“Monsieur Damiral?” said the minister.
“I can only endorse, Sir, the words you have just heard. Like M. de Morelles, I cannot involve the establishment which I represent without the guarantees which he mentioned. I could not do so without violating the principles and the traditions which have made this establishment one of the most powerful in Europe, principles and traditions which have often been attacked, but which enable it to prove its devotion to the State when the latter appeals to it, as it did five months ago, as it is doing today, as it will perhaps do tomorrow. It is the frequency of these appeals, Monsieur le Ministre, and the resolution we have made to hear them, which oblige me to ask for the guarantees which these principles and traditions require that we assure to our depositors, and thanks to which-as I have allowed myself to tell you, Sir-we are at your disposal. We can no doubt dispose of twenty million.”
The representatives looked at one another in consternation: the deposits would be reimbursed. Ferral now understood what the minister had wanted: to give satisfaction to his brother without committing himself; have the depositors reimbursed; make the Establishments pay, but as little as possible; be able to draw up a satisfactory report. The bargaining continued. The Consortium would be destroyed; but its annihilation mattered little if the deposits were reimbursed. The Establishments obtained the guarantee which they had demanded (they would lose, nevertheless, but very little). A few enterprises, which would be maintained, would become the affiliates of the Establishments; as for the rest. All that had happened in Shanghai was about to be dissolved, here, in a complete meaninglessness. He would have preferred to see himself despoiled, to see his work go on living completely out of his hands, conquered or stolen. But the minister would see only his own fear of the Chamber; he would tear no jackets today. In his place, Ferral would have begun by banishing himself from the Consortium, which would thereby have been rendered more healthy, and would then have maintained it at any price. As for the Establishments, he had always affirmed their incurable avarice. He remembered with pride a phrase of one of his adversaries: “He always wants a bank to be a gambling house.”
The telephone rang, close by. One of the attaches entered:
“Monsieur le Ministre, the President of the Council on the private wire.”
“Tell him matters are being satisfactorily arranged. No, I’ll go myself.”
He went out, returned a moment later, gave the delegate of the principal commercial bank (the only one which was here represented) a questioning look. A straight mustache, parallel to his glasses, bald head, weariness. He had not yet said a word.
“The maintenance of the Consortium does not in any way interest us,” he said slowly. “A share in the building of the Railways is assured to France by the treaties. If the Consortium falls, another enterprise will be formed, or will develop, and will succeed it. ”
“And this new corporation,” said Ferral, “instead of having industrialized Indo-China, will distribute dividends. But, as it will have done nothing for Chiang Kai- shek, it will find itself in the situation in which you would be here, if you had never done anything for the State; and the treaties will be manipulated by some American or British society with a French screen, obviously. To whom you will lend, for that matter, the money which you refuse me. We have created the Consortium because the policy of the French banks of Asia maintained a policy of guarantees that would have led them to make loans to the English in order to avoid making loans to the Chinese. We have followed a policy of risk, it is. ”
“I did not dare to say so.”
“. obvious. It is natural that we should reap the consequences. The savings will be protected (he smiled with one corner of his mouth) to the extent of a fifty- eight billion franc loss, and not fifty-eight billion and a few hundred million. Let us now examine together, gentlemen, if you wish, the manner in which the Consortium will cease to exist.”
Kobe
In the full light of spring, May-too poor to hire a carriage-was walking up the hill towards Kama’s house. If Gisors’ baggage was heavy, they would have to borrow some money from the old painter to get back to the ship. Upon leaving Shanghai, Gisors had told her he would seek refuge with Kama; upon arriving he had sent her his address. Since then, nothing. Not even when she had informed him that he had been appointed professor in the Sun Yat-sen institute of Moscow. Fear of the Japanese police?
As she walked she was reading a letter from Pei which had been delivered to her upon the arrival of the ship at Kobe, when she had had her passport visaed.
“. and all those who were able to flee Shanghai are awaiting you. I have received the pcmtphlets.. ”
He had published two anonymous accounts of Ch’en’s death, one according to his heart: “The murder of the dictator is the duty of the individual towards himself, and must be separate from political action, which is determined by collective forces.,” the other for the traditionalists: “Even as filial duty-the faith which our ancestors have in us-enjoins us to seek what is noblest in our lives, even so it requires of each of us the murder of the usurper.” The clandestine presses were already publishing these pamphlets again.
“… I saw Hemmelrich yesterday. He thinks of you. He is a mounter in the electric plant. He said to me: ‘Before, I began to live when 1 left the factory; now, I begin to live when I enter it. It’s the first time in my life that
I work and know why I work, not merely waiting patiently to die. ’ Tell Gisors that we are waiting for him. Since I have been here, I have been thinking of the lecture where he said:
“ ‘A civilization becomes transformed, you see, when its most oppressed element-the humiliation of the slave, the work of the modern worker-suddenly becomes a value, when the oppressed ceases to attempt to escape this humiliation, and seeks his salvation in it, when the worker ceases to attempt to escape this work, and seeks in it his reason for being. The factory, which is still only a kind of church of the catacombs, must become what the cathedral was, and men must see in it, instead of gods, human power struggling against the Earth. ’ ”
Yes; no doubt the value of men lay only in what they had transformed. The Revolution had just passed through a terrible malady, but it was not dead. And it was Kyo and his men, living or not, vanquished or not, who had brought it into the world.
“1 am going to return to Cbina as an agitator: 1 shall never be a pure Communist. Nothing is finished over there. Perbaps we sball meet; 1 bave been told that your request has been granted. . ”
A newspaper clipping fell from the letter; she picked it up:
Work must become the principal weapon of the class-struggle. The vastest industrialization plan in the world is at present being studied: the aim is to transform the entire U.S.S.R. in five years to make it one of the leading industrial powers in Europe, and then to catch up with and surpass the United States. This gigantic enterprise.
Gisors was waiting for her, in the doorway. In a kimono. No baggage in the hallway.