House of All Nations (40 page)

Jules was about to speak but Daniel held up his hand and walked with one restless pace round the corner of the table. ‘But what's the beauty of my scheme? Everyone can think up the one-eighth ad valorem in goods, can't they? But I go a step farther. I form an American company, a Delaware corporation. I have nominee American shareholders; I'm the director—William and I represent Americans. Under the capitulations, I can demand protection for my Yankee friends; I get extraterritorial rights! You get preference as a foreigner. Let the Galeries Lafayette or any other French concern try to compete with me, then! The Yankee consul has to protect my interests. It's beautiful. Watertight, till they see through it and then—we will have sold out. So I buy for nothing in America, I pay my duty in bad garters, and I get special protection against French competition in a French protectorate. It's beautiful.' His honest, sanguine face shone with enthusiasm.

‘How much do you think you'll make?' asked Jules.

‘About half a million francs the first year. About a million in all … then a quick sale. Maybe more. Sell out for seven and a half millions on a five-year basis. The cow will be milked dry by then.'

Jules was inspired, as always, by the display of acumen. When they had dispersed and Daniel had gone down to the stock-exchange room to receive the homage and questions of the client-cronies, Jules wandered into Alphendéry's room, musing.

‘You know, Michel, I just had a brilliant idea. How about getting into touch with Sournois, the deputy who is Carrière's friend and get him to start a movement like that National-Socialist one in Germany, a fake one. We'll form a consortium and take over a shirt factory and manufacture colored shirts: black, the French are Latins and like black. We can sell them to Daniel in his bazaars. We'll make red and black. Get in touch with the
Action Française
and see what color they'd like their men to wear.'

‘Jules, there's one thing you must understand: we must keep clear of these reactionary movements. If I ever find you in any such thing, I leave you right away. I'd rather make my living selling
L'Humanité
on the streets than work with you.'

Jules laughed. ‘All right, I'm only dreaming.'

Jules was wafted out on his own good humor. For a few hours after that, however, he sat in his room or drifted about the bank scheming like a spider and the subject of his dreaming was the manufacture of badges and uniforms. He telephoned Daniel. ‘I've got a good idea. Come up. The Arabs are madly superstitious! Give them astrological readings free and sell dream books along with them! There's a little hand token they think brings them good luck. Why don't you give them a little hand with every two pair of braces?'

They were closeted together a long time. By the end of the afternoon, there was no weakness of the human race they had not made provision for in the projected popular bazaars.

* * *

Scene Forty: Adam's Return

A
dam Constant presented to Jules and William Bertillon and Alphendéry, as soon as he got in in the morning, the newly printed articles of association of the Leadenhall Securities Guarantee Corporation, Limited, which he had just formed through the bank's solicitors in London, Ledger, Ledger, and Braves. The association had an office in St. Mary Axe, an office manager who had just departed for a tour of the provinces, to sound provincial family lawyers, and a stenographer who did nothing with dignity all day and was paid two pounds ten weekly for it. The manager, Dacre-Derek Caudal, sea-blue-eyed, was immensely grateful to Bertillon and to Constant. He came to them from a desert of unemployment two years long, and he vowed everlasting fidelity to them.

The corporation lent out money to indigent
rentiers
, received their negotiable stocks and shares as security, and had the right (section seventeen of the agreement signed by him, close-printed in pearl type, gave this) to sell out the shares, replace them, and manipulate them exactly as if they were the property of the corporation. At the end of two years, and not before, the
rentier
was to claim his shares and pay up the loans he had received.

‘Not only,' laughed Alphendéry, ‘will they not come back to reclaim them, but they'll be in hiding for fear we'll be after them to make them pay. For what those two-penny shares will be worth in two years is no one's business: they will read like the bear's pipe dream. And we don't give all the loan right away; we give a small advance now, a stated amount and so on. Poor devils! There must be plenty that would give us their shares, even if we explained the whole thing word for word.'

‘Don't be so sure,' said William unpleasantly. ‘They like to live on bad Ceylon tea and keep their Aunt Emmy's heritage in paper. Perhaps you won't get any offerers.'

‘You keep in touch with Caudal, Constant,' Jules said, calmly. ‘I leave this end of the business to you. When it's going all right, we might be able to use you for Shanghai.'

‘Are you sure it's the right time to open a Shanghai branch?' ventured Constant. ‘I can see this three-cornered fight going on in China for ten or fifteen years. Perhaps the international settlements will be wiped out.'

‘Certainly, I know. But I'm playing for five years, not ten,' Jules explained.

* * *

Scene Forty-one: Thargelion

P
aris was lovely now and yet Alphendéry left it almost every week end to go to the Touraine, Normandy, Burgundy—any spot that could be reached within two or three hours. He had no car and he traveled alone by rail, carrying no luggage, putting up at the best or second-best hotel of the town, eating pasties, fish dishes, chickens, and drinking local wines in chill dining rooms, going rapidly by foot round all the points of historic and romantic interest—then returning on Sunday evening, tired but refreshed. He was always going out like a honeybee to other scenes to bring in a store of sweet for the dark hive in which he lived. He disliked the bank much more than he admitted to himself. He had half a mind to go back to Alsace and live with his mother, become, as he put it, ‘a poor scholar.' But that did not attract him very much, either. He had seen too much also of the men at the bank: he inwardly had little sympathy for their money passions; their range of wit and learning was that of an eight-year-old boy. Some like Jules, Cambo, and Léon were interesting but suffocating personalities, planets circling with their satellites, self-sufficient, dark planets with their own motion, but absorbers of his wit. He struggled on because those he supported were not used to poverty and because since the age of fourteen he had seen the weekly pay checks coming in. If it had suddenly stopped he would hardly have known how to face the day.

Alphendéry had many friends, strangely assorted friends, clients of the bank, who came into his private room during the week, partly to enjoy his wit and economic learning, partly to spy on him and try to discover what he did alone all day in a room, this man of resource and ability, who was publicly said to be a ‘stock-exchange clerk.'

Thargelion, with a dark bloom like Mediterreanean night, tall, mellow with the beauty of many generations, a sort of Aristides turned society tobacco runner, came in softly, elegantly, daily to court with his discreet perfumes, suave poses, and snatches of exotic verse the unsuspecting Alphendéry. The son of a famous modern statesman, sufficiently rich, he was always occupied in Paris in missions for some opposition party ready to make the assault of power in Greece. He also had a wine business, a fig business, and had divers other small sources of revenue. The past winter Alphendéry, sick, gray for want of sun, said to Thargelion, ‘How can you be here, away from Greece? How can you stay so long away from the blue skies that the whole world turns linger-longer glances on?'

Thargelion said in that bright melodious accent, which is the sign of his class, the rustle of polished steel, the cooing of ball bearings, the chingle of arms in deep bottoms sliding through the flood tide at night, ‘That Greece is an illusion of tourists: I do not want you to care for Greece in that way, Mr. Alphendéry. I detest it. A cousin of mine sells tickets to tourists, vulgar creatures, to see the ruins of the Parthenon: it is nothing but a couple of split stones. I would rather see the American Radiator Building: it is modern Greece … Oh, do not speak to me of that aspect of Greece, it is repulsive, like a salvaged wreck covered with green slime that the salvagers bring up for prize money … Greece is—strikes, fights, treachery, blacklegs, democracy, even the Red International now. I do not want to see it … I detest it …' He softened. ‘But if you would really like to go there, Mr. Alphendéry, I would arrange it with only too much pleasure, on one of my cousin's ships, or in the company of a friend of mine: you would be well looked after. For a vacation cruise, perhaps it is not so bad. Besides, you are not like those who go and gape, you understand these things.' At this word, he lowered his voice and spoke so exquisitely, so tenderly, that Alphendéry felt his skin prickle and his diaphragm gulp. After Thargelion had gone downstairs, incomparably urbane and sleek, Alphendéry went and looked into the mirror of the men's washroom, at his odd masklike face, enough to make Goya start from his Bordeaux grave and grab him by the coattails as he went by. Then he smiled.

He went into Jules's room, sank into a chair, and after some idle talk, said, ‘Thargelion has been making love to me.'

‘That's good,' said Jules. ‘Egg him on. We'll get Paleologos's account. He and Mouradzian can swing it between them …'

‘By the way,' interjected Alphendéry, ‘did you write anything on that bet with Carrière? You didn't, did you? It's too dangerous.'

‘Do you think I'm crazy?' asked Jules, dismissing it.

‘There's no harm in it, but it's fiddling,' said Alphendéry. ‘Every rich man has a fiddling department and if he doesn't put cotton wool in his ears, it ruins him.'

‘Ptt!' blew Jules.

‘Trouble with my brother,' said William who had lounged in behind, ‘is he thinks he's a banker but he's still an office boy figuring winners, behind the filing cabinet.'

‘You two wisecrackers make me sick,' said Jules, put on his hat and walked out.

William frowned. ‘Once in a blue moon he goes so crackers that he does the right thing: that's what saves him.' He sat down in Jules's place. ‘He looks funny, though. I wonder what he's been doing.'

William continued, ‘Banking isn't dreaming, it's having enough in the kitty every morning to pay those who won't come back tomorrow. You don't want imagination; you want a credit balance.'

‘Do you think I could get six weeks off to go and see Athens?' asked Alphendéry.

They compromised on a week-end trip to Rambouillet.

* * *

Scene Forty-two: A Stuffed Carp

T
he old question came up, ‘Is it the fourth floor or the fifth?' ‘Sometimes I think it's the third.'

‘Last time I'm sure it was the fourth. They're all like peas in a pod.' But they got out at the fifth and walked down to the fourth,
as the little gilded lift did not work in reverse. All the pale gray paneling and coconut mats were the same and with the constant walking up and down, Marianne and Aristide had begun to forget even whether it was the Bagpur Tea Company, the Mouriscot Hydraulic Company, or the Assam Carpet Company which had its quite exotic offices opposite the Hallers' flat. But, tonight, as usual, it proved to be the Bagpur Tea Company. They rang, settling their papers and parcels, undoing their gloves, smiling confusedly at each other. There was an uneven, heavy step, a key was turned, a chain rattled. In the crack of the door now grew a pale lump face with iron-gray hair, brown eyes, and hairy warts. The pale purple mouth laid open like a stale knife incision was mute but unrebellious.

‘Good evening, Anna.'

The maid opened the door wide. She ruggedly seized their coats and one hat, covered the coat-tree with them and speedily lumbered down the dark wide hall to another door, where she said something coarsely, in a foreign language—Hungarian, no doubt. A mistress voice answered. She closed the door, came back, took the long-proffered hat from Mme. Raccamond and, ignoring the gloves, pushed open the door of the anteroom, looked at them like an impatient sheep dog.

‘Oh, good evening, dear Mme. Raccamond. How delighted I am to see you and Mr. Raccamond! You look tired. Please excuse my husband for a moment. He is telephoning the newspapers to get the latest on the Briand crisis.'

‘Good evening, dear Mme. Haller. How pretty you look!'

‘Do I? No, you're kind. You have such a pretty dress on, too, Mme. Raccamond. Very pretty!' The little dark plump woman touched Marianne's sleeve lightly, like an affectionate cat. ‘Such good taste. You look so young, too! But why' (whispering) ‘does he look so tired?' A nod of complicity. ‘Yes, they are very busy at the bank. Poor man …' (Brightly) ‘You must not work so hard, Mr. Raccamond. Mme. Raccamond is quite worried about you. No business worries, now, I hope.' An arch smile to Marianne. ‘Let us go into another room.'

The ritual went on. Mr. Haller now appeared smiling at the intermediate door, little golden hands outstretched, little golden head thrown back in welcome, little paunch neat, tight, and muscular. ‘Well, Mr. Raccamond! How are you? And Mme. Raccamond?' At once Haller drew Aristide apart near the Indian silk striped curtains. ‘I was just telephoning Havas. They tell me …'

‘Come away, Mme. Raccamond, let us go into the other room for a minute—I will show something—you know what' (whispering). ‘Mr. Haller doesn't like me to' (a little gay glance). ‘We will leave the men alone for a while' (softly). ‘Eh? Yes?'

‘What lovely crystal!' Marianne cried.