I often think of the Bureau d'Echange de Maux and the wondrously evil
old man that sate therein. It stood in a little street that there is
in Paris, 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'Echanges 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'Echange 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 peculiar 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 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 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 to England and 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 of habit I risked it, and I held
my breath all the way and clenched my hands. Nothing will induce me to
try such a journey again. I would sooner go up to my room in a
balloon. And why? Because if a balloon goes wrong you have a chance,
it may spread out into a parachute after it has burst, it may catch in
a tree, a hundred and one things may happen, but if the lift falls
down its shaft you are done. As for sea-sickness I shall never be sick
again, I cannot tell you why except that I know that it is so.
And the shop in which I made this remarkable bargain, the shop to
which none return when their business is done: I set out for it next
day. Blindfold I could have found my way to the unfashionable quarter
out of which a mean street runs, where you take the alley at the end,
whence runs the cul de sac where the queer shop stood. A shop with
pillars, fluted and painted red, stands on its near side, its other
neighbour is a low-class jeweller's with little silver brooches in the
window. In such incongruous company stood the shop with beams with its
walls painted green.
In half an hour I found the cul de sac to which I had gone twice a day
for the last week, I found the shop with the ugly painted pillars and
the jeweller that sold brooches, but the green house with the three
beams was gone.
Pulled down, you will say, although in a single night. That can never
be the answer to the mystery, for the house of the fluted pillars
painted on plaster and the low-class jeweller's shop with its silver
brooches (all of which I could identify one by one) were standing side
by side.