House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  Raccamond looked up, slightly dazed, from his earnest attitude of compelling intimacy and after hugging with a glance the two brown-eyed old men, said, ‘Mr. Tanker is thinking of selling all his stocks and taking a short position. I’ve told him we consider it wiser.’

  ‘Or perhaps I shouldn’t,’ said John Tanker, Sr. ‘Perhaps your information comes from a pool. What am I to do? I don’t want to lose my money. I mustn’t lose any more money. When I was younger I did nothing but make money. Now, every turn, I lose money. What do you think of London, Bertillon? Do you think it’s safe to keep a balance in London? Will they confiscate gold, Bertillon?’ He shook his head, his hand trembled on the cane: ‘I mustn’t lose any more money.’

  Raccamond said, ‘You won’t, Mr. Tanker. Mr. Bertillon himself is selling short all the time, except in London.’

  Passionately the trembling old man asked, ‘Are you, are you, are you? Tell me: where do you get your information? It all depends on the source. In the old days I could smell a pool a mile off. I’m an old man. No one will look after me but myself.’ He murmured some string of words to himself.

  Jules was sympathetic: ‘Why, Tanker, what do you want to make more millions for? Why don’t you get married and have a good time? Get someone to look after you. Where will be all of us in a few years? You can’t bank on eternity any more, John. I’m not worrying and look how many more years of poverty I would have than you—then why should you worry, John?’

  The old man shook his head long. ‘You are young. You have time, strength. When I was young I shouldn’t have worried. You can make more money. No one else will bother about me. My money—’ He looked closer at Raccamond. ‘What’s your name, eh? You’re new, aren’t you?’

  ‘Raccamond,’ he said startled: they had conferred so often!

  ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps you’re right but I don’t know if you know. I must ask Alphendéry: that’s who I must ask, Alphendéry. Jules, what about my S.O.N.J.? If there’ll be a war, I shouldn’t sell. Do you think the Swiss franc is going off, Bertillon? Do you, Plowman?’ He looked at Raccamond. ‘Do you, Whittaker?’ Aristide started. Jules, standing behind Tanker, Sr., shook his head. Raccamond answered, ‘No, no, Mr. Tanker, you needn’t worry.’

  ‘Ah, pah,’ said the old man, ‘you don’t know anything about it. I don’t know. It’s a dangerous time. I must think about it myself. Perhaps you’re right. Don’t sell yet.’ He looked closer at Raccamond. ‘What’s your name? Eh? It doesn’t matter: you had a man a little while ago, Bertillon, Légaré: where’s he? Bad policy to keep changing your men. What about my S.O.N.J., Bertillon? Whittaker says to sell. You can never tell with these customers’ men: what do they know? Stock-exchange rats: run about after dark, pick up the grains that fall. Rats!’ he said loudly, fiercely to Raccamond. ‘Never make any money themselves. Don’t know what money is,’ he nodded to Bertillon. ‘Money is a mystery—an open mystery: you and I could tell them a thousand times what it is made of and they wouldn’t know any better. No good asking their advice. Now, Alphendéry—he’s secret: he looks seedy, but they say,’ he lowered his voice and quizzed Bertillon, ‘they say he’s made millions for you, Jules, and has socked away half a million dollars in America. Is it true? Eh? Where is he? I get my advice from moneymakers … Have you ever made a fortune, Ratisbon,’ he asked Raccamond, cunningly. ‘No, eh? Then why should I take your advice. He says to sell, eh?’ He began to lift himself out of the chair, cunningly laughing at Jules. ‘I must see someone about my Rio Tinto and Anaconda: I’m very worried.’ Without looking round he went out: the swing door padded gently on his back.

  Plowman said, ‘Where are his children?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t care twopence for him. He divided up his money with them about ten years back so that they wouldn’t be sitting round with their tongues hanging out for his funeral: the result is they live ten thousand miles apart and they’ve all got lawyers waiting briefed, ready to fight his will, whatever it is.’

  The felted swing-door opened of itself, a little slit: then Tanker, Sr.’s old brown felt hat peeped through the crack. He surveyed them carefully and came in.

  ‘Bertillon! I was looking for you. I think I ought to switch, really.’ He looked at Plowman. ‘Hullo, Richard.’ He sat down. ‘Everything costs so much. I can’t afford it. My sister has no sense of responsibility. Nothing but spend, spend, spend: waste, waste. A woman of her age to be gadding about! She eats downstairs in the restaurant! I tell her, ‘Why can’t you do what I do, eat in your room?’ No: money, money, money. I told the hotel clerk to put a table in my room so she could come and eat with me. Company. She doesn’t have to make it. I make it. I boil it two hours. It’s on now. When I get home, it’s done. What can I eat but porridge, at my age? My digestion. I like those other things: I like them. But my digestion! They put me in a little burner. I told them, “It’s all in the service.” They don’t expect anything. She gives, she gives.’ He rubbed his knee. He held up his hands to Raccamond, showing the knots at the fingers. ‘Look at that!’ he said with mournful vanity. ‘Rheumatism. Aix-les-Bains. Hrmph! “It’s old age,” I said to him, “you can’t cure”—Aix-les-Bains! That’s it: money—they want you to spend. Old age you can’t cure, so why should I spend the money, I ask … spend.’ He laughed, had a flash. ‘No one on earth could make money if everyone thought the way I do—I did—’ he stopped a moment to grieve. ‘Let them criticize me. God bless them. They don’t know. If I spent money would I have it? Ha! My sister is an ignorant woman … Steaks, blood, blood, ugh! She’ll be sorry for it. Let her eat porridge with me—restaurants!’

  ‘What do you eat for supper though, John?’ said Plowman, kindly and even with some interest.

  ‘What do I want, an old man? Nothing, nothing, nothing. I don’t eat—to keep me going—nothing, a little of this, a little of that: nothing. What can I eat? I hate to have a lot of people round me expecting tips … I said to her, “I’ll cook the porridge: you’ve only got to eat it. It’s not asking much. Surely you can eat with your old brother.” You’d think—human kindness—alone! Who cares? Now! Now! It’s a tragedy to be old,’ he said looking imploringly at Jules Bertillon, ‘No one to look after your money: the least chink of a coin and their eyes full of greed, snatching, murdering greed!’ He brought his stick in quickly to his chest. He shook his fist and looked at Raccamond.

  Raccamond leaned forward with a spasm. ‘Mr. Tanker! Are you going to buy the Anaconda?’

  ‘Eh? Anaconda? What about Anaconda? Buy? Sell? Who knows? Do I want to sell? I’ll see: there’s no hurry. I’ll let you know. Thanks very much for taking such an interest in my account. I’ve got to be going. Good-by, Plowman. You see, it takes me forty minutes to walk home.’ The felted door swung.

  Jules walked to the window and looked out. ‘Don’t worry about John Tanker, he’s no more gaga than you or me. His head is screwed on tight when it comes to Anaconda. What do you make of it, Richard? How much of the porridge act is a gag? I know for certain he really lives on porridge. He made a settlement on his sister twenty-five years ago. He’s not a bad old duck. He’s been very decent to his family and they’ve all turned sour on him, except his sister. They’re in agony trying to get to his cashbox. They tried to shut him up three years ago … There he goes! Are you coming along, Richard?’

  ‘No, I’m going over my account with Aristide, here.’

  Jules laughed, ‘What on earth for? Ask Mlle. Gentil in the next room: she’s got the whole bank at her finger end … ’

  ‘I was. Raccamond and I were having a little chat,’ said Richard pleasantly.

  Jules laughed, ‘O.K. Claire wants you to supper tonight, don’t forget.’

  The door shut, Jules felt dissipated, ill at ease. He looked for comfort somewhere. In the next room was the aged accountant, ten years past retiring age, Jean-Baptiste Berthellot. He was dressed in a loose, greasy black coat with tails, low-cut waistcoat st
rained over his belly, white shirt, and stock, and sat sleeping, his hands aground on his fat legs. He had just got in from lunch. His thin hair, not yet gray, lay in streaks across a bald patch. A minute after the door opened, he opened his eyes and smiled placidly at Bertillon. ‘Good day, Mr. Jules.’ He struggled vaguely, pretending to be about to rise in his chair, but Jules patted the air with his hand. ‘Sit down, Berthellot. Anything new?’

  Berthellot smiled broadly. ‘No, no nothing, nothing at all!’

  ‘Don’t you want to retire, Jean-Baptiste? You can have your pension any time you want it.’

  ‘Thanks very much, Mr. Jules. I know. Not yet, no … Mr. Jules! I entered a monthly meeting of the Five Brothers Simla (Luxemburg) Corporation this morning.’

  ‘Oh, good! You look after that, Jean-Baptiste: it’s mechanical.’

  ‘I drew my usual director’s fees.’ There was a sort of malevolent twinkle in the folds of the old man’s eyes.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And I entered an extra meeting of the Delaware Blue Dome Holding Company, Inc.,’ murmured the old man with a crisp suggestiveness.

  ‘With the usual director’s fees,’ said Jules, grinning. ‘O.K … Well, don’t overwork, Jean-Baptiste. At your age, too many directors’ meetings might make you liverish.’ He let the door close softly behind him and grinned to himself in the green dusk of the corridor. ‘Old horse thief!’ He stood thinking a moment. Should he retire the old creature by force, or not? He wanted him to train someone for him before he went. Jean-Baptiste Berthellot was the only one beside his eldest brother, William, and himself who had any idea of the real income and outgo of the bank. Alphendéry didn’t know: twin brothers, Paul and Francis Bertillon asked nothing as long as their bills at Pyle’s were paid occasionally; Claire-Josèphe was only concerned with the fate of her marriage portion. No one else counted.

  Berthellot was eminently trustworthy because he was so vain of his self-perfected little system of inoffensive blackmail: he was ‘director’ or minority ‘shareholder’ in several inactive companies which Jules had incorporated in Luxemburg, England, Scotland, and the State of Delaware, U.S.A., both to dispose of assets and to scatter responsibility, and he never failed to roll up for his director’s fees, although naturally no meetings were held but were only entered formally on the books to comply with the laws regulating such companies.*

  * Books of minutes, already made up, may be purchased.

  Jules shrugged his shoulders and laughed it off, compliant, lethargic. ‘Microscopic graft! One of these days the attractions of growing radishes in Juvisy will be too strong for him.’ He walked off and after an abstracted moment spent looking over the balustrade and considering the ‘lambs’ he had gathered in his ‘sap basket’ downstairs (his private terms for clients and the open court with glass roof in which business was done), he walked into the next room whistling. An open file case, an unoccupied typewriter, a green carpet. Jules went to the window and looked out into the street. Tanker, Sr., who must have been dallying downstairs over the blackboard, was just struggling across Rue Lafitte. A taxi swerved away from him and the chauffeur indignantly gesticulated. Jules laughed. ‘The spines of all the Tanker lawyers must have crawled.’ He yawned and looked round the walls. Jules Simla Bertillon, citation for bravery, military medal; for having brought down four enemy planes singlehanded. Jules Simla Bertillon, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; Jules Simla Bertillon, certificate of the Racing Club of France; the same, member of the Thoroughbred Horses’ Club. He kicked his heels round, much bored, and came to the squat green strongbox that he was considering when Armand Brossier, gold clerk, came in. He almost saluted Jules. ‘I beg pardon!’ He had just taken a bunch of keys out of his pocket.

  ‘Got some money there, Armand?’

  ‘Yes, sir: some gold Mr. William just bought—some American gold eagles and a Persian gold piece someone brought in for curiosity, five krans. He bought it at once.’ He proceeded to twist the mechanism and unlock the secret drawer inside. Jules looked in.

  ‘How much have we got in there, Armand? Mr. William didn’t tell me we had so much. Why, you’ve got twenty-five bags there about, haven’t you? What’s in them?’

  ‘Different coins in different bags: here, gold eagles and gold half eagles; here, twenty-five-peseta pieces in gold; here, some German gold twenty-mark pieces; in this bag, odd coins, like Japanese ten-yen pieces. The rest are all sovereigns, half-sovereigns, and gold louis … roughly, about 1,625,000 francs in here. Mr. Bertillon, about one hundred thousand francs per bag, as well as I have been able to divide them.’ He was very earnest. He exhibited the bags, each about the size of a goose egg, as passionately as if he had dug it up himself.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Jules calmly. ‘You like that, don’t you, all that gold?’

  The young man smiled palely. ‘I suppose I do, in a way: you cannot look at gold as filthy lucre.’

  ‘When people are collecting gold they aren’t doing business,’ said Jules, with a note of irritation. ‘Gold is constipation: even bankruptcy is more fluid. Gold isn’t wealth: positions in markets are wealth. Don’t be taken in.’ He smiled, ‘But you’re doing no harm. They’ll take it out again soon enough, don’t worry, and bury it in some other hole: dogs always are digging up their bones.’

  Brossier regretfully closed the drawer and the safe. ‘Yes, Mr. Bertillon: I understand.’ But he looked downcast. Jules was irritated. He had had no idea that William had bought so much gold. He went along to William’s room and as he was opening the door, cried, ‘Say, you’ve made me costive in gold. Why keep gold? To pay a debt to a rich man is a waste of money—he’ll throw it to his brokers or his whores in a couple of hours and to pay a poor man is a waste of time: he’ll pay his rent to some gangster who’ll be across the Spanish border tomorrow with the general funds and the chap you pay’ll be on the bread line tomorrow, however you look at it. Keep your money. It’s all right to give confidence by gold, or as a bet on inflation, but don’t spend so much money on it. It’s a commodity, and we’re not in commodities, William. We’re in grapples, clinches, blackmails, plunges, lucky breaks, long odds, lowdowns, big gambles, and secret bookkeeping … You and I are trying to run two different sorts of banks on the same premises. I wish you’d do what I want. I started this bank … ’

  ‘I know you did,’ said William mildly, ‘but gold is virtue: one double-eagle crushes four shady rumors. And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog! It’s better than stocks and bonds; it’s always valid; and it doesn’t have to be changed into any other value. It is value. You let the Comtesse de Voigrand know you can pay out a demand for, say, fifty thousand francs entirely in gold, and she’ll bring you back the next day half a million: gossip harvest …’

  ‘What’s the use of reserves in a time like this: have the Germans reserves? We have and we’re picked on by all Europe: blackmail is what pays,’ squealed Jules. ‘We’ve got out of the gold age, that’s all. Gold is only good because it’s portable … the governments have learned a thing or two: they won’t be letting us hold gold and let it sweat profits in failing currencies, the way it does at present … Not too much of it: I need funds …’

  William was laughing in his sleeve. ‘Say, Jules: you know the Swedish baroness used to be here? She left an account of two hundred and fifty thousand crowns: I thought she’d forgotten about it. You know she’s always soused in akvavit. Last week she sent in a letter demanding the transfer of two hundred and fifty thousand francs (not crowns) to her bank in Stockholm. I forgot about it, I’ve been so busy. Today I got another letter insisting on the transfer at once of her two hundred and fifty thousand francs at the current rate of Swedish crowns—about 41,666 crowns. So I did it. If she finds out her “mistake,” we’ll transfer the rest …’

  Etienne, the venerable doorkeeper, appeared in the doorway, his faithful eyes on Jules.

&n
bsp; ‘Mr. Jules! Monsieur Aristippe de Partiefine would like to see you.’

  ‘Send him up. Poor guy,’ said Jules, ‘I suppose he wants a loan: his last wife only gives him petty cash.’

  Aristippe de Partiefine was one of the fabulous figures of little Paris—a penniless Casanova; so charming, so rich in love, and so empty-headed that four rich women had married him and deserted him.

  ‘Aristippe must be forty-five now, you know,’ said William in a melancholy tone.

  He came up, tall, broad, very swarthy, well groomed, bowed a little from his excessive height, modest-speaking, mild. His features, though well formed, had a disproportion that caused people to say, ‘Why, the man’s quite ugly!’ His eyes were set rather close together, but deep enough with richly folded lids that disappeared in shadows at the outer corners; his jutting nose had a slightly thickened end; the long mouth with perfectly formed, dark swelling lips, broadened to smile a guileless, kind, confiding smile, whenever Aristippe turned from the person speaking to him, to some other one standing by, as if to confirm this silent person in their first impression: ‘I am your friend: count on me.’ Women immediately felt that they had happened on an affinity, a natural intelligence, a deep harmony, a grand devotion. Aristippe smiled at Jules.

  ‘Jules, I have a little scheme for business. I just wanted to know if you knew some good stenographers, male stenographers I should prefer—I want some copying done … I have a formula I want copied out. François Legris said he would back me. It’s a good formula—for reinvigoration, much better than the Titus pearls.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get one of my girls to do it.’

  ‘Oh, no: I shouldn’t like the young ladies here to do it … you don’t know some public stenographers. You see, they are used to all sorts of work. And then it has to be translated from the Polish. It was sent to me from—a man I know in Warsaw. It is used by him and his family. It is a sort of family secret. It is all in Polish. There would have to be so many words to look up—you see,’ he smiled his smile at William and went on to Jules, ‘Your girls couldn’t do it. Besides, I must pay for it.’