House of All Nations (21 page)

He often lived with the Bertillons, for all of whom he had an unquestioning affection; he knew all their friends and lived in a happy world in which the pearl necklace of Mamie, the divorce of Tony and Aline, Poppo's racing car, Pedrillo's peccadilloes, William's salt soup, Claire-Josèphe's new dress from Worth, Anita and Johnny's new maid, what Tommy said to the attaché at the Mexican embassy, and the new thoroughbred of Jean de Guipatin were the chief characters, and creatures of absorbing interest. He had forgotten how he made his money and had returned (because it was simpler and made Jules seem even more charming) to the innocent credo of a schoolboy of fourteen.

Plowman had just come back from London. He had brought eight ounces of best smoking mixture from Fortnum & Mason for Dr. Jacques Carrière, Pedro's guitar with the new string attached, a cribbage board for an old English crony (married in France) of ‘Old' Berthellot, the head accountant, an iodine locket for his housekeeper, and the English style of Kruschen salts for François Vallat; he had an old tattered Charing-Cross-Road copy of
Sweeney Todd
for William Bertillon whose imagination had been fired by a chance reference to the demon barber, a pound of Ceylon tea (gold-label) for Mrs. Haller, one of the clients of the bank, and a pair of socks, two and six, very cheap, English style, for Mr. Haller. Nevertheless, he felt shamefaced because he had failed to get a real (cheap) Dunhill pipe for Jacques Manray, who coveted this particularly. On his way to get some pearls restrung for Lady Bobbie, a young acquaintance of his in London, he had picked up Claire-Josèphe to take her to the pictures and to lunch and here they were at the bank, where Claire-Josèphe had to cash a check.

‘Oh, Jules,' cried Claire-Josèphe in her fashionable babble, ‘the most awful thing happened to Richard on his trip to London. Tell him, Richard.'

‘Yes, I was quite cut up,' said Richard. ‘I lost eight pounds, one five-pound note and three ones in the Burlington Arcade. I am perfectly sure someone picked my pocket. Such a thing has never happened to me before, I've never lost money. It's most upsetting, I assure you. It's not so much the money—although, you know—but it's the idea: I have eight pounds in my pocket and someone can come along and slip it out without my feeling it. And not in a crowd. What was I doing. Was I standing gaping, without knowing it? It makes me feel so—bad: I couldn't sleep all night. That's what made me come home earlier: I felt London had turned on me.'

‘You can leave the smoking mixture here,' said Jules. ‘Jacques Carrière rang up to say he would be in. He's interested in the fate of sterling. What did you hear, Richard?'

‘They'll never go off: it would mean the crash of the sterling area.'

‘Any big selling?'

‘Yes, but mostly foreigners. Frenchmen, Dutch. They say.'

‘The French should know: it's all a question of whether they continue to withdraw their funds from London. If they're selling.'

‘We'll squeeze them, my boy: the old game. Why, we couldn't afford to go off gold: London is the world center of foreign deposits. Our reputation is that we're solid, we don't waver when the rest of the world is a jelly. It would ruin our banking business. We couldn't afford to do it, dear Jules. Don't you bet on it. Don't listen to the hotheaded plungers here: Paris is so feverish compared with London. You know it's a tangible difference: in London everything is silence, calm, quiet: we're well balanced. You ought to go to London, whenever you think of selling, Jules, dear boy, and you'd think twice about it.'

‘H'm: I often prefer to be rash. You make more money that way … However—well, look who's here! Frank ‘Rhodes' Durban!'

Richard Plowman's lifelong crony, bronzed, broad, and sixty, with a breezy expression and waterlogged gait, hove in sight. He had been tubercular at twenty, gone out to South Africa, and made a couple of million sterling out there.

‘Hello, Jules! Don't believe him: he's a Little Englander, although he was born in a consulate. She will go off and it won't be her ruin: she'll stagger and right herself and you'll see a regular wave of prosperity carry her homewards about 1933 to '34 and onwards to 1938. Then we'll see what we shall see.'

‘Rhodesia makes everyone a pathological optimist,' said old Richard with regret. ‘He only comes to London to say the opposite of everyone in the club.'

The two old fellows presently trotted out.

‘You haven't got too much money in this bank, Dick, have you?'

‘Yes: quite a bit. Why?'

‘It's too nice. Where's the bill department? Where's the loan department? Where's the business done? I don't see any banking.'

‘It's a rich man's club: a gambling, deposit, and tax-evasion bank, don't you see? It's just the rich man's section of a big bank taken out, polished, and set rolling on its own wheels. Very good idea. Jules always had such chic ideas.'

‘Don't believe in it,' said ‘Rhodes' Durban stoutly. ‘Take your money out: I don't care if he's your own son. I like to see property, freights, loads of grain, sugar, leather, dates, asphalt, something, behind a bank. I don't see it here. That's wrong.'

‘No. Now I'll explain it to you: this is very comparable with another idea of Jules's that he had last night and is going to start straight away. He's going to get a big ocean-going yacht like Virginie Henriot's. He'll institute a gold-bar, bond, and stock transport between say Cherbourg and New York, or say Bordeaux and Buenos Aires. This yacht will only carry such goods required for quick delivery. No waiting for mail boats, customs, taking on passengers, all that. And it can sail any time: no waiting for schedule. Everyone will take advantage of the special precious-stuffs yacht.'

‘Yes? I should like to be the captain. You mean to say people are going to put their fortunes on a private yacht—'

‘A company will be formed: nothing of that sort.'

‘Oh, a company will be formed. That will be very different, of course!'

‘You're used to those bluff South African types,' scolded Richard Plowman. ‘You don't understand a delicate intelligence, a man who instinctively thinks in finance and precious goods; his grandfather was in the diamond trade. It's in the blood. He belongs to one of these old European families in whose veins it is not so much blood as some rare old liqueur that runs.'

‘You're crazy, Dick: I pity you. If you put a ring in your own nose you can't expect people to resist the temptation. But I'd hate to see you lose a lot of money: you couldn't stand it as well as you think.'

‘I'm a simple man, Rhodes: I have the tastes of a baby. No one can get at me. I'm safe.'

‘When we have everything naturally we desire nothing—therefore we have simple tastes. That's no riddle. You'll get a surprise one day. You've got to the stage of playing with dolls: one doll is Claire-Josèphe and one is Jules. Take my advice and go back into banking yourself. You've forgotten what the human race looks like.'

* * *

Scene Seventeen: In Praise of Gold

T
he word ‘gold' spoken by those who have seen it, had it, lived with it, has undertones of sensual revel and superstitious awe and overtones of command and superhuman strength that excite the greatest hostility and indignation in those who have not got it, have never seen it, or have not lived with its beautiful invisible presence—invisible, because it is always socked away. This joyful sensuality comes not only from its brightness, softness, purity, rarity, great specific gravity, nor from the designs, head, crowns, olive branches, men with staves, lions, unicorns, escutcheons, arms, and legends printed on it, nor from its finely milled edge in coins, nor wholly from the worshipful value of a very small bar of it, nor from the soft jingling it makes in a leather bag, nor from the way, like a little sun it can bring light on to the face of everyone who regards, and reverence, as Ra to his admirers: it comes from all these things, but also from a lifelong association of the word ‘gold' with the idea ultimate wealth, perennial ease, absolute security. It is an absolute and in its presence the anxious heart breathes sweetly and the blood laughs and the toiling brain sheds its dew of agony. Sweet gold! It has in it everything that man desires in a wife, that cannot, precisely, be purchased with gold. Beautiful gold! It is cosmetic: it makes a girl handsome and marriageable in a moment. Virgin gold! There may be suspicions and shades of jealousy clinging to those whose all is paper and participations, but there is a sun-colored cloak ‘Sir-Galahad' model for those who own gold. Fetish gold! But that's an old one: we know what that means: it means ‘I've none.'

Armand Brossier lived in the state of mind of a pure and pious choirboy who has the happiness to serve in a cathedral. He it was who took up the gold coins deposited each day, who doled them out to clients who were hoarders, who counted them and saw with religious ecstasy the number of little chamois bags increasing, and with foreboding their decrease, as rumor came and went. Jules had taken him into the bank and found him tubercular. Armand had got into the war in its last year, been gassed, had pneumonia, and come back in health completely ruined. Jules found his coughing ghastly in the echoing white walls of the hollow pearl that his bank was, and had sent him off to Chamonix and the hills behind Nice to cure him. For him, he had opened a little office in Juan-les-Pins—and made money by it. When Armand seemed cured, he brought him back to Paris, gave him the key and combination of the safe, and left his duties at that. The relations between Armand Brossier and Jules were those between Abelard and the most impressionable of his students. Armand slept soft and dreamed sweetly and had halcyon days. When he wanted to marry he went and told Jules and Jules raised his salary one thousand francs a month, because he was always rash and he believed in treating well the sprite of the combination.

The foregoing will explain (to those who don't know) one of the reasons, apart from reasons of speculation, why the question of ‘going off gold' fretted so many nations, so many individuals, for so many days: why some took it as a world-without-end calamity and some as an unnatural blessing. In the old days those that sought the absolute tried to make gold: our own conception is not very different.

* * *

Scene Eighteen: The Bet

I
don't know where you get your information, Carrière,' said Michel Alphendéry, ‘and you may be right, but the pound sterling has stood up so well to attacks from outside and in that I wouldn't bet on its going off now: that's all. Nor would I bet on its staying on. I like to bet on fixed horse races. But here you simply can't know what's going on behind the scenes. Perhaps you do.' He looked with meaning at Carrière who was the crony of most of the young Radical-Center deputies. He got up, dusted his knees, showed some intention of going back to his room.

Jules was leaning back in his chair looking at the shade-somber olive walls of his room that never saw the sunlight, staring at the crystal luster, looking at them all rather impatiently, smiling and rocking in his chair.

Carrière stood in the center of the room, one foot forward like an orator, balancing on the other. His hand was stuck in his jacket. His powerful small head thrust back brought into prominence his forehead, Roman nose, broad chest, and early
embonpoint
: it also emphasized the roll of fat at the nape of the neck. His left hand was on his hips, his feet were in shiny handmade shoes. He was tall, with solid bones, had a late-Roman look of arrogance, self-confidence based on boundless vice, astuteness, and corrupt waywardness.

His shining blond poll turned from one to the other. Will Bertillon stood, tall, plump and fair also, against one of the bookcases, an athletic figure grown too fat, too young, a slight graying of a fresh complexion due to too many indoor hours and soft sitting. He rang his own little peal of bells, in a faraway meditative tone: this he did by gently sifting the coins in his pockets, gathering them all up again and once more rhythmically letting them chink down. He chuckled now.

‘When even Michel thinks they won't go off, I'll trust the British to pull a fast one. They'll go off overnight some week end, you'll see. Some day we're not expecting it. How are they to make money otherwise? And there'll be a tight squeeze first to shake out the shorts. You can't outguess the other chap's game. You know—who—is going to give us the information when he gets it from Grosshändler of the International Quayside Corporation. If
he
knows it. Who is really on the inside of the inside of the inside? How can you guess the other chap's game. I don't know a quarter of what Alphendéry really thinks and yet he spends his whole life explaining what he thinks. And you mean to say we're going to scrape out the inside of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's brainpan? Let's keep out of all Crime Club guessing competition: they know the answer and you get a prize if you deduce the murderer from the facts on page 143. That's where we stand with sterling … It's bankrupt they are? And is that a reason for going bankrupt? Bankruptcy is nowadays the normal method of doing business with your creditors—why, if they're really bankrupt, they can blackmail the world with—What are you going to do if the sterling area goes off gold? What are you going to do if there's a panic in Lombard Street? Are you going to put your money in America! With every bank shutting its doors? Are you going to invest in China? In France, which is going to be losing her man power and money like water in about three years from now … You make me laugh: bankrupt! They don't worry.'

Carrière swung round, pointed the finger at him,

‘Bertillon, you'll never make money with that philosophy: you can secrete, but never produce, a male hedgehog. To make money you've got to outguess even the crooked roulette wheel.'