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

hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie
along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like
two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and
jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing
as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door
ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go
along the street from store to store telling the tale of the
christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details
of the story.

It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one
of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks
and in the gutters of Main Street--black snow, sordid with the
gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the
bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling
along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they
carried dinner pails.

The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great
hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie,
Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and
looked after him as with the loaf of bread under his arm he hurried
along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still
enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his
nearness to life in the mining town. "Did not Christ himself laugh,
eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, as he waddled
through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the
two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-
shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was
the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole
between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand
forth among his fellows.

In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it
is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast
disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in
route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent
of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of
them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or
Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of
the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of
our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of
our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing
step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own
individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly