‘No paper,’ said Jules with sudden wrath, bringing down his firm hand on the table. ‘No one has to complain of me.’
Aristide paled and pondered. When he reported the affair to Marianne, she proclaimed, ‘There is trickery there and it will have a bad denouement, unless you are careful.’
He was silent for several minutes, then: ‘The thing that terrifies me, Marianne is—the policy. All that short position!’ He stared at Marianne, his great cheeks drooping: impossible to say what his physiognomy was like because of all the timid fat that covered him. Marianne knew. When he came out of the war he was still thin, lank, great-eyed, blue-chinned, with the look of an Italian peasant. The fat, as his bourgeois dress and his city manners, were acquired since. He had intelligence; the war had given him savoir-faire amongst men and necessary vices.
‘Nevertheless, they made money,’ said she, not quite understanding. ‘But it’s not natural: it’s against nature, to be always betting on the wrong side,’ exclaimed Aristide honestly. ‘It seems almost—crooked. And suppose they always do it! Suppose they have, even now, some such position in another stock. It can’t happen all the time! This was just luck. When it turns the other way—where will we all be? I won’t sleep at night, Marianne, you know me.’
She considered, ‘That’s true: too bad you didn’t get him to divide on this cleanup. Well, we will think of a way. Now, another thing, I went to Carrière today and he’s agreed to put up twenty thousand francs towards my sheet. I told him I had a friend in Hollywood, in the Hearst interests who would give me original dope. He was impressed. I rather think the French cinema attracts him.’
‘We could do something along that line, one day. If I got an organization—’
‘We will make out together. Léon won’t part up, Bertillon is not interested in enterprises, but Carrière is the man with vision, the man of the future.’
Jules’s spring suddenly dried up. The last one to drink was Cancre, an artist picked by Alphendéry. He came from a miserable town, Troyes, had come to Paris to pick up a living as a tailor. He went to Montparnasse by accident, was dazzled by the Vie de Bohème, and discovered a talent for drawing. Some famous artist praised him and Cancre saw a brilliant future opening for him. He borrowed money for his hotel bill, for paints, brushes, canvases, left work, had no money for lessons, starved, and occasionally, to put a bite between his teeth, cadged from the flush and the drunk at Montparnasse, or painted uncouth, brilliant washes (‘after Cézanne and Van Gogh’) which he sold to the unsuspecting and round the Montparnasse station. There Alphendéry found him, encouraged him, and bought his works at ‘any price you like to give.’ For a while Alphendéry was convinced that the ‘early sketches of Cancre’ would be worth their weight in gold. Cancre had now exhausted all his resources, all his friends. His wife, a young pretty tubercular girl whose father was a railway ganger at Aubervilliers, and whose dream of romance seemed fulfilled when she fell in love with an artist, had fallen into a frightening decline. The letter told this. Would Jules lend Cancre the railway fare to take his wife to a sanatorium, and to take him back to Troyes to work as a tailor with his brother? Cancre was an honest man. He sent Jules by Aristide a ‘portrait of Jules the banker, by hearsay’: a hard, crude thing in oils, together with a copy of his ‘manifesto.’
‘Vous êtes poêt? Alors, vous n’est pas un homme! Vous n’est pas simple! Vous avez compliquez votre jeoi et votre douler. Tout la nature se réveille, tout la nature s’éffleuris, se réjeouis, et le pas de poèt devient gràve et loud comme si c’été le dernier jour de la terre. J’ai pitié de vous mon poèt, et pourtant c’est à moi que je parle comme a vous. Ne cherchez jamais rien. Selon les mérites, vous aurez tout ou rien. Apprenez de poèt qui cherche toujours et trouve jamais, ou qu’il le cherche, le paradis, il en trouve l’enfer. Son printemps nest pas un printemps, son printemps est un calvair. Faut-il être misérable, pour être un poèt! Bref, oui! Ou faire tomber son oéuvre de bateau ivre? Dans un village ou il n’y a pus que des poètes. Paris!’
Jules, to whom the illiterate complaint of the miserable and starving poèt meant nothing at all, paid for the portrait another two thousand francs and told Alphendéry in a hard voice ‘to give it to him and tell them both to get back to Troyes and forget the Bohemian boloney’ If he had no influence he’d get nowhere: Fragonard, Boucher, Derain? A question of getting the right people to support one!
‘I don’t say he’s bad,’ said Jules, squinting at the portrait. ‘I even think he’s pretty good, but he’s poor and it shows in his drawing; no one wants it.’ Alphendéry went with profuse thanks and Jules became sulky. Like all openhanded people who go in for an orgy of spending, he suddenly knew satiety. He would spend no more; he would have the pleasure of saving, for a salutary change. He suddenly regretted the stream of cash that had flowed from his open hands: he shut them. He determined to make up the loss; and Mouradzian, Cristopoulos, and Thomas Sweet began to find him a source of commission-income again. While others cried, ‘The purification of the system,’ he smiled sardonically, ‘Where one Kreuger, one Oustric, one Hatry is found—there sprout a hundred; and for each one ruined, there are a hundred making money hand over fist. Why not—they’re all like me,’ he explained to his intimates. ‘… crazy, expensive, flighty, daring—birdmen of finance!’
* * *
‘
Scene Eighty: Measure of Brains
Raccamond has just appointed another accountant in London to replace the one we sacked. And what has he done, the other accountant? Found work! Astonishing! No one will sit idle! Mad world. Worse than that, the more he steams and puffs, the more he’s convinced he has ability. It’s fatal: a man employs one clerk, he has a minimum of ability; he writes one letter, he’s a zero. He employs one hundred clerks and he’s earning his stripes. He says, ‘Dupont, write this identical letter to five thousand people in the telephone book,’ and he’s almost a captain of industry. Of course, that makes ‘work.’ And poor Dupont thinks he’s important: he begins to fret because he’s not getting on, he wants to be as vacuous, as viciously useless as his boss.’
Jean Frère said curiously, ‘But it is a bank like the others, after all!’
‘Of course. The terror of it! Don’t forget there is this bank, which is Jules’s, and that of the employees, to whom it represents not only the old order, a stable financial system, the basis of the center-left, republican, catholic or socialist politics they go in for. It also represents their home, hopes of marriage, children, summer holidays, life insurance, old father’s kitchen garden, medical expenses, everything in life. They take it very seriously. They must. They read the newspapers, particularly any news affecting banks and banking, and imagine that they have penetrated it more easily, due to their experience in Bertillon Frères. They are getting on in life. They are ‘well-placed.’ And this bank is nonexistent: it is nothing! It has no purpose. It is a privateer’s fantasy: here today and gone tomorrow. Oh, God, it frightens me! Look at Raccamond struggling the way he does, trying to oust William and me, jealous of Mouradzian, treading on the corns of the lesser employees, flattering the clients, running himself to death, being egged on by his ambitious shrew-wife, hoping to cover up all the muddy steps of his early career. Look at Betty, my cousin; at this poor Cancre, at Légaré—the lot of them, believing in an illusion, spending their lives round it. A fantasy in the brain of an ignorant, a flighty, self-centered freak. How unreal, Jean, is this whole world I struggle in and get my gray hairs in!’
‘The employees at the bank, and their idea of the bank, are real, too,’ said Jean.
‘No,’ said Michel, not able to bear a good word on the bank, ‘no, because they’re secretly in league with Jules and the rich people they serve … They believe Jules’s dictum implicitly.’
‘That is?’ queried Jean Frère.
‘A man’s salary is a rough measure of his ability.’
At times
Michel resisted the influence of Jean Frère, as now, and feared him. Richer by five hundred thousand francs, he felt less like casting himself adrift.
* * *
Scene Eighty-one: Shadows
Raccamond came in one morning in a delirium of fear, and went straight upstairs to see Jules.
‘Mr. Bertillon, what do you think of the threatened publication by the fisc of a list of all the private banks which defraud the tax collector through holding in their branches abroad, the taxable bonds of clients? What will we do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Jules.
‘But if they publish we will be on the list.’
‘Oh, Aristide! Let them publish, Aristide: I’d be only too glad. It’ll bring business.’
‘But it’s illegal,’ cried Aristide.
‘Oh, Aristide!’ He was irritated this time, then laughed, ‘Illegal! Oh, Aristide. Don’t tell me you didn’t know we had our clients’ interest coupons cashed abroad! Where have you been?’
‘Yes, I knew, of course; it’s the regular thing. But if they publish it! We might be ruined, Mr. Bertillon. They might shut the bank up.’
‘They won’t shut me up! I’ll buy off the inspector.’
‘But it will be flagrant; they’ll say our foreign branches are only to collect interest abroad and avoid the taxes.’
‘So they are. Listen, Aristide! It isn’t the government worrying about the eighteen per cent deducted at the source that our honorable clients are all evading; it’s the pressure from the overrich, trying to shut up little banks like me, because I’ve got the Salon trade … we’re getting too much of the private business. Look at the accounts I’ve got! A lot of people like little banks: secrecy they think, privacy. No clerks to blackmail, no postal clerks to see what’s going abroad. Just big bear eat little bear, that’s all, Aristide, and no ‘legality,’ at all. They can’t shut me up,’ he said with bravado.
‘Some clerk here could blackmail us,’ worried Aristide.
‘Nobody blackmails me!’
‘They could,’ worried Raccamond.
‘Listen, Raccamond, I want to tell you one thing. The lists are kept abroad; foreign clerks don’t care twopence for the French fisc or French newspapers. They won’t blackmail. I pay them too good a salary. They won’t blackmail. When clients prefer to keep their bonds themselves, or here in the bank, the coupons presented for dividends are taken abroad by a clerk. That clerk does not come to this bank. He meets the clients in a room rented in a hotel.’
‘An Englishman?’ asked Aristide, involuntarily.
Jules did not hear. ‘I’d threaten to publish the lists myself of all the clients keeping bonds abroad and accounts abroad through my branches and thus defrauding the fisc themselves. If I’m guilty, aren’t they?’
‘You couldn’t … you’d lose every account, overnight! We’d be ruined.’
‘You are simple, Raccamond,’ said Jules with dislike. ‘Would Carrière and his like allow such lists to be published? They’d back down at once. Let them. You’ll see nothing will come of it.’
Aristide, with a sullen and sidelong look, walked out. Aristide did willingly what the law or its silences allowed, but to dare, to affront was not his line: he suspected it. What were the secret thoughts of a man like Jules so venturesome, so contemptuous of threats? Aristide had seen others in difficulties or faced with disgrace. Léon was cunning but ran; Claude fought and broke down. Marianne’s relatives were evil and supple. But the rash Jules when desperate? In a moment of clairvoyance, Aristide saw that the clients, the bank itself meant nothing to Jules: Jules was a lone hand. He went in and tried to alarm Alphendéry about the proposed revelation.
‘If they do it,’ said Alphendéry, ‘they’ll make an Aunt Sally of one or two small banks that they’re trying to abolish from the horizon, and that’s all. But they wouldn’t dare do more: are they going to bring mobs into the rich quarters? Is there anyone of them who keeps his accounts at home and pays taxes? A patriot, Aristide, is one who takes interest in other countries.’
He laughed. That was all? Surrounded by such recklessness and such incomprehension, Aristide suddenly found his stature: either he was the only real ‘banker’ amongst them, or else the world he had been struggling to get into was chaos, or else he had once more landed on one of those rotten houses whose bottom would fall out overnight. Poor Aristide, sailing to prosperity on a death ship.
The following Saturday afternoon William stayed behind and fossicked in all the files and private drawers of the establishment. He had skeleton keys made long ago. In the evening he met Alphendéry and after some unusually slow and satiric remarks, he planted a fold of papers under Michel’s nose, saying, ‘There’s something to give you pleasant dreams.’
Alphendéry read the copy of the agreement that Jules had sent to Carrière long ago, promising to pay the drafts at a fixed sum in francs, and a copy of further letters covering various payments, one of which, the last, said, ‘Here’s the money coming to you on the sterling drafts, according to our contract: stop court proceedings, for now you are paid up to date.’
Alphendéry said, ‘He admits that the contract has force, after denying it all along. The result of his win on K. & T. Well, now we are sunk. It certainly is hard to have to work for a Carrière.’
‘I thought Jules learned nothing at school,’ mused William, ‘but I see he learned too much: how to write.’
‘A fatal gift!’
He also showed Alphendéry the list of Jules’s losses in the past six months, and finally let him know that the bank had lost all its money three times during the Carrière press campaign, and only been replenished by fortunate accidents like the Paleologos account.
‘We had nothing, we owed Carrière, and also showed two millions loss in the stock-exchange account when the Kreuger windfall came! Let’s take the hint and close up.’
The only political shadows were the first great Japanese attack on Manchuria and the terrifying rise of Hitlerism in the May, 1932, elections. All those who had been depending on German Social-Democracy, and on a return to liberalism or monarchy financed by Germany’s creditor states, were bitterly disappointed; at this moment the wing of terror spread its shadow over Europe, and the governing classes, in despair since 1929, began to see that Fascism was not simply an expedient to be used on a lackadaisical southern people, but a real salvation for their property. At this time the socialist friends of Alphendéry began to tremble; the wisest predicted ten years of black reaction; the conservatives predicted a hundred years of domination. Jules even became captious and cruel and couldn’t bear Alphendéry to mention socialism or to wish the comfort of all …
‘If the stock exchange is abolished,’ said Jules, ‘men like me will always set up a black bourse: it will come back. What you dream of are opium-den dreams, and besides you’re wasting time … You can make money … That’s what I want you to do … none of your communist friends has ever made money, and so what brains have they? Forget them. You’re working for me!’
Alphendéry laughed with contempt. ‘Jules, don’t worry. You’ve got time. There are plenty of tricks they can and will pull yet: every measure designed not for economic recovery but to put up the market, as if that were the first reality of economics, not merely the mercury of the middle classes … This is the period of effrontery of capitalism and you think right, Jules, you’ve got the general line!’
‘Yes,’ said Jules, cooling. ‘I know it won’t last long, and I won’t last long; my three sons will be engineers, don’t fret! This is the day of the short-play heroes. No more Rhodeses and houses of Rothschild!’
* * *
Scene Eighty-two: The Factor X
The panic deepened in France despite all efforts, and by June, 1932, all values, however expressed, whether in paper or gold, were at the lowest point of the century. Recovery attempts had begun on a grand scale.
In the U.S.A. the fall of the Dawes Bank in Chicago foreshadowed the moratorium of March, 1933, but the panic was staved off in order to produce an election boom for Hoover: a campaign was worked up even before the Kreuger suicide and crash.
In England the government reversed the price of gilt-edged by conversion, and the English, in the hope of profit in the Empire, accepted the conversion, and paid their taxes as they were requested.
The world was really crumbling: all speculators hoped to make money out of the death and decrepitude of something or other.
Jules had a proposition from a poor author, for the constitution of a library of rare and antique books, bought from the libraries of financially decrepit nobles and landed proprietors, in order to ‘raise prices and sell high to foreign speculators.’
Carrière bought up mortgages on old houses in the new building quarters, hoping for a market rise; and Achitophelous at this moment announced that he had bought and was renovating the finest hotel on the Promenade des Etats-Unis at Nice. The hotel had gone bankrupt the previous winter.
Everyone had a last glimmer of hope and thought that with exceptional cunning they could get in before the rise in prices. Only Daniel Cambo, Dreyer, William Bertillon, and their partners went on steadily with their cheap-bazaar projects, convinced that today’s money was in rubbish goods. ‘There are only two businesses today,’ said William, in excuse to Jules. ‘Yours—selling to those who believe in substitute money; and mine, selling to those who believe in substitute goods.’
This was a world which Raccamond did not understand and in which he floundered. It was not a world to build a career in but a world in which crust, derring-do, luck, and lawlessness had the upper hand. Raccamond felt that someone had cheated him.
And at this time he received from his secret man, entered as accountant in the Brussels office, the following note,
Dear Mr. Raccamond,
House of All Nations Page 73
