"Lord Dunsany - The Bureau D'exchange De Maux (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

The Bureau d'Exchange de Maux

by Lord Dunsany




I often think of the Bureau d'Exchange de Maux and the
wondrously evil old man that sate therein. It stood in a
little street that there is inParis, its doorway made of
three brown beams of wood, the top one overlapping the
others like the Greek letter pi, all the rest painted green,
a house far lower and narrower than its neighbours and
infinitely stranger, a thing to take one's fancy. And over
the doorway on the old brown beam in faded yellow letters
this legend ran, Bureau Universel d'Exchanges de Maux.
I entered at once and accosted the listless man that
lolled on a stool by his counter. I demanded the wherefore
of his wonderful house, what evil wares he exchanged, with
many other things that I wished to know, for curiosity led
me; and indeed had it not I had gone at once from that shop,
for there was so evil a look in that fattened man, in the
hang of his fallen cheeks and his sinful eye, that you would
have said he had had dealings with Hell and won the
advantage by sheer wickedness.
Such a man was mine host; but above all the evil of him
lay in his eyes, which lay so still, so apathetic, that you
would have sworn that he was drugged or dead; like lizards
motionless on a wall they lay, then suddenly they darted,
and all his cunning flamed up and revealed itself in what
one moment before seemed no more than a sleepy and ordinary
wicked old man. And this was the object and trade of that
peculiar shop, the Bureau Universel d'Exchange de Maux: you
paid twenty francs, which the old man proceeded to take from
me, for admission to the bureau and then had the right to
exchange any evil or misfortune with anyone on the premises
for some evil or misfortune that he "could afford," as the
old man put it.
There were four or five men in the dingy ends of that
low-ceilinged room who gesticulated and muttered softly in
twos as men who make a bargain, and now and then more came
in, and the eyes of the flabby owner of the house leaped up
at them as they entered, seemed to know their errands at
once and each one's particular need, and fell back again
into somnolence, receiving his twenty francs in an almost
lifeless hand and biting the coin as though in pure absence
of mind.
"Some of my clients," he told me. So amazing to me was
the trade of this extraordinary shop that I engaged the old
man in conversation, repulsive though he was, and from his