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

oil. From the first he served the new thing well and he soon found others
to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts,
servants of the new king, princes of the new faith, merchants all, a new
kind of rulers of men, defied the world-old law of class that puts the
merchant below the craftsman, and added to the confusion of men by taking
on the air of creators. They were merchants glorified and dealt in giant
things, in the lives of men and in mines, forests, oil and gas fields,
factories, and railroads.

And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and poetry
died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants
of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in other American towns,
whose fathers had walked together on moonlight nights along Turner's Pike
to talk of God, went away to technical schools. Their fathers had walked
and talked and thoughts had grown up in them. The impulse had reached back
to their father's fathers on moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland,
France, and Italy, and back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where
shepherds talked and serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught
the drift of the talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of
these men in the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From
all sides the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted
at them. Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices
arose. The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In
making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day
to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.

And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days
at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust
his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be accepted as
fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had come. During the
day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an express truck to the
open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on his back with a sheet
of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums. Farmers driving past on
Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him in the stores in town. "He's
a queer silent fellow," they said. "What do you suppose he's up to?"

Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in the
streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men
loafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quiet
streets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in the
lamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of his
own. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to make
inquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the station agent
was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and she lingered for
a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questions she asked with
monosyllables and she soon went away, but he was delighted and looked upon
the incident as an adventure. At night he dreamed of the school teacher and