House of All Nations (39 page)

When Léon had gone for good, Alphendéry returned with a scheme he had been worrying about for a fortnight. ‘Jules, we should change the wording on our customers' forms. For example, instead of saying, “We have bought for your account,” we should say, “We have credited to your account,” or “You are credited with.
”
'

‘Why not,' said William who acted as Alphendéry's rearguard on these occasions, ‘why give excuses for quibblers?'

‘All right,' said Jules, ‘what does it matter?'

‘When we get new forms printed we can say that and no one will notice the change,' Alphendéry carried on.

‘The judge is only looking for you to give him a way out,' remarked William.

‘Oh, let it ride,' shouted Jules suddenly irritated, ‘I'm going to make big money; you two fellows sit there all day thinking up new wrinkles like two college boys writing notes on Molière and I've got to make the money. You don't make money out of codicils, riders, and word shifting. I'm going to the pictures. I've worked too hard …' He jammed on his hat, walked out, and came rapidly back. ‘I won't have that form changed, do you hear? I want it as it is.'

* * *

Scene Thirty-nine: Daniel Gambo

D
aniel Cambo stretched his long thick legs and reveled in the luxury of telling the boys how devilish clever he was. There were half a dozen of them gathered in Jules's room to discuss his bazaar venture. He was already ‘turning money away,' for his fame as a get-rich-quick-slick had reached every client of the bank months ago. Every real money-maker feels that he was born a Machiavelli with footnotes and that he has improved himself into a Napoleon of strategy and a vulture of iniquity. When he has any time off, he shakes hands with himself for his genius, chuckles with himself over his inspirations, pats himself on the back for his bigheartedness, gets wistful over the child poetry in his heart.

‘Did I ever tell you how I got a shipment of novelties from New York for nothing?'

‘No, how did you do that, Daniel?' Jules stretched himself also and gave himself up to the pow-wow. William stood lolling against the bookcase, as usual clinking the coins in his pockets, pretending to take no interest in anyone, but intent as an ant gathering together bits of information against Daniel, who had the reputation of being the sharpest chiseler of them all. But William, of course, thought himself a pretty good crook, too.

‘How did you do it, Daniel?' Francis asked. His twin brother, a perfect replica of himself, eyed him coolly. They were sleek gentlemen both and thought Cambo a great liar and rascal, but his reputation for quick-slick money and immediate turnover had lured them both; they had made it up between themselves to invest their savings with him, unknown to William or Jules, if he gave a convincing sales talk.

‘It was easy, easy. I go round to the bond division on the wharves, you know. I give the man a couple of dollars and he tells me what merchandise is lying there, on drawback, or consignee can't pay and when I see something I can use, maybe I go and see the consignee. Maybe not. It depends. This lot, these six cases—there were two boys who wanted them for a novelties business in Twenty-third Street. But fashions change so quick in America. They got them from Czecho and by the time the shipments got there, the fashion had changed. So! no good.

‘In America you can get any amount of job lots for nothing. But you got to go carefully, otherwise they think, “Quick, here's a sucker from Europe.” I brought over a pattern of knitted goods once to America, I showed it to a man and said, “Look, do you think this would go in America?” “Yes,” he said, “it would go good, very good, but it's too expensive; the process is too slow; you got to put hop into a process to get things out here: it's no good.” So I got a pattern of a machine from Lyons and brought it over to America and I showed it to an engineer. “Look,” I said to him, “can you make a better model?” “Yes,” says he: “sure I can do it. Give me four days.” And in four days he brought me back a model of a wonderful little machine. That's American. Ha! I had it made and while it was being made he thought of a couple of improvements. I got twenty made and put the girls to work. They turned out goods twenty times as fast as back in Lyons. I didn't let anyone into the factory … no fear. But a boy in Chicago worked out the sort of machine it must be and next week he had an improved machine on the market and a coupla fellers went into business and beat me hollow. I had to shut up shop. That's how it is in America. It only pays to buy the hash.

‘All right, it makes a big waste of machines and goods. All right, bring them back to Europe. Go into the business of waste. Eh? It's the best-paying today. Well, everyone's gone into the fire-sale, mill-ends, shoddy business, but this is something different. A real smart bazaar business with regular lines and disappearing lines: not dreck so much as sample lines, odd lines, sample shipments from Japan, Czecho, Germany. Buy everything below cost from people whose capital has been lost. Like me in the machines. See: deal in human dreck, not dreck goods! A man's bankrupt: he'll sell for anything. A man dies: his heirs are damn fools, don't know the business—they sell for nothing. A man starts in business, no capital, he is dying for enough to eat: he's glad to sell and he goes back on the unemployed lines. And you got to know how to bargain. See! And it's nice business.'

‘What about the goods you got for nothing?' asked William impatiently.

‘Listen, not for nothing, just for warehouse charges, and I got them back.' He laughed, winked, and expanded, so merrily it was a pleasure to see him. ‘Well, I went round to those boys in Twenty-third Street and I found them working out a bankruptcy. I could smell it. They didn't want the goods. No one in America would touch them. They were too good to ship South. And for the North, they were out of fashion, just rubbish and they couldn't even pay the warehouse charges.

‘I went round to the warehouseman and I said, “Look, those boys won't take those goods; they won't pay the charges; those six cases are going to lie there messing up the place for months. The consignor won't take them back so easy. You'll have to sell them at auction and what will you get out of it? I don't know that I want them, either. Maybe, though, I can sell them to some connections of mine in France. I'll see. I can't pay for them myself, not on the spot.” I slipped him a couple of dollars, see. I said, “Those goods are on drawback. Well, you send them back to the original consignor telling him they're refused. All right, at Le Havre my man calls for them and takes charge of them. It's not your fault. Wrong address. I get the bill of lading from the boys. Then I see if I can sell them to my friends in France. If I do, I pay the warehousing charges and something for you, see. And we'll do some more business, some other time. I'm in that line.
”
'

‘He said to me, “Buddy, what do I care who gets them?” So he ships them to Le Havre with the wrong address, I call for them, I sell what I can, what I can't I put back in the cases, then I fill the same cases up with a lot of stuff I can't get rid of and I send the stuff back to the warehouse in New York. “Refused. Wrong address.” I suppose the chap in Czecho got back a lot of funny stuff and he sent it back again. Maybe they're still going backwards and forwards. But you've got to be smart. I didn't pay a cent, only a couple of dollars.'

‘You've got to nose around,' said William, thoughtfully. The twins, Paul and Francis, looked like two chickens who have seen the same worm.

‘There's a little chap down in the Place des Vosges makes swan's down powder puffs: they're washable. But what girl is going to wash her powder puff if she can get say twenty for five francs, say four for one franc? You see, they're just manufacturing in the void. You got to manufacture for a market. It would be like a story writer saying, “I don't write for
Vanity Fair
or the
Mercure de France
… I write for anybody, everybody
”
' (Cambo said innocently). ‘Now, there are thousands of these poor little birds: and I'm doing them a favor: I'm a natural market for them. Say, these little fellows can't make a cent anyhow. I'm doing them a favor if I take the stuff off their hands below cost.

‘Now, I want to show you one thing. It doesn't pay me to go into business manufacturing things. It pays me to buy only from the one-horse shows, the attic factories, women who knit in parks while they're watching their babies, unemployed men turning out little gadgets. You save rent (because the homeworker is paying his own rent), you save installation, deterioration of machinery—all that's washed out with the one-horse manufacturer when he goes bankrupt. You don't have to bother about factory laws, installing W.C.'s, hours and wages and overtime. And you're doing them a service: you're giving them work, you're giving them a market.

‘Now, they sometimes put in machines when they see you coming back; they save you the expense. You say, “Give me the exclusive supply,” and they're willing to borrow money and put in the machines. Well, if the goods don't please, and they're overextended, they can sell to your competitors for a bit (but you've already broken the back of the market) and then they go bankrupt! If there's still a tag end of market, you buy the bankrupt stock cheap. They were bankrupt before: they're bankrupt again! They've always been bankrupt. And so you've done no harm; you've given them something to eat for a few months. Say, these little fellows can't last. They're not adapted to the wholesale age.'

Jules put in sharply, ‘And what do you do with the stuff that goes stale on your counters?'

Daniel laughed, threw out his hand with a vast gesture. ‘What do you do? Why, I send it to the country, little dead places like Sens and Senlis and—anywhere—and then to Morocco. Now that's where the real jewel of my scheme is lying. You see? You go to the receivers and you say, “These goods are old-fashioned: I know. I was selling them six months ago in Paris, now they're done. You can't sell them except in some dusky paradise. I don't know if I can sell! Maybe in Patagonia, in the Solomon Islands. But if you want to sell them to me for almost nothing, I'll do you a favor, I'll take them off your hands. You see, my competitors won't look at the stuff. But I'm different: I've got, maybe, someone I can write to … factors.” Then they ask around, they don't take too much trouble, why should they? They give it to me by private treaty. I slip them a couple of ten-franc notes. Well, what can you do? You've got to earn your living. You can't go to sleep standing up.' He smiled his open, good-natured, boyish smile that split his great honest face with a neat strong bite of white teeth.

Daniel was busy from morning to night, like a prodigious hummingbird, flitting, hovering, quick as a flash of light from one store to another, from giant wholesaler to poverty-ridden private home, from small artisan in the Faubourg St. Antoine or the Place des Vosges to miserable mothers knitting and doing gross filet lace for a living in the park of the Buttes-Chaumont. He also observed, without any need of a notebook, the prices in department stores and working-class bazaars, the first necessities as well as the first luxuries of the poor: men's shirts, children's shirts, socks, kitchen utensils, kitchen silver, cleaning powders, rag flowers, cosmetics, buttons, lamp shades, electric fittings, wedding rings …

The clients of the bank were divided sharply into two camps, immediately—those who saw in Cambo's scheme the big new racket, and those who said, ‘The French will never buy goods turned out whole-sale to one pattern; they are a petty-artisan nation, and care for the curious and individual; they understand quality.' The ladies especially (those who six months later were buying knitted shirts for nephews and nieces from Cambo's stores at twenty francs) sustained the thesis that Frenchwomen, even working girls, were too elegant ‘by nature' to buy things to cover their delicate individual skins in vulgar bazaars. Mme. Mimi Eloth, Mme. Berthe Yves, Mme. de Sluys-Forêt, and Mme. Raccamond led these insurgents: they appeared to take Cambo's proposition as a personal insult.

‘He is, after all, a Smyrna Jew: he does not understand the essentially French,' said Mme. Raccamond and they all agreed with her.

But Jules, and almost every moneymaking male in the place, was with Cambo. Alphendéry said, ‘Frenchwomen! Those that come from the Gare de l'Est at seven o'clock in the morning aren't Frenchwomen, they belong unwillingly to the international of flour-sack home dress-making: of course, they'll hail Cambo as a savior if he puts out twenty-franc dresses.'

‘Sure,' said Jules, ‘slaves. Everything comes back. We're getting back to slavery. They've got to learn to like mass-production goods. We've got to sell them something. Say, Mussolini and Woolworth are the giant minds of our age; Musso got them to wear mass-production, nonsoiling shirts; Woolworth extended it to everything they want. They both succeeded, didn't they? Hitler will get on, mark that, you boys. He's got the mass-production idea. I bet you anything you like some smart fellows in Germany now are behind him, only waiting to sell brown shirts, by the million. Say, Daniel, it would pay you to organize a green-shirt movement or say a red-shirt one, for the Reds.'

‘Why don't you, Jules?' Daniel asked with a certain hope.

‘Oh, I don't sell anything visible.' Jules lay back and indifferently began playing with his paper knife. ‘You shear the white lambs; I'll take the black sheep.'

They grinned at each other, flattered by the notion that they were all infinite blackguards. Ephraïm Dreyer pondered: ‘Will they let you get away with it, Daniel? Won't they try to shut you up? You'll undercut them all.'

‘And what am I doing all that time?' asked Daniel. ‘I hold them off a year or two and then I sell out. Business today is climbing up the corridor of the avalanche, before the avalanche. Let it pass. Climb again: Look, Morocco's not a French colony; it's only a protectorate and has its own laws. French goods don't get any preference, but pay twelve and one-half per cent ad valorem like those of any other country. So the French interests there have no advantage. I dump Yankee goods in Morocco, that I buy the way I told you. Do I pay twelve and one-half per cent? No. You don't have to pay in money in Morocco: you can pay twelve and one-half per cent in goods, in kind. So you pay the customs one-eighth of the goods. Naturally, I pay them in goods I don't want particularly, whatever has deteriorated in sales value. Then I give the customs officials a couple of ten-franc bills, and when he auctions the stuff off, my stuff that I paid over to him, I buy it back at a bargain price. Before anyone catches on, I've made my money and I sell out.'