Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/48

20 climbed upon a chair, and surveyed the suburb.

Low, red, suburban houses huddled together in compact blocks. The growing city, having broken through its girdling ramparts, had designs upon the neighboring radish beds. Streets had already been planned, running in a straight line through the harvests. Pavements bordered fields exploited until the last moment by the expropriated peasant. In the midst of harvests there emerged, at the top of a stake, like a scarecrow, signs bearing this phrase: "Building Plots." And, veritable scouts, sentinels sent in advance by the army of urban construction, saloons took the corners of the new streets, and from the height of their many-storied, ordinary facades, new, but already of a sordid aspect, surveyed the stubble, cut short and gathered in and seeming to implore the clemency of the invaders. There is nothing as suggestive as the meeting of the country and the city. They riot in a real combat of outposts.

The plethoric, unnatural, shy appearance of the landscape was darkened by the embankments of the fortifications: crenelated doors, sombre as tunnels, crushed under platforms; walls pierced by loopholes; barracks from which plaintive bugles replied to the factory clock.

Three windmills, straggling in the fields, turned in full flight, playing their last stake while waiting to share the lot of a fourth, whose stone walls rose pitiably above the scaffolding against which was rising a tenement of workingmen's hovels, and whose wings the besiegers, with the customary behaviour of the rabble, had cut away like drunken bird-catchers.

Laurent sympathized with the poor dismantled mill without coming to detest the population of the little