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

garrulity I gathered these facts. He spoke in perfect
English though his utterance was somewhat thick and heavy;
no language seemed to come amiss to him. He had been in
business a great many years, how many he would not say, and
was far older than he looked. All kinds of people did
business in his shop. What they exchanged with each other
he did not care except that it had to be evils, he was not
empowered to carry on any other kind of business.
There was no evil, he told me, that was not negotiable
there; no evil the old man knew had ever been taken away in
despair from his shop. A man might have to wait and come
back again next day, and next day and the day after, paying
twenty francs each time, but the old man had the addresses
of all his clients and shrewdly knew their needs, and soon
the right two met and eagerly exchanged their commodities.
"Commodities" was the old man's terrible word, said with a
gruesome smack of his heavy lips, for he took a pride in his
business and evils to him were goods.
I learned from him in ten minutes very much of human
nature, more than I have ever learned from any other man; I
learned from him that a man's own evil is to him the worst
thing there is or ever could be, and that an evil so
unbalances all men's minds that they always seek for
extremes in that small grim shop. A woman that had no
children had exchanged with an impoverished half-maddened
creature with twelve. On one occasion a man had exchanged
wisdom for folly.
"Why on earth did he do that?" I said.
"None of my business," the old man answered in his heavy
indolent way. He merely took his twenty francs from each
and ratified the agreement in the little room at the back
opening out of the shop where his clients do business.
Apparently the man that had parted with wisdom had left the
shop upon the tips of his toes with a happy though foolish
expression all over his face, but the other went
thoughtfully away wearing a troubled and very puzzled look.
Almost always it seemed they did business in opposite evils.
But the thing that puzzled me most in all my talks with
that unwieldy man, the thing that puzzles me still, is that
none that had once done business in that shop ever returned
again; a man might come day after day for many weeks, but
once do business and he never returned; so much the old man
told me, but when I asked him why, he only muttered that he
did not know.
It was to discover the wherefore of this strange thing
and for no other reason at all that I determined myself to
do business sooner or later in the little room at the back
of that mysterious shop. I determined to exchange some very
trivial evil for some evil equally slight, to seek for
myself an advantage so very small as scarcely to give Fate