He laughed greyly, straightened his broad shoulders, sleekly at ease in his pale grey cassimere: the filtered light lent mauve and olive gleams to his smooth, greased blond hair. ‘Toine thinks the same too: he’s not so crazy as he sounds. If he had a screw looser he’d be running round like these flossy lounge lizards, playing polo or smashing himself up at bobsleigh at Saint-Moritz. He spent a year at the Beaux-Arts, and when they kicked him out came here full of hot-air, talking cinquecento, Renaissance, Great Pandora and Little Pandora, the Genius of France, wanted the return of the monarchy. He got that monarchy stuff from the cheesy crowd in the Deux-Magots, those journalists he used to hang round with. He said the monarchs of France cherished the lace industry—any excuse for reading the Action Française, the deadest sheet on earth.’
Marpurgo smiled affectedly.
Georges continued:
‘Oh, that was just measles. Now he’s a republican because under a republic wages are higher and girls are working in factories, and so able to buy their own slummockies. There’s a lot to that, you know?’ He looked suspiciously at Marpurgo.
‘I believe in Toine.’ Marpurgo snapped his fingers softly before Georges’s face. His keen, salt-blue eyes flickered. ‘He’s one of those transparent, endlessly becoming characters, infinitely, beautifully, involuntarily complex, like crystals ramifying on glass.’
‘Fantasy should be kept out of business: business is making money,’ said Georges.
Marpurgo smiled, waved his hand, and went out to lunch. He heard Georges’s voice when half-way down the stairs.
‘Are you taking any of those expensive business friends of yours to lunch to-day? Why don’t you let them give you a break, and treat you sometimes? You’re too open-hearted, Marpurgo; that’s your fault,’ and a faint chuckle.
Marpurgo raised his profile, which bit at the air with its long droop-tipped nose.
‘I am a small man, but I cannot live in my own pocket: if I were not, life would not be worth living.’
‘So you live out of pocket,’ said Georges’s voice.
Marpurgo thought for a moment and then climbed back upstairs, with a hurt and spiteful expression. Georges had gone. Marpurgo hesitated outside the door, biting the inside of his bottom lip, getting more furious as he stood there. Suddenly the door opened and Antoine Fuseaux appeared. He looked at Marpurgo standing there with his pocket-book in his hand and a green complexion.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Are you short, Marpurgo? Here, take five hundred. Is it enough?’
Marpurgo shook his head. ‘I have enough, thank you. Georges seems to think I have too much. He told me I was living out of pocket. Of course, I had no idea that you did not wish me to have an expense account.’
‘What’s the idea?’ cried Antoine. ‘Don’t be so touchy, Marpurgo! I’m surprised at you! You know Georges: you can’t take offence at him. He doesn’t mean it; he’s just naturally a grouch: he always was. Go on, Marpurgo. What are you grinding your teeth about? Temperament, temperament, temperament makes donkeys of us all. Where are you going? To the Capucines? Come along, I’ll drop you there.’
Marpurgo’s dark face softened craftily. He murmured: ‘Thanks, Antoine; I did not think you could feel that way. Georges is always crabbing about my expense accounts: I find it difficult to keep my mind on business when I know there’s someone eating my back when I’m away.’
Antoine laughed. ‘Nonsense, Annibale! Gosh, you should have been a woman. Your mother must have been neurotic, Annibale. Fancy getting worried about something Georges says! Everyone knows Georges. He doesn’t mean it. He’s probably hungry. You know he’ll never go out to lunch, because he pretends customers may come in and find us all away. Georges is very fond of you. He’s very fond of everyone, but he thinks he has to hide it, because it isn’t business.’
Marpurgo smiled frankly. ‘Well, I don’t think you know your brother as well as outsiders do. At the same time, I hope what you say is true, and I’m willing to believe it for your sake. I’d do anything for you, Antoine: you’re irresistible.’
Antoine laughed gaily, irresponsible, careless, always the sunny spoilt child, and presently shook hands with Marpurgo before he left the taxi. ‘Now, run along and have a good dinner: have a fine: have a Corona, and you’ll feel better.’
Marpurgo stood and looked after the taxi with bare head and a faint smile, and then turned into his favourite restaurant.
During lunch he read the current copy of Mind: he prided himself on keeping in stride with the most recent advances in modern philosophical thought, especially the English logicians and philosophers, because he appreciated their strains of whimsy and wit. He was late getting back to the firm’s offices, as always, and found Antoine already there, in a good humour, his room full of smoke, and an impressive-looking fellow with an eagle-head, grey hair, hand-made boots and white linen, expounding mysteriously and wittily some scheme. Georges, crabbed but subdued, dictated some letters to Mlle Rose. Marpurgo was being wafted past Antoine’s room, by his own pointed toes, when Antoine saw him and called him in.
‘Marpurgo, I want you to meet Mr. Severin. This is our chief buyer, Mr. Marpurgo.’
Severin had a well-fleshed, ruddy face, large grey eyes set well apart under thick eyebrows, a large sanguine nose. He flashed his well-made dental plate at Marpurgo. ‘Italian? Ho gran piacere d’incontrarla…’
Marpurgo answered in French, the language they were all using. ‘You are not Italian, I think, Mr. Severin.’
Severin lowered his glance, but in a moment recovered his poise. ‘My mother was Italian and my father Russian. I was born in America. I married a Frenchwoman during the war, and my boy is going to school in Switzerland.’
Antoine laughed. ‘You sound like a slippery customer: no one knows where to have you, or where to get out of your way.’
‘It is bad, is it not?’ said Severin charmingly to Fuseaux. ‘I often get confused myself.’
‘So you were in the war?’ continued Marpurgo. He knew that Fuseaux valued his opinion of a man and that he had been invited in to size Severin up. Marpurgo never bated his style unless he wanted money: and despite the spotless linen, the polished hand-made shoes, his instinct told him Severin had none. Fuseaux was watching his attack. Severin’s manner had changed: he was warier, and suaver, but his voice had a frank ring.
‘Yes, I enlisted—a mere private: somehow or other I found myself a major. The war broke into my academic career; it broke out just three months before I took my Doctor of Science. I have never ceased regretting it: my little old mamma can never forgive the war for breaking out just before she could refer to her only son as Dr. Severin. She herself has lost faith in my talents. A man not in destiny’s lap—evidently there’s something wrong! She is not really consoled by the major, for she hates war: a real pacifist. And then my father was a professional soldier: he fought under Denikin: left her, in fact, to do it: went to Prague and spends his time scheming against Russia and sleeping with chorus girls. Mamma is a pacifist—evidently. I was invalided to Tours: there I met a lovely Tourangelle—angel was quite the word, I thought: such an accent. Actually, she came from Loches, Alfred de Vigny’s town. She was born under the castle wall. I married her and thought of becoming a Frenchman. Eventually, though, we went back to America. But we see Europe nearly every year.’ He smiled at Marpurgo. ‘I represent—various large interests. I have been sketching out to Mr. Fuseaux some ideas I hope will prove profitable. Mere sketches: I like to get the slants of various experienced business-men on them: saves me from tangents, you know. Likewise, it sometimes leads to a little mutually profitable investment…’
‘Tell him about the scheme, Severin,’ said Fuseaux.
Severin unfolded a white silk handkerchief with an embroidered initial and flicked his nose.
‘You can tell Marpurgo anything: he’s my investments manager,’ added Fuseaux.
‘Do you smoke? I think you do,’ said Severin to Fuseaux.
‘No, no thank
s, not now.’
‘And you, surely?’
Marpurgo could not resist the proffered cigar, which he sized up with quick eyes. Severin smiled.
‘I get them from one supplier only in London, corner of Jermyn and Bury Streets. He imports them: the only man I know in London.’
‘There’s another, near Dover Street. I’ll give you the address if I see you again, I’ve just forgotten the number. I found him out, “extensive researches,” you know. When I found him I knew there was balm in Gilead.’ He held his gold lighter to Severin’s cigar.
‘A beautiful lighter,’ murmured Severin.
Marpurgo looked at it with a street urchin’s cold appraisal, and said in a quick cracked voice:
‘Do you like it? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? A gift—I didn’t deserve.’
He sent a twinkle to Antoine, who had given it to him, and sucked at his cigar with pursed lips: he raised the cigar in his fingers and spoke in a fat, melting way, indicative of sensual content:
‘Well, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes are the present texts of the world: what have you to suggest that will bring us forward to Ezra and Nehemiah?’
‘The venality of the French press is a legend: and not a golden legend, but a nickel one—you can buy silence and vociferation for a nickel.’
‘They teach the same in their own public schools,’ agreed Marpurgo.
‘The French, like all Latins, are mad speculators—one-tenth lottery tickets when they’re poor, Bayonne bonds when they’re rich,’ went on Severin.
Marpurgo puffed. Antoine put in impatiently:
‘The point is, everyone nowadays wants to get something for nothing, that’s why there’ll never be communism anyhow: but the French are the only people who study how to lose their money on the Stock Exchange.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Severin. ‘Every newspaper here runs its financial page, and there are dozens and dozens of little daily and weekly sheets giving Bourse tips and notations. The English are mad over horse-racing…’
‘Even the workhouses have their weekly sweepstakes,’ added Antoine.
‘You see chalked up in a few places Shining-Light to win the 2.30,’ continued Severin, ‘but what do you have for information sheets? The tipsters’ envelopes, very dear, and a couple of bi-weekly or weekly sheets. In France the local financial news comes out daily.’
‘You forget,’ said Marpurgo. ‘You do the Teutonic countries an injustice: you forget they can’t read or write: if they could, undoubtedly they’d read the newspapers. I tell you they’re smart. When you hear a bus-conductor figuring how he will win fifty pounds through five races with an initial outlay of a tanner, you realise that was the race of Newton. I always hold the people are the unexplored mines of intelligence of the country.’
‘Rats,’ said Antoine. ‘The average man knows he has a job, a wife and a pint of beer, or no job, no wife and no pint of beer: that’s all he knows and all he’ll ever know. If he were smart he’d do something about it. Would I sweat for a boss? Not likely. If they were smart you couldn’t get money out of them. I’m tired of arm-chair socialism: you know yourself, Marpurgo, you’re a million times smarter than most of the work-people you meet. Of course you are, of course you are. Don’t be silly, Marpurgo: if you weren’t, you’d be working for eight hundred francs a month and dying at forty of old age: instead of which you’re wearing a satin-lined overcoat and smoking a Corona-corona. And are you ashamed? Of course not? Am I ashamed when I go out in my Rolls-Royce with Francis in livery in front, with my boots that cost eight pounds, and my coat that cost 3000 francs? Of course not: I’m proud of them. I like them. If they tried to take ’em away I’d fight them for them. I don’t care whether it’s right or wrong: I want ’em, and I’d fight them for them: that’s not economics, that’s human nature. And it always will be. Who could stop me, or you, or Severin, from wanting to be better off than the next feller? We’re made that way.’ His boyish laugh kept on carolling out: he had had a good lunch. ‘If they weren’t dumb-bells, could any business-man make a living, eh? Go on, Severin, tell him your scheme for syndicating the Bourse papers.’
‘As I was saying,’ said Severin promptly but patiently, ‘the French Bourse gamblers will read any tip, bad, good or indifferent, and any sheet, however suspect and whatever rumours are current about it, because of a third fact, the incredible venality of the parliamentarians and the judiciary: they always assume that these little sheets can get information from high sources through sheer blackmail. Even if they are pool-papers, the little speculator thinks he may as well be in on the pool. He reasons, The minister giving this information may or may not be telling the truth: in any case the rumour will lead to a rise (or fall) in the prices—I may as well get in at the beginning and get out before the end of the ripple; the same with a ramp. You’ve got to know them. It may be a canard, they think, but someone owns it and someone will pluck it: now I’m as smart as the next feller. It’s a republican sentiment, you see.’
‘I get the point,’ said Marpurgo.
‘Now, the fourth point of my plan is based on the fact that French newspapers hate to pay for cables,’ went on Severin. ‘They’ll print bad news, news a week old, they’ll crib, steal, invent—but they won’t pay for cable service.’
‘And Havas?’ put in Marpurgo, looking cunning and showing his rat-like teeth.
‘I’d pay Havas part of the boodle, that goes without saying: the point is, I have New York backing from Wall Street pool-workers.’
Marpurgo considered. ‘You could buy some cheesy little bankrupt sheet, spread the rumour through the white-slave and Bourse cafés that the backer was Wall Street, and make a rip-roaring success overnight: why wouldn’t one be enough? You’ve only got to start the fashion: insinuate that what you’ve got comes straight from the laps of the gods.’
‘No. To really sell the shares en masse, we’ve got to have all the financial press behind us. Let the rumour about our machinery be confused, that which naturally springs into gamblers’ minds, but nothing precise. It should be good enough especially to catch all the suckers, to draw the good coins out of the famous country wool-stockings, out of old maids’ cotton bosoms, out of the funds held in trust by family lawyers. I don’t want only the smart-alecs who take a flyer, the beachcombers who wait for the turn of the tide, the wise guys who cut a loss and cut a profit; I want investment money.’
Marpurgo said: ‘How about working it through existing institutions?’
Severin snickered cleverly. ‘Accounting and ladies should be beyond reproach, and that’s only possible if they both stay at home. My wife is beautiful—I keep her at home.’
‘And your accounting too is beautiful,’ said Marpurgo.
‘Severin’s already got the direction of the Herald of Dawn to agree, provided their bosses agree. The idea, of course, is that we pose as a private cable service. Actually we get service through one of the big companies. It would be worth the while of any of them to get the Stock Exchange cables alone.’
‘Another idea,’ explained Severin, ‘is to call ourselves a Committee or Society of Economic Survey. We would have a board of directors, of whom, for example, leading manufacturers and middlemen like Mr. Fuseaux would be one, an advisory board, of which, say, a gentleman like yourself would be a distinguished member.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m simply acting as agent for my New York friends. The directors and economists receive salaries, the directors participations, and the economists bonuses according to the amount of research done.’
‘And the money?’
‘The money should be French capital,’ said Severin. ‘It would not do for the rumour of foreign money corrupting the Bourse to have any foundation.’
‘It has possibilities, I think, Antoine, don’t you?’ murmured Marpurgo. ‘We should have a detailed suggestion and think it over.’
‘Knowing Mr. Fuseaux’s experience, I was going to ask him to suggest details himself, as well as yoursel
f: you both know the French and the French Stock Exchange better than myself. I, on the other hand, know the American end.’
‘Who else have you spoken to about this?’ asked Marpurgo.
‘No one—except Monsieur Dacapo.’ He mentioned a well-known financial Jove.
Fuseaux started. ‘Dacapo? What did he say?’
‘He’s interested. I’m to see him at ten to-morrow. I told him I was going to see you next, and he wants to know what you think of it.’
Antoine Fuseaux was visibly flattered. Marpurgo crushed the end of the cigar in the ash-tray.
They promised to meet again on the following day. Antoine asked Marpurgo eagerly, when they were alone, what he thought of it. Marpurgo said:
‘I don’t know: I’ve got to think it over. That boy’s no angel: I want to work out his game exactly before I give an opinion.’
‘That’s right: you do that. Now let’s look through these patterns and get it over with.’
They spent the rest of the afternoon over the business for which Fuseaux was known. When Marpurgo was leaving, Georges came into the wash-room.
‘What you doing to-night, Marpurgo? Are you eating?’
‘I’m going to the Capucines. Come along!’
‘No, I’m eating at the Pyramides!’
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes: the grub’s good. And what do I have? A chop. And I know the waiters. Come along.’
‘I like the Capucines: the cuisine’s excellent—they make a filet mignon exquisite. And the best coffee in Paris. Be my guest, Georges.’
‘No; why can’t you come to the Pyramides for once? Come along, come along, come along: it’s the only place you can eat quietly.’
The Beauties and Furies Page 7
