“Hello? Yes."
“He’s holding out a club to hit you with. He is hostile to intervention, that’s obvious. It’s only a question of deciding whether it’s better to attack him as a pederast or accuse him of being bought. That’s all.”
“It being perfectly understood that he is neither. Moreover, I don’t like to have one of my collaborators believe me capable of attacking a man for a sexual deviation which he might really have. Do you take me for a moralist? Good-by.”
Martial did not dare to question him. That Ferral did not keep him posted on his plans, did not tell him what he expected about his secret conferences with the most active members of the International Chamber of Commerce, with the heads of the great associations of Chinese merchants, appeared to him both insulting and short-sighted. On the other hand, if it is annoying for a Chief of Police not to know what he is doing, it is even more annoying to lose his post. Now Ferral, born in the Republic as in the bosom of a family, his memory full of kindly faces of old gentlemen-Renan, Berthelot, Victor Hugo-the son of a great counselor-at-law, an agrege in history at twenty-seven, at twenty-nine the editor of the first collective history of France, a deputy at a very early age (favored by the epoch that had made Poincare and Barthou ministers before forty), and now President of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium-Ferral, in spite of his political downfall, possessed in Shanghai a power and a prestige at least equal to those of the French Consul-General with whom, moreover, he was on friendly terms. The Chief was therefore respectfully cordial. He handed him the speech:
“1 have spent eighteen million dollars in all, and taken six provinces, in five months. Let the malcontents look for another general-in-chief, if they wish, mho spends as little and accomplishes as much as 1. .”
“Obviously the money question would be settled by the taking of Shanghai,” said Ferral. “The customs would give him seven million dollars a month, just about what is needed to make up the army deficit. ”
“Yes. But they say that Moscow has given the political commissars orders to have their own troops beaten before Shanghai. In that case the insurrection here might end badly. ”
“Why those orders?”
“So that Chiang Kai-shek would be beaten, to destroy his prestige, and to replace him by a Communist general to whom the honor of taking Shanghai would then go. It's almost certain that the campaign against Shanghai has been undertaken without the assent of the Central Committee of Hankow. The same informers claim that the Red staff is protesting against this policy. ” Ferral was interested, though skeptical. He continued to read the speech:
“Deserted by a considerable number of its members, the Central Executive Comnittee of Hankow nevertheless is determnined to remain the supreme authority of the Kuomintang Party.. 1 know that Sun Yat-sen admitted the Conmunists as auxiliaries of the Party. I have done nothing against them, and I have often admired their energy. But now, instead of being content to remain auxiliaries, they set themselves up as masters and violently and insolently aspire to govern the Party. I warn them that I shall oppose these excessive pretensions, which go beyond what was stipulated at the time of their admission. .”
It was becoming possible to employ Chiang Kai-shek. The present government signified nothing, except by its strength (which it lost by the defeat of its army) and by the fear which the Communists of the revolutionary army inspired in the bourgeoisie. Very few people had any interest in its maintenance. Behind Chiang there was a victorious army, and the whole Chinese petty bourgeoisie.
“Nothing else?” he asked aloud.
“Nothing, Monsieur Ferral.”
“Thank you.”
He went do'wn the stairs, met half-way down an au- bum-haired Minerva in a tailored sport-suit, with superb immobile features. She was a Russian from the Caucasus who was reputed to be Martial's occasional mistress. “I’d like to see the expression on your face when you’re making love,” he thought.
“Pardon me, Madam.”
He passed her with a bow, climbed into his car which began to be swallowed up in the crowd, against the current this time. The horn shrieked in vain, powerless against the force of the exodus, against the seething thousands which invasions stir before them. Petty merchants with their two trays dangling like scales from beams that caught and swung wildly, carts, barrows worthy of the T’ang emperors, invalids, cages. Fer- ral was advancing in the opposite direction to all those eyes which fear caused to look inward: if his checkered life was to be destroyed, let it be in this uproar, amid this frantic despair that came beating against the windows of his car! Just as he would have meditated upon the meaning of his life had he been wounded, so now that his enterprises were menaced he was meditating upon them. He realized, moreover, where he was vulnerable. He had had too little choice in this combat; he had been obliged to undertake his Chinese affairs to give new outlets to his production in Indo-China. He was playing a waiting game here: he was aiming at France. And he could not wait much longer.
His greatest weakness lay in the absence of a State. The development of such vast affairs was inseparable from governments. Since his youth he had always worked for them: while stiil in Parliament he had been president of the Society of Electrical Energy and Appliances, which manufactured the electrical equipment of the French State; he had next organized the reconstruction of the port of Buenos Ayres. Possessing the kind of arrogant integrity which refuses commissions and accepts orders, he had looked to the French possessions in Asia for the money he needed after his falclass="underline" for he did not intend to play the same game again; he was going to change the rules. In a position to utilize his brother’s personal standing, which was superior to his office as director of the Mouvement General des Fonds Ferral-who had remained at the head of one of the powerful French financial groups-succeeded in getting the General Government of Indo-China to undertake a pro-
1 A depa^ment in the Ministry of Finance charged with the distribution of State funds.
gram of public works involving an expenditure of four hundred million francs. (Even his enemies were not averse to furnishing him means of getting out of France.) The Republic could not refuse the brother of one of her highest officials the management of this civilizing program; it was a great success, and caused surprise in this country in which even big financial ventures are carried on haphazardly.
Ferral knew how to act. A good deed is never lost: the group passed on to the industrialization of IndoChina. Little by little there appeared: two credit establishments (land securities and agricultural loans); four agricultural development associations-rubber, cotton, and sugar plantations and tropical cultures-controlling the immediate conversion of these raw materials into manufactured products; three mining associations: coal, phosphates, gold, and a subsidiary salt-mining enterprise; five industrial firms: light and energy, electricity, glass, paper, printing; three transport companies: barges, tugboats, street cars. At the center, the Public Works Cor- poration-queen of this vast organization of effort, hatred and paper, mother or midwife of almost all the sister societies engaged in living by profitable incests-was able to obtain the contract for the construction of the Central Annam railroad, whose tracks (who would have thought it?) passed through the greater pan of the concessions of the Ferral group. “Things aren’t going so badly,” the vice-president of the administration council would say to Ferral, who said nothing, busy piling up his millions in steps on which he could climb to a position that would put Paris within his reach.
Even with the project for a new Chinese Company in each pocket, he thought only of Paris. It was his dream to return to France rich enough to buy the agence