House of All Nations (93 page)

Strasbourg, March 31, 1932

My Dear Son,

Thank you for your letter. Look after your health. My own health is bad and I fear I am not long for this earth. But do not worry about me: what can't be cured must be endured. Here is a letter from Estelle's sister-in-law, Betty, the Dutch girl, you remember. I think she is very fresh, but I send it on since she asks me to. I am glad your nice Mr. Bertillon has had good luck; everyone knows about it. What a surprise for you! I am so tired that I need a little fresh air: I asked the old coachman to come every day at three and take me out; it costs so very little, but if you do not wish it, I will tell him not to come any more. The fresh air gives me a little interest in the world … I have so little now. Estelle writes me nice letters. Write to her, Michel: I have few friends; she is not a bad girl, giddy, that is all. May you ever be happy, and wiser than you are!

Your old sweetheart,

Mother

And the sister-in-law's letter sang a sweet, but opportune tune,

Amsterdam, March 28, 1932

Dear Mother Alphendéry,

Thank you so much for your sweet letter and it was so sweet of you to answer my little card so promptly. I had your address from dear Estelle and of course Amsterdam is ringing with the success of the bank Michel is in, so I thought I would write and congratulate you, and him; but I know that is one and the same: I am so glad that you are feeling much better and think you are quite right to engage a little carriage for the afternoons, especially with the good weather. The weather here is the usual, but warmish. Amsterdam is so charming and you would adore it—it certainly is a wonderful city and I am happy here with my dear husband and our little ones … It is strange, but we spoke of you all this very afternoon, you and Michel and Estelle and other dear ones. My Willem and Jan remember you and ask, ‘Will dear Mother Alphendéry come to Ams'a-am?' We have a nice five-room apartment on the top floor near the Kayser gracht and I pay 100 guilders but I will rent out two rooms and help with our rent. Jan was very ill and we thought he was going to die—he got a streptococcus germ in his throat and ran 40 for nearly three weeks, I had to take him for X-ray treatments. Think of the expense for such poor people. But the children are everything to us. Now we are strapped. I asked Estelle if she thought Michel could help us, and we will repay. What do you think, dear Mother? I would not ask unless I asked you first … And now, good-by; let me hear a yes or no—I shall write to you again soon. All my dear love to you and kiss from Jan and Willem who love you.

Lovingly,

Betty

P.S. Remember me to Estelle and dear Michel when you write.

William suggested an exhibition of begging letters: all members of the staff to contribute. Jules was rueful. He was for paying them all something to hear no more of it; he felt that these were mildew on his good luck and he wanted no ill wishers. At his request, therefore, Michel sent off small checks to everyone: to Légaré, two thousand francs; to Bomba (unknown to William), five thousand francs; to Betty, twenty guilders; and Jules told him to send his mother two thousand francs extra to pay for her carriage. ‘Spoil the old thing,' said Jules. ‘There's this difference between her and the others, that she really loves you.' Armand Brossier came up genteelly but with a certain assurance, and said that he was marrying and would like an advance; he received an advance of five hundred francs a month. Jacques Manray asked for a holiday and got it. Jules paid out these propitiatory offerings to his gambling god. This done Jules shrugged with a faint contempt, put on his hat, and vanished from the crystal towers of his dreams, into the daytime street.

The news of his gift to Alphendéry became common talk in the city; even the cashiers and tellers felt some envy. Aristide Raccamond's heart turned upside down: for days and nights he raged at the injustice of it. He trembled looking back at the danger the bank had been in! If the scale had tipped the other way—where would they all have been? Between envy and fear, he came to the edge of a nervous breakdown, quarreled with his clients and every day hysterically brought their troubles on to Jules's carpet. They had lost where Jules had won and they were bitter: Jules must pay them off, repay their losses, divide something of his enormous winnings with them …

‘Why?' asked Jules calmly of Aristide, but unable to bear the neurotic pressure of Aristide and of Marianne, who came to see him when Aristide was taking headache powders at home, he paid off the cinema star Freddie Pharion, twenty-five thousand francs, and to Dr. Froude, Raccamond's largest and best-paying client, thirty-five thousand francs. No sooner were these acts of grace performed than Aristide conceived that real injustice had been done his clients, and he began gloomily to read past records and find out other losses that his clients had sustained, and to clamor that they now were dissatisfied. Jules, although he detested him, and had a fear of him tainted with superstition, took him out to lunch at Fouquet's and promised him a participation in all future operations. Aristide was relieved at this and immediately proposed a ‘paper to that effect' to be drawn up by his lawyer.

‘No paper,' said Jules with sudden wrath, bringing down his firm hand on the table. ‘No one has to complain of me.'

Aristide paled and pondered. When he reported the affair to Marianne, she proclaimed, ‘There is trickery there and it will have a bad denouement, unless you are careful.'

He was silent for several minutes, then: ‘The thing that terrifies me, Marianne is—the policy. All that short position!' He stared at Marianne, his great cheeks drooping: impossible to say what his physiognomy was like because of all the timid fat that covered him. Marianne knew. When he came out of the war he was still thin, lank, great-eyed, blue-chinned, with the look of an Italian peasant. The fat, as his bourgeois dress and his city manners, were acquired since. He had intelligence; the war had given him
savoir-faire
amongst men and necessary vices.

‘Nevertheless, they made money,' said she, not quite understanding.
‘But it's not natural: it's against nature, to be always betting on the wrong side,' exclaimed Aristide honestly. ‘It seems almost—crooked. And suppose they always do it! Suppose they have, even now, some such position in another stock. It can't happen all the time! This was just luck. When it turns the other way—where will we all be? I won't sleep at night, Marianne, you know me.'

She considered, ‘That's true: too bad you didn't get him to divide on this cleanup. Well, we will think of a way. Now, another thing, I went to Carrière today and he's agreed to put up twenty thousand francs towards my sheet. I told him I had a friend in Hollywood, in the Hearst interests who would give me original dope. He was impressed. I rather think the French cinema attracts him.'

‘We could do something along that line, one day. If I got an organization—'

‘We will make out together. Léon won't part up, Bertillon is not interested in enterprises, but Carrière is the man with vision, the man of the future.'

Jules's spring suddenly dried up. The last one to drink was Cancre, an artist picked by Alphendéry. He came from a miserable town, Troyes, had come to Paris to pick up a living as a tailor. He went to Montparnasse by accident, was dazzled by the
Vie de Bohème
, and discovered a talent for drawing. Some famous artist praised him and Cancre saw a brilliant future opening for him. He borrowed money for his hotel bill, for paints, brushes, canvases, left work, had no money for lessons, starved, and occasionally, to put a bite between his teeth, cadged from the flush and the drunk at Montparnasse, or painted uncouth, brilliant washes (‘after Cézanne and Van Gogh') which he sold to the unsuspecting and round the Montparnasse station. There Alphendéry found him, encouraged him, and bought his works at ‘any price you like to give.' For a while Alphendéry was convinced that the ‘early sketches of Cancre' would be worth their weight in gold. Cancre had now exhausted all his resources, all his friends. His wife, a young pretty tubercular girl whose father was a railway ganger at Aubervilliers, and whose dream of romance seemed fulfilled when she fell in love with an artist, had fallen into a frightening decline. The letter told this. Would Jules lend Cancre the railway fare to take his wife to a sanatorium, and to take him back to Troyes to work as a tailor with his brother? Cancre was an honest man. He sent Jules by Aristide a ‘portrait of Jules the banker, by hearsay': a hard, crude thing in oils, together with a copy of his ‘manifesto.'

‘Vous êtes poêt? Alors, vous n'est pas un homme! Vous n'est pas simple! Vous avez compliquez votre jeoi et votre douler. Tout la nature se réveille, tout la nature s'éffleuris, se réjeouis, et le pas de poèt devient gràve et loud comme si c'été le dernier jour de la terre. J'ai pitié de vous mon poèt, et pourtant c'est à moi que je parle comme a vous. Ne cherchez jamais rien. Selon les mérites, vous aurez tout ou rien. Apprenez de poèt qui cherche toujours et trouve jamais, ou qu'il le cherche, le paradis, il en trouve l'enfer. Son printemps nest pas un printemps, son printemps est un calvair. Faut-il être misérable, pour être un poèt! Bref, oui! Ou faire tomber son oéuvre de bateau ivre? Dans un village ou il n'y a pus que des poètes. Paris!'

Jules, to whom the illiterate complaint of the miserable and starving poèt meant nothing at all, paid for the portrait another two thousand francs and told Alphendéry in a hard voice ‘to give it to him and tell them both to get back to Troyes and forget the Bohemian boloney' If he had no influence he'd get nowhere: Fragonard, Boucher, Derain? A question of getting the right people to support one!

‘I don't say he's bad,' said Jules, squinting at the portrait. ‘I even think he's pretty good, but he's poor and it shows in his drawing; no one wants it.' Alphendéry went with profuse thanks and Jules became sulky. Like all openhanded people who go in for an orgy of spending, he suddenly knew satiety. He would spend no more; he would have the pleasure of saving, for a salutary change. He suddenly regretted the stream of cash that had flowed from his open hands: he shut them. He determined to make up the loss; and Mouradzian, Cristopoulos, and Thomas Sweet began to find him a source of commission-income again. While others cried, ‘The purification of the system,' he smiled sardonically, ‘Where one Kreuger, one Oustric, one Hatry is found—there sprout a hundred; and for each one ruined, there are a hundred making money hand over fist. Why not—they're all like me,' he explained to his intimates. ‘… crazy, expensive, flighty, daring—birdmen of finance!'

* * *

Scene Eighty: Measure of Brains

R
accamond has just appointed another accountant in London to replace the one we sacked. And what has he done, the other accountant? Found work! Astonishing! No one will sit idle! Mad world. Worse than that, the more he steams and puffs, the more he's convinced he has ability. It's fatal: a man employs one clerk, he has a minimum of ability; he writes one letter, he's a zero. He employs one hundred clerks and he's earning his stripes. He says, ‘Dupont, write this identical letter to five thousand people in the telephone book,' and he's almost a captain of industry. Of course, that makes ‘work.' And poor Dupont thinks he's important: he begins to fret because he's not getting on, he wants to be as vacuous, as viciously useless as his boss.'

Jean Frère said curiously, ‘But it is a bank like the others, after all!'

‘Of course. The terror of it! Don't forget there is this bank, which is Jules's, and that of the employees, to whom it represents not only the old order, a stable financial system, the basis of the center-left, republican, catholic or socialist politics they go in for. It also represents their home, hopes of marriage, children, summer holidays, life insurance, old father's kitchen garden, medical expenses, everything in life. They take it very seriously. They must. They read the newspapers, particularly any news affecting banks and banking, and imagine that they have penetrated it more easily, due to their experience in Bertillon Frères. They are getting on in life. They are ‘well-placed.' And this bank is nonexistent: it is nothing! It has no purpose. It is a privateer's fantasy: here today and gone tomorrow. Oh, God, it frightens me! Look at Raccamond struggling the way he does, trying to oust William and me, jealous of Mouradzian, treading on the corns of the lesser employees, flattering the clients, running himself to death, being egged on by his ambitious shrew-wife, hoping to cover up all the muddy steps of his early career. Look at Betty, my cousin; at this poor Cancre, at Légaré—the lot of them, believing in an illusion, spending their lives round it. A fantasy in the brain of an ignorant, a flighty, self-centered freak. How unreal, Jean, is this whole world I struggle in and get my gray hairs in!'

‘The employees at the bank, and their idea of the bank, are real, too,' said Jean.

‘No,' said Michel, not able to bear a good word on the bank, ‘no, because they're secretly in league with Jules and the rich people they serve … They believe Jules's dictum implicitly.'

‘That is?' queried Jean Frère.

‘A man's salary is a rough measure of his ability.'

At times Michel resisted the influence of Jean Frère, as now, and feared him. Richer by five hundred thousand francs, he felt less like casting himself adrift.

* * *

Scene Eighty-one: Shadows

R
accamond came in one morning in a delirium of fear, and went straight upstairs to see Jules.

‘Mr. Bertillon, what do you think of the threatened publication by the fisc of a list of all the private banks which defraud the tax collector through holding in their branches abroad, the taxable bonds of clients? What will we do?'