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

myself holding her close. I will think that for an hour I was closer to
her than I have ever been to anyone else. Then I will think of the time
when I will be as close as that to my wife. She is still, you see, an
awakening woman. For a moment I will close my eyes and the quick,
shrewd, determined eyes of that other woman will look into mine. My
head will swim and then I will quickly open my eyes and see again the
dear woman with whom I have undertaken to live out my life. Then I will
sleep and when I awake in the morning it will be as it was that evening
when I walked out of my dark apartment after having had the most
notable experience of my life. What I mean to say, you understand is
that, for me, when I awake, the other woman will be utterly gone."




THE EGG


My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly
man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farm-hand for a
man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell,
Ohio. He had then a horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove
into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farm-
hands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben
Head's saloon--crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farm-hands.
Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o'clock father
drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for
the night and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life.
He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.

It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my
mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the following spring I
came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened to the two
people. They became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in
the world took possession of them.

It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a school-teacher
she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of
how Garfield, Lincoln, and other Americans rose from poverty to fame
and greatness and as I lay beside her--in the days of her lying-in--she
may have dreamed that I would some day rule men and cities. At any rate
she induced father to give up his place as a farm-hand, sell his horse
and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall
silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes. For herself she
wanted nothing. For father and myself she was incurably ambitious.

The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They
rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs's Road, eight miles from
Bidwell, and launched into chicken raising. I grew into boyhood on the
place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning