House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  They had one victory. They had handed Parouart’s affair to Maître Lemaître and presently, to their great surprise, Parouart was nonsuited in the courts. With the announcement of this nonsuit, they witnessed a slight increase in deposits. They mentioned it to Plowman but they both refused to write to Jules.

  Henri Léon, always in correspondence with Alphendéry, wrote,

  I am coming to Paris.

  P.S. Be careful vis-à-vis Theodor Bomba.

  H. L.

  On top of this, they had another flying visit from Daniel Cambo, in Paris again to look over trash goods for his shops, and Daniel informed them that Jules was unhappy now in his court on the Blue Coast. Theodor Bomba and Aristide Raccamond were at daggers drawn. Mme. Raccamond had turned sour because she got no invitations from Claire-Josèphe and, woman of action, had made a scene about it to Jules. Meanwhile, Aristide, always with his melancholy expression, had got very close to Jules’s skin, and Jules introduced him everywhere as ‘my new general manager.’ Alphendéry and William looked at each other: the bank (for them) visibly trembled. There was silence for a full minute in the company until Paul piped up, ‘I think Francis and I ought to go down: Jules always listened to us.’

  William got up and went to the door, grimly satirical, ‘If we’ve reached that stage, Michel, it’s time for you and me to take a holiday and forget to come back.’

  When Léon got to Paris he immediately engaged Alphendéry in a long discussion about his stocks and shares, forgetting even to ask after Jules’s health and it was not till long after midnight that Michel was able to ask about Bomba. Léon went to his bag and got out a letter. ‘He sent that to me. I didn’t answer it. He came and saw me in Antwerp. Jules paid his fare. I sent him packing. He’s your enemy, Alphendéry: I have that instinctive feeling and on that I’m never wrong. He’s bad luck.’

  Alphendéry read the epistle from the would-be jackal.

  Dear Léon,

  Forgive me for being a faithful jackal once more. I continue to wish that it had been possible to unite our economic destinies in the wheat deal (but despite earnest Kabbala on my part, your hobgoblin friend undid at once everything I built up). Nevertheless, continual cohabiting with the sibyl (I wrote fourteen sibylline books once, burned them myself and so reached the quintessence of sibylline wisdom), forewarns me that we will one day soon find the Midas touch together, you and I … In the meantime, I am Mercury to your interests and purely in an interested fashion for present mead is like to turn bitter, vile Sir Sycophant Pickthank and blockhead Mr. Merryandrew Messmate I.R. (idle rich) turning the silly head of our poor Fortunatus. I desire nothing so much as to join you and work economic miracles on your behalf. Self-interest is the best alchemy: I say naught of ‘mankind’ and the ‘Russian El Dorado of hope’ indulged in by sentimental vassal exquisites of the intellect … I know you were badly disappointed over Bertillon’s failure with the wheat deal. I had consistent talks with him on this and emergent economic problems and found him like a colander full of soup: you smell something but when you try to lick it up, it has run away, God knows where … Now it is being bruited around the best financial circles (Tarnhelm tells me) that Jules’s whole establishment is a hollow sham and that the money he is lavishing on all and sundry at present on the Blue Coast is the last anyone will ever see from him. This is for your private ear: if you have money with the bank protect yourself ! I require no recognition for this: this is but in the course of nature. It is even said that the money he is spending at present is got from a soft young nobleman (as noble as our sons will be if they descend to that last infamy of merchanting and buy a title)! Do not let William Bertillon or Alphendéry know that I have written to you: envious both. Their object: to get control of the shell of the bank as it stands. They are trying to thrust the Chief out entirely. The one thing you must realize about both of them, Alphendéry with his Mongolrisen face, his social-fascist line, is that they are both smooth-faced liars. Jules, constitutionally a liar, rather beautifully so, so that he doesn’t know himself whether he is one or not and likewise it is impossible for anyone to unravel his lies: William, a consistent, voluntary stubborn liar; Alphendéry, weak, intemperate, sensual, a jocund, Rabelaisian, and very poor liar. One can see through anything he says. This unholy Trinity, which I thought holy and holy-ghosted for, are jogging in uneasy harness to a short and unhappy end: the everlasting penal bonfire. They will have neither remorse nor comprehension when they drag down with them those of their friends who remain faithful to them … More of this when I see you.

  In secrecy, and devotedly,

  Bomba-Mercury

  Alphendéry laughed.

  ‘You laugh,’ said Léon with great round eyes.

  ‘Oh, he is out on the flat of his back: he is greener than totties in the dark of the moon.’

  The next morning Jules, in an acid, dictatorial mood, telephoned that he was coming back to work. The brothers and Michel were torn between relief and anxiety. When a Great Man comes back from two months’ vacation he arrives in a dust storm of trouble of which the heart is self-conceit.

  But the next morning when Alphendéry came to work he found a telegram,

  JULES BERTILLON INJURED IN PLANE ACCIDENT IN HOSPITAL NICE ADVISE PLOWMAN

  BOMBA

  Jules had concussion, a broken ankle and two broken ribs.

  ‘That’s perfect,’ groaned William, ‘though how he got concussion puzzles me. He had it.’

  He refused to appear upset by anything Jules did. ‘I hope he’ll come to his senses after this: instead of spending his life with idiotic playboys. So there they are: Prince Jules in a private suite, Claire-Josèphe engaging nurses and bringing surgeons from Paris, Bomba blowing his own kazoo on a platform of gold, Raccamond that great jelly and his Diana-wife hunting in open season on our preserves.’

  Meanwhile, as he said, the parasites and gilded friends in Jules’s court knew their Maytime. Jules had nothing to do and his jack-in-the-box temperament made it hard for him to lie still, still harder for him to follow a regime for concussion. He fretted and had a thousand bees in his bonnet in a day. It was some time before they allowed him on to his precious telephone and when he did it was only to exchange snarls with William who called him every name in the cap-and-bells catalogue.

  Curiously enough, the brothers, who had seen each other through storms for years, did not forgive each other this concussion. William had been looking forward to a holiday of his heart, driving fast but prudently up and down all the roads of Europe; Alphendéry had been planning a trip to Italy to see the fascist system at first hand. Jules, though he would never admit it, was greatly hurt that William had not written to him condoling with him. But although, out of that pathological obstinacy that often arises between members of the same family, William had never written and scarcely inquired about Jules, ashamed, no doubt, to seem one of the flock of self-seeking inquirers, he theorized every day with Michel about Jules’s crash and his recovery and even made extensive inquiries of everyone who had been near Jules. But, except with Michel, he did it with a bantering, sarcastic air, with a show of indifference, a jovial style, a set of adjectives and names for Jules, that completely misled people; and, such people, either shocked or vicious, reported William’s words to Jules.

  * * *

  Scene Fifty-seven: Exorcism

  Alphendéry refreshed his philosophy every day by reading the leading communist dailies and weeklies, in several languages. Although he told everyone he got his information from them, people chose to regard this as a freak of his, for few people at the bank could believe such a thing. They thought him gifted by nature and were constitutionally unable to believe that the workers, robots between eight and six, suckers between six and ten, raw-labor producers between ten and six, pulp readers between six and eight, who had no brilliant schemes but for turning the hat trick and scooping the football pools, that these dull s
tone-choppers and animated machine minders could say anything of any value whatever on economic problems and on moneymaking. They knew quite well that if they asked the first workman in the first cabmen’s bar the price of St.-Gobain he would probably look blank: how could he possibly have anything to say on the world at large? Whereas they knew the price of St.-Gobain and also of U.S. Steel and were therefore entitled to run the world at large. This was, in a nutshell, the simplehearted philosophy of the bank’s clients. No, they concluded, Alphendéry made up his ideas himself or got them from a ‘secret’ source and, out of a perverted vanity and a queer sense of humor, liked to pretend he got them from rags like L’Humanité.

  When Alphendéry came in one morning, full of sap, Dick Plowman came out of the stock-exchange room to hear his discourse on the gold-letting of the Bank of England, the first serious suspicions of the pound sterling, which was now resulting in a run and the overthrow of the Labour Government, with the formation of a National Government ‘to save the pound.’ This, of course, affected Dick Plowman very deeply. If the pound went off gold and a serious inflation set in, the prices of bonds on a gold basis would fall, the prices of stocks would rise; a small boom would set in, prices of commodities would rise, due to heavy buying to escape from a wobbly currency. It meant a great loss to anyone who owned property, mortgages, or lived on rent of land and buildings, as well as any with deposits in banks: and Richard was in this class, although the greater part of his fortune was held abroad, in France and America. Nevertheless, he was not opposed to inflation, on the ground that it would ‘bring back prosperity.’

  ‘It is, in the first place,’ said Alphendéry, ‘not a patriotic move. It is an expropriation of the workers—because wages never rise as fast as prices, and of the poor middle classes, who have invested seriously in savings banks and insurance accounts. Moreover, the operation is not complete. They must expropriate some more, before they have finished. In my opinion, Britain must expropriate to keep alive. And although it is a clever trick to get in a Tory Government, the National Government cannot ‘save the pound’ and must inflate. That can be done in England. How is it to be done? I don’t know that. But they have some trick up their sleeve and the stampede election of the Tories is to cover it.’ And much more in this strain.

  Richard Plowman followed Michel upstairs, thoughtfully. Since Jules had lain in bed, Plowman had been accepted, without protest, by the brothers and Michel, as unofficial censor: they knew that, with the deepest devotion to Jules, he ran a paternal check system on their acts and comments. Naturally, they treated him more playfully than ever, told him nothing, and amused themselves with digging up scandals about past associates of his and making sad deductions about the deviltry of ‘the most respectable bankers.’ He had entirely forgotten how money was made and was much saddened not only by the proofs of roguery but by the “boys” cynicism. He pinned Alphendéry down this morning, as he sat over the morning mail.

  ‘Michel! I admire your intelligence but I think you look at the world upside-down.’

  He hesitated and Alphendéry went on, laughing, ‘What I say, Dick, most economists in the world today, say. Do you want Jules to go on living in a dream world made from the debris of 1919–1920? He’s in most markets: he’s got to know what moves them.’

  Plowman had recovered. ‘The beauty of his character, Michel, is in its fine intuitions.’

  ‘Imagination—and experience.’

  Earnestly, Plowman went on, ‘It is a great mistake of yours, Alphendéry. Besides, it is not true. Your saying that nothing that can happen now can help the British Empire. That was said before the war. I have seen many a panic and depression in my time, my boy. And the war increased Britain’s colonies … I was down with Jules the other day, however, and what does he do but talk about ‘selling the British Empire short’ in a restaurant full of people. He got that from you. Alphendéry: you are a Frenchman, the traditional antagonist … well, friendly enemy, shall we say. Not only the French, but the rest of the world has had the same hallucination for years.’

  He shook his head, his clean, blond head-clerk face, his blue eyes full of integrity, seeking to convince Alphendéry by his honest expression. ‘No one wants to do business with a bank that thinks the capitalist system is not going to last. Men with your type of mind don’t make money, Michel. You are Quixotes: the wind blows and the world whizzes round—whoolloo-moolloo! Oh, they’re reaching out to catch me, those giant arms, think you! And in you run, bravely, full tilt. But the world’s not trying to catch you … or Jules. It’s just going round and round. The wind bloweth where it listeth. Neither you nor I, Michel, are going to make any difference. All our theories are feathers in the wind. You see, you don’t believe in money. You believe the financial world is nothing but a carcass—’

  ‘A bluebottle,’ said Alphendéry grinning.

  ‘You have no sense of history.’

  ‘The sense of history is that the British Empire will last for ever by divine right? And the rest goes spinning brainlessly till London organizes it. Oh, worthy race, admirable illusion!’

  Plowman frowned and came down to the downstairs manager, Jacques Manray, who happened to quote back at him one of Alphendéry’s remarks, ‘The history of Europe since the war has simply been that of a South American republic—dictators, repudiation, paper money, civil war.’

  Plowman said smartly, ‘Mr. Alphendéry does not think like a banker; he thinks like a radical and is from our point of view irresponsible. He is injuring the credit of the Bertillon brothers, Mr. Manray. Please do not repeat his remarks.’

  He was angry. When William hove in sight, he buttonholed him also, ‘When a boom comes Jules will have sold everything short: his phrase to me last week. The world is not going down and down. It’s against common sense. Why, if booms don’t come naturally, they’ll ease things up by spring booms and market booms, even inflation. It’s so absurd to think bankers will allow values to disappear completely. They aren’t there for that. If Alphendéry were to leave the bank, Jules would begin to see with his own eyes again. It’s absolutely essential that Alphendéry should stop being a bear or go: otherwise, you boys will be ruined.’

  William jovially went to caricature all this to Alphendéry but to his surprise found him very depressed. ‘I know.’ He looked at William with great, distressed eyes: ‘Plowman is right. I mean I subtilize overmuch. I am too eager. I belong to those who want to see the great change in their lifetimes and so I overlook the truth that our overlords will not give up the ghost without trying to strangle us to death first. My philosophy is only casuistry, as far as you boys are concerned. Plowman, the old fool, is right. They have a hundred tricks up their sleeves before they’ll lose and then, the last trick, machine guns.’ He put his head on his hand. ‘I am too clever by half.’

  William roused him, cheered him, ‘Dick is doddering; while we work, Jules and Dick have been patting themselves on the back down there. How to explain why they’re not rolling in profits? The old trick: make the Jew the scapegoat.’

  ‘No, no, William: although he doesn’t know why he is right, Plowman is right.’

  * * *

  Scene Fifty-eight: Return

  Meanwhile a client arrived from the south with a note scribbled on the card of Aristide Raccamond, ‘Director of Bertillon Frères.’ William smiled. ‘Every day someone sends us roses.’

  A letter from Jules commanded them to pay Aristide Raccamond henceforth twenty thousand francs monthly, ten thousand as salary and ten thousand in commissions, any balance to be settled on December 31.

  ‘Listen,’ said William more seriously than usual, ‘you and I have power of attorney. We will be doing Jules a service if we transfer his money to some other place and maybe some other person. Shall we pay off the big clients and close the shop?’

  But Alphendéry had lost his verve: he was trying to think in another vein, for Jules’s sake, and t
o draw out his telescoped wishful view of disaster. He would not take any step, even with William behind him, yet.

  And now Jules, accompanied by Raccamond, arrived suddenly from the Blue Coast by train. Jules was mad as a centipede self-stung by months of pain, idleness, and insane flattery. He did not speak either to William or to Michel, when they came into his room, ordered them to go about their business, and tried to set up his court once more in his own office. He received many calls of solicitude. The charm began to wear off in three days and it was hard for him to reconcile his grandeur and the wild pretensions of his toadies with the everyday work of the bank, the docile application of the cashiers and accountants, the questions which began to crop up every hour and which William plentifully showered him with, about accounts, shares, and taxes of clients. People began to drop in, as before, with propositions. At first Jules spoke of making a million dollars in a week, whereas those two blockheads had done nothing but had turned the place into a café during his absence and made no money at all; but presently he began to see that Michel and William, though hurt and silent, were working persistently, giving exchange, settling disputes, even paying off Carrière without any reference to himself, and perhaps one morning in the cool hours, he suddenly came to himself. At any rate, at this moment of near disenchantment, who should arrive, in full bloom, but Theodor Bomba! He had left himself behind on the Blue Coast, first, not to compete with Raccamond on the journey up and second, to fix up some small affairs hanging over for Jules, and third, to see what could be seen round the new office which Jules had just opened in the Hotel Magnolius.