OU_214051 UNIVERSA - Osmania University

A CRIME IN HOLLAND 173
" I didn't put it quite like that.... Listen ..."
But Maigret was already at the door. Now that his back was
turned, he allowed his features to relax from the gravity he had
assumed during the last part of the conversation. If he didn't actually
laugh, he certainly went out beaming.
The quay outside was bathed in sunshine, gentle warmth, and
peacefulness. The ironmonger was standing on his threshold. The
little Jew who kept the chandler's shop was counting his anchors
and marking them with signs in red paint.
The crane was still busy unloading coal. The schippers hoisted
their sails, not because they were putting to sea, but to dry the
canvas. Some white, some brown, they hung flapping lazily among
the crowd of masts.
Oosting smoked away at his short-stemmed clay pipe, sitting in
the stern-sheets of his boat. The Quay Rats Club went on with their
leisurely discussions.
But if one turned one's back on that scene to study the town,
one was faced by well-built, well-painted houses, windows beautifully
clean, curtains spotless, cactuses on every window-sill. What
was behind those windows?
Certainly they looked different now after the conversation
Maigret had had with Jean Duclos. The latter was no fool, for all
his pedantry. There were, indeed, two worlds here.
On the one hand, the salt-water world. Men in sabots, boats,
sails, the smell of tar .. . and schnapps.
On the other, the world of respectability. Houses that seemed
hermetically sealed, in whose rooms, with their well-polished
furniture and sombre wall-papers, they had for the last fortnight
been shaking their heads over a certain officer of the training-ship
who had had one or two glasses too many.
The same sky hung over them, a sky limpid as in a dream. But
that didn't make any difference. The two worlds were separated by
an almost impassable frontier.
Maigret had never seen Popinga, nor even his body, but it was
not difficult to picture him. A man with a jolly, rubicund face which
betrayed human appetites.
And he could see him standing, so to speak, astride of this
frontier, looking enviously at Oosting's boat—at the five-master
whose crew had been having a fling in every Soudi American port
—or at the Dutch liner home from China, where you could find
whole junk-loads of girls, pretty as hell....