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

hunger.

As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own people for
a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been father and
mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year he worked
constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When he awoke in the
morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fear indolence would
overcome him and he would not be able to arise at all. Getting out of bed
at once he dressed and went to the station. During the day there was not
much work to be done and he walked for hours up and down the station
platform. When he sat down he at once took up a book and put his mind to
work. When the pages of the book became indistinct before his eyes and he
felt within him the inclination to drift off into dreams, he again arose
and walked up and down the platform. Having accepted the New England
woman's opinion of his own people and not wanting to associate with them,
his life became utterly lonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.

Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never did become
active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish eagerness. The vague
thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him but that had been
indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds floating far away in a hazy
sky, began to grow definite. In the evening after his work was done and he
had locked the station for the night, he did not go to the town hotel where
he had taken a room and where he ate his meals, but wandered about town and
along the road that ran south beside the great mysterious river. A hundred
new and definite desires and hungers awoke in him. He began to want to talk
with people, to know men and most of all to know women, but the disgust for
his fellows in the town, engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's words and
most of all by the things in his nature that were like their natures, made
him draw back. When in the fall at the end of the year after the Shepards
had left and he began living alone, his father was killed in a senseless
quarrel with a drunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and
what seemed to him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went
early one morning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had
been his father's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave
him money to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the
railroad company telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his
place. On the afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he
bought himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down
alone on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train
that would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew that
he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people. He thought
he would go east and north. He remembered the long summer evenings in the
river town when the station master slept and his wife talked. The boy who
listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyes of Sarah Shepard fixed
on him, had not dared to do so. The woman had talked of a land dotted with
towns where the houses were all painted in bright colors, where young girls
dressed in white dresses went about in the evening, walking under trees
beside streets paved with bricks, where there was no dust or mud, where