The Club of Queer Trades (Annotated) E-Book

G.K. Chesterton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

First published in 1905, “The Club of Queer Trades” is a collection of six amusing stories by English writer G. K. Chesterton.

Each story in the collection is centred on someone who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means (a "queer trade", using the word "queer" in the sense of "strange"), a potential candidate for The Club of Queer Trades. To gain admittance one must have invented a unique means of earning a living and the subsequent trade being the main source of income.

The framing narrative by "Cherub" Swinburne describes his quest for The Club of Queer Trades with his friend Basil Grant, a retired judge, and Rupert Grant, a private detective who is Basil's younger brother. Each of the stories describes their encounter with people with an unique way of making a living, which makes them eligible for the select and secretive club.

Leseprobe

G. K. Chesterton

Table of contents

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit

Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

There are writers who disappear into their subjects or, rather, who dissolve into them, like a substance that determines, but we barely perceive; others, on the other hand, it seems that their personality is the key to everything they touch. Among the latter is Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), author of almost a hundred works including essays, articles and short stories. He found it hard not to write a book on any subject that occupied his mind. He was a cultured man, and more intuitive than rigorous, although it must be admitted that his intuition was very well formed, except, perhaps, in his fierce defence of Catholicism, something which united him with his lifelong friend Hilaire Belloc, another who, if not bordering on fanaticism, at least touches on obsession bordering on nonsense at times, as when he postulated, something he shared with Chesterton, the need for there to be only one religion, the true one, that is, Catholicism. Chesterton is one of those writers, like Samuel Johnson, who possesses a strong personality, and he shares with the Scotsman the good fortune of having had talent; otherwise he would have been an imbecile or a buffoon. Not all those without talent are imbeciles or buffoons, for that you have to take some risk, and Chesterton took the risk, for the time being, of arguing with his contemporaries, and of confronting the great dead with an attitude not exempt from closeness and irreverence, without excluding admiration and respect, which manages to make them more alive to us. Moreover, like H. G. Wells, he was a writer concerned with his time, although the author of "The Invisible Man" was a socialist and Chesterton a conservative, but, like almost everything about him, he needs to define himself in order to fit in. I said earlier that he was not rigorous, and what I meant was not that he did not try to get to the end of his reflections, but that on many occasions he did not do enough research, for example, in science, when he talks about evolutionism, because, unlike H.G. Wells, he had no idea of biology. But Chesterton was a man of remarkable intelligence, as well as a wonderful prose writer, a master of paradoxes and parallels of all kinds, able to make sparks fly in any sentence. He was brilliant, and those sparkles illuminated much of what he spoke. He had other qualities: cordiality and humour, also with himself, although humour and cordiality did not exempt him from being combative and a fearsome debater. As is well known, he moved from agnosticism to Anglicanism before finally, in 1922, embracing Christianity with fervour and book. From that date is his text "Why I Am Catholic," which could be read in parallel with Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927). Chesterton looked a bit like filmmaker Orson Wells, very tall and getting fatter with age. They both had some temperamental stubbornness, I think. And they both shared what I said at the beginning: we recognise a Chesterton text as easily as we recognise a Wells film fragment as something that belongs entirely to them.

An overview of Chesterton's work In his early literary days he used to write poetry, making his debut with the volume of poems "Greybeards At Play" (1900). In 1911, he would publish his finest work of poetry, "The Ballad of the White Horse." This was followed by phenomenal critical essays on various British literary figures, including Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, and his first novel, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1904), a book of incisive political observation and social criticism approached with an intelligent sense of humour. He later published important titles such as " The Club of Queer Trades" (1905), the book of police intrigue and Christian allegory "The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare" (1908), "Manalive" (1912), "The Flying Inn" (1914) and "The Return of Don Quixote" (1927). His international transcendence, apart from his excellent books of essays, was based on the writing of novels and short stories that showed his skill in linguistic handling, in the use of insightful comedy, and in the imagination for the creation of detective plots, with many of them retaining a critical character and an allegorical sense. His stories featuring Father Brown brought him worldwide fame. This character was created on the basis of his friendship with Father John O'Connor, whom Chesterton met at the beginning of the 20th century. O'Connor's ideals of life made a strong impression on the intellectual mind of G. K., who by 1909 had left the hustle and bustle of London to live in the quieter Beaconsfield. The titles of the books with the adventures of the popular priest detective are "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911), "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914), "The Incredulity of Father Brown" (1926), "The Secret of Father Brown" (1927) and "The Scandal of Father Brown" (1935). In fiction, he also published short stories, such as those collected in the volume "The Poet and the Lunatics" (1929), short stories centred on a single character, the poet Gabriel Gale. Chesterton was a lucid thinker on the political and social reality around him, defending the simplicity of primordial Christian values, and in 1911 he founded a publication with another British writer of French origin, Hilarie Belloc. After the First World War he took up distributism, which called for a better distribution of wealth and property. His ideas clashed with other important intellectuals of the time, such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. As explained above, in 1922 G. K. Chesterton eventually converted to Catholicism, writing biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. Some of his most important essays are "Heretics" (1905), "Orthodoxy" (1908), "What's Wrong With the World" (1910) and "The Everlasting Man" (1925). He also wrote "A Short History of England" (1917) and biographies of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Bernard Shaw.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

G. K. Chesterton

Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.

The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also call me 'The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour—the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern—a powerful, legal face. And no one but I knew who he was.

Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene that occurred in———, when one of the most acute and forcible of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all. For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: “I sentence you to three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside.” He accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: “Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul.” All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:

“O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.”

He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.

I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.

“Sorry to bother you, Basil,” he gasped. “I took a liberty—made an appointment here with a man—a client—in five minutes—I beg your pardon, sir,” and he gave me a bow of apology.

Basil smiled at me. “You didn't know,” he said, “that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?”

“I am and have been for some time,” said Rupert, with some dignity, “a private detective, and there's my client.”

A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” with a stress on the last syllable that somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social. He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.

Basil immediately said to me, “Let us come into the next room, Gully,” and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:

“Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.”

The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.

Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion—the cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.

“Well, Major,” said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging himself into a chair, “what is the matter with you?”

“Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,” said the Major, with righteous indignation.

We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes shut in his abstracted way, said simply:

“I beg your pardon.”

“Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something. Preposterous.”

We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent, praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to the Major.

“I'll tell you what, sir,” he said. “If you're interested in them things, you just get on to that wall.”

“On the wall!” cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.

“Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,” hissed the tempter. “I'll help you up, sir.”

How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of the Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence:

DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN