[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

did they ever deny their faith? Do you think we don't want to
fight? Night and day I have prayed--I have longed--for an atheist
revolution--I have longed to see your blood and ours on the
streets. Let it be yours or mine?"
"But you said..." began MacIan.
"I know," said Turnbull scornfully. "And what did you say? You
damned fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for
a year, and shadowed by the coppers for half a decade. If you
wanted to fight, why did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got
you out, to fight if you want to. Now, fight if you dare."
"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to
you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that
nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash
together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed
Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her
heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the
honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the
chalice of the Blood of God."
The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."
III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES
The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single
sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange
and mellow light. It made a little greasy street of St. Martin's
Lane look as if it were paved with gold. It made the pawnbroker's
half-way down it shine as if it were really that Mountain of
Piety that the French poetic instinct has named it; it made the
mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed
with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian
colour. And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the shop
of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze of old world
beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop not unbeautiful in
itself. The front window had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel,
lit, as by a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to be
jewels; for it was in brief, a shop of bric-a-brac and old
curiosities. A row of half-burnished seventeenth-century swords
ran like an ornate railing along the front of the window; behind
was a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up
hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils,
whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them,
no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of
the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop,
had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open,
the front door that opened on the street and a back door that
opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a
square of gold. There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look
as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky
were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place.
I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely. To
say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be
a tribute to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made
him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew
of the Fagin type. But he was a Jew of another and much less
admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name. For though
there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of
any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is
called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy.
The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Percy branch
of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes whose
industrious object is to lose themselves. He was a man still
young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy
handsome clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked
at the first glance kindly, and at the second cowardly. The name
over his shop was Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his
shop that evening could come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.
These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but
free-handed payers. One of them who seemed to be the principal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]