House of All Nations (49 page)

‘Oh, yes, there are things I have faith in. Principles.' He hesitated and pointed mildly, ‘Your steak, Ralph—don't let it get cold.'

Obediently Stewart took a bite. Alphendéry cautiously, but with insistence, nodded at the glass of wine. Stewart drank some wine, obediently. He went on, ‘You know, Alphendéry—you know Austin Friars?—I look down from my window and just for a moment, I know there is a haven for me outside all those things.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in the green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul
.' A rapt expression floated on the sharp, raffish features. Alphendéry looked round. ‘
He prepareth a banquet for me in the presence of mine enemies
,' went on Stewart, ‘
and I will dwell in the House of the Lord for ever
. I see it before me, there in Austin Friars, you know, the pastures, the still waters. That gives me comfort. That was why I took the places in Virginia Water and on Lake Windermere. I—'

Alphendéry slid in,
sotto voce
, ‘Your steak, Stewart.'

He ate, chewing it thoughtfully, ‘This steak! Why is it so fine, Michel? Because the cow itself delights in green pastures. Poor beast. I suppose it spent a few happy months before it was led to the slaughterhouse. I never could hold with the vegetarians. I want you to come down to my place over the week end, next time you come to London, Michel. I go to church twice on Sunday. The service is Anglican, but I go because it's the only church near and the singing is so good. But the Anglicans sing praises of their Redeemer through stiff collars.' Alphendéry, with an amazed look, as of a man who finds himself sleepwalking, motioned to the waiter.

‘You'll like it,' insisted Stewart. ‘Strawberries and cream for me, please. It's simply extraordinary how I like strawberries. They give some people a rash. By Jove, those are fine specimens, aren't they? Some have been gathered with white tips, of course. A thing that should never be done. A strawberry should be eaten straight off the soil: it loses its taste after a few hours. Good, these. It's because, I suppose, there are no fresh ones to compare them with. You'll like the Sunday-morning service, even though it's quite High Church, very snobbish in fact. I disapprove of anything High Church: Banners, Vestments. No, most amazing how Protestants can stomach it. These strawberries are really good. I had no idea the French had such strawberries. Well, what did Richard Ford say, “We can't beat the Continent at two things—dancing and pastry”? Do you like strawberry jam, Michel? My housekeeper puts up very good strawberry jam. It's all a question of the amount of sugar put in and the sealing. The pots should be sealed with paraffin, dated, and used in sequence. I put in the sugar myself.'

‘I don't like sweets, Stewart; they're fattening.'

‘Yes.' He took a sip of coffee, made a face, took another sip. He began to gobble. ‘Strange you're not a Christian, religious I mean, Alphendéry. A man and his philosophy are all of one piece, of course. No one has a right to know what passes between a man and his Maker. You always struck me as a man of principle—feeling, too. Very much so! At home in my garden, I like to ponder these things, in the week end: questions of life and death, immortality, our destiny. There's a very good book, I must lend you—you'd like it.
Our Duty to God, Man, and Ourselves
, by Timothy Bletherall. A man is all alone in this world.'

‘Yes, he is alone unless he interests himself in man's fate.' Alphendéry sat up straight.

‘Quite so,' said Stewart, not listening, ‘and it seems to me that the reason the English have their Empire is that they are true Christians.'

‘I beg pardon!' Alphendéry caught himself up. ‘You mean they believe firmly they're doing the right thing, no matter what.'

‘Exactly,' agreed Stewart eagerly. ‘Look at the missionaries we send out to savages and heathens, Mohammedans, and Chinese; look at India. How else do we hold India? God in our work. Not only bearing a Bible but a plowshare. The most successful colonists in the world—in history, my dear fellow! We have been blessed with the fruits of the earth.
The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof. The world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the Seas. This is the generation of them that seek him
. You see, amazingly apt. I take off my hat whenever I pass in front of the Royal Exchange and see that:
The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof
. There is always something amazingly inspiring about the crossing at the Bank of England.
He is the King of glory
. You see what we English feel is that the Empire is a dedication: the proof as well as offering of our service to Jesus Christ. You know the parable of the one talent and the ten talents … Hey, boy,
garçon, un journal
. What's the name of the sheet?'

Alphendéry, slowly waking from a nightmare, said with a pale face, ‘
Paris-Midi
.'

‘Odd little rag. So unlike our English press. “Farmer Finds a Corpse in Well.” Real French news, eh?'

Alphendéry, with the soft crumpling spring of a baby leopard, seized one sheet as it fell and devoured the noon stock prices. ‘Woe is me, Alhama!' Stewart looked severely at him. Alphendéry shook his head, ‘I'm afraid most of our bear customers have lost money. I'll have to call for margins. That Raccamond will be scuttling for cover. He nearly dies of fright when his customers lose. I always have to face the embattled comtesses and ‘rectify' their accounts. They also always think that God is—or should be—always on their side. And if not God, their banker.'

‘Eh?' said Stewart.

‘I mean, to get rich or powerful a man has to have God working for him,' said Alphendéry cryptically. ‘I mean history.'

‘Ah,' Stewart shook his head archly, ‘you call it history; I call it God. But we think the same, Michel; I rather thought so.' He was pink with satisfaction.

* * *

Scene Forty-six: Friend of the King

T
hey taxied back to the bank, through the hot, asphalted streets, crumby with people, cars, scaffoldings. ‘I met the King of Spain once,' said Stewart. ‘He's a charming fellow really. Good businessman. Of course, the family has this disease, haemophilia. If he gets a scratch he bleeds profusely. Dreadful, isn't it? One would have to be careful. These overrefined old strains, you know. Comes from Louis XIV or someone like that, doesn't it? Probably a legend. You know their lives must be a mass of legend. I shouldn't like to be a king; most uncomfortable. Our royal family, of course, has always been so clean; no trace of any hereditary weakness, like these Continental families. Murthen met the King, our King, I mean, of course. In fact, he's quite a friend of the King, as much as one can be of a man like that whose entire life is public. In fact (you won't repeat this?), we've done a fair amount of business for the King on several occasions. Not for him directly, of course. And Murthen says he's really a delightful soul, virile, of course, absolutely practical, not at all unworldly as you might suppose, surrounded by chamberlains and not hearing the facts. But the King insists on reading the daily papers and acquaints himself with everything he comes in contact with, meets people, reads the stock-exchange prices; most creditable, isn't it? And so simple, Murthen says, not a bit of put-on. It's really rather wonderful. I think we English are to be congratulated on the way we manage the whole business. No frill and yet full dignity. Now, our King, Murthen says, if someone said to you, “That's the KING OF ENGLAND,” you'd say, “Not a bit of it: that's plain Jack Windsor!” It's all so simple, done without any fuss and frill.'

‘You've got to be careful with the King,' mused Alphendéry. ‘He'll be a danger one of these days like all stale, rotten institutions. One party or another will use him and then one class or another will have to get rid of the whole family.'

Stewart smiled pityingly. ‘The English don't think like that.'

‘No? Your name is funny.'

Stewart flushed. ‘Yes, once, as a lesson, but never again. We originate: we don't repeat.' He teetered as if at a very good joke.

‘There's William just coming back from his beer and sausages,' said Alphendéry delightedly looking out the taxi window as if he and William had been separated for a year. ‘Don't be misled by his manner, Stewart: he's a wonderful fellow, the soul of the bank—one of its souls. It has a soul, a ghost, a wraith, a spook, a double, a reflection, and a shadow, like an old Jew. He's the soul. Pretends to be thorny but that's all part of his game—his game in life, I suppose. He acts the crusty bachelor but his pockets are warm and wet with generosity. Really I never met such a foolishly, even nauseatingly generous man. After the first few months I got to love William.'

They stood on the doorstep. ‘Silly notion to act like that all the same.' Stewart was irritated. ‘You ought to speak to him, Alphendéry. It's all so simple. He-can-think-what he-likes, no-need-to-say-it. He was down there this morning saying a lot of darn silly things. Jules Bertillon, too.' He turned, offended, away from the entrance hall and looked out into the cool street. The sun lay overhead; the leaves in the Rothschild garden hung like sun-bathing philosophers, shone but made no sound, asleep.

As they entered Stewart said
,
‘A cosmopolitan crowd.' Alphendéry exclaimed, ‘Jules with his imaginative schemes, lavish spending, gay antics, disordered gilded postwar harlequinade, his playing bowls when the Armada is sailing down on him, appeals to these war boys, who have never settled down from flying, thieving, rampaging, giving orders, camping with the boys, raping the girls, spending their leave in cabarets and all the other sublunacies of the day, as it saw the sun fourteen short years ago. These rich young men had a grand spree then and they never want to grow up. Jules understands them. They flock to him. He will not grow up and accept his fate. He always reserves for himself in the future some great sunburst noon when he'll play truant. I don't think he could change. Out of his setting he would lose money. At present he doesn't seem able to. He's coining money.'

‘And also paving the streets with it,' said Stewart.

Alphendéry started and laid his hand on Stewart's arm. ‘He has private orders with you?'

‘Big ones,' said Stewart. ‘Some days Bertillon makes the market in London and in New York in certain stocks.' His voice dropped to a whisper.

‘Good afternoon, Etienne,' said Alphendéry. ‘Any letters for me?'

‘Yes, sir. Here.'

‘Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern: their usual! This letter,' Alphendéry showed a five-page, close-written spiderweb scrawl, ‘is from one of our lunatics. Do you get many?'

‘Oh, dozens of them. He wants money. They're lunatics but they act like clockwork. They're so mad that they all want the one thing and it's the same thing that you and I want, but they want it with a decision and energy that I'd like to see in my clerks but not in my competitors. There's method in madness. I just throw them in the wastepaper basket. Never write to them. Never write to anyone. A mistake in business. No letters. It's all so simple then.'

‘Poor Légaré!—he was born with that name!—all he wants is five hundred thousand francs. Now a sane blackmailer, Stewart, asks for ten thousand and settles for two thousand.' He looked at the letter. ‘He says that we really owe him a couple of millions, but knowing what sadistic ruffians we are, he'll settle for one hundred thousand.'

‘Or else he'll go to the Criminal Investigation Division,' Stewart commented bitterly.

‘Naturally.'

‘Whenever I see a man of mine getting discontented or moody, unless it's his wife, I send him to a doctor and if it isn't his liver or his lungs I sack him. Even then I usually do. I don't give him time to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Send him packing before he has a sense of injustice. It's really quite simple. Can't stand stupidity or animal resentment in man or beast, woman, dog, or horse. Sulks are the black flag of blackmail.'

‘Légaré seemed quite bright on the contrary,' lamented Alphendéry. ‘I liked that man. Now he's turned against me, too.'

‘Be kinder if you could shut them up the minute they started getting poky.'

‘I'm not much of an authority on madness. Everyone has his lunacies. Suppose you told Breton fishermen that in Paris men sit all day watching figures jumping on a blackboard, some red, some white, and, some yellow, and that they throw away on red, yellow, and white chalk dust a fisherman's annual pay, enough to keep a miner and his family in comfort, enough to pay him an old-age pension from forty on and that they think heaven should reward them for their labor in watching the figures jump a thousand times as much as heaven rewards the fisherman for risking his life in storms at sea, wouldn't those fishermen think those Parisians quite mad?'

‘If you put it that way, I suppose. You're quite a socialist, aren't you, Alphendéry?'

‘I favor socialist organization,' said Michel.

Stewart bit his lip. ‘You mean, Alphendéry, business should be organized. I quite agree. Fishermen—'

‘Don't tell me what I mean, Ralph,' cried Alphendéry. ‘I mean a revolution to wipe us all out, all of us who scrounge on others and ravage the wealth of the world—you and Jules Bertillon and me. We must all go.'

‘No,' said Stewart, ‘of course not. I'm quite in sympathy with new methods myself. I think new brooms should sweep clean. I came into business without any backing myself, and got on through being with a new firm of young men. I quite agree that old firms should be broken up, like old models. And I suppose we are—even you and me—more or less old models, compared with, say, a Jules Bertillon.' He looked dubious and became thoughtful. ‘But big interests use men like that to conceal their hand?' He searched Alphendéry's face. ‘Jules Bertillon is very mysterious.'