"Шервуд Андерсен. Сын Винди МакФерсон (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old soldier!--to
beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"

"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
her long face the only sign that she had heard.

Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle of
the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale silent
mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring at him,
and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the house. "You
don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand the heart of a
soldier."

In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on the
evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
injustice of it.

The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to bluster and boast
upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
believing eyes.