House of All Nations (82 page)

Yours very truly,

Michel Alphendéry

There were tears in Jacques Manray's eyes: ‘Poor old beggar; the children of the rich are all savages. Why do you do these things for them, Michel?'

Alphendéry was embarrassed; his glasses glinted; he ducked and said with a childish smile, ‘Oh, at the last moment, Jules and I could not resist sticking the last paragraph in; they're not giving us anything for this. It's not convincing and they'll hate us, anyhow, so we thought we might as well put a little sting in the tail. Why not? What difference does it make? He's dead and they're bastards. And I'm a whore, Jacques.'

His soft bluish pallor arranged itself into masses and shades: he became a mask in the bad light, the mask of tragicomedy, a sort of pathetic minotaur.

Old Richard Plowman came in quite shaken. He had chatted every day with John Tanker, Sr. ‘Did you see the suit of his children to break his will and stop the bequests to charity on the ground that he was insane?' He sat down. He looked older: they both saw that Dick Plowman, who had been so chipper till yesterday, till seventy-two, would lose hold and age suddenly. At seventy-five he would be senile.

Jules roved up and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Don't think about it, Dick: your children are not that sort.'

‘I've done the same thing,' said Plowman. ‘I've bought them off!'

Alphendéry said, ‘They're Americans: they have a more brutal way of behaving, they waste no time in foot scrapings—that's why it shocks our European sense, that's all. Why, Dick, your head's not going to start turning at human venality at your age! Tanker would not have been in the least surprised; the proof is, that his will is unbreakable—he foresaw some such procedure! He laughs at them from his funeral urn.'

But Plowman was suffering from a revulsion and fear they were twenty or thirty years too young to understand, the fear of the dishonored sepulcher, the unloved grave; as well as a respectable horror at the snatching of a property and charitable piety from a dead hand and soul. He raised his head with a strange look, his lips moved and they heard:

How sharper than the serpent's tooth,

It is to have a thankless child …

A look of astonishment grew: ‘Why, they are trying to prove their father mad.'

‘Only make your will so well, Richard, and you'll have nothing to fear,' advised Alphendéry.

But Richard was broken by another idea. ‘Jules, I don't say it's true, it must be a rumor, but they say you sent a letter saying Tanker was insane and appeared bizarre in the bank.'

Jules said indifferently, ‘Not I, I didn't; did you think I would?'

He was troubled. ‘No.'

Jules said coolly, and with cheerful perfidy, to Alphendéry, ‘You did no such thing, did you, Michel?'

Michel could not lie any more, he suddenly found. ‘Yes, I did, Jules.'

Jules had reddened: a low and cowardly trick of Alphendéry to let him down; he knew Alphendéry's coward conscience. Alphendéry looked grave: he was irritated with Jules finally. Jules said in a harsh loud voice, exasperated, ‘Michel, why the deuce do you do these things without consulting me? I have no idea of what's done in my own bank! You compromise me without so much as letting me know that you've written a letter. Where is the letter? I want to see the Tanker letter. Get it at once!'

Alphendéry knew the letter was in Jules's desk, under his hand. ‘I tore it up, Jules! I threw away both the letter and my answer; it was just a fantasy, it will have no weight.'

Jules snarled, ‘What the deuce do you waste your time for then, sending letters with no weight?' He looked to Plowman for comfort, ‘You see, Richard, how things are run round here. How can I make money? The two of them lost fifteen thousand francs last week.' Fifteen thousand francs was a sum paid to Carrière the week before. Jules threw in, ‘Your advice, Richard, is better than theirs: I don't know why I don't always follow it.' In a calmer tone: ‘With their fantasies I'd be ruined, if it were not for my exceptional luck. I make back at Deauville in a night what they lose in a month!'

Plowman hung piteously round the bank all day getting under the feet of them all. In Alphendéry's office he returned to the attack. He continued, sermonizing Alphendéry's drooping face. Alphendéry had taken off his glasses and his large dark eyes opened rebelliously or melancholy on Plowman from moment to moment like two limpets.

‘You're probably laughing at me. You're a great mystery to me: you are half an angel and half a devil, half dishonest and half honest. Pardon me: that's what I say to myself. I'm not a psychologist: I'm a simple man, that's the only way I can express it. I'm sure you're not like that. At first, I thought you were Jules's friend, simply devoted to him; then I thought you were a vaudevillist, a Rabelaisian sort; then I got worried: I thought you were two-faced; now, I know you're not that, but I'm puzzled … At any rate, you must forgive an old man. I've been so upset by this letter, this affair of Tanker … Banks aren't asked for services like that! What sort of a reputation have you? … That isn't banking.'

A smile was beginning on Alphendéry's crushed face, ‘Richard, this is a telescoped bank, a private luxury bank: here we do things on the first floor that they do on the fiftieth story in a fine New York bank, that's all. This is a bank between friends.'

Plowman frowned. ‘No honest man could think the way you do, and yet you do nothing dishonest, small things like this letter, squibs they would be if it weren't so macabre, so horrible … Alphendéry, I'm certain that Jules would make more money if you left him. Please leave the bank. I'll help you with some of my friends. I can recommend you: I know you're a good man. But you need someone who can stand up to you. Other men, men of another type, would take what you say, sift the grain out of the chaff, but these boys can't. I'm making no imputations on your honor. It's strange, but you're honorable, straightforward. You're extremely subtle. It's the question of Jules especially. These boys are more to me than my own children, or rather, Jules is and dear Claire. It's selfish of me to talk this way.' He wiped his eyes. ‘You have your life, I have mine. I'm an old man. I'll be going the way of John Tanker.'

Alphendéry looked at Plowman with pity. ‘I don't see them so much, Richard.' Rarely, he told himself that Jules was a snob: Alphendéry would not wear dress clothes and further had not dress opinions. Jules, who flew all the color of rebellion in business, at home with his ‘Babs' and his ‘Camillas,' his ‘Tonies' and ‘Alines,' kowtowed to their fluff universe, and Claire, a sensible woman of character, babbled incessantly in a baby accent simply because it was the fashion.

Richard murmured, ‘I'm not jealous, Michel. It's another thing. You make them think too much about their place: that gives them a sense of futility, so that they don't construct—they only think of bearing the market, destroying, getting in on “rackets,” as they say. Then, you spoonfeed them, you dramatize the bank for them; they see too far. They talk things over together like two boys playing back in the nursery.'

Plowman looked at Alphendéry calmly, with his dignity of old bank manager. ‘Without Jules this bank is nothing, empty stones; your talk is clever, but it leads nowhere. Without Jules you could shut up shop tomorrow. Why do you hobble him? Jules is not only brilliant, but solid: a rare combination. Akin to genius. And modest, so he thinks you have more brains than he, and he listens. I know you've a good heart. If you'll consent to work elsewhere, Alphendéry, I'll give you what introductions I can.'

Alphendéry's eyes were moist, he looked at Plowman with a curious mixture of resentment and self-deprecation: by moments, his eyes scintillated too, with amusement, with anger—it was hard to say.

‘I can't see myself in that light, Plowman.'

Plowman hardened. ‘I'm not fanciful, I'm not theatrical, I don't pretend you're an agent of Moscow.' His simple staid face, with its lines of married ecclesiastic, comfort-loving, full of unresisting, blue-eyed compromise, tried to place a penetrative suggestive look in Alphendéry's candid and now rollicking brown ones.

‘My word,' murmured Alphendéry, restored to calm and watching the old man with circumspection, for, after all, his job was in question, ‘you give me credit for a lot of spiritual cross-purposes and moral power, Richard. Are you sure you're not taking me for a Jew; you know, the hornèd Jew?'

Plowman flushed. He had always been a sensitive liberal. After a silence Plowman said, ‘Jules's idea was to make a fortune; now, what is his idea?'

‘To make a fortune,' said Alphendéry, laughing all over again, tumbling into the well of his own fun and glistening.

‘No,' said Plowman. ‘I don't see the same thing now. Now, he wants to win at all costs, when others are losing; he wants to be brilliant when the rest of the world is going bankrupt.'

Alphendéry said with gravity, ‘We get in clients with the idea that they will destroy themselves, that what they do is wrong, fated to ruin them, that whatever they do can only bring them nearer to the day when they will be begging their bread or living on their children. Tanker escaped it by dying too soon: nevertheless, his fortune declined by three million dollars while he was with us, and that entirely without any aid by us. But apart from this natural mortality in business and private fortunes, we have now reached a stage of the world where all rich men of mediocre fortune, that is, all but the very highest, who have already banded themselves into iron companies, are going under; the poor have been bled since all eternity; the middle-class doesn't count any more—its blood has been sucked: now is the turn of the medium rich and they are our clients. Whom have we on our books? Only one or two shareholders of the Banque de France, for example, and then they have given us the parings of their business. Our clients belong to the parvenu and accidentally rich, who are rapidly being shorn of all they have. Every year or two, storms come: the plums fall, some into our lap. We wait. Is that criminal? Is that “destructive.” We are small prospectors, Richard: we must be satisfied with washings. We're trimmers. Consider Jules's nature, too. No, my function with Jules is most serious. I know his function, I know his chances. I instruct him carefully in them: he makes no mistake as to his role. He is a raider. Don't forget he and I have made some twenty-five million francs since 1929 on my policy.'

Plowman regretfully nodded, ‘I don't deny it; but I deny it was made on your policy: it was made on his.'

‘You don't understand the postwar world, Richard, if you'll forgive me saying so. You walked into a neat subaltern position in a banking system already past its golden age. Look how astonished, even wounded you were when Insull weakened: you knew Insull, you could not believe that such a ‘fine fellow' would be involved or would be the fantastic he suddenly appeared to be. And Lord Kylsant, a noble lord: dear me! Ah, worse is to come, Plowman—your green old age will be full of surprises. Kreuger will crash, bigger fellows than that will crash before you're through.' He laughed, ‘You have a definite impression that I'm responsible, at least partly for the crashes of Loewenstein, Hatry, Royal Mail, Besnard, Gualino, Oustric, and company.'

‘You're making a joke of it as usual, Michel.'

‘If you examine your heart, Plowman, you'll find you have that impression: you blame me.'

Plowman was silent for a moment, then said with an evident lack of determination, ‘No, no, that would be simply an antipathy. I only mean—there are incompatibles, as they say. You should be working with brilliant men of the world, with an old banking family, with—with men like yourself, of—of—with—'

‘With Jews?' hazarded Alphendéry cruelly.

‘No, you know, Michel, that I am—and have always been almost fatuously philosemite. No, I mean with men of a profounder European type. European? The fact is in the East I've met Chinese of your type. The same fatalism, the same cynicism, the same disbelief in everything.'

‘How you misunderstand me, Richard!' said Alphendéry affectionately, flattered. ‘I am neither fatalist nor cynic; I am a young-hearted optimist; only I have hope in things not yet born.' Alphendéry looked at him with glittering eyes.

Plowman suddenly felt immensely fatigued. The emotion of the morning, the fear of death, disputation. He hardly knew how he had taken this bold step with Alphendéry. He had dreamed for over a year of evicting Alphendéry, kindly, respectfully, if possible and with no financial loss to Alphendéry. He had lain awake at night, reasoning with the docile shadow of Alphendéry.

Plowman smiled a little: ‘Well, good luck, Alphendéry, but I want you to seriously consider my proposition. You don't perhaps recognize your own—hem—'

His old friend Frank Durban had entered the room and was standing round and solid between them.

‘Hello, Frank!'

‘Hello. Take his advice, Alphendéry,' said Durban. ‘You've had the good fortune to get a reputation of wizard and mystery man from the nitwits. Get yourself a good job while you can. Anyone will take you at the moment in Amsterdam or London, even farther afield. The cholera is going about, and I'm cholera-wise: I smell it here!'

Plowman murmured, ‘Frank! A joke is—'

‘A joke! Priests tuck up their skirts and run when it rains, even though they believe in God; this place looks all wet to me. You're a fool if you stay, Alphendéry—but you have your reasons for what you do. This old cobber of mine is a double-fool, fool-born and fool-matured: his boys, his Jules, his William. I don't have to wonder what his boys are thinking about in secret: I know. Take your money out and buy a lot in the cemetery, Richard: it's better than burying it in Jules's vaults.'