House of All Nations (91 page)

Aristide had just induced Madame de Sluys-Forêt to sell all her shares, in the belief that the market was ready for another dive, when markets rose all over the world, and Madame de Sluys-Forêt, along with other dames of consequence, began to din their complaints in Aristide's ears all day long.

He said desperately to Marianne, ‘I shall blow my brains out if this continues; it is the finishing touch. They tell me to get my clients to sell out and then they expect me to face the music: nothing doing,' and took a train for Biarritz.

At Biarritz, too, he had something to attend to. His foolish son had got in with a band of young Spaniards who intended to foment a ‘Carlist' rising in favor of old Don Jaime. Young Raccamond was negotiating the sale of old ships out of Marseille for gun running: a nice business. Young Raccamond was ‘sick of the French' (who had arrested him for signing checks without provision) and had become a royalist; there would only be purity, he opined, under a king.

Raccamond was a center conservative-liberal: he had no illusions about ‘the forty kings who in a thousand years made France'; and although he knew the nobility that he courted were tender to pale youths who went in for royalism and general rightist rebellion, he wanted no political involvements. He had his own and they were with Carrière and Jules Bertillon, Bertillon being an intimate friend, as he believed, of Débuts of the Banque du Littoral du Nord.

When he was safely in Biarritz, he telegraphed Marianne Raccamond, who put on her best tailored suit and went in in tears to see Mr. Bertillon.

‘My husband has had a nervous breakdown: Mr. Alphendéry advised him to tell his clients to sell out—they did so, and now they are threatening to withdraw their accounts. Mr. Raccamond fears that he will lose them all. Of course, I have assured him that there is nothing to worry about, as the loss was sustained on the advice of the bank.
Doubtless
, you will make some arrangement with them.'

‘Tell him to take a rest if he feels bad and come back as soon as he's well. We need him. In the meantime, we'll fix up everything with his clients. Tell him not to worry.'

‘He has always been on good terms with his clients, and he has worked so hard to build up a position that naturally he feels as if all his work is rooted out: his is an absolute nature.'

But Madame de Sluys-Forêt stage-managed a creditable scene of hysterics both over the telephone and in the front office, and as a result Marianne was able to tell Aristide that his clients, Madame de Sluys-Forêt and the Princesse Delisle-Delbe, were ‘reinstated,' their losses made good by the house. Aristide came out of his hiding place.

A Changed Man

* * *

Scene Seventy-seven: A Changed Man

M
ichel Alphendéry, speaking to a Sunday congregation of socialist workers at Juvisy, was very different from the baffled, romantic, encyclopedic but neurotic Alphendéry of weekdays. His serried, dry, and humorous lectures, delivered in an even voice at great speed, gave him a following of young disputatious student-workers and old socialist wisebeards, union secretaries, former orators, former admirers of Blanqui, Ferry, Garibaldi, Jean Jaurès and others whose names are multiplied in the avenues, boulevards, streets, and squares of southern France, especially.

Alphendéry commented on Mussolini's dictum: ‘Without fascism bolshevism might engulf Europe.'

‘Fascism, something that Engels foresaw but that the capitalist class happened on, as they happen on any expedient, irrational but resolute, a sort of introvert imperialism, bringing back into Europe the methods used in South America, the dictators of South America, the prison and bloodshed of South America, and India, and Indo-China and the Congo—fascism has not been presented in one of its simplest aspects: it is the savior of capitalism (they say); but what saves fascism? The money of free peoples. Just as no South American dictator was able to exist without financing by free and therefore rich commonwealths, nations with liberal forms of government and free trade, as France, the U.S.A., and England, so no European “Supremos” can or will be able to exist without financing by freer forms of government, without the financial aid of England, France, the U.S.A. … if they exhaust the sympathy of these peoples, or if a socialist revolution, such as that which has taken place in the U.S.S.R. should deprive them of financing they must fall: they cannot produce, they can only imbibe from outside; they live on the juices of more vigorous states. Now capitalism is only vigorous as it knows freedom. The decay of the host brings the decay of the parasite. Far from saving capitalism, fascism exhausts it. But capitalism is not an abstract idea, it is not a dying tree, it is a form of organization of peoples, and fascism exhausts those peoples: it oppresses its own and robs others. If one remembers that fascism has, so to speak, no normal internal financing and lives on repudiated loans, that is, on gifts, we perceive that it is an ugly temporary expedient.'

Alphendéry's emphasis and pauses were as expressive as his sentiments. Jean Frère was ravished. ‘I always knew you had the stuff, Michel; but by jingo, I didn't know you were a socialist orator of the grand school. You're a changed man. I don't recognize in you the fatalist Alphendéry of the bank.'

‘I am not the same.'

‘How you have wasted your time, Michel! What a pity you went in for banking! What made you do it?'

‘My father died. My mother wanted me to take up a liberal profession. An old inventor who had made himself rich, a real inventor, adopted me and put me to work at fourteen, saying I should have nothing to do with the schools. He put me into finance. He intended to make me his heir. There was a rupture, I never cared to court him since—he's still alive, anyhow, at eighty-eight: money is a great embalmer. And I've been in his finance ever since. In a nutshell …'

‘Yes, but since you became a Marxist, why—?'

‘Defect of temperament, dear Jean.'

‘What a pity! You must change, Michel; you must not be lost.'

‘I know this is my real métier.'

Jean clapped him on the back. ‘Of course.'

A broken-down, middle-aged worker approached him, began mumbling to him. Jean, with embarrassed looks around, gradually edged away from the crowd and from Michel. He pulled his broken hat farther over his eyes, peered anxiously through the fallen lock of hair. The man talked on, argued. Jean's face dropped, his eyes became woeful. After some seven or eight minutes, he excused himself abruptly and reached Alphendéry's side.

‘A loan?' said Alphendéry.

The man stood gloomily against the platform. ‘You see,' said Jean, hopelessly, ‘you see why I hate to come to these things? If I don't get him a job, or get him local relief, all he can do will be to commit suicide. If I don't help him out at once, he'll be found floating in the Seine tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. He doesn't want money. His wife doesn't know he hasn't a job. He goes out every day at six-thirty in the morning to fool her and comes home at five-thirty. He's been doing it for nineteen months, giving her money each week out of his savings! Now, they're all gone. It's horrible, isn't it! What can I do? You see what they expect me to do. Why me?' he suddenly said with an explosion of wrathful misery. ‘A folk hero! I am to work miracles! I'm sick of it. Every time I come to one of these affairs it's the same. I'm afraid to show my head.' He pulled Michel by the sleeve, ‘Let's get out of here!'

Michel dragged himself away with regret. Jean went up to the miserable man, smiled, patted his shoulder, then rejoined Michel. ‘I told him to come and see me tomorrow at the paper. What can I do for him? At any rate, to prevent him from throwing himself under the subway tonight. A day gained. Ah, Michel, Michel; it's no life. I must get away from Paris for a while. I can't stand their miseries. To forget politics for a while, to forget the unemployed, the fellows with their miseries, the scandals, the alarums, the war that's coming. You see, I'm not a political type, Michel. They don't understand that. Even with a Lenin, even Lenin, they had to wait twelve, twenty years, before they had any hope—and now, the first Five-Year Plan not through and Europe waiting to fasten its fangs in Russia's throat. It's no life, Michel; or I'm tired. Michel, come down with me to my garden; don't talk politics. I'll go down with Judith tonight and you come tomorrow or the day after. Get a day off. Come down and don't chew the rag; just sit and let me be quiet and breed ideas.'

Alphendéry was speechless at the mention of the garden, shuddered. Jean's heavy muscular hand fell on his shoulder. ‘Michel?' His caressing voice entreated him: ‘Michel, you can do it.'

‘I have a heavy position,' Michel said nervously. ‘I can't leave it. Jean, I'll tell you because it's no interest to you. We're short 83,700 shares of stocks of all values, a position worth, at the moment, in the neighborhood of eighty million francs. I alone, outside the Bertillon family, know the position. I alone, excluding the Bertillon family, am managing the account. You see that I can't leave.'

Jean had turned pale. ‘Michel! If the market goes up?' He took his arm.

Michel laughed. ‘Oh, don't worry. If it goes down, we make a real fortune, Jean; if it goes up—we skip! Our money is abroad. Now, hush, not a word.'

Jean looked entirely addled. ‘Oh, heavens, not a word, no! But Michel, if you skipped, what a scandal! Michel, you could not work for us. Oh, what danger you are in! Michel, get out of it. Don't be in that danger! How do you manage it? I wouldn't sleep a wink any night.'

‘I stay up till three or four o'clock,' said Michel with a sad smile. ‘I work things out, I read Marxism, consoling myself, and then I fall into bed, dead. That's how I sleep. I get up late in the morning. The hotel boy wakes me and brings me my shoes. I go down the street, have coffee at a cabmen's bar, standing up at the zinc. I talk to the bus conductor. That's how I keep sane. When I get to the office, I am ready for their lunatic world. In between times, I used to go and talk to Adam. Then I have to wait for you boys after work. That's how I keep sane.'

Jean's lips were trembling, ‘You oughtn't to be in that business, Michel. How do you think the market will act?'

‘Down,' said Michel grimly. ‘Otherwise—'

‘I'm as dumb as an ox in finance, but those eighty million francs, er, are they Bertillon's? I don't understand.'

‘I'll explain it all to you, Jean. But not tonight, if you don't mind. I'm more tired than I thought, and the mere thought of our position,' he laughed gaily. ‘No, don't worry about me: it's too monstrous, you see. One can worry about five thousand francs. If they're lost, it's a tragedy. But about eighty million—if they're lost, the world's come to an end—who could worry?'

Alphendéry in his Rue Volney coat and Jean in his rough campaign coat went out, leaving the secretary to trim up. The book peddler made a few sales, the meeting organizer took up a collection, the few friendly groups shivered together for a few minutes, prefatory to returning to their cold cheap hotel rooms and pallets and holes and close family bedrooms. The secretary, in his greasy dilapidated trench coat, his healthy thin blond face eager and battling, rubbed his hands, asked members what they thought of the new lecturer, took notes of their criticisms, bloomed with content at his new acquisition. ‘Did you notice how I advertised it?' he asked them, genial. ‘I got in first, under the
A's, After the demonstration
—it's very important what is read first.' He had a piece of paper in his hand with notes on it. He had yet little but open-air and strike experience, so he had taken a few notes on Alphendéry's manner of presentation and delivery, Alphendéry being above all a class-amphitheater and hall speaker.

The members of the audience now pressing out, either pretended not to see Alphendéry out of courtesy, or dropped him a timid smile. One or two engrossed in union affairs bustled along by themselves. A thin small fellow with faded blond hair and caved-in chest, without an overcoat, his poor boots covered with slush, from the dirty miles he had walked in the ‘demonstration' that day, scuttled out, giving Alphendéry and Frère an angelic little smile. This night the air was biting and the temperature of the lecture-room, frigid.

‘Oh, my God,' cried Alphendéry as if he had a shooting pain, ‘look at them! Look at him; in this weather!'

The secretary came up, flushed with success.

‘You need a stove,' said Alphendéry suggestively.

The secretary looked annoyed. ‘Yes, I've asked the man who runs this hall—a dozen times: he could put in an oil stove. I must remember to ask again.'

‘The way they come,' said Alphendéry. ‘The courage of these men.'

‘Eh, eh?' said the secretary looking round.

‘Coming here in this weather, without proper clothing after marching all day … And then they pay voluntarily for learning, for hearing about the finances of Europe, for hearing about the Rothschilds, the De Wendels, the Schneiders, the Du Ponts. And they're grateful to me.' He put his hand to his face for a moment, laughed in an embarrassed fashion. ‘Oh, oh, and to think I used to despise people who went to night schools as piddlers, dreamers.'

Jean Frère looked round vaguely, rosy; he smiled. ‘You've got to know the background.'

The secretary, who had often gone to lectures in the same conditions, but was a healthy vigorous animal, strong and ambitious, and with enough of the honest careerist in him to enable him to cut his way to the top, only listened to this with half an ear. ‘They're mostly regulars,' he explained; ‘I'm disappointed that there was such a small attendance tonight, but the demo always takes my people away. Another time you'll get more. You'll get known, you see,' he explained encouragingly to Alphendéry. ‘They wanted to talk to you tonight, but another time is better: we ended late. You talk to them, Michel, and you'll learn what they most want to know. They're very eager; you can say that those who came tonight are the most loyal. I missed a few.' He frowned. ‘Excuse me while I see that the lights are all out.' He came back, took Alphendéry's hands in his, shook them hard. ‘Thanks ever so much,' and hurried back.