House of All Nations by Christina Stead Page A

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