House of All Nations by Christina Stead

Author:Christina Stead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2013-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Scene Fifty-three: The Wheat Scheme

Léon sprang into the bank in the morning, fresh, succulent, and fat, brimming over with intention. He said, ‘Good morning’ from his vortex to Jacques Manray and went up the main stairs. At Jules’s door he knocked. Jules was lounging over an airplane journal. He knew two of the entrants for the next Deutsch-de-la-Meurthe cup and at moments thought of inducing William to enter, as an advertisement for the bank. William was out of condition and flatly refused to leave the earth.

‘I got an idea,’ said Léon. ‘This wheat scheme: do you want to listen to it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Where’s Alphendéry? Tell him to come in, will you? I like him round to get his angle.’

‘Sure.’ Alphendéry entered at this moment, having heard of Léon’s arrival, by grapevine telegraph. ‘Hello, my boy. Listen, I want you to listen to this, get the points, so that we can put it over.’

‘I’m listening, Henri,’ said Alphendéry.

Léon straddled, pushed back his head, uttered an ultimatum. ‘America full of wheat because of, lack of—she’s smothered in wheat, she’s very depressed on account of the surplus. Can we put wheat into the Gulf of Mexico—can we find an outlet for it?’

‘Can we?’ Alphendéry was a tight ball of a thousand gummy layers of attention, springing along a parabola of intention.

‘I mean, she says to herself, ‘Can we throw the wheat into the Caribbean, twenty-one thousand feet, get rid of it?’ If we can find an outlet for it—wheat—in the U.S.A.—wheat would—the market’s very poor—it would bolster up the stock market. Now, you see, the financial position is—’

‘Shocking—’ murmured Jules.

‘Shocking but not, but not—shocking, but—’

‘Not catastrophic,’ said Alphendéry.

Léon’s great finger was wagging up and down like a baton, for the trio. ‘Shocking but not catastrophic—it might become—a rise in wheat would restore confidence. Am I right, Michel, am I right? Eh, eh?’

‘You’re right, Henri,’ they both said.

He shifted his giant Adam’s apple quickly in his collar. ‘Here, in Europe, the situation is—the countries need wheat—’

‘The consuming countries—’ said Alphendéry.

‘—the consuming countries have need of wheat. Watch me, Alphendéry, see if you get this. But there are reports of a big promising surplus in Russia. Russians are supposed to be ready to dump wheat at any price, first to dump, second to undermine the system.’ He laughed hugely. ‘The Russians are devilishly,’ he corrected himself, blushed, ‘very much enjoying the low prices! Now she is around—’

‘Russia is a seller of wheat,’ said Alphendéry.

‘Yes, Russia’s a seller of wheat (thank you, Michel) because, because she has bills to meet and her credit is—forty per cent, she’s got—forty per cent—when she took cash—’

‘Russia,’ explained Alphendéry to Jules who was listening idly (and not following, except that with a pencil he had written on a blank piece of paper, ‘How much?’), ‘Russia has very bad credit, no credit at all. She must get goods for the Five-Year Plan and in order to get goods for the Five-Year Plan she has to pay four per cent a month; that’s the usurious interest she has to pay, because she has no money and no credit.

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