House of All Nations (79 page)

They therefore concocted a letter between them and sent it after getting Jules's lazy consent. He was sick of them; although, if they appeared, he thought they were fair game and then willingly played the part they handed him.

The very next morning the ambassadors from Germany to the Bertillon Bank hove in sight.

‘We insist on having Mr. Alphendéry brought in.'

‘Talk to me,' said Jules hotly. ‘I'm the head here: no one else has anything to say.'

‘If we are not readmitted at once, our demands satisfied, Jacques Manray at least transferred, and Mr. Alphendéry's real position in the firm revealed to us, we have no other course but to sue.'

Jules tried to pacify them, both because he had nothing else to do at the moment and because the Parouart, Wade and Carrière cases had for the first time made him tired of suits. Alphendéry arrived on wings, armed for them, having tossed and turned the affair over since the day before.

‘Gentlemen, I am obliged to tell you you are wrong on twenty-two counts and that if you go to law you will get nothing but a bill of costs!' He laughed, his white teeth danced, he positively caressed them with a glance.

‘We'll see to that.'

‘Moreover, don't forget that you are aliens in this country. I don't say that because it means anything to us: as you know I personally have always been your deepest friend; but law courts habitually treat a foreigner worse than a native.'

Guildenstern thrust back, ‘Don't forget that you yourselves can't very well stand another lawsuit. We know that you have two million francs tied up in the Bank of France already, more in the Crédit, more in the Bank of Paris. We have nothing to lose but a desk. You are ready to crumble. We can bring you down. You have no alternative but to compromise with us.'

‘You still have something to learn—' began Alphendéry, but Jules broke in, ‘What would be your demands?'

Alphendéry signaled to Jules to let him continue, but Jules rudely turned sideways so that he would not see him. This was perceived by both the complainants, who likewise turned their backs on him.

‘First,' said Guildenstern, ‘who is the last authority in this institution: and to whom have we the pleasure of talking when we talk to Mr. Alphendéry?'

‘Talk to me. I am the bank,' said Jules, in a high tone. ‘Mr. Alphendéry is my employee like any other.'

‘Has Mr. Alphendéry any say in the bank's policies?'

‘None whatever: he is a mere salaried employee. He has nothing whatever to do with the policy of the bank.'

‘Then we are to ignore him? We are to ignore the letter sent by him to us yesterday?'

‘Certainly. The letter was sent without my knowledge. I didn't want it. I was not consulted.'

Alphendéry had gone very pale and said nothing.

‘Then' (triumphantly) ‘if that is his position, how is it that we have an agreement signed by him?'

Jules stirred, looked at his long white fingers tapping on the table. ‘You insisted on signing with Alphendéry. Who am I to stop you? Alphendéry is of no importance. He has not even power of attorney. Your funeral! If you look at the paper you see it has no seal, no counter-signature. Your haste!'

Guildenstern said impatiently, ‘It's a trick.'

Alphendéry rushed in, in a hard voice, ‘You have only yourselves to blame. You came here and hoped to get the wedge in through me. You began by dividing the bank against itself. German politics! You thought you'd get Jew against Gentile, subordinate authority against senior, me against Mr. Bertillon. You worked the Jewish-brotherhood racket with me, trying to wheedle the secrets of the bank out of me, and then you tried to sap behind my back in conference with Mr. Jules. You have the hate of both instead of the confidence of all. You expect Frenchmen to work under the whip like your countrymen?'

Rosenkrantz flushed and turned to him, but Guildenstern turned quick as a snake to Jules: ‘Since this man has no authority here, why does he insult us? Will you ask him to leave the room!'

Jules, irritated beyond endurance by the whole thing, which he had started as a tragicomedy, said, ‘Leave us alone, Alphendéry.'

‘I have only worked for your interest, Jules. Why do you allow these two men to flatter you at my expense?'

‘Leave the room, I tell you.'

A despicable triumph showed on the faces of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

Rushing blindly out, Michel ran into William.

William looked, swung to the door. ‘What's he done now?'

‘Ask him. He threw me out at the request of our faithful friends, the Heavenly Twins.'

‘He's out of his mind.'

‘I don't know and I don't care. I'm never coming back again.'

Madder than before, Alphendéry rushed into the corridor, his eyes starting from his head. William showed a rare alacrity and tenderness. ‘Come into Plowman's room.'

‘No, I've got to get out of here.'

‘Wait till I get my hat … I'll tell him that if he insults you, I leave too.'

‘And leave him at their mercy?'

‘Why not? If he wants to commit suicide, let him. I'm through. Mlle. Dalbi! I'll be out fifteen minutes at least. If anyone calls from Brussels, you talk to them.'

But no sooner were Jules, Rosenkrantz, and Guildenstern together than his fury turned on them and theirs on him, and they parted the worst of friends.

Alphendéry returned with William to his work, soon after his hurried exit, but he did not speak to Jules, nor Jules to him, for three days. Jules, in fact, went about the bank with a stormy and martyred air and comforted himself for his behavior to Alphendéry by telling Plowman several times that Alphendéry was responsible for the misfortunes of the bank; and he found it easy to justify himself. As did Alphendéry.

However, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern had their own hobbies, and three days later Alphendéry found himself served with a blue paper, in their name, emanating from the bailiff who served one of Dr. Carrière's lawyers, the notorious Maître Lallant. He ran into William.

‘Here's the clue! They have gone to Carrière's lawyer. The plot thickens.'

‘I don't like it,' William said calmly. ‘It was a bad move to take them in, a worse to throw them out. Those boys are hard luck. You're too heady, Michel. We can't afford any more lawsuits. Especially as the lawsuit king is too grand to speak to us and too expensive to put his hand to the plow himself. It only means a dozen more headaches for you and me.'

‘Don't worry: I'll fight it all myself,' said Alphendéry.

And Jules said to Claire-Josèphe, ‘Those boys are ruining me. It would be cheaper for me to turn William and Michel out to pasture and keep them as I keep Paul and Francis.'

‘Do it, then, Jules darling,' she urged, with some anxiety. ‘Jules, we have four sons. We have to think of them first. We've had our chance.'

‘Yes. I'll run the bank my own way.'

‘Yes, do it, Jules darling. They're always giving you the wrong advice and you listen to them … Jules, does it pay us?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Let's take the money, darling, and go away with it. We owe our children so much. If you keep on, you'll keep paying out money to all sorts of people who have enough. I'd never forgive myself if I thought I'd not given the children their future. They've got to have a start.'

He waved his hand carelessly, ‘Claire, their great-grandmother is still living and rolling in cash. They have nothing to fear.'

‘Well, at any rate, I want you to segregate the money for them right away, Jules. We must do it tomorrow.'

‘All right.'

* * *

Scene Sixty-six: Façade

T
he more Michel looked at these façades, fine furnishings, crystal panes, brass rods, chased mirrors, carved frames, and soft carpets, the more depressed he became, the more was he convinced that he had to leave the bank and find another job. This came not only from his natural penchant for simplicity but also from a constant guilty picture in his mind's eye: a ganger sweating on the permanent way and the subtitle ‘these stones, grilles, mahoganies came that way.' It was too much: it was too good.

Raccamond, on the other hand, coming from a sturdy artisan family, which handed down its carved peasant wardrobes and beds from generation to generation, and where lace curtains and linen were still given as part of the marriage portion, was admirably affected by all this, thinking that the grilles in Bertillon's bank, the gilt letters in the Place du Palais de Justice in Brussels and all the rest, with the marquis customers' men and the Rothschild glorified office boys, were all the result of generations of accumulation and saving and only the just reward of a good hard-working breed. For the first time, Aristide, with a new conspectus of the bank and its affiliates, in his mind's eye, looked upon Bertillon's as one of the rising houses. With the hoarding instinct of his blood, he saw Bertillon going from one to the other of his relations by marriage and birth, weaving them into a pattern of his own, or as building a pyramid of influence, stone on stone.

Alphendéry had begun by teasing him but was soon anxious to convince him that the bank was the Canaan of his dreams. ‘If Raccamond is there,' thought Michel, with a sudden access of weariness, ‘he will fight off the Bomba, out of self-interest, and he will help William, for William will not desert his brother, for all he says. Raccamond will marry himself spiritually to the family Bertillon and a good union it will be. And I shall be free: free to starve, but free, and I won't starve.'

Like a lion Aristide now leaped on all the morsels that Alphendéry threw him: he walked among the cities of Europe absorbed in himself and the possible grandeur of the house of Bertillon, Raccamond and Company. He haunted by day and by night the fine white walls and arched entries of the bank and its foreign depots, already talking to the clerks in a haughty tone, with that breath of inner confidence which a feudal master uses in talking to old servants. His head was feverish at night; his dreams were thick and threaded with anxieties—he saw himself bald, gone white in a night, suddenly old and nerveless; he feared that all this would take place before he had the position he had worked and lied and betrayed for all these years in Paris. When he got up in the morning, he had himself well groomed, well perfumed, and then rushed off, passionate, strung up, to the office he was visiting, or to someone who could give him information about persons in the service of the bank. He was always there before Alphendéry, listened silently to everything Alphendéry said in the careless largesse of rhetoric, kept a diary and noted everything down in it, all the connections, all the scandals, all the pipe lines.

Raccamond found that an accountant was lacking in the Brussels office, and he installed there Posset, a man who had worked with him in Léon's office ten years before and who became entirely his creature, being fabulously grateful for the job. Inspired by Raccamond's rich dress, fine eating, dignified air, and the solemnity with which he spoke of himself and the house and moved to a real distrust of and disgust with Alphendéry, whom he pictured as a sort of shifty, horned beast, Posset promised to serve Director Raccamond in all things. Raccamond unfolded his plans to this unfortunate fellow in a
brasserie
in the St. Hubert Gallery in Brussels one midday, the day after he entered the Brussels downtown office in the Place de la Gare.

‘You are now getting three thousand francs monthly?'

‘Yes, Director. Really, I don't know what I would have done. I'd given up believing in Santa Claus and you turned up. I had thought of doing away with myself. You may be sure I'll be as loyal to you as your own brother.'

‘Good. I told you my plan for reorganization: a strictly methodical business organization parallel with the splendid organism of social relations set up by the Bertillons.'

‘It's a very fine system, Director.'

‘You have to go carefully, not arouse jealousy or suspicion, not annoy old employees: that would not help me at all. But these older employees are embedded in the more or less feudal old business habits of the firm. I want to introduce New World efficiency. I will consult with you. Forward me copies of any books or documents which seem strange to you: we will unravel all the knots. You know these branches are never visited. There has been no check-up. It is a scandal. You understand!'

‘Perfectly, Director.' And only a shadow round his eyes showed where a smile and even a leer would have stood in more prosperous days.

‘If anything unusual comes your way and you can send me a memorandum, send it by registered post to my home address. Some of the secretaries at the bank have a habit of opening mail. Telegraph me if you find cause. Take it out of office expenses, naturally. And you have my home address?'

‘Yes. I'll do everything you want, Director. I will never forget what I owe you!'

There is something disconcerting in proclamations of indebtedness: the next creditor is entitled to the same fidelity! A crumbling rock on which to build a career; but Raccamond had been in quagmires. Moreover, Raccamond was building a dike and had determined to stop up all possible leaks with the fingers of accountants and others owing him a debt of gratitude. According to the system, he had also installed, within the last few weeks, his former clerk, Perrier, in the Amsterdam office. He was curious about the way the bank made money, about the accounts held abroad, the amounts paid out, the brokers, salaries. Perrier had been reporting, he was none too lucid. He had a jealous suspicion still of Alphendéry: rumor said he had been well paid through participations with the Bertillons in the past. Aristide had cultivated Alphendéry's company during the last few weeks, listened with great attention to everything he said, sifted and weighed, trying to find out his net worth, and his position in the bank. But Alphendéry, with all his fire, his aphorisms and inconstancies, his continual generalizations and philosophies, was constant in one thing: he represented himself as a poor man interested in the poor, and he ridiculed and ran down the rich all day long. This was a jigsaw that Aristide had to put together. Alphendéry, far from reflecting Aristide's jealousy, was far too open for comfort.