Adam finished his job arranging the stones and then began to break up new ground in the wild half-acre. He found some mint and this brought Mme. Lucide out, to hunt for plants for salads, poultices, and infusions. Adam knew these things as well as Mme. Lucide and got on beautifully with her. Alphendéry could not help feeling a little hurt that his friends treacherously possessed all this agricultural learning, away from him.
Jean appeared, yawning, mooched round with them for a bit, and then gave up work and sat on a tuft. He showed no disposition to come and sit by Michel and talk politics. Jean only wore slacks like Adam. His rather long, robust, and youthful torso lent more light and youth to his broad sunny face. Adam, too, looked different, above his naked body: he looked more the frail earthly first man hearing the strains of sun music in one of William Blake’s dawn pictures.
The ground broke open, brown, odorous, faintly moist. Adam drove the hoe into the matted strong grass roots which held the earth together. Judith watched them occasionally and smiled and called from the veranda.
‘It’s heaven here,’ called Jean blissfully. ‘How grand you look, Judith, by Jove! You must live in the country: you were made for it. You look ten years younger.’
‘I don’t look fourteen,’ protested Judith, glancing unconsciously at her developed figure.
‘Women always look better in the country,’ said Adam in quiet, affectionate tones: ‘they understand Mother Earth.’ He looked up at Judith and gave her a smile. Her clothes were tight-fitting because she was growing out of them. She was the perfect wife now, wedded to the earth, functioning with it, secretly fertile. The two men felt free and happy. But Judith, though alive with joy, was seen in many reflective poses round the house that morning, absorbed in some idea, perhaps not entirely pleasant. She was feeling the buffets of a battle taking place, not only in her heart, for it had long moved out of that cramping corridor, but all through her body, in her chest, her muscled waist, her broad hips, her thighs, even in her ankles. It seemed that this conflict had started up suddenly the moment Adam Constant had come last night and said, in that quiet voice, ‘I needed the country so much. I have never seen Jean’s garden.’
Alphendéry, seeing all this silent activity about him, got up and took a walk up one of the dried mud ruts. They saw him in the distance, patroling by some decayed-looking shrubs and trees, twisting his hand-kerchief into knots, a habit of his, when alone, and probably talking to himself. For talking was his great amusement. Alphendéry had been walking up and down more than half an hour when he glanced for the first time at the shrubs along the paddock track. He recoiled and his heart flopped stickily around. They were loaded with swarms of small black caterpillars, living for the most part in communal cocoons, very large, white, and flossy and through which, though, imprisoned they could still be seen, moving sluggishly. This vermin had attacked a great number of green things in the neighborhood. They ate up the leaves and covered the bare branches with their horrible black masses and their giant white cocoons. They confirmed Alphendéry’s worst suspicions about the country. He hurried back towards the house. No one was about. He knew what had happened. They had all gone off to pick ‘dandelions’ (which with ‘lilies’ completed Alphendéry’s botanical universe). They had deliberately left him to walk near caterpillars and gone off to collect dandelions; probably at this moment they were indulging in that raw laughter that degraded even the finest men, even communists, in the country. He met Adam and said, ‘I begin to understand fellow feeling here, because there is nothing between me and the earth.’
‘Yes, it’s the beginning of fellow feeling all round, the birth of a curious feeling, that brotherhood is not just an idea, or a fear of loneliness, or a need for telling other people your ideas; the feeling is, this is a piece of the very same flesh, as one piece of velvet and another from the same robe, but, I mean, the texture, the grain, the folding—no, I haven’t said it! When you see a lot of wounded in a hospital, covered with bandages, you are just part of a roll of gauze, like the others: you are gummed together with sticking plaster out of the same box. When you see another person and, though you have never held—his hand, you know you are planted in him and he will be obliged to explain you away and stand by you, his life through; and you know he will, just as likely, ask you to die for him, as to lend him a franc, you feel very pleased: you take the sharp knife out of your belt and throw it far away, into the middle of the Luxembourg at night, you scuttle it in the Seine: the sharp knife which we call ambition, or what you will. For, what can you lose, if you die the same day: why shouldn’t you go and fight, for example? You have already touched with your finger, lightly but sensibly, the living clay, you have been at the heart of life and seen invisible life. The clay of all living men is on fire, after that, with the same life. But there has to be one, perhaps not your lover, who has to be the door to the house of the living. Do you understand that, Michel?’
‘No,’ said Alphendéry, ‘I never experienced that. Perhaps I never will.’
‘It is quite an accident. It happened to me: the odd thing is, I have not much wish to live now.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Adam shook his head and went on cheerfully putting in the little plants from the burnt house. ‘It was a woman,’ he added; ‘an ordinary woman.’
For lunch they had aromatic dishes of plants mostly taken from the wild ‘garden.’ They praised Mme. Lucide, teased her, and she caught them out on agricultural and country matters. After lunch, Alphendéry went for a short walk and climbed a knoll with Jean Frère. There were tins and rags about: Jean snuffed the air. In the distance, a hill covered with trees stood up.
* * *
Scene Eight: J’Accuse
The visit to Frère’s garden strengthened the acquaintance between Adam Constant and Alphendéry. ‘When is your book of poems coming out, Adam?’ asked Alphendéry, coming in from lunch.
‘In about two months. They are slow. They have always been slow. They are the fruit of seven years,’ said Adam.
‘It has to be that way, with poets, perhaps?’ said Alphendéry.
Adam’s ragged black-and-white face, with its traces of fire and desolation, grew smaller and younger as he smiled. ‘Well, I hope it won’t be always so. I put it down to solitude. I always think if we could rub shoulders with a happy people we’d be throwing off poems all day long. I don’t believe in conservation. A real poet would be a waster, not a conserver. He’d scatter his fragments everywhere, along the roads, in an automobile, passing a manured paddock, saying Cheerio to a girl in an apron outside a country pub. Oh, I think when the people are free a great harvest will come up and the poet will be the first to eat from it, with the stealing birds and the harvesters at noon. To feel the hard meat, the reluctant milk of the heavy cream grain! What is more beautiful on earth than the land under wheat and barley? It takes all the shades of the sky like a thick pile. All the voices of the air gather in it to sleep and stir and sleep. It gives comfort, it gives wit, it gives peace. So is a land heavy with well-watered and round-ripened people. I wish I could see that age.’
‘Well, you will: you are young enough,’ said Alphendéry.
‘No,’ said Adam, ‘I don’t think so. I might. But I don’t want to see it when I’m too old. I want to see it now: I want to see a harvest now, even this year! It’s silly: the world won’t begin to roll faster for my sake.’
‘You had lunch with Henrietta Achitophelous?’
‘Yes. She is beautiful. Full of the hairsprings of her secrets. But she doesn’t know them. She never will.’ He laughed questioningly. ‘Platitudes and vain health go together: you see it in new colonies, virgins, and humanitarians.’
‘How do you like working here, Adam?’
‘I like it well. Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men: the world is a jungle to them. They perceive acutely that they
are at the dawn of economic history. It is fascinating living among the Cro-Magnons …’ But his face suddenly became drawn. ‘I am patient,’ he said evenly: ‘what I have in mind is to write a book of poems new even for today. It will not be much but it will be bitten as deep and plain as the words on jail walls. For life as it is, is a concentration camp for Man. And in one corner sits the poet, snarling if he is touched, chuckling over a little dirty bag that contains his life’s savings. Out of all his experiences, he sedulously lays aside his conclusion, his aphorism, his extract of sentiment, his pellicule of profit. A love affair leaves nothing behind but a pair of glossy eyes; five years of life are reduced to five verses: the day lost in fruitless brain-racking becomes a bitter aphorism at night: that is the profit poet, the superfluity poet, the luxury-tax poet, the bank poet, poor wretch, the limited-edition, gilt-edged, signed-copy poet, the poet who gives himself a gilt-edged invitation to a small select party of kindred souls and one by one sheds them, disappointed, confused, betrayed—’
He tried to go on but there was a racket just behind Alphendéry: Henri Parouart, a humble barnacle of finance, a stone who got into the shoe of every stock-exchange dealer round the town, was figuring on a scrap of paper and explaining something to Abernethy Gairdner, the American short-story writer.
‘But I don’t understand how they make money, according to this process,’ Gairdner explained. ‘How does it pay them?’
‘Look,’ Parouart began as if his life depended upon it. ‘Say I buy an American stock, says U.S. Steel at 100. The broker sells it out at 100. U.S. Steel goes to 200. Then the broker owes me 100. I buy three shares at 200. On the books my account stands—owed 100 + 3 × 200 = 700. My equity is the first 100 now plus a profit of 100 equals 200. I owe the broker 500. If the market drops so that my equity is no longer 700 but 500, that is a drop of twenty-eight per cent, that is, my account stands debited 500 on the books, and nothing paid, then they owe me nothing and I owe them 500. Meanwhile, they have taken no risk. Their profit is 500. Clear?’
‘H’m,’ said Gairdner, ‘of course.’
‘Now,’ said Parouart, ‘I say, tell the bank to buy one hundred U.S. Steel or Royal Dutch, it doesn’t matter. But the bank has already got two hundred U.S. Steel that the client has bought for himself. And now he has his doubts about Steel. He thinks it might go down. So he doesn’t want to have my one hundred Steel on his books as well. He sells a hundred U.S. Steel instead of buying it. So he only has a hundred U.S. Steel altogether on his books.’
‘But why should he do it then, just when you want to buy it? Why can’t he sell his own?’
‘This is all part of a process, a long process, don’t you see?’ cried Parouart, hopping from one foot to another like Rumpelstiltskin, in his anxiety to spread an idea that had been eating into his nights. ‘It didn’t start today or yesterday. It is just part of a balancing process.’
‘Yes, I see. It gives him the cue, that’s all. It helps in bookkeeping, is that your idea?’
‘Yes, you can put it that way. Bertillon sends me a chit: ‘Bought for your account one hundred shares Hokum Company at,’ say, ‘$100 a share.’ He debits me ten thousand dollars. The market goes down. Hokum is $75 a share. I’ve lost twenty-five hundred dollars which I owe him. Theoretically! But he never bought those shares. It just cost him the ink. I pay him the twenty-five hundred dollars which is his clear profit.’
‘That’s simple. But,’ said the writer carefully, ‘supposing the U.S. Steel Corporation comes along and says, “We’re paying a dividend of $1 on every share.” Then the broker would have to pay you $100 out of his own pocket. Would it be worth while to take the risk? Because the market doesn’t always go down twenty-five per cent, it often goes down only one-fourth of one per cent. It’s a big risk. And then, think of the bookkeeping: think of the organization. Think of the risk! It’s a good theory, but is it practicable, for any one?’
‘Yes,’ said Parouart testily. ‘You’re assuming that the bank always has to make a profit. But suppose it loses! It pays you out of reserves. How do we know what is the bank’s financial position?’
‘Now,’ said the American slowly, ‘don’t you see it’s different over there? You see, there’s no matching books over there: everything is done right on the floor of the stock exchange and there’s an exact record, second by second, of every sale made, so you don’t have to stew about this: you can look it all up and see if the transaction was done.’
‘I buy a hundred shares,’ cried Parouart, ‘and every other sucker in the country buys a hundred shares and who is to say which was mine? Who can tell whether my hundred shares were ever bought? A big day on the stock exchange, thousands of shares every minute: who can tell? We French call that balancing, contre-partie operations.’
‘Well,’ said the American, ‘you may be right: in fact, I think you’re probably right. But you can’t prove it. So what are you going to do about it? Why worry? As long as you think he’s good for the money.’
‘Who says he is?’ demanded Parouart cunningly.
‘Another of those grateful beggars,’ said Alphendéry, as they moved away, ‘who use our bank for a café and then spit on the terrasse.’
‘Warn him off,’ said Adam dryly.
‘You can’t run a stock-exchange department without these little sacs of venom: they are not men, they’re exudations of the money world. They’re galls: a shriveled little insect of a man is working away somewhere inside them.’
‘There are no men in this bank,’ remarked Constant, ‘only money galls of one color and another shape: only an infection of monsters with purses at their waists that we wait upon and serve … My dream is, that one day I will get them all down, I will leave them on record. I want to show the waste, the insane freaks of these money men, the cynicism and egotism of their life, the way they gambol amidst plates of gold loaded with fruits and crystal jars of liqueurs, meats pouring out juices, sauces, rare vegetables, fine fancy breads, and know very well what they are doing, brag, in fact, of being more cunning than the others, the poor. I’ll show that they are not brilliant, not romantic, not delightful, not intelligent; that they have no other object but their personal success and safety. Although, of course, there are plenty of living intelligences among them, sidetracked talents, even warm breasts, perspicacious men amongst them, but all, all compliant and prostituted …
‘I’ll show another thing,’ he said lower, putting his face nearer to the grille, to reach Alphendéry’s ear, ‘that there are some of them, and those nearest the top, who believe absolutely in what the revolutionaries teach, who know that the ones they call “the agitators” are only speaking plain truths, buttressed by every known fact, by every fact that they alone know and that they keep from the people …
‘It follows that the denunciations they utter, and the prosperity tom-toms and the strokings and the dulcet tones, the flames of hell drawn round the Reds and the pale sainthoods lithographed round cabinet ministers are only a gigantic, monstrous masque put on the boards to fool the people. “Knowledge, money, real love, power,” they say, “are too good for the people. These things are divine, we must keep them all to ourselves.” And they debase learning, coinage, sex, democratic control to fool the people …
‘But they are haunted. They fear the numbers of the people and their inevitable revolt and all they can think of is how to employ agitators for themselves, provocateurs to head off the crowd, disappoint the believing, betray the courageous and frighten the right-thinking asses and the liberals: and for the little fellows they have the distractions of war at home and abroad, when things look too lively. I’ll write down how they meditate for hours together on how to excite political passions and make civil war simply to affect the stock exchanges and aid their own speculations in currencies. I’ll show them for what they are, bestially selfish, true criminals and gangsters, who admire particularly gangsters in their hearts and comment at len
gth, with love, on the exploits of bandits, armament sellers who sell arms against their own country, great exploiters who kill hundreds of men, women and children under them, apaches of commercial life, profiteers of war, rapine, and fratricidal slaughter, and all those who make their fortune by no matter what means. I’ll show their “society” made up of princesses in whose blood runs the blood of ten thousand miserable shopgirls exploited and prostituted for them; of comtesses who are women of the basest lives, drunkards, prostitutes for a title, or for a cocktail, who dispute, blackmail, play the Sarah Bernhardt, yell and faint for a couple of francs wrong in their account; of young women of good family who sell themselves, of women who sleep in any bed; of husband- and lover-pimps; of provocateurs, spies, stool-pigeons, homosexuals, drug dreamers, boxers, actors, and cinema actresses swollen with unhoped-for success and lunatic with power; of fine violinists destroyed by a passion for gambling and great singers whose voices tremble with tears, but only because Phillips Glow-Lamp has gone down from 263 to 249 between the first and the second acts—all the rascality of Europe, Ethiopian princes come to Paris to sell their country, princes of Morocco come to taste the pleasures of a capital that, if they were patriots, they would detest, dubious nobles from old Russia hunting bed and board, the debile, crooked, or vulgar aristocracy of England, Spanish grandees and South-American feudal landlords, inavowably ferocious, luxurious, and sensual.
‘I’ll tell what I know, that the lobbies of great bankers that the poor workman fears to enter, and that he comes into twisting his cap, swarm with gunmen, gangsters escaped from the American police, bankers from beyond borders with their swag about them, mayors from stripped municipalities, kings in exile who had the foresightedness to exile their money ahead of them; of all those who pour out a tale of banishment and poverty and who are rich in millions, and of secret agents preparing coups d’état in foreign countries and of their political enemies already preparing to secrete the estates that would be snatched from them; also of the friends of those in power, who send abroad gold for the day they will fall and negotiate the purchase of yachts which lie waiting, polished and under steam, in harbors along all the coast, men who buy doubles to front the public fury and private vengeance and keep unoccupied apartments in frontier towns.
House of All Nations Page 10