House of All Nations (44 page)

‘How would we run the state without it?' demanded Aristide, whose dream was to insure his old age by a great quantity of War loan, Treasury bonds, and so on. ‘Why, colonial expansion has only been possible on compound interest. My customers wouldn't buy stocks or bonds if they didn't expect compound interest on their money. Money can't lie sterile, Mr. Haller.'

‘Eat, eat, Mr. Raccamond; you are eating nothing.' He ate obediently, saying between mouthfuls, ‘I know it's a burden on the mortgagee, but that is the only way you can encourage people to save and to hold property. Mortgages and rent are really a sort of compound interest on your saving and foresightedness.'

‘Georg, don't talk to Mr. Raccamond : he wants to eat. Look at him, his plate is empty. Help him to some cream, Georg. You see, Mme. Raccamond, these are tinned peaches, but I only get the very best. They are the Australian brand, Yanco … do you know it? There is only one place where you can get it. You don't know?' She bit her lip, almost irritated: the Raccamonds were really no connoisseurs. She felt it her duty to save Mme. Raccamond from poisoning Raccamond by inches. ‘Mme. Raccamond, I'll go and get the tin.'

‘Sophy! There's no need to do that.'

‘Georg, don't speak so sharply; you don't understand that they don't know the brand!' All this in German. She hurried out. At the door: ‘And after, some tea, some coffee? Yes? A little tea with wine in it, surely.'

They were glad to see her go, being anxious to plunge back into the interest discussion again. Marianne especially, who was slowly accumulating an income from bonds, was heart and soul for interest.

‘Interest is sound arithmetically, but unsound and revolution-producing politically,' Haller set out, placing a little slip of paper with algebraic symbols on it, between the peaches and the chocolates. ‘Interest is unsound financially and revolutions are necessary to purify the financial system; revolutions lead to a revival, the dead weight of indebtedness is thrown off: repudiation is necessary to liquidation and this to optimism and new hope. Nothing arouses hate for the ruling classes like excessive taxes and an excessive burden of internal debt. Lenin saw this. He acted as a cathartic; the ruling classes in Russia had stuffed themselves to bursting on interest. You see, the financial papers enable the people to see the Fat People eating.'

‘You mean the financiers?'

‘Yes, I call them the Fat People. Now, human nature teaches us, we know by instinct, that there is something wrong when five per cent of the people stuff and ninety-five per cent have almost nothing to eat and no money to put into interest-bearing bonds at all.'

Aristide said cloudily, ‘Perhaps, there are thieves, my dear friend, amongst the rich, but what about the sound bourgeoisie to which you and I belong? The sound bourgeoisie—the workers don't realize this—are hard-working, intelligent, saving, modest, liberal, the only good people. The best intelligences are found amongst them, the highest positions in the State. The workers live from hand to mouth. If they ever seized the State, it would be a fearful thing: the State would live from hand to mouth.'

Marianne nearly nodded her head off at this and looked positively Chinese with grasping and avarice. Not that the Chinese are grasping—this is just the way she looked. ‘We go out on the road on Sunday in our little car which we have just been able to afford, out of our savings. We can hardly get along the roads with working-class people in cars too. Secondhand cars. God knows they can't afford them. And there they go racing past us, jeering at us, using up oil, destroying the roads, risking human life, not only their own lives—they can do that, with pleasure, but ours too. They have no idea of economy. I shudder at the thought of the money that must be poured out in Russia: every sou is gone. No wonder the country is breaking down. It's a detestable thing. It's because they were a nation of animals and personally I don't blame them so much as the old aristocrats. They were very charming people in themselves, but they didn't improve the country and now they have to pay for it: a nation of animals and pack mules have got hold of their estates and their factories. When the landed people and the capitalists get back it will take them twenty years to repair the country.'

‘You are wrong, Mme. Raccamond,' said Haller, in his deliberate manner, intending no offense though. ‘A backward economy eventually proves more economic than an excessively hurriedly modern one. Do you know thread at all, Mr. Raccamond? Look at the thread in this shirt, it is made of six strands; it won't wear out in forty years, probably. I was getting some very fine thread from a place in Lille, but only a little of it, some years ago. Finally, I went to see the man, thinking I would buy the place and improve it, make a big business out of it. I found him in a side street and his machine a tiny old-fashioned thing, more like a bedstead than a modern filature. I sat down on the floor with him and he told me, his brother went into business, put up a modern spinning factory, and has been bankrupted because of the constant need for modern improvements in machinery. The buyers demand it. Then the slack time comes, he is left with it on his hands, weeds grow in the courtyards, dust falls from the walls; in five years when business picks up, industry has got far ahead of him. He has used up all his capital, he owes everything to the bank, and he has nothing to start with again.

‘Meanwhile new competitors are starting from scratch with the latest thing in machines. You see the waste? America, for example, has spent all this time, labor, money, lives, has seen bankruptcies and suicides, to learn how to build modern buildings; and England has now only to take over the latest designs and profit from American experience, without bleeding for it herself. The expense of experimentation is enormous and I assure you, Mr. Raccamond, that thousands of profitable, time-saving inventions are throttled in their cradles, even in America, to save money. Now Russia was saved all the elementary struggles of machine capitalism. She is that much to the good. She can start right off now, with her first tractor factory the same as the best tractor factories in Germany or America. She need count nothing for depreciation. But in an old-fashioned economy, like England's, the profit lasts only a short time. The preservation of antiquated styles by tariffs and loss of trade by old patterns eventually disable the country. It cannot be done artificially. Only in the revolutionary way. And Lenin saw that, too. He was a great economist!'

‘That is very well for men of our cultivation,' protested Aristide, with a blank expression, ‘but workers cannot understand these things. We have had a university education. I once tried to read Marx and found it quite impossible. I didn't understand even the first page. How can workers then?'

‘That is a comfort to me,' Marianne peaceably put in, lapping up her peaches. ‘Even if the Reds continue to govern in Moscow, which I don't believe, it will take them fifty years to acqure any culture, a hundred and fifty years to produce a Velasquez, longer than that to produce an El Greco.'

Mme. Haller returned with the opened peach tin which she had rescued from the garbage box. She was flushed. ‘You see, Mme. Raccamond! This is it. You will recognize it by the label? It's a pretty label, isn't it?'

‘They are the very best,' Georg explained. ‘You see, they get so much sun, they are unusually luscious. Otherwise we would not eat tinned things at all. The ordinary brands are unhealthy. You don't eat tinned things, do you, Mme. Raccamond?'

Marianne's eyes brightened at a recollection, ‘Yes, we do … not much. But we do get a simply marvelous
pâté de foie gras
from the Dordogne, the best I ever tasted; it is made by a little firm down there. Do you like it, Mme. Haller? I would get you a tin.'

The Hallers were pale with astonishment. After a moment, Mme. Haller managed to say, in a stricken voice, ‘Mme. Raccamond! You know—' (very low) ‘how they are made,
pâtés de foies gras
?'

‘Why, yes.'

Almost tonelessly, she questioned, ‘You know they are made from' (a shocked look) ‘the diseased livers of overfed geese?'

‘Of course.'

The two couples exchanged glances of complete incomprehension. Almost stonily, Mme. Haller said, ‘No, no, we never eat them. We could not eat them.'

What was so particularly shocking to them in the sluggish livers of lazy, overfed geese? But Mme. Haller had managed to convey a feeling of cannibalism. Briskly, Haller broke the spell, ‘Some wine, Mme. Raccamond? Do you like Burgundy or Bordeaux, red or white?'

‘Oh, Burgundy, thank you … red.' A pleased look, ‘I didn't know you had wine.' She began to think, after so much liqueur, ugh! but I need a tonic.

‘Tell Anna, some Burgundy, Sophy.'

‘I'll get it myself. And Mme. Raccamond, did you taste the butter? I must show you the box we get it in. We get it specially from a place near Mulhouse. It is sent up every month.'

Yes, and now it is rancid, thought Marianne. ‘Really, I used
beurre d'Isigny
,' she said with confidence, mentioning the best domestic butter in Paris.

‘
Beurre d'Isigny
! Oh, Mme. Raccamond, do you buy it from the butterman like that? But you know that they
mix
it! You get nothing
pure
. You must get it yourself from the producer. You don't know what you're getting.'

Marianne flushed. ‘We don't use very much … we eat out most of the time.' She dared him to go back to the ground of restaurants. He eyed her for a moment and turned courteously to her husband.

‘The reason I have built up a reserve of goods as well as gold is that gold itself is sterile and the holding of it sterilizes not only money-making capacity but even the mental faculties all round. It stultifies its holder. You see, even me—Mr. Raccamond. I was able to retire at forty-five and what have I done the last ten years? Nothing. When the depression came I realized that not only was the world sterile, through overproduction, but I was sterile. I want to go back to my home town and become a doctor. I regret that five years ago I did not start my medical course, but there is still time. I think I will do that. I fear the sterilization of gold. I hold it in so many places, England, Switzerland, Canada, for example, that even traveling has no pleasure for me any more. I am afraid to disturb my gold reserve. You see, how it is with me? Do you understand, Mr. Raccamond? And so the only thing for me to do is to go back to earning with my bare hands! … Do you remember when you were a student, Raccamond? I was happy when I was a student. I was a prize student. I thought I would be building machines all my life … You know, we are lazy, Mr. Raccamond. The government should force us all to do some vulgar labor, like weeding gutters, or cleaning sewers, for a month every year: it would act as a purgative for our laziness …Yes, indeed, Mme. Raccamond, we have to be forced. Working people too must be forced; if things go well in Russia, they will have to be pressed to do the dirty jobs, they will have to be pressed to obey hygienic regulations! I had some peasant girls once who would not bind their hair in handkerchiefs to save their hair from the looms. I had to be very strict with them … I would not mind going to a new developing country myself, say, like Australia or Palestine and showing the people how to work.'

Sophy returned with the butter box and behind her, Anna, carrying a plate of sausage and a bottle of red wine.

Aristide was spilled in his chair, his mouth half open, his eyes bulging and his pendulous cheeks some pale shade between French blue and mauve. When the wine was poured for him, although his head was reeling, he grasped the glass and drained it, hoping to combat the nightmare indigestion that had already set in. He looked with bitter astonishment at Haller, breathing freely, cheerfully, cutting up the sausage, which (of course) came from a special, though nameless, shop, brought specially in a basket by Anna, the only shop in Paris free from bacteria, poison, and pollution, according to both the Hallers. Anna, at the door, surveyed them a minute. She knew, of course, very well, what they came for, the two black pigs: they came to snuffle and grub in her master's dishes.

‘A little port wine?' asked Sophy, and getting out a special glass, put the purple-mantled port, not a particularly good one, by Aristide's plate. He pushed it away a centimeter, ‘No, please.' But with the usual protestations, he drank.

‘If Hitler or some demagogue like that insisted on everyone going to a labor camp for a month a year,' said Haller, ‘even I would say there was some good in him. But he's a weak fellow.'

Aristide shook his head: he had quite lost the thread of the conversation; he blurted out feebly, ‘You, Mr. Haller, pay your own debts. Where would the sausage maker, the bread baker be otherwise? You wouldn't get your butter from Mulhouse.'

Haller laughed and ate a big piece of sausage with relish, ‘Yes, but if it were a question of paying them compound interest for ever on a sausage, if I had to mortgage my bread to them as well and keep on paying through the nose, I would run away and remain solvent and honorable in another country where such fantastic practices didn't exist. I would even run away to Russia …' He raised his eyebrows, looked seriously at them. ‘The little harmless bourgeois, with little homes, haven't been touched. They respect them. I would keep my money abroad … Take America,' he went on, not remarking that Aristide was past taking anything, ‘in America the increment of wealth is three per cent per annum, the increment of population one per cent, but the Government gives four per cent which is more than reason allows, and most people casually expect to reap six to ten per cent on their money—in the stock market even more. All that should be purged from the system, industry should lose that dead weight, the common people should have all that shifted off their bread and cheese … We take laxatives, Mr. Raccamond; the system should, too.'