House of All Nations (13 page)

‘How do you like working here, Adam?'

‘I like it well. Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men: the world is a jungle to them. They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history. It is fascinating living among the Cro-Magnons …' But his face suddenly became drawn. ‘I am patient,' he said evenly: ‘what I have in mind is to write a book of poems new even for today. It will not be much but it will be bitten as deep and plain as the words on jail walls. For life as it is, is a concentration camp for Man. And in one corner sits the poet, snarling if he is touched, chuckling over a little dirty bag that contains his life's savings. Out of all his experiences, he sedulously lays aside his conclusion, his aphorism, his extract of sentiment, his pellicule of profit. A love affair leaves nothing behind but a pair of glossy eyes; five years of life are reduced to five verses: the day lost in fruitless brain-racking becomes a bitter aphorism at night: that is the profit poet, the superfluity poet, the luxury-tax poet, the bank poet, poor wretch, the limited-edition, gilt-edged, signed-copy poet, the poet who gives himself a gilt-edged invitation to a small select party of kindred souls and one by one sheds them, disappointed, confused, betrayed—'

He tried to go on but there was a racket just behind Alphendéry: Henri Parouart, a humble barnacle of finance, a stone who got into the shoe of every stock-exchange dealer round the town, was figuring on a scrap of paper and explaining something to Abernethy Gairdner, the American short-story writer.

‘But I don't understand how they make money, according to this process,' Gairdner explained. ‘How does it pay them?'

‘Look,' Parouart began as if his life depended upon it. ‘Say I buy an American stock, says U.S. Steel at 100. The broker sells it out at 100. U.S. Steel goes to 200. Then the broker owes me 100. I buy three shares at 200. On the books my account stands—owed 100 + 3 × 200 = 700. My equity is the first 100 now plus a profit of 100 equals 200. I owe the broker 500. If the market drops so that my equity is no longer 700 but 500, that is a drop of twenty-eight per cent, that is, my account stands debited 500 on the books, and nothing paid, then they owe me nothing and I owe them 500. Meanwhile, they have taken no risk. Their profit is 500. Clear?'

‘H'm,' said Gairdner, ‘of course.'

‘Now,' said Parouart, ‘I say, tell the bank to buy one hundred U.S. Steel or Royal Dutch, it doesn't matter. But the bank has already got two hundred U.S. Steel that the client has bought for himself. And now he has his doubts about Steel. He thinks it might go down. So he doesn't want to have my one hundred Steel on his books as well. He sells a hundred U.S. Steel instead of buying it. So he only has a hundred U.S. Steel altogether on his books.'

‘But why should he do it then, just when you want to buy it? Why can't he sell his own?'

‘This is all part of a process, a long process, don't you see?' cried Parouart, hopping from one foot to another like Rumpelstiltskin, in his anxiety to spread an idea that had been eating into his nights. ‘It didn't start today or yesterday. It is just part of a balancing process.'

‘Yes, I see. It gives him the cue, that's all. It helps in bookkeeping, is that your idea?'

‘Yes, you can put it that way. Bertillon sends me a chit: ‘Bought for your account one hundred shares Hokum Company at,' say, ‘$100 a share.' He debits me ten thousand dollars. The market goes down. Hokum is $75 a share. I've lost twenty-five hundred dollars which I owe him. Theoretically! But he never bought those shares. It just cost him the ink. I pay him the twenty-five hundred dollars which is his clear profit.'

‘That's simple. But,' said the writer carefully, ‘supposing the U.S. Steel Corporation comes along and says, “We're paying a dividend of $1 on every share.” Then the broker would have to pay you $100 out of his own pocket. Would it be worth while to take the risk? Because the market doesn't always go down twenty-five per cent, it often goes down only one-fourth of one per cent. It's a big risk. And then, think of the bookkeeping: think of the organization. Think of the risk! It's a good theory, but is it practicable, for any one?'

‘Yes,' said Parouart testily. ‘You're assuming that the bank always has to make a profit. But suppose it loses! It pays you out of reserves. How do we know what is the bank's financial position?'

‘Now,' said the American slowly, ‘don't you see it's different over there? You see, there's no matching books over there: everything is done right on the floor of the stock exchange and there's an exact record, second by second, of every sale made, so you don't have to stew about this: you can look it all up and see if the transaction was done.'

‘I buy a hundred shares,' cried Parouart, ‘and every other sucker in the country buys a hundred shares and who is to say which was mine? Who can tell whether my hundred shares were ever bought? A big day on the stock exchange, thousands of shares every minute: who can tell? We French call that balancing,
contre-partie
operations.'

‘Well,' said the American, ‘you may be right: in fact, I think you're probably right. But you can't prove it. So what are you going to do about it? Why worry? As long as you think he's good for the money.'

‘Who says he is?' demanded Parouart cunningly.

‘Another of those grateful beggars,' said Alphendéry, as they moved away, ‘who use our bank for a café and then spit on the
terrasse
.'

‘Warn him off,' said Adam dryly.

‘You can't run a stock-exchange department without these little sacs of venom: they are not men, they're exudations of the money world. They're galls: a shriveled little insect of a man is working away somewhere inside them.'

‘There are no men in this bank,' remarked Constant, ‘only money galls of one color and another shape: only an infection of monsters with purses at their waists that we wait upon and serve … My dream is, that one day I will get them all down, I will leave them on record. I want to show the waste, the insane freaks of these money men, the cynicism and egotism of their life, the way they gambol amidst plates of gold loaded with fruits and crystal jars of liqueurs, meats pouring out juices, sauces, rare vegetables, fine fancy breads, and know very well what they are doing, brag, in fact, of being more cunning than the others, the poor. I'll show that they are not brilliant, not romantic, not delightful, not intelligent; that they have no other object but their personal success and safety. Although, of course, there are plenty of living intelligences among them, sidetracked talents, even warm breasts, perspicacious men amongst them, but all, all compliant and prostituted …

‘I'll show another thing,' he said lower, putting his face nearer to the grille, to reach Alphendéry's ear, ‘that there are some of them, and those nearest the top, who believe absolutely in what the revolutionaries teach, who know that the ones they call “the agitators” are only speaking plain truths, buttressed by every known fact, by every fact that they alone know and that they keep from the people …

‘It follows that the denunciations they utter, and the prosperity tom-toms and the strokings and the dulcet tones, the flames of hell drawn round the Reds and the pale sainthoods lithographed round cabinet ministers are only a gigantic, monstrous masque put on the boards to fool the people. “Knowledge, money, real love, power,” they say, “are too good for the people. These things are divine, we must keep them all to ourselves.” And they debase learning, coinage, sex, democratic control to fool the people …

‘But they are haunted. They fear the numbers of the people and their inevitable revolt and all they can think of is how to employ agitators for themselves,
provocateurs
to head off the crowd, disappoint the believing, betray the courageous and frighten the right-thinking asses and the liberals: and for the little fellows they have the distractions of war at home and abroad, when things look too lively. I'll write down how they meditate for hours together on how to excite political passions and make civil war simply to affect the stock exchanges and aid their own speculations in currencies. I'll show them for what they are, bestially selfish, true criminals and gangsters, who admire particularly gangsters in their hearts and comment at length, with love, on the exploits of bandits, armament sellers who sell arms against their own country, great exploiters who kill hundreds of men, women and children under them, apaches of commercial life, profiteers of war, rapine, and fratricidal slaughter, and all those who make their fortune by no matter what means. I'll show their “society” made up of princesses in whose blood runs the blood of ten thousand miserable shopgirls exploited and prostituted for them; of comtesses who are women of the basest lives, drunkards, prostitutes for a title, or for a cocktail, who dispute, blackmail, play the Sarah Bernhardt, yell and faint for a couple of francs wrong in their account; of young women of good family who sell themselves, of women who sleep in any bed; of husband- and lover-pimps; of
provocateurs
, spies, stool-pigeons, homosexuals, drug dreamers, boxers, actors, and cinema actresses swollen with unhoped-for success and lunatic with power; of fine violinists destroyed by a passion for gambling and great singers whose voices tremble with tears, but only because Phillips Glow-Lamp has gone down from 263 to 249 between the first and the second acts—all the rascality of Europe, Ethiopian princes come to Paris to sell their country, princes of Morocco come to taste the pleasures of a capital that, if they were patriots, they would detest, dubious nobles from old Russia hunting bed and board, the debile, crooked, or vulgar aristocracy of England, Spanish grandees and South-American feudal landlords, inavowably ferocious, luxurious, and sensual.

‘I'll tell what I know, that the lobbies of great bankers that the poor workman fears to enter, and that he comes into twisting his cap, swarm with gunmen, gangsters escaped from the American police, bankers from beyond borders with their swag about them, mayors from stripped municipalities, kings in exile who had the foresightedness to exile their money ahead of them; of all those who pour out a tale of banishment and poverty and who are rich in millions, and of secret agents preparing
coups d'état
in foreign countries and of their political enemies already preparing to secrete the estates that would be snatched from them; also of the friends of those in power, who send abroad gold for the day they will fall and negotiate the purchase of yachts which lie waiting, polished and under steam, in harbors along all the coast, men who buy doubles to front the public fury and private vengeance and keep unoccupied apartments in frontier towns.

‘I will tell how they exchange a daughter for a mistress and a mistress for an automobile, how they spent ten thousand francs on a mistress and grudge their stenographer a ten-franc raise, and how they send their daughters to school with the daughters of leading swindlers and distinguished hetaerae in order that they can learn to wipe their mouth on a serviette without taking off the rouge, their baccalaureate! In other words,' he said, flushed and laughing with embarrassment, ‘the low-lives of high society who go to the Opéra and drink at Fouquet's.'

‘And read the market quotations in Bertillon's,' laughed Alphendéry. ‘Yes, this is a great experience for you. And I imagine you never expected to see that!'

He pointed at Raccamond, at this moment hurriedly threading his way through the groups in the lobby. They were chatting while awaiting the opening quotations of the American stock exchange, which are relayed by telegraph and come through to Paris every day at three o'clock.

During the morning and just after lunch, the majority of these idlers had put in orders for the purchase and sale of stocks. They were well preened, and fluffed-up, cheerful, expectant, full of interest because the game was about to begin again. This was the third innings. The London market opens at ten and the Paris market at twelve. Stock gambling is thus an all-day occupation and—for those who care to see the New York market close—it saves the expense of evening entertainment, too.

Raccamond saw nearly all his Paris clients there. He was very much ashamed of a guitar which he was carrying, and had to deliver on behalf of a South American client, to old Richard Plowman, former head of the Timor and Arafura Banking Corporation, and now closest and most faithful friend of Jules Bertillon. Plowman was a man of sweet and obliging nature who made himself messenger-boy for all sorts of private commissions of clients and friends. He got pearls restrung in Paris for London ladies, and French rejuvenators for London gentlemen, and Kruschen salts for John Tanker, Sr., the oil millionaire. He read cuttings, smoked the best Havanas, wrote letters, and read best-sellers in the great room on the third floor which stood over Jules's own room.

Raccamond, in his great hurry to rejoin Richard Plowman, and give him the wretched guitar, did not notice a heavy Scotch terrier smelling at the corner of his desk, at the end of a taut leash; and he went sprawling over it, while the guitar flew down the staircase which led to the vaults. There was a flutter and a round of laughter through the bank: heads appeared at the three circles of higher balconies. They concealed their laughter as he rose. Jacques Manray, share clerk, strode over, flushed and manful to help Aristide. The culprit, charming Mme. Mimi Eloth, mistress of Achitophelous, a great favorite and
grande dame
, genteelly twinkling, was at his side. ‘Oh, a thousand pardons! He is so
wicked
! MacKenzie is so stupid! MacKenzie, apologize to Mr. Raccamond! He will never stand still. But you're not really hurt! What an idiot! It is because he is a champion! Next time I will get a mongrel. Come along, MacKenzie, I'm furious with you. I will tell Mr. Jules all about you.'