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

and ate. When the soldiers came to town she walked along the street
jeering at them. "Pretty boys! Scabs! Dudes! Dry-goods clerks!" she
called after them as she walked by the tails of their horses. A young
man with glasses on his nose, who was mounted on a grey horse turned
and called to his comrades, "Let her alone--it's old Mother Misery
herself."

When the tall red-haired boy looked at the workers and at the old
woman who followed the soldiers he did not sympathise with them. He
hated them. In a way he sympathised with the soldiers. His blood was
stirred by the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought
there was order and decency in the rank of uniformed men moving
silently and quickly along and he half wished they would destroy the
town. When the strikers made a wreck of the garden of the Italian he
was deeply touched and walked up and down in the room before his
mother, proclaiming himself. "I would have killed them had it been my
garden," he said. "I would not have left one of them alive." In his
heart he like Cracked McGregor nursed his hatred of the miners and of
the town. "The place is one to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't
like it here let him get up and leave." He remembered his father
working and saving for the farm in the valley. "They thought him
cracked but he knew more than they. They would not have dared touch a
garden he had planted."

In the heart of the miner's son strange half-formed thoughts began to
find lodgings. Remembering in his dreams at night the moving columns
of men in their uniforms he read new meaning into the scraps of
history picked up in the school and the movements of men in old
history began to have significance for him. On a summer afternoon as
he loitered before the town's hotel, beneath which was the saloon and
billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men
talking of the significance of men.

One of the men was an itinerant oculist who came to the mining town
once a month to fit and sell spectacles. When the oculist had sold
several pairs of spectacles he got drunk, sometimes staying drunk for
a week. When he was drunk he spoke French and Italian and sometimes
stood in the barroom before the miners, quoting the poems of Dante.
His clothes were greasy from long wear and he had a huge nose streaked
with red and purple veins. Because of his learning in the languages
and his quoting of poems the miners thought the oculist infinitely
wise. To them it seemed that one with such a mind must have almost
unearthly knowledge concerning the eyes and the fitting of glasses and
they wore with pride the cheap ill-fitting things he thrust upon them.

Occasionally, as though making a concession to his patrons, the
oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the
sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently
back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning "The
harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed." After the