Georges Eekhoud

“ Gina had just read in it something other than murderous fury, a more direct plea, an imminent danger ...
"Before I assure your happiness and that of Bergmans forever, be good to me just for one instant, Gina ... the instant that it takes to give a sister's kiss. Then I shall leave to accomplish my mission. And you shall never see me again ... Quick! the farewell kiss, my Regina ..."
His voice changed, became hoarse and threatening; his plea sounded false; he dragged her by force to him, twisting her wrists as he did it.
"Laurent! Stop! You're hurting me!..." ”

“ Laurent never saw them again. But, after that fatal adventure, each time he heard the hoarse cry of a crossing-keeper's horn or saw the black tank of a gasometer overhanging a surly suburban district, there rose before his eyes the two young people leaning against the crossing-gate; he, swarthy as a faun, clad in a reddish-brown smock, his brass horn hung over his shoulder by a red woolen band; she, blonde, rose, ready to swoon, and, with her white cap and apron, as appetizing as the cloth at a banquet. ”

“ Béjard took Gina to the piano and begged her to sing. Laurent went down into the garden, allured by the delicious evening-tide, the breeze from the Scheldt, the perfume of the thickets, the sensuous and heady silence that teased the cry of the crickets and dulled the oblique, velvety flight of the bats, terrified by the unwonted presence of the masters of this deserted country place. ”

“ Insurgent by instinct against all authority, ready to take the part of the feasters against the police, Laurent flew outside, and above the shoulders of the superintendent of police who had stopped at the sill of the door, above those of Béjard, of Athanasius and Gaston, he saw, to his consternation, Angéle and Cora crouching each one in a corner of the room and forcing themselves to disguise in the folds of the window-curtain the pagan simplicity of their toilette. ”

“ Without leaving his country, without ceasing to bathe in its sunshine and breath its atmosphere, Laurent experienced the deadly devotion, the voluptuous martyrdom of an exile. He saw and perceived the smallest objects of the land with a sensuous intensity known only by those who return after a long absence, or who are leaving forever; those who are resuscitated or who are dying. It is only on native shores that the three kingdoms of nature are adorned with this freshness, this youth, this eternal resurrection. ”

“ Whipped by this violent attack, as blinded as though she had dashed a bottle of vitriol in his face, Laurent did not even try to justify himself. Appearances overwhelmed him; the best thing he could do would be to take himself off at once. The arrival of Béjard might convert her slanderous hypothesis into a reality at any moment.
Laurent took to flight, not without stumbling many times, ready to fall.
Gina! His dearly beloved Gina! To think him capable of such deceit! Never could Laurent rise beyond it again. ”

“ To paint Antwerp, its life, its harbor, its river, its sailors, its dockers, its luxuriant women, its rosy and chubby children whom Rubens, in other days, had thought sufficiently plastic and appetizing to populate his heavens and Olympuses; to paint this human mob in its own ways, its costume and surroundings, with the most scrupulous and cherishing care for its special customs and morals, without neglecting any of the correlations which accentuate and characterize it ”

“ It mounted in a single jet, quickly, the upright stem of a vegetation, and at the tip of this white, cottony unending stem, there formed the immense bulbous mass of a red and black tulip blowing, like the fabulous aloe, in the crash of lightning; a still born flower shedding its petals in ominous fireworks.
At the second stroke of three, during the thousandth of a second in which this pyrotechnic flower had its life, Laurent, who was gazing at the petals, distinguished arms, legs, trunks, and entire human silhouettes, gesticulating horribly like disjointed puppets. ”

“ Laurent breathed freely, although he was both happy and heart-broken; almost happy in spite of himself and his remorse. But he was not yet at the end of his anguish.
Gina, the flirtatious and mischievous Gina, who seemed to have made so little of Bergmans' attentions, seemed most affected by his absence. Her regret and her worry became so apparent that finally a light broke upon Laurent.
"She lied to me; she loves him!" he said to himself. And the lacerating torture that this discovery caused him made him admit to himself his own desperate love for her. ”

“ Laurent's eyes rested with more satisfaction and even with a certain pleasure upon Regina, or Gina, the only child of the Dobouziez', a few years older than himself, a slender, nervous brunette with expressive black eyes, a mass of curly hair, and a flawlessly oval face. The nostrils of her aquiline nose were sensitive, her mouth was roguish and wilful, her chin marked by a delicious dimple, and the soft rose of her coloring had the delicate, dull transparence of a cameo. Never before had Laurent seen so exquisite a little girl. ”

“ Even the movements of the longshoremen seemed less superhuman, less hieratic. The workers, on the point of quitting work, surprised him by breathing like simple mortals, their arms crossed or hanging loosely at their sides, or wiping their foreheads with the back of their sleeves. Laurent found them as handsome this way, and more kindly. At the moment of going home, of bathing themselves in the intimacy of home life, they laughed, having become listless in advance, and a langor descended from their backs to their legs, and their embraces sought objects less rough and less inert. ”

“ Gina had been forced to put up with her husband's cynical confidences. The infamy of the private and public life of the people of her world had been revealed to her by this aspirant. And, suddenly, she had seen clearly through this society, so brilliant from the outside; she understood Bergmans' intransigeance, she loved him for it so deeply that she, the proud Gina, espoused the cause of this revolutionary, or, as her husband termed him, this king of the wastrels, in the very depth of her heart. ”

“ She will never belong to anyone!" "But Bergmans is your friend!" "I hate him!" "Murderer, Gina is dying!" "Rather than bring them together I shall kill them both!"
That Gina was dying was true. Watching her become thin, emaciated, sad, so feeble, so quiet and sweet, never laughing or teasing, indifferent to all distractions, Laurent was a hundred times upon the point of telling what he knew of Bergmans' feeling. His tongue burned like that of a mute whom one word will relieve, but whom pitiless nature prevents from pronouncing that word. ”

“ At times it was like the pantomime and the guttural noise of a deaf-mute on the point of speech. His impressions and his impulses congested him. At school he made but few friends. The other boys would have made him a laughing-stock had he not been able to make them keep their distance with his fists.
The premature death of his parents resulted not in disgusting him with life but in making him comprehend it in his own way, love it for other reasons, see it through other eyes, look askance at codes, morals and conventions. He became more and more taciturn. ”

“ And that is why, on this January morning, the bowels of The Gina—that big craft, once so rakish, but long since painted the uniform black of a poor man's coffin—should have been elastic to accommodate all the human flesh that was being stowed therein, all those pariahs for whom wily thaumaturges evoked, out of the leaden fogs of the Scheldt, the gleaming, distant Pactolus. ”

“ A gang of navvies at work, a crew of pavers, plump and bending over their toil, on the curb of a street, reminded him of companies of discus throwers exercising in the palaestra, and since his return from the banks of the Scheldt, he could imagine no bas-relief with a more perfect rhythm than that of the movement of a brigade of the Nations. On Sundays and Mondays Paridael danced, until break of day, in the dives of the quarters made dramatic by riots between soldiers and people, or in the musicos of the Quartier des Bateliers, where runners and sea- faring folk gathered. ”

“ The Pasha had always had the soul of a convict-warden or a slave-driver, and the ex-slave-dealer Béjard had found in him the implacable brute whom he required to plan and expedite his traffic in souls.
Had it not been for the intervention of his clerks, who tore him away from his aggressor, the miserable man would have been killed on the spot. Laurent had half strangled him, and in both of his clenched fists he clutched Saint-Fardier's pepper and salt whiskers. ”

“ The eldest of the boys, to whom Laurent had just spoken, was but sixteen years old, and Laurent learned from him that the majority of his companions had not yet reached that age.
In questioning them, Paridael took a hitherto unfelt interest in their welfare, felt there and then an imperious and almost piercing solicitude, the most intense, the most jealous that any human being had ever aroused in his veins, taxed his ingenuity to prolong the conversation in order to hold them back, there, near him, and delay their entrance into the factory from minute to minute. ”

“ Does no one do you any harm in there? Are you sure? That man, Béjard; doesn't he take pleasure in drawing blood from you? Are you not lending yourselves to his amusements; doesn't he burn you and mangle you, the tyrant? Don't deny it! I know him! Be careful!..."
They looked at each other and burst out laughing, not understanding anything of this reveller's divagations.
The presentiment of a hidden danger that menaced them worried Paridael cruelly, sorrowed, to employ the word of the sublime Saviour, his soul unto death. ”

“ And, by a strange anomaly, the prejudice of the bourgeoisie of Antwerp against the soldier blinded the common people, even those who intended serving or had served, and fathers whose sons were or were to become soldiers.
It was no longer a question of class hatred, but of a true incompatability of habits, of an historic hatred that Antwerpians imbibe, as if from a tradition inherent in the air they breathed, or the milk with which they were suckled.
In roadside inns, working women often refused to dance with soldiers. ”

“ However, at Siska's cries of joy, Vincent had run in, no less agreeably surprised than his wife. They took Laurent by the shoulders and pushed him into their little living room.
This retreat resembled a cabin with a vengeance. During the day a window as narrow as a porthole admitted a dull, filtered light as though it were submerged under water. Its industrious occupants solved anew each day the problem of making it hold the greatest possible number of people and objects. ”

“ It overhangs the city and towers above the country. The aerial and lacy belfry surpasses all its rivals, so high that one can now see nothing else. Antwerp is eclipsed by a bend in the river; the tower, like a proud lighthouse, marks the location of the powerful metropolis. And Laurent contemplated the tower of Notre Dame until it melted, slowly, into the far distance where the blue horizon paled. ”

“ Laurent broke through the mob of dockers, sailors and tearful women whom a common grief had brought together, a mob made even more tragic by the presence of many wretched looking families of emigrants, designated for the next sailing, perhaps marked for the next wreck! Lamentations and sobs arose at intervals above the black and suffocating silence.
Laurent succeeded in worming himself through the crowd as far as the counter in the office. ”

“ When they came under the shed, before walking down the gangplank of the boat, steaming up for departure, those at the head of the line halted and faced about, turning toward the tower of Antwerp, and putting the brasses to their lips, their flag hoisted high, they began, not without false notes, the supreme national song, the "Où pent on être mieux" of the Liégeois Grétry, the simple and gentle melody of which brought together, in the accents of the noblest language, Flamands and Walloons, sons of the same Belgium, differing in temperament, but not enemies, in spite of what politicians say. ”

“ When it was over and the garrison band, at the head of the torchlight procession, took up, as they began to march, the principal theme of the cantata, Laurent, tingling to his very marrow, his nerves coursing with an indefinable and contagious enthusiasm, momentarily beside himself, locked step with the soldiers and pushed on with the equally enthusiastic and excited mob in which bourgeois and workmen, entangled arm in arm, struck up in full voice the dithyrambic chant. ”

“ Ladies and girls in fresh, delicate summer gowns, gentlemen in elegant negligé, straw hat and white flannels. Not only was Laurent as well dressed as they, but even better dressed, and the Saint-Fardier boys, two prigs of eighteen and twenty, to whom Gina introduced him as a young savage reputed to be incorrigible, but in the process of being trained, looked askance, exchanging a smile of understanding with the young girl, which, at any other moment, would have quite taken the starch out of Laurent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beneath her proud beauty, which caressed his taste for fine lines, noble blood, well-modelled flesh, he divined a character more original and more interesting than those of the other heiresses. On her part Gina did not fail to save him one of her so greatly coveted dances. Bergmans' frank and pleasing expression, his inherent ease of manner, impressed this proud young girl who for the first time had met in him a young man worthy of her attention. Beyond the perfect fashion of their clothes, Gina had for a long time found nothing to appreciate in the Saint-Fardiers. ”

“ The deck had the look of a bivouac of tramps, of a gypsy encampment. In jostling these pariahs from every country, carrying heaven knows what special color and odor in their belongings, Laurent noticed that they were very lightly clad, and that already there were many whose teeth chattered and who were trembling with fever. One of Béjard's agents was passing among them, and to comfort them was telling that the cold would last but for a few days. Once past the gulf of Gascony, perpetual summer would begin. ”

“ A swarm of bad flies, of invisible insects seemed to simultaneously sting the whole licentious tribe, and then, the whole length of the river and the canals, under the warehouses, amidst the piles of merchandise, there were furious races, pillages like those of the guerilleros, formidable filibusters that excited the police and threw them into consternation.
If he did not pass the night in the open air, Laurent lay with criminals of all species, in the dives at Schelleke of Coude Tortu, of the Impasse de Glaive or of the Montague d'Or. Here he had to pay for his night's lodging in advance. ”