"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

painful performance, something he did not want to do. All physical acts
were to him dull but necessary parts of his training for a vague and
glorious future that was to come to him some day in a brighter and more
beautiful land that lay in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as
the East. "If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like
all of the people about here," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man
who had bred him and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along
Main Street or sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was
disgusted with him and had come to share the opinion the station master's
wife had always held concerning the people of the Missouri village.
"They're a lot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a thousand times,
and Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might
not also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.

The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any of
the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh was to
know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not smart was to
live among smart energetic men and women and be called a big man by them
without in the least understanding what they were talking about.

Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern origin.
Living originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by
slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor. In the
South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their own and being
unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live without labor. For
the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill country of Kentucky
and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive to be thought worth
cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of the valleys and plains.
Their food was meager and of an enervating sameness and their bodies
degenerate. Children grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished
plants. Vague indefinite hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves
over to dreams. The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness
of their position in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started
among them and they killed each other to express their hatred of life.
When, in the years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north
along the rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in
Eastern Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy
in making the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way
of life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few of
them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois or Iowa
or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or Arkansas. In
Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the life about them and
with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke. They have tempered the
quality of the peoples of those regions, made them perhaps less harshly
energetic than their forefathers, the pioneers. In many of the Missouri and
Arkansas river towns they have changed but little. A visitor to these parts
may see them there to-day, long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away
and awakening out of their stupor only at long intervals and at the call of