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

him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river and the woods. He lay
on his belly and gazed down over the river out of sleep-heavy eyes into
hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed like visions through his mind.
He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed and vaporous. For hours the half
dead, half alive state into which he had got, persisted. He did not sleep
but lay in a land between sleeping and waking. Pictures formed in his
mind. The clouds that floated in the sky above the river took on strange,
grotesque shapes. They began to move. One of the clouds separated itself
from the others. It moved swiftly away into the dim distance and then
returned. It became a half human thing and seemed to be marshaling the
other clouds. Under its influence they became agitated and moved restlessly
about. Out of the body of the most active of the clouds long vaporous arms
were extended. They pulled and hauled at the other clouds making them also
restless and agitated.

Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on the cliff above the river that
night in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying in the
woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him there returned
with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in the wet grass,
closed his eyes. His body became warm.

Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the sky to join
the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky he thought he
looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills and forests. He had
no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth, but was torn away
from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in the sky above the
earth he saw the great river going majestically along. For a time it was
quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he was a boy down below
lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in boats and could hear
their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he looked abroad beyond the
wide expanse of the river and saw fields and towns. They were all hushed
and still. An air of waiting hung over them. And then the river was whipped
into action by some strange unknown force, something that had come out of a
distant place, out of the place to which the cloud had gone and from which
it had returned to stir and agitate the other clouds.

The river now went tearing along. It overflowed its banks and swept over
the land, uprooting trees and forests and towns. The white faces of drowned
men and children, borne along by the flood, looked up into the mind's eye
of the man Hugh, who, in the moment of his setting out into the definite
world of struggle and defeat, had let himself slip back into the vaporous
dreams of his boyhood.

As he lay in the wet grass in the darkness on the cliff Hugh tried to force
his way back to consciousness, but for a long time was unsuccessful. He
rolled and writhed about and his lips muttered words. It was useless. His
mind also was swept away. The clouds of which he felt himself a part flew
across the face of the sky. They blotted out the sun from the earth, and
darkness descended on the land, on the troubled towns, on the hills that
were torn open, on the forests that were destroyed, on the peace and quiet