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

with its stir and bustle. For the first time he saw brick-paved streets and
streets lighted with lamps. Although it was nearly ten o'clock at night
when he arrived, people still walked about in the streets and many stores
were open.

The hotel where he had taken a room faced the railroad tracks and stood at
the corner of a brightly lighted street. When he had been shown to his room
Hugh sat for a half hour by an open window, and then as he could not sleep,
decided to go for a walk. For a time he walked in the streets where the
people stood about before the doors of the stores but, as his tall figure
attracted attention and he felt people staring at him, he went presently
into a side street.

In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed to
him miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and occasionally
passed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask his way. The street
climbed upward and after a time he got into open country and followed a
road that ran along a cliff overlooking the Mississippi River. The night
was clear and the sky brilliant with stars. In the open, away from the
multitude of houses, he no longer felt awkward and afraid, and went
cheerfully along. After a time he stopped and stood facing the river.
Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of trees at his back, the stars
seemed to have all gathered in the eastern sky. Below him the water of the
river reflected the stars. They seemed to be making a pathway for him into
the East.

The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the cliff
and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible but a
bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had made his way
to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a through passenger
train from the West passed over it and the lights of the train looked also
like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that seemed to fly like
flocks of birds out of the West into the East.

For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that it
was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad of the
excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his life felt
light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy in which sat a
young man and woman went along the road at his back, and after the voices
had died away silence came, broken only at long intervals during the hours
when he sat thinking of his future by the barking of a dog in some distant
house or the churning of the paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.

All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within
sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it
in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked
along the edge of the water; in the spring when the floods raged and the
water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and even parts of houses; in
the winter when the water looked deathly cold and ice floated past; and in
the fall when it was quiet and still and lovely, and seemed to have sucked