Madder than before, Alphendéry rushed into the corridor, his eyes starting from his head. William showed a rare alacrity and tenderness. ‘Come into Plowman’s room.’
‘No, I’ve got to get out of here.’
‘Wait till I get my hat … I’ll tell him that if he insults you, I leave too.’
‘And leave him at their mercy?’
‘Why not? If he wants to commit suicide, let him. I’m through. Mlle. Dalbi! I’ll be out fifteen minutes at least. If anyone calls from Brussels, you talk to them.’
But no sooner were Jules, Rosenkrantz, and Guildenstern together than his fury turned on them and theirs on him, and they parted the worst of friends.
Alphendéry returned with William to his work, soon after his hurried exit, but he did not speak to Jules, nor Jules to him, for three days. Jules, in fact, went about the bank with a stormy and martyred air and comforted himself for his behavior to Alphendéry by telling Plowman several times that Alphendéry was responsible for the misfortunes of the bank; and he found it easy to justify himself. As did Alphendéry.
However, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern had their own hobbies, and three days later Alphendéry found himself served with a blue paper, in their name, emanating from the bailiff who served one of Dr. Carrière’s lawyers, the notorious Maître Lallant. He ran into William.
‘Here’s the clue! They have gone to Carrière’s lawyer. The plot thickens.’
‘I don’t like it,’ William said calmly. ‘It was a bad move to take them in, a worse to throw them out. Those boys are hard luck. You’re too heady, Michel. We can’t afford any more lawsuits. Especially as the lawsuit king is too grand to speak to us and too expensive to put his hand to the plow himself. It only means a dozen more headaches for you and me.’
‘Don’t worry: I’ll fight it all myself,’ said Alphendéry.
And Jules said to Claire-Josèphe, ‘Those boys are ruining me. It would be cheaper for me to turn William and Michel out to pasture and keep them as I keep Paul and Francis.’
‘Do it, then, Jules darling,’ she urged, with some anxiety. ‘Jules, we have four sons. We have to think of them first. We’ve had our chance.’
‘Yes. I’ll run the bank my own way.’
‘Yes, do it, Jules darling. They’re always giving you the wrong advice and you listen to them … Jules, does it pay us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let’s take the money, darling, and go away with it. We owe our children so much. If you keep on, you’ll keep paying out money to all sorts of people who have enough. I’d never forgive myself if I thought I’d not given the children their future. They’ve got to have a start.’
He waved his hand carelessly, ‘Claire, their great-grandmother is still living and rolling in cash. They have nothing to fear.’
‘Well, at any rate, I want you to segregate the money for them right away, Jules. We must do it tomorrow.’
‘All right.’
* * *
Scene Sixty-six: Façade
The more Michel looked at these façades, fine furnishings, crystal panes, brass rods, chased mirrors, carved frames, and soft carpets, the more depressed he became, the more was he convinced that he had to leave the bank and find another job. This came not only from his natural penchant for simplicity but also from a constant guilty picture in his mind’s eye: a ganger sweating on the permanent way and the subtitle ‘these stones, grilles, mahoganies came that way.’ It was too much: it was too good.
Raccamond, on the other hand, coming from a sturdy artisan family, which handed down its carved peasant wardrobes and beds from generation to generation, and where lace curtains and linen were still given as part of the marriage portion, was admirably affected by all this, thinking that the grilles in Bertillon’s bank, the gilt letters in the Place du Palais de Justice in Brussels and all the rest, with the marquis customers’ men and the Rothschild glorified office boys, were all the result of generations of accumulation and saving and only the just reward of a good hard-working breed. For the first time, Aristide, with a new conspectus of the bank and its affiliates, in his mind’s eye, looked upon Bertillon’s as one of the rising houses. With the hoarding instinct of his blood, he saw Bertillon going from one to the other of his relations by marriage and birth, weaving them into a pattern of his own, or as building a pyramid of influence, stone on stone.
Alphendéry had begun by teasing him but was soon anxious to convince him that the bank was the Canaan of his dreams. ‘If Raccamond is there,’ thought Michel, with a sudden access of weariness, ‘he will fight off the Bomba, out of self-interest, and he will help William, for William will not desert his brother, for all he says. Raccamond will marry himself spiritually to the family Bertillon and a good union it will be. And I shall be free: free to starve, but free, and I won’t starve.’
Like a lion Aristide now leaped on all the morsels that Alphendéry threw him: he walked among the cities of Europe absorbed in himself and the possible grandeur of the house of Bertillon, Raccamond and Company. He haunted by day and by night the fine white walls and arched entries of the bank and its foreign depots, already talking to the clerks in a haughty tone, with that breath of inner confidence which a feudal master uses in talking to old servants. His head was feverish at night; his dreams were thick and threaded with anxieties—he saw himself bald, gone white in a night, suddenly old and nerveless; he feared that all this would take place before he had the position he had worked and lied and betrayed for all these years in Paris. When he got up in the morning, he had himself well groomed, well perfumed, and then rushed off, passionate, strung up, to the office he was visiting, or to someone who could give him information about persons in the service of the bank. He was always there before Alphendéry, listened silently to everything Alphendéry said in the careless largesse of rhetoric, kept a diary and noted everything down in it, all the connections, all the scandals, all the pipe lines.
Raccamond found that an accountant was lacking in the Brussels office, and he installed there Posset, a man who had worked with him in Léon’s office ten years before and who became entirely his creature, being fabulously grateful for the job. Inspired by Raccamond’s rich dress, fine eating, dignified air, and the solemnity with which he spoke of himself and the house and moved to a real distrust of and disgust with Alphendéry, whom he pictured as a sort of shifty, horned beast, Posset promised to serve Director Raccamond in all things. Raccamond unfolded his plans to this unfortunate fellow in a brasserie in the St. Hubert Gallery in Brussels one midday, the day after he entered the Brussels downtown office in the Place de la Gare.
‘You are now getting three thousand francs monthly?’
‘Yes, Director. Really, I don’t know what I would have done. I’d given up believing in Santa Claus and you turned up. I had thought of doing away with myself. You may be sure I’ll be as loyal to you as your own brother.’
‘Good. I told you my plan for reorganization: a strictly methodical business organization parallel with the splendid organism of social relations set up by the Bertillons.’
‘It’s a very fine system, Director.’
‘You have to go carefully, not arouse jealousy or suspicion, not annoy old employees: that would not help me at all. But these older employees are embedded in the more or less feudal old business habits of the firm. I want to introduce New World efficiency. I will consult with you. Forward me copies of any books or documents which seem strange to you: we will unravel all the knots. You know these branches are never visited. There has been no check-up. It is a scandal. You understand!’
‘Perfectly, Director.’ And only a shadow round his eyes showed where a smile and even a leer would have stood in more prosperous days.
‘If anything unusual comes your way and you can send me a memorandum, send it by registered post to my home address. Some of the secretaries at the bank have a habit of opening mail. Telegra
ph me if you find cause. Take it out of office expenses, naturally. And you have my home address?’
‘Yes. I’ll do everything you want, Director. I will never forget what I owe you!’
There is something disconcerting in proclamations of indebtedness: the next creditor is entitled to the same fidelity! A crumbling rock on which to build a career; but Raccamond had been in quagmires. Moreover, Raccamond was building a dike and had determined to stop up all possible leaks with the fingers of accountants and others owing him a debt of gratitude. According to the system, he had also installed, within the last few weeks, his former clerk, Perrier, in the Amsterdam office. He was curious about the way the bank made money, about the accounts held abroad, the amounts paid out, the brokers, salaries. Perrier had been reporting, he was none too lucid. He had a jealous suspicion still of Alphendéry: rumor said he had been well paid through participations with the Bertillons in the past. Aristide had cultivated Alphendéry’s company during the last few weeks, listened with great attention to everything he said, sifted and weighed, trying to find out his net worth, and his position in the bank. But Alphendéry, with all his fire, his aphorisms and inconstancies, his continual generalizations and philosophies, was constant in one thing: he represented himself as a poor man interested in the poor, and he ridiculed and ran down the rich all day long. This was a jigsaw that Aristide had to put together. Alphendéry, far from reflecting Aristide’s jealousy, was far too open for comfort.
‘You are right to organize the routine, Aristide. Mr. Jules Bertillon belongs to the species of which Buffon remarked that “servile imitation costs more than a new design.”’
Did Buffon say it? Alphendéry was such a mountebank that a man had to doubt the authenticity of his authors and citations. He disliked this intense mental life of Alphendéry apropos of anything, nothing; he found it impractical and repeated the well-worn saw of striving dullards, ‘A brilliant man cannot be sound.’
* * *
Scene Sixty-seven: The Cholera
Splendid Zucchero Zurbaran, with dark skin, bulbous forehead, and deep-set eyes was the very pinnacle of South American society. He entertained the Prince of Wales, married the most beautiful young European actress in Hollywood. When in Paris he negligently deposited his check with, and drew on Jules, along with the other extrarich gallants of his race and type. He never asked for an account and Jules never gave one. In this, Zucchero and Pedrillo were alike. The other South Americans were more businesslike and some of them, though rich, played Jules for a goldfish: but there is give and take in banking as elsewhere. All these dashing young fellows moved in a restricted international, which takes its orders from Paris and New York. They spent money like water and tried to keep down their mortality, manslaughter, and murder account, in order to stay in Paris. These young men are the ne plus ultra of today, handsome, rich, lawless, powerful. They are aviators, sports champions, riders. When they die young, at bobsleigh, hunting, or flying, one cannot regret it; they have flown over the Andes, thrown away gold on the roof gardens of New York, been feted at fashionable crushes with sixteenth-century music in London, talked with Hitler, flown with Mussolini’s son-in-law, for a prank run out to some new ruins dug up by archeologists in the Sahara, outyachted, outflown, outridden each other; they have had all the toys in creation, from superspeedboats to new drugs; they are the wonderful race, the supermen of a weary, middle-aged European society, these young broncobusters, the carnivorous orchids of South America.
When Zucchero went home to Brazil, so that his two young sons, aged two and four, could be brought up on the paternal acres, Jules was sorry, Mayfair remembered, Paris forgot him; there were others.
William strolling in one morning, pointed out to Jules that the time had come to send Zucchero a letter (‘if he could read,’ he nastily added). Zucchero’s account was overdrawn some twenty-five thousand American dollars. Jules replied, ‘Oh, leave it; he’s good for the money. Zucchero can’t stay away from Paris. He’ll be back in the spring.’
But Zurbaran went up into the sky one blue morning, zoomed over the flashing walls and avenues of Rio de Janeiro, and suddenly came down into the bay. Small Rodolfo Zurbaran became the owner of the several million acres; and William gnashed his teeth.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Alphendéry: ‘Pedro will go home leaving us—what? Eighty-nine hundred dollars. The Zurbaran estate owes us twenty-five thousand dollars. They’ll pay. We’re in nearly thirty-five thousand dollars. Not much but a mouthful. As long as Jules doesn’t conceive the idea of letting it run on till Rodolfo grows up.’
‘We won’t be here then,’ said William, with more than customary spleen.
Arturito MacMahon, son of richissimes of the Argentine, originally of Scottish stock and devilishly proud of his name, was twenty-eight, blue, handsome, long, cold, and amiable as an English hunting rifle. Even in the bank and among the forgiving and understanding South American society, gloomy tales were told of him. Arturito spoke Jockey-Club French and Eton English, with a cutting snobbery, but if he carried on any conversation any length of time he produced a strange imbroglio of accents of all classes, for in London he ranged from Mayfair to the East India Docks in the raging pursuit of fashion and vice, and in France from the apartments of the Avenue Foch to the bars of the ‘milieu’ behind the Boulevard Barbès and the Mayas of Marseille.
Arturito MacMahon was therefore to an Englishman or a Frenchman an anatomical section of his national dialects. Elegant, smooth, and cold, avid and detached as a black leopard, Arturito in the bank relished its green corridors and shady corridors, spoke to no one except Jules and the richest members of the South American colony. With his somber eyes, he seemed to see visions of hate and ferocity and to ignore all that passed in front of him. As instinctively as they loved Pedrillo, the women hated Arturito, who was nevertheless, possibly the most handsome of them all. Nevertheless, on account of his immense wealth, his unlimited vice, his beauty and elegance, and his savage temper, MacMahon was courted in South American society and it was for this reason that Jules paid him the ‘small’ salary of about twenty thousand dollars yearly. Arturito for this only had to say that he had his bank account with Jules Bertillon and that Jules was a good fellow. This was practically the only work that Arturito had done in his life. His family had made a great fortune out of lumber in the Argentine, and Arturito was the sole heir. He had a superlative head for business and even at his age, was grasping. He turned in accounts to Jules, who rode, flew, raced, gambled, and dined with him, but so far the profit on those accounts had only equaled about $15,000 yearly. William chafed and Jules laughed elfishly.
No one knew exactly how sophisticated Jules was. Nightly to Claire-Josèphe, rarely to William and Alphendéry, Jules went over his game, spoke of them all as his pawns, gave his reasons, hung up the cloak of irresponsibility and intuition which was one of his great masquerades and charms.
The South American colony was Jules’s stay. They liked him, were not penurious or querulous, gambled and spent with a large gesture, paid whenever they were asked: they did not care whether their accounts were right to the centime; they preferred to live as magnificoes and have no questions asked.
But when they were out of pocket they expected Jules to help them out, and he gave them overdrafts for large sums, out of his own pocket and the bank. Every two or three years a fresh river of South American money would flow into Paris, with a new boom, in coffee, lumber, tea, or phosphates, and when a depression came and some Arturito or some Pedrillo had to go home, they sent young men of their caste and more fortunate in some new boom to take their place. Like all children of booms they spent freely and to the last penny, they spent with hope, and returned home broke with hope and often returned again to Paris in a space of time between three and twenty years.
Jules, a Walloon by origin, during the war, founded a friendship with a young French liaison officer, Edmond, who had a beautiful young French s
outherner for mistress. After the war, when Jules married Claire, Claire and Simone, Edmond’s mistress, were great friends and bought their clothes and were seen having tea together. José MacMahon came to Paris, exiled for the assassination of a man of his own class, met Simone and married her. Edmond’s second mistress, Aza, married another Argentine living in Paris. Paris belonged to the South Americans during the war, and Jules had known them in their glorious time: they clung to him. He was also both generous, immoral, and fantastic, much in their own line, although quieter. ‘Soft,’ Pedro told him he was. ‘We’d send you to a convent in the Argentine: you can’t ride a morning in the Bois but you complain of a raw seat: I’ve spent three weeks in the saddle, sleeping, eating, drinking, raping, and never grown a corn.’
‘What were you doing three weeks in the saddle?’
‘Whipping the peons when they were troublesome.’
The colony Jules called ‘the silvertails,’ his English clients and brokers ‘the umbrellabirds.’ Arturito had been gone nine months and was receiving regularly a check from the bank for ‘invisible returns.’ William was smoldering into revolt, when José MacMahon penetrated the shades of the bank one morning to give an item of news: Arturito was dead, assassinated one afternoon in a street in Buenos Aires. Accident, thief, hired assassin, plundered peon, mistress, feud? No one knew. ‘And who cares?’ asked William coarsely. ‘Tigers are hard to catch: thank God the world has one less!’
Aristide Raccamond hove busily in sight at this moment, elephantine in a new suit draped rather than cut, to hide his fatness. William called, ‘Aristide, you’ll need an armband to that suit: one of your friends was taken for a ride in Buenos Aires.’
Raccamond paled excessively, looked at José MacMahon; William pointed to José, ‘Arturito MacMahon.’
‘Do you believe it?’ asked Raccamond of José.
‘Why not?’ José looked at him with dislike.
‘You have three brothers.’
House of All Nations Page 62
