House of All Nations Read online

  ‘I’m tired,’ said Margaret firmly. She got into a taxi.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Léon climbing in after her, ‘jump in, I’ll take you home, Margaret, myself. A bit of penance. I need it, eh? Ho, ho. Hotel Westminster, driver. Wait, wait! Jack’s is the restaurant: not Moulin Rouge. Omelet. All have some. Here, Aristide, here’s some money. Here. We had a good time. Made whoopee. Here, girls.’ He handed some money to the tall Russian. ‘Give them one each, one hundred francs each. Had a good time. I enjoyed it. Good night, girls. Here, Aristide, here’s for the omelet—not enough—taxi for you and Marianne. If it costs more tell me in the—h’m. Never mind. Don’t waste money. Driver, Hotel Westminster. Good-by. Marianne! Good night. See you tomorrow. Very sweet of you to come, Marianne.’

  ‘Au revoir,’ called the girls.

  ‘Good night,’ he snapped. He had already forgotten all about them.

  They drove off leaving Aristide and Marianne on the curb with the women. Aristide looked at the money thrust into his hand—four hundred francs. Léon had shortchanged him, as usual. He looked at the girls, only nine of them.

  ‘Here,’ he said in a curious bullying tone to the Parisian woman in black, ‘go and get something to eat!’ He gave her two hundred francs and got into the taxi. ‘Driver, Rue du Docteur Blanche.’

  ‘Hey,’ said the woman, ‘hand over the other two hundred! I saw he gave you four hundred to take us out to supper. And there’s the taxi waiting. Something of the piker in you.’

  ‘Drive on, what are you waiting for?’ cried Aristide savagely. The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders and turned the wheel.

  ‘What about me?’ cried the third chauffeur. There was a shower of insults and reproaches from the girls waiting on the pavement. Stretching her neck, as they turned the corner, Marianne saw that the tall dark girl was paying out and the chauffeur was leaning out of his cab, giving them advice: ‘They are dividing it, all right,’ said she.

  Aristide said wildly, ‘Horrible.’ He struggled for a reason, ‘I don’t want my wife to be seen out with a party like that. Suppose we had been seen. He has no sense.’

  Marianne reflected, ‘Things whizz when Henri’s about. Has he really gone to the station?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘The chit in the restaurant, I suppose?’

  ‘No. The Russian woman.’

  ‘Well, well. Well, she has class, at any rate.’

  ‘Léon stinks of money,’ Aristide said rudely. He wrestled in an agony of envy. ‘Eleven hundred francs to those whores, about one thousand on champagne—they sold him nine bottles of sixty-franc champagne at one hundred and ten francs apiece. Mme. Ashnikidzé got five hundred francs, he’ll probably give this woman a thousand, that’s about her rating. And this evening when I asked him about the twenty-five thousand gulden he owes me, he made a joke out of it. Why shouldn’t they go for him? He bought me for less. I don’t know as much as they do.’

  Marianne asked with circumspection, ‘Did he make you any offer at all, any settlement?’

  ‘No! Said the market had been up and down, his accounts weren’t fixed up for that year because that was the year the books were lost—the usual story. Oh, you know it’s hopeless. He made me a proposition: he wants to become a baron in Belgium. If I act as his go-between and write the proper letters and if he gets it, he’ll see about giving me my twenty-five thousand gulden.’

  ‘And he gave you nothing?’

  Aristide admitted with shame, ‘He gave me—one hundred and twenty gulden—ten pounds in sterling he had on him. I took it. Why not? Anything from that fellow is cream. I didn’t expect that.’

  There was an embarrassed silence. Then Marianne laughed. ‘The deposit technique!’

  ‘What he calls the deposit technique: yes.’

  * * *

  Scene Five: Small Kratz and Great Léon

  Little Julius Kratz, friend of school days and soup kitchens, clung to great Henri Léon as he zoomed upwards, lent him his advice, the advice of a wasp to an airplane, told him his defects with peculiar truth, listened to his inspirations with more asperity than a wife, and devised plots against their friends. Sometimes, in pure mischief, they wrote anonymous letters to friends in business, mentioning magic words: Scotland Yard, the Parquet, the Crown Prosecutor; or sent telegrams worded as follows, All is discovered, fly to the Continent; or, All is discovered, fly to England, which usually resulted in their receiving postcards from Bruges, Milan, or Chester! They studied the lists of donors to the Established Church in the wealthy suburbs in which they lived, and directed income-tax inspectors to these pillars of the church. These little scherzos occupied odd crannies in great Léon’s mind but kept Julius Kratz busy from morning to night. He was forever lounging into some somber and pompous office got up by Léon, with some new joke, over which they would both laugh like hyenas for ten minutes. At the end of the morning, Léon would take Kratz out for coffee and ask him when he was going to pay the next installment due to him, Léon, on the mortgage of his house and Kratz would invariably reply something like this, ‘A fine friend: yes, a mortgage is the gift of the rich to the poor!’ or, ‘You’re a vulture, wait till I’m dead: then you can pick my bones.’ By a law of nature, until they were both forty, Léon always had a mortgage on Kratz’s home.

  Henri Léon, always mindful of the misery from which he had sprung and to which he was determined never to return, had labor sympathies. Further, he aspired to political honors and seeing England as the country in which revolution came slowly and respectably, he got himself naturalized, with the words, ‘England has always welcomed immigrant genius!’

  If he had had more theory and less cupidity, he might have been a great leavener of the masses, a sonorous revolutionist, a meteoric careerist, a second Garibaldi or a Mussolini, perhaps; but he had two fiery passions which stood in his way. The first was love of money and the second, love of women. The first took him to Liverpool and the second there settled his fate. At the age of fourteen, his second talent, proclaimed before, besides, by his brilliant roving eyes and great trumpet nose and that parallel lift of the long shadowy brows and mouth, declared itself in a lively style. He was that creature, rather rarer in the West than in the East, supposed figment of the darling dreams of men and women, so rare that the masters of dreams go looking through history for traces of him as a ‘race concept,’ a Don Juan: a Don Juan in the grain trade. He was the inexhaustible suitor of innumerable women; an insatiable curiosity led him to desert the fair who had once proved frail.

  Henri Léon, settled in London with his lady, was often called abroad. On these trips he was accompanied invariably by Julius Kratz. Kratz provided an alibi for Henri Léon in his gallant adventures in public places, and was a companion in private. When Henri Léon’s ladies, sniffing a little coolness in the air, decided that the time had come to realize their positions and demanded silver foxes, minks, leopards, and other guerdons, it was Julius Kratz who would announce that Henri Léon had just had serious reverses in the stock market. And when some of these ladies took up arms, it was little Julius Kratz, the weasel, not worth shooting, who interviewed them, soothed them, cracked a nasty joke at Léon’s expense, and pocketed the pearl-handled revolver at the psychological moment. In return for this, Henri took Kratz into the cabarets, gambling circles, theaters, follies, bars, restaurants, and whorehouses for which Kratz had the most passionate thirst. He sometimes gave Kratz a little to gamble with, he put him up at hotels, paid for his mistresses, champagne, his wife’s operations, his children’s schooling, his clothes. He took it out in mortgages. He sometimes helped him by writing to Labour members with whom he was intimate (for Kratz often went skulking in fear of the shadow of the Home Secretary), and he took this out by lending Kratz money at a rather high rate of interest. But he lent him money and a man will do anything for that. And Léon seemed to think it only fair, that since he held him in
a vice, he should let Kratz insult him, spit venom at him, and talk scandal about him behind his back.

  In the last ten years Léon’s greed had led him into the bad affairs of the Diamond Syndicate (with Achitophelous), the New-Art Furniture Company promotion (with Leverwurst), the Restaurant Refuse Company (with Jakie Neunkinder), the Artificial Indigo Company (with Schwartzperl), the Color Process Company (with Paul Méline), and several others. In the last ten years, Kratz’s greed had got him into the messes of the Happy Hearthside Company, (with Jakie Neunkinder), the Reformed Rubberized Fiber Company (with Schwartzperl), the Glass Insulation Company (with Leverwurst), and the Good-Little-Larry Toy Company (with Benny Hobogritz). Léon had financed Kratz’s partnership in all the latter, and Kratz had gone in with Léon in all the former.

  At forty, Julius Kratz looked back over his career, decided Henri Léon had all the luck and all the mortgages, took a ticket for Australia for himself, his wife, and children and set sail; but not before he had sat down and written a long letter to Henri Léon, a letter of the most hideous, cruel reviling, touching him on all his soft spots, mentioning that death was just around the corner for him and that the White Rabbi of Botoshani had called him a wicked man and a sordid soul and prophesied his ruin. He saw to one or two other things, too, in between packing his few trunks. He referred all his creditors to Henri Léon, transferred his debit accounts to Léon’s accounts, cabled his friends on the Continent and in America that Léon had ruined him and wrote to the income-tax authorities in England, America, and the Continental countries in which Léon was engaged in business, telling them the true state of Léon’s fortunes and revealing to them where he kept his private trust accounts.

  Scarcely a week had passed in his life, in which he had not made Henri Léon tremble by casually mentioning the Angel of Death; strangely audacious himself, and no doubt thinking Azrael would scorn to stoop and pick up a bug so mean and small as himself.

  When Julius Kratz left so suddenly, Léon felt relieved and then subdued. Then Scotland Yard called upon him and he found out that ‘an anonymous person’ had told them he had four or five passports. Immediately after, the favorite son of the head of Bang’s Grain Company, for whom he was working, ordered in the accountants and made a thorough examination of the books. Léon was forced to take an airing on the Amsterdam quays and hire an office boy to drop some of the books in the Thames mud by accident. When he returned, he found that Marian, his wife, long neglected and at last enlightened (by Kratz), had taken a lover. Following this, laws were introduced in a certain neutral country in which he kept the bulk of his money, threatening him and others like him with heavy taxes. Then a book which had been written for him by a professional ‘ghost,’ and which was the darling of his career, was savagely attacked in the press, as a frost. Within a week of this the minister he had most cultivated in the English cabinet, on whom he had spent the most money, to whom he had written the most artful sentimental letters, and in whose name he held, in his vault, a bundle of photostated checks, died suddenly. Following this, the most admired of his casual mistresses married and wrote him a long moral letter.

  Henri Léon took a cure at Schuls-Tarasp. He took his shroud with him in his trunk. When he got back, with his hair half gone and his face drawn and grayish, he wrote a letter to Julius Kratz in Australia, enclosing the money for the return trip for him, his wife, and two children, and told him to cable the name of the boat and the date of sailing. He was firmly convinced that little Kratz was his scapegoat. When Aristide Raccamond, therefore, told him that he had seen little Kratz or his double in the entry of an apartment house in Montmartre, Léon had shivered and also rejoiced. He felt that his luck had turned and he was on his way to a second fortune. And yet again, he shuddered, when he thought what he must go through to have that luck, little Kratz’s snickerings, harpings, whinings, his insults, threats, and dark warnings.

  He had observed the luck sign in Alphendéry’s head with hope and had begun to think that if he took on Alphendéry, he would not need the detestable scapegoat. He therefore, for the first time, wished that Kratz had stolen the money and not sent him a cable and not taken the boat back from Australia. He determined to employ Alphendéry in his own business, but purely as a mascot, and at as low a salary as possible. He saw at the first glance that Alphendéry would not drive any sort of bargain.

  * * *

  Scene Six: Limen of Honesty

  Jules said to Alphendéry, ‘You’d like to be an agitator, but you’re too kind to your dependents and so you’ve got to keep on working for a high salary and it’s a good thing. It keeps your head cool.’

  This conversation worked Alphendéry into a fit of discontent. He was very brilliant, fitful; spent some time walking up and down the corridors, with his hands in his pockets, murmuring yes and no to people or ignoring them. Everyone knew this was a sign of the greatest distemper in him and left him alone. Presently, he went into Raccamond’s room and gave him a review of the market and political situation, which Raccamond retailed to all his clients as soon as he went downstairs. But on the way down he went in to see Jules Bertillon and presently Jules came after Alphendéry, irritated because Raccamond had once more implored him to give him some sort of rough balance sheet or interim report to show to clients. ‘I could get ten times the business,’ Raccamond said. Jules had given him a flat refusal.

  ‘The man is a donkey,’ Jules exploded. ‘If I had gone bankrupt yesterday and also embezzled, I’ll guarantee I could get business again today and get people to believe in me. You don’t need a balance sheet to get business. If you’re as antipathetic to money as that, you won’t get business, even with a balance sheet. What does he think a balance sheet proves? Hasn’t Kreuger got a balance sheet? He’s got a forest full of balance sheets. And what does Wallenberg say? He’s got a balance sheet and I don’t understand a thing in it.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it, Jules?’ asked Michel. ‘If people believe in black scratches on paper, give it to them. Make them happy. What do you care?’

  ‘No: it commits me. Anything in black and white commits you, even if it’s the truth. The more mysterious the business, the handsomer it seems. People are all bush lawyers: give them a few facts to chew on and they won’t be satisfied till they tear you to pieces. Everyone slanders his banker every time he has a toothache. But you give them no balance sheet and what can they do? They can only imagine vast operations that are beyond their imagination. That’s ideal. Then your whisper is as good as the next fellow’s. Then it is all mystery, secret gold, and high finance. Why, Michel, “Write nothing down”—I thought that was your maxim! I’ve taken it over. Many a promising career has been cut short by a conscientious typist and a bookkeeper with his books balanced. Surround me with dullards and loafers, O Lord: spare me the office boys who study bookkeeping and the bookkeepers who study banking and the office managers who read pamphlets on will power. I don’t want those who believe in my game. I want those who don’t—I pick them out quickly and sack them—and those who can’t, like yourself, and those who don’t know there is a game. The best people for a man like me are dopes and communists.’

  ‘Why?’ Alphendéry was restored to good humor, finding Bertillon delightfully ridiculous.

  ‘I’m not joking. Dopes are grateful to you for keeping them because they’re dopes and communists because you know they’re communists. But the ambitious dull guy that’s found you out, wants to punish you for the good years he wasted learning a game that didn’t exist! Poor dopes! Why, it’s as plain as day, from the first day—’ he laughed, gay and free. ‘Look where you stand with me, Michel. You are a sort of limited power of attorney; you have the right, also, to buy and sell stocks, bonds, gold, commodities, transfer them in or out as you wish; you sign checks, you accept accounts, you make decisions. But you’re not a director, you haven’t got a contract, and I could turn you out tomorrow if I wanted to. And without even the regulation six m
onths’ salary, because you’re not on the books of the bank! You are responsible to no one and everyone is responsible to you. You could clean me! But you’re not ambitious, you don’t want a partnership. You hate to sign letters. You don’t try to make me divide, you don’t steal a ha’penny, you even take me out to lunch once I’ve taken you out to lunch. It’s fantastic. Why is it you’re not ambitious and you don’t try to steal my job? Because you’re a communist. You despise me. You wouldn’t let your friends see you standing in my shoes. If you stole money and the police got after you, your Red friends would never talk to you again. And that’s what you can’t bear! You have ideas outside the business and they’re your real life. Don’t you see, I’m a hundred thousand times safer with you than with a budding De Wendel? You wouldn’t even steal the money to give it to the Reds. I call that real drama, Michel, don’t you? Most people would be glad to take all I have if they were in your shoes. But I’d trust you with this bank, if I had to run and I’d fully expect to get it all back at the end of the year. And then you wouldn’t ask for a reward—you’d just hang around, rather quiet, with a hurt expression. Oh, Michel, Michel, Michel, my dear boy.’

  Alphendéry laughed, ‘You’d trust me with sixty million francs? Do you think any man can resist that amount?’