Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (47 page)

Marcelle, suddenly looking up, saw Jordan before her. He was soaked, and looked quite shattered, with the trembling lips and slightly crazy eyes of those who have pursued a hope for a long time without attaining it. She at once understood.

‘So you got nothing?’ she asked, turning pale.

‘Nothing, my darling, nothing at all… Not anywhere, just not possible…’

She simply let out a low moan that expressed the bleeding of her heart.

‘Oh, my God!’

At that moment Saccard came out from Jantrou’s office and was astonished to find her still there.

‘What, Madame, your truant husband has only just got back? I told you to come and wait in my office.’

She stared at him, a sudden thought having just awoken in her
large, desolate eyes. She did not stop to reflect, she yielded to that wild courage that drives women forward under the impulse of passion.

‘Monsieur Saccard, I have something to ask you… If you don’t mind, we could now go into your office…’

‘But certainly, Madame.’

Jordan, who feared he had guessed her intentions, tried to hold her back, stammering: ‘No, no!…’ in her ear, in the sick anguish that always afflicted him where money was concerned. She broke away and he had to follow her.

‘Monsieur Saccard,’ she resumed, as soon as the door was closed, ‘my husband has been rushing about for the last two hours trying to find five hundred francs, and he doesn’t dare to ask you for them… So it is I who am asking you…’

And then, with vigour, and the droll expressions of a lively and resolute young woman, she described the happenings of the morning, the brutal entry of Busch, the invasion of her room by the three men, telling how she had managed to repel the assault, and the promise she had made to pay up that very day. Oh, the wounds money makes for humble folk, the great suffering created by shame and helplessness, life itself constantly under threat, all for a few wretched hundred-sou coins!

‘Busch,’ Saccard repeated, ‘it’s that old scoundrel Busch who has you in his claws…’

Then with charming affability, turning to Jordan, who sat silent and pale in unbearable discomfort, he said:

‘Well, I’ll advance you the five hundred francs. You should have asked me straight away.’

He had sat down at the table to write a cheque when he stopped, with a sudden thought. He remembered the letter he had received, and the visit he had to make, which he had been putting off from day to day, in annoyance at the shady business he scented. Why shouldn’t he go straight away to the Rue Feydeau, taking advantage of the opportunity now he had a pretext?

‘Listen, I know this scoundrel of yours very well… It will be better for me to go in person to pay him, and see if I can’t get your notes back for half the price.’

Marcelle’s eyes now shone with gratitude.

‘Oh, Monsieur Saccard, how kind you are!’

And to her husband:

‘See? You great ninny, Monsieur Saccard didn’t eat us up!’

In an irresistible impulse Jordan threw his arms round her neck and kissed her, for it was she that he thanked most of all for being more active and skilful than he in these difficulties that paralysed him.

‘No, no,’ said Saccard, when the young man at last shook his hand, ‘the pleasure is all mine, you are very sweet, the two of you, to love each other so much. Go on home in peace!’

His carriage, which was waiting for him, took him in two minutes to the Rue Feydeau, in this muddy Paris, in the bustling of umbrellas and the splashing of puddles. But at the top of the stairs he rang in vain at the old door with flaking paint, on which a brass plate displayed the word: ‘Litigation’ in big black letters; it did not open, and there was no movement from inside. And Saccard was just about to leave when, in his frustration, he beat the door violently with his fist. Then halting footsteps were heard and Sigismond appeared.

‘Ah! It’s you!… I thought it was my brother coming back, having forgotten his key. I never answer the doorbell… He won’t be long, you can wait for him if you really want to see him.’

With the same painful and faltering steps he returned, followed by the visitor, to the room he occupied, looking out on the Place de la Bourse. It was still full daylight up in these heights, above the mist with which the rain filled the streets below. The room was bleak and bare, with its narrow iron bed, its table and two chairs, its few planks loaded with books, and no furniture. In front of the fireplace, a little stove, untended and forgotten, had just gone out.

‘Sit down, Monsieur. My brother said he was only going out and coming back straight away.’

But Saccard refused the chair, looking at him and seeing the progress the tuberculosis had made upon this tall, pale youth with the eyes of a child, eyes drowning in dreams, so strange beneath the energetic obstinacy of the brow. Between the long curls of his hair, his face was extraordinarily hollowed out, as if elongated and dragged towards the tomb.

‘You’ve been ill?’ he asked, not knowing what to say. Sigismond made a gesture of total indifference.

‘Oh, just the same. Last week was not good, because of this filthy weather. But anyway, things are all right… I don’t sleep any more, I can still work, and I’ve a slight fever that keeps me warm… Ah, there is so much to be done.’

He had gone back to the table, on which a book in German stood open. He went on:

‘Forgive me for sitting down, but I’ve been awake all night reading this book which I received yesterday… A great work indeed, ten years of the life of my master, Karl Marx, the book on capital that he had been promising us for so long!… And now here it is, here is our Bible!’
*

His curiosity aroused, Saccard moved to take a look at the book, but the sight of its Gothic characters
*
immediately put him off.

‘I’ll wait until it’s translated,’ he said with a laugh.

The young man, shaking his head, seemed to say that even when translated it would be properly understood only by a few initiates. It was not a work of propaganda. But what forceful logic, and what a triumphant abundance of proofs, demonstrating the inevitable destruction of our present society based on the capitalist system! Once the ground was cleared the rebuilding could begin.

‘So, it’s the clean sweep?’ Saccard asked, still joking.

‘In theory, yes absolutely!’ replied Sigismond. ‘Everything I explained to you a while ago, the whole revolutionary process, is all in there. It only remains for us to bring it about in fact… But you are all blind if you don’t see the great advances the idea is making hour by hour. So, with your Universal, in three years you’ve moved around and centralized hundreds of millions, and you don’t seem to have the slightest inkling that you are driving us straight into collectivism… I’ve followed your business with passionate interest, yes, from this quiet, out-of-the-way room I have studied its growth day by day and know it as well as you do yourself, and I tell you it’s a wonderful lesson you’re giving us, for the collectivist state will only have to do what you do, take you over in one go after you’ve taken over the smaller companies one by one, and thus fulfil the ambition of your extravagant dream, which is to absorb all the capital of the world, to be the sole bank—isn’t that so?—to be the one general depository of public wealth… Oh, I greatly admire you! I would let you continue if I were the master, for you are beginning our work, like a forerunner of genius!’

He smiled with his pale invalid’s smile, noticing the attentiveness of his interlocutor, who was very surprised to find him so well acquainted with the business of the day and very flattered too by the intelligent praise.

‘But’, Sigismond went on, ‘on that happy morn when we take you over in the name of the nation, replacing your private interests with those of all, making your great machine for sucking up the wealth of others into the very regulator of social wealth, we shall begin by abolishing this.’

He had found a sou among the papers on his table and held it up between two fingers, as the intended victim.

‘Money!’ cried Saccard. ‘Abolish money! What utter madness!’

‘We shall abolish cash money… You must realize that metal money has no place, no justification in the collectivist state. For all remuneration, money is replaced by work vouchers; and if you think of money as a measure of value, we have an alternative which will stand perfectly well in its stead, one that we shall obtain by establishing the average day’s labour in our workplaces… It has to be destroyed, this money that masks and encourages the exploitation of the worker, allowing him to be robbed by reducing his wage to the smallest sum needed to prevent him starving to death. Is it not appalling, the way the possession of money builds up private fortunes, bars the way to fruitful circulation, and creates scandalous kingships that powerfully rule both the financial market and social production? All our crises, all our anarchy, arise from this. It must be killed, money must be killed off!’

But Saccard was getting annoyed. No more money, no more gold, no more of those shining stars that had illuminated his whole life! Wealth for him had always taken the form of that dazzle of new coins, raining down through the sunshine like a spring shower and falling like hail on the ground, covering it with heaps of gold that you stirred with a shovel just to see their brightness and hear their music. And they were going to abolish that joy, that reason for fighting and living!

‘That’s idiotic, that is—idiotic!… Never, do you hear?’

‘Why never? Why idiotic?… Do we make use of money in the family economy? There all you see is common effort and exchange… So, what’s the use of money when society is nothing other than one great family, governing itself?’

‘I tell you it’s mad!… Destroy money? But money is life itself! There would be nothing left. Nothing!’

Saccard walked up and down, beside himself. And in his anger, as he passed by the window, he looked out to make sure the Bourse was still there, for this terrible young man had perhaps blown it away. It was
still there, though very blurred in the depths of the oncoming night, as if melted under the shroud of rain, a pale and spectral Bourse, almost vanishing into a smoky greyness.

‘Anyway, I’m really stupid to be arguing about this. It’s impossible… Go on, abolish money, I’d like to see you try.’

‘Bah,’ Sigismond muttered, ‘everything gets abolished, everything changes and disappears… For instance, we have already seen the form of wealth change once before, when the value of land went down and landed fortunes, big estates, fields and woods declined in favour of securities and industrial wealth, stocks and shares, and today we are observing the precocious decay of the latter, a sort of rapid depreciation, for it’s certain that the value of money is being debased, and the norm of five per cent return per annum is no longer reached… The value of money is declining then, so why shouldn’t it disappear altogether? Why shouldn’t a new form of wealth come in to govern social relations? It’s the wealth of tomorrow that our work-vouchers will provide.’

Sigismond had become absorbed in contemplation of the sou, as if dreaming that he was holding the last coin of past ages, a stray sou that had survived the old dead society. What joys and sorrows had worn away the humble metal! And he had fallen into the sadness of eternal human longing.

‘Yes,’ he went on quietly, ‘you are right, we shall not see these things. It will take years and years. Can we even know whether love of one’s fellow men will have enough vigour in it to replace egoism in the organization of society?… And yet I hoped the triumph would be sooner, I should so like to have been there to see that dawn of justice.’

For a moment, bitterness over the illness from which he suffered broke his voice. He, who in his denial of death, treated it as though it did not exist, made a gesture as if to push it away. But he was already becoming resigned once more.

‘I have completed my task, I shall leave my notes in case I don’t have time to draw out of them the complete work of reconstruction I have envisaged. The society of tomorrow must be the mature fruit of civilization, for if we do not keep the good side of emulation and control, then all is lost… Ah, that society, how clearly I see it now, at last created and complete, such as I have managed to set it up after so many sleepless nights! Everything is foreseen, everything is resolved,
and at last there is sovereign justice and absolute happiness. It’s all there on paper, mathematical and definitive.’

And he stretched out his long, emaciated hands over the scattered notes, and exulted in this dream of the billions won back and equitably shared among all, in this joy and health he was restoring to suffering humanity with a stroke of the pen, he who neither ate nor slept, and was simply dying, needing nothing, in that bare room.

But a harsh voice made Saccard start.

‘What are you doing here?’

It was Busch, who had come back and now looked askance at the visitor like a jealous lover, in his constant fear that someone would make his brother talk too much and provoke a fit of coughing. Anyway, he did not wait for an answer but started scolding in despair, like a mother.

‘What! You’ve let your stove go out again! I just ask you, is that reasonable in such damp weather?’ He was already on his knees, in spite of the heaviness of his large body, breaking up some kindling and relighting the fire. Then he went to get a broom and tidied things up, asking anxiously about the medicine his brother had to take every two hours. He was not content until he had persuaded him to stretch out on his bed.

‘Monsieur Saccard, if you’d like to come into my office…’

Madame Méchain was there, sitting on the only chair. She and Busch had just made an important visit in the neighbourhood, and were delighted with its successful outcome. At last, after a long and desperate wait, they had been able to make a start on one of the affairs they most cared about. For three years La Méchain had scoured the streets searching for Léonie Cron, that seduced girl for whom the Count de Beauvilliers had signed a note promising ten thousand francs, payable on her majority. In vain had she appealed to her cousin Fayeux, the collector of revenues in Vendôme, who had bought the note for Busch in a pile of old debts, part of the estate of one Charpier, a grain merchant and occasional moneylender. Fayeux knew nothing, he wrote only to say that the girl Léonie Cron must be in service with a bailiff in Paris, that she had left Vendôme more than ten years before and never come back, and he couldn’t even question one of her relatives, for they were all dead. La Méchain had found the bailiff and managed to trace Léonie from there to a butcher, then a lady of ill-repute, then a dentist; but after the dentist the thread suddenly
broke, the trail came to an end—now it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, a fallen woman lost in the mire of huge Paris. In vain had she done the rounds of the employment agencies, visited seedy boarding-houses, rummaged about in haunts of debauchery, always on the watch, looking about her and asking questions as soon as the name Léonie struck her ear. And this girl she had gone so far afield to search for, she had just that very day, by chance, laid hands on her in the Rue Feydeau, in the local brothel, where La Méchain had been pursuing a former tenant of the Cité de Naples who owed her three francs. A stroke of genius had enabled her to sniff her out and recognize her under the distinguished name of Léonide, just when the madam in a high-pitched voice was calling her to the salon. Busch, being notified, had at once gone back to the house with La Méchain to negotiate; and this fat girl, with her coarse black hair falling over her eyebrows and her flat, flabby face, of vile vulgarity, had at first surprised him; then he had recognized what must have been her special charm, especially before ten years of prostitution, delighted anyway that she had fallen so low and become so abominable. He had offered her a thousand francs if she ceded to him her rights on the promissory note. She was stupid, she had accepted the bargain with childlike joy. Now at last they would be able to pursue the Countess de Beauvilliers, they had the weapon so long sought, a weapon of an even unhoped-for degree of ugliness and shame!