"Avram Davidson - What Strange Stars And Skies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

and the Native Indian States of Patiala and Cooch Debar, as well as two of the Trucial Sheikhdoms, the
Free City of Danzig, and Deaf Smith County in the Commonwealth of Texas; none of which, it must be
regretted, is admissible in proceedings at the Old Bailey. As he is a British subject by birth, he cannot be
neither deported nor denied admission on his return from frequent trips abroad. He is known to be
always ready to purchase, he is entirely eclectic as to the nature of the merchandise, and he pays well and
he pays in gold.
It is necessary only to add that, offered any obstacle, affront, or rebuff, he is unremitting in his hostility,
which combines the industry of the West with the Patience of the East. Smith occupies both sides of the
semi-detached villa in Maida Vale of which he owns the freehold; its interior is crammed with opulent
furnishings from all round the world, and stinks of stale beer, spilt gin, incense, curry, raw fish, the foul
breaths and bodies of those he deals with, and of chips fried in ghee.
His long, lank, and clotted hair is covered in scented grease, and on his fingers are rings of rubies,
diamonds, pearls and other precious stones worth with their settings a prince's ransom. Add only the
famous Negrohead opal worn in his stained silk four-in-hand (and for which Second Officer Smollett of
the Cutty Sark is said to have strangled Mrs. Pigler), and there you have the creature Motilal Smith in all
his repulsive essence.
***


(The night of that Fifth of November found the unfortunates among whom this great lady pursued her
noble work no more inclined than in other years to celebrate the delivery from Gunpowder Plot of King
James VI and James I and his English Parliament. Here and there, to be sure, in the glare of the
gin-palaces of the main thoroughfares, a group of grimy and tattered children had gotten up an even more
unsavoury Guy; for them Dame Phillipa had provided herself with a large supply of pennies. But that night
as on most other nights there was little enough evidence of innocent gayety.
There are multitudes, literally multitudes, in this vast labyrinth of London for whom the normal
institutions of a human society seem barely to exist. There are physicians in the East End, hospitals, and
dispensaries; yet numbers past counting will suffer injury and disease and creep off to die like brutes in
their dim corners, or, if they are fortunate, by brute strength survive. There are public baths in every
borough, and facilities for washing clothes, yet many never touch water to their skins, and wear their rags
unchanged till they rot. Babes are born without benefit of any human witness to the event save their own
wretched mothers, though a word to the great hospital in Whitechapel Road will bring midwife and
physician without charge. And while eating-places abound, from quite decent restaurants down to the
dirty holes-in-the-walls offering tuppenny cups of tea and sixpenny papers of breaded smelts and greasy
chips, and while private and public charity arrangements guarantee that no one need quite die of hunger
who will ask to be fed, no day goes by without its toll from famine of those who-- having their hoards of
copper and silver-- are disabled by their madness from spending either tuppence or shilling; or who find it
much, much easier to die like dogs in their secluded kennels than come forward and declare their needs.
As the pigeons in Trafalgar Square have learned when and where the old man with the bag of
breadcrumbs will appear, as the ownerless cats near Billingsgate can tell what time and in what place to
scavenge for the scraps of fish the dustman misses, as the rats in the sewers beneath Smithfield Market
know without error the manner in which "they seek their meat from G-d"; just so, from this stinking alley
and from that crumbling tenement, here from underneath a dripping archway and there from a disused
warehouse, slinking and creeping and peering fearfully and furtively and sidling with their ragged backs
pressed against ragged walls, there appeared by one and by one the castoffs-- one must call them
"humans", for what Other name is theirs?-- the Self-exiled, the utterly incapable, to take in their quick
reptilian grasp the things Dame Phillipa had for them. She knew, knew by instinct and knew by practice,
which ones would benefit by a shilling and which by half-a-crown; she knew those to whom money was
of no more use than cowry-shells but who would relish the meat of a hard-cooked egg and the savour of
the tiny scrap of seasoning which went with it; knew those who would be hopelessly baffled by the labour