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

will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built
the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall
live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one
shall go hungry."

The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses,
squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and
depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields,
but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in
droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness
of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. When the children
fight and scream in the houses and in the streets, the dark spaces between
the walls rumble with strange and appalling noises.

The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment
escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light comes
into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up stories
about them. "The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of days over
the tops of trees," he says and looks quickly about to see if he has been
heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he runs away with
a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other mice are repeating
his saying and getting some little comfort from it, he and the female mouse
find a warm dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that
mice continue to be born to dwell within the walls of the houses.

When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had been
whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship,
floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying in the
window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of the new
specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions at a bench
in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a strange dog that
has at last found a master. He paid no attention to Steve Hunter who, with
the air of one bearing in his breast some gigantic secret, came in and
went out at the door twenty times a day, but kept his eyes on the silent
Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings on sheets of paper. Allie tried
valiantly to follow the instructions given him and to understand what his
master was trying to do, and Hugh, finding himself unembarrassed by the
presence of the half-wit, sometimes spent hours trying to explain the
workings of some intricate part of the proposed machine. Hugh made each
part crudely out of great pieces of board and Allie reproduced the part in
miniature. Intelligence began to come into the eyes of the man who all his
life had whittled meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach
stones, and ships intended to float in bottles. Love and understanding
began a little to do for him what words could not have done. One day when a
part Hugh had fashioned would not work the half-wit himself made the model
of a part that worked perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine,
he was so happy that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing
with delight.

When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of