House of All Nations (26 page)

Alphendéry, whose efforts at conversation, or rather at brilliant monologue, or apothegmatic reply, had been silenced several times by the man in the mirror, now tapped on his knife with his head down, a very rare thing for him: his conversation usually flourished to the accompaniment of profuse, meaningless gestures. He said automatically, ‘There isn't a Frenchman alive who doesn't try to make himself a picture of the universe, and a remarkably well policed one (too policed)! But there isn't the background of Grimm's fairy tales, marvel, dread, and illiteracy that is the basis of much of the profound thinking from over the Rhine. The troll wood, the Black Forest, dragon rocks, river maidens, the Lorelei: it produces a beautiful and confused effect of torrents and thunder in German music. The vast barren stretches, like Courland, produce your German categories.'

The man in the mirror was thrust into the background. Another legendary figure arose, the racial theory. Captain, now German citizen (in exile) Rosenkrantz, said, ‘It astonishes me to hear you defend the two-dimensional thinking of the French. You are French, in a way, by birth, but your father and mother came from that very region, you say, from the Black Forest! You yourself were born in Strasbourg. Except for a territorial convention, that is Germany. And then, more important, you are, like me, a Jew! The Talmud has given us a rich, medieval background, even if we don't go to the synagogue, which makes us friendlier to the splendid complexity, the grand subterranean instincts of German thoughts. Germany is the true home of the modern Jew.'

‘Are you in Paris?'

Rosenkrantz shook his head. ‘Economic necessity. New forces arising are alien to the German soul, the German-Jewish soul. The Marxists, the National Socialists. Both Jews and Germans understand that social organization is founded on the family: the German has the tribe father, the Jew the father as King in Israel. The Frenchman has no sense of family: he habitually keeps two ménages, he has illegitimate children, brings venereal disease into the heart of the home: he has no sense of true organization. Tell me one thing, Herr Alphendéry, would you have your children brought up in France?'

Alphendéry laughed. ‘You keep on forgetting I am French.'

‘But you are a Jew. You must yearn for a deeper, truer sense of living.'

Alphendéry suddenly became excited. ‘I know I am French and forget everything else. Compare Diderot and that ass Kant. Diderot was a mind that adorned six universes of knowledge—without him the social history of his time could not be written. Kant? A monstrous pedant, a colossus of ignorance, who never went thirty miles from his home and never had sexual intercourse. Is that a man? That's a mummy. I don't believe in your pure reason. The only philosopher for me is the one who is ostentatiously physiological, and whose brain only overworks, because all his other functions overwork: a true giant of a man, not a beetle.'

Captain Rosenkrantz, retreating before his man's choler, shifted to more familiar ground: ‘Even the German needs a little fermentation to produce the perfect metropolitan type. Between ourselves, there is too much of the Slav and the peasant in your ordinary German.'

Alphendéry bit off a chunk of the conversation, like a hungry, healthy man who bolts, and whose digestion is nevertheless unimpaired. ‘Yes, in fact, the Jew has been hammered on the anvil cobbles of cities for many generations, long before the ancestors of most of the Germans had learned to cook the roots they dug with their nails or their stones. But that does not make him a Jew. It makes him a metropolitan. What is the Jew? Just a bourgeois. The soul of the burgher. The reason you don't like France, Herr Rosenkrantz, is that you can't pick out the Jews here: they all look Jewish, everyone. You don't like that. You want to sit in a tribe, don't you? And then the French are as smart as the Jew, they have all he has—a head for finance, money monopolies, learning, family organization, love of law and medicine, rationalism, democracy, a complete organization of property round the family. But what were we, Herr Rosenkrantz? The wireless telegraphists of the Middle Ages? By carrier pigeon, or grapevine telegraph, or messengers, or mails, we got to know the prices for which goods had been or could be sold in the central markets; we were the exchange men. Where are we now with the radio? The peasant in the wildest parts of Bessarabia, once he has a radio, knows just as well as you or me the closing in Winnipeg and Chicago. No more Jew: the radio wiped him out. Let the Jew become a citizen. But no. The Jews howl against the Soviet Union which frees them from pogroms, from the sweatshop, from rabbinical graft and superstition. They cling to Germany which detests and insults them, to the British Empire which is using them as does a jackal, as a cat's-paw. And we think we're clever … What is it the Jew doesn't want to lose? Not Judaism, my dear Herr Rosenkrantz, but the bourgeoisie, of which he is the archetype, the most concentrated example. That's my analysis of the return to the synagogue by the overrich members of our congregation. A defense against Bolshevism? And what is Bolshevism? It's Izzy, Jakie, and Manny forming a labor union in the sweatshop. So the boss runs back to Judaism … Let us forget the Jew, Herr Rosenkrantz, let's remember humanity.'

Rosenkrantz had an intelligent, flushed, and insincere air, with something of patronage. ‘You are one of those who put our racial history in a nameless sepulcher because it has been unpleasant. But that is where our wary intelligence comes from! From fight, from oppression, from loopholes. Forget that and we become like the Gentiles, ignoramuses, bumpkins: we have lost our patrimony! And will the
Goyim
ever let us forget it? Perhaps for a liberal generation or so, but it returns. And the French! The French cunningly wish to submerge our rival intelligence by absorbing us, making us lose our identity. At one time, they said, “Your race or your life!” That's it now. I prefer the Germans and the old Russians who hate us, imprison us, lock us in quarters like lepers, but respect the integrity of our race. Yes. We suffer, but the essential, the dignity of the soul, and the race soul remains. We are men, being dogs.'

Alphendéry's reply was like a trumpet: people in the restaurant turned to look at them. ‘We suffer and live in the best hotels, eat in the best
brasseries
, travel in the luxury expresses, spend money at Le Touquet, dress ourselves in the Rue de la Paix, ski at St. Moritz, own châteaux from here to Tokio, have our paws on all the credit and commercial banks: we reign and we are oppressed, too. We suffer the way my broker in London, E. Ralph Stewart, with a house in the country, a house in Mayfair, and a leased shooting lodge, is a follower of the humble despised Christ. I am tired of those fairy tales.'

He looked tired. Rosenkrantz sneered politely. ‘But you believe in socialism, if I'm not mistaken! The theory of a man who put his own children in an orphan asylum, for example. Karl Marx who drank beer with the roughs on Hampstead Heath and assaulted policemen. Refined company. Their socialism is a sort of bureaucratic tiger-eat-tiger. Where else do you have such corruption as in France? Imagine the possibilities in a more democratic or, as you say, a proletarian state. What virtues has the common man?'

Alphendéry was cool with rage. ‘May I ask why you left your paradises then? They still pogromize Jews in Roumania, I believe. You ought to go there if it's so fine for the soul and for business.'

‘We, in international business, are never in a foreign country. The market place, the exchange booth is our home. Am I dealing with France? Are you? Are we dealing with Rotterdam, the Ukraine; telephoning to Bucharest, London, Liverpool, Dublin? And whatever country we're in, we're telephoning those places; it makes no difference. France is just a foothold to do business in. What is there in it to hold the soul of man?'

‘There, you see,' said Alphendéry calmly, ‘our greatest weakness: we have no gratitude to our friends. And we kiss the foot that kicks us, abasing ourselves, as no living man should, while winking to each other and telling ourselves how smart we are, fooling the
Goyim
!' Alphendéry started laughing like a diamond. ‘They make wonderful pastry here.'

‘The French are good cooks,' said Rosenkrantz with a faint sneer.

‘And Paris is farther from German aeroplanes than Antwerp,' Alphendéry put in with rebuke.

Rosenkrantz smiled to himself, spat out a cherry stone, wiped his fingers elegantly, and looking round for the waiter, clapped his hands.

‘Coffee?' asked Alphendéry. ‘
Un café noir
.'

‘Demitasse,' corrected Rosenkrantz in his old-fashioned phraseology. He put his serviette on his knees and looked at Alphendéry who was replete, rounded, and smiling in his happy digestion. ‘Mr. Jules Bertillon is a charming man. A little—faunish, shall we say? It occurs to me that he has no ideology at all. It is impossible, of course, but one would say—almost irresponsible.'

Alphendéry smiled. ‘He likes to give that impression.'

Rosenkrantz half closed his eyes. ‘Brandy? Waiter, two
fines maison
. It's easy to caricature oneself: to play the part of oneself, I mean. Many people do the same. It's a double role. They are at liberty to be themselves, they sense a masquerade. This may be one of those cases.'

‘He has a vivid financial imagination: that I can testify to.'

‘Has he financial intelligence though? Instincts, I should say, but not much real financial
Weltanschauung
. My impression. I don't want to underrate him. That would be quite an error. It is well to know men's distinguishing characteristics before you begin to work with them: then there are no surprises, you can determine your plan of campaign beforehand.'

‘Bertillon has one distinguishing characteristic, his make-up is solid, his bank is liquid. It's a whim, of course, in these days, but he is like that. His own system. He is not so light as he appears.'

‘If I didn't think that, I wouldn't do business,' Rosenkrantz lifted his clean cuffs to light a cigar: through the smoke his gleaming teeth smiled at Alphendéry. ‘Herr Alphendéry, as between brothers-in-the-credo, you can tell me your real impression, your own private summing-up of the situation. It will go no farther.'

Alphendéry's beautiful, resonant voice was sharp when he said, ‘My private impression is that Bertillon is a financial genius who is bound to live and die rich.'

Rosenkrantz said in an undertone, ‘I hope so.' Alphendéry could see him studying him through the smoke, with some doubt. Alphendéry, used to racial confrontations, due to his frontier birth, knew what was in his mind, viz., ‘This is a Gentile-loving Jew … he's a hard nut to crack. Or is he holding out on me for some private bargain?' He knew that in Rosenkrantz's view of the world there were no motives in men but those of personal gain. And yet Rosenkrantz was an exceedingly well-educated, relatively humane, and widely experienced man. He said, ‘You think Mr. Bertillon will work with us? It costs him nothing and adds a department to his bank. We could organize the same in his other branches, especially in the Low Countries … We have our own correspondents. Only we can't afford to pay for cable service, quotations—a serious handicap …'

Generously Alphendéry offered, ‘But why can't you get it from us? We get it automatically and we really have no use for commodity quotations, except as a check-up. Our boys wouldn't mind a bit telephoning them through to you, either here or in the Netherlands … You're strangers here and you will need your path smoothed till you get the hang of the city … We don't mind at all giving you the service. I can help you personally: I know my Paris as few men do.' Alphendéry, who had been out of tune all the evening, warmed up in the spirit of his generosity and beamed at Rosenkrantz.

Rosenkrantz feared in him the ‘rationality of the Frenchman,' which he regarded as a slick, apish, mental trick for avoiding the profound problems of the universe. He dropped something of his
Geheimrat
manner and they discussed diverse manners of co-operation between the little office in the Rue Boissy-d'Anglas (Rosenkrantz's office) and the Banque Bertillon in the Rue Pillet-Will. Alphendéry recommended him to Maître Lemaître, in his opinion the leading lawyer of Paris. In leaving, they bowed to each other with German courtesy, Rosenkrantz with courtly elegance, Alphendéry with something more of roundness, jollity, and affection.

Rosenkrantz immediately telephoned to Guildenstern. ‘Alphendéry, the alter ego of Bertillon, is partially with us. He began hostile but he is coming over. It's a Jew, after all. I don't think we need worry on that score. Now, what I figure is this: either Bertillon is really rich, in which case we can get in through Alphendéry, eventually, or, being broke, they won't go down for six months or a year, because, naturally, they won't plunge: they'll arrange things carefully, and we will inherit a good proportion of their clients, by that time. And if it's longer, we can, by that time, dig in to the other branches and have claims on them: we can be there before the receivers. We'll get a contract out of them for six months or a year, say, and we can word it—Bertillon has the reputation of being rash and ill-advised. His lawyer is Pierre Olympe, an absolute fool who married money. An ex-airman. No, I didn't get a lawyer. Alphendéry, who is quite a talker, one of these soft liberals, recommended a lawyer, but naturally I don't want one he's too friendly with. Besides he seems to be some jurist of international repute: we don't want that. We want a man with business
nous
. A Jew, of course … Bertillon's a harlequin, and Alphendéry's a socialist; the three other brothers—pure zeros, of course … There's a very smart fellow, Maître Lallant, was in trouble, but he knows everybody, taps all the pipe lines: he's the one, evidently. Alphendéry kept on insisting that Bertillon is rich. Selling line? Like most liberals, he's blunted: do you think the
Goy
has pulled the wool over his eyes? Tomorrow morning in the Select at eight? Good night. My respects to your gracious lady.'