House of All Nations (50 page)

While Alphendéry stayed down in the stock-exchange room, he went up to see Jules Bertillon, very much put out, rattled; ill at ease, and he scarcely knew why. He said to Jules, ‘Alphendéry was just talking of the Five-Year Plan and although I think state socialism is a monstrous mistake—machine planning, the draftsman, can never take into account the psychology of the market, the question of supply and demand—for if a man could foresee that, how would we make a living? Still, as I was saying, it is true that peasants have no idea of getting the most out of the land. Look at all the time they've been working the land, since the Middle Ages!' He looked round, feeling something cold at his back, and saw Alphendéry's shrewd expression and half-smile as he came through the door. Irritably, he added a codicil, ‘This childish idea of making the law for the rich and the poor the same: it's absurd, they haven't the same responsibilities! As well make the same door for a stable and a kennel.'

Jules, who regarded Stewart as a serious bore, and always thought of everyone in his game as a grafter with grappling irons and nothing more, fixed a bright glance on him and let his thoughts wander.

Jules began to whistle softly, being in the fever of some new scheme. He wished Stewart would go. Trying to get him to buy back his position. Idiot. Did he think he ever sold them really? Did he think the world wasn't going to smash, British Empire or no? Did he think the Union Jack could keep the market up just by giving a sodden flap? Stupid Englishman. He imagined a Frenchman could never work out
his
schemes. Well, Stewart came to Paris for his own good. Let him rave. ‘I'll bet there's a good graft in pesetas in Gibraltar. Say, don't you think you ought to send Constant down to Gibraltar? He looks Spanish and speaks English. They say the hotel business is booming in London now, Stewart, expecting the barons of Spain to take refuge in their royal suites for a while. Gee, how those boys can rob! They don't have to pay anything back to their peons, practically. A lesson for our boys, with their social-insurance schemes. They keep on taking it out of the soil and they put nothing back, not so much as a sou of fertilizer. They're bright babies! Why don't we learn something? We've got to get the world down to a pauper economy: all the same-color pants, all the same paper hats, all the same rope shoes, like the Spaniards. Jesus, the Duke of Alva makes more every year than I make with all my tricks. Now, take the Duke. He has about one hundred thousand peons, Zurbaran told me. Say he gets two pesetas out of them a day, on the average all through the year. How much is that a year, Michel?' He started to write on his block. ‘I'm just working it out, Stewart. A second. Don't talk about the peasants,' he laughed at Stewart. ‘We're the ones who are ninnies. I say, Stewart, I want to tell you something. A stone crop makes a lot of money for the landlord, don't worry. Michel, two pesetas surplus value a day.'

‘What sort of value, did you say?' queried Stewart, stiff but mystified.

‘Oh, ask Alphendéry. That's a swell phrase of Alphendéry, meaning they squeeze two pesetas by taking a pint of their blood every day and rendering it down. When it boils right down there's two pesetas there.' His wild, eerie laughter rang round the room. ‘Now, Michel, say they all work all the year. It's good land, isn't it? Christ above, that's seventy million pesetas a year, every year, not counting what they've got saved up from centuries of stealing—and they pass their own laws and that they're all in the army.' He looked warmly desirous, with shining eyes. ‘What a game, Michel! I've been a fool all my life, working my brains out in dark rooms, trying to scoop the stock exchange. Upon my word, Michel, I'm beginning to think the original, stupid, caveman, Abraham-and-Isaac rackets are the best.'

‘The old Jews returned the land to the people every fifty years,' Alphendéry murmured hastily. Jules took no notice.

‘What are we wasting our time here for, Stewart, spending all our lives sweating in dark board rooms and dirty streets, with sad little chiselers setting private dicks on our tracks, with haughty girls that come screeching for profits straight from the latest title they've whored for? We could go out, sit in the sun, squat on a big bit of land, and set some poor dumb peasants to work and sit back and collect the rent out of the clods of sticky, wormy brown dirt. Isn't there some country left, Alphendéry, where you can go out and get the government to throw selections at you free if you introduce a few sheep? Do we make seventy million pesetas a year? No, we're pikers, Stewart, that's what we are. I don't say Alphendéry here, for he doesn't care for dough—he's mad—but you and I, Stewart, spend our whole lives dreaming about it, and getting indigestion for it. And where does the Duke of Godoy sit? Not here. No sir! He sits in Cannes, Hendaye, and Barcelona and lets the monkey men grub for him. They do it, too. Ask my boys downstairs to run the bank and send me the profits, and they'll all have worked out by tomorrow afternoon some scheme for stealing my money—but there's a mystery in the earth. No one wants to run away from it. And they think in terms of clods. They never think of robbing him of one little peseta.'

‘No?' said faraway the musing voice of Alphendéry, but Jules didn't hear it.

‘Listen, Stewart. You think I'm a nitwit, don't you, because I have in my bank all this flossy crowd of young milkbellies. But they've got the easy, perennial, soft, regular, steep dough, Stewart. Because they all come from primitive lands where those peons grub for them in the sun. It doesn't depend on a turn of the market and they're not mean. They don't care whether your accountant, who has cancer, left out ten francs or not. That's the crowd to be with, Stewart. And if your sons go with the huntin' and fishin' and ridin' sets, you're lucky. That's the big money.'

‘Not in England: there's been a change,' said Alphendéry, softly, unheeded.

‘Listen, Michel, what do you say to hiring a fleet of wherries to pick up the Spanish refugees while the scare is still on and they're still running away?'

‘Idiotic,' said Michel. ‘What do you think there is, a reign of terror?'

Jules sighed, ‘Don't get peevish, Michel. If I didn't have crazy ideas, sometimes, I'd go crazy. You can tell how sane a man is by the number of crazy ideas he has. Be careful of a man who's always solemn. Either he's religious or he hates you. In either case he'll blackmail you. Like that Raccamond. Wish I could sell him to someone.'

The conversation languished. Jules meditated. Stewart, nervous as a filly, sat upright in his pale gray suit and looked pink: his small blue eyes dilated and shifted with a hesitating intention. ‘I say,' said Jules, having lost his spring, ‘Stewart, we've all got to think up some new dodges.' He revived, ‘Tons of money changing hands: some of it ought to go on our weighbridge. I want to see some real money. That's it,' Jules cried, his long hands, white collar, long money-sniffing nose with the gambler's drop of flesh pendent at the end, all coming together into a composition of sober acuity. ‘While it's on the wing, you whistle to it, see! That's not hard luck, that's good luck. Why, if all their money were safely tied up in government funds, Indian Railways, Shanghai tramcars, Argentine meat, thriving estates, safe percentages, sure crops, priest-ridden patient brutes of peasants, if there were no soviets, no Red propaganda, only Nicholas and Alfonso and God, only Alva and Medina-Sidonia still on their thrones drinking the dew off the mountains, all the water out of the rivers, where would a man like me be? I shouldn't have a bean. But as it is—the storm is good for wreckers, the river that changes its course over the sands lets prospectors go down and find the specks of gold in the shifting bed. I don't believe, Stewart, that there's any sense in spending one minute lamenting about the age of unrest. All ages have been ages of unrest. Haven't they, Michel? Michel knows: he told me all about it. Money was never safe. It's too valuable.' He laughed. ‘Any more than a beautiful virgin is safe. Everyone wants it. You always had to protect money with mantraps, laws, and the militia. I wouldn't give a halfpenny to have the prewar world here again, Stewart. Surely, I don't object to the restoration of a monarchy or anything like that. Do you know why, Stewart? Because every time a king is put back he makes new nobles, and new chaps get the money. He doesn't put the old crowd back: no fear. He doesn't want that grudging jealous lot with boundary-fence complaint. He wants a new crowd, everyone of whom will be grateful to him. Well, what is that? Another transfer of funds. Another lot of sanguine money that can be easily brought into your paddock. I say, what's the matter with you fellows sitting round groaning it's not worth while making money? I wouldn't own a gold mine today. I don't have to mine my gold.'

Alphendéry's low voice broke in, ‘A private banker has to watch his step though, Jules. When the Crédit Lyonnais goes broke, it's a patriotic duty to support it out of taxes. When we go kaput, it's a patriotic duty to see we take a taxi to the Santé. If you don't join up with the big boys, they'll scuttle you.'

‘I know, I know,' said Jules irritably. ‘That's where you make a big mistake, Stewart, with your king business. They'll have to get rid of the king to have an exchange of dough; they won't want to afford a king and all his grandsons and nieces, soon. Too many unemployed to keep already.'

‘You don't know my people,' Stewart remarked with a trace of pity.

‘Of course, they'll lose their jobs,' Jules flung out his hand. ‘Ptt! You don't think they're going to spend another hundred years working their bottoms off for a chap who doesn't even know their names, do you?' Stewart shrugged his shoulders and bit his lip. Jules smiled but in a moment, impatient, cried, ‘Big money! This isn't getting us anywhere. One-quarter per cent, one-half per cent, even two per cent! I want highflying cash, beautiful cash, in platoons, in platoons, zooming; I want it big, rich, and plentiful, and all mine. And I will get it, by heck.' He got up restlessly, longing like a girl in love, looked at his half-empty bookcases. ‘I don't like these empty shelves, Michel. We've got to fill them. I want you to do that for me. Tomorrow! Send Adam Constant a couple of hundred pounds and tell him to scour the bookshops in London and get all the classics—banking, everything. I want it to look like a big-time show. Tomorrow you go down to the Rue Jacob and—you know best and get about—three hundred books. All good: only get the very best writers and the classics. I don't want any second-rate stuff. No simili-backs. That'll frighten them.' He paced, took positions. ‘I'll arrange the light this way. Take that big Italian candlestick away, Michel. I look like the Pope. One is enough. I'll put the luster on full to see. This chair here. Like that. How do you think it looks, Stewart? And the shelves full of books. Yes. Do that, Michel. Don't forget.'

‘The ginks who come in here can't read,' Michel said tartly.

‘It would be quite effective,' Stewart considered.

‘That's the idea; fool them, impress them, flatter them, take away their money, eh, Stewart?' He was feverish.

Stewart's restless intention gushed out. He lifted his nose so that his eyes were out of Jules's line of vision, reconsidered, brought them back again. Boring into Jules's now impatient eyes, Stewart began to babble a word twenty syllables long: ‘When-Christ-cast-the-moneychangers-out-of-the-Temple, he-cast-no-imputations-on: the prohibition against usury was a tenet of the Old Testament. Usury, as Jeremy Bentham shows, only arises when it is prohibited. Christ said, ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'; he himself took money from a fish's belly. There is nothing unclean about money as such. In my own office I discourage light cynicism about finance. Take the custom of wearing top hats into the city, for bank clerks and stockbrokers' clerks! It gives finance dignity! There are too many outside the city, who ignore finance and commerce, their alpha and their omega, who talk about filthy lucre; but finance is the heart's blood of the national economy as London is the heart of a great commonwealth of peoples. The people see a bank clerk wearing a top hat and a morning coat in the tube in the morning. They know he's poor but he has the dignity of the power, experience, wealth of the men who rule the nation. They know they couldn't run the nation. And so respect on respect, you keep order in the country.'

He was deadly serious; he looked at Jules, who smiled in his sleeve.

‘Another thing … I don't like a loose discussion on general principles. If a clerk of mine says to me, I see the market is wobbly,' I make him show me the exact paragraph, the exact quotation. If he says, “I see there's going to be investment in real estate,” the same thing. Loose discussion enervates in master or man; it takes the mind off the immediate job. What is the good of trying to take a ramble in the middle distance? Ramble on your own garden path.'

He gobbled a little. ‘They get to think they can make money by easy, slick, even fraudulent,' he said with immense distaste, ‘even fraudulent methods, by all sorts of chicane, and the human mind is too impregnated with that by nature. We have only ourselves to blame,' he said in a lower tone and giving Jules an accusing look. ‘The worship of the ruling classes saves money. Things get done in our country without upheaval, without petition, without questions in Parliament. Our nation is a business nation. The ruling minds do not waste money on philanthropy or the arts or the theater, the way they do on the Continent. The people can see they are intent on their business. They respect them for it. England is the greatest taxmaster with the least frill and the fewest lackeys,' he said with deeprooted patriotic pride. ‘We do not have to buy our servants. An Englishman is proud to serve. Here people certainly think that they have every right to chatter day and night about other people's affairs. Ignorant reformers and poor get-on-quick demagogues from the lower orders are too prone to that sort of thing by nature and it is the lack of tradition and classic principle in themselves, a sort of catchpenny, basic cynicism about themselves and other men, due to lack of education, which keeps them where they were born, poor and unsuccessful. They end up in jail for all their catch phrases and misleading the poor workers!