Читать книгу The Complete Clayhanger Family Novels (Clayhanger + Hilda Lessways + These Twain + The Roll Call) - Arnold Bennett - Страница 191

And at the same time he was extremely sad, only less sad than his father. When he allowed his thoughts to rest for an instant on his father he was so moved that he could almost have burst into a sob—just one terrific sob. And he would say in his mind, “What a damned shame! What a damned shame!” Meaning that destiny had behaved ignobly to his father, after all. Destiny had no right to deal with a man so faithlessly. Destiny should do either one thing or the other. It seemed to him that he was leading his father by a string to his humiliation. And he was ashamed: ashamed of his own dominance and of his father’s craven submissiveness. Twice they were stopped by hearty and curious burgesses, and at each encounter Edwin, far more than Darius, was anxious to pretend that the harsh hand of Darius still firmly held the sceptre.

When they entered the shining mahogany interior of the richest Bank in the Five Towns, hushed save for a discreet shovelling of coins, Edwin waited for his father to speak, and Darius said not a word, but stood glumly quiescent, like a victim in a halter. The little wiry dancing cashier looked; every clerk in the place looked; from behind the third counter, in the far recesses of the Bank, clerks looked over their ledgers; and they all looked in the same annoying way, as at a victim in a halter; in their glance was all the pitiful gloating baseness of human nature, mingled with a little of its compassion.

Everybody of course knew that ‘something had happened’ to the successful steam-printer.

“Can we see Mr Lovatt?” Edwin demanded curtly. He was abashed and he was resentful.

The cashier jumped on all his springs into a sudden activity of deference.

Presently the manager emerged from the glazed door of his room, pulling his long whiskers.

“Oh, Mr Lovatt,” Edwin began nervously. “Father’s just come along—”

They were swallowed up into the manager’s parlour. It might have been a court of justice, or a dentist’s surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his abdication—anything but the thing it was. Happily Mr Lovatt had a manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all occasions. So that Edwin was not distressed either by the deficiencies of amateur acting or by the exhibition of another’s self-conscious awkwardness. Nevertheless when his father took the pen to write he was obliged to look studiously at the window and inaudibly hum an air. Had he not done so, that threatening sob might have burst its way out of him.