Tales of Wonder

  The Bureau d'Echange de Maux

  I often think of the Bureau d'Echange de Maux and the wondrously evilold man that sate therein. It stood in a little street that there isin Paris, its doorway made of three brown beams of wood, the top oneoverlapping the others like the Greek letter _pi_, all the restpainted green, a house far lower and narrower than its neighbours andinfinitely stranger, a thing to take one's fancy. And over the doorwayon the old brown beam in faded yellow letters this legend ran, BureauUniversel d'Echanges de Maux.

  I entered at once and accosted the listless man that lolled on a stoolby his counter. I demanded the wherefore of his wonderful house, whatevil 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 fromthat shop, for there was so evil a look in that fattened man, in thehang of his fallen cheeks and his sinful eye, that you would have saidhe had had dealings with Hell and won the advantage by sheerwickedness.

  Such a man was mine host; but above all the evil of him lay in hiseyes, which lay so still, so apathetic, that you would have sworn thathe was drugged or dead; like lizards motionless on a wall they lay,then suddenly they darted, and all his cunning flamed up and revealeditself in what one moment before seemed no more than a sleepy andordinary wicked old man. And this was the object and trade of thatpeculiar shop, the Bureau Universel d'Echange de Maux: you paid twentyfrancs, which the old man proceeded to take from me, for admission tothe bureau and then had the right to exchange any evil or misfortunewith anyone on the premises for some evil or misfortune that he "couldafford," as the old man put it.

  There were four or five men in the dingy ends of that low-ceilingedroom who gesticulated and muttered softly in twos as men who make abargain, and now and then more came in, and the eyes of the flabbyowner of the house leaped up at them as they entered, seemed to knowtheir errands at once and each one's peculiar need, and fell backagain into somnolence, receiving his twenty francs in an almostlifeless 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 ofthis extraordinary shop that I engaged the old man in conversation,repulsive though he was, and from his garrulity I gathered thesefacts. He spoke in perfect English though his utterance was somewhatthick and heavy; no language seemed to come amiss to him. He had beenin business a great many years, how many he would not say, and was farolder 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 hadto be evils, he was not empowered to carry on any other kind ofbusiness.

  There was no evil, he told me, that was not negotiable there; no evilthe old man knew had ever been taken away in despair from his shop. Aman might have to wait and come back again next day, and next day andthe day after, paying twenty francs each time, but the old man had theaddresses of all his clients and shrewdly knew their needs, and soonthe right two met and eagerly exchanged their commodities."Commodities" was the old man's terrible word, said with a gruesomesmack of his heavy lips, for he took a pride in his business and evilsto him were goods.

  I learned from him in ten minutes very much of human nature, more thanI have ever learned from any other man; I learned from him that aman'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 seekfor extremes in that small grim shop. A woman that had no children hadexchanged with an impoverished half-maddened creature with twelve. Onone 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 agreementin the little room at the back opening out of the shop where hisclients do business. Apparently the man that had parted with wisdomhad left the shop upon the tips of his toes with a happy thoughfoolish expression all over his face, but the other went thoughtfullyaway wearing a troubled and very puzzled look. Almost always it seemedthey did business in opposite evils.

  But the thing that puzzled me most in all my talks with that unwieldyman, the thing that puzzles me still, is that none that had once donebusiness in that shop ever returned again; a man might come day afterday for many weeks, but once do business and he never returned; somuch the old man told me, but when I asked him why, he only mutteredthat he did not know.

  It was to discover the wherefore of this strange thing and for noother reason at all that I determined myself to do business sooner orlater in the little room at the back of that mysterious shop. Idetermined to exchange some very trivial evil for some evil equallyslight, to seek for myself an advantage so very small as scarcely togive Fate as it were a grip, for I deeply distrusted these bargains,knowing well that man has never yet benefited by the marvellous andthat the more miraculous his advantage appears to be the more securelyand tightly do the gods or the witches catch him. In a few days more Iwas going back to England and I was beginning to fear that I should besea-sick: this fear of sea-sickness, not the actual malady but onlythe 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 thehead of the firm (one never does when shopping) but I decided thatneither Jew nor Devil could make very much on so small a bargain asthat.

  I told the old man my project, and he scoffed at the smallness of mycommodity trying to urge me to some darker bargain, but could not moveme from my purpose. And then he told me tales with a somewhat boastfulair of the big business, the great bargains that had passed throughhis hands. A man had once run in there to try and exchange death, hehad swallowed poison by accident and had only twelve hours to live.That sinister old man had been able to oblige him. A client waswilling 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 rattlingtogether as he spoke a little pocketful of twenty-franc pieces.

  Strange business I watched in that shop for the next few days, theexchange of odd commodities, and heard strange mutterings in cornersamongst couples who presently rose and went to the back room, the oldman following to ratify.

  Twice a day for a week I paid my twenty francs, watching life with itsgreat needs and its little needs morning and afternoon spread outbefore me in all its wonderful variety.

  And one day I met a comfortable man with only a little need, he seemedto have the very evil I wanted. He always feared the lift was going tobreak. 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 wordswere needed to convince him that mine was the evil for him, he nevercrossed 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 soabsurd a fear could never trouble me. And yet at times it is almostthe curse of my life. When we both had signed the parchment in thespidery back room and the old man had signed and ratified (for whichwe had to pay him fifty francs each) I went back to my hotel, andthere I saw the deadly thing in the basement. They asked me if I wouldgo upstairs in the lift, from force of habit I risked it, and I heldmy breath all the way and clenched my hands. Nothing will induce me totry such a journey again. I would sooner go up to my room in aballoon. 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 ina tree, a hundred and one things may happen, but if the lift fallsdown its shaft you are done. As for sea-sickness I shall never be sickagain, 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 towhich none return when their business is done: I set out for it nextday. Blindfold I could have found my way to the unfashionable quarterout of which a mean street runs, where you take the alley at the end,whence runs the cu
l de sac where the queer shop stood. A shop withpillars, fluted and painted red, stands on its near side, its otherneighbour is a low-class jeweller's with little silver brooches in thewindow. In such incongruous company stood the shop with beams with itswalls painted green.

  In half an hour I found the cul de sac to which I had gone twice a dayfor the last week, I found the shop with the ugly painted pillars andthe jeweller that sold brooches, but the green house with the threebeams was gone.

  Pulled down, you will say, although in a single night. That can neverbe the answer to the mystery, for the house of the fluted pillarspainted on plaster and the low-class jeweller's shop with its silverbrooches (all of which I could identify one by one) were standing sideby side.