The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  She read it through, added the word "yours," and sent it to him. She liked the way she had not openly offered reconciliation yet had managed to imply that forgiveness would not be unreasonably withheld.

  It did not please John at all. Yet he realized it was the best he was likely to get from Nora and that, on balance, he would do well to think of it as "Nora's apology," accept it as such, and hope that these aberrations in her behaviour would die away.

  Chapter 32

  This year, Sam was at La Gracieuse before them. He had, in fact, come over three days earlier and gone straight to Paris. There he spent two days alone before coming back to Normandy, arriving an hour before the Stevensons and Sarah. He stood at Rodie's side while she made the courtyard ring with her eerie yodelling welcome.

  Nora closed her eyes on tears of joy. "That noise!" she said. "All the way over I've been trying to remember it. Dear Rodie!"

  And then there were long minutes of crying and embracing and mangled French-English before they even moved indoors. In the midst of it, Nora's "Hello, Sam love," and his "Nora luv!" and their warm (but English-warm) embrace seemed like an ice chip.

  Only an English eye could have discerned the warmth in the handshake and the "Mrs. Cornelius"—"Mr. Telling" that Sam and Sarah exchanged. Rodie was disappointed. "Oh," she said severely, "you must kiss the hand, Monsieur Sam. But you shall tonight, you see." She turned to Sarah. "You are going in a bowl."

  "Really?" Sarah was bewildered. Sam's smile showed he knew what was meant.

  "Oh, yes! All." She threw wide her arms. "All of we are going in a bowl. But it's for the youngs—the youth." She narrowed her compass to just Sarah and Sam. "The quadrille," she said into the face of Sarah's bewilderment. "Kiss the hand."

  "A ball!" Sarah said. "Un bal, hein?"

  "Oui. What I say. Très grand!"

  "Not," Nora said to Sarah when Rodie was out of earshot, "a wedge-foot bowl, you see."

  The ball was a very grand affair at the château of Monsieur Tallien, the man whose name had led John to tell the Rodets that Nora's maiden name was Telling. Someone said they had two thousand candles lighted that evening, and two servants working full time to replenish them. Everything else was on the same scale—an orchestra of sixty players to dance to, eight large buffets with four tiers on each so laden with food that hardly an inch of rosewood or mahogany showed, a winter garden where gentlemen could smoke their cigars, and a long terrace where perspiring dancers could escape the candle fumes and wander in the warm, starlit twilight. But all the wealth and all the lands of the Talliens could not provide the one element that Nora sought: the fragrance of the oaks—the smell of Normandy in spring; for spring was gone for another year.

  She danced several dances with John, who then excused himself and went off to talk business with Rodet. She stood watching him, wishing fiercely that she could go too. Then something, a movement to her right, caused her to turn that way. It was only a couple coming in from the terrace, and she was about to look away again when she caught sight of a tall, stooping man standing outside and peering lugubriously at her through the glass. He smiled and came in from the terrace. She smiled back and looked away; she was sure they had not been introduced.

  "May I present myself, Mrs. Stevenson, since I am unable to find Madame Rodet to do me the honour?" He was foreign but not French. Dutch or German perhaps. He spoke in English to her.

  "You know Madame Rodet?"

  "A very dear friend. I am Julius Wolff. Of Hamburg."

  The name awakened her interest. "There is a firm of bankers in Hamburg…" she began.

  "Gebrüder Wolff," the man said. "The same."

  Nora gave him her hand at that. "But, then, we are hardly strangers."

  He kissed it and murmured, "Gnädige Frau." As he leaned forward, she noticed that his lower eyelids, which were loose and wrinkled, fell free of his eyeballs, like loose pockets. He had the face of a starved pug with little pearly beads of fat just under the skin; a whole cluster of them, like a family of yellow ticks, were stuck between his left upper eyelid and his nose. Yet his smile was inviting and friendly, promising more. She thought him to be about sixty. "The family name is Wolff-Dietrich," he added. "It's the old name for the leader of the werewolf pack." He grinned to show that he was joking; the effect was ghastly.

  "You act as Chambers's agent in Hamburg," she said.

  "And the whole of Holstein."

  "Ah. We have bought and sold a lot of paper through you."

  He chuckled. "Much. And more in the future, I hope."

  She smiled.

  "Against—pesetas, perhaps?"

  "If the arbitrated rate is good, we will buy and sell against cowrie shells from the Spice Islands."

  He laughed. "You give nothing away, madame." He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed water from his eyes; the loose lower eyelids kept filling like cisterns.

  They danced two dances together—or, rather, one and a half, for in the middle of the second, a waltz, he complained of feeling hot and giddy and she took him to sit out at the side. She asked a footman to get him a brandy, for he was trembling. He smiled at her and apologized. "I did not eat," he said. "Stupid."

  The brandy steadied him but now he began to sweat. "Come outside," she said, "where it is cool. I will support you, see."

  But he was firm as a rock—so firm that she began to suspect that the whole episode was a ruse.

  "You like France, Mrs. Stevenson?" he asked.

  "What I know of it, Herr Wolff-Dietrich. Only Normandy. But I have such a good friend here in Madame Rodet."

  "I too share that good fortune. Please—'Wolff' is enough. In fact, I think we meet there tomorrow. At the Rodets'."

  "I look forward to that—and so, I know, will Mr. Stevenson when I tell him."

  Wolff seemed on the point of saying something; he hesitated, looked at her, then looked away, and breathed out.

  They leaned against the heavy stone balustrade of the terrace, gazing out over the gardens, dark and mysterious. The stone harboured the heat of the day's sun. She wondered if Wolff and his brother were good bankers; Stevenson's had used them only as agents for buying and selling foreign exchange. Would it be etiquette to talk of his business? Continentals were sometimes very funny about that.

  "Do you enjoy banking, Herr Wolff?" she risked asking.

  It was as if the question touched a start lever within him. "It is at once the most absorbing and frustrating of professions," he said. "To see inside so many great affairs, sometimes even to help plan them, yet always in the end to be the—you say, third person?"

  "Third party. Chambers says it's the trade of sultan's eunuch."

  Her frankness, which was deliberate, took him aback. For a moment he did not know what to say, then he composed himself to pretend she had said something else, and then he laughed. She decided that a man of sixty years' experience who, when surprised, let so much of his thoughts show in his face was probably not a very good banker.

  "Its good," he said. "He is amusing, Chambers."

  "There is a funny side to him," Nora agreed. She looked away again, for her gaze seemed to discomfit Wolff, and said, "I imagine there was never a more interesting time to be a banker than the present."

  "In London," Wolff agreed. "But on the Continent, we meddle with mere currency; we argue of currency unions and common coinage. We are techniciens. But in London you are artists."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because of what happened last October and November. The manner in which the extraordinary demand was met." He looked at her. "Did you not find that—exciting?"

  She decided to say nothing; instead she smiled, making him smile too. "On the Continent, it would have been…chaos." He said Kaos, the German word; it sounded much more doom-laden than mere "chaos"—which, to her mind, was a fitting description of the everyday state of the London money market.

  He became even more lugubrious. "But we can procure Kaos without extraordinary demand. You
are so comfortable and secure in your little island. But here on the Continent things are terrible."

  "Really, Herr Wolff!" She laughed. "What a thing to tell me at the start of a visit here!"

  "Truth," he said, with a Germanic intensity that carried no apology. "Do you realize—of course you don't—how close revolution is, here, in France too, also in Germany, also Italy—everywhere?"

  She began to feel a little bored with Wolff. Only the suspicion that he had something important to say and could not work around to saying it kept her out there with him. His recovery from "giddiness" was so complete that it could not have been real. "If you are so certain," she prompted, "why do you not close your business and come to London?"

  "Oh!" It was a dismissive sound. He shrugged and waved his hands aimlessly, as if ten dozen contrary reasons presented themselves. "Do you know how little a banker can move? Only his fixed capital—his own money. But his loan capital—his good name—how can he move these? Yet they are his real trade."

  "You have survived revolutions before," Nora said, preparing to return to the ball.

  He did not move. "This one is—will be—completely different. In England you are so clever. Peel repeals the Corn Law, and what happens? The country workers, rural workers, are at once in harness with the aristocracy and proprietors of land, for expensive corn. But the town workers, they of course are in harness with the factory masters and proprietors of industry, and they want cheap corn." He brought down his hand, like a guillotine blade, on the baluster rail. "Boomz! The worker class is divided."

  It was an interesting insight, one she had not heard before; she made no further effort to disengage. "Here they are not?"

  "Here we have no rural worker class; only peasants. So the town worker class has no—no interest together with the bourgeoisie, they say. It is a hard fight. It is revolution like no other before. It is not ancient against modern or country against town; it is the modern against modern, the bourgeoisie against—we call it das Proletariat."

  "We use the French—prolétaires. What are their demands?"

  "They wish the state. They wish to be masters, to direct capital, to appropriate profit. They wish to become the proprietors—the sole proprietors!"

  Nora began to laugh. "You mean communists and socialists! But how can you take them seriously? It is so easy to demolish all their arguments and pretensions. Their leaders are idealists, their followers are greedy; and, as always happens, the greedy will swallow the idealists. And then they will choke."

  "Of course we take them seriously!" he said. The note of anger carried to the groups and couples passing by, provoking amusement and raised eyebrows. But he persisted, unnoticing. "It's easy for England. You have been so clever. You divide the prolétaires, you give them slow improvement—enough to stop revolution. So you avoid danger—and you think it is no danger on the Continent too. But it is. And it's dangerous for you, as well. A hot fire can jump the water! It can jump the English Channel, even the German Ocean."

  "Perhaps we do not see these things as clearly as we should, Herr Wolff," she said to soothe him. "But you too are misled if you think we have solved the problem in the ways you say. Perhaps we do not face immediate revolution, but our danger, seen over years, is worse. We are facing a new kind of leader of our workers. He is not communist. Perhaps he is socialist out of convenience, but certainly not out of conviction. He thinks"—she tapped her forehead—"like you and me. He thinks of supply and demand and price and market. And so he thinks of his labour as a commodity, like tea or iron. He says if a Baltic trader can corner the market in Russian tallow and then dictate his price, why cannot the labourer make a corner in his own commodity? How do we answer that, Herr Wolff? It is our own ideal thrown back at us."

  He nodded. "Here too, in France and Germany, is such an element. I tell you how we answer it: with guns and soldiers. And then"—he made his fist explode with a flurry of fingers—"revolution!"

  "But that is not your answer, Herr Wolff?" she asked, certain now that she was close to his purpose in drawing her out here.

  "No" he agreed. "We—my brother and myself—because we are bankers, and very cautious, old-fashioned bankers—and also not young—we can have only a little answer. We wish to put some money abroad, in England. Not much, of course, because everything that goes away makes smaller our—fundament, do you say? Our fundament for lending."

  "Basis. I can see that."

  "Ach so! Basis. It's the same."

  "Why do you not speak to Chambers?"

  "I did. We did." He looked calmly, almost—as far as she could tell in the light that poured from the house onto the terrace—amusedly, at her.

  "And? What did he say?"

  Wolff lowered his voice. "He says that of all people who would know how to use best this money, it's you."

  The slight smile on her face did not vanish, but inside she was furious. It was all a joke. This whole charade of Wolff's was the elaborate opening round of some little scheme of theirs to humiliate her. A little Jewish bankers' joke on the gentile lady. Chambers! He was so sure of himself they had even agreed to bring his name into it from the beginning. Her first instinct was to sweep majestically from the terrace, as any affronted heroine would feel impelled to do. But Nora was no longer a woman of first instincts.

  Instead she said, quite neutrally, as if reserving the choice of being pleased or angry: "He had no right to say such a thing."

  Wolff looked pained. "He did not discuss your business. But he admires you so." He gripped her gloved arm fastidiously in his gloved fingers and said confidentially, "He told me not to mention his name. He says you unreasonably mistrust him. But I do not like secrets."

  It was too amusing—that they would imagine she could be taken along so easily. She decided to play them out at the game they had chosen. "I think, Herr Wolff, that you are a victim of Mr. Chambers's humour. You know him well?"

  "Nathan?" he asked. (He pronounced it Nah-tan, which Nora did not at once recognize.) "From a child. I used to give him—what do you say?" He gestured the holding of a child on his shoulders.

  "A flying angel," Nora said.

  "Oh? It's good. A flying angel. I give him many." He chuckled at the memory.

  "And now he is playing a little game with you."

  "Oh no!" Wolff was at once serious. "I assure you, no."

  "Very well, Herr Wolff. How may I help you?"

  "We wish, my brother and I, we wish you to take some of our money and to invest it for us in—in such places where you invest your own." He studied her face closely for the effect of this extraordinary proposal. She could tell from his reaction that he found nothing there.

  "In whose name?" she asked. "Understand, I think this is preposterous—a joke of Chambers's in poor taste. But—let us play, let us amuse ourselves. In whose name?"

  "You will see it is serious." He pulled out a bill drawn on Chambers in London. It was marked a vista, which made it payable at sight. It was drawn in her favour. And it was for ten thousand pounds sterling.

  An expensive joke. The first doubt that this proposal might, after all, be genuine occurred to her. She pulled her shawl around her and said, "It has gone far enough. And I wish to dance."

  She walked away from him. "Please!" he called after her. His anguish sounded genuine. "I have done it so badly. Nathan has said not to say his name. And I—fool—think I know better. Please, just listen."

  She stopped then. She had been walking slowly back to the terrace doors with him jogging at her elbow. "Very well, Herr Wolff. I will listen. And I will try to believe."

  He thrust the bill into her hand. "You take. You invest it—anywhere you believe good. You are free, totally free. And you keep ten per cent of its profit. And the other ninety per cent you reinvest on the same conditions as before."

  "Fifteen per cent," she said at once. There was one way to scotch this silly idea. But moments later she wished she had said twenty, for, although he looked unhappy and muttered about h
aving to consult his brother, it was clear he was going to agree. Quickly she added: "And there will be management fees. Were you thinking of a trust?"

  "No," he said unhappily. "We cannot so certainly revoke a trust. We give power of attorney."

  She nodded. "So there will also be a fine for cancellation of the power of attorney. The management fee will be one-half per cent on the investment each year that the profit or yield is not realized on that investment. The cancellation fee will be ten per cent if in the first five years, five per cent between five and ten years, two per cent thereafter."

  That will surely kill it, she thought. At least I come out butter-side-up. She wished she could see Chambers's face when Wolff-Dietrich, the werewolf king, carried the tale back.