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

possession of her. In all her life there had never been anything warm
and close. She shivered although the night was warm and with a quick
girlish gesture passed her hand over her eyes.

The gesture was but an expression of a desire to brush away the cloud
of fear that had settled down upon her but it was misinterpreted by
Duke Yetter who now stood a little apart from the other men before the
livery barn. When he saw Mary's hand go up he smiled and turning
quickly to be sure he was unobserved began jerking his head and making
motions with his hand as a sign that he wished her to come down into
the street where he would have an opportunity to join her.

* * * * *

On the Sunday evening Mary, having walked through Upper Main, turned
into Wilmott, a street of workmens' houses. During that year the first
sign of the march of factories westward from Chicago into the prairie
towns had come to Huntersburg. A Chicago manufacturer of furniture had
built a plant in the sleepy little farming town, hoping thus to escape
the labor organizations that had begun to give him trouble in the city.
At the upper end of town, in Wilmott, Swift, Harrison and Chestnut
Streets and in cheap, badly-constructed frame houses, most of the
factory workers lived. On the warm summer evening they were gathered on
the porches at the front of the houses and a mob of children played in
the dusty streets. Red-faced men in white shirts and without collars
and coats slept in chairs or lay sprawled on strips of grass or on the
hard earth before the doors of the houses. The laborers' wives had
gathered in groups and stood gossiping by the fences that separated the
yards. Occasionally the voice of one of the women arose sharp and
distinct above the steady flow of voices that ran like a murmuring
river through the hot little streets.

In the roadway two children had got into a fight. A thick-shouldered
red-haired boy struck another boy who had a pale sharp-featured face, a
blow on the shoulder. Other children came running. The mother of the
red-haired boy brought the promised fight to an end. "Stop it Johnny, I
tell you to stop it. I'll break your neck if you don't," the woman
screamed.

The pale boy turned and walked away from his antagonist. As he went
slinking along the sidewalk past Mary Cochran his sharp little eyes,
burning with hatred, looked up at her.

Mary went quickly along. The strange new part of her native town with
the hubbub of life always stirring and asserting itself had a strong
fascination for her. There was something dark and resentful in her own
nature that made her feel at home in the crowded place where life
carried itself off darkly, with a blow and an oath. The habitual
silence of her father and the mystery concerning the unhappy married
life of her father and mother, that had affected the attitude toward