"Шервуд Андерсен. Марширующие люди (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women
at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had thought
before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent to
their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it
crudely so that it hurt.

Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again
he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill.
Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.

Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky.
"One living up here and never going down there might think it rather
grand and big," he said. Again the hatred came. "They might think the
men who live down there knew something instead of being just a lot of
cattle."

A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole
into her eyes. "We get at one another," she said, "we can't let one
another alone. I wish we hadn't quarrelled. We might be friends if we
tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I've heard
others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here
would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was
than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say
that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay
listening."

The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. "I don't like
the women," he said, "but I liked you, seeing you standing in the
stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought
maybe you amounted to something. I don't know why you should be
bothered by what I think. I don't know why any woman should be
bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on
doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a lawyer."

He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood
crept over him.




CHAPTER III


The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and
cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east