Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/49

Rh streets that hugged it, hard-hitters and habitual vagabonds, heroes of many a sinister adventure, a tormenting race which the police did not always dare to grapple with in its own haunts. These "millers of the stone mill" were among the most sturdy ruffians of the city scum. The prowlers on the docks and the fresh water sharks, better known under the name of "runners" came chiefly from these waters.

But even aside from this gang of irregulars and criminals, whom Laurent came in time to know at closer range, the rest of this half-urban, half-rural population, a hard-working and tractable people, sufficed to invite and preoccupy the speculative child. Besides, the millers inevitably gave the neighborhood its color; they sprinkled with a vulgar and spicy leaven these fugitives from the villages, farm laborers turned masons and dockers, or, reciprocally, artisans turned market-gardeners, and work girls become dairy maids. By scratching the bully, one could find the cowherd; the butcher's boy had been a herdsman. Strange mongrels, sullen and fanatical as in a village, cynics and fault finders as in the city, at once surly and unreserved, truculent and lustful, fundamentally believers and superficially blasphemers, awkward and sharp-witted, patriotic, chauvinistic, their hybrid and badly defined character, their tawny, muscled and sanguine complexion endeared them, perhaps from that time forth, to the kindred barbarian, the vibrant and complex brute that was Paridael.

For a long time these affinities smouldered, vague, instinctive, latent within him.

Standing upon his chair, the view of the far lying suburb beneath him, he saturated himself in his homesickness and tore himself away from his morbid