House of All Nations (23 page)

Alphendéry lowered his voice, looked around, ‘William; how much have you, honest to God, cut and dried, that you can lay your hands on? Gold bars, gold-dust, gold coins, notes, Liberty bonds,
bons du Trésor
, Treasury paper, War loans: are we liquid? Are we solid, that is?'

William wiped his mouth, flipped for the waiter. ‘I really don't know exactly how much, but there's an awful lot there, Michel! There's at least one million pounds in gold in London, there's a vault in Geneva with gold bars in it. Claire has put away about twelve million in
bons du Trésor
for the children, and Jules has a lot of the sort of stuff you could sell at a moment's notice without moving the market more than a quarter of a point. I've saved my salary: what do I want out of life? It's enough if I go home and hear my Chinese nightingale sing: Nightingale seed is what I want out of life!' He laughed fully, content. ‘Jules has a couple, perhaps more than that, of little companies incorporated in Luxemburg or some such place, darned if I know what he does with them. I think they snooze and do nothing. It's impossible to get an answer out of him, but I can't imagine that he hasn't got cash soaked away for hard times. In general—there's a whale of a lot of money in the place, Michel, and don't you lose sleep. Don't get nervous. You don't want to be like this Raccamond …'

Alphendéry opened his eyes wide. But all he said was, ‘I'm not curious, William: if you tell me it's so, it's so.'

‘What do you care? You're always with us: you'll be provided for.' Michel said casually, it seemed, ‘And the clients?'

‘Supposing we were eighty per cent solvent: that would be more than any other bank in the world. And we've got no widows or orphans.'

* * *

Scene Nineteen: No Retreat

T
he butler poured port out of a giraffe-necked crystal carafe. The Comtesse de Voigrand, a virile old woman of seventy, was a beveled, electric-lighted showcase of those salon virtues and porcelain graces that characterize the French woman from six to eighty-six and from the table in Maisons-Lafitte to the table in Passy. She smiled at Jules with that healthy worldliness and practiced friendship which brings out the best in all social souls. They formed a triangle of Louis XV chairs. The second was Jules Bertillon, very gay: the third, Mr. Armand Lalmant, former professor at the Sorbonne, now retired to be the Comtesse's librarian and personal savant-in-fetters.

Jules was always so pert that it took a thimbleful of liquor only to set him bubbling entirely; he declared, to the Comtesse's amusement, ‘Certainly, I understand the idea of the class war. There are those who know what they want and those who want it when they see the other fellows with it, but don't know how to get it themselves. We steal from the pigs: the pigs know they want truffles and we want truffles when we see the pigs with them. Money is truffles. Are we going to grub up their truffles for them? Porkers fish for truffles and then bring home the bacon; what a pig's life! First the Morgans see it, then the little spry fish like me, then the gangsters, then the manual workers, then the clerks, and it takes twenty-five years to get from the top to the bottom. It's the time lag that gives us our profit! … I like Marx, Lalmant. If the rich ones would follow Marx's idea and stick together in a class, they'd never lose a cent. Look at the Army: even when a chap lies and forges, it sticks by him …'

‘If there had been honor and loyalty among thieves, society would have wiped them out long ago,' said the Comtesse.

Jules ran on, ‘Just the same, as every imbecile will say some bright things in a lifetime, if he gossips enough, Marx, who was a sort of lunatic, had some bright ideas. No, the class war is a good idea. I suppose he really wasn't mad, just one of these—h'm—er—journalists.' He eyed the professor and smiled.

‘I'm not surprised,' said the librarian, a tall muscular, severe, gray man with an arid tone that made the tongue of his listeners swell, blacken, and cleave to the roof of the mouth. He smiled unpleasantly. ‘Nowadays even the richest is convinced that a revolution is coming—the day after he dies. And they don't mind.'

The Comtesse was becoming mellow. ‘Money is a hard master: it takes no excuses, it flies from a false economics.'

Dryly her secretary replied, ‘Comtesse, all this isn't romantic, it isn't due to the intelligence of money: these people see the revolution because it is here, as we are at war often before the outbreak of hostilities. But we are entering upon a new state of war: war without the paraphernalia of the old history books, war without costume, without notes, ultimatums, treaties, war in which peace is but a truce. So with revolution. Revolution has been with us since 1917 … 1919! … 1926 …' He laughed. ‘But it isn't only that! All rich men are haunted by a more personal fear—they are all persuaded that they will die in penury!'

‘I assure you, Mr. Bertillon,' said the Comtesse, with her ready laugh and energetic mien, ‘I am quite worried about it: formerly we had town and country houses. But now we all have
pieds-à-terre
in town and hideaways from the Reds in the country and all the uninhabited islands in the world are being dug up and planted with gold bars. Thank goodness, Scotland provides so many, and then there's the Aegean. Think of the treasure-island stories there will be for the ages to come. Happy children!' She turned the talk. ‘They say Jacques Carrière is becoming a Roman Catholic again after having been fearfully agnostic for years,' insinuated Loïse de Voigrand, with a twinkle.

Jules was a Catholic, of course, but never gave a thought to the Church except once a year at Easter, when he went as a matter of habit and because the whole world went. Lalmant explained. ‘In ages of disaster people turn from the Church, and it turns from the people: it becomes a chief's superstition and mummery again. They are all second-rate men to lick the shoes of the bosses when they could serve the people! Can a man of wit eat his bread in an atmosphere dried with errors, forgeries, stupidities, lies, and mountebankery? As for the people—the physics laboratory provides wilder joys in the matter of transubstantiation, the dissection table, better anatomies!'

The Comtesse looked at him with respect: he was able to knot her into his skein: a steady fire burned day and night under this pedantic exterior: the Comtesse knew him to be one of the first intellectuals of France and also one of the first to join the new revolutionary movement. She knew his eternal flame and it warmed her old bones.

‘True,' said the Comtesse, ‘but the Church can no more retreat gracefully than the rich can. We have to march towards another slicing of heads. The only thing we can do, stiffening, is to develop towards a final liquidation. Yet, when the last day comes,' she made a little
moue
, ‘what does it matter how clever we have been, with your bank or any other, Mr. Bertillon? Paper, gold, houses, orchards, mines? A crooked sixpence in a little crooked house on a little crooked island—if we fly in time. What a commerce between countries in rulers: their only invisible imports. You take my king: I'll take your queen …' She shifted and pressed a bell. Her firm, well-stocked, manly mind wanted something more solid to bite on.

The butler appeared, ‘Madame is served.'

‘Well, Mr. Lalmant, I'm so old that the society I was born into will last my time, but it won't last Jacques Carrière's! His mother is worrying about him spending ten million in three years. He'll never get back the money he spent on the futurist theater in the
Rue Delambre. That's what comes of being a liberal, hereditary bankbook—quandary—squandery. Remain a tough old aristo like I am and know where you stand and when not to stand there!' She cackled. ‘Jacques, forsooth, an entrepreneur! He'll be running for Ajaccio next. As for Mme. de Morengo, she's made up her mind to see her son has a fine funeral. Did you hear he had syphilis? Silly parrot. That broke up his first intention to marry. What a dowry slipped through his fingers! I'd made up my mind to marry him to Toots Legris for old sake's sake and to kill off dear Inès de Morengo: for naturally she'd die of chagrin to see him tobogganing in the Legris Dolomites of gold. Do you know what is his weakness, Jules?'

‘What, Madame? I mean what do you think? I know a hundred weaknesses he has: and I hate every one of them: even his virtue, relentless spite, is execrable to me.' The syllables chased each other head over heels like jelly-boned puppies: he was laughing, drinking, smiling, covered with blossoms of light from head to foot, as if fairies stood off in the clouds and shuttled the reflections from a thousand fairy mirrors on him: he was nearly drunk.

‘Oh, Jules!' laughed the Comtesse. ‘Mr. Lalmant, look at Mr. Bertillon. Jules, you are not drunk by any chance? Is your head so full that one drop spills it over? He's a magnum of champagne. No, Jules, if I told you all Jacques' weaknesses now, it would do you no good and I only wish your good … The first is, he's pompous and thinks he can think. Now, you're born naked of theories and you're shameless: you're such a reckless, hand-to-mouth boy that I love you. Look at the charming, self-indulgent get-rich-quick foppery that it is! And how is your star, Jules, how are your pictures, askew, the ravens on top of your house: what color is Alphendéry's tie today? Oh, he thinks he's of the race of Morgan, but he's independent of their solid grasping qualities.'

‘You're right, quite right,' babbled Jules. ‘I'm a gambler, I'd gamble in sawdust if I didn't have chaff and in chaff if I didn't have barley and in barley if I didn't have International Harvester. Quite, quite right … But what sort of a gambler, dear Comtesse? Ah, ah, that's what you don't know. A special sort of gambler: the one that dies rich. I have the secret: everyone's a gambler, but he dies rich only if there's a
rentier
sitting at the bottom of his pants. Ah, ah! And what is Luxemburg for, I'd like to know, if not to sit at the bottom of my pants? … So I only get money to throw it away: no, I'm an international harvester: it's the chaff I throw away. Take my advice, Comtesse, and you'll die rich.'

The Comtesse held her sides and even Lalmant smiled irrepressibly. ‘And what is it then?'

‘Bet on disaster, Comtesse,' said Jules solemnly, waving his finger at her. ‘The world's like an old pope: it's dying with a hundred doctors in attendance. It's dying of everything at once, because they kept it alive too long … Bear everything! Take my advice.'

‘But not sterling, eh?' said the Comtesse. ‘You don't think that's going down, eh? Not from what I hear.'

‘Sterling.' He sat up and looked at her cannily. ‘No. So. You heard it from Jacques?'

‘Yes … And I wonder myself if you're right.'

‘Of course, I'm right.'

‘Yes, I think you are … But of course, it's not serious. You're rash, Jules: very few men in Europe would take that chance today.'

‘I will: it's against my principles and so I'm hedged.'

Abruptly, she changed the subject. ‘Jules, I should like you to send Alphendéry to see Professor Lalmant and me for lunch one day. Alphendéry is a Red and a brilliant man.'

‘Don't you bluebloods do anything but invite Reds round to see you, these days?' grinned Jules. ‘What's it for?'

‘Boring from within, dear friend,' said the Comtesse, with a high giggle.

‘They'll never make a punched franc with their crazy way of thinking,' said Jules, suddenly cross. ‘They put you out of joint. We should keep away from them. They see what's what, but they see it in the wrong tempo: march time instead of jazz time. They ought to be organized … Alphendéry often jangles my nerves with his abracadabra. It's only a new religion. It's newer than planchettes.'

The Comtesse laughed to see him so discontented. ‘Jules! The bet with Jacques: the bet with Jacques. Don't forget. His mother is furious with him. She's heard of it …'

‘Then I'll do it,' said Jules. ‘She's always saying I'm flimsy …' ' After which he became chaotic, worried, and hectoring, and the Comtesse said no more about it.

‘I heard that Pedro climbed up a drainpipe somewhere in Brussels and attacked a young heiress of seventeen. He was scared off, sent her a note, and made a rendezvous the next day in a teashop. She was late at the rendezvous and he raped the tea girl instead: she was so furious when she came in and found them that she got her father to turn Pedro out and now he's in London! That's what Stéphanie de Changford just telephoned me. Don't you think he ought to go back to Chile, Jules? He's so irresistible! But they understand those things better in Chile.'

‘Why should I? I like to have him round the place. His father will die soon enough. They say the old fellow's off his rocker and rides round building chapels.'

* * *

Scene Twenty: Roundshow

J
ules got back to the bank cheerful but in a fragile state of mind and could not bring himself to sign the letter on his desk. He wandered round the corridors whistling under his breath. He whistled his gay way into the third room where he found Aristide Raccamond talking to Richard Plowman and John Tanker, Sr., who was sucking the head of his cane. John Tanker, Sr., that well-known oil owner from Texas and Mexico, was now in his dotage. His fond children hourly expected his death. Richard Plowman got up and took Jules affectionately by the arm, ‘Did you lunch with the Comtesse?'

John Tanker looked at Jules. ‘I'm very worried about my accounts in Swiss francs. They say the Swiss franc is going off.'

Raccamond looked up, slightly dazed, from his earnest attitude of compelling intimacy and after hugging with a glance the two brown-eyed old men, said, ‘Mr. Tanker is thinking of selling all his stocks and taking a short position. I've told him we consider it wiser.'