House of All Nations Page 6

  After he left Léon was thoughtful. ‘Well, I don’t want to talk business. But I don’t object to its being little money. Means you can make a graceful exit in a crisis. If France gets any poorer, you’ll have socialism here and they’ll gun for the big fellows … ’ He shook his head. ‘At the same time, it’s small. It depends on yield. You make your money how? That’s what I don’t understand, Raccamond. Can’t figure it out. I’ve been worrying about it, all the afternoon. You don’t give loans, you don’t give commercial credits, you get no half-commission back. Isn’t that what you told me? Then how do you make money?’

  Aristide said, ‘I’ll find out later on: I’ll work it out.’

  ‘Well,’ commanded Léon, having exhausted the subject, ‘don’t let’s talk business. We want to make whoopee, don’t we? No business.’ He clapped his hands and stared round at the pillars. ‘Waiter, where’s the waiter? A bottle of wine. You want some more wine, don’t you, Margaret? Of course. Marianne? Aristide?’ They all licked their lips and agreed under their breaths. Aristide alone said in a businesslike tone, ‘We’ve got enough, Henri.’

  ‘Enough? Enough! Two bottles of wine for four people. You’re not going to go back on me, Margaret? I want to have fun tonight. I come to Paris to have fun. Come on, darling, say you’ll drink some more wine? You will. Waiter! More wine. Another bottle.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Léon looked round the table grandly, with satisfaction. Aristide said, bending over his plate and cutting a great hunk of meat, ‘Bertillon makes fortunes for himself at Deauville and on the stock exchange: he’s lucky—’

  ‘Don’t talk about Bertillon,’ commanded Léon cheerfully: ‘let’s talk about me. I want to be with my friends tonight. What’ll we do afterwards? Eh? A cabaret. The Scheherazade? I’ve got four tickets. A girl there gave them to me. Four tickets and champagne free. She gave me four. We’ll go to the Scheherazade.’

  They ate dumbly while he looked round, searching for fresh horizons to beam upon. He leaned forward. ‘Ah, I tell you, Marianne, Alfonso XIII has to go. They all have to go: all the tyrants. That’s what my heart tells me. No oppression. You can make more money under socialism. And if you couldn’t, I’d still want it … Money-making isn’t all of life. My life would be empty if there were only money-making in it. I tell you, Margaret, if I thought my life was going to end like that, I’d go and throw a bomb at one of the men who are oppressing people. A man can’t go out like that. You light a gas flame, it sings and suddenly it goes out. There’s no more money in the meter. Do I want to be like that? I get sad, Margaret, when I think that my life is empty.’ He got gayer. ‘No, Margaret, I can’t end like that. I’ve got to be famous, Margaret: by James, I’ll be famous, I’ll make my name known, even I have to throw a bomb and kill—George V—no he’s too gray—kill Mussolini and free his people.’ He looked tenderly at them all. ‘Eh, Marianne, did you know I felt like that? No, Marianne, I can’t just be put back into a box after having been out all over the table, like a pack of cards.’ He looked around. ‘My, what a pretty girl! Don’t they have pretty girls here. Hé, Miss!’ The girl smiled and approached with her tray of cigarettes. ‘What do you want, Margaret? Abdullas, Abdullas, Marianne? I’ll buy you all cigarettes. Have you got any small Abdullas, Miss? These, these, no these, haven’t you got any smaller—there you are, Margaret. You’re too pretty to be working here, Miss. Bring me some cigars, will you?’ She went off smiling. He whispered gigantically, ‘I say, she’s a pretty girl: um, isn’t she? Isn’t she a pretty girl? What do you think? Say, they’re pretty smart, aren’t they? Nothing but pretty girls here. Look at the other one: not so bad. Poor girl, I bet she has to work hard.’

  They smiled suitably. The girl approached again. It must not be forgotten that theoretically Margaret Weyman had approached Léon on a business proposition. Léon said, ‘Hey, Miss, what’s a pretty girl like you doing here? You ought to be in the chorus. Aren’t you in the chorus? Why aren’t you?’

  The girl dallied, with aplomb but without conviction. ‘Why, I never thought about it, sir.’

  ‘You’re too pretty to be working here. You work pretty hard, eh? When do you get off?’

  The girl said with a quiet dignity, her eyes having summed up the other women, ‘Oh, late. It depends. I get off at seven and then I have to come back at eight and don’t get off till eleven.’

  Léon shook his head. ‘Eleven! No, that’s late. Young woman mustn’t—unhealthy. And what do you do between seven and eight?’ The girl didn’t even trouble to smile but said in a cash voice, ‘We stay in.’

  Léon was all consideration. ‘You stay in—here, ugh? Upstairs, ugh?’ He shook his head, said to Margaret Weyman, ‘It’s long hours, isn’t it?’ He asked the girl, ‘And then you have to go home: how long does that take you? Is it far?’

  The girl cast eyes at a handsome Balkan man, as she answered carelessly, ‘It’s quite a way. Near the Place de la Nation. I often have to get the all-night bus.’

  Mrs. Weyman, annoyed by Léon’s raw style, got up and asked her way to the ladies’ room. Marianne sat on, ghoulishly enjoying the scene. Léon felt somewhat relieved by Margaret’s exit and made haste to bring things to a head. He finished his canvass in a flurried warm tone: ‘It’s a shame, a pretty girl like you. Would you like to get into the chorus? I know someone in the theater. This gentleman here knows Henri Bernstein, almost all the actors and managers of Paris. Don’t you, Aristide?’

  Aristide was sullen, but Marianne said instantly, ‘Certainly: that’s true.’

  Léon nodded his head like a good little boy, ‘I’ll see if I can do something for you: should you like that, eh? See me after work some night and we’ll fix it up. What do you say, eh?’

  The girl yawned. ‘All right: I don’t mind.’

  ‘When do you get off? Eleven tonight? Tonight?’

  ‘Later,’ said the girl.

  ‘I’ve got a car. I’ll take you in a taxi home. I don’t like to think—pretty girl. You’ll be tired at night. I’ll get you a job, depend on me.’

  The girl smiled sweetly. ‘What have I got to lose? … Tonight, perhaps.’ She went off lingeringly, and with some misshapen gratitude, it seemed, in her heart. Perhaps she was lonely.

  But Léon triumphed and puffed out his chest. He bent to them. ‘Eh? How was that? I don’t waste time. That’s what I say. Do something for a poor girl and she’s grateful. You give a poor girl two and six, and she says thank you and means it. You give a girl you pick up in the Scribe Bar a couple of hundred francs and she hardly opens her mouth. She never reckons it means more than a week’s wages for a miner. She never thinks of the miner working for his wife and children for a week for less than she gets. You’ve got to take working girls to know real gratitude. How did I make out, eh? You think she likes me, Marianne, eh? Yes, I think she took to me.’ He spied Margaret Weyman coming back and finished quickly. ‘Shh! Don’t say anything to her: she’s a nice girl, she’s a nice woman. You know American women—not sophisticated, not European.’

  Margaret sat down. He put his hand on her arm. ‘Margaret—another bottle of wine!—Margaret, did I tell you what I did in the General Strike in 1926? I was in London, see, staying with Strindl and Company, with Taube, he’s a fool, but old Elster is his uncle and let the boy run the business—boy, I say, fifty he is, but Elster is seventy—I was staying with Taube in Hampstead. I wake up in the morning. I eat breakfast at a quarter to eight. There’s no breakfast! There’s no gas to cook me an egg. There’s water running: I can wet my face. That’s all. There isn’t even a tin of salmon in the house. And no grocery boy. All right, I think, I’ll go downtown and get a cup of coffee. I call my chauffeur Corbin. ‘Sorry, sir: I’ve got no petrol. I can’t even get down to the gas station and at the gas station they’ve no deliveries.’ What’s the matter? A general strike. Misery! All right, no tube, no taxi, no car. I must get downtown: see what’
s doing. So I walk. All right. No coffee downtown. I go to the Baltic:* the janitor opened it but who was there? Almost no one could get there. The Post Office was open but who was there to run it? Almost the telephones weren’t working. I walk round. Everyone is gloomy. I go to the Western Union. There are two boys who lived in the city alone working. An American company. ‘Tell me what’s the opening Winnipeg and Chicago.’ Terrible … So it goes. I go home and I think. No business. If business could be done! I come down next day. Some more people are on the Baltic but no business: everyone is walking round gloomy thinking the red flag will be over London. It nearly got by. They nearly got the red flag. And still a terrible market in Winnipeg and Chicago. By the third and fourth day, no one thought of business, people were only wondering if they could get the price of a boat fare to Antwerp or Paris. What a pity, I think. No business being done and the market so low. I get an idea. It looks like revolution. The markets are starving. Not an order out of England in three, four days. They’ll just wolf down any order. So I go to the Western Union and I calmly telegraph to buy half a million bushels wheat in Chicago in Strindl’s name. They had the credit: their credit was still good … Well, I calculated: if it really is the revolution, they can’t dun me in a soviet Britain, can they, for wheat bought before the revolution? And if it isn’t the revolution, if we can sell short on the red flag yet, then the market will go up and I’ll make money. Perfect. I couldn’t go wrong. And I could say, ‘Who telegraphed? Not me.’ I signed Strindl or Elster or Taube. I had a right: don’t forget they were my partners in Amsterdam at the time. No swindle. No. Well, was I right? That’s how I made ten cents a bushel. The market had had a tremendous bust. I plunged. No harm. Fifty thousand dollars—ten thousand sterling. I took a risk. Ha? Margaret, what do you say?’

  * Baltic: Mercantile and Shipping Exchange, London.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind being your partner if there were two of me.’

  Léon took this as a great compliment. ‘You’re great, Margaret. Well, let’s go somewhere. Say, say, look at that girl. What a beauty! Fancy her sitting there like that waiting for men: isn’t it a shame. I’ll tell you what, Margaret, Marianne: let’s ask her to go with us? Yes. Look at her, poor girl. A beauty too. What do you say?’

  He looked eagerly at them.

  ‘I’m a sport, Henri,’ said Marianne, ‘but Aristide and I are rather well known in Paris, and doubtless this woman is, too. What will be thought of us: Aristide’s clients may—no, certainly will see him in the Scheherazade—you can’t take a woman like that with you to the Scheherazade where everyone who counts in Paris may see us.’

  Léon looked crestfallen, but his eyebrows rising took in Marianne’s dowdy black evening dress and sequin-scaled jacket, her badly curled hair, her thick rouge. The handsome woman waiting for men on one of the padded seats had caught his eye by this time and knew he was discussing her: she looked the two women over with superb insolence, and they crumbled and fell to dust at her glance, while she continued to glitter and even grew in beauty like a sea gull letting fall sea drops from wings shaken by sun and wind. Léon dismissed Marianne with an unconscious but careless curl of the lips and nose and turned abruptly to Margaret, took her arm in a brotherly fashion.

  ‘Margaret, come on: we’ll all go along and have a good time.’

  Margaret was recovering from her astonishment enough to look down her nose. This disgusted Léon. He snapped his fingers, smiled at the woman, cried, ‘Madame.’ He said with a sudden malicious inspiration, half intoxicated and half in anger, ‘Margaret, why didn’t I notice it before? This is Mme.—I forget the name—this is the intimate friend of a friend of mine, a grain merchant: why you know, Achitophelous, Marianne, why this is an old friend of his, poor woman: she had a bad time. He isn’t a nice fellow to his women. Poor girl. Imagine her waiting for men in this café. Madame … ’

  He had left them and energetically gained her side. With mocking and brilliant looks she was splendidly flirting with him and sneering at the others. Aristide had pushed a heavy and irritated look towards her, taken her in and now sat with his head bowed over the table, until he had the presence of mind to say, ‘Marianne, Mrs. Weyman, we need not stay: if you like—’

  Mrs. Weyman dryly replied, ‘I think I will stay. If this is really a friend of Mr. Léon, how can we leave him? He is our host. Wouldn’t we look rather ridiculous, suddenly getting up and scuttling? Let’s wait. He’s only doing it to annoy us … ’

  ‘Is he?’ asked Aristide sardonically. ‘I hope so. Let us wait and see.’

  But now Léon came towards them, leading the dark-browed houri by the hand. She was dressed in black, low necked with silver fox furs. An exceedingly smart hat with evening veil set off the black brilliants which were her eyes. Her hair appeared to be done by Antoine: she had platinum and diamond bracelets and silver and ebony bracelets on her arms. She was so much better dressed than either of them and so much grander, silkier, and stranger in manner, like polished ebony, that they were at a loss. She seated herself and Léon said, ‘This is the friend of my old friend Achitophelous, Mme. Verneuil.’

  The women, like two clucking schoolgirls, bowed and felt dowdy. As if forcing them against a background by sketching her own personality in more brilliantly, the alleged Mme. Verneuil lit an opium cigarette, after offering one to each of the other women, showed off her carmine nails and diamonds, and said in a saccharine coo, ‘And what shall we do, Mr. Léon?’

  Léon looked round, said, ‘Let’s get another friend: let’s see if we can see another of my friends. There, on the terrasse.’

  Mme. Verneuil gave a faint start, but came quivering back to the leash, like a black greyhound. ‘You have some more friends here, then, Monsieur?’ She laughed.

  ‘I am looking for more friends. I want all my friends. Eh, Margaret, don’t you want to meet all my friends? I know Paris so well. All my friends have friends in Paris. Let’s take them all out. Poor girls. Such beauties. Such houris. It is practically paradise. You do not mind, dear Madame? Are there any of your friends, here?’

  ‘No,’ said the black-browed Parisienne, slowly, ‘none of my friends is here. I do not think, in fact, I have any friends living or dead, except you tonight, Mr. Léon.’

  Léon frowned at her for a moment, but she only responded with a salon smile. He sawed the air with his hand. ‘Waiter, hé: bring some more wine.’ The waiter looked faintly pained but hurried away. The headwaiter advanced with a real smile and saw to the nesting of the bottle himself.

  ‘I can sing,’ said Léon. ‘In the Seven Mountains, where I was born, everyone can sing. But not here. Do you believe I can sing?’ he said turning suddenly to Margaret and quenching the light in the houri’s eyes.

  ‘I should like to hear you again.’

  ‘You will, you will: but I must have all my friends. I don’t like this female exclusive game—do you, Aristide? Listen, Marianne: Aristide will have four girls and I will have four. We will take out ten girls and two men. That is a dozen. I feel like a dozen, or even a baker’s dozen, tonight. It was remembering the one hundred and twenty-five thousand guilders I made in the General Strike. Ah, Margaret, I was walking down the street this afternoon: I looked in the gutter and saw an empty purse. Think of it, I said to myself. It is a month since I was in love; since I felt in love. That’s a terrible feeling, Margaret. Do you know what I mean? I need romance. Let me have romance tonight. Be nice to me. Bear with me.’ He begged so nicely of them that they all softened and even Aristide left off toying with a coffee spoon and his foggy eyes smiled for a moment, or at least lightened faintly. The women even settled themselves more easily and accepted each other.

  ‘Love is usually a caricature and a bad joke,’ said Aristide.

  ‘I have gypsy blood,’ said Léon: ‘I went to the White Rabbi in—my home—last year, and he said to me, “Olim (my name), you’re a wicked man, but your star is lucky. You are rich a
nd you will go on getting richer.” It is my gypsy blood: it is with me. There is a rose in my blood: wherever I go, stones glittering underneath my shoes. Did I ever tell you my first experiment in agriculture? No. My father died. My poor mother lived by herself with four children. One day my uncle came and drove his cows into our yard. After that we sowed cucumbers. We always sowed cucumbers. We make wonderful pickles,’ he beseeched Madame Verneuil who was bored but pretended to devour him with interest. ‘Pickled cucumbers, what do you call them? When the cucumbers came up, the whole yard was covered with cucumbers: you couldn’t walk without mashing them. I never saw so many. Good, we thought: the yard is good for cucumbers. But next year there were no cows; when we sowed, there were only two or three stringy things. My first lesson in agriculture, you see. At first I thought it was perhaps our gypsy blood, luck. My grandmother—’ he stopped abruptly. ‘Waiter: Aristide! See that girl over there! Aristide: go and get her. It’s a friend of mine. I met her—in the Westminster Hotel. She is a very fine lady. She was worth—millions.’ His eyes danced. ‘Millions of—pesetas: her husband was a Spaniard. Now look at her. Isn’t it sad? We’ll all have a good time. We’ll drink the wine and then we’ll go to the Scheherazade.’

  Aristide sat up and said, ‘I really think we have enough company, Léon. The Scheherazade is really very small and the company is small; you can’t take a big party there unless you arrange—’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re afraid: don’t be afraid, my boy. Go and get the girl. She’s a dear old friend of Mr. Rhys of Rotterdam. When the Spanish husband died, Rhys was very kind to her. Poor girl. Do me a favor, Aristide, and go and ask her.’

  ‘What is your friend’s name?’ said Aristide sternly.

  ‘Ask her! She’s probably married now. You don’t want to offend the ladies—wrong names? You can make mistakes, eh, Marianne?’