House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  Presently Alphendéry said sharply and with bitterness, ‘Why are you so astonished, Henri? Have you ever known a businessman, yourself included, who wasn’t mad with conceit, superstition, disorder, and egotism? Who didn’t think himself a combination of Machiavelli, Napoleon, Rockefeller, a vulture, and an imperial eagle? Would you have asked any questions of how Jules or Bomba did it, if they’d put it over? What surprises you is that Jules is a sort of madman, to you; he isn’t as keen at your schemes as he is on his own. You could have picked up any clerk in our office downstairs, Adam Constant, the poet (whom Jules employs, by the way) and done a thousand times better than Jules, with his Stevie and Theodor: you say. But would you have picked better people? Look at the people you pick for your own deals! Little Kratz, who denounced you to all the authorities in the world, a sneak and a fantast; Achitophelous, who spent his time between dumping daybooks in the Seine and trying to seduce your mistress and faking telephone accounts; Aristide Raccamond, a fat louse, who looked giddy and sucked, and squeaked and sucked, and ran round in circles and sucked, and who, when you tried to crush him, still sucked. Is it such a beautiful circle of friends you have yourself, to call upon, to use? What people are in our game, Léon? Thieves and streetwalkers: you and me, too. Who is there to pick on but leeches, double-crossers, and vain fools like Bomba. You won’t go to America—on account of Barnett Baff. Jules won’t go to America on account of—do I know why? You all make me tired, Henri. I can’t listen to your lamentations. You all sell, not grain and stocks, but flesh, human hope, blood, and desire, children and the future of the human race. And then you’re all alike, you and Jules and Achitophelous and William and Daniel Cambo, the Comtesse de Voigrand and Madame de Sluys-forêt, you all come round me and expect me to get out a black-rimmed handkerchief and weep because you didn’t make a million francs through a stroke of the pen.’

  Léon looked miserable, hung his head, said very low, ‘You’re right, Michel: we’re no good to the human race. Michel, if I didn’t think I was going to do something brilliant, I wouldn’t take any interest in life. I’ve got to do something, Michel. Now, Michel, I don’t want you to look on me as a parasite. I’m not like that. In New York, when I was a young man, I was always the quickest—dearest buyer, cheapest seller, made a fortune, only on commissions; I never went past the brokers, even when I could, and they all came to me. They made my market. I went wrong! I thought there was a big market; but no, it was only that they all came to me. After a few weeks I find I’m doing all the business and I’m losing money. What’s wrong? I find out. I’m making the market myself. Quick in, quick out, never holding the bag and yet never making a profit. How come? I find out. Another lesson. You see, I learn, Michel. I like to be progressive. I like to construct. Destructive—doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t want to go down and leave nothing, Michel. Now Jules,’ he became sad, ‘he’s not like me.’ Alphendéry brought up short, swallowed his wine, and said nothing. ‘Jules,’ said Léon, with immense regret, ‘Jules is unable to realize a first-class business scheme through remaining in a fantasy world. I started without a cent, without a cent.’

  ‘Jules made plenty,’ said Alphendéry, in the dumps. ‘He’s full of irresistible charm.’

  ‘Really? I don’t see it, Michel. Not so much.’

  ‘No? Others do. I know twenty people who, if Jules robbed them of every cent in the world, would go before a judge and swear he never harmed them, that he was innocent and had been tricked by someone else.’

  Léon’s eyes opened wide, ‘Really? Say—can he do that? He just gets people’s dough—eh?’

  Alphendéry said in a curt tone, ‘Despite the lying and bragging of self-made men, there is usually some honest little incident of real business on which their money is really founded—plus a few windfalls—but they never tell about it: they’re ashamed of honesty. They consider it dull.’

  Léon looked self-conscious and changed the subject, saying with a brave gaiety, ‘Go on, go on: I’ve never been able to make out how he made his money.’

  Alphendéry told him as much as he could of the career of Jules, without injuring his repute: that is, in the eyes of a businessman. Léon listened with divining eyes, shaking his head. In the career of others, as in his own, he believed firmly in the ‘grand coup,’ in the sudden blazing of the star of fortune, the star foretold, from cradle days. He refused to accept the pedestrian fact of fortunes built up from day to day, by hard work and unwinking devotion to money, by good salesmanship, some superlative quality of inspiring confidence, hustling buyers or serving others to their vanities. For if magic exists, obviously endless fortunes can be gained by ‘lucky’ men, even into their forties, fifties, and sixties. There must be no iron law of fortunes, or where would we poor millionaires be? In the same category as other men? Subject to old age, disintegration, empty old age, the shelf? A thousand times no. No, there is magic in it, and the key, though invisible, is in our luck-shaped hands.

  ‘Jules,’ said Léon, after the story, evidently disbelieving all that had been told him, evidently still searching for the secret of his success, ‘Jules should get—a man gets things back from reciprocal business. Is he living off capital? Jules does hundreds of thousands of shares— everywhere! If Jules gets back half-commissions he does not need to bucket. Now, Michel, do you know whether he does or not?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t get half-commissions.’

  ‘You don’t know, Michel,’ Léon shook his head paternally. ‘You think you know; you don’t. No feller tells you his game. Now, say he was doing the legitimate business you began, Michel; taking care of the house, when the clients go wild speculatively, say he gets sick of being legitimate, “What do I want to be in this peanut business for?” He goes in, in big licks for himself, he becomes a sucker himself then. You see? You don’t know that, Michel. No, I got to find out … If he made money—of course, we don’t know. There’s a rule: if you are bullish, buy; if you are too bullish, sell. Call the turns. Who can do it?’ He meditated. ‘Participations. He could say, “I’ll send you my telephone bill every month, Legris, and you pay it.” Supposing Legris agrees to take one hundred thousand shares General Foods for Bertillon and guarantee him against loss. Expenses would be paid … If not. Michel, Michel! He has a best seller there. Will he go in with me? I have a proposition. Only. He lacks confidence in others.’

  Alphendéry had become attentive. ‘Jules goes into propositions with lots of people.’

  Léon shook his head, ‘His own class: playboys. They won’t let him down. He’s right. He plays the class game. Now with me … Lone-wolf ideas. No. They don’t go …’ He murmured something like, ‘The government allows him to lend gold on forward wheat and I got wheat forward: I buy wheat, I hedge it, I—instead of paying five to twenty per cent—’

  Alphendéry put his hand to his head. ‘Funny,’ he said to Léon, ‘my head’s going round: I had the impression I heard you say that before.’

  Léon said, ‘You need coffee. Waiter! Coffee! Because he lacks confidence. He wants to be the only one. It’s vanity. A man doesn’t go in with you either because he doesn’t like you or because he’s dishonest. He lacks confidence in—himself or you. If I have something good I go to another man … No, no. We got to find out, Michel, my boy, which is it? … I got some boys there: they would buy the Bertillon Bank. Only, he’s got to go in with them or show them a balance sheet. Lacks confidence.’

  Alphendéry laughed, ‘You’ve got to convince him you’re not just trying to get him to show his books for nothing.’

  Léon was troubled. ‘No, no, my boy. You know I wouldn’t … You see, put and call. You got the bank. You begin by selling calls; the man pays commissions; then he got to buying puts and that was where he went wrong. He sold short twice: once on the client’s judgment, then on the market; you can’t take a position against yourself. That’s where maybe he went wrong …’

  Alphendéry laughed. ‘Do
n’t you sell him short, just because he didn’t fit in with your wheat deal! How do you know all this about selling short?’

  Léon worried, ‘Why won’t he show me his books?’

  Alphendéry laughed. ‘He hasn’t got any books perhaps. What would you say if I told you I was his books? I’ve got a God-awful long memory: Huet D’Avranches and Lord Acton are just about my rivals. Say we don’t keep any books and I’m all the bookkeeping there is.’

  ‘No, no, my boy. You don’t know the whole story. There are books. No one tells anyone the whole story. William doesn’t know it; the twins don’t know it. Claire-Josèphe doesn’t know it. Only Jules knows it.’

  ‘How do you know that, Henri?’

  ‘It is always so. Trust me: I know.’

  ‘You may be right, Henri.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he take a partner, otherwise? He’s had offers. I’ve just brought him an offer, Michel. A real one. No hoax.’

  Alphendéry opened his eyes and looked in surprise at Léon. ‘Henri, I suppose, after all, I don’t know everything.’

  ‘Nothing, Michel. Consolidate your position, Michel. The boys don’t owe you anything. Look out for yourself, Michel.’

  ‘Well, didn’t you offer me a job as your secretary? … And Ralph Stewart offered me a job. I figure on being out of the whole game in five years.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Join the workers’ movement.’

  Léon was in a panic. ‘And your wife? What will she do? She’s a lovely girl, Michel: you know, a wife’s a wife. After all. She wants a home, Michel. Is she going to marry, eh? We have responsibilities, Michel.’

  ‘You keep her, then, Henri: you seem so excited about her fate.’

  Léon shook his head slowly but said no more.

  * * *

  Scene Fifty-six: Interregnum

  Jules, anxious to avoid giving Léon a direct answer about selling the bank, and also, sick in his pride, because of the failure of the wheat deal and the folly of his toady, Theodor Bomba, went away silently to the Blue Coast. In such voluntary types especially, the will works persistently, unconsciously, day and night, and when the body is fatigued, it works as much towards death as life. When the body is tired, it bends to disease and suicide to have rest. Jules remained sick for some weeks. During this time Carrière called in for a payment: the drafts had come through, the pound was exactly at 122 at the time, and William paid him out without more ado.

  Jules rented a magnificent suite in the Hotel Magnolius and now rang William, Alphendéry, or Raccamond or Jacques Manray, every day, not asking about business, but delivering bizarre, operetta ideas on the market, ordering quantities of shares to be bought or sold, predicting political turns in a style which betrayed his invisible audience; full of whims and commands. Sometimes he masqueraded for the lounge lizards as ‘the great banker’; sometimes, in the restaurant, he was ‘the Great Man’ running his business from afar, commanding his humble servants, pulling invisible wires; sometimes, they could tell, it was only for himself, to keep his courage up.

  Every time he telephoned, William and Alphendéry looked at each other with amusement, with impatience, smarting under his impertinence as much as laughing at his sallies and absurdities, thinking that he would come back soon, get a sense of reality, and get into harness again. William, who loved a jog trot, remarked, ‘Let him stay away: he does no work anyhow. When he’s away he only gives us a pain once a day.’ He refused to write to his brother, opened all his letters, boycotted him completely. He was a little annoyed, both over the American expenses of his aversion, Theodor Bomba, and over the refusal of Jules to sell the bank.

  Bomba meanwhile had installed himself as Jules’s pet, sick nurse, and state flatterer in the Hotel Magnolius and his cash drawings, being confused with Jules’s own, escaped William’s retributive eye. This annoyed William even more. But Jules was on the upgrade: tired of showing himself everywhere as the rose crown of young bankerdom, his sense of theater warned him that he must soon return to Paris. He had been away two months. The bank was running itself. The last fact was becoming evident and was no compliment to the chief. During that time no great strokes had been made, but neither had any money been lost. There was no champagne in it.

  ‘What’s the use of running a bank like that?’ clamored Jules again and again. Sometimes, true, for two days he would go to sleep and forget that he was a great man, a financial wizard and all the rest of it, till one of the innumerable Peggies, Tonies, Fifis, Pippies, Nonos, and Dédés who deposited money with him (or had overdrafts of him), would run into him on some yachting expedition and say, ‘Julesy darling, aren’t you going to be a banker any more?’

  Then Jules would get on to the telephone in a rage with himself and them, full of worthless suggestions and recriminations. For it is a rule of creative ability, that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.

  Curiously, as time wore on, the ‘boys’ became convinced that Jules would open a branch of the bank in Nice to please himself: they spoke of ‘pensioning’ him there and of taking over the bank themselves. They had, between the twins, William and Alphendéry, enough powers to do this. An arrangement with Jules, and they could work the bank rationally, cutting off all the rank wild flowers of fantasy which drank up the hard-won profits; drilling this brilliant musical comedy into the functions of an ordinary exchange and bourse office ‘without any strings,’ as William said.

  Raccamond, now on the Blue Coast, was lying low, working hard, conversing respectfully with William and Alphendéry over the telephone about twice a week, sending in clients and orders, looking for a site for a Nice office, proposing personnel, and altogether behaving so rationally and modestly that William and Alphendéry began to cherish his good qualities and look upon him as a third mate.

  One afternoon, William came in to Michel with the cheerful expression of a constitutional pessimist vindicated. He stuck a double sheet of notepaper under Alphendéry’s nose. It said,

  Hotel Magnolius,Promenade des Etats-Unis,Nice.

  Dear Dick,

  Thanks for your letter. I hope you get down here soon. I think you’re right about William and Alphendéry, I especially have no confidence in Michel’s judgment: he’s a pessimist and subversive by nature and we don’t want that. It ruins business. William is a muddleheaded donkey: I’ve known him since the nursery and even there while he was hiding his pennies the twins were stealing his toys. I must come back and take charge of things. Of course, things are slipping. But I’ll soon put that right. In the meantime, try to get down. Best love to Anita and Johnny.

  Jules

  P.S. Thanks for keeping an eye on the boys for me.

  William smiled as he retrieved it. ‘I got it out of Richard Plowman’s desk. Wait till I put it back.’ When he came back he found Alphendéry walking up and down the room, twisting his handkerchief, his brows twisted, the hollows that would be in his cheeks twenty years from now, painfully apparent, his large brown eyes very sad. He said swiftly, painfully, ‘How can Dick Plowman betray us? I know he’s always thought Jules was too good for any one of us.’

  ‘What can you do?’ William, smiling, as if he had just had the best news in the world, his hands in his pockets, easily promenaded about the room. It amused his slow, sardonic nature to discover stupidity or treason: he preferred a person to lie to him; he found it more amusing and a sign of weakness in that person. Even treason against himself seemed to him a particular comic sort of boomerang. He had nothing to lose. Or, thought Michel, watching him covertly, he was too canny to appear to resent it.

  William laughed, a mellow, youthful tone in his voice. ‘It’s typical of someone you’re keeping: it’s like a woman. You sweat to give her all the comforts and she criticizes you to her friends. Open a wife’s correspondence and discover what love is. We’re both working to keep one wi
fe: Jules.’ He smiled at Michel, soothed him. ‘Why do you get upset at that idiot Jules? I’ve known him since he was a baby. He’s always been the same. Thinks the sun couldn’t get up if he didn’t. He thinks he works. He says Ouf! and that’s the wind that starts the mills going. Daniel Cambo was passing through there the other day with his woman, Raquel Gerson. He told me Jules is holding a regular court there every day, with Bomba, Raccamond, and Raccamond’s nephew, a gilded wastrel. Bomba boasts about his trips to the United States. Raccamond calls himself a ‘director.’ Jules is getting the idea that the bank made a great hit in the United States and that they will all be rolling over here with their gold. He forgets the money Bomba and Pentous spent: he thinks he’s a friend of the President, I don’t doubt.’

  Alphendéry took the medicine. ‘Well, it’s his show: it’s his to run or ruin. But why don’t we get out and let him have his sanctum in the Hotel Magnolius? He doesn’t want us.’

  ‘You get a good salary, Michel.’

  ‘Aristide Raccamond is now drawing more than me and nearly as much as you. A splendid salary doesn’t compensate me for the loss of my youth. I stay here like a fool because I’m loyal to Jules, whom I love dearly—’

  ‘Who asks you to be loyal? To love? Jules isn’t loyal to you. Jules loves you yesterday, Bomba today, and Raccamond tomorrow. You’re dizzy if you’re loyal. It’s money. I’m loyal to Jules and I’m his brother: does that make any difference to our Prince when he’s discovered that he’s another Rothschild? He’s not human. I know him. He’s keeping a retinue of yes men now and they’re bathed in glory, but in a couple of months he’ll be tired of them, too, and their more-than-loyalty, their bootlicking, their voluntary flunkying, their dribbling admiration, their whipped-cream flattery won’t do them any more good than your loyalty.’

  ‘You don’t quite understand, William. It’s just because he’s so unprincipled, because he has no knowledge of the principles on which his business is running that I love Jules and I fear for him. I think he has a right to a sweet fate. He is as beautiful as light. There is something not entirely human about Jules. I fear, I fear to see him go down in some all-too-human crash. He runs on so wildly and impetuously. He seems unconscious that there is anyone above him or below him. He does not seem to know there are lawcourts, people who hate, who pursue—disaster, death. Perhaps I’m deceiving myself: perhaps he would do better if I left him without all my philosophy: it isn’t his. He doesn’t want it.’