House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  ‘Have you got it?’ asked Jules. ‘I can read Polish. I was in Poland one time.’

  Partiefine handed over the formula. It was a typewritten document about fourteen pages long, giving the formula, the complaints it was supposed to cure, the happy results obtained by its use, a short history of the family that had originated it, the method of distribution, its cost … Aristippe smiled once more sweetly at William to show that no favoritism was meant by showing Jules the formula first …

  ‘It looks fine,’ said Jules.

  ‘I have some chaps going round the pharmacies in the sixteenth and seventh and fifteenth arrondissements and the pharmacies have agreed to take it, but I’ve got to get up some diagrams and publicity. Do you think François Legris will really put up money?’ Aristippe had a rather timid and deprecating manner which showed Jules that he hoped the Bertillons would back him, too. ‘I thought a few, downstairs—’ he hesitated and smiled at William, ‘might like to back me,’ he said softly. ‘I showed it to a couple of them. Your manager, Urbain Voulou, said he would put a couple of thousand francs into it. I think it should—interest—the pharmacies seemed—quite interested. Of course, there are other—other kinds—being sold. I thought I might call it the Polish Formula: it’s attractive, isn’t it? Or the Viennese Formula … Will you give me the address? …’

  ‘Ask Alphendéry,’ said Jules. ‘He knows everything.’

  Aristippe soberly thanked him and moved out with the gait of the leaning tower of Pisa walking.

  ‘I’ll give him a couple of thousand, if he brings it up again,’ said Jules. ‘Every guy when he’s out of luck invents a contraceptive, a reinvigorator, or a purgative: why I wonder? That goes in the petty-cash account. The Comtesse told me to take Carrière on: she thinks the pound will hold, she thinks it’s just a scare.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I’d rather start fooling with the pound a few months from now: why is he anxious to run you in on this? Keep out of it. Carrière is poison.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t do anything. I don’t trust that fellow.’ William walked out.

  The door opened and Jules came in with Dr. Jacques Carrière, the famous young society bachelor, and Aristide Raccamond. Carrière was a head taller than Raccamond, Raccamond a belly wider than him; Carrière was flushed with wine, conceit, and impudence, but the secretary, Lucille Dalbi, thought him handsome. ‘I don’t need you, Aristide,’ said Jules insolently. Aristide lowered his head, looked at them all like a cornered bull, and left. Carrière sank down and his knife crease and florid shoes emerged more opulently.

  ‘To begin with, Jules, I’m a bit overmargined and you’ve got about 275,000 francs of mine here: you can make a book transfer of that, before I send you the rest round from the Crédit. By the way—the commission: I’d like to have a half per cent paid to Comte Hervé Lucé, poor chap. He’s a friend of Jean de Guipatin’s and I thought I’d make a bit of money for the poor fellow.’

  ‘Why not?’ agreed Jules. ‘You know I don’t want the money … What’s the matter with him? Dope?’

  ‘Dope. I know the chap that sells it to him. You’ve got one of them here unless I’m mistaken: I’ve seen him hovering about the passages and back streets, pressing the hands of funny-looking gentry—that miserable little huckster-fellow that wears a bowler hat, a Belgian, isn’t he? Looks like a bankrupt private detective, never shaved in the morning. Quite a cad, I should say, but—in cahoots with the drug squad.’

  ‘You mean Henri Parouart? He’s a chiseler, petty blackmail artist. Catches us up by one minute on an execution in New York and a quarter of a point in London … Blackmail doesn’t interest me,’ said Jules with more emphasis: ‘a blackmailer and a denouncer always find themselves on the pavement. They do no more than beg their bread in a peculiarly slimy fashion: at the first breath of big business, the ranks close and we chuck them out …’

  ‘I’ve heard a Paris Napoleon is behind Parouart,’ suggested Carrière with malice.

  ‘In those shoes? Let him ride: I’ll get something on him, sooner or later, when I have the time. Well, Jacques, we’re going to have Spanish royalty with us in Paris. Do you really think he’s got all that dough here? I think we’ll get fat with all the revolutions going on. They all come to Paris—everyone from the Aga Khan who sells his bath water, to Don Jaime de Bourbon, who only lives by divine right, gets here …’

  ‘Shall we write a letter to each other about this pound-sterling business? Or let it rest. Do you care? Perhaps an informal letter.’

  With confidence, foxily, Jules agreed, ‘Sure, I’ll write a letter: what do you want? Mlle. Dalbi, ask the telephone girl to get Comte Lucé up here: he’s going to get a half per cent, he may as well witness it.’

  * * *

  Scene Twenty-one: The Letter

  The letter in its final draft was so full of erasures and reconsiderations that Jules said, ‘Listen, Jacques, I’ll send it to you by tonight’s mail, or tomorrow morning: you send me yours in the same mail. That’ll settle it. Hervé will be my witness …’

  ‘O.K … I must get along. I want to drop in at the Chamber to see the debate. The future of Briand has got them all excited.’

  ‘Good luck: why don’t you run for the Chamber? You could get big support down in the Dordogne, a native son. Must be lively down there. I’ll bet the border towns are flustered with grandees, jostling each other, their coats all out of line with concealed duros …’

  When Carrière had gone, Jules called up his crony Pierre Olympe, a lawyer fabulously ignorant, but extremely fashionable. Between them, they concocted the letter about the bet on sterling and posted it off to Carrière. It read:

  I agree to pay you in francs, at the rate of 122 francs to the £, any sterling demands in the sum of £,25,000 each, the first demand payable on May 10,1931, and succeeding demands every four months thereafter, until the sum of £,250,000 shall have been paid, on this basis. On the other hand, should the £ continue above the rate of 122 francs at the dates of such demands, the difference between 122 and the prevailing rate shall accrue to me, Jules Bertillon, on each occasion.

  Carrière read this carefully and laughed aloud the next morning at breakfast. He looked across at Caro de Faniul, with his suffering white face and long scarlet mouth. The youth’s hands, long, firm, white, and ringed, tapped impatiently: he was scowling frightfully and forcing his face into a wrinkled mask because Jacques was reading the mail in his presence. Jacques smiled. ‘Read that, Caro.’

  His lids drooped and he tossed it back. ‘You know I don’t understand anything about business!’

  Carrière was even more expansive. ‘Why, he says ‘sterling demands,’ the fool, not ‘drafts.’ Thus, without any brewery at all, he has to pay me the difference in exchange on any demand I send through: he hasn’t mentioned the brewery, for example. Well! … Of course, the pound will go off: it will give him a stitch in the side trying to keep up with the pound, and it may ruin him. Not bad!’

  ‘You are filthy, Jacques.’

  ‘That sort of boy, self-centered and ignorant in a world of quicksands, if he gets something done, thinks he is a genius, something mystic and superior to us other men: he has never seen a snow crystal or the hair of a fly through a lens, for example: if he did, he would believe in demons! It’s so easy to break him—it’s no more pleasure than splintering a match, really.’

  ‘Then don’t do it, Jacques: it’s so vulgar.’

  ‘To realize anything is vulgar,’ said Carrière. ‘When you’ve done it, you ask yourself, “Why did I bring it out in the light of the sun?” like the mother of an ungrateful son. There’s as much difference between the image and reality as between the joy of conception and the chaos of childbed.’ Caro looked at him coldly, drank the last of his coffee. ‘But why is this so?’ asked Jacques Carrière, with the slow grinding tone of one who is forced to talk although he knows he is boring his partner. ‘Becau
se I am myself formless and cannot conceive properly. You see that, don’t you? You should. If I could grow up, entirely, I would not be so vicious: I am an unhappy myth. Jules is endlessly, primevally fertile. But he isn’t human! He doesn’t even try to be a man.’

  ‘He is charming,’ said Caro. ‘You know, when I met him I said to myself, ‘Who is he? Where have I seen him before? Long ago, very long ago?’ And later in the evening, I found myself saying, ‘Hermes, Hermes,’ again and again, muttering the name like that. Why (I thought) Hermes. That’s Jules. He would be at home in ancient Greece, crooked, modern, plausible, argent, endless coiner, stamping images of himself on wax hearts, his own fraud, currency.’ Jacques studied him carefully with an aged expression of craft and understanding.

  ‘A king-thief!’ said Jacques Carrière.

  * * *

  Scene Twenty-two: ‘Weltanschauung’

  Franz rosenkrantz looked in the mirror all the time he talked and this gave his conversation an added polish, a reflective elegance of mood which matched well his polished fingernails, eyeglasses, white collar, and smooth thin black hair. A few gray hairs in tufts over each ear fell in with his mid-European color scheme of balanced black and white. The responses that Alphendéry made to him were only legatos in the sonata of his reflections: he heard what was said faintly as an echo and he bound these musical echoes into his theme.

  ‘I was at Verdun,’ said Alphendéry. ‘I saw five years of war and I really am still alive.’

  ‘Undoubtedly: then we never faced each other—I was in the division that occupied St. Quentin in 1917.’

  He looked into the mirror, half smiling to himself, but at himself. ‘One would say that time is a river in which we turn over and over like logs and blades of grass!’ He held his wineglass to the light with a gesture from the old gay dramas. ‘I prefer the purple mantle of dark Burgundy! The French put all their Weltanschauung into their wine! Our wine is clear, reedy, piquant, reasonable, and we put our Weltanschauung into our music, literature, and philosophy! Judge which nation has chosen wisely.’

  Alphendéry, whose efforts at conversation, or rather at brilliant monologue, or apothegmatic reply, had been silenced several times by the man in the mirror, now tapped on his knife with his head down, a very rare thing for him: his conversation usually flourished to the accompaniment of profuse, meaningless gestures. He said automatically, ‘There isn’t a Frenchman alive who doesn’t try to make himself a picture of the universe, and a remarkably well policed one (too policed)! But there isn’t the background of Grimm’s fairy tales, marvel, dread, and illiteracy that is the basis of much of the profound thinking from over the Rhine. The troll wood, the Black Forest, dragon rocks, river maidens, the Lorelei: it produces a beautiful and confused effect of torrents and thunder in German music. The vast barren stretches, like Courland, produce your German categories.’

  The man in the mirror was thrust into the background. Another legendary figure arose, the racial theory. Captain, now German citizen (in exile) Rosenkrantz, said, ‘It astonishes me to hear you defend the two-dimensional thinking of the French. You are French, in a way, by birth, but your father and mother came from that very region, you say, from the Black Forest! You yourself were born in Strasbourg. Except for a territorial convention, that is Germany. And then, more important, you are, like me, a Jew! The Talmud has given us a rich, medieval background, even if we don’t go to the synagogue, which makes us friendlier to the splendid complexity, the grand subterranean instincts of German thoughts. Germany is the true home of the modern Jew.’

  ‘Are you in Paris?’

  Rosenkrantz shook his head. ‘Economic necessity. New forces arising are alien to the German soul, the German-Jewish soul. The Marxists, the National Socialists. Both Jews and Germans understand that social organization is founded on the family: the German has the tribe father, the Jew the father as King in Israel. The Frenchman has no sense of family: he habitually keeps two ménages, he has illegitimate children, brings venereal disease into the heart of the home: he has no sense of true organization. Tell me one thing, Herr Alphendéry, would you have your children brought up in France?’

  Alphendéry laughed. ‘You keep on forgetting I am French.’

  ‘But you are a Jew. You must yearn for a deeper, truer sense of living.’

  Alphendéry suddenly became excited. ‘I know I am French and forget everything else. Compare Diderot and that ass Kant. Diderot was a mind that adorned six universes of knowledge—without him the social history of his time could not be written. Kant? A monstrous pedant, a colossus of ignorance, who never went thirty miles from his home and never had sexual intercourse. Is that a man? That’s a mummy. I don’t believe in your pure reason. The only philosopher for me is the one who is ostentatiously physiological, and whose brain only overworks, because all his other functions overwork: a true giant of a man, not a beetle.’

  Captain Rosenkrantz, retreating before his man’s choler, shifted to more familiar ground: ‘Even the German needs a little fermentation to produce the perfect metropolitan type. Between ourselves, there is too much of the Slav and the peasant in your ordinary German.’

  Alphendéry bit off a chunk of the conversation, like a hungry, healthy man who bolts, and whose digestion is nevertheless unimpaired. ‘Yes, in fact, the Jew has been hammered on the anvil cobbles of cities for many generations, long before the ancestors of most of the Germans had learned to cook the roots they dug with their nails or their stones. But that does not make him a Jew. It makes him a metropolitan. What is the Jew? Just a bourgeois. The soul of the burgher. The reason you don’t like France, Herr Rosenkrantz, is that you can’t pick out the Jews here: they all look Jewish, everyone. You don’t like that. You want to sit in a tribe, don’t you? And then the French are as smart as the Jew, they have all he has—a head for finance, money monopolies, learning, family organization, love of law and medicine, rationalism, democracy, a complete organization of property round the family. But what were we, Herr Rosenkrantz? The wireless telegraphists of the Middle Ages? By carrier pigeon, or grapevine telegraph, or messengers, or mails, we got to know the prices for which goods had been or could be sold in the central markets; we were the exchange men. Where are we now with the radio? The peasant in the wildest parts of Bessarabia, once he has a radio, knows just as well as you or me the closing in Winnipeg and Chicago. No more Jew: the radio wiped him out. Let the Jew become a citizen. But no. The Jews howl against the Soviet Union which frees them from pogroms, from the sweatshop, from rabbinical graft and superstition. They cling to Germany which detests and insults them, to the British Empire which is using them as does a jackal, as a cat’s-paw. And we think we’re clever … What is it the Jew doesn’t want to lose? Not Judaism, my dear Herr Rosenkrantz, but the bourgeoisie, of which he is the archetype, the most concentrated example. That’s my analysis of the return to the synagogue by the overrich members of our congregation. A defense against Bolshevism? And what is Bolshevism? It’s Izzy, Jakie, and Manny forming a labor union in the sweatshop. So the boss runs back to Judaism … Let us forget the Jew, Herr Rosenkrantz, let’s remember humanity.’

  Rosenkrantz had an intelligent, flushed, and insincere air, with something of patronage. ‘You are one of those who put our racial history in a nameless sepulcher because it has been unpleasant. But that is where our wary intelligence comes from! From fight, from oppression, from loopholes. Forget that and we become like the Gentiles, ignoramuses, bumpkins: we have lost our patrimony! And will the Goyim ever let us forget it? Perhaps for a liberal generation or so, but it returns. And the French! The French cunningly wish to submerge our rival intelligence by absorbing us, making us lose our identity. At one time, they said, “Your race or your life!” That’s it now. I prefer the Germans and the old Russians who hate us, imprison us, lock us in quarters like lepers, but respect the integrity of our race. Yes. We suffer, but the essential, the dignity of the soul, and the race
soul remains. We are men, being dogs.’

  Alphendéry’s reply was like a trumpet: people in the restaurant turned to look at them. ‘We suffer and live in the best hotels, eat in the best brasseries, travel in the luxury expresses, spend money at Le Touquet, dress ourselves in the Rue de la Paix, ski at St. Moritz, own châteaux from here to Tokio, have our paws on all the credit and commercial banks: we reign and we are oppressed, too. We suffer the way my broker in London, E. Ralph Stewart, with a house in the country, a house in Mayfair, and a leased shooting lodge, is a follower of the humble despised Christ. I am tired of those fairy tales.’

  He looked tired. Rosenkrantz sneered politely. ‘But you believe in socialism, if I’m not mistaken! The theory of a man who put his own children in an orphan asylum, for example. Karl Marx who drank beer with the roughs on Hampstead Heath and assaulted policemen. Refined company. Their socialism is a sort of bureaucratic tiger-eat-tiger. Where else do you have such corruption as in France? Imagine the possibilities in a more democratic or, as you say, a proletarian state. What virtues has the common man?’

  Alphendéry was cool with rage. ‘May I ask why you left your paradises then? They still pogromize Jews in Roumania, I believe. You ought to go there if it’s so fine for the soul and for business.’

  ‘We, in international business, are never in a foreign country. The market place, the exchange booth is our home. Am I dealing with France? Are you? Are we dealing with Rotterdam, the Ukraine; telephoning to Bucharest, London, Liverpool, Dublin? And whatever country we’re in, we’re telephoning those places; it makes no difference. France is just a foothold to do business in. What is there in it to hold the soul of man?’

  ‘There, you see,’ said Alphendéry calmly, ‘our greatest weakness: we have no gratitude to our friends. And we kiss the foot that kicks us, abasing ourselves, as no living man should, while winking to each other and telling ourselves how smart we are, fooling the Goyim!’ Alphendéry started laughing like a diamond. ‘They make wonderful pastry here.’