This story reminded me a lot about Kane and Abel by the same author. While in Kane and Abel we have a hotelier bearing animosity against a banker. In The Fourth Estate we have two communications moguls fighting in business with each other.
True to form, this type of male aggression seemed to play out until the death of one party. In the "war" between Kane and Abel, only the banker's death ended the ill feelings. But in the territorial war between Armstrong and Townsend, it ended with Armstrong's suicide. Both were willing to gamble, to take great risk for tremendous gain.
The closest in life I have come to so far in life to this type of animosity is the disagreement between two Chinese men. One man was educated by the British and he was big on keeping his promise. He was also very adamant that any gentleman should not go back on his word. The other man was related to the first by marriage. The first man was poor while the second was rich. Under a certain set of circumstances, the rich man promised the poor man's wife something. But by the time the rich man realized what the promise implicated in terms of dollars and cents, he changed his mind.
The poor man held the rich man by the promise that came out of the latter's mouth. As long as the latter refused to keep to his verbal promise, the former refused to talk to nor acknowledge the former. This became difficult when there were family occasions, if A turned up, B would not be there. Whereas if B turned up, A would walk off. Now that the poor man passed away, the stand off ended.
No comments:
Post a Comment