Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/110

86 unconscious balancers, mount up the high scaffoldings and risk the giddiness of lofty ascent. At times they remain masked by the foliage, then all on a sudden they emerge from behind the tall-grown trees, their active bodies standing out in dramatic silhouette against the neutral blue of the sky.

Why does his heart swell with indescribable nostalgia, when, after sunset, he sees them pass the rustic blue smock over their work-a-day clothes as daubed and besmeared as a painter's palette? It will be still worse the day after to-morrow when they will have finished; their harmonious activity, like an orchestra, was becoming an habitual pleasure to his eyes, and he foresees that he will miss them, these toilers, especially one, an alert, light-haired youth, who was better made, had finer curves than the others, and whose supple and statuesque movements of the hips, calves, and shoulders would have driven a sculptor to despair.

"Some of these masons' assistants will be withdrawn later from their decorative trade to serve in the barracks," Kehlmark reflects, when he heard the calls of the clarion, meant one day for them, die away in a quaking of leaves and a stirring of fragrant