Chapter 15

That afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another. The memory
of the former is a little blotted out. Things began to move so quickly
that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I
cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first
explanation. I must have attacked her fiercely--on the score of de
Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the
interest of the name allow her to see the man again. She told me things,
too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got
Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down. Halderschrodt
was de Mersch's banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch's, and so
on. The "so on" in this case meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt,
apparently, was the "somebody who was up to something" of the American
paper--that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented.
I can't remember the details. They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and
I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it. But, in sum,
it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly
vast Black Monday--a frightful thing in the existing state of public
confidence, but one which did not mean much to me. I forget how she said
she had been able to put the screw on him. Halderschrodt, as you must
remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius
and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some
enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which
foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was
his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that
weakness. I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they
concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution
that was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been
engineered in our Salon. And she had burked the revolution--betrayed it,
I suppose--and the consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt and all
the rest of them were left high and dry.

The whole thing was a matter of under-currents that never came to the
surface, a matter of shifting sands from which only those with the
clearest heads could come forth.

"And we ... we have clear heads," she said. It was impossible to listen
to her without shuddering. For me, if he stood for anything,
Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the tremendous name, and
there was the person I had just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind
approaching almost to the royal had conferred a presence that had some
of the divinity that hedges a king. It seemed frightful merely to
imagine his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she had pointed