Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/52

24 Penalties rained like grapeshot upon the bewildered population. The least peccadillo entailed the discharge of the best and oldest hand. Saint-Fardier showed himself as abrupt with the foremen as with the most recent apprentice. One would have thought that if it occurred to him to measure his blows and distinguish between his victims, he would have preferred to smite the oldest employees, those whom no punishment had ever compassed, and those who had been with the factory since its foundation. The workers had named him "The Pasha," equally because of his despotism and his wantoness.

Dobouziez, who was as self-willed and as arbitrary as his partner, was less demonstrative and more closemouthed. He was the judge, the other, the executioner. Dobouziez, crafty and well-bred, gauged at his true value the illiterate and boorish partner whom a rich marriage had put into the possession of a fortune equal to his own. The mathematician was happy in making use of the man of strength, the man whose mouth was as scorching as that of a furnace, in extremities repellant to his own finely tempered nature.

It was generally known among the workers that the worst holocausts among the important employees usually coincided with a decline in the demand for the manufactured article or an increase in the price of raw materials.

Nevertheless, Dobouziez found it necessary to curb the zeal of his partner, who, urged on by a chronic affection of the liver, rioted in proscriptions worthy of a Marius.

A very shrewd business man, but none the less clever, Dobouziez, who permitted the exploitation of the proletariat, disapproved equally of Utopian schemes and