House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  ‘There have been recurring declines in American business since 1850, still more bad years since 1900. The monopoly capital system of production will reach its final stage in the U.S.A. towards 1938 to ’40 probably. The best thing for anyone with money to do is to lay out a five-year-plan in the stock market, say, first “bearing,” then watching for a small rise, then flurries of rises, then artificial “dope” rises, the market pumped up by the interests, then preparation for inflation.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Dr. Jacques Carrière, ‘a five-year-plan of investments! Good idea. I’ll think it over. Come out and see me at home.’

  ‘There goes Raccamond giving my advice,’ said Alphendéry with good-humored regret. ‘When will I make money and a reputation for myself? I must start some time.’

  ‘A five-year-plan in investments, is that your idea? Not bad,’ said Jules.

  ‘Why not: modern finance is what medicine was in the stage of necromancy. We ought to take a hint from the Soviets and steal a march on the interests.’

  ‘If we knew what was going to happen for five years ahead!’ Jules shrugged.

  ‘We do. The only thing that can happen to the British Empire from now on is trouble: she’s had everything. The only thing that can happen to Russia is prosperity if there’s no war. For America, a lot of trouble, then inflation, a temporary boom. For Germany, some desperate attempts at fascism—the German people won’t take to it, but the bosses may try it—and then a restoration, aided by Britain, when they see fascism is breaking down. For Italy—secret alliances and present aid to the highest bidder. For France, preparation for war with Germany, a Soviet alliance: an attempt at fascism, which will doubtless be defeated, certainly be defeated. For China, a long struggle resulting in the eventual triumph of the Soviet system over the greater western part … ’

  ‘That’s what you want to see, not what will happen,’ said Jules: ‘the powers will see to that. America won’t have that … And how are we to plan for five years on that, may I ask?’

  ‘For England, the bet is on inflation, either of currency, of commodity prices or of both: the Government must resort either to taxation on a scale never before seen, or issue more bonds or devalue the pound or print currency. The only alternative that great capital actually fears is increased taxation since it is no longer possible to pass very much of this load on to the shoulders of the workers or middle-class consumers. Wages and middle-class receipts have touched bottom. The standard of living of any group may yet be slightly reduced by wage slashes or exploitation, especially in the shape of increased efficiency of the worker at the point of production, but there is a curious resistance to exploitation by heavy taxation. The wage-slashing technique is only restrained by the fear of reducing the physique of the nation’s manhood below army acceptance level: that is marked, in their opinion, no doubt, by the dole figure. (Of course they are wrong: but the advance of mechanical warfare is such that they have no longer to depend so much on route-march power of the national riffraff: they have their trained bodies of well-built men for flying, the key services. But they are dead wrong.) You see it is true basically that the extent to which labor can support taxation after the boss gets through with it is small, and the bosses therefore are afraid of increased taxation. Now all such fears are translated by the stock market into depressions, even panics and lower valuations of stocks. On the other hand, inflation enables the capitalists to defer the burden of the government deficit on to the future accumulations of capital, and it increases profits here and now by raising the value of manufactured articles at a rate faster than the comparatively halting increases in wages, after inflation. Because the prices can be altered from here to tomorrow, but the increases in wages have to be wrung, penny by penny, from the bosses, through strikes and collective demands. And it would not pay the bosses to grant them any other way—despite their cries about lost profits—because they gain time thereby. Therefore an inflation program permits a stock market to capitalize increased net profits, higher prices for goods sold and a lagging increase in wages as against the prices at which the products of labor are sold … Therefore, my dear boy, it pays the British capitalist class to inflate: they must inflate. And they will make a profit out of it for a few months. But that profit cannot last and after that you will have a depression and a social awakening among the lower classes, much worse than any that is taking place now.’

  ‘The English will never revolt,’ said Jules: ‘they are too meek and mild.’

  ‘A social awakening doesn’t mean revolution; and starvation wages, dole, or outright starvation do not mean revolt. If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.’

  ‘But what do I get out of this?’ queried Jules impatiently.

  ‘This,’ Alphendéry proceeded sagely: ‘there will be big increases in stock-market ratings among especially the cheap, worthless, gaudy, spectacular, and flimsy minor promotions and corporations: an increase in paper money suits them as sound money never could. They can’t pay their way so well on a sound-money basis, but this momentary lag of wages, this increased exploitation of labor, gives them their chance. For an optimistic stock market such as you see after inflation is merely an investment in the lowering of the real wages of labor. And is that a pure pleasure for the little profiteer, apart from anything else! Now, my scheme is a simple one, Jules. Let’s work out our share-guarantee scheme to cover only the little tawdry shares that banks won’t lend on. When inflation comes, as it undoubtedly will within the next two years, we can line our bathrooms with gold.’

  ‘It’s good,’ said Jules. ‘We’ll send a man to England at once. We must get an Englishman, someone who looks honest and won’t ask too many questions. But we must have an English company, don’t you see? The English won’t put their shares, even tin-pot ones, with a French company: with the perfidious French, good God! So we must get a couple of public-school men with the farseeing Cunard-captain sea-gray eyes, and square jaw and no brains, put them in a nice, worm-eaten, dark-green office with heavy furniture and a picture of the Bank of England in 1866 and of the South Sea House, and send them round the country talking to country bank managers and family lawyers. That’s the thing to do. It’s a great scheme. Now, who speaks English? You: you jabber it all right. Raccamond? Adam Constant? How about him? Would you take him along with you?’

  ‘He speaks English perfectly,’ exclaimed Alphendéry with enthusiasm.

  ‘Good, then send Adam Constant to scout round for offices and then you can go over and engage some men. Now, the English are funny. They won’t look at a firm that was set up yesterday. What we’ve got to get is some old title that’s been lying round in solicitors’ offices for the last twenty years and buy it. What would it cost? Twenty pounds?’

  ‘No: the cost of incorporation and the tax on the capital: probably about one thousand pounds.’

  ‘A hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. It’s a big sum.’

  ‘Not in English units,’ said Alphendéry. ‘It all depends on the unit you count in.’

  Adam Constant came up, sat uneasily in the big armchair, and looked at Bertillon dumfounded. He had not from Bertillon’s description any idea of what was wanted of him, except that he had suddenly to go to London, a place he had never seen, and sign a lease for some offices, buy furniture, and engage two English public-school men, and make sure they were not hangers-on of the secret service. Many more details were added which seemed to him bizarre and fantastic.

  ‘I’ll explain it all to you, Adam,’ said Alphendéry. ‘The essential thing is a man with Cunard-colored eyes.’

  * * *

  Scene Sixteen: ’Ware the Bank

  You see, Adam, most men are constitutional bulls: I’m a constitutional bear—I can only win when the tendency is down. But the history of the world (our world) is down now. I can only see pessimism for capi
talism: if it has any spring left in it, I will be wrong … The stock market doesn’t understand alibis.

  ‘Jules Bertillon can only make real money in a dissolving world: if they ever get the jigsaw puzzle together even for five minutes, Jules will have to live on his reserves. We’re in the phantom buggy with him. We’re riders of the storm: all of us together with him in this phantom bank, built on misery, shining out of mire, solid in an earthquake, soundproof in thunder, a living lightning conductor: an accident in capitalism. So—take your first-class ticket: it may be a long time before another comes your way.’

  ‘When one survivor comes to shore after a wreck, I can’t believe in him. I can’t believe in myself now,’ said Adam. ‘I feel we live in a dream world. What do we produce? What service do we give? Who are we, whose cousins, whose employers? How can we extract food, drink, and Pullman seats from looking through gilt grilles all day and handing paper money backward and forward. It isn’t real … it’s Katzenjammer Castle.’ He shook his head and laughed delightfully, ‘But of course, I’m not saying no. You have a heart of gold, Michel, the only gold thing you’ll ever have.’ He looked ruefully at the frayed edges of Michel’s trousers. Michel drew his feet in hastily and went on, ‘The only thing I regret about a bear market is that Jules makes so much money that he begins to want to expand in all directions. You know he wants to open a branch in Berlin and one in Shanghai. I imagine old man Richard Plowman, who used to be head of the Timor and Arafura Trading Bank, put him up to that. But I really believe there is a chance out there. They must be speculating wildly. The world is so unsettled and no one puts money away in chaotic times …’

  ‘If there’s a chance of sending anyone out there, Alphendéry, send in my name, will you? It’s my chance: there’s a power drawing me out, it’s so strong that I know I will go one way or another.’

  Old Richard Plowman, ‘the perfect Englishman’ with small, long oval face, gray hair, kind blue eyes, was born in the British consulate at Caracas, worked in British banks in Sydney, Shanghai, Colombo, Alexandria, and Old Jewry and once had ventured into foreign lands and worked in Chicago. He became head of the Timor and Arafura Trading Bank, made money, and retired. The year of his retirement, like many another modest Englishman, he went to Paris. There he met Jules Bertillon. He was captivated by him and saw in him the sort of young man he would have liked for a son.

  He was one of Jules’s first believers: one of those who first saw his star rise. He now regarded the marble, mahogany, silk, and plush of the bank as the furnishings of his spiritual home and was always in and out of the bank, at any time of the day and evening. He knew all the employees, canoodled with the clerks, accountants, and typists, loved especially those who had special rooms—he would drop in on them, about tiffin hour, through old habit—and had an immense room of his own, as big as that of Jules, in which he spent long pleasant hours smoking and talking with Jules and old Paris friends.

  Whenever he vacated this room and went to walk on the Champs Élysées or by the Seine, or to eat or visit ladies, or do little commissions for them, the two busy restless associates moved in, spread out samples, wrote letters, concocted guarantees and agreements, looked up tariffs and completely changed the stage. Daniel Cambo was now in general merchandise and his uncle Ephraïm Dreyer in knitted goods.

  Dreyer was a charming mid-European Jew, with old velvety skin and fine hands and nose, and Cambo was the energetic, muscular Balkan Jew of the same type as Léon but less Napoleonic, because issued from a very rich family. When they packed up their papers and notions and went out to do business with someone in London, New York, Kharkov, Geneva, Vichy, or Constantinople, old Richard Plowman came back with some book of memoirs by sea dog or friend of the Aga Khan and sat there again in the great green-painted room, bringing with him all the old air of eternal security, eternal self-content.

  He often lived with the Bertillons, for all of whom he had an unquestioning affection; he knew all their friends and lived in a happy world in which the pearl necklace of Mamie, the divorce of Tony and Aline, Poppo’s racing car, Pedrillo’s peccadilloes, William’s salt soup, Claire-Josèphe’s new dress from Worth, Anita and Johnny’s new maid, what Tommy said to the attaché at the Mexican embassy, and the new thoroughbred of Jean de Guipatin were the chief characters, and creatures of absorbing interest. He had forgotten how he made his money and had returned (because it was simpler and made Jules seem even more charming) to the innocent credo of a schoolboy of fourteen.

  Plowman had just come back from London. He had brought eight ounces of best smoking mixture from Fortnum & Mason for Dr. Jacques Carrière, Pedro’s guitar with the new string attached, a cribbage board for an old English crony (married in France) of ‘Old’ Berthellot, the head accountant, an iodine locket for his housekeeper, and the English style of Kruschen salts for François Vallat; he had an old tattered Charing-Cross-Road copy of Sweeney Todd for William Bertillon whose imagination had been fired by a chance reference to the demon barber, a pound of Ceylon tea (gold-label) for Mrs. Haller, one of the clients of the bank, and a pair of socks, two and six, very cheap, English style, for Mr. Haller. Nevertheless, he felt shamefaced because he had failed to get a real (cheap) Dunhill pipe for Jacques Manray, who coveted this particularly. On his way to get some pearls restrung for Lady Bobbie, a young acquaintance of his in London, he had picked up Claire-Josèphe to take her to the pictures and to lunch and here they were at the bank, where Claire-Josèphe had to cash a check.

  ‘Oh, Jules,’ cried Claire-Josèphe in her fashionable babble, ‘the most awful thing happened to Richard on his trip to London. Tell him, Richard.’

  ‘Yes, I was quite cut up,’ said Richard. ‘I lost eight pounds, one five-pound note and three ones in the Burlington Arcade. I am perfectly sure someone picked my pocket. Such a thing has never happened to me before, I’ve never lost money. It’s most upsetting, I assure you. It’s not so much the money—although, you know—but it’s the idea: I have eight pounds in my pocket and someone can come along and slip it out without my feeling it. And not in a crowd. What was I doing. Was I standing gaping, without knowing it? It makes me feel so—bad: I couldn’t sleep all night. That’s what made me come home earlier: I felt London had turned on me.’

  ‘You can leave the smoking mixture here,’ said Jules. ‘Jacques Carrière rang up to say he would be in. He’s interested in the fate of sterling. What did you hear, Richard?’

  ‘They’ll never go off: it would mean the crash of the sterling area.’

  ‘Any big selling?’

  ‘Yes, but mostly foreigners. Frenchmen, Dutch. They say.’

  ‘The French should know: it’s all a question of whether they continue to withdraw their funds from London. If they’re selling.’

  ‘We’ll squeeze them, my boy: the old game. Why, we couldn’t afford to go off gold: London is the world center of foreign deposits. Our reputation is that we’re solid, we don’t waver when the rest of the world is a jelly. It would ruin our banking business. We couldn’t afford to do it, dear Jules. Don’t you bet on it. Don’t listen to the hotheaded plungers here: Paris is so feverish compared with London. You know it’s a tangible difference: in London everything is silence, calm, quiet: we’re well balanced. You ought to go to London, whenever you think of selling, Jules, dear boy, and you’d think twice about it.’

  ‘H’m: I often prefer to be rash. You make more money that way … However—well, look who’s here! Frank ‘Rhodes’ Durban!’

  Richard Plowman’s lifelong crony, bronzed, broad, and sixty, with a breezy expression and waterlogged gait, hove in sight. He had been tubercular at twenty, gone out to South Africa, and made a couple of million sterling out there.

  ‘Hello, Jules! Don’t believe him: he’s a Little Englander, although he was born in a consulate. She will go off and it won’t be her ruin: she’ll stagger and right herself and you’ll see a regular wave of prosperity carry her
homewards about 1933 to ’34 and onwards to 1938. Then we’ll see what we shall see.’

  ‘Rhodesia makes everyone a pathological optimist,’ said old Richard with regret. ‘He only comes to London to say the opposite of everyone in the club.’

  The two old fellows presently trotted out.

  ‘You haven’t got too much money in this bank, Dick, have you?’

  ‘Yes: quite a bit. Why?’

  ‘It’s too nice. Where’s the bill department? Where’s the loan department? Where’s the business done? I don’t see any banking.’

  ‘It’s a rich man’s club: a gambling, deposit, and tax-evasion bank, don’t you see? It’s just the rich man’s section of a big bank taken out, polished, and set rolling on its own wheels. Very good idea. Jules always had such chic ideas.’

  ‘Don’t believe in it,’ said ‘Rhodes’ Durban stoutly. ‘Take your money out: I don’t care if he’s your own son. I like to see property, freights, loads of grain, sugar, leather, dates, asphalt, something, behind a bank. I don’t see it here. That’s wrong.’

  ‘No. Now I’ll explain it to you: this is very comparable with another idea of Jules’s that he had last night and is going to start straight away. He’s going to get a big ocean-going yacht like Virginie Henriot’s. He’ll institute a gold-bar, bond, and stock transport between say Cherbourg and New York, or say Bordeaux and Buenos Aires. This yacht will only carry such goods required for quick delivery. No waiting for mail boats, customs, taking on passengers, all that. And it can sail any time: no waiting for schedule. Everyone will take advantage of the special precious-stuffs yacht.’