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

stores were gay bright places filled with beautiful wares that the people
had money to buy in abundance and where every one was alive and doing
things worth while and none was slothful and lazy. The boy who had now
become a man wanted to go to such a place. His work in the railroad station
had given him some idea of the geography of the country and, although he
could not have told whether the woman who had talked so enticingly had in
mind her childhood in New England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in
a general way that to reach the land and the people who were to show him
by their lives the better way to form his own life, he must go east. He
decided that the further east he went the more beautiful life would become,
and that he had better not try going too far in the beginning. "I'll go
into the northern part of Indiana or Ohio," he told himself. "There must be
beautiful towns in those places."

Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a part of
the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had given him
courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready for association with
men. He wanted to become acquainted with and be the friend of people whose
lives were beautifully lived and who were themselves beautiful and full of
significance. As he sat on the steps of the railroad station in the poor
little Missouri town with his bag beside him, and thought of all the things
he wanted to do in life, his mind became so eager and restless that some of
its restlessness was transmitted to his body. For perhaps the first time
in his life he arose without conscious effort and walked up and down the
station platform out of an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear
to wait until the train came and brought the man who was to take his place.
"Well, I'm going away, I'm going away to be a man among men," he said to
himself over and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he said it
unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high in anticipation
of the future he thought lay before him.




CHAPTER II


Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of the year
eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feet and four
inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was immensely strong but his
long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He secured a pass from the railroad
company that had employed him, and rode north along the river in the night
train until he came to a large town named Burlington in the State of Iowa.
There a bridge went over the river, and the railroad tracks joined those of
a trunk line and ran eastward toward Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his
journey on that night. Getting off the train he went to a nearby hotel and
took a room for the night.

It was a cool clear evening and Hugh was restless. The town of Burlington,
a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country, overwhelmed him