The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page B

sitting with the five millionaires, youngest of the six wealthy men that the other guests in derision called the
Gold Trust
, a very thin young man, with a long Dutch nose; a B ANKER he was, from London. He had a sea-going yacht, three motor-cars, a house in Grosvenor Square, a house in the country, three racehorses and twelve servants: he gave five hundred guineas for a horse-race and a silver cup for polo, and he went each weekend to France to get the sun. But in town his chief amusement was to go to the pictures with his wife seven times a week. He abhorred the opera which he thought was noisy and the theatre which he thought old-fashioned and wordy. He lived in the depths of his house alone with his wife; and they went about as inseparable as twins. He dined off an omelette and a chop badly served by his lazy and spoiled French chef, and sipped a glass of bad, red wine from a bin in the pantry furnished by his thief of a butler. He knew his servants robbed him but could not bear to sack them (he said), because they would thereby lose their jobs. He did not like to go to friends’ houses to dine for he could not understand the sense of their flippancies and their high-church passions drove him mad; and he never entertained, for he liked to live at home with his wife alone.
    If he met a pretty girl, he looked for a rich husband for her to marry: if he was amused by a journalist he mentioned his name tosome cabinet minister to get him influence: if he thought an author hardworking and mild, he would think about his case, telling him, perhaps, that he could work quicker if he took the stories out of the Arabian Nights and simply changed the names, and local colour, such as the degree of heat and the type of costume. He had stolen his brother’s shillings when they were in the nursery together and had only been beaten by his brother’s squirrel secretiveness. He never read a book; and he had passed through the costliest and most famous schools of his land and all their bosh (he said) had fallen off him like water off a duck’s back. But in banking he knew all that he should know. His natural ingenuity was so complex and so wakeful that if a clerk made an error of two pence he made four pence out of it; if the world was prosperous he promoted gambling-circles, rotary movements and publishing houses, lent money to liberal professors and ne’er-do-weel geniuses and made fortunes in speculation in fraudulent inventions exploited on the exchange; and if the world was black and most men were ruined, he laid in stocks of fat, flour, and cotton, speculated in armaments and cheap shirts and got back his money from the liberal professors now turned conservative. If a king lay at death’s door, he bought a bolt of crape, if a peasant girl in adolescent delirium saw the Virgin at her furrow’s end, he started an omnibus line. He understood only one thing, Profit; he thought all men thought as he did, and that their bank-balances were the measure of their brains. He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist’s chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of mind in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry for nine months the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short.
    There was with him a S OLICITOR from London. He liked to walk in the City on a sunny morning swinging his cane and rubbing shoulders with the crowd in Throgmorton Street. He loved a little chat, with a legal joke and a neat personality, and a little cup of tea. He lived at