House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  Marianne’s eyes brightened at a recollection, ‘Yes, we do … not much. But we do get a simply marvelous pâté de foie gras from the Dordogne, the best I ever tasted; it is made by a little firm down there. Do you like it, Mme. Haller? I would get you a tin.’

  The Hallers were pale with astonishment. After a moment, Mme. Haller managed to say, in a stricken voice, ‘Mme. Raccamond! You know—’ (very low) ‘how they are made, pâtés de foies gras?’

  ‘Why, yes.’

  Almost tonelessly, she questioned, ‘You know they are made from’ (a shocked look) ‘the diseased livers of overfed geese?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The two couples exchanged glances of complete incomprehension. Almost stonily, Mme. Haller said, ‘No, no, we never eat them. We could not eat them.’

  What was so particularly shocking to them in the sluggish livers of lazy, overfed geese? But Mme. Haller had managed to convey a feeling of cannibalism. Briskly, Haller broke the spell, ‘Some wine, Mme. Raccamond? Do you like Burgundy or Bordeaux, red or white?’

  ‘Oh, Burgundy, thank you … red.’ A pleased look, ‘I didn’t know you had wine.’ She began to think, after so much liqueur, ugh! but I need a tonic.

  ‘Tell Anna, some Burgundy, Sophy.’

  ‘I’ll get it myself. And Mme. Raccamond, did you taste the butter? I must show you the box we get it in. We get it specially from a place near Mulhouse. It is sent up every month.’

  Yes, and now it is rancid, thought Marianne. ‘Really, I used beurre d’Isigny,’ she said with confidence, mentioning the best domestic butter in Paris.

  ‘Beurre d’Isigny! Oh, Mme. Raccamond, do you buy it from the butterman like that? But you know that they mix it! You get nothing pure. You must get it yourself from the producer. You don’t know what you’re getting.’

  Marianne flushed. ‘We don’t use very much … we eat out most of the time.’ She dared him to go back to the ground of restaurants. He eyed her for a moment and turned courteously to her husband.

  ‘The reason I have built up a reserve of goods as well as gold is that gold itself is sterile and the holding of it sterilizes not only money-making capacity but even the mental faculties all round. It stultifies its holder. You see, even me—Mr. Raccamond. I was able to retire at forty-five and what have I done the last ten years? Nothing. When the depression came I realized that not only was the world sterile, through overproduction, but I was sterile. I want to go back to my home town and become a doctor. I regret that five years ago I did not start my medical course, but there is still time. I think I will do that. I fear the sterilization of gold. I hold it in so many places, England, Switzerland, Canada, for example, that even traveling has no pleasure for me any more. I am afraid to disturb my gold reserve. You see, how it is with me? Do you understand, Mr. Raccamond? And so the only thing for me to do is to go back to earning with my bare hands! … Do you remember when you were a student, Raccamond? I was happy when I was a student. I was a prize student. I thought I would be building machines all my life … You know, we are lazy, Mr. Raccamond. The government should force us all to do some vulgar labor, like weeding gutters, or cleaning sewers, for a month every year: it would act as a purgative for our laziness …Yes, indeed, Mme. Raccamond, we have to be forced. Working people too must be forced; if things go well in Russia, they will have to be pressed to do the dirty jobs, they will have to be pressed to obey hygienic regulations! I had some peasant girls once who would not bind their hair in handkerchiefs to save their hair from the looms. I had to be very strict with them … I would not mind going to a new developing country myself, say, like Australia or Palestine and showing the people how to work.’

  Sophy returned with the butter box and behind her, Anna, carrying a plate of sausage and a bottle of red wine.

  Aristide was spilled in his chair, his mouth half open, his eyes bulging and his pendulous cheeks some pale shade between French blue and mauve. When the wine was poured for him, although his head was reeling, he grasped the glass and drained it, hoping to combat the nightmare indigestion that had already set in. He looked with bitter astonishment at Haller, breathing freely, cheerfully, cutting up the sausage, which (of course) came from a special, though nameless, shop, brought specially in a basket by Anna, the only shop in Paris free from bacteria, poison, and pollution, according to both the Hallers. Anna, at the door, surveyed them a minute. She knew, of course, very well, what they came for, the two black pigs: they came to snuffle and grub in her master’s dishes.

  ‘A little port wine?’ asked Sophy, and getting out a special glass, put the purple-mantled port, not a particularly good one, by Aristide’s plate. He pushed it away a centimeter, ‘No, please.’ But with the usual protestations, he drank.

  ‘If Hitler or some demagogue like that insisted on everyone going to a labor camp for a month a year,’ said Haller, ‘even I would say there was some good in him. But he’s a weak fellow.’

  Aristide shook his head: he had quite lost the thread of the conversation; he blurted out feebly, ‘You, Mr. Haller, pay your own debts. Where would the sausage maker, the bread baker be otherwise? You wouldn’t get your butter from Mulhouse.’

  Haller laughed and ate a big piece of sausage with relish, ‘Yes, but if it were a question of paying them compound interest for ever on a sausage, if I had to mortgage my bread to them as well and keep on paying through the nose, I would run away and remain solvent and honorable in another country where such fantastic practices didn’t exist. I would even run away to Russia …’ He raised his eyebrows, looked seriously at them. ‘The little harmless bourgeois, with little homes, haven’t been touched. They respect them. I would keep my money abroad … Take America,’ he went on, not remarking that Aristide was past taking anything, ‘in America the increment of wealth is three per cent per annum, the increment of population one per cent, but the Government gives four per cent which is more than reason allows, and most people casually expect to reap six to ten per cent on their money—in the stock market even more. All that should be purged from the system, industry should lose that dead weight, the common people should have all that shifted off their bread and cheese … We take laxatives, Mr. Raccamond; the system should, too.’

  ‘There would be no confidence,’ Aristide said slowly, with a death rattle in his voice, a choke which made Marianne blanch, ‘if such things were said publicly.’

  ‘Aristide,’ cried his wife, ‘what’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, what’s the matter, Mr. Raccamond?’

  ‘Air—a little air … I’m faint.’

  ‘Oh, dear. (Georg, you hear!) Air. Open the window.’

  Georg got up and went to the window, with precise haste. Aristide rose and hung trembling to the arm of his chair. Marianne darted anxious looks round, wondering if he would have the courage to go outside the room. But their tiny hostess was struggling on the other side, already heaving him towards the window. ‘Oh, Mme. Raccamond, your husband … help him, look!’ At the window, Aristide collapsed into the window seat. Georg stood by him and spoke to him in murmurs. The curtains flung themselves out into the room again and again as the blessed zephyr blew in. The two women retired once more to the sofa and sat talking, Sophy commiserating with Marianne. Poor Mr. Raccamond worked so hard. These rich clients were so exacting: the market turned for a day and plop, down they came on the customers’ man. The men had left the room.

  Pale, but himself, Aristide now returned, took his place, and Georg, relieved and content, sat opposite him. ‘Sophy, is the tea ready? Mr. Raccamond needs some tea.’

  She pressed the bell. Meanwhile the clock had been going round and round and Aristide, with drops on his brow, had watched that dreadful minute hand dragging itself with malevolent slowness to the half-hour, to the hour. They had now been here gorging two hours and ten minutes, and it was by no means finished. What a man goes through to keep customers! And this one, too, w
ho sometimes passed a hundred shares in a month, and who paid himself ten times ten per cent interest by getting the Raccamonds to dinner and pumping Aristide about the bank, about the market, about Bertillon’s position in the market, about Alphendéry’s relation to him, about the great goldbugs who had their bonds with Bertillon and about a thousand other things, upon whose details he fed in his long idle hours of the day and night. But Aristide knew that engineer or no, mathematician or no, one of these days Haller might require a ‘private service,’ some transferring of bonds, or gold, and that it was just possible he would get it for himself … He looked at the little rubicund blond gnome with his mountains of gold and despised him; him, once a leading spinner of East Prussia, now a frog in a giant bell jar predicting the political weather!

  ‘The tea, Sophy! The tea.’

  ‘I suppose she has gone to sleep. When I went into the kitchen, she was singing and she would not answer me.’

  ‘Then go out yourself, Sophy.’ (In German) ‘Don’t show yourself so incompetent in the management of a servant.’ She trotted out.

  The door opened. ‘The tea!’ said Sophy cheerfully, ushering in Anna with a tray on which stood handsome glasses full of a transparent orange liquid. ‘Now, Mr. Raccamond, you will feel better. You need a little stimulation.’

  ‘Put a little more wine into it than usual, Sophy. Mr. Raccamond is tired, he needs it.’

  The tea became the color of blood.

  ‘Moderation,’ said Haller, ‘is a wise use of liberty, a wise limitation of plenitude. There must be a redistribution of goods.’

  ‘Some of these chocolates with your tea, Mr. Raccamond; they are the best chocolates in the world and come from Switzerland. Lindt and Sprüngli. It is amusing that when I was at school in Switzerland,’ said Mrs. Haller, ‘I was told to be most careful not to acquire the Swiss ‘li ’ for ‘lein’ and once when they asked me what chocolates I had bought (they were very careful of our diet), I said Lindt and Sprünglein.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Georg. ‘Well, Mr. Raccamond, moderation is a thing financiers won’t hear of and so we have revolution, their own fault. They can’t be moderate, and so neither can the ninety-five per cent disinherited. It is inevitable.’

  Marianne said tartly, ‘There have been a lot of revolutions already and no one is satisfied.’

  Sedately Haller shook his head, as he put another macaroon on Aristide’s plate (he assumed that as Aristide was no longer suffocated, he could eat again). ‘No, where the redistribution goes only from five to ten per cent of the people, that is not a revolution. You see, Russia is the only revolution that concerned ninety-five percent of the people. That’s why they like it.’

  ‘But the worst elements are on top,’ cried Marianne, in real distress. ‘Look at L’Humanité! Look at the way they criticize the theater and literature. “The impact of dialectics.” Bah! How can they use such barbarous words!’

  Haller pleasantly sipped his wine-filled tea, ‘Ah, my dear lady, they are not trying to please us … no! They will do away with us. Entirely. They don’t need us! A shoemaker, Madame, can make shoes: he doesn’t need our executive ability at all. It’s sad, but it’s true.’ He laughed sunnily. ‘I would love to go to Palestine, for instance, and knock some sense into their heads.’

  ‘Whose heads?’

  ‘The workers’ heads … teach them how to work.’

  Aristide said, ‘Would they listen to you; they’re obstinate brutes.’ Sophy fluttered gaily, ‘Oh, we had a communist and an unemployed man up here to talk with us, at dinner, on two separate occasions; we know just how they think.’

  Georg flushed, looked extremely flattered, boyish. ‘Yes, I quite agree with the communist, a most intelligent man and not a bit grateful for the dinner, you know.’

  Faintly Marianne asked, ‘What was he? The secretary of the party or something?’

  ‘No, just a tramman Georg found down at the sheds. He wrote a letter to our paper about it.’

  ‘What paper is that?’

  ‘The Frankfurter Zeitung. It is the only liberal paper. It is the best paper in the world. We read it every day. The literary criticisms, my dear Mme. Raccamond: you would be delighted to read them. So very refined, modern, too.’

  Georg, on the point of revealing his naked soul, said to Raccamond, ‘Why do you work for Bertillon, Mr. Raccamond? It is (don’t laugh at the old-fashioned phrase), it is rather sordid, isn’t it? Why don’t you free yourself and—better yourself. You are the slave of great capital, aren’t you?’

  Aristide looked displeased at this admonishment. ‘I hope to get on, you know. A partnership—’

  ‘Aristide?’

  ‘With some house or other—later on. That is not so bad. A private bank, you know, is the needle’s eye to influence in finance, in Paris.’

  ‘Yes, but does that satisfy you, Mr. Raccamond? You seem to have such a cultivated view,’ said Sophy, regretfully.

  ‘Oh, yes. I was born for finance,’ Aristide said. What a curious look Marianne gave him!

  ‘Give Mr. Raccamond a leetle more sausage with his tea,’ urged Sophy. At this moment Anna came triumphantly in, as if she knew Aristide’s state—and who would not, seeing his complexion and bulging eyes and sweating chops?—and more tea was forced on him, as well as a splendid Doyenne de Comice pear, specially bought for him, ‘because he needed fresh fruit for his digestion.’ There was a hailstorm of protestations and inquiries, refusals and moral suasions. Sophy won. Suddenly, Georg said, two hours and forty minutes too late, ‘Sophy, you know it is not polite to press anything on people. They know what they want.’ She looked guilty and desisted.

  When they got out into the quiet street and found it past midnight, they felt as if a battle had been lost and won. ‘Never again, Marianne,’ said Aristide choking. ‘I feel as if I will die. I can’t do it again … I am suffocating.’

  Marianne bit her lip. ‘When I asked you to go and get my handkerchief, didn’t you understand I wanted to give you a chance to go out in the hall? Instead, you passed me yours.’

  ‘I didn’t know, Marianne; please forgive me. It was kind of you.’

  ‘You should have refused.’

  ‘Oh, I tried … didn’t you see that? But they are terrible; they are ogres. Marianne, we will never go there again. He comes to Bertillon’s for quotations and places his order in Cleat, Placket, and Company, and I don’t believe any amount of listening to his nonsense will make him realize that it’s unethical.’

  ‘They must be fabulously rich, just the same,’ sighed Marianne.

  ‘Yes, you are right, unfortunately. Well, it won’t be until next month. They only ask us once a month.’

  ‘They are our friends, and true friends. Friends are true in the measure that they appreciate our moneymaking ability and financial staying power. Mme. Haller asked me to go shopping with her and I will. She will be useful to me.’

  Aristide looked at her curiously and after an inspection said, ‘How can she possibly be useful to you? You don’t need anything, that I know of.’

  ‘I may,’ Marianne declared. “Aristide, I have been chasing a ghost light: physical goods are power. I am going in for moneymaking, flat. I’ve sold my play in London, but there’s nothing in it. I’ll go in for big moneymaking, naked business, and when I’m through I’ll have enough material to write a real play, something in the Bernstein line.’

  Aristide looked at her with admiration. ‘Marianne, you have a man’s brain. You never swerve. Whatever you want you will get. I wish I was as resolute as you.’

  ‘Why, so you are, my dear.’

  He shook his head faintly, then seeing her glance, smiled and nodded in acquiescence, ‘In my own way. We are well matched, Marianne. I will always be glad we married. Where should I have been without you?’

  She was cheerful, resolute. ‘Still in the arms of Lucienne, I su
ppose.’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know. I had outgrown that.’

  She smiled to herself in the dark. ‘Do you feel better now, Aristide?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our son, Aristide, is very like his mother; I see Lucienne in his eyes and brows; his mouth is like yours.’ There was a silence. ‘There is a sort of spiritual bloom over his face, which is like Lucienne’s,’ she continued.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he murmured half-heartedly.

  ‘Ah, yes. She is very brave to let us educate him and have him come home to us.’

  Aristide said bitterly, ‘She is poor. She could not expect me to give her your money.’

  ‘A mother will do a lot for a son,’ Marianne said cheerfully.

  Aristide looked at her in unconcealed surprise, ‘You are so strong, Marianne … you have an incredible strength of soul.’

  ‘Ah!’ She smiled with intense secret gratification.

  ‘Lucienne,’ he murmured, ‘never had your breadth of vision, Marianne. She was kind, she is good, she is a woman, but it is impossible for her to think with the moral vigor that you have. Nor have I,’ he ended with faint, instinctive malice, well hidden.

  Marianne frowned, and they fell silent, until she changed the subject, to her advantage. ‘There’s no subject so rich in ideas as Money.’ Aristide grunted. ‘I’m thinking,’ went on Marianne tenderly, with a richer tone than she usually used, ‘that money is a very pure thing in its way; that’s why the Hallers have such curious habits. They have nothing more to do, they do not even need more money—they have enough for avarice. Now they are looking for the absolute. They caught that from their gold bars. It is an absolute. People have such a delicate love for money that if you speak jealously of it or of those who own it, all the dirt falls back on you: people take you for a miserable, poor-spirited person.’ She laughed richly. ‘I could almost love money, I should like to wash my hands in gold coins. I should feel like a princess. No, it is not sterile. No, water seems sterile, too.’ Aristide grunted. ‘I will, some day!’ Marianne murmured with energy.