House of All Nations

by Christina Stead

  Bomba blocked out a lot of air with base, blond fat. He was gaily dressed in a Homburg hat. He had a well-molded face with square forehead and long, fine amethyst eyes: the attentive, rapidly changing expression was part of his dress. His hands were longish, loose, with tapering fingers, but they jarred with the face. He usually compressed his canoe-shaped red mouth and his eyes with a certain expression of pensiveness, dignity, or excruciatingly flattering attention, but when he smiled a horrible change took place: he leered as if he knew degrading ludicrous secrets about his vis-à-vis, as if he had the whiphand of him in a peculiarly humiliating illegal affair, and he almost imperceptibly hunched his shoulders, as if hugging his own cunning to his breast. He could not conceal his malice at the undoing of others, or at their degradation by his hands or his tongue. He used his hands in an outward stirring motion, as if he was fishing round in a cesspool to find some delectable bits of garbage. Both William and Alphendéry found it very hard to take his flabby hand and when he smiled, this first time of his return, Michel fell back two steps as if from infection.

  They were thunderstruck. How could Jules, that delicate, fragrant creature, even sit in the same room as Bomba? He had changed: on Jules’s money he had got fatter and more noticeably unpleasant. William said agreeably, to Jules, ‘Claire wrote to me that you swallowed something that gave you gripes down in the Hotel Magnolius. I don’t blame you.’

  Jules frowned. Bomba, refusing to understand anything but a commencement of hostilities, smiled once more his revolting smile: he seemed to use it as a weapon. Alphendéry stopped Jules in the corridor, despite Jules’s bad temper: he was still in a fit of astonishment and fear as if he had just discovered something in Jules’s nature that he had never known.

  ‘What has happened to you, Jules? Bomba is a leper so evident that he seems to carry a bell round his neck: I’m sure mangy dogs lick his ankles in the street. Overdressed, he is Vice naked. He’s rather a miracle. What are you doing with such a fellow round you ? I don’t wonder things went queer in the U.S.A.’

  ‘Bomba knows the whole of the Internal Revenue Department. He’s in touch with gangsters who have been revenue detectives for years. He can do anything for me in the States. He’s no theoretician.’ Jules was furious. ‘I still expect to get the wheat and cotton deals through, through Bomba. I’ve been working ten times as much, on the Côte d’Azur. Don’t criticize the men I have round me. I want new ability. I want someone who believes in making money and can help me do it. I don’t want wisecracks.’

  Alphendéry’s face fell. In a very sad voice, he acquiesced, ‘All right, Jules: if you feel that way—but we all have an instinctive aversion to Bomba. Believe me, it’s nothing personal.’

  ‘I don’t judge by men’s faces: I judge by their advice. I need a person with ideas in my place. I don’t say I like him. That’s not the point.’ He flung into his room.

  Alphendéry faded into misery so far that he almost became a ghost. He went down into his room, took up L’Information and sat for a long time without being able to fix his mind on a single sentence. He was frightened by Bomba. He resolved to fight it out with Jules anyhow, even if he lost his job. Plowman came in cackling with glee.

  ‘Did you see Bomba? Smart fellow, eh? You should hear what he’s got to say about markets. He says in Wall Street, everyone’s expecting a gigantic rise. We’ve definitely turned the corner, I believe. There’s nothing for it but to buy, buy! The world,’ he smiled paternally at Alphendéry, ‘can’t go on negatively. You’ve been making that mistake, Alphendéry. When you’re my age, you will have seen so many depressions that you won’t get depressed. Ha, ha! But thank goodness, Jules is always right. He sometimes makes mistakes but he can always retrieve himself in time. My money is on Jules!’

  ‘Do you like Bomba, Richard?’

  Plowman was less confident but did his best, ‘I like his positive way of thinking. I like his connections. He is well-known in all the capitals.’

  Alphendéry followed up his advantage. ‘I suppose he tells Jules what he wants to hear?’

  ‘I approve of that. Jules is naturally a straightforward simple architect: his instincts are right when he’s in that mood and he should then be simply approved.’

  ‘You’ve worked with hundreds of men in your career, Richard. Would you employ a Bomba?’

  ‘If he had good references and his act was good.’

  ‘And the American act was good, in your opinion?’

  Plowman flashed indignation, ‘Jules was sabotaged from the beginning by Léon.’

  ‘I see! I see everything! And Bomba says that Léon is responsible for the fiasco?’

  ‘Obviously he was. And sabotage in the bank itself. You, in particular, I’m not accusing of that, Michel.’

  Alphendéry smiled.

  Bomba, unable to keep the triumph out of his face, was spreading himself in Jules’s presence. Jules, like a madman, stung by a crowd of impulses that blotted out the sun, angers, frets, remorses, doubts, found it more and more difficult to listen to his new virtue. Bomba had a whole bestiary of smiles for himself as he developed his theme. So fat was he with the prospect he saw here of a rich pasture, that he neglected to watch Jules whose character was changing every hour, as he became impregnated with the habits of the past and the familiar air of the bank, his home for twenty years.

  ‘Jules,’ Bomba said familiarly, ‘I am no philosopher, but a sorcerer. I live by turning imponderables into gold. A proposition in real goods, like the wheat deal, good enough for the thick sinews of Atlas-Léon, baffles me. Besides, there was something queer in the memorandum they gave me. I said to myself, “There is something awry here: its tail is missing. Nothing to hold it by.” I set myself to it like a child learning a lesson. It sounded fine but I missed the milk in the coconut. It was a nut all milk rather, no meat. White, wishy-washy. Nothing to it. That’s what Léon landed you with. No mistakes without malice aforethought is my rule of thumb. Now I am forced to believe there was no nut but Léon’s self-conceit. These petty Napoleons—he builds up schemes which sound glorious and you keep tearing them apart to find the stone on which they are built. He assures you, the philosopher’s stone. I assure you, not even anything so solid as ambergris. The reason is a—biological necessity. Self-glorification.’

  Jules paid great attention to the last part of the speech. ‘You’re right, Theodor. He just wanted glory. When it came to putting it across, he quailed. Didn’t want to show himself up. What was the idea of sending you across with a hollow offering like that? … Only I have an idea—I think we can work it ourselves.’

  ‘I had a letter from Dan Waters only yesterday.’ He felt round in his pockets: ‘Funny, I left it at home. I can repeat it textually, though.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before? This is important.’

  ‘I know, I know!’ He patted the air down with his hand. ‘Only this has to be worked tenderly, with psychological tricks, with attention to crotchets, with Kabbala.’ He had caught the phrase from Léon, and Jules recognized it. Bomba waved his hand. Jules was struck by the ugly strangeness of this hand. He himself had a very beautiful hand and he was shocked by physical disharmony, unless it had some bizarre key signature of its own. Bomba spoke grandly.

  ‘Let your grand vizier think. You know what you are? You’re a prima donna and you want a manager. You are full of miracles but you don’t know how to give them a local habitation and a name. That’s why you’re so restless. Now your brother is a good sort, but he is absolutely without genius, and he can’t understand you. And Alphendéry, a defeatist. He has no class, no caste, no country, no occupation: he’s an intellectual déclassé: and what’s moving him are the mild, open-minded liberal sanguine impulses of the old-fashioned professional bourgeoisie. When I see an open mind I want to put a padlock on it. To account for his having no money left in his family, he says the whole world is going to blazes. A very l
ogical attitude, Jules. But why should you participate in it? For you the whole world is not going to blazes. On the contrary, there are fortunes to be made this very year and you are one of those going to make one of them. You’re what is wanted in these times, a brilliant mind, a genius. What you have lacked, hitherto, is an executive who understands you without participating in your genius. Now, well, you have one. I am devoted to you, Jules. Self-interest! Why not? Self-interest is an engine in perpetual motion. You had one once in your old associate Dannevig that I ran into in your suite in the Hotel Magnolius. Poor old Dannevig! he’s nothing but a scarred warhorse now. Poor old crab! I’m afraid he’s been giving a very bad impression in your Oslo office, of not understanding banking at all, but of having a purely totemistic view of finance. Shocking, his unconscious sabotage of your inspirations, Jules. The unconscious hate of the old for the young. He tried to keep me away from you.’

  ‘You say?’ Jules was impatiently counting on his fingers.

  ‘Well—that doesn’t interest you. You’re right. You’re interested in making money …’

  Jules had half-forgotten the violent interest he had taken in him down on the Côte d’Azur. His impulses were veering. He dismissed Bomba, who sulked cautiously for half an hour and then disappeared.

  Jules pressed a button and called William. William appeared, pale skin, pale shirt, gray eyes, gray-shadowed eyes, gray suiting, immaculate, unmoved, satiric.

  ‘Go on: don’t tell me you want to hear something about your business!’

  ‘Stop fooling, William. What’s been going on here while I’ve been away. Have you made any money?’

  ‘All the goings-on have been elsewhere. What’s the idea of the janissaries. Are you going to run for king in the Vendée in the next elections? Why don’t you come to earth and realize you’re a ham like the rest of us and that you’ve got to work. Daddy goes to work and bacon grows in the pantry. Kid notions. Forget to be a genius, will you? You made your money giving fair exchange rates when everyone else only dreamed of gypping. Did that teach you anything? No! Alphendéry and I slave here—we never leave the bank, we meet everybody, get everybody’s troubles. And you spend your time with the choicest bouquet of hand-picked hallelujah men I ever saw in my born days. I’m sorry if you’re sick, Jules, but no one else is. These fellows are only using the crutch you just threw away to climb into your pocket. Jules, have I ever deserted you? I felt miserable when you were lying there on the Côte d’Azur. But how could I get away? And my gorge rose at the idea of elbowing my way in past your handout men to say, “How d’ye do.” Now will you come to your senses? Sack them and let’s start with a clean sheet.’

  Jules listened with downcast eyes, tapping slowly on the blotter. ‘You can’t blame me. I can’t make any money when I’m with psychological saboteurs like you and Michel. Besides, you didn’t write to me once while I was in bed. You let a type like Raccamond look out nurses for me. Why, even Daniel Cambo came to see me.’

  ‘Yes, and you let Daniel Cambo deposit a postdated check in sterling for his balance in the hope that the pound will go off and we’ll only get eighty per cent of the money he owes us, maybe less. And this with talk of a frantic loan from Paris, going on. I say, out of what fairy-tale book did you get the idea that people are in love with you? Let them be in love with you, but you sing them to sleep.’

  The two brothers faced each other with a certain repose now. Jules wanted to keep up a pretense of anger but had no heart for it. William’s apology had healed the rankling hurt. William saw it and pressed home. ‘Another thing. Alphendéry. What’s the idea of writing to everyone that he was no good. You’re so clever that you can’t get your bus off the grass without smashing yourself up and yet you know what’s going on up here, by second sight. You know Michel is loyal and you damn well know how hard he works. We all do. Now, he wants to resign.’

  ‘Let him resign. He nearly ruined me, with his despair philosophy.’

  ‘Said Mr. Richard Plowman. What’s the use of talking to you?’

  ‘I want to see the position of the clients.’

  ‘O.K. Come and see them. Michel’s in there making up margin calls. You’ve scarcely seen him since you came back.’

  ‘Shut up! Leave me alone. You give me a headache.’ The brothers were silent for a minute. Jules said in a lower tone, ‘Who’s talking about either of you leaving me? They pestered me down there. You don’t know what a hole I was in. I suffered too. Don’t tell anyone that. If you or Michel had come down they wouldn’t have been so thick around me. Blame yourselves.’

  During the next few days Jules was cold to Bomba, who slavered round till he found out that William was asking for his dismissal. Then he got up a mental card index on William. He came round one day, in a humble way to ‘borrow’ 12,500 francs. Jules gave it to him gloomily and suddenly told him to go to Oslo and help old Dannevig in that branch.

  * * *

  Scene Fifty-nine: Time Forward, Time Abolished

  Jean Frère had a stew on the fire in his workshop-flat and they walked that way. It was in an old house looking on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, at the corner of the Rue du Pont de Lodi, near the Pont Neuf. It was twilight and they, like the macadam and the buildings, were coated with that faint lucent ghostly gelatine light that makes Paris-real so like Paris-graved and Paris-memoried. There was a great atelier with one or two bench rooms leading off it, that Jean lived in at night when he stayed in town. It was used by young art students and their teacher in the daytime. The stew greeted them in the slimy bricked courtyard. Jean took a key of medieval proportions from the rack, and a letter, and showed them the way up the worn wooden staircase. They sat down in the angles of the workshop, angles made by walls, tables, cupboard, a bookpress, a stove, chairs, and sat on all sorts of things the natures of which were concealed in the thickening night.

  The violet luminosity, like a distant glow from some giant blue-printer’s hole, stole in through the upper panes of five windows, one on the courtyard, three on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, one in a bench room with no door and the only other light came from a few embers in the stove. Jean got out four soup plates, talking about his stew, meanwhile, and served out the stew to Adam Constant, Michel Alphendéry, and Charles Lorée, a physicist, issued from one of the ‘grand families.’

  Charles Lorée was already known all over the Latin world. He was a giant, ‘six feet four,’ he explained carefully, ‘but only six feet three when I take my shoes off,’ and weighed ‘two hundred and eighty-nine pounds and five ounces, on the average.’ He wore a cloth cap usually over his bald pate and its size was seven and three-quarters, he told them confidentially. He was a great physical phenomenon: his brain box was immense, completely overshadowed his eyes, so that no one ever saw them, unless they looked very close, through his eyebrows: his nose was great, his chin great and powerful, his biceps were great, he was powerfully ventripotent, he walked with a slight stoop, like most tall men: when he sat down with his legs outstretched like pine logs the whole company was in danger of somersaults and broken crowns.

  The stew was remarkably good. Charles Lorée himself ate four soup-plates full and then stopped with a foxy glance at the rest of them, as if he had calculated their stomach capacity. He took a whole bottle of Jean’s light wine to himself and kept taking a pull at the bottle mouth. He said little. The night fell completely and the street lamps shone yellowly in across the benches under the windows, showing all the paraphernalia of the studio, pencils, chisels, hammers, a gluepot, drawing paper.

  Alphendéry made one or two attempts to bring in a political discussion, but after some ragged, distrait responses, they died in his throat, and he settled with the others, into the blood-warm silence of the evening. Someone moved—it was Jean. He opened a cupboard and got out something. He came back and sat down. The lamplight laid a golden thread down the outline of his wild curls, short neck, and bowed shoulders in a bl
ue workshirt. They heard the first reedy sounds of his accordion, and he began a recital for them—for himself—in the dark, and presently broke into song. They heard the clink of Charles Lorée’s bottle on the floor and then he broke into a vast, sweet baritone humming. Jean’s selection was simple—street songs, family songs, movie theme songs, famous national ditties—Auprés de ma blonde, Ma Normandie, Les Filles de la Rochelle, Ma Femme est morte, Sous les Toits de Paris, Annie Laurie, Black Eyes, Old Man River, The Varsovienne, Di provenza il mar, il suol, Ecco ridente, The Internationale, Marching through Georgia—people’s tuneful songs.

  Alphendéry spent the time falling deeper in love with Jean Frère and conscientiously picking out grains of pedantry in himself, for he had been brought up to sing (in his flawed and untrained voice) themes from Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and Mozart. In fact, he never allowed himself to hum, even to himself, any popular tunes—strange results of having Dutch uncles! But Jean and Charles Lorée went on singing away in their two beautiful and blended voices and Jean urged softly once or twice, as he drew breath, ‘Sing, sing.’ Alphendéry sat there, turning large, soft, defenseless, black eyes on the outlines of things in the dark. He was not used to sitting in the dark: he always sat in the brightest lights possible and thought and talked in the most brilliant manner possible. It unnerved him to sit with the ‘great people’s leader’ Jean Frère and the ‘famous physicist’ Charles Lorée in the dark and hear them singing Old Man River. His world swiftly dissolved and slowly rose up again from cells.

  At home, they had sing-songs, when he was a boy, but they were the great themes from ‘the great masters,’ trumpeted, droned, double-bassed, celloed in his uncles’ great Rhineland pipes; there were orchestration, a conductor, and the devil to pay if you went out of tune or forgot the score. It was not really singing: it was a concert under an iron conductor, with the regulation jokes at certain passages, and three or four or even a crowd of passers-by listening intently outside the window. And bright lights, Heine, Goethe, Racine, Corneille, Molière, Shakespeare, Pushkin on the library shelves, works of philosophy and medicine and endless coffee and apple cake. If Michel had at that time ever forgotten himself and fallen into Ecco ridente he would have had a lecture on culture beginning with Alaric (at the latest) and ending with barbarians yet unconceived even of fascist poets … So there he sat and thought of the great lover of culture he was and the great oddity he appeared in the company of Jean and Charles and Adam, and he sweated. ‘But happily, happily,’ his lips moved, ‘I know now—oh, thank God, they never got me to take a professor’s job. Happily—’ Shades of his uncles Guillaume and Robert arose and he saw their heads together with his mother’s over the long waxed table.