House of All Nations (112 page)

‘Ah, you'll come back to me, Michel; you'll be back with me before you know it. You need me. I give you rein. You'll find out.'

Michel laughed. ‘Maybe! Who knows?'

* * *

Scene One Hundred: Last Days

T
hey were in Plowman's London club.

The old man raised his kind face with a flash of indignation, perhaps covering some doubt, ‘Bomba, I am surer of Jules than of my own son. I have been through tight places with him for twenty years. He knows he can depend on me. It's a sign of sanity that instead of taking out his gold and selling it, he is calling on the bank balances of the branches—no doubt he's in a temporary jam. He's a big gambler, and a safe one. No doubt, he needs some margins.'

‘Ralph Stewart tells me that he has been rather slow paying his options lately and that has created a certain impression in the city, you know. No man in business should let them wait an hour. Why is it? Is he rash? Is he strapped?'

‘I don't know. He has his reasons, no doubt. Jules has been in business for twenty years: he has always come through. I don't ask him questions.' He hesitated, ‘The slow payment—I know—that's William. That's his idea. His idea is always to keep people waiting.'

‘That's true enough,' sighed Theodor Bomba. ‘When I was there I had trouble enough getting ordinary office cable charges and salary lists paid. I pressed him not to ruin the bank's name for quick payment—it was when Carrière was pressing—for the sake of a few centimes' interest gained. Now I am away—Alphendéry has gone. Jules has gone up in the air, if you want my plain opinion. William thinks of hoarding, scraping, and saving and—quite the opposite of other days—he is full of levity and freaks. Jules is alone. Someone should stand with him. I was speaking to Alphendéry—he is in London now doing business for Henri Léon. A smart fellow. Feathers his nest in time, eh?' Cunningly, he looked into the old man's face.

The old man raised his fading blue eyes, faintly bloodshot. ‘Don't urge Alphendéry to go back. Don't go back yourself. I am staying away. I'll tell you why. I think you're a friend of Jules. The brothers are reunited now. Never before did the four brothers dine together in the evening. Now they do it nearly every evening. Claire-Josèphe spends most of her time out riding or motoring with her little ones. A thing that has not happened for years and years. She used to spend her whole time out with friends and at the dressmakers'. It makes me so happy.' He wiped away a senile tear. ‘Of course, I suffer from it. When the family is so close, the old family friend is a little
de trop
. But for their sake and for the good of the bank, I am glad to be exiled a little. And then—since the death of dear old Frank Durban—' another pair of tears—‘I have become a philosopher.' He teetered. ‘The clients are impressed,' he went on energetically. ‘They comment upon the activity of the brothers. They feel there is a firm leadership, a syndicate of brothers. Divided we fall, united we stand!'

‘So there was a syndicate of brothers in Claude Brothers! Raccamond got them, too.'

‘Raccamond is mistaken, but he's a good man—he'll make a good manager: I've been begging Jules to take him back. What a sense of organization! You see,' he said with pathetic charm, ‘he is ambitious, but he worships Jules. I know men, my boy—I'm old … As for Alphendéry—better as it is. I always combatted the theory that he was the brains of the bank. He's subtle—never spread it himself. To a man as sensitive as Jules, to undermine his sense of responsibility and importance is fatal.'

Theodor Bomba smiled.

Plowman put his hands in his pockets and whistled to the cash, as it were. ‘Jules is,' he spoke softly with all his heart, ‘the greatest genius I ever met, the greatest natural, untaught, original genius.'

‘He has great charm, and he has genius, no doubt,' cut in Bomba. ‘Well, you are convinced your money is safe? Then I am. For where a man's money is, there his brains are.'

Rumors clustered thicker as the days went on. Stewart said that Jules had pyramided with him and that other brokers in the city were calling for their margins from Jules in vain. People began to smile when Alphendéry mentioned Jules and say, ‘I see you've left him; well, I suppose that's all right. You always knew what you were doing,' with a broadening smile. Others snickered and asked him if his friend Jules Bertillon was still in cahoots with Montagu Norman. Although William could get no information at the bank in Paris, everyone Alphendéry spoke to in London and in Amsterdam (by phone) knew that Jules's aviation company was fantastic, not worth the paper its letterhead was printed on, that big interests who saw themselves defeated by the proposed aviation combine were out to crush him, that the taxation authorities had decided to close the bank. Jules could get no credit in London. Paul Méline no longer dragged Alphendéry through Shorters' Court in the busy hours, to show that he had the Banque Mercure account; Ralph Stewart no longer whispered about what Bertillon was doing this week.

Alphendéry, with all these things flying round in his head, sickened and went to bed for a week.

How then was Jules? Jules was in a deep blue funk. All of the rumors were right. Jules had sunk five million francs, by now, in the aviation combine, to please Jean de Guipatin and young Campoverde. With these two were associated Juarez de Machuca, Hervé Dumas, young Lucé, Daniel Cambo, and young Mouradzian, all of whom had been named as directors in the Aviation Combine. Jules was now ‘betting on blue blood.' ‘Enough rads, Reds, and proletarians,' he proclaimed.

These young bluebloods were supposed to bring money into the venture from their various high-toned families and associates, but Jules was the only one who had done so: the others were chary, wary, their families asked questions and, for the most part, it turned out that they were the least trusted, the most ridiculed member of the family, the younger son without a pension or a father's blessing, or any hope but some doting aunt. And doting aunts don't like aviation.

But Jules was in no state now to put pressure on these ambitious and naïve young aristocrats, snuffing up politics, position, and money with wide nostrils and long necks. He sat in his bank, transformed into a junior version of the Jockey Club and gossiped with these youths and entertained all the retired admirals and gaga generals they liked to bring along. He had felt he was in clover: he was almost ruined.

There was some anxiety in Claire-Josèphe's young heart, too. When Jules transferred the gold from Amsterdam and elsewhere to Oslo, he had failed to segregate the gold bars which belonged to her personally, as part of her dowry. She saw him pouring money out for these ventures, and into the stock markets; she had moments of black panic, when she saw herself and her children ruined and Jules a runaway. She felt that afternoon had fallen on Jules's world, too; it was not shining and sunny any more; it did not love him. All he could do was to hide his head or change his hemisphere! The family atmosphere was streaked with lightning.

Thereupon Jules called his brothers and Maître Olympe to his apartment one evening and said, ‘I'm through. I'm going to leave the bank with the doors open, and run. I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At present you may not notice it but I do. Every minute I snap at someone—I lose my temper. Every hour of the day is a battleground for me, a fight against screaming! Something's gone wrong. Maybe it's me. I want to run away from you all, even you people. You see where I am? If you don't put your heads together and save me, there'll be a scandal, and you'll all have to face the music … Our money is all abroad now. It is all in two spots—Oslo and Esthonia. You must all follow me there, unless you have made up your minds about some other spot … Things are bad here. There's no one to stand the gaff for me—I let Alphendéry go too soon. We're short of money. Carrière takes all the profits we make on plain trading. I've dropped twenty million francs in markets and clients and ventures since the beginning of the year. We were ruined before the Kreuger windfall came and that only helped to stop the gap. I've had to pay some of Raccamond's clients out of my own pocket. Now since Raccamond ran round to the branches with his story, they've become very cagey: Bomba won't send me any money from London; Brouwer won't let me touch the Brussels balance; the same in the other spots. They're determined to cover themselves if I go down! They seem to forget whose bank it is! However, there I am. I haven't enough money to run the bank. And I can't stand another struggle for clients, and I can't pay out the ones I've got. As for the employees: I'm sorry. I always intended to give them six months' pay each, when I folded up, but I can't. That's flat. I'll give one of them six months' pay, to stay round when the inspectors come, but that's all I can do. The others must fight with the liquidators. It's a dirty deal—but what the deuce! I've got to think of myself first.'

The next morning, Jules flew off in William's airplane, and William flew in a borrowed plane to the field where Jules's was, and burned it. This was the only aviation which resulted from Jules's aviation venture. As soon as William received the following telegram from Jules:

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT

MERCURE

He telephoned his mother and Claire-Josèphe and told them to call for him in the Rue Pillet-Will at five that afternoon. He stayed until four-forty-five, giving orders, running things as usual, and then sauntered downstairs. It was Saturday afternoon. There were only the inveterates in the board room watching the figures jump; the rest of the bank was beautifully dark and quiet. In the great circular lobby he found Daniel Cambo writing a letter while he waited for him.

‘Are you going to the bouts tonight?' asked Cambo.

‘No. I'm driving down to Lourdes for the week end. You know how old women are—as my old lady gets older she gets more superstitious. I thought I'd give her a treat and show her the Basilica.'

‘It's nice weather,' said Cambo. ‘Don't know what I'm going to do. Mme. Gerson is out of town. Just get drunk, I suppose.'

William stuck his head in at the board-room door. ‘Well, will you close up, Jacques?'

‘Yes.'

William looked up at the glass pane still sparkling on the first floor, outside Jules's room. The luster was always on in that room while the bank was open, whether Jules was there or not. William nodded upstairs. ‘I forgot to turn off my brother's light. Do you mind turning it out, Jacques?' He freshened and said good-humoredly, ‘Well, never mind. I'll do it myself.' He disappeared by the private staircase and in a minute the light had gone off. Thus Cambo saw him coming down the main staircase again.

‘Can't we get rid of you, eh?'

‘Sure,' amiably responded William.

Daniel Cambo accompanied him to the footpath and found the car waiting there, an unusual thing, for William usually rejoined his car at one of the gates of Paris, to avoid the city traffic. William casually remarked, ‘The old lady wanted to drive down and pick me up, so I let her. Well, tootle-oo: see you Monday.' His white teeth appeared in a charming smile.

An affectionate smile appeared on the merchant's face, and he mimicked the nancy-boys with a wave of his hand, ‘Tootle-oo!'

They drove off.

When the police found that all the Bertillons were absent for three days, they came in and closed the bank, supposing it had failed; but as they were in the dark and were afraid of moving too fast, they simply put up a notice:
Closed by Tax Authorities for Inspection of Books. Will Reopen on Friday.

* * *

Scene One Hundred and One: Post-mortem

N
o one knew anything, and the poor employees stood around in consternation like a family of fowls when an airplane passes overhead. It was discovered that no one knew anything about the bank. What was its name? Everyone called it the Banque Bertillon. It had a plate which said Bertillon Frères, but it was really the Banque Mercure, S.A. Some said the general manager was William Bertillon, some said Alphendéry, some Aristide Raccamond, some Jacques Manray, and one even said Urbain Voulou. As to the money behind the bank, some said it was Claire-Josèphe's, some said Jules's, and others thought that there was big anonymous money behind it, while others inclined to the idea that it was nothing but a branch of Legris and Company of Amsterdam.

This difference of opinion existed about every question of office and interest in the bank. This was what had excited Aristide Raccamond to his ‘reorganization,' and this was what now roused the magistrates to admired frenzy. ‘How could you possibly work in a bank and not know who was the manager?' they asked Jacques Manray. ‘You were there thirteen years.'

Manray respectfully but manfully replied, ‘Mr. Jules Bertillon was everything: he decided everything, everything was his. When he was away the bank seemed asleep, at least above stairs. What did it matter who we were? We had our jobs and we did them and we were paid for them. Everyone seemed to be in some secret, in Mr. Jules's secret. We each had our secret. We all thought we were important: that's why we were satisfied and asked no questions. Besides, it was his money, and that was how he ran things.'

‘What secrets are you jabbering about?' asked the little, rude magistrate Dame.

Jacques flushed, and this pleased Dame and disposed him more favorably to Jacques. Jacques explained: ‘For example, Brossier, the young man who went abroad, was allowed to look after the gold safe, and only the Bertillons and Brossier knew what was in it. Only the Bertillons and I knew about certain arrangements with clients; only Mlle. Gentil and the Bertillons knew whose were the anonymous numbered accounts. In this way we all trusted Mr. Bertillon, because we knew one or other of his secrets. But he is all secrets; he has plenty and to spare. I am sure even his brother does not know them all.'