“Gosh, this is a nice wood here! I never came up before, because I thought it was a little bit of a tufty place full of woodcutters, and I didn’t like passing the cadaverous cross they have there at the top of the ramp. It’s picturesque, though, that cross, I suppose, for the monks. You should put it in one of your plays, Director! It would be a hit: it would be a real money-maker, that, with the trees, and you could stick in a bit of the convent wall painted yellow, with one of the Brothers in sandals.”
Then the Banker said good-morning to them all with much grace and good-humour, and was about to make an excuse to leave them, when he saw behind them the Master of the Day, who had come in late, and he cried:
“Good morning, Master of the Day—is that what we call you? How are the stories going? I see you’ve created no public scandal yet! It wouldn’t be a bad idea, you know, to get a reporter here to hear what’s going on, and then to have him write it up. It would make an interesting story, and boom the Festival!”
“It’s a good idea,” replied the Viennese Conductor. “But don’t run away from us like that: for you are the next one to tell a talc.”
“What, me? You don’t think I know any stories, do you?” cried the Banker laughing. “No, I‘m going, good-bye.”
But the Viennese Conductor, a firm man in emergency, insisted on the Banker’s staying to amuse them. The Banker said, in his clear, gay voice:
“What the deuce am I going to do? I had to write a composition in school, once, on ‘Some Books are Made to be Eaten’, or some tripe of that sort, a remark by Bacon (the chap was inspired by his name!) and I got the lowest marks in the class. I’ll have to make it up as I go along.”
The Banker sat down, consulted with his wife, stretched his thin legs and began to tell his tale.
The Banker’s Tale
THE SENSITIVE GOLDFISH
HENRY, the securities clerk, was born under the sign of Pisces, but he had not learned swimming, for all the water he had seen had been in London Pool and in the goldfish pond on the roof-terrace of the Bank of Central Honduras. The Bank of Central Honduras, I have no need to say, is the Bastille of the City: the humble citizen who passes its buttressed, unpierced walls, thinks of the mountains of gold under the mined pavement, and for a moment comes into his pale eye an imperial glint, the look of the slave-driver, the frontiersman, the dragoon.
The yellow-vested porters have the composed mien and slow speech formerly associated with a five-thousand-acre pheasant shoot. At sunset, the flag is struck, and the Bank’s private band plays soft martial music while the steel doors within, all over the building, automatically swing to: the yellow day porters go off and the sable night watchmen come on.
Henry smiled each morning when, arriving at the Bank, the auroral liveries of the porters put him in mind of the goldfish in their Chinese sleeves and skirts. He was called a securities clerk, but his function was to aërate and feed the fish; and a large part of each day he spent in a stone cabin on top of the building listening to the voices, motor-horns and sirens ascending through the fog which often covered the City’s business; or, on a clearish day, following with shaded eyes the barges moving slowly down the sluggish golden flood which at noonday rolls under London Bridge. Often, too, on a moony, brown night, he leaned on the kerb of the goldfish pond and listened to the soft voices of the goldfish, then gambolling, white, dark and silver, in the basin. How many of them were there? He had never counted: they were like leaves.
Henry had discovered long ago that his fish were temperamental. On certain days, quite apart from the occasional sad tinges lent them by soot, fog or nightfall, the fish appeared to change colour, hourly, and even momently, due to secret and invisible movements of the water, or its animalculæ, or to the filtration of light through the plankton, or to the thoughts of those finned mages themselves. Sometimes, their bars and mottlings, their scars, freckles and wine-marks would glow and burn, redden, blacken, glower: sometimes, the fish would turn paler and the outlines of their beauties fade.
Henry dreamed of other climes and postulated to himself other habits. He saw goldfish swimming in the sunken tarns of impassable mountains, goldfish in brimming rivers floating through the reeds, goldfish in the shape of a wild boar’s head pressing through the packed flood-waters of the Yellow River, goldfish in the one-franc glass bowls of the Paris bird-market, goldfish in bamboo cages and oiled-paper tanks, goldfish momentarily glinting behind a rattan screen in the Maughamy air of some Eurasian bungalow, with milk-fed feline clumsily pawing and the shriek of overturned globe. He pondered so deep that often he thought he heard a voice arising from the depths of the artificial pool, as if he were in the thicket by Melisande’s glade, and a fatal voice foretelling harm smote his heart: then whistles, as of distant wild geese affecting that imagined sky, seemed to drop to him from the vaporous circles of the moon, moving rheumily over the sky in its crinolines of mist, shadowing, with its morbid light, airy spites and watery turbulences.
Thus he dreamed: but never, day or night, forgot to feed the fish on powdered liver, which swelled their mandarin bellies and reddened their metal coats.
He, at other times, seemed to himself that ancient mandarin whose loving-cup, in jellied alabaster, painted with twin carps in Chinese red, was now preserved by the heaven-descended professor of ichthyology in an inferior Canton College, and catalogued in a shop in Piccadilly. The marble basin stood in his hand, he offered it full of wine to some beautiful girl bought for a phenomenal price—a beauty of such high birth that her full eyes were scarcely almond, and her complexion the colour of the cup with two red carps floating in her cheeks.
He kissed the flat-tasting water of the pool, lying in the shadow of the Bank’s parapet, and a goldfish, rising suddenly, presented a viscous, cool surface to his lips. Ungrateful for this caress, the youth wished for the day to come when he could take service in foreign branches, and look down from the glass top of his table upon the silent steps of some masted sea-port, and the swilling quays, grown with seaweed of a foreign sort, in a land of coral. He blamed himself again, looking at the fish sporting their unmerchantable plates of gold, that he could think of no scheme for making money; with his opportunities (as his sister said). Looking through the goldfish and through the bottom of the pool, he transpierced the beamed rooms, the mahogany, marble, plush and shagrin, into the vaults of the bank, where (he believed) attendants dressed like Phantomas glided above a vast honeycomb of gold, sealed in cold chambers, along slippery corridors, guarded by impenetrable steel doors, full of wheels and cogs, and bombs of teargas, and subterranean lakes in cement basins.
The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, like the porters, or the newsboys, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever. More, newsboys, proverbially became noble lords, but what known bank-clerk had done so? Newsboys got tips, telephone-operators tuned in on important calls, cashiers—sometimes got away, but the road before him was long, slow, footworn and desperately unspeculative. He saw himself like a sparrow on the Bank-top; sitting on the wherewithal for a thousand, thousand meals and dropping dead from hunger the first day of winter. The fish had liver, the fish had marble, the fish changed their colour from day to day, and were a matter of concern to the Baron; but what was he?
As the securities clerk despaired one day, in this style, the chief director, Baron Franz-August de Geldreich, came out in the pallid late sunlight and peered through the mist at the goldfish now coloured like brass showing through rubbed silver. The clerk gazed at the Baron, at his superiorly stolid, red phiz, his sad-coloured eyes and pensive moustache: the Baron had his shoes patched once a month and never took a taxi, even when it rained. In the last two matters Henry resembled the Baron.
The Baron said in his deliberate, impeccably accented voice,
“Look after these fish
carefully for me, like a good fellow. They have a curious colour: did you feed them this morning?”
“Yes,” said Henry.
“These fish are most valuable, most extraordinary,” said the Baron; “watch them carefully. I had them, you know,” he continued, turning pleasantly to the youth, “from an old Chinaman, politician, sage and poet. He poisoned his wife and sold his sister, but was a good friend to his friends, did well by his fifteen illegitimate sons, and was said to have been altogether in the sway of his last mistress, a child he found sailing paper boats in a fountain in the hills.
“These fish are over two hundred years old; and were said, by the informants of my sage, to have come from the cataracts of Kin- Sai, in a miraculous tempest which raged over Pekin all one night. It was so fierce that when morning drew near the coolies were afraid to go out to work, but did so, and found the ground moist only with dew, and thick with unsmirched flowers. On that night, these fish and others like them appeared in the fountains of the Emperor, a holy prince who waged war continually with the enemies of the State and whose treasury was drained to the last ounce of gold-dust. Immediately after the appearance of these fish, the Emperor was granted an enormous loan on most favourable terms by our own country, and although he himself was poisoned, with his uncle and son, by his mother, shortly after, the next Emperor, his mother’s son by a second marriage, was enabled to live long and abdicate in time, by a discovery and study of the secret virtues of the fish. This is, of course, the tale told me by the donor of the fish. Have you an ichthyological turn? While taking this freshwater story with what salt you think necessary, you may be sure the fish are of the rarest breed—are, indeed, unique! Watch them carefully,” said the Baron Franz-August, “if anything should ever happen to them, let me know at once, personally.” He smiled at the curator, and departed with the delicate, pointed tread of a quick-witted stout man.
The youth peered at the ancient fish, sons of Kin-Sai, who turned like scythes round the coppery spindles of the fog-sifted sunlight. It even seemed to him that on their great caudal and pectoral fins the black, orange, rose and silver markings took curious shapes; here was a blue willow, there a cluster of lanterns, there, weeping night-blue hair, garment of a sallow face.
He cautiously drew from his inside coat-pocket at last, preparatory to going downstairs, the day’s copy of “The Speculative Times”. He did not care for the true nature of the Junonian milk, the curvature of the earth’s, or infantile, spines, Sir James Jeans’s cosmogony, or the flights of contemporary Teutonic statecraft: his speculations concerned Spratt & Brown’s Brewing Process, Emprunt & Borrow’s new share capital and the North Atlantis Gold Mining and Diamond Syndicate, Ltd.
Henry’s study of this paper was necessarily furtive, for no-one in the Bank would have been seen reading anything inferior to the “Commercial & Financial Chronicle”. Indeed, “The Speculative Times” which habitually took an unhappy and morose, no, even malcontent view of most things that happened in what it was pleased to call “that adamantine, floating, faery isle, the City”, was scarcely a paper to be seen about with. It marked a man as having no vision, no future, no honorific qualities, but as having the nature of a tick, termite or hookworm, and a taste for whispering behind hands concerning men of high principle, of battening on the battener. Henry had seen the wretched office where this prophetic sheet was printed, and yet he hoped that (with his opportunities) he would be one day able to tell a bargain from a ramp, make a scoop, and rapidly advance up the rungs that led to the East, the West, and directors’ participations.
He looked at the goldfish which seemed flushed with emotion. Did they bring fortune? For the Baron, for the Bank, or for whom? He wished he could have one of all those fish to predict fortune for him, and to bring him good luck. In a romantic head, temptation germinates fearfully fast. The next day Henry slipped into the Bank with an air of virtue, because he had brought with him a goldfish bowl the size of a cricket-ball in which he intended to carry home, just for one night, one of the Baron’s miraculous goldfish, the smallest, the plainest. There were one hundred and twenty-five goldfish that he counted before he abstracted his small one, and all were red as paint. When he got home and showed his small fish to his loving sister, he was dismayed to see that it was very pale, although quite healthy, and he took it for a bad omen, tossing all night, and hardly able to wait for daylight, so that he could get up and take the fish back to the Bank.
His sister came in to wake him, from the heavy sleep into which he had at length fallen, and whispered to him that the fish had gone: it was not in the bowl—perhaps the cat had taken it. They beat the cat, and Henry went to work without any breakfast, feeling like death. He dragged himself up to the roof and looked dismally at his wards. He saw in the basin a very small fish. He counted the fish, and found there were still one hundred and twenty-five. He rubbed his eyes. That night, trembling with his daring and folly, he took home again, in a new and larger glass bowl, another goldfish, after carefully counting them all again. The next morning his bowl was empty but the tale at the Bank was complete. To have evidence of the miracle he, next night, put a gold wire delicately round the tale of a goldfish and carried it home. On the way home he looked in at the offices of the North Atlantis Gold Mining Syndicate to see what he could see, but the offices were shut up, with thick doors, barred windows and padlocks like a gaol, and when he knocked, a little suspicious man popped up a tiny slot in the pane of a door and asked him rudely what was his business. Henry asked for the last annual balance-sheet of the North Atlantis Syndicate, and when, after a prolonged cross-examination, it was grudgingly handed to him, he was so upset that he asked the janitor’s leave to sit a minute on the stool placed in the frigid iron-barred corridor. There he took out his fish to see if it was still with him, and found it not only there but brilliantly red. He got up and walked across to the grim door of the North Atlantis Gold Mining, watching his fish. The fish was now red as blood. Henry, to save it from bursting from apoplexy, turned on his heel and hurried out of the building. The janitor shook his head in astonishment.
Henry and his sister spent the whole evening looking at the goldfish. A visitor disturbed them, a young bank-clerk from a branch bank, the suitor of Henry’s sister: under the seal of secrecy, he was told the marvellous tale of Kin-Saï and the temperamental goldfish, and he offered to buy the fish from Henry. Henry refused, but as the clerk raised his bid for the fish (for he intended to promenade it round all the speculative companies of the City the next day) Henry suddenly remembered that the ingenious youth might well buy it and take it home, it would be at the Bank again in the morning, whatever happened. He accepted the offer. The youth made off almost at once and Henry, when he heard the front-door close, went pale and dashed out after him. But the youth was nowhere to be seen. “What if the fish, once sold, stays with its buyer?” he asked his sister, trembling: “and can Herbert be trusted?”
“Herbert could be trusted with a million pounds, or secrets of state,” said Henry’s sister indignantly. Henry sighed.
The next morning, the fish with the gold wire on its tail was back in the pool. It is sad to relate that during the next few weeks Henry sold the same fish to one hundred ambitious bank-clerks, and the legend of Kin-Saï had become one of the most widely-spread legends of the City. Henry, likewise, had, to console the desolated and mystified Herbert, gone shares with him in a small flutter in North Atlantis shares: they bought the shares at 7/6 and they rose to 12/6, at which price the youths sold out and took their profit.
Now, to the end of my tale.
One morning, a year or so ago, the clerk mounted the stairs on a Friday morning and perceived a marked agitation in the building. When he asked questions, a hundred answers were given him, and one of the clerks, sniggering, said, “It is the Lord fluttering his account-books of his chosen.” It was, in fact, not only the day before the Jewish Sabbath, but the most dismal Friday in all the year, the one which precedes the Day of Atonement, wh
en all Israel mourns: it is then that the Lord makes up his accounts of good and evil for the year, and closes, after a brief respite, that journal for ever. The chief director, Baron Franz-August, necessarily, was not at the Bank, but was attending to his spiritual business.
Nevertheless, at eleven o’clock the directors of the Bank assembled hurriedly, and there was a going and coming all day. Henry, in the exceptional rumours of the day, had neglected his goldfish for a few hours. At eleven o’clock he took the lift to the roof and the most dreadful sight met his apprehensive eyes. The pool was strewn with fish, which were not only past gasping, but were all of a shocking colour, and limp and blown-up, as if they had been dead a week, at least: the scales had fallen off in places, the eyes were completely clouded, the gills pale, fungus had appeared on the bodies and the fins were eaten. Henry thought of putting his head in the pool along with the valuable dead, and cutting short a breath much less prized by man. Next, he considered that the water might be poisoned, and like us all, he did not wish to meet an unknown death, but only the one chosen. He ran to the lift, trembling violently, almost running out at every floor, and making a mistake in the end, and getting out at the sixth instead of the fourth floor.
Here, as luck would have it, a director hailed him, gave him a sealed note and said in the gravest and most peremptory way, “Henry, run as quickly as you can, take a taxi, to the Duke Street synagogue, and give this note to the Baron Franz-August: tell the attendant that nothing could be more important.”
The jaws of fate presented themselves: he rushed in. He was now convinced that in one of its journeys his stolen fish had caught some inimical germ, communicated it to all the fish, and that he, in fact, had killed them. The world whirled away past him like the waves of the ocean rushing innumerably past a ship. He reached the synagogue, was admitted, and there, touching the shoulder of the mourner, he whispered, “Baron, Baron, I don’t know how to tell you, but the goldfish are dead!” The Baron followed him quickly from the synagogue, and took the letter from his hand, saying “Dead? All? Just now? You were right to tell me! What time is it?” and he followed the palpitating youth into a taxi. He had been followed by the inquisitive and anxious looks and was now followed by the inquisitive and anxious persons of such other businessmen of wealth as found themselves in the temple.
The Salzburg Tales Page 23