"Dunsany, Lord - Exiles Club, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

London in which they had built it it appeared unduly
enormous. Lifting right up above those grotesque houses and
built in that Greek style that we call Georgian, there was
something Olympian about it. To my host an unfashionable
street could have meant nothing, through all his youth
wherever he had gone had become fashionable the moment he
went there; words like the East End could have had no
meaning to him.
Whoever built that house had enormous wealth and cared
nothing for fashion, perhaps despised it. As I stood gazing
at the magnificent upper windows draped with great curtains,
indistinct in the evening, on which huge shadows flickered
my host attracted my attention from the doorway, and so I
went in and met for the second time the ex-King of
Eritivaria.
In front of us a stairway of rare marble led upwards, he
took me through a side-door and downstairs and we came to a
banqueting-hall of great magnificence. A long table ran up
the middle of it, laid for quite twenty people, and I
noticed the peculiarity that instead of chairs there were
thrones for everyone except me, who was the only guest and
for whom there was an ordinary chair. My host explained to
me when we all sat down that everyone who belonged to that
club was by rights a king.
In fact none was permitted, he told me, to belong to the
club unless his claim to a kingdom made out in writing had
been examined and allowed by those whose duty it was. The
whim of a populace or the candidate's own misrule were never
considered by the investigators, nothing counted with them
but heredity and lawful descent from kings, all else was
ignored. At that table there were those who had once
reigned themselves, others lawfully claimed descent from
kings that the world had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by
some had even changed their names. Hatzgurh, the mountain
kingdom, is almost regarded as mythical.
I have seldom seen greater splendour than that long hall
provided below the level of the street. No doubt by day it
was a little sombre, as all basements are, but at night with
its great crystal chandeliers, and the glitter of heirlooms
that had gone into exile, it surpassed the splendour of
palaces that have only one king. They had come to London
suddenly most of those kings, or their fathers before them,
or forefathers; some had come away from their kingdoms by
night, in a light sleigh, flogging the horses, or had
galloped clear with morning over the border, some had
trudged roads for days from their capital in disguise, yet
many had had time just as they left to snatch up some small
thing without price in markets, for the sake of old times as
they said, but quite as much, I thought, with an eye to the
future. And there these treasures glittered on that long