tracks; mooring-ropes caused him to stumble, bales thrown in flight from hand to hand like simple juggler's balls by Herculean jugglers, threatened to upset him, and the gang whose rhythmic, cadenced work he interfered with rated him in a patois as enormous and crusty as their bodies.

Nothing could alter, today, Laurent's good humor; he took pleasure in being hardly used by the world he preferred, enjoyed the extreme familiarity with which he was treated by these dockers, as robust as they were placid.

He lounged about the great Kattendyck basin. His heart beat more rapidly at the sight of comrades from the America, the Nation of which he himself had been a part, unloading grain. The sacks snatched by the hooks of the crane at the bottom of the hold were hoisted to the height of the masts and funnel, then the mighty lever, describing an horizontal quarter-circle, carried its load to a truck waiting on the quay.

Standing on the truck, bare-headed and bare-armed, a tall fellow, his loins girded like a wrestler, with a