House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  ‘Yes? I should like to be the captain. You mean to say people are going to put their fortunes on a private yacht—’

  ‘A company will be formed: nothing of that sort.’

  ‘Oh, a company will be formed. That will be very different, of course!’

  ‘You’re used to those bluff South African types,’ scolded Richard Plowman. ‘You don’t understand a delicate intelligence, a man who instinctively thinks in finance and precious goods; his grandfather was in the diamond trade. It’s in the blood. He belongs to one of these old European families in whose veins it is not so much blood as some rare old liqueur that runs.’

  ‘You’re crazy, Dick: I pity you. If you put a ring in your own nose you can’t expect people to resist the temptation. But I’d hate to see you lose a lot of money: you couldn’t stand it as well as you think.’

  ‘I’m a simple man, Rhodes: I have the tastes of a baby. No one can get at me. I’m safe.’

  ‘When we have everything naturally we desire nothing—therefore we have simple tastes. That’s no riddle. You’ll get a surprise one day. You’ve got to the stage of playing with dolls: one doll is Claire-Josèphe and one is Jules. Take my advice and go back into banking yourself. You’ve forgotten what the human race looks like.’

  * * *

  Scene Seventeen: In Praise of Gold

  The word ‘gold’ spoken by those who have seen it, had it, lived with it, has undertones of sensual revel and superstitious awe and overtones of command and superhuman strength that excite the greatest hostility and indignation in those who have not got it, have never seen it, or have not lived with its beautiful invisible presence—invisible, because it is always socked away. This joyful sensuality comes not only from its brightness, softness, purity, rarity, great specific gravity, nor from the designs, head, crowns, olive branches, men with staves, lions, unicorns, escutcheons, arms, and legends printed on it, nor from its finely milled edge in coins, nor wholly from the worshipful value of a very small bar of it, nor from the soft jingling it makes in a leather bag, nor from the way, like a little sun it can bring light on to the face of everyone who regards, and reverence, as Ra to his admirers: it comes from all these things, but also from a lifelong association of the word ‘gold’ with the idea ultimate wealth, perennial ease, absolute security. It is an absolute and in its presence the anxious heart breathes sweetly and the blood laughs and the toiling brain sheds its dew of agony. Sweet gold! It has in it everything that man desires in a wife, that cannot, precisely, be purchased with gold. Beautiful gold! It is cosmetic: it makes a girl handsome and marriageable in a moment. Virgin gold! There may be suspicions and shades of jealousy clinging to those whose all is paper and participations, but there is a sun-colored cloak ‘Sir-Galahad’ model for those who own gold. Fetish gold! But that’s an old one: we know what that means: it means ‘I’ve none.’

  Armand Brossier lived in the state of mind of a pure and pious choirboy who has the happiness to serve in a cathedral. He it was who took up the gold coins deposited each day, who doled them out to clients who were hoarders, who counted them and saw with religious ecstasy the number of little chamois bags increasing, and with foreboding their decrease, as rumor came and went. Jules had taken him into the bank and found him tubercular. Armand had got into the war in its last year, been gassed, had pneumonia, and come back in health completely ruined. Jules found his coughing ghastly in the echoing white walls of the hollow pearl that his bank was, and had sent him off to Chamonix and the hills behind Nice to cure him. For him, he had opened a little office in Juan-les-Pins—and made money by it. When Armand seemed cured, he brought him back to Paris, gave him the key and combination of the safe, and left his duties at that. The relations between Armand Brossier and Jules were those between Abelard and the most impressionable of his students. Armand slept soft and dreamed sweetly and had halcyon days. When he wanted to marry he went and told Jules and Jules raised his salary one thousand francs a month, because he was always rash and he believed in treating well the sprite of the combination.

  The foregoing will explain (to those who don’t know) one of the reasons, apart from reasons of speculation, why the question of ‘going off gold’ fretted so many nations, so many individuals, for so many days: why some took it as a world-without-end calamity and some as an unnatural blessing. In the old days those that sought the absolute tried to make gold: our own conception is not very different.

  * * *

  ‘

  Scene Eighteen: The Bet

  I don’t know where you get your information, Carrière,’ said Michel Alphendéry, ‘and you may be right, but the pound sterling has stood up so well to attacks from outside and in that I wouldn’t bet on its going off now: that’s all. Nor would I bet on its staying on. I like to bet on fixed horse races. But here you simply can’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Perhaps you do.’ He looked with meaning at Carrière who was the crony of most of the young Radical-Center deputies. He got up, dusted his knees, showed some intention of going back to his room.

  Jules was leaning back in his chair looking at the shade-somber olive walls of his room that never saw the sunlight, staring at the crystal luster, looking at them all rather impatiently, smiling and rocking in his chair.

  Carrière stood in the center of the room, one foot forward like an orator, balancing on the other. His hand was stuck in his jacket. His powerful small head thrust back brought into prominence his forehead, Roman nose, broad chest, and early embonpoint : it also emphasized the roll of fat at the nape of the neck. His left hand was on his hips, his feet were in shiny handmade shoes. He was tall, with solid bones, had a late-Roman look of arrogance, self-confidence based on boundless vice, astuteness, and corrupt waywardness.

  His shining blond poll turned from one to the other. Will Bertillon stood, tall, plump and fair also, against one of the bookcases, an athletic figure grown too fat, too young, a slight graying of a fresh complexion due to too many indoor hours and soft sitting. He rang his own little peal of bells, in a faraway meditative tone: this he did by gently sifting the coins in his pockets, gathering them all up again and once more rhythmically letting them chink down. He chuckled now.

  ‘When even Michel thinks they won’t go off, I’ll trust the British to pull a fast one. They’ll go off overnight some week end, you’ll see. Some day we’re not expecting it. How are they to make money otherwise? And there’ll be a tight squeeze first to shake out the shorts. You can’t outguess the other chap’s game. You know—who—is going to give us the information when he gets it from Grosshändler of the International Quayside Corporation. If he knows it. Who is really on the inside of the inside of the inside? How can you guess the other chap’s game. I don’t know a quarter of what Alphendéry really thinks and yet he spends his whole life explaining what he thinks. And you mean to say we’re going to scrape out the inside of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s brainpan? Let’s keep out of all Crime Club guessing competition: they know the answer and you get a prize if you deduce the murderer from the facts on page 143. That’s where we stand with sterling … It’s bankrupt they are? And is that a reason for going bankrupt? Bankruptcy is nowadays the normal method of doing business with your creditors—why, if they’re really bankrupt, they can blackmail the world with—What are you going to do if the sterling area goes off gold? What are you going to do if there’s a panic in Lombard Street? Are you going to put your money in America! With every bank shutting its doors? Are you going to invest in China? In France, which is going to be losing her man power and money like water in about three years from now … You make me laugh: bankrupt! They don’t worry.’

  Carrière swung round, pointed the finger at him,

  ‘Bertillon, you’ll never make money with that philosophy: you can secrete, but never produce, a male hedgehog. To make money you’ve got to outguess even the crooked roulette wheel.’

  ‘William’s
right: sterling won’t go off. You have nothing to worry about.’ Jules looked dogmatic.

  ‘You feel as confident as that? I almost think you’re right. Would you like to make it a bet?’ Carrière moved up to Jules’s desk, his dark blue eyes glinting intently through the long lashes. ‘How much do you bet, Jules?’

  ‘Anything you like: what do I care: I’ll take you to any amount. I’ve just got a hunch sterling isn’t going off this year. It’s an old trick. Everyone’s counting on it going off. Why shouldn’t they squeeze the shorts? Let me stay on through this crisis and all the money in the world will pour into London. That’s how they live. There’s no other reason for planting your money up there in the fog.’

  William, who had been playing nonchalance all through this, felt his nose-for-danger twitch. ‘Jules! Even Alphendéry says he can’t understand a thing in the Bank of England statement.’

  ‘It’s just like Kreuger’s,’ said Alphendéry: ‘they smell the same to me. True, there’s a statement but what’s the good of a statement in Aramaic. I don’t read Aramaic.’

  William, struggling for Jules’s financial soul, became easy again.

  ‘Why,’ said Carrière, ‘a matter of foreign relations: would France allow her to go off; France has gold. Why wouldn’t she lend it to England?’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Alphendéry. ‘She’s so busy lending it out to make a ring of roses round Germany … You see, Jules, there is a likelihood, that’s all you can call it.’

  ‘The Bank of England,’ laughed Jules, ‘is just like Bertillon Frères …’

  ‘With this difference,’ Michel rushed in, ‘with this difference,’ he laughed softer and repeated, ‘with this difference though: we’ve got a cover of one hundred and ten per cent or something like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jules: ‘now what would I do if I were Montagu Norman? But, it’s my bank. I’d kill myself with laughing to see the whole world selling me short and I’d let them mortgage the last foot of Uncle Tom’s farm and then I’d snap down: I’ve got the dough—or, I’ve got the power, or the backing. No, my bet is he won’t go off.’

  ‘I’m glad I never took up banking,’ said William, ‘they say it requires so much brains.’

  Jules silenced him testily, ‘You don’t help with those funniments. I am in banking.’

  ‘Banking?’ meditated William. ‘Don’t call it banking. Call it a raffle or rouge-et-noir and you’ll know what that is you’re doing. Every time you hear a man say, or think, “I’m a Napoleon: you’re just mud on my spats,” or “One day you’ll be able to see my star without the aid of a telescope,” or “I bumped my head on the moon last night, I must remember to stoop tonight,” or “Things are going on and on and up and up,” or when he calls a janitor a building supervisor or a crapshooter a banker—you know that tomorrow you’ll have to buy a box of matches from him outside the church … Know what you are: you won’t lose any money, even if you don’t make the grand sweep. I’ve heard about one but not seen it yet …’

  He pulled out one of his eternal cigarettes, did not offer it to anyone, lit it, and kept his eyes on Alphendéry, for he knew both Carrière and Jules were furious with him. He went on in an intimate conversational tone as if he were opening his secret heart to Alphendéry, ‘That’s how they all come a cropper. The little ones throw dice on the zinc counter, the middle ones buy Snia-Viscosa, the big ones go to Deauville. You go in the office sweepstake and go without lunch all the week to punt at Auteuil, to get two hundred francs to buy ten shares of Dummy-Gummi Incorporated and put a mortgage on your house and buy a false identity card to be able to get into Monte Carlo and get to the point of putting a bullet through your head, because you want to have the right to sit with crooks and order hot hors d’oeuvres at Philippe’s. You begin with a postage stamp and end with a postmortem.’

  ‘Speaking seriously,’ began Carrière, deliberately turning to Jules, leaning on the desk, compellingly balancing on both hands, with a brilliant, persuasive, old-school-friend intimacy, ‘Jules, are you taking any chances on the pound?’

  ‘Why, the Americans have to keep the pound at par. Your money’s safe. Any boy would be crazy not to take you on. It’s a little safe money.’

  ‘Would you guarantee such a contract as mine?’ said Jacques, friendly, detached. Jules flopped down on the two front legs of his chair and brought his hands down on the blotter, in a whirlwind of good humor.

  ‘I’ll guarantee you to pay your whole contract on that brewery in Burton-upon-Trent at not less than one hundred twenty-two francs to the pound. Tell them to send the sterling drafts to me. I’ll pay them.’

  ‘Every three months?’

  ‘Every three months, whatever—’

  Alphendéry spoke, ‘Jules, aren’t you rather rash? How long a period do the drafts cover, Carrière?’

  ‘Three years from this month,’ said Jacques briefly, with a touch of scorn.

  William pleaded earnestly, ‘Jules, if you want to throw money away, throw it in the street: think of the fun you’ll get out of seeing Marianne Raccamond burst with indignation when she sees a couple of street cleaners in Rolls-Royces.’

  ‘I woke up this morning knowing I was going to make money,’ said Jules. ‘It’s all right. I’m sorry for you, Jacques, but I can’t stop you: you’re wasting your money. O.K. It’s a deal.’

  ‘What’s the consideration?’ asked Alphendéry coldly.

  ‘O.K. We’ll just call it a friendly bet,’ said Carrière coolly. ‘We’ll have a letter, one from you, one from me, countersigned. That’s sufficient, isn’t it? No documents. It’s enough.’

  ‘What’s the consideration?’ said Alphendéry.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Jules. ‘You send me your letter, not a lawyer’s letter.’ He was restless however, and got up, stretching his legs. William and Michel Alphendéry said nothing more, both having one idea in mind and that was to make Jules go back on the bet as soon as they could get him out of the sight of Carrière. Carrière picked up his hat and stick and looked at them with that smooth, bursting expression which is almost a smile.

  William stood up.

  ‘And what’s the consideration? If the pound should go off and we had such an arrangement with you, we should be liable for any amount—there are no buffers for runaway currencies. You ought to do your banking with us, Carrière, on the strength of a deal like that. You ought to pull in some of your friends in the Chamber of Deputies, and tell Larue to give us carte blanche. Or would you rather have an overdraft? That would be more in our general style of business. I’ll write you a check now. How much? Jules is giving away the bank in the morning. Be round early and see if you can’t get a slice. If you know anyone who wants a bank tell him to drop round.’

  Jacques laughed, and had a twinkle for William.

  ‘Oh, I’ll give you a deposit, Bertillon. Jules, write down two million francs on your books for me: I’ll send it round. Now be sure to write it down to my account. I’ve got a little account of two million over at the Crédit. I’ll tell them to transfer it …’

  ‘Keep your petty cash,’ Jules said languidly, grandly. ‘What’s two million? I don’t want your deposit. I can rustle up business without you putting up earnests. Don’t be a fool.’

  ‘Well, I’m still saving up,’ said William. ‘I’ll take it, Jacques: so just send it round to my account, will you?’

  ‘I’ll tell them to transfer it before closing this afternoon,’ said Jacques, negligently magnificent to Jules.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Jules, on whom common sense was slowly gaining. ‘We’ll pay one-half per cent of it into Raccamond’s account. It will give him confidence and he’s your man in a sort of way, isn’t he? Ten thousand will cheer him up. He’s still so blue about that Claude Brothers business. He still has to go down to give testimony and he’s one of these neurotics who want to bang their
heads against the wall every time anyone says “You’re a crook.”’

  Carrière looked at Jules in an odd way. Jules laughed. ‘Oh, don’t mistake me: I know he’s all that’s crooked. But that makes no difference. He’s out for himself but he can’t do without me. And ten thousand is a nice present … Well, I’m having lunch with the Comtesse de Voigrand. I’ll tell her I’ve seen you. How’s your mother?’

  ‘The old buzzard got back to town yesterday. That reminds me. I must ring her. I want her to advance me some cash for those vineyards I want to buy near Lyons. Everyone says it’s a bad investment, wine is going to be used for irrigation one of these days. But I’m banking on the Eighteenth Amendment being repealed in the U.S.A. With the people getting no jobs and no dole, they’ve got to give them some pleasure in life. She always behaves like a hellcat but she usually comes across.’ A spasm of hatred passed over his face. He said, viciously, with a raw, rich tone, ‘I hate her.’

  ‘Why?’ said Jules carelessly. He didn’t care for his mother, either, but he had no emotions about her.

  ‘She knows I’m waiting for the pleasure of sending roses to her funeral and she gets heartier every year. She enjoys making me crawl for the few million francs I want for my ventures. She knows what I could do with half—just half—six hundred million francs.’

  He looked at Jules with hatred: Jules calmly, penetratingly returned the look. He knew what fly was stinging ambitious Carrière’s mind. Jules and he were abreast, in the figures of their reputed fortunes—about one hundred and thirty million francs each. Jules had a little family money behind him but Carrière’s inheritance when his mother died and two of his uncles died would be colossal, counted in astronomical numbers. But they were all healthy and Carrière, fretting and rotting away his youth was just as likely to die as they. When he left, William commented.

  ‘He’s got to gorge on dead bodies, fermented juices, and living men to keep alive. His right is three fat corpses—his mother’s, his two uncles’—and two million francs. That’s the way he sees himself when he’s normal. As I never dream I don’t know what he sees when he gets outside a bottle of champagne …’ William turned to Jules, ‘Forget that Mickey-Mouse sketch about the bet. I won’t pay him a farthing even if you do sign anything with him. What do you let him get under your skin for?’