House of All Nations (48 page)

‘Why, that may be the City view,' said Alphendéry, ‘but what about the rest of the country? The West, the industrial North, Scotland? The mines?'

‘The City is England,' said Stewart obstinately.

* * *

Scene Forty-five: Christian Stockbroker

I
told you the market would go up,' said Ralph Stewart to Alphendéry. ‘Things couldn't keep at that level. It isn't natural. Was Bertillon still a bear when the market turned up?'

‘Not so much,' Alphendéry told him. ‘We cashed in before the turn.' This was a lie.

‘I'm expanding. I'd like you to come over and see our new premises in Austin Friars: finest in the city. Did that boy of yours—Constant—send you any information? Do you really think he can get anything worth-while like that? I doubt it, I tell you, going there without introductions. Now, if you'd let me take my time and introduce him properly. I hear he was seen down in Shorters' Court with Mulloney from Mulloney and Moonsteyn: showy fellow that Mulloney. Your man actually went round to the jobbers. My dear fellow, that's absolutely not done!' Stewart bridled and reddened at the idea.

‘And the jobber told him in fact what we wanted to know about Royal Dutch and C.P.R.,' laughed Alphendéry.

‘Yes, but my dear fellow, you can't do it—you can't do things that way! No one can see the jobbers, my dear fellow, but ourselves. And we don't see their books!'

Stewart was quite ruffled. Alphendéry began to wonder if he had come to Paris especially to tell him this. But no, his business sense was too good for that. Stewart looked at a pretty woman passing and cleared his throat. ‘Mme. Bertillon is a handsome woman,' he remarked. ‘I like the European woman—simply can't stand the English woman. They say, Mme. Bertillon has a lot of money in her own name.'

‘I believe she has. She was an heiress.'

Stewart was calmer and said with a gleam of humor, ‘Financial types are divided into two: those who end by ossifying, preserving, and protecting their estate; those who create eternally and so disappear without leaving anything but crusts behind. In this business it is old age which appears to have the temperament suitable for money survival—mean, narrow, querulous, hard, and conserving. Unpleasant, isn't it? Now, Bertillon I don't take to be that type?'

His little trip, thought Alphendéry, is to test our solvency or see what good clients we may be: nothing else—and of course, everyone relishes an excuse for a trip to Paris. While he was pondering this and fishing for a reply—it was hot, the air was blossomy, ripe, Stewart went on pregnantly, ‘There are only two ways of getting on in life—have so much money that you can tell everyone to go to hell or owe so much that you can tell everyone to whistle for it.'

‘I am certain Jules is in one of those positions,' laughed Alphendéry, slyly looking up at the tall choleric Englishman.

‘I've got a smart young fellow in this week,' pursued Stewart. ‘David Cohen, twenty-five. I have much more faith in Jews: they rarely let a Gentile down, always Jews, if anyone. But I've been in business all my life and never found them dishonest; quite the contrary. Of course, my opinion is not too popular. But I make my own. He was on the
Commercial and Financial Chronicle
, worked in some Yankee firm too, knows transatlantics backwards, and we'll have a big business in them later on, when things look bad in Europe and better in England and America. Now, I'll tell you frankly, Alphendéry, I don't believe in stealing the best men of other firms, but I always try to if I have a good excuse. Bertillon's-very-nice-fellow' (he suddenly said, apparently all in one syllable) ‘but-don't-
know-if-h'm-his-position-neither-do-you, neither-does-anyone. The-point-is-that-if-you-want-to-change, that's-what-I-mean-and-want-
to-throw-in-your-lot-with-us-and-can bring-some-of-those-accounts,
when they're thinking of moving to London, you know. I'll be more than delighted to have you. Most extraordinary sympathy Englishmen have for you.'

‘Well, thanks very much.' Alphendéry was touched. ‘Of course, just now, I couldn't. Jules is a funny fellow and would take it as desertion. That's what makes it difficult. If it comes to that, I'll come in with you—on some serious basis, of course.'

‘Certainly, a junior partner, something like that. Naturally depends on the kind of accounts.'

‘A lot of people love me,' said Alphendéry, ‘but between loving me and handing me their accounts is an Atlantic.'

The little pink lip, the little scrub mustache over the rat teeth trembled irritably, but no, Stewart was smiling and his eyeglasses were dancing. ‘I have confidence in you, Michel. H'm, h'm, Bertillon reminds me of a firm I worked with before the war—Incarnat, Oliver, and Company. You must have heard of them, although you were a boy then. Still, they made quite a name for themselves. Had a capital of about three million pounds, some days more, some days less. Every day they put the whole kitty on the table, gambled the whole amount every day: arbitrages, Yankees. They sent more orders for Yankees through London than the whole of the New York market. They made the market in Union Pacific, U.S. Steel—few others.' His glasses glittered and his pink sharp face became softer and boyish. ‘It was exciting, by Jove, despite the risks. I wouldn't mind going through it all again. There were some headaches—but isn't all business headaches?— and nowadays no one gets the thrill we got in those days. My first job. By Jove, we had fun. At one time they had a short position in Union Pacific which exceeded the floating supply in the market! Were they ruined? Not that time. They had to come to terms with them, my dear fellow! The fact that they had oversold alone saved them. They had to come to terms with them: otherwise a world panic would have resulted. They would have been alive yet, but the World War got them. They didn't believe a war was coming. It did. That was the end. They were left nursing a million quid of enemy bonds and stocks with all the markets in the world closed. Bertillon gives me the old familiar tingle when I come into his room. (It's just instinct and I may be wrong.) Only, he's not a partnership. He's one man. A sort of Quixote with a couple of Sancho Panzas and a donkey and it doesn't work. No Sancho Panza ever yet stopped a Quixote from getting his nose broken by a windmill. I sympathize with him. By Jove, yes. The Northwest Mounted, the Chicago gangsters, and a scrimmage in Mespot don't compare with a plunge in stocks. But there'll be another war one of these days and he'll guess wrong. I'm thinking of you, Alphendéry. London will then be the natural deposit bank for all these Continentals; one war scare and they'll fly to us. Why not forestall them? I am. Not now, of course. Even that fellow of yours, Aristide Raccamond, sees it. He wrote to me, you know, offering to throw me business. Not a dull fellow. I see he's one of your directors now.'

‘He told you so?'

Stewart said nothing without a purpose and now withdrew from his cardcase the card of Aristide Raccamond. He looked at Alphendéry sharply while he studied it.

‘Nice card,' said Alphendéry.

They reached the Avenue de l'Opéra and after a few minutes' walking came into the Rue d'Antin which runs into the Marché St. Honoré. There is Griffon's, a good restaurant. They entered.

‘However,' finished Stewart, ‘that's for you to decide. When the time comes. I suppose it pays you to risk it at present. (It always does.) You have no expenses. A Chateaubriand and peas for me. Shall we have a carafe of Beaujolais?'

Alphendéry took off his glasses, leaned on the table, and looked up, foreshortened, at Stewart, with his admirable large dusky eyes. ‘For myself, Stewart, no. But I have a wife. A very beautiful lady, elegant and ‘aristocratic.' A Central European who feels Paris is outlandish, practically situated in the Atlantic Ocean. She prefers Vienna, Berlin, Brussels. It's not her fault. As a matter of fact,' he continued, lower, making a queer face, ‘she spends most of her time in Brussels where she has two establishments to keep up, one house that she is furnishing and a
pied-à-terre
where she meets Theus, the minister. I presume her latest venture shows economy: she will use one of her own apartments for Theus. The whole of Brussels says that I am the only one who does not know that she is his mistress. And so, out of decency, I remain ignorant. The legend is that she and Theus are the most dashing malpractitioners of love in Brussels. Her library is absolutely stuffed with books on flagellation and sex life in ancient Greece, helped out with a little fortunetelling—a modern lady's library. It's quite amusing. When I last went to see the Brussels office, Theus gave a brilliant dinner. University professors were there, some men of mark from Paris—Blériot the deputy, Tourcarré the physicist, Robert Menikian the financial journalist, a few ministers of the Belgian crown besides, Theus—Mme. Theus—she's a famous pervert, too—the Duchesse de Scheveningen, Estelle my wife, and I. Henri Léon was there too, a dolphin out of water, invited at the request of the reigning beauty, Mme. Cécile Ganse, mistress of a Continental royal personage, and also Léon's mistress. (He followed her all over Europe and finally ran her to earth at Bruges. The Bruges religious processions were on and when she saw them she got so emotional and mystic that she fell right into Léon's arms.) Léon was wretched; so was I. Every soul in the room except Léon was thinking about Theus, Mme. Theus, Estelle, and me. I thought, what the devil? What difference does it make to my reputation if my wife takes lovers? A wife is noble who lets her husband run around with girls and never complains. Why not a man? Ridiculous convention dating back to the harem. I'm not conventional, that's all.' He said with regret and some pride, ‘I was brilliant that evening, Stewart. Even my wife turned her eyes on me a number of times with admiration. For once she saw ministers of the crown, scholars, diplomats, savants admiring me, chiming in; as our wits rose more varied and more harmonious, she began to concede a little respect for me. For naturally she despises me for the disgrace she herself brings me! Naturally, also, she has accepted the popular view of me that I am worthless, clever, but shallow, talented but aimless—that means, I don't care to make big money! A stomach of energy without head or tail or grasp. Women rarely love a man for himself. At least not women of the higher, refined society. They think it beneath them. I wish I had had the sense to marry a working girl.'

Stewart was inexpressibly shocked; his fork stayed in the air. But he liked Alphendéry. ‘You can divorce your wife.'

There was commiseration in Alphendéry's face: he smiled, ‘Poor thing! She's counting on Theus's marrying her. He likes his own wife too well. True, he doesn't sleep with her but he likes her. If I divorce her, where will she be? Poor, silly, vain, spendthrift, dishonest, shameful, beautiful Estelle! Where will she be then? She is not in love with anyone. Where would she be, divorced, adrift on the tides of society, trying to pick her living off men? Where do they all end up? I know a woman here—she has every natural advantage—the mistress of Achitophelous: what a charming, lovable, gracious, beautiful girl! And she is worn to a shadow calculating who's going to marry her next and what to do with her money to make it safe so that one or other of her quondam lovers won't take it back from her and what to do to grind a bit more out of her lovers and how to put up with the rest of her friends who hate her and whom she detests, and how to keep her beauty and late hours and what on earth she's going to do in exactly five years when she's forty! And her answer is—suicide! Of course, I don't think she will. There is still time for more prostitution in the grand manner, and selling herself to dressmakers and wearing new styles in jewelry for jewelers and going a bit to grand houses of rendezvous and scrounging her way on to yachts and in to banquets and wearing out the pity of her friends, and drugs and drink and sanatariums and the inexperience of a couple of young men, and then, perhaps, by the merest luck, some obscure hideous marriage, or mother, or some still loyal brother, and an old age full of lies. She sees it all. And in her I see Estelle. This delightful Mimi comes round to the bank now making a hell of a row if her stocks drop a point: she expects us to make it up to her—and Jules sometimes does, just to stop the noise. She is always sitting on the edge of her statement of account peering for mistakes in percentages, calling us up on the telephone, trying to gouge us, trying to jew us down from two and one-half to one and one-half per cent, trying to get it for nothing, squabbling about ten shares, wetting three handkerchiefs for half a share of stock dividend, outacting three Sarah Bernhardts for the sake of one hundred francs. And still she's a woman, and she once had a life fuller of promise than mine ever was, because of the ease of life for a beautiful woman! I'm sorry for her, I can't help it. I'm here and I forget Estelle. When she's old, I'll send her a little income if I've still got it and if not, she's got her brother and mother. She likes me in a way; she wishes me no harm.' Stewart, with knife and fork poised, said, ‘If it were not for the immortality of the soul, life would not be worth living.' Alphendéry raised his respectacled eyes attentively and let them rest on the pink lead-pencil face. Stewart laid down his knife and fork. ‘I have been in the City since I was a boy of twelve. I like it. I'm a businessman. But if I didn't feel that Jesus Christ was leading me ‘towards that distant Aiden' the endless rough-and-tumble would be insupportable. Don't you agree with me, Michel?'

Alphendéry looked at Stewart's steak with anxiety. He half pointed at it, but desisted, ‘No, I'm an atheist, Stewart. My father and his father before him were atheists.'

‘Yes, but whatever you believe in, whatever the Principle is, gives you courage, I mean.'