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

He laughed bitterly. "And that's why I want to run and play," he said.
"I want to be a leaf blown by the wind over hills. I want to die and be
born again, and I am only a tree covered with vines and slowly dying. I
am, you see, weary and want to be made clean. I am an amateur venturing
timidly into lives," he concluded. "I am weary and want to be made
clean. I am covered by creeping crawling things."

* * * * *

A woman from Iowa came here to Chicago and took a room in a house on
the west-side. She was about twenty-seven years old and ostensibly she
came to the city to study advanced methods for teaching music.

A certain young man also lived in the west-side house. His room faced a
long hall on the second floor of the house and the one taken by the
woman was across the hall facing his room.

In regard to the young man--there is something very sweet in his
nature. He is a painter but I have often wished he would decide to
become a writer. He tells things with understanding and he does not
paint brilliantly.

And so the woman from Iowa lived in the west-side house and came home
from the city in the evening. She looked like a thousand other women
one sees in the streets every day. The only thing that at all made her
stand out among the women in the crowds was that she was a little lame.
Her right foot was slightly deformed and she walked with a limp. For
three months she lived in the house--where she was the only woman
except the landlady--and then a feeling in regard to her began to grow
up among the men of the house.

The men all said the same thing concerning her. When they met in the
hallway at the front of the house they stopped, laughed and whispered.
"She wants a lover," they said and winked. "She may not know it but a
lover is what she needs."

One knowing Chicago and Chicago men would think that an easy want to be
satisfied. I laughed when my friend--whose name is LeRoy--told me the
story, but he did not laugh. He shook his head. "It wasn't so easy," he
said. "There would be no story were the matter that simple."

LeRoy tried to explain. "Whenever a man approached her she became
alarmed," he said. Men kept smiling and speaking to her. They invited
her to dinner and to the theatre, but nothing would induce her to walk
in the streets with a man. She never went into the streets at night.
When a man stopped and tried to talk with her in the hallway she turned
her eyes to the floor and then ran into her room. Once a young drygoods
clerk who lived there induced her to sit with him on the steps before
the house.