House of All Nations (11 page)

‘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 months' 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?'

William had come in and was standing against the door. Jules said cheerfully, ‘Yes. Am I right or not? Eh, Michel? Would you steal it? Tell me. I'd like to know. You wouldn't. I know you. You couldn't.'

Alphendéry said slowly, with some regret, ‘I'm afraid you're right, Jules.'

William laughed shortly. ‘And no one's making him try it out.'

‘Would you, Michel?' Jules was curiously persistent.

‘I'll make a deal,' said Alphendéry: ‘thirty million I'd be honest, sixty million and I'd be a crook.'

‘If you gave it back, even the thirty million, you'd be a fool,' said Jules roughly.

‘He wouldn't, you needn't worry,' said William; ‘and I say that, having as much respect as you for Michel's honesty and principles. A man with thirty million doesn't have to be honest. Honesty is another word for an empty pocket. What is honesty? It's being too poor to buy yourself a ticket across the Channel where they can't catch you. You think you'd get the money back out of Michel because you think he's soft and a neurotic, don't you, Jules? Well, that's where I know him better than you. The hardest man to break is the softest. People know that, by instinct. Everyone suspects Michel of having dark designs round here and of being in the thick of something. Only because he's so nice and sweet. Could you argue Michel into giving back the money? Michel can argue you into a cocked hat. Ah, haven't you got something else to think of?' He stretched his legs, his contented chops set firmly as if he had said all that needed to be said for evermore.

Alphendéry harked back to their own conversation. ‘I don't like stupid people to work with. They don't know what you're driving at and they get angry and sore.'

William said sagely, ‘The only reason you don't want smart people round you, Jules, is that you don't want to work.'

Jules only laughed at this brotherly candor.

* * *

Scene Seven: Jean Frère's Garden

A
lphendéry was filled with longing. He wanted to see people who ‘spoke his language.' After work, he waited for the teller, Adam Constant, and strolled with him down to a little bar, near the offices of
l'Humanité
where they usually saw some of the workers. Constant was somber.

‘What is there to live for in France today?'

‘I thought you lived for your poems, your workmen's classes, and
The Workers' Almanac
.'

‘It's not enough—for me.'

‘You're young to feel that.'

‘Twenty-four!' Adam laughed bitterly. ‘I don't know enough to write. That's the trouble.'

‘What do you want to do?'

‘Go out to China, maybe,' said Adam.

‘To join the Red Army?'

‘Yes. You see Chiang Kai-shek has started a new campaign against them. The first Congress of Chinese Soviets opens in November.'

‘With a little alteration of the muscles, you could pass for some brand of Chinese.'

Adam Constant laughed cheerfully. ‘I was born in the East, although I'm pure French. You see,' he added, rather shamefacedly, ‘I feel I cannot teach till I have learned. And I have my way of learning.'

‘And so you'll go?'

Adam nodded. After he had finished the
apéritif
, he said rather confusedly, ‘You see, I'm not very happy here. I still have the feeling that all communists ought to be angels and work together singing psalms. Ridiculous, isn't it? It's like asking them all to be virgins before you go in with them: something like that. Oh, I suppose it's some troublesome heritage of my Protestant ancestors. It leaves a mark on you to be born a Protestant in France.'

They were both silent, sipping a second small vermouth, when some husky-sweet vocables exploded in Alphendéry's ear. Only two men had that voice, Henri Léon (who was in Belgium) and Jean Frère. Alphendéry spun round, with the ardor of Jean Frère already in his entrails and his throat, his limbs, even before he visualized his face and form. This was how Jean Frère appeared to everyone: first, like the warm and vigorous somnolency that precedes healing sleep, a period of shadow redolent with the most splendid blooms of the imagination; and again, in the same breath, like a seasoned barge captain particularly good in the grain, with a slight sea roll, freshly rank with the cargoes in lighters, one who sings out frank but not lewd compliments to all the girls along the banks.

Although he was forty, with his youthful, vigorous, and engaging aspect, his well-knit walk, he could have been twenty-five or twenty-eight. His variable, unaffected voice had the low-pitched rich, somber, or sentimental tones of an old-fashioned oboe, or became fresh and hopeful as a schoolboy's. He had a dark broad face, smaller and shorter than Léon's, a dark rosy skin, shining dark eyes and a rather large, but well-formed mouth, with the lower lip pouting often. He had not the compressed mouth of adults, but there was often about his lips that slight damp pout that children have who are under two years old.

One of his great characteristics made him very different from the bald Léon: he had extremely thick long curly coarse brown hair, growing low and irregularly on the broad forehead. When he smiled his eyes went into slits the shape of snowshoes and his mouth elongated like a longbow over his regular white teeth. He was thickset with a short thick neck, a large widespread nose, with a faintly Negroid air. His hands were firm, wide, and brown as a farm laborer's.

The clothes of Jean Frère also merit description more than those of most men because he wore the very same, summer and winter, year in and year out: they were therefore a part of him and painted themselves in any point on the memory as well as he did. A suit in heather-mixture sports wool bought ready-made for the type ‘broad stub,' too large for him, unpressed, so baggy at the knees that chickens could have been hidden there, worn unpolished brogues, an old cotton shirt close round the neck, and an old shoestring tie were in no way concealed by an immense old rough tweed overcoat two sizes too large, in the great patch pockets of which some dozens of newspapers, manuscripts, and periodicals were stuck. Precariously on the decidedly uncombed hair an exceedingly old soft hat hung sideways. When anyone looked too long at this hat, Jean Frère took it off, turned it round on his hands, and with some bitterness spoke of having it ‘renovated.' On occasion he wore a large workman's cap. The dark, curly hair fell down from under the hat in a wild, unchecked style of its own, sometimes over an eye, or ear, sometimes in the middle of the forehead. Nevertheless, Jean Frère always looked engaging.

Two suns rose in his eyes when he saw Constant; he threw an arm round the shoulders of each. ‘I'm going to take you two boys out to see my garden! A Pernod! It rained yesterday and now it will be good to dig. They threw me out of
The Almanac
and so I'm going out to let my garden nurse my sorrows. Michel, you will come! Adam's coming, aren't you, Adam?' Michel flinched and drooped.

‘You are coming tonight to see the garden?' said Jean, seeing this and rightly interpreting it. ‘Look—my second Pernod. I've been off it for three weeks. I—I saw a doctor. He told me to lay off cigars, cigarettes, and strong liquor. Of course, I have that small wine at home. I didn't feel so good … I'm getting old,' he said with a faint breathless apology and smile.

It was strange to hear it. Alphendéry had to say to himself, in so many words, every time he met Jean, ‘This boy is over forty: he has been through the War,' and then he always had a contraction of the heart. But Jean did not worry over the prospect of growing old: he was sure he would be killed in a street fight one day with the police, and so avoid the long agony.

After his two Pernods, Jean Frère wanted to eat. ‘Today I'm as hungry as a bear because I'm not going back to the office this afternoon. Gee!—' he shook his head a long time.

‘What was all the trouble about?'

‘An article of mine. I was after Levilain for the way he attacked the new playwright Bonni. Why do they have a man like Levilain for dramatic critic? He hasn't got even a hair of the hide of a dramatic critic on his—hoo!—skinny—hoo! I think skinny people are naturally jealous.'

‘They're hungry,' said Alphendéry, with sympathy. Skinny he had never been.

‘Yes. Jealous and hungry. Everything—chimney pots, loaves of bread, moneybags, pillars in art museums, big gilt frames round masterpieces, rolls of carpets, horses, women—all bigger than they are. They want to bite the sides of houses. Bite, bite, they never get enough!' He laughed ruefully. ‘And Bonni, to make matters worse, has a juvenile
embonpoint
and is the handsomest man that ever rose to take a bow, not handsome, downright beautiful and soulful. And Levilain looks like sin, injustice, and poverty in one person.' He shook his head. ‘Let's go. We'll have a bite in the little Spanish dump, shall we? And then we'll go out home. My garden! Judith's out there. She'll be terribly pleased to see you.'

Alphendéry made a last faint attempt. ‘Are you sure there are enough beds?'

‘Oh, of course: why, there are lots of beds!'

Alphendéry immediately had a grim vision of what sort of beds those lots of beds must be.

But Adam suddenly said, ‘I'd really like to go, Jean. I stifle for the country. I've been wanting to see your garden.'

‘Neither of you has ever seen my garden,' said Jean joyfully. ‘What does it cost to eat here? I generally have a plate of soup in the bar along the street. Let's see. H'm, h'm. Well, we can stand it. I'm hungry. Hey, comrade' (mumbling). He said aside to Alphendéry, ‘I don't know whether to call him comrade: I suppose he must be at least a socialist? I suppose so. Hey—er—have you got a special daily dish, anything like that?' His face was suffused with laughter, as if he and the waiter had spent their boyhood tumbling about the roads together. When the waiter went away to get the card, Jean said, ‘He's a nice fellow, isn't he? Eh, don't you think he's a nice fellow? They look all nice here. I like it. I often look in here but I never came here. Do you like it? See, the pretty pots of flowers and things. Shows genuine taste, doesn't it? I generally take onion soup at lunchtime down the street. I like it! They make it wonderfully down the street. Sam Convient he calls himself!' He laughed, full of glee.

‘Sam Convient, Sam Convient!' They all laughed, in fact, shook with fun. Alphendéry had not had such a good time for weeks. ‘Have you seen that café opposite the cemetery of Père Lachaise:
Ça roule
.'

‘Not bad! H'm—when they come out of the cemetery—a philosopher.'

Even Adam Constant cheered up and they all began to look forward to the night in the country.

Everyone who knew Jean Frère had heard about his garden but very few had seen it. Someone had murmured rather darkly to Adam Constant at one time, ‘Wait till you see it!' Jean Frère regularly reviewed the garden annuals and agricultural handbooks for
The Workers' Almanac
so that he could have the books for himself afterwards. He always found them excellent.

After a dinner they enjoyed intensely and several carafes of wine—for each was under the impression that he was treating the others—they took a bus to St. Germain-des-Prés and after waiting for some time for the tram at the terminus there, started on the long, long ride to Fontenay-aux-Roses.

Ineluctably they reached Jean Frère's home in the country.

A little clean wooden staircase ran up through the ceiling of the front room. ‘I can sleep up there,' said Michel, ‘certainly, why not?' and he ran upstairs, bumped his head on the ceiling, stared over at them a moment, with an expression of surprise, and with another step brought his head level with the attic floor. He had no words when he saw it. A mattress lay on the floor, with a candlestick and a half-used candle next to it. Tobacco had spilled out of a little pouch, matches lay on the wooden flooring. There were low bookcases, books half opened lying face down: a discarded pajama suit lay near the bed. Clean new rafters came so low to the floor that there was no standing upright: two skylights looked out sideways to the black sky line, where he saw dimly the waving tips of trees. But the attic was very dusty. Nothing had been moved since the last scurried Monday morning. The rumpled army blankets lay as they had been thrown back in that hour of alarums.