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

the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight. They went in sullen silence, the girls to limp slowly along
dropping the plants out of baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to
crawl after them and set the plants. In the half darkness the little group
of humans went slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to
a wagon and brought the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went
here and there swearing and protesting against every delay in the work.
When his wife, a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work
in the house, he made her come also to the fields. "Come, come," he said,
sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several
thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. "Now is
our chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must get in a big crop. If
we do not work hard now we'll starve." When in the field his sons found
themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood up to stretch
their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's edge and swore.
"Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!" he shouted. "Keep
at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks it'll be too late for
planting and then you can rest. Now every plant we set will help to save us
from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling around."

In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots
of the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending to
the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away into
the darkness. "I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."