House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  ‘The hell it’s my way,’ cried Durban. ‘I mean what I say and Jules knows which one of us still has his wits about him. It’s all right, Jules: this old fool will stick to you till the last. I’m giving him good advice, but he’ll frown at me and reproach me. I suppose if you took the shirt off his back, he’d forgive you.’

  ‘Eh, eh, eh,’ Jules cried seriously, ‘Frank, what have I ever stolen from anyone? Hey, hey, where’s the evidence? Instinct is all very well! You John Bulls have your privileges, but if I lost Richard I’d be a boat without a rudder. If Richard wants his money, he gets it at once, instanter and over the counter, he knows that.’

  Plowman got up. ‘Frank! Jules, it was only a joke, his idea of a joke; I’ve known him fifty-two years, he never had a bit more sense. He got away with it out there in the wilds.’

  Durban shrugged his shoulders, looked bluntly at his old friend. ‘You were always a mooch, Plowman: I don’t give a damn, except that I’ve been jogging along by your side all our lives, before you were married, during, after. We went to the same school, we belong to the same clubs, we’re real imperialists. And now our partnership’s going to break up—I won’t be able to give you the dressing-downs you still need.’

  Jules let the legs of his chair come gently to rest on the carpet.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ asked Plowman.

  ‘I have a warning,’ said ‘Rhodes’ Durban. ‘I’ve always been in good health: I’m a good standard clock. I heard a whirr this morning, let’s put it! It’s my belief that in two days I won’t be here. I don’t know how I know, but I know.’ He smiled at them, passed his hand over his face. ‘Making a scene, what?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Alphendéry, pulling at his sleeve. Durban laughed without amusement, said to Jules, ‘I leave Plowman to your mercy: I’ll leave him something in my will, not to be touched till he comes of age, you know.’

  When they had gone out together, Alphendéry brightened. ‘The death of other people usually cheers the old: they chalk up each one they bury and it gives them an extra kick. It wasn’t old Tanker’s going under, it was the dispute over the will. Even the dead hate to have their pockets picked.’

  William said nothing. Then, brusquely, ‘Jules is becoming more like Clément every day.’

  ‘Clément? I thought he was a sort of café philosopher with rundown heels!’

  ‘That’s another of his tales, probably invented to please you! Clément’s another of our burdens. He pays five thousand francs a suit, you know, and his clothes don’t fit him because there’s nothing inside them. When Clément comes into the room, you think, “How his clothes creak!” To tell you how brainless he is, he goes home to change his clothes six times a day, takes a taxi. This is Clément getting dressed.’ William heaved up his slow blondness, deftly took a light pose on the carpet between Alphendéry and the door, forward on the ball of the foot, one foot advanced. His face had an expression which made him resemble the thinner Bertillons, Jules and the others, quaint, mercurial, anxious. William unbuttoned his waistcoat and eased his tailored, semistiff cambric shirt round the waist of his trousers, darting glances into an imaginary pier glass. ‘That way: no, no,’ he murmured, worriedly resetting a gather. He stuck two fingers into his waistband, giving a delicate hitch to the trouser leg. He consulted Alphendéry, ‘Look, William, look here a moment, now is that right? Or do you think the crease falls too near to the inner line of the leg? No, I think it’s better eased—look, how do you think that looks? A little tighter. A little fullness is necessary but not too much. I’m slender. It’s a question of being as close to the ideal as possible and yet remaining individual. It seems to me this height is right. Look, William! Should I tighten the braces? The trouble is that when this leg is right and this leg is right, the catches on the braces are at unequal heights. Now, what do you say to this? So, so! Yes.’

  William slumped and fell into a chair. ‘For two hours together,’ he said gloomily. ‘And always smiling, always watching his walk, trying to catch the look of his hat in glasses on shopwindows as he walks along Piccadilly, Fifth Avenue, or the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Always a pair of new gloves, worn once, always the same ties and cuff links as Jules, the same shirts, socks, suits as Jules—because the monkey has the sense to see that Jules looks better-dressed than he does. It’s like a photomaton picture trying to look as dandy as its original; it’s like these raw dancers in vaudevilles in the suburbs who imitate Fred Astaire: everything there but the man and his elegance! That’s my brother Clément. Oh, Jules likes him, Jules keeps him—and to date he hasn’t cost much more than his tailor’s and shirtmaker’s and bootmaker’s bills. He’s had two wives to keep him. Now he’s on the loose, that’s the bad part. Jules let him go to Germany in the skirts of some society girl who was stuck on him; now she’s got sick of him. Clément can always get a rich society girl to take him out for three months; he proposes marriage to all of them. He’d marry them, too. But his charm wears off as soon as they have been through his wardrobe once.’ William gave a smile of complicity. ‘Not too strong in that line, either, believe me: and you know that sort of girl—she doesn’t buy blind.’

  Alphendéry had finished laughing over William’s comedy, ‘But does Clément gamble?’

  ‘No, I only said that in a general way. Oh, no, Clément is very mean, very niggardly. He’d rather go without a girl for a year than buy a coffee for one. If he does by accident find himself in the uncomfortable position of being forced by circumstances to buy a girl a coffee, she has to listen to his life history and innermost thoughts and personal tragedy as well. And the continuous silence is more than any girl can bear: the result is what? He always loses the girl. No, as to the gambling, I only meant, Jules was going to seed.’

  Alphendéry got up, made a move to get his hat. William proposed that the two of them should go out together and ‘leave the bank to that sap’ (his brother Jules, its owner). In the men’s room, they found Pedrillo cavorting and exclaiming at the top of his voice, ‘Oh, Jules, just now on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Jules, oh, oh, oh, I nearly fainted, oh, ouch, ee, ee, what a girl! Oh, what girls this morning. And this one, I assure you, Jules, the finest, the—ai, ai ! what a neck, what breas’, ai, ai ! I couldn’t control myself, I started after her! Oh, oh, what a world, what a stupid world where such women, who ought to be—oh, just the mere thought—ouch, Jules, hold me up!’ he fanned himself with his hat, which he had before folded into a desperado shape for some previous comedy. ‘Fan me, Jules, feel my head, feel my wrists —ee, ee, when I think of how I might have loved her. I can’t stand it, I foam at the mouth. William, like this, I held her;’ suiting the action to the words, he grasped William’s arm and shook it frantically, rolling his sexy glance into William’s annoyed face. ‘I could hardly stand. Oh, darling, darling, darling!’

  William shook him off: ‘Say, try your stuff out on Alphendéry, he’s got more charm.’

  Pedrillo stood up and put his hat on his head. ‘And she said she would call a policeman! And what eyes, what a glance with the words! Could see she loved me, worshiped me, I could see she was turning to fire! Ai, ai—someone in a pair of pants comes up, “Monsieur!” “What did he say?” “I don’t know!” “I love her,” I shouted to him. Oh, oh, they pulled me off! What a scene, what a world! I love her, I can’t bear it, Jules; what shall I do?’ The whole accompanied by frantic gestures, mimicries, the most serious accents and desperate gestures in the world. Jules after laughing gently, prepared to leave the large white-tiled room, one of the really intimate corners of the bank.

  ‘All that doesn’t make me a sou, Pedrillo,’ he said cheerfully, ‘you and your adventures. Why don’t you be decent and go home and see your dying father?’

  Pedro frowned. ‘I hate a pants civilization: I won’t go home.’

  Jules turned back in the doorway. ‘They’ll filch the estate from under your nose then, Pedro.’

 
Pedro looked vaguely about, as if he thought Jules was referring to Michel or William; then his glance returned to Jules. He brightened. ‘You mean, money? Oh, the peons bring us money.’

  ‘Your brothers!’

  ‘My mother,’ said Pedro vaguely interested, ‘and my cousin, the one they want me to marry, always stand up for me. I have nothing to worry about, absolutely nothing.’ He frowned, ‘It’s true my mother says the Jesuits are intriguing to get money for a new church. He’s built forty-seven chapels for them. They threaten him with years in purgatory.’ He appealed to Jules with a glance.

  ‘Go home,’ said Jules promptly; ‘the old buffers wander at the last: he may get mad with you, Pedro!’

  ‘It’s a choice between harem women and cabaret women at home,’ said Pedro. ‘You see?’ He appealed to Michel: ‘I look at the plains, I see steers grazing: I look at the women we have to marry, the same cow foreheads, cow locks, cow eyes, cow hoofs, cow gait, cow shivers, cow bellows. If you think that interests me! Here, I see grand passions twenty times a day: what women!’

  Jules said dryly, ‘Now don’t fall into a trance, Pedro. Go home, see the last of your old man, and then come back. Marry your cousin and leave her to manage your business. Do it for me, Pedro: I want you to.’

  Pedro suddenly made a diabolic grimace, showed his teeth, lifted his head like an Aztec image high up, in the sun, pretended to whip out a revolver and shoot it off, while yelping and howling like a dog, shake it, curled his lips in an intense grin of vengeful vanity. Pedro relaxed. ‘My dear brother Julio!’ He bowed low, as if presenting a number in a variety show. ‘A brute, a savage,’ he said coolly. ‘They are all complete savages down there: I don’t want to be near them—I wish I had been born in Paris. What a shame to have to go back to those barbarians, for a miserable inheritance! How they bore me!’ He yawned, took on an expression of hopeless ennui. ‘Pranks of bloody squires, mixed up with illiterate superstition. The women are the same, savages under their rolls of fat and their cowish pale wide foreheads and cowish jowls. Do you think love can be interesting with such primitive brutes? They have no elegance: their idea of fun, for example—nothing but jokes about buttocks, beds, and—members.’ He made a grimace, ‘If a woman is indelicate, I can’t love her: it makes her a combination of the mother, the slops woman, and the cow: taboo, in other words. And you want me to go back to that, Jules, you a Frenchman, a Parisian! Puh!’

  ‘Then stay off them, for a month or two; you can do that surely, until your father passes out.’

  They walked out and Michel and William after them. William was cross, having been interrupted in his confidential mood. At lunch he was sulky, but towards the end, he said with difficulty, like a young girl admitting that she has felt the pangs of love, after all, ‘I was going to tell you, that is, about Jules. Never say a word to anyone! No one speaks about it and I am not supposed to know even—I would only tell it to you: my father and uncle were both lawyers. My uncle gambled away all he had, embezzled, converted, shot himself. My father worked himself to death to repay—died of a cancer; that’s the story! He died just before the twins were born. You see what the family is? I’m slow, Clément and the twins are—minus. Jules has all there is, except sanity!’ It was the last of diverse family histories.

  Michel gave him a good smile. ‘There’s not much to the idea of family heredity, William; I wouldn’t worry. The theory that genius, or whatever Jules has in that line, is akin to madness, is also a moldy old one: don’t let that eat into your night’s sleep.’

  William shook his smooth shoulders. ‘Nothing does that, nothing. Cannon fired under my window wouldn’t wake me.’ They ate. ‘Nevertheless,’ said William irritated again, ‘Jules is gambling—more than he’s telling us. I sniff, I trace, I snoop, I find out things here and there. He asks me for money to transfer to private accounts, to buy gold. Where does it go? I don’t know. He won’t tell me. “It’s safe,” he says.’ He lifted porcelain, strange eyes on Michel. Michel thought, again, as always, ‘If any of them go mad, this one will: it’s always these slow, unbending, ingenuous natures that break.’ A romantic idea of his perhaps? And the way William’s idea buzzed round and round, like a mechanical leaden hornet that could not get off the ground through having no vital spark? Round and round, maddeningly repeating the same maxims, the same fears, the same assurances, until Michel was ready to scream, like a hysterical wife. He saw William, the broad dull rainy plain of Holland, and beyond that a curtain of cloud and beyond that some sort of shapeless terror. Imagination again! He knew that his febrile imagination inspired not only the Bertillons but others with unease, discontent, and dislike, at certain times. Jules regularly said about him, ‘One grain planted differently in your brain, Michel, and you would be a lunatic!’ That was the misery of working each for a private ambition; the hopes of the others were mysterious, hateful, and insane. He sighed.

  It went on like this day after day. ‘If I don’t take a ticket to Alsace,’ said Michel to himself, with a lowering expression, ‘I’ll go clean crazy. It isn’t the speculation, it isn’t the clients all going mad with notions of the millions they might make, it isn’t Jules with his hunches and cries, it isn’t Estelle, it isn’t my mother scolding me for not being a schoolteacher or a government official, it isn’t my weakness in not joining the communists: no, it’s William. I can’t stand his drone; I’ll take French leave some fine morning and that will be the last they see of me.’

  ‘You should have seen Aristide’s face when I told him Arturito was bumped off,’ cackled William. ‘You bet he was in on the white-slaving racket with him. Young Mouradzian had the dope.’

  Michel snapped his fingers. ‘Waiter, another black coffee.’ Would it continue?

  ‘And this afternoon,’ said William, ‘first thing, he wants to get me to find a buyer for his house down in Biarritz: what does that look like, I ask you?’

  * * *

  Scene Sixty-eight: No Money in Philosophy

  Jules sat at his desk, and William leaned against the bookcase full of the classics of political economy and statistics.

  ‘Can’t you stop your pal from going mad? He’s been ticking off Michel and telling him he’s ruining you, that he ought to be singing happy days are here again. Tell him to pipe down, won’t you? We don’t want Alphendéry running out on us in disgust, just when we’re going to need him most. You know that the entire reserves of the bank have been withdrawn twice; we’re getting them back again, probably only for a third withdrawal. This wolf Carrière means to sink you. How are you going to arrange to fly with a flea in the flue, if Michel isn’t here to hold the fort?’

  ‘You haven’t told him yet—you fool!’

  ‘Keep your shirt on: I haven’t.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ said Jules cantankerously, ‘if it weren’t for listening to Michel’s bolshevik boloney, I’d be worth a hundred millions today. It’s fatal to know too much: a hunch is worth a hundred items out of Die Welt im Zahlen. If statistics made a man rich, every Poincaré-emulate would become a Rockefeller. Statistics are a heavy meat, indigestible, they send a man to sleep. What does a pirate like me want with philosophy? Did Jean Bart want any philosophy? Did Prester John? Philosophy is by the timid for the timid. The men who have made billions have hardly been able to write their own name. Let’s fire Alphendéry. I thought it was a lark. Now, what do I know? I believe he is really a communist. He’s one of their agents, for all I know; probably the police follow him.’

  Jules scowled. ‘This is my bank: I don’t want anyone’s name on it but mine. Alphendéry is too much of a circus, anyhow. I don’t want smart men: I can do the thinking. I don’t want a salon here with philosophers giving out epigrams or whatever you call them—anagrams, for all I know. What do I care if the system’s wrong? I know it is. But I’m wrong. Look at Plowman! No need to say, ‘What an ass he is!’ But look at the money he made by simply believing in ‘the system.’ Of
course, ‘the system’s’ wrong for those who aren’t on top. Do you want Plowman to get angry with me? You want him to draw it out before we make the grand getaway? Let him think we’re fighting Alphendéry. Send Alphendéry away and let Plowman and this ox Raccamond think we’ve put things to right. They’ll both be pleased as punch. I can manage my getaway without Alphendéry. And think of Carrière! Carrière will think I’ve lost ‘the brains of the firm.’ It doesn’t suit me to have everyone saying, ‘The power behind the throne is Alphendéry.’ I want my name to be the name; I want my name on all the accounts; I want all my accounts to be in my name; I want myself to be the directors of my holding companies; I want my holding companies to be called not the Holding Company, but Bertillon Deposit Co.: I want the Zurich trust, to be called, not Claire-Josèphe Trust, but Jules Bertillon and Sons, Incorporated: what am I in business for? You’re married to Alphendéry. If that boy ever gets on the witness stand in our case, and if the Humanité starts to say he’s a dirty capitalist we’re done for. He’ll do anything to prove he’s their friend.’ He ended on a high note, almost a scream.

  William looked at him medically. ‘I want to tell you one thing. After all Alphendéry has been to you, and the way he’s worked for you, while you were away, you can’t insult him. If you’re going to insult and annoy men like Alphendéry who’ve paid for all your fantasies by their hard work, you’ve got to do the same for me. I’ve done the same for you. If you think it good policy to send him away to calm Plowman’s nerves, ask him to investigate Brussels, Geneva, Antwerp, anything. Ask him to set up a new London office, a new London or New York or Oslo office. It’s cheaper.’

  ‘Another thing,’ said Jules with intense preoccupation, ‘Raccamond hates Alphendéry. Raccamond is asking too many questions. He’s acting funny. I think if I sent Alphendéry away, Raccamond would calm down: he’d see no one between himself and the throne.’