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

had clouded his mind. He muttered as he walked along the road and
talked to himself like an old man.

The red-haired boy ran beside his father happily. He did not see the
smiles on the faces of the miners, who came down the hill and stopped
to look at the odd pair. The miners went on down the road to sit in
front of the stores on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory
of the hurrying McGregors. They had a remark they tossed about. "Nance
McGregor should not have looked at her man when she conceived," they
said.

Up the face of the hill climbed the McGregors. In the mind of the boy
a thousand questions wanted answering. Looking at the silent gloomy
face of his father, he choked back the questions rising in his throat,
saving them for the quiet hour with his mother when Cracked McGregor
was gone to the mine. He wanted to know of the boyhood of his father,
of the life in the mine, of the birds that flew overhead and why they
wheeled and flew in great ovals in the sky. He looked at the fallen
trees in the woods and wondered what made them fall and whether the
others would presently fall in their turn.

Over the hill went the silent pair and through the pinewood to an
eminence half way down the farther side. When the boy saw the valley
lying so green and broad and fruitful at their feet he thought it the
most wonderful sight in the world. He was not surprised that his
father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground he opened and
closed his eyes, his soul stirred by the beauty of the scene that lay
before them.

On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
droning song.

On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of