"Шервуд Андерсен. Триумф яйца (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

is a road turns off to a little rummy-looking farm house set in a yard.

That night after the race I went along that road because I had seen
Jerry and some other men go that way in an automobile. I didn't expect
to find them. I walked for a ways and then sat down by a fence to
think. It was the direction they went in. I wanted to be as near Jerry
as I could. I felt close to him. Pretty soon I went up the side road--I
don't know why--and came to the rummy farm house. I was just lonesome
to see Jerry, like wanting to see your father at night when you are a
young kid. Just then an automobile came along and turned in. Jerry was
in it and Henry Rieback's father, and Arthur Bedford from home, and
Dave Williams and two other men I didn't know. They got out of the car
and went into the house, all but Henry Rieback's father who quarreled
with them and said he wouldn't go. It was only about nine o'clock, but
they were all drunk and the rummy looking farm house was a place for
bad women to stay in. That's what it was. I crept up along a fence and
looked through a window and saw.

It's what give me the fantods. I can't make it out. The women in the
house were all ugly mean-looking women, not nice to look at or be near.
They were homely too, except one who was tall and looked a little like
the gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, but with a hard ugly
mouth. She had red hair. I saw everything plain. I got up by an old
rose bush by an open window and looked. The women had on loose dresses
and sat around in chairs. The men came in and some sat on the women's
laps. The place smelled rotten and there was rotten talk, the kind a
kid hears around a livery stable in a town like Beckersville in the
winter but don't ever expect to hear talked when there are women
around. It was rotten. A nigger wouldn't go into such a place.

I looked at Jerry Tillford. I've told you how I had been feeling about
him on account of his knowing what was going on inside of Sunstreak in
the minute before he went to the post for the race in which he made a
world's record.

Jerry bragged in that bad woman house as I know Sunstreak wouldn't
never have bragged. He said that he made that horse, that it was him
that won the race and made the record. He lied and bragged like a fool.
I never heard such silly talk.

And then, what do you suppose he did! He looked at the woman in there,
the one that was lean and hard-mouthed and looked a little like the
gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, and his eyes began to
shine just as they did when he looked at me and at Sunstreak in the
paddocks at the track in the afternoon. I stood there by the window--
gee!--but I wished I hadn't gone away from the tracks, but had stayed
with the boys and the niggers and the horses. The tall rotten looking
woman was between us just as Sunstreak was in the paddocks in the
afternoon.