Free House of All Nations by Christina Stead Page A

station they’ve no deliveries.’ What’s the matter? A general strike. Misery! All right, no tube, no taxi, no car. I must get downtown: see what’s doing. So I walk. All right. No coffee downtown. I go to the Baltic:* the janitor opened it but who was there? Almost no one could get there. The Post Office was open but who was there to run it? Almost the telephones weren’t working. I walk round. Everyone is gloomy. I go to the Western Union. There are two boys who lived in the city alone working. An American company. ‘Tell me what’s the opening Winnipeg and Chicago.’ Terrible … So it goes. I go home and I think. No business. If business could be done! I come down next day. Some more people are on the Baltic but no business: everyone is walking round gloomy thinking the red flag will be over London. It nearly got by. They nearly got the red flag. And still a terrible market in Winnipeg and Chicago. By the third and fourth day, no one thought of business, people were only wondering if they could get the price of a boat fare to Antwerp or Paris. What a pity, I think. No business being done and the market so low. I get an idea. It looks like revolution. The markets are starving. Not an order out of England in three, four days. They’ll just wolf down any order. So I go to the Western Union and I calmly telegraph to buy half a million bushels wheat in Chicago in Strindl’s name. They had the credit: their credit was still good … Well, I calculated: if it really is the revolution, they can’t dun me in a soviet Britain, can they, for wheat bought before the revolution? And if it isn’t the revolution, if we can sell short on the red flag yet, then the market will go up and I’ll make money. Perfect. I couldn’t go wrong. And I could say, ‘Who telegraphed? Not me.’ I signed Strindl or Elster or Taube. I had a right: don’t forget they were my partners in Amsterdam at the time. No swindle. No. Well, was I right? That’s how I made ten cents a bushel. The market had had a tremendous bust. I plunged. No harm. Fifty thousand dollars—ten thousand sterling. I took a risk. Ha? Margaret, what do you say?’
    * Baltic: Mercantile and Shipping Exchange, London.
    â€˜I wouldn’t mind being your partner if there were two of me.’
    Léon took this as a great compliment. ‘You’re great, Margaret. Well, let’s go somewhere. Say, say, look at that girl. What a beauty! Fancy her sitting there like that waiting for men: isn’t it a shame. I’ll tell you what, Margaret, Marianne: let’s ask her to go with us? Yes. Look at her, poor girl. A beauty too. What do you say?’
    He looked eagerly at them.
    â€˜I’m a sport, Henri,’ said Marianne, ‘but Aristide and I are rather well known in Paris, and doubtless this woman is, too. What will be thought of us: Aristide’s clients may—no, certainly will see him in the Scheherazade—you can’t take a woman like that with you to the Scheherazade where everyone who counts in Paris may see us.’
    Léon looked crestfallen, but his eyebrows rising took in Marianne’s dowdy black evening dress and sequin-scaled jacket, her badly curled hair, her thick rouge. The handsome woman waiting for men on one of the padded seats had caught his eye by this time and knew he was discussing her: she looked the two women over with superb insolence, and they crumbled and fell to dust at her glance, while she continued to glitter and even grew in beauty like a sea gull letting fall sea drops from wings shaken by sun and wind. Léon dismissed Marianne with an unconscious but careless curl of the lips and nose and turned abruptly to Margaret, took her arm in a brotherly fashion.
    â€˜Margaret, come on: we’ll all go along and have a good time.’
    Margaret was recovering from her astonishment enough to look down her nose. This disgusted Léon. He