erly against these matrons clad in percaline or plaid satin evening dresses.
In the promenade around the dancing floor goodhumored old sea-dogs, sprightly cabin-boys, fishermen smelling of sea- weed and fish-gall, sat at tables, tippling and making the women who straggled about drink out of their glasses, calling them and despotically drawing them down on their laps.
Sea-folk were meeting lightermen, the bosses of beurts and their cabin-boys, less sunburnt, less chapped, rosier, immature, their ears projecting and pierced with silver rings.
In the swirl of dust, of sweat and tobacco as acrid and as black as peat, the forms of the dancers darkened or emerged in fragments. Hats, caps, suroits or tarred zuidwesters, curly heads came to the surface of the heavy cloud.
By the aid of a gleam of light, when the entrance or the exit of a couple wafted a momentary draft through the hall, one could see blue jerseys as close-fitting as tights, oil-skins with large collars, bare, full-breasted bosoms, tight-fitting breeches, a herding of haunches and hips, a blowing about of short skirts, fishing boots, tight stockings showing through their light meshes the rose of a more or less firm thigh. It was a skirmish of heads close together; lips meeting avidly; eyes darting baiting gleams; sighs of languor, ticking laughs, embraces, insinuating movements of the knee, bursts of passion badly restrained …
On the morning after these wild nights, Paridael, greedy for air that could be breathed, hurried to meet at Doel his gang of comrades, the river-pirates.
Quarantine was held at Doel. The service-launch met all the boats coming up the Scheldt, the doctor
