Despite Dark’s description of Sydney in Waterway as a ‘quiet grey city’,^[15] the outside world intrudes. Professor Channon reads of the failure of peace talks in Europe in the morning paper and understands that the ‘greyish patch’ in the newspaper (Europe) will soon burst into smoke and flame,^[16] and the inference is that Australia will be drawn into the conflict. As a progressive thinker who advocated the benefits of science and technology, Dark was nevertheless uncomfortable with the shrinking of time and space, made material in the development of the city skyline, and she wrote of this in an unpublished note:

How then to act in a time of war? Dark was a socialist and, while her political beliefs were not especially problematic in Katoomba in the 1930s, she seemed to suspect that her loyalty to Australia would be questioned at some point—and she was right. In 1938, however, she could allow her characters to become transnational subjects and express their support for international socialism and to relate to new ideas about environmentalism, workers’ rights and gender equality. The growing international interest in conservation fitted well with Dark’s preference for an outdoors life in which to be Australian was to hike, climb, drive, walk or swim through the landscape. At this point, the rhetorical territory of transnationalism could be fostered without endangering her sense of place.

Stead was also taken up with thinking about place at this time but, unlike Dark, she celebrated this unease: she was philosophical about her role as a wanderer, saying, ‘[I]t is like the uneasiness and loneliness felt by Russians, US Americans, Brazilians, who with, at their backs, the spaces and untamed land, seek Paris, the Riviera and New York?’^[18] Cities attracted wanderers (which perhaps explains Dark’s discomfort in New York) and there are many such characters in A House of All Nations. The novel tells the story of the downfall of a private bank, Banque Mercure, ‘a sort of cosmopolite club for the idle rich and speculators of Paris, Madrid, Rio, Buenos Aires, New York, London and points farther east and west’.^[19] The bank is led by the fabulous Jules Bertillon, a wealthy playboy-banker whose international risk taking knows no bounds: it is entirely appropriate that the name ‘Mercure’ connotes Mercury, the classical god of merchants and messengers. The book’s title refers not just to the bank itself but to a famous Parisian brothel of the period, neatly linking the worlds of prostitution and banking. The bank is, however, the geographical focus of the narrative: richly, if conservatively, appointed, its luxury creates an atmosphere of an illusory financial solidity. This is a novel in which interiors—of the bank, restaurants, bars, dining rooms and the occasional farmhouse—provide the structure against which the transnational game of finance is played. The bank’s interconnecting secret passages throughout the Parisian quarter provide the scaffold for the movement of money around Europe and the United States, including drug running and white-slave operations between Africa and South America. None of this, of course, is a concern to the operators of the bank. As Jules Bertillion reminds his employee Aristede Raccamond, ‘whoever heard of clean money?’.^[20]

Their money flows out of communist Russia and into international markets as Germany, France and Russia take market positions on the British pound sterling. This money has the power to cross race and class boundaries and produce subjects who inhabit a temporary hybrid nationality. Stead populates the work with close descriptions of racial and national stereotypes that are followed by accounts of the ways in which perceptions can lead one astray. Bertillion’s trusted advisor, Michel Alphendéry, is a French Jew of German (Alsatian) parentage, and Brigid Rooney argues that Alphendéry is ‘a familiar revolutionary—the deracinated, déclassé intellectual of the generation that, after the Dreyfus affair, defined the political activism of modernity’s cultural intelligentsia’.^[21] Alphendéry certainly attempts to balance being both inside and outside the system and it is this mobility that makes him such an asset to Jules—and, one could say, such an attractive figure for Stead. He finds a perverse pleasure in lecturing working men at night while keeping the bank afloat during the day. He sees capitalism as a form of social organisation and he asks himself why he should wear his life away ‘grubbing for rich men’.^[22] When the bank collapses, however, he immediately takes a position with another finance house. Alphendéry moves location but not occupation, much as did Stead and Blake when one of their banking colleagues was arrested in the United States.

Like Stead, Alphendéry is a wanderer who, like the money he moves, can disappear across borders. A liberal socialist of Jewish heritage, his cultural background is contrasted with other Jews, such as the grain merchant Henri Léon, who ‘knew no Yiddish. Coming from the Balkans, he spoke various Eastern tongues and the Ladino of the Jews exiled from Spain’;^[23] and the bankers Franz Rosenkrantz and Franz Guildenstern, who claim: ‘We in international business, are never in a foreign country. The market place, the exchange booth is our home…France is just a foothold to do business in. What is there in it to hold the soul of man?’^[24] The transnational cosmopolitanism of financial exchange becomes a rhetorical territory in which hybrid languages signify the displacement and time is marked by the opening and closing of the major stock exchanges of the world.

It is obvious that Stead does not unilaterally condemn the amoral world of Banque Mercure, despite the opening credo in which she frames the cynicism and corruption of the novel’s main characters. There is a fondness for the charming and desperate characters who stride across the bank’s foyer and a humour that lightens the economic wrangling between Jules and Michel or many of the bank’s clients or friends. This, of course, could have been a strategic move on Stead’s part. She and Blake worked for some years at the Travelers’ Bank in Paris, on which Banque Mercure’s activities were based. Blake was deeply implicated in the financial dealings of the bank and he resigned only three months before the collapse of the business in 1935. Many years later, Stead said that House of All Nations was not ‘an attack on the system, it’s a picture of the system…there’s a certain amount of amusement and love in a way, of the system. I’m not a polemic writer.’^[25] Hazel Rowley, however, points out that the American-owned bank had operated for some time on a legal and illegal basis, noting that ‘it is plain that she [Stead] was perfectly aware of the illegality of the proceedings’.^[26]

By this time, Stead had travelled a long way from her youth in Watson’s Bay, but the community of international finance offered her a stimulating framework for social critique. As a citizen of the world who mixed in intellectual circles, she could bring to Australian readers a singular perspective on the financial and political movements that were in turn shaping events at ‘home’. Her life became one of continual movement across borders and the fictional accounts of this transnational experience found their way onto the bookshelves in libraries from London to Sydney under the title of ‘Australian Literature’.

In Sydney, the financial space that Dark examines is a far more circumscribed and ordered structure in which wealth is derived from trade or property rather than speculation on a gold standard. It is, however, similarly gendered, class based and powerful. The narrative deals chiefly with relations between the upper and lower middle class, with occasional guest appearances from the professions, the politically committed and the unemployed. The two wealthy families of Waterway represent this division: Sellman’s and Hegarty’s share the retail economy in which ‘Hegarty’s was vast and cheap and amorphous—the Mecca of the lower middle class, but Sellman’s stood for quality, distinction, good taste, the last word in modernity’.^[27] Dark, unlike Stead, is not troubled by polemics, and the character of Arthur Sellman represents quite literally the ugly face of capitalism. Whereas Stead showcases Bertillon as sophisticated and erudite, Dark’s Sellman is overfed, cruel and ignorant. Sellman is opposed by those in the narrative who hold socialist sympathies, including his wife, and he has little understanding of the working class, who, however, have his measure. Dark’s working men might have ‘tall, loose-knit bones in shabby clothes’, but they have ‘intelligent’ eyes that lack ‘utterly any suggestion of deference’.^[28] Her narrative sympathy is firmly on the side of the socialists, while worldly sophisticates are treated with disdain. The young man about Sydney, Sim Hegarty, is an air-ace (as is Jules Bertillon), but unlike Jules, Sim does not theorise about the source of his wealth. His only qualms about his future are momentary and personal. With the well-travelled local beauty Lorna Sellman (who has rejected an active modernity by turning down a role in a Hollywood film), Sim represents a passivity that stands in stark contrast with the politically engaged (and Australian-focused) characters, Roger Blair and Lesley Channon. Roger and Lesley are united by left-wing philosophy rather than class or money, which is denounced as ‘that false and arbitrary substitute for the real wealth of the soil, of man-power, of brain-power’.^[29] These lovers have the interest of their country at heart, but this is couched in the discourse of international socialism.

In an interview, Stead admitted that House of All Nations was ‘badly received in Wall Street, because it was so true’.^[30] She said she liked her work at the bank and found the bankers ‘very friendly fellows’,^[31] who revealed all their business to her, knowing that she was a writer. This is the ‘old world’ that Blair calls unclean in Waterway, a world that has the potential to pollute Australia. He argues, ‘[I]t’s all very well to talk about being international—who wants to rush forward and embrace his brother, the leper?’^[32] Dark’s answer, in the words of Professor Channon, is that one must look beyond the national to a strong intellectual ‘sense of brotherhood’^[33] led by scientists and artists. In this emphasis on an international intellectualism, Dark was countering nationalist sentiments of the day: in general, her works of the 1930s offered a stronger contestation of what it meant to be an Australian in that period of modernity than was generally accepted.

Stead and Dark display, therefore, a common distrust of capitalism, but their work provokes different responses to the situation. Stead is content to show the personal and political wreckage caused by the bank, but she stops short of the advocacy of a Professor Channon or Roger Blair. One further way in which the writers do connect, however, is in their discussion of marriage as an economic institution and a form of prostitution—a preoccupation that travels through time and space. The wedding scenes in Waterway and House of All Nations show with disarming frankness the institutional relationship of sex, marriage and money.