House of All Nations by Christina Stead Page B

(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,