House of All Nations (14 page)

With insulting insouciance, she smiled and turned from poor Aristide towards the lift. Etienne, the old porter, closed the gilded door of the lift cage and bore her aloft into glory to the first floor, surrounded by flashing mirrors, serpentine brass, and electric bulbs concealed in cinquecento blooms.

Old Richard Plowman was quite pleased to see the guitar. He took the guitar, laid it on his table, and in the great dark-green room, filled with blue smoke, he softly tweaked the strings. And he began to think of the Timor and Arafura Banking Corporation. But Raccamond was already downstairs, burbling about stocks and dividends to the Comtesse Rosy de Cousse, his latest acquisition, called by some “Dishonest Rosy” and by others “the Milwaukee Pavement Pounder,” but who remained a countless and one of the bank's biggest accounts, for all that. The Comtesse was drunk.

‘I inshist on sheeing Mr. Jules,' she kept saying. Aristide, in a panic, led her upstairs. The Comtesse flopped into Jules's great chair and said, ‘Jules, Jules, you are a shwindler but I'm not going to let you get away with it.'

‘What's the matter, Rosy?' Jules asked, with enchantment. ‘You know I wouldn't swindle you.'

‘Oh, yesh, you would, oh, yesh, you would. But you can't get away with it. Rosy ish a tough—baby. Here'sh my first monthly shtatement: you owe me 293 francs.'

Jules took the account and read it through. He lifted the receiver. ‘Alphendéry, come here!'

‘Shright,' said the Comtesse, ‘make a riot: tell them I'm not a sucker. You're a good boy, Julesy, I like you—I'm going to stick by you. Tell the boy to bring up 293 francs. I want it now. Put it on the desk right now. I don't want any—finagling.'

‘Alphendéry,' said Jules severely, ‘there's a mistake in the Comtesse's account. We owe her 293 francs. Will you ask the bookkeeper to put it right.'

Alphendéry took the account and glanced through it. ‘Comtesse, you've made a mistake. This account is in order. We don't owe you anything.'

The Comtesse fell into a fury. ‘You're a liar: careless accounting. You plank 293 francs right down here or I walk out of the bank.'

‘Now, Comtesse, let me explain how you got this idea. We don't owe you 293 francs: as a matter of fact, there is a mistake here and you owe us 301 francs.'

‘All right, all right, Comtesse, we'll call it square.' Jules lifted his pen and was about to alter the account, which Alphendéry had put in front of him.

She sprang out of the seat and seized the thick tough piece of paper. ‘No, nothing doing.' She turned to Alphendéry. ‘You heard what he told you: tell your man to pay me 293 francs.'

‘But Comtesse,' Alphendéry deprecated her pose, her manner, ‘Comtesse, if you'll cast your eye through this again … '

‘Tell this man to leave the room: he's insulting me,' shouted the Comtesse. ‘He's trying to make me out a liar. Tell him to get out.'

‘Get out, Alphendéry,' said Jules furiously, for he had hoped to get the drunken Comtesse out in a minute or two.

‘But Jules,' said Alphendéry.

‘Get out, Michel!' shouted Jules.

Alphendéry bit his lip and walked out. He went round to William's room, hesitated, turned back, went round to the door of the second brother, pushed it open and found it empty, as usual. When he returned, mortified, silent, past Jules's room, in a few minutes, he heard the Comtesse giggling and retailing scandal: ‘The little Comtesse Lelgarde is a mad Lesbian: she was drunk and making up to Aline, and Tony looked stony. Then Lelgarde and Aline went off together to fix up their hair and when they came back Tony was sitting admiring the bracelets of Caro de Faniul. Then Jacques Carrière came in—'

Spilled on the desk in front of her were three hundred-franc notes.

‘How can you humiliate me like that?' asked Alphendéry. ‘I am always loyal to you, Jules.'

‘Oh, you've got to humor the girls. I get on fine with them. But if I could get a law passed keeping women out of banks, I would.' Jules shrugged and went on about other affairs, in a cold, brittle voice. He detested Rosy but she was one of their set. The telephone rang; Jules lifted it. ‘What you say? Tony and Aline? Go on. Rosy was just telling me. O.K. Ask them over for dinner.' He rang off. ‘Tony's divorcing Aline because of the little Comtesse Lelgarde. At least, that's the latest. I don't believe it.'

At this moment, Aristide Raccamond went past with the Baron Koffer's man saying, ‘Something is hanging over markets: some great disaster seems to be hanging over our heads. People are ready to question the giants of finance. We have not yet seen the bottom. The history of business may be down, step by step, and crash to crash, from now on. Don't buy yet, Mr. Broeck. Tell the Baron that is our considered opinion. We are constitutional bears.'

‘There goes Raccamond wearing your tail feathers,' said Jules gently, to Alphendéry. ‘He seems rather smart. Perhaps you and William were not so wrong, after all.'

‘I think I know men,' said Alphendéry. ‘He takes orders, he's a hard worker.'

‘I asked him what he thought he should get. He said ten thousand a month.'

‘Wow! He isn't picayune.'

‘I gave it to him. What the hell.'

‘Well—he'll make it or he won't make it.'

* * *

Scene Nine: Jules Bertillon

A
robber by instinct, sharpshooter of commerce by career, nourished by corruption (one of his grandfathers served his time), child of his age, Jules Bertillon was born to profit greatly by it, without understanding it in the least. He had only one interpretation of history and politics, an economic one; he saw in altruism the perspicacious self-interest of cunning ambition, imagined that philanthropists are good jelly souls who can't bear to be afflicted by the sight of the misery of men, but this also, by a side glance of self-interest, and he was persuaded that the great saviors and leaders of men are ambitious men who, coming from a wretched cradle, hope to succeed quicker by demagogy. As for the martyrs and agitators who remained in these roles, they were simply unbalanced men of small talent, brought to lunacy by physical defects (because of the evident morbid sacrifice of self), and by perceiving that they could never succeed with their temperaments in the swarming life of men. He admired the successful and was cheered up by all success of any kind in any sphere of activity, gangsterism, revolution, politics, roguery, or even the arts, because art, he said, was a way to get oneself fed by the rest of mankind without working or with little work, by reason of an inborn capacity. He regarded it as a rather delicate little trick for getting jam, as well as a sort of evidence of the smile of the great god Luck. He admired artists, for example, even more for this favoritism shown them by the stars, than for their works, because he regarded art as a rather old trick. In fact, he was a careerist of a very pure type, and admirably adapted. Besides, this, he was full of a fantastic, ingenuous, and disarming charlatanry, and of a delicate, wise charm which knew how to simper, do a ballet step or leap strongly and agilely like the best of dancers. He was a proud man and always approached the swing-doors of his various offices whistling or singing softly to give warning to his employees, since he found it unworthy of himself to scold people for wasting time. At the same time, it gave him an opportunity to listen at doors in complete tranquillity!

Jules loved to be known genteelly and in his own world and he would have preferred above everything else to illustrate his name by grandiose acts: therefore he moved about splendidly, spent money fabulously, gave tennis, polo, racing, aviation prizes, and he loved to have his name in all sorts of transactions, for instance in gambling and speculation, where it would have been more prudent to hide it. His losses and the attacks made on his name, out of jealousy, came from this love of glory which he could not subdue.

He thus let everyone know that he was a great speculator in exchanges, stocks, and at baccarat; a lucky gambler, he gave out. When dining out with some rich man, or with the representative of one of the great old commercial and banking houses, he told his secrets, bragged, and gave free rein to his fantasy, lying, and vapid cynicism, making a thin, hollow, despicable thing of the extraordinary charm that was the man entire. His judgment was limited, he never troubled to find out the background of other rich men's lives, he pretended to himself that they were all like himself, part of Ali Baba's band, and thus he was able to lose overnight ground which had taken him and his friends months to gain. He knew, really, nothing, and nothing of the world he lived in, worked in, made money in: monstrously ignorant, he succeeded because he had recognized at once that in the financial world there are no dignities which cannot be questioned or facts which are not given out for someone's interest.

He hatched thousands of projects, but was unreflective and disdained the law too easily. He knew that the great financiers disregarded the law completely and bought counsel and judgment, but he did not observe well enough that the big men in his game use the laws to punish and get rid of little men who threaten them. He was brave, full of go and gaiety but he was frail. His will was short-breathed and he was volatile. He detested all detailed work and long study which he called ‘slavery.' He always cried impatiently, ‘I pay you for that. I don't want to be bothered with details. I've got the ideas, eh? I pay you to carry them out.'

Apparently very polished, kind, and egalitarian with his employees, he easily got angry and began to shout, throw himself about, and scold. He was irritated by meticulous discussion of details or theories and if anyone spoke seriously except about money, he shook himself, jumped out of his chair, walked up and down, became arch, began to sing, tap on the desk, make unpleasant comments and ironic asides, or, in a sharp, cunning tone suddenly break in with, ‘What are the figures for all that?'

He had a vocabulary just adapted to his needs, disliked slang and commonplaces but misunderstood and mispronounced a good many ordinary words and elided more sounds in speaking, than anyone else in Paris. He didn't know any foreign languages, except a little English and then he preferred the American cinema expressions and a little Yiddish which he had picked up and which he used comically to salt his style. The few foreign expressions he knew he pronounced with a perfect intonation and accent but without any reference to the spelling.

He wanted to see all his friends succeed and was always thinking up bizarre ideas to help them, as, for example, that Abernethy Gairdner the short-story writer, who confessed that he could only turn out one short story a month, should copy all the stories out of
The Arabian Nights
, change the names of persons and places, and send them in, seriatim. He was devoted to
The Arabian Nights
and took the entire unabridged edition with him wherever he went. He wanted to put Hervé Beurnon, the sculptor, in touch with all the deputies in the Chamber so that he could do all the war monuments for their various districts; tried to get eligible bachelors for the young women of fortune; even (because Alphendéry was a communist sympathizer) thought up a few schemes by which the Communist Party could make money.

When provoked, he thought immediately of direct action, gunmen, scandalous arrest, anonymous denunciation to the police, political influence, whispering campaigns, injury; but he was mercurial and often lethargic and fought with one hand tied.

He was wholly superstitious and defied science. ‘What's wrong with superstition?' he asked saltily. ‘Get me together all the bankers of the world and I'll ask them one question, Where are you now? Another, Are you one hundred per cent solvent; are you fifty per cent solvent? And this with their mathematicians, statisticians, crooked parliamentarians, with their journalists, go-betweens, and Moon Hopkins calculating machines, with the game built for them, the wheel fixed by them and the cashier paid by them and with gunmen at the door to flatten anyone who gets away with anything! And still, where are they? I'd rather gamble on the color of Alphendéry's hat: it's just as satisfactory and a big reduction in overhead.' He said that again and again.

But whether laborious or lazy, Jules's brain was never idle a moment. When not making money, when actually losing it, he would be occupied in gaily and convincingly whispering about legends of his wealth, designating countries, banks, and vaults where his assets were safely planted ‘against currency depreciation,' hinting at his luck in speculation, filling the ears of his own believers, like Cornells Brouwer and Pedro de Silva-Vizcaïno, with the stories of his winnings at Deauville; so that at a certain time when his pyramiding in various markets had cost the bank nearly two million francs and they were running on the day-to-day deposits and were obliged to send out margin calls strictly, conservative clients of the bank were saying that ‘Jules Bertillon could not be worth more today than about fifty to seventy-five million francs, because he must have had losses lately.' Almost all other bankers and speculators, like Méline, Léon, and Claude Brothers behaved humbly and alternated between gloom and bragging, when they were short of money, but Bertillon must have always believed in his genius: he never lost elegance or his translated, cool demeanor. In this way, he laid the foundation stones of a house of legend in which he lived safely for many years. Years after, when he had not a cent, people were to believe that he had pots of gold buried in Spain, Hungary, Switzerland, Scotland, and Weissnichtswo, and he was always too gracious to undeceive them. He was, in fact, a man gifted from birth and specially destined for his business.

This was the man, this hummingbird of rumor, fancy, and adventures, to whom Alphendéry, Richard Plowman, Adam Constant, Aristide Raccamond, and many other diverse natures attached themselves. They hoped as much from his speculative daring as from his unexampled generosity. To very few he revealed his true self—that he was daring because he was ready to fly at a moment's notice and regarded his imposing, wealthy bank as a joke, and that he was generous because he was handing out ‘gambler's gold, fairy money,' as he always said. ‘I give it because I can make it: why should I hoard it? I can always make it.'