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

as it were a grip, for I deeply distrusted these bargains,
knowing well that man has never yet benefited by the
marvellous and that the more miraculous his advantage
appears to be the more securely and tightly do the gods or
the witches catch him. In a few days more I was going back
toEnglandand I was beginning to fear that I should be
sea-sick: this fear of sea-sickness, not the actual malady
but only the mere fear of it, I decided to exchange for a
suitably little evil. I did not know with whom I should be
dealing, who in reality was the head of the firm (one never
does when shopping) but I decided that neither Jew nor Devil
could make very much on so small a bargain as that.
I told the old man my project, and he scoffed at the
smallness of my commodity trying to urge me to some darker
bargain, but could not move me from my purpose. And then he
told me tales with a somewhat boastful air of the big
business, the great bargains that had passed through his
hands. A man had once run in there to try and exchange
death, he had swallowed poison by accident and had only
twelve hours to live. That sinister old man had been able
to oblige him. A client was willing to exchange the
commodity.
"But what did he give in exchange for death?" I said.
"Life," said that grim old man with a furtive chuckle.
"It must have been a horrible life," I said.
"That was not my affair," the proprietor said, lazily
rattling together as he spoke a little pocketful of
twenty-franc pieces.
Strange business I watched in that shop for the next few
days, the exchange of odd commodities, and heard strange
mutterings in corners amongst couples who presently rose and
went to the back room, the old man following to ratify.
Twice a day for a week I paid my twenty francs, watching
life with its great needs and its little needs morning and
afternoon spread out before me in all its wonderful variety.
And one day I met a comfortable man with only a little
need, he seemed to have the very evil I wanted. He always
feared the lift was going to break. I knew too much of
hydraulics to fear things as silly as that, but it was not
my business to cure his ridiculous fear. Very few words
were needed to convince him that mine was the evil for him,
he never crossed the sea, and I on the other hand could
always walk upstairs, and I also felt at the time, as many
must feel in that shop, that so absurd a fear could never
trouble me. And yet at times it is almost the curse of my
life. When we both had signed the parchment in the spidery
back room and the old man had signed and ratified (for which
we had to pay him fifty francs each) I went back to my
hotel, and there I saw the deadly thing in the basement.
They asked me if I would go upstairs in the lift, from force