House of All Nations (37 page)

‘Well,' Jules was masterfully gay, ‘Michel, I chucked out two of your sob-story boys this morning. Garrigues and Kézébec. I can't throw out Gairdner yet because his family still may cable him a few thousand dollars: also when his mother dies, he's coming into something like fifty thousand dollars. We ought to make a rule never to take in anyone who works for a living: they can't stand the gaff.'

‘Let's do that hereafter,' agreed Michel. ‘But how? You can't make them show their identity cards the way they do in Monaco.'

‘By smell,' said Jules, ‘by smell. And tell that fool Raccamond. He's so hungry for commissions, that he even took an order from François Vallat yesterday. I don't want my men in the market, unless they're seasoned, like Jacques Manray, or are so much in debt to me like Urbain Voulou, that it doesn't make any difference, anyway. I don't want the small fry. Big gamblers know they're punting; little fellows think they're selling their souls to the devil into the bargain—they all turn into Sarah Bernhardts in consequence.'

Stewart had moved away. He never failed to be astonished at the flurry of clients who gathered in Bertillon's lobby. In England, not even in a broker's office, let alone a bank, do clients gather to gamble in the stock market: this is because the fixing of prices is done through jobbers and the London market is settled fortnightly. But wherever the American stock market is concerned, because every trade is (supposed to be) done on the floor of the exchange and the price of every trade is recorded, speculators find an intense fascination in the flashing in and out of the prices: they seem to picture to them not only the wild scramble in the exchange so many miles away, but also the heartbeats of Dame Fortune herself. And with them stock-market luck has become one and the same thing as fate.

‘Look at Garrigues, that damn sculptor,' said William, still in his detestable vein, ‘he's a failure. The theory of art is the bunk: an artist who knows how to sell himself can always sell his pictures. A bad artist has always a thousand excuses why he can't sculp or paint. They naturally become gamblers: art is a gamble. They don't ever work. Artists are basically people who get paid for amusing themselves. They're all dreams: they don't exist if no one takes notice of them. They're invented by other people. What's the sense of art anyhow? A photograph gets the details down better than a painter; a procès-verbal or the archives of the criminal police give you conversation and plots better than a writer; an automobile is a lot more difficult to get right than a hunk of stone. They're out-of-date and when they try to catch up they find they're out-of-step; then they're more wronged than a left nancy, touchier than a retired Indo-China colonel, more sniveling than a school telltale … they begin dupes and end rogues. If I had my way I'd only let in here the ones that know what game they're in, the scenarists, film stars, and radio warblers, artists of photo-montage, voice doublers, and cabaret decorators. Those old-timers—Jesus, I get a crick in my neck trying to see them crawl round my ankles, they're such petty cash!'

Leon's eyes followed Stewart with regret: he was pining to get some tips from Stewart. ‘You annoyed him,' he said to William. ‘He's touchy, like all Englishmen. What do you want to offend him for?'

‘He's coming here for his health, not for mine,' said William in his stark style. ‘I can kick him in the teeth today and he'll come back tomorrow with a new false set to smile with, if he needs the business. And we don't need him. Say, I know what's the matter with him. I never saw a fruit merchant that liked you to cut bits out of the inside of his melons to sample them, even when they're good. You know the English: a nation of window dressers.'

Léon shook his head. ‘Stewart is good; he's a good businessman. He's got the place full of Jewish boys. He likes the Jews. He's made a lot of money.' He edged off in search of Stewart.

William went in search of other prey. ‘Asking the stock market to make your living expenses,' he said, when he collared Jacques Manray, ‘is like going to a whore in the hope that she'll give you money to buy your wife a dress. She'll take a special pleasure in picking your pocket.'

* * *

Scene Thirty-six: Ralph Stewart

W
ho is that talking to Mr. Léon?' asked Raccamond of Alphendéry, from the balcony.

‘That's E. Ralph Stewart, of Stewart, Murthen, and Company, one of the biggest brokers on the London Stock Exchange: one of our brokers. Stewart is a very smart man … started without a shilling. Don't be taken in by his bumptious, testy, all-England manner. He knows more about the London market than any ten men—although he won't tell it to you, because he's more patriotic than a German Jew cheering for King George. You've got to dig through a double-coat of Up, England! to get any meat out of him. I'll introduce you; you ought to know him if you're going over to England any time.'

Stewart began to blink, swallow and stutter inaudibly when he saw Alphendéry. He almost brushed Raccamond aside and had obviously an important subject that he would not bring out in Raccamond's presence.

Glad to see you, Stewart; coming upstairs?' queried Alphendéry with joy, as if Stewart was the man he most wanted to see in the world.

But Raccamond bumbled along. He had fluent English, with a broken musical southern French accent. ‘I want to introduce my clients especially to the put-and-call market.' He devoured Stewart with his great, round, fringed eyes.

‘Yes,' Stewart was milder than before, ‘Mr. Alphendéry can explain it all to you.'

‘I have personal clients,' said Raccamond, his tone heavily weighted.

Stewart looked at him rapidly and spat out in his most incomprehensible style, ‘I-understand-of-course-you-mean-clients-of-this-house. Mr.-Alphendéry-is-their-specialist-in-the-London-
market. I-take-it-you-are-working-with-him. Consult-him. Good-
day.'

‘I beg pardon,' said Raccamond, contritely.

Stewart tossed his head and repeated the sense of his inquiry, biting each word as if he loathed to have it pass his lips again.

Raccamond sprang at him. ‘No, no. I am working up a special business myself. There are types of operations unique in London which this house does not particularly—er, push: there is the hedging of international shares—arbitrage—I feel we have neglected this side of the business.' He perceptibly grew and was more dignified. ‘A private business—doing business almost entirely on the Continent—' Stewart looked at him with contempt, but it might have been a mere tic Stewart had.

‘—We should be half-English, half-French. Mr. Alphendéry is—a remarkably able man, very able, but he thinks towards the Continent—towards Berlin even. I've had experience elsewhere, you see. I worked in Buenos Aires. I want to divert a lot of business towards London with a view to establishing myself—the bank, a branch of the bank—there. I went over this with Mr. Bertillon when I first agreed to come in with him …'

Stewart looked impertinently up and down Raccamond while he was speaking. As soon as his voice dropped, he rushed out with, ‘I-must-say, I-don't-share-your-opinion-of-Mr.-Alphendéry: he's-a-remarkable-arbitrage-man. Amazing-understanding-of-the-
terrific-stutter-stutter-it's-ever-been-my-pleasure-to-meet. However,
Mr.—what's your name? Eh?—'

‘Aristide Raccamond: I—'

Stewart waved his hand impatiently. ‘If your clients are thinking of English stocks, they're right. There's the beginning of a big rally on now: spring rally; it'll go on right through the summer. No doubt of it. Who would put their money in America now? After all, England is still the home of finance … No doubt of it. All the money is pouring into England. Only place where people have confidence. Only place for investment. Tell them, everything's sure to go up and up all the year. I see no slump ahead at all. I take no stock in this bogy talk. England's the world's banker. Never failed yet, never failed yet. She keeps her word, that's why.' He added crossly, with contempt, ‘None of this, none of this—speculation you get in the American stock market. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry trying to make a pile—like in France! It's our system … eliminates crowding … spreads the takers. Excuse me!'

He had seen Alphendéry beckoning from the balcony and rapidly climbed the stairs. Aristide looked after him with envious affection. Old Thomas Sweet, Stewart's man in Paris, was falling behind the line. In due time, Raccamond thought, he would like to install himself in old Thomas Sweet's lucrative job. Thomas Sweet was an old-timer with the manner of the Wilhelmstrasse, 1900, dull proud official old gent and altogether a dud in modern Paris. Murthen was established in London for three hundred years: Stewart had the active, irritable, unpleasant, insolent brain of a young animal: compared with Murthen's history, very young he was and the red blood in the firm came from him.

Mnemon Cristopoulos came down the stairs, bland, secretive as ever. What a detestable pink shirt! thought Aristide, but at any rate it served as a pilot light—for others. What was he doing here? Always here. Jules must certainly be doing some business with him. But why didn't he place his orders through his own customers' men, like himself, Raccamond? This bank, though it would absorb his energies for a year or two to come and though he would absorb it slowly (and surely) as the python—nasty beast, as the earthworm, petty beast, as the python, nobler beast, absorbs the antlered stag (but what does it do with the antlers?)—this bank would be only a sort of antechamber where he would meet the men necessary to him. In school he was head in mathematics and in Latin lyrics, too. The son of a tailor.

His dark-lashed lids wide open, round the swimming whites of the pupils, watched Stewart stop and laugh with Alphendéry. Alphendéry was a valuable man—personal charm, living wit kneaded into him, a likely, valuable man, with something feminine, compliant, winning, responsive that attracted men—old, Jewish, Central European blood? A man who loved men's company and knew how to bring out the best in them and who suggested ideas to them, so that they felt richer through him; he got a lot of affection and a lot of business, purely through his affectionate behavior and encyclopedic information but rather a light intellect, a pessimistic, cynical, skating, skimming, inverted, scholar's intelligence, due entirely to the lack of a great urge in him.

‘The urge is everything,' thought Raccamond to himself, standing there lost in the gay press of the moneymaking crowd. ‘It roughens the road, but it makes it longer and higher. Now an Arab horse galloping—he has no need to gallop, but he becomes incomparably stronger than the one that fattens in the rich dowager's stable. Fantasy is needed to draw a man out of the rut.' Chateaubriand, his favorite author, remarked, ‘A little madness is needed to get a man out of some situations.'

‘As to Alphendéry,' thought Aristide, ‘he is willing to attach himself to anyone: he is a good third mate. All he wants is a salary large enough to let him buy books, to pursue the even tenor of his way. He will work but won't push.' Raccamond did not intend to lose sight of him: he would gradually supplant him and show Alphendéry that he was the man he should attach himself to. At the very first he had heard of him as the man who stood nearest and dearest to the Bertillons, even at times as the
éminence grise
of Jules Bertillon, and he had picked up all the information he could about him.

One disquieting thing: Aristide had bribed Madame Furness, a corn-yellow blowsy girl in the accountant's office to get the salary list of the employees, in order to picture the hierarchy. But Alphendéry received no salary: therefore he either drew at will, according to a verbal agreement with the Bertillons, or received commissions from these foreign richissimes. He also drew on a foreign corporation called Lollard and Company and signed the checks as a member of that foreign corporation. The whole thing presented a prospect of months of sapping to Aristide and he was quite happy. This sort of thing appealed to him above all. Perhaps, Aristide reflected with a contraction of the gullet, Alphendéry was not quite so guileless and influenceable as he appeared!

‘No man ever made enough money,' said Jules. ‘I like the London market and among other things I'm going into the business of selling C.P.R. and Royal Dutch short. A chap in Fleet Street is sending me memoranda about Royal Dutch. He knows the inside of the inside and he's convinced I'm working for Gulbenkian, and a great personal enemy of Sir Henri Deterding, so he gives me the true oil. I know enough about them to sink a battleship. The point is—when? The whole British system is backing them up from what I can see. That's the only weakness. Do you think you can pick the moment to sell Royal Dutch or any of its subsidiaries, Stewart? Say, I had my boy over there looking them all up at Somerset House, a shilling a time; but I don't care, I'm willing to sell Threadneedle Street and Throgmorton Street short, if necessary. I don't give England five years. Where would they be without India? And do you think if the Five-Year-Plan goes through the Hindus will continue to pay through the nose to keep Lancashire alive and all that? It's a regular Bastille you've got there, isn't it? Deterding, Bearsted, the Samuels, the Ionides, all the Alliance Assurance crowd, the Church of England chief, the Sebag-Montefiores, the steamship high mucky-mucks, the Big Five. It's too perfect, Stewart: it's the one-horse shay … they'll have to all go down together. I'm willing to bet on it.'

Stewart pursed his lips and looked as prim as if someone had said, ‘It's profiteering' during the collection in church at Virginia Water on Sunday. ‘I hope you won't, Mr. Bertillon. Everyone was selling England short, as you say, before the war and no one thought she'd come through the way—especially the Americans,' he said with peculiar distaste, ‘but she did and then money flowed into England because everyone thought, if she can weather that storm she's good for a long time yet.'