Читать книгу Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis - Страница 17

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He had fallen into rather a rigid routine. Most days, between office and home, he walked to the Union Club in winter, drove to the golf course in summer. But tonight he was restless. He could not endure the fustiness of the old boys at the club. His chauffeur would be waiting there, but on his way to the club Sam stopped, with a vague notion of tasting foreignness, at a cheap German restaurant.

It was dark, quiet, free of the bouncing grandeur of Kynances. At a greasy oilcloth-covered table he sat sipping coffee and nibbling at sugar-crusted coffee-cake.

“Why should I wear myself out making more money for myself—no, for Kynance! He will like hell take my caravans away from me!”

He dreamed of a very masterwork of caravans: a tiny kitchen with electric stove, electric refrigerator; a tiny toilet with showerbath; a living-room which should become a bedroom by night—a living-room with a radio, a real writing desk; and on one side of the caravan, or at the back, a folding verandah. He could see his caravanners dining on the verandah in a forest fifty miles from any house.

“Kind of a shame to have ’em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, that’s just sentimentality,” he assured himself. “Let’s see. We ought to make that up——” He was figuring on a menu. “We ought to produce those in quantities for seventeen hundred dollars, and our selling-point will be the saving in hotel bills. Like to camp in one myself! I will not let Kynance have my ideas! He’d turn the caravans out, flimsy and uncomfortable, for eleven hundred, and all he’d think about would be how many we could slam on the market. Kynance! Lord, to take his orders, to stand his back-slapping, at fifty! No!”

The German restaurant-keeper said, as one content with all seasons and events, “Pretty bad snow tonight.”

“Yes.”

And to himself: “There’s a fellow who isn’t worrying about Doing Big Things. And work isn’t his religion. His religion is roast goose, which has some sense to it. Yes, let’s go, Fran! Then come back and play with the caravan.... Or say, for an elaborate rig, why not two caravans, one with kitchen and toilet and stores, other with living-bedroom, and pitch ’em back to back, with a kind of train-vestibule door, and have a real palace for four people? ... I would like to see Monte Carlo. Must be like a comic opera.”