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

upon the problem of rooting the stupidity and dullness out of his mind
as her father had worked at the problem of rooting the stumps out of the
Michigan land. After the lesson for the day had been gone over and over
until Hugh was in a stupor of mental weariness, she put the books aside and
talked to him. With glowing fervor she made for him a picture of her own
youth and the people and places where she had lived. In the picture she
represented the New Englanders of the Michigan farming community as a
strong god-like race, always honest, always frugal, and always pushing
ahead. His own people she utterly condemned. She pitied him for the
blood in his veins. The boy had then and all his life certain physical
difficulties she could never understand. The blood did not flow freely
through his long body. His feet and hands were always cold and there was
for him an almost sensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly
still in the station yard and letting the hot sun beat down on him.

Sarah Shepard looked upon what she called Hugh's laziness as a thing of
the spirit. "You have got to get over it," she declared. "Look at your own
people--poor white trash--how lazy and shiftless they are. You can't be
like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless."

Swept along by the energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to overcome
his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He became convinced
that his own people were really of inferior stock, that they were to be
kept away from and not to be taken into account. During the first year
after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimes gave way to a desire
to return to his old lazy life with his father in the shack by the river.
People got off steamboats at the town and took the train to other towns
lying back from the river. He earned a little money by carrying trunks
filled with clothes or traveling men's samples up an incline from the
steamboat landing to the railroad station. Even at fourteen the strength in
his long gaunt body was so great that he could out-lift any man in town,
and he put one of the trunks on his shoulder and walked slowly and stolidly
away with it as a farm horse might have walked along a country road with a
boy of six perched on his back.

The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, and when
the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome and demanded that
the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spirit to refuse and
sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the station master nor his
wife was about he slipped away and went with his father to sit for a half
day with his back against the wall of the fishing shack, his soul at peace.
In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth his long legs. His small sleepy
eyes stared out over the river. A delicious feeling crept over him and for
the moment he thought of himself as completely happy and made up his mind
that he did not want to return again to the railroad station and to the
woman who was so determined to arouse him and make of him a man of her own
people.

Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on the
river bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he became