House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  ‘He said to me, “Buddy, what do I care who gets them?” So he ships them to Le Havre with the wrong address, I call for them, I sell what I can, what I can’t I put back in the cases, then I fill the same cases up with a lot of stuff I can’t get rid of and I send the stuff back to the warehouse in New York. “Refused. Wrong address.” I suppose the chap in Czecho got back a lot of funny stuff and he sent it back again. Maybe they’re still going backwards and forwards. But you’ve got to be smart. I didn’t pay a cent, only a couple of dollars.’

  ‘You’ve got to nose around,’ said William, thoughtfully. The twins, Paul and Francis, looked like two chickens who have seen the same worm.

  ‘There’s a little chap down in the Place des Vosges makes swan’s down powder puffs: they’re washable. But what girl is going to wash her powder puff if she can get say twenty for five francs, say four for one franc? You see, they’re just manufacturing in the void. You got to manufacture for a market. It would be like a story writer saying, “I don’t write for Vanity Fair or the Mercure de France … I write for anybody, everybody”’ (Cambo said innocently). ‘Now, there are thousands of these poor little birds: and I’m doing them a favor: I’m a natural market for them. Say, these little fellows can’t make a cent anyhow. I’m doing them a favor if I take the stuff off their hands below cost.

  ‘Now, I want to show you one thing. It doesn’t pay me to go into business manufacturing things. It pays me to buy only from the one-horse shows, the attic factories, women who knit in parks while they’re watching their babies, unemployed men turning out little gadgets. You save rent (because the homeworker is paying his own rent), you save installation, deterioration of machinery—all that’s washed out with the one-horse manufacturer when he goes bankrupt. You don’t have to bother about factory laws, installing W.C.’s, hours and wages and overtime. And you’re doing them a service: you’re giving them work, you’re giving them a market.

  ‘Now, they sometimes put in machines when they see you coming back; they save you the expense. You say, “Give me the exclusive supply,” and they’re willing to borrow money and put in the machines. Well, if the goods don’t please, and they’re overextended, they can sell to your competitors for a bit (but you’ve already broken the back of the market) and then they go bankrupt! If there’s still a tag end of market, you buy the bankrupt stock cheap. They were bankrupt before: they’re bankrupt again! They’ve always been bankrupt. And so you’ve done no harm; you’ve given them something to eat for a few months. Say, these little fellows can’t last. They’re not adapted to the wholesale age.’

  Jules put in sharply, ‘And what do you do with the stuff that goes stale on your counters?’

  Daniel laughed, threw out his hand with a vast gesture. ‘What do you do? Why, I send it to the country, little dead places like Sens and Senlis and—anywhere—and then to Morocco. Now that’s where the real jewel of my scheme is lying. You see? You go to the receivers and you say, “These goods are old-fashioned: I know. I was selling them six months ago in Paris, now they’re done. You can’t sell them except in some dusky paradise. I don’t know if I can sell! Maybe in Patagonia, in the Solomon Islands. But if you want to sell them to me for almost nothing, I’ll do you a favor, I’ll take them off your hands. You see, my competitors won’t look at the stuff. But I’m different: I’ve got, maybe, someone I can write to … factors.” Then they ask around, they don’t take too much trouble, why should they? They give it to me by private treaty. I slip them a couple of ten-franc notes. Well, what can you do? You’ve got to earn your living. You can’t go to sleep standing up.’ He smiled his open, good-natured, boyish smile that split his great honest face with a neat strong bite of white teeth.

  Daniel was busy from morning to night, like a prodigious hummingbird, flitting, hovering, quick as a flash of light from one store to another, from giant wholesaler to poverty-ridden private home, from small artisan in the Faubourg St. Antoine or the Place des Vosges to miserable mothers knitting and doing gross filet lace for a living in the park of the Buttes-Chaumont. He also observed, without any need of a notebook, the prices in department stores and working-class bazaars, the first necessities as well as the first luxuries of the poor: men’s shirts, children’s shirts, socks, kitchen utensils, kitchen silver, cleaning powders, rag flowers, cosmetics, buttons, lamp shades, electric fittings, wedding rings …

  The clients of the bank were divided sharply into two camps, immediately—those who saw in Cambo’s scheme the big new racket, and those who said, ‘The French will never buy goods turned out whole-sale to one pattern; they are a petty-artisan nation, and care for the curious and individual; they understand quality.’ The ladies especially (those who six months later were buying knitted shirts for nephews and nieces from Cambo’s stores at twenty francs) sustained the thesis that Frenchwomen, even working girls, were too elegant ‘by nature’ to buy things to cover their delicate individual skins in vulgar bazaars. Mme. Mimi Eloth, Mme. Berthe Yves, Mme. de Sluys-Forêt, and Mme. Raccamond led these insurgents: they appeared to take Cambo’s proposition as a personal insult.

  ‘He is, after all, a Smyrna Jew: he does not understand the essentially French,’ said Mme. Raccamond and they all agreed with her.

  But Jules, and almost every moneymaking male in the place, was with Cambo. Alphendéry said, ‘Frenchwomen! Those that come from the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock in the morning aren’t Frenchwomen, they belong unwillingly to the international of flour-sack home dress-making: of course, they’ll hail Cambo as a savior if he puts out twenty-franc dresses.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jules, ‘slaves. Everything comes back. We’re getting back to slavery. They’ve got to learn to like mass-production goods. We’ve got to sell them something. Say, Mussolini and Woolworth are the giant minds of our age; Musso got them to wear mass-production, nonsoiling shirts; Woolworth extended it to everything they want. They both succeeded, didn’t they? Hitler will get on, mark that, you boys. He’s got the mass-production idea. I bet you anything you like some smart fellows in Germany now are behind him, only waiting to sell brown shirts, by the million. Say, Daniel, it would pay you to organize a green-shirt movement or say a red-shirt one, for the Reds.’

  ‘Why don’t you, Jules?’ Daniel asked with a certain hope.

  ‘Oh, I don’t sell anything visible.’ Jules lay back and indifferently began playing with his paper knife. ‘You shear the white lambs; I’ll take the black sheep.’

  They grinned at each other, flattered by the notion that they were all infinite blackguards. Ephraïm Dreyer pondered: ‘Will they let you get away with it, Daniel? Won’t they try to shut you up? You’ll undercut them all.’

  ‘And what am I doing all that time?’ asked Daniel. ‘I hold them off a year or two and then I sell out. Business today is climbing up the corridor of the avalanche, before the avalanche. Let it pass. Climb again: Look, Morocco’s not a French colony; it’s only a protectorate and has its own laws. French goods don’t get any preference, but pay twelve and one-half per cent ad valorem like those of any other country. So the French interests there have no advantage. I dump Yankee goods in Morocco, that I buy the way I told you. Do I pay twelve and one-half per cent? No. You don’t have to pay in money in Morocco: you can pay twelve and one-half per cent in goods, in kind. So you pay the customs one-eighth of the goods. Naturally, I pay them in goods I don’t want particularly, whatever has deteriorated in sales value. Then I give the customs officials a couple of ten-franc bills, and when he auctions the stuff off, my stuff that I paid over to him, I buy it back at a bargain price. Before anyone catches on, I’ve made my money and I sell out.’

  Jules was about to speak but Daniel held up his hand and walked with one restless pace round the corner of the table. ‘But what’s the beauty of my scheme? Everyone can think up the one-eighth ad valorem in goods, can’t they? But I go a step farther. I form an American company, a Delaware corporation. I have n
ominee American shareholders; I’m the director—William and I represent Americans. Under the capitulations, I can demand protection for my Yankee friends; I get extraterritorial rights! You get preference as a foreigner. Let the Galeries Lafayette or any other French concern try to compete with me, then! The Yankee consul has to protect my interests. It’s beautiful. Watertight, till they see through it and then—we will have sold out. So I buy for nothing in America, I pay my duty in bad garters, and I get special protection against French competition in a French protectorate. It’s beautiful.’ His honest, sanguine face shone with enthusiasm.

  ‘How much do you think you’ll make?’ asked Jules.

  ‘About half a million francs the first year. About a million in all … then a quick sale. Maybe more. Sell out for seven and a half millions on a five-year basis. The cow will be milked dry by then.’

  Jules was inspired, as always, by the display of acumen. When they had dispersed and Daniel had gone down to the stock-exchange room to receive the homage and questions of the client-cronies, Jules wandered into Alphendéry’s room, musing.

  ‘You know, Michel, I just had a brilliant idea. How about getting into touch with Sournois, the deputy who is Carrière’s friend and get him to start a movement like that National-Socialist one in Germany, a fake one. We’ll form a consortium and take over a shirt factory and manufacture colored shirts: black, the French are Latins and like black. We can sell them to Daniel in his bazaars. We’ll make red and black. Get in touch with the Action Française and see what color they’d like their men to wear.’

  ‘Jules, there’s one thing you must understand: we must keep clear of these reactionary movements. If I ever find you in any such thing, I leave you right away. I’d rather make my living selling L’Humanité on the streets than work with you.’

  Jules laughed. ‘All right, I’m only dreaming.’

  Jules was wafted out on his own good humor. For a few hours after that, however, he sat in his room or drifted about the bank scheming like a spider and the subject of his dreaming was the manufacture of badges and uniforms. He telephoned Daniel. ‘I’ve got a good idea. Come up. The Arabs are madly superstitious! Give them astrological readings free and sell dream books along with them! There’s a little hand token they think brings them good luck. Why don’t you give them a little hand with every two pair of braces?’

  They were closeted together a long time. By the end of the afternoon, there was no weakness of the human race they had not made provision for in the projected popular bazaars.

  * * *

  Scene Forty: Adam’s Return

  Adam Constant presented to Jules and William Bertillon and Alphendéry, as soon as he got in in the morning, the newly printed articles of association of the Leadenhall Securities Guarantee Corporation, Limited, which he had just formed through the bank’s solicitors in London, Ledger, Ledger, and Braves. The association had an office in St. Mary Axe, an office manager who had just departed for a tour of the provinces, to sound provincial family lawyers, and a stenographer who did nothing with dignity all day and was paid two pounds ten weekly for it. The manager, Dacre-Derek Caudal, sea-blue-eyed, was immensely grateful to Bertillon and to Constant. He came to them from a desert of unemployment two years long, and he vowed everlasting fidelity to them.

  The corporation lent out money to indigent rentiers, received their negotiable stocks and shares as security, and had the right (section seventeen of the agreement signed by him, close-printed in pearl type, gave this) to sell out the shares, replace them, and manipulate them exactly as if they were the property of the corporation. At the end of two years, and not before, the rentier was to claim his shares and pay up the loans he had received.

  ‘Not only,’ laughed Alphendéry, ‘will they not come back to reclaim them, but they’ll be in hiding for fear we’ll be after them to make them pay. For what those two-penny shares will be worth in two years is no one’s business: they will read like the bear’s pipe dream. And we don’t give all the loan right away; we give a small advance now, a stated amount and so on. Poor devils! There must be plenty that would give us their shares, even if we explained the whole thing word for word.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ said William unpleasantly. ‘They like to live on bad Ceylon tea and keep their Aunt Emmy’s heritage in paper. Perhaps you won’t get any offerers.’

  ‘You keep in touch with Caudal, Constant,’ Jules said, calmly. ‘I leave this end of the business to you. When it’s going all right, we might be able to use you for Shanghai.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the right time to open a Shanghai branch?’ ventured Constant. ‘I can see this three-cornered fight going on in China for ten or fifteen years. Perhaps the international settlements will be wiped out.’

  ‘Certainly, I know. But I’m playing for five years, not ten,’ Jules explained.

  * * *

  Scene Forty-one: Thargelion

  Paris was lovely now and yet Alphendéry left it almost every week end to go to the Touraine, Normandy, Burgundy—any spot that could be reached within two or three hours. He had no car and he traveled alone by rail, carrying no luggage, putting up at the best or second-best hotel of the town, eating pasties, fish dishes, chickens, and drinking local wines in chill dining rooms, going rapidly by foot round all the points of historic and romantic interest—then returning on Sunday evening, tired but refreshed. He was always going out like a honeybee to other scenes to bring in a store of sweet for the dark hive in which he lived. He disliked the bank much more than he admitted to himself. He had half a mind to go back to Alsace and live with his mother, become, as he put it, ‘a poor scholar.’ But that did not attract him very much, either. He had seen too much also of the men at the bank: he inwardly had little sympathy for their money passions; their range of wit and learning was that of an eight-year-old boy. Some like Jules, Cambo, and Léon were interesting but suffocating personalities, planets circling with their satellites, self-sufficient, dark planets with their own motion, but absorbers of his wit. He struggled on because those he supported were not used to poverty and because since the age of fourteen he had seen the weekly pay checks coming in. If it had suddenly stopped he would hardly have known how to face the day.

  Alphendéry had many friends, strangely assorted friends, clients of the bank, who came into his private room during the week, partly to enjoy his wit and economic learning, partly to spy on him and try to discover what he did alone all day in a room, this man of resource and ability, who was publicly said to be a ‘stock-exchange clerk.’

  Thargelion, with a dark bloom like Mediterreanean night, tall, mellow with the beauty of many generations, a sort of Aristides turned society tobacco runner, came in softly, elegantly, daily to court with his discreet perfumes, suave poses, and snatches of exotic verse the unsuspecting Alphendéry. The son of a famous modern statesman, sufficiently rich, he was always occupied in Paris in missions for some opposition party ready to make the assault of power in Greece. He also had a wine business, a fig business, and had divers other small sources of revenue. The past winter Alphendéry, sick, gray for want of sun, said to Thargelion, ‘How can you be here, away from Greece? How can you stay so long away from the blue skies that the whole world turns linger-longer glances on?’

  Thargelion said in that bright melodious accent, which is the sign of his class, the rustle of polished steel, the cooing of ball bearings, the chingle of arms in deep bottoms sliding through the flood tide at night, ‘That Greece is an illusion of tourists: I do not want you to care for Greece in that way, Mr. Alphendéry. I detest it. A cousin of mine sells tickets to tourists, vulgar creatures, to see the ruins of the Parthenon: it is nothing but a couple of split stones. I would rather see the American Radiator Building: it is modern Greece … Oh, do not speak to me of that aspect of Greece, it is repulsive, like a salvaged wreck covered with green slime that the salvagers bring up for prize money … Greece is—stri
kes, fights, treachery, blacklegs, democracy, even the Red International now. I do not want to see it … I detest it …’ He softened. ‘But if you would really like to go there, Mr. Alphendéry, I would arrange it with only too much pleasure, on one of my cousin’s ships, or in the company of a friend of mine: you would be well looked after. For a vacation cruise, perhaps it is not so bad. Besides, you are not like those who go and gape, you understand these things.’ At this word, he lowered his voice and spoke so exquisitely, so tenderly, that Alphendéry felt his skin prickle and his diaphragm gulp. After Thargelion had gone downstairs, incomparably urbane and sleek, Alphendéry went and looked into the mirror of the men’s washroom, at his odd masklike face, enough to make Goya start from his Bordeaux grave and grab him by the coattails as he went by. Then he smiled.

  He went into Jules’s room, sank into a chair, and after some idle talk, said, ‘Thargelion has been making love to me.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Jules. ‘Egg him on. We’ll get Paleologos’s account. He and Mouradzian can swing it between them …’

  ‘By the way,’ interjected Alphendéry, ‘did you write anything on that bet with Carrière? You didn’t, did you? It’s too dangerous.’