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Unknown - "Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers "

Anthony Trollope - "Hunting Sketches"

Samuel Butler - "God the Known and God the Unknown"

N. H. Bishop - "Voyage of The Paper Canoe"

The Club of Queer Trades

G >> G.K.Chesterton >> The Club of Queer Trades




His face grew grave.

"Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible
that the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that
I was wrong about him."

"Then come along with you," I said, with a certain amicable anger,
"and remember that you owe me half a crown."

"As to that, I differ from you," said Rupert coolly. "The
milkman's remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman
may have been. But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of
the bet were, I think, as follows, as I propounded them, that
wherever that milkman came to a real stop I should find out
something curious."

"Well?" I said.

"Well," he answered, "I jolly well have. You just come with me,"
and before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked
through the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I
followed almost before I made any decision.

When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish
literally, as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a
closed door, shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come,
the ridiculous well in which I found myself, and the ridiculous
man who had brought me there, and who stood there with dancing
eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert caught me by the
elbow.

"Just listen to that," he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his
right hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters
of the basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and
even inclined my head for a moment towards it. From inside was
coming the murmur of an unmistakable human voice.

"Have you been talking to somebody inside?" I asked suddenly,
turning to Rupert.

"No, I haven't," he replied, with a grim smile, "but I should very
much like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?"

"No, of course not," I replied.

"Then I recommend you to listen," said Rupert sharply.

In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood
a moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which
there was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning
sound which took the form of the words: "When shall I get out? When
shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?" or words to that
effect.

"Do you know anything about this?" I said, turning upon Rupert very
abruptly.

"Perhaps you think I am the criminal," he said sardonically,
"instead of being in some small sense the detective. I came into
this area two or three minutes ago, having told you that I knew
there was something funny going on, and this woman behind the
shutters (for it evidently is a woman) was moaning like mad. No,
my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything about her. She
is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited daughter, or a
member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being wailing
that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman and
beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or
three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning, that is all."

"My dear fellow," I said, "I apologize; this is no time for
arguing. What is to be done?"

Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.

"First of all," he said, "house-breaking." And he forced the blade
into the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter,
leaving a gap and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room
within was entirely unlighted, so that for the first few seconds
the window seemed a dead and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of
slate. Then came a realization which, though in a sense gradual,
made us step back and catch our breath. Two large dim human eyes
were so close to us that the window itself seemed suddenly to be a
mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass within, and
with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening came
the words:

"When shall I get out?"

"What can all this be?" I said.

Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing
the ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in
it, smaller and more accurate than I should have supposed possible.
The moment he had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to
speak, piercing and querulous and clear, making the same demand for
liberty.

"Can't you get out, madam?" I said, drawing near the hole in some
perturbation.

"Get out? Of course I can't," moaned the unknown female bitterly.
"They won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them
I'd call the police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes.
They could keep me as long as they liked only--"

I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my
stick, incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held
my arm hard, held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as
if he desired to stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do
so. I paused a moment, and in the act swung slightly round, so
that I was facing the supporting wall of the front door steps. The
act froze me into a sudden stillness like that of Rupert, for a
figure almost as motionless as the pillars of the portico, but
unmistakably human, had put his head out from between the
doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted
lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it into
abrupt darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of
his face beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at
us. I must say I thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He rang
the area bell quite idly, and went on talking to me with the easy
end of a conversation which had never had any beginning. The black
glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it
was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden
with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small
and decorous housemaid stood in it.

"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to
make somehow or other at once affable and underbred, "but we
thought perhaps that you might do something for the Waifs and
Strays. We don't expect--"

"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable severity
of the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in
our faces.

"Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people," said the
philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As
we did so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly
disappeared.

"Well, what do you make of that?" asked Rupert, slapping his
gloves together when we got into the street.

I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such
conditions I had but one thought.

"Don't you think," I said a trifle timidly, "that we had better
tell your brother?"

"Oh, if you like," said Rupert, in a lordly way. "He is quite
near, as I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall
we take a cab? Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him."

Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat
deserted look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil
Grant with his great head and his great white hat blocking the
ticket-office window. I thought at first that he was taking a
ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly long time about
it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with the
booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole
in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time
before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental
fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some
of the official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we
managed to get him to understand that we had made an astounding
discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively, walking
between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a
rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington, of
the equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and
the man staring from the porch. At length he said:

"If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice
on the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different
pretext would look worse. You may be quite certain that the
inquisitive gentleman who looked at you looked thoroughly, and will
wear, so to speak, your portraits next to his heart. If you want to
find out if there is anything in this without a police raid I fancy
you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see them."

His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of
the house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor
of twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it
was.

"Do you think it's safe, Basil," said his brother, pausing, a
little pale, under the lamp, "to go into that place alone? Of
course we shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these
devils might do something--something sudden--or odd. I can't feel
it's safe."

"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly, "except,
possibly--death," and he went up the steps and rang at the bell.
When the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a
square of gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with a
bang, burying our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder.
It had been like the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of
some evil leviathan. A freshening night breeze began to blow up
the street, and we turned up the collars of our coats. At the end
of twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or spoken, we
were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension
than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement
towards the house.

"I can't stand this," he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back
into the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the
black house front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted
against it coming out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so
loudly that you could have heard every syllable across the street.
Another voice, or, possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking
back at him from within.

"No, no, no," Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious
hostility. "That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of
all. It's the soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of
cosmic forces. When you see a cosmic force you don't like, trick
it, my boy. But I must really be off."

"Come and pitch into us again," came the laughing voice from out
of the house. "We still have some bones unbroken."

"Thanks very much, I will--good night," shouted Grant, who had by
this time reached the street.

"Good night," came the friendly call in reply, before the door
closed.

"Basil," said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, "what are we to
do?"

The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

"What is to be done, Basil?" I repeated in uncontrollable
excitement.

"I'm not sure," said Basil doubtfully. "What do you say to getting
some dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I
tried to get those fellows to come, but they couldn't."

We stared blankly.

"Go to the Court Theatre?" repeated Rupert. "What would be the good
of that?"

"Good? What do you mean?" answered Basil, staring also. "Have you
turned Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of
course."

"But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!" cried
Rupert. "What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I
go for the police?"

Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.

"Oh, that," he said. "I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some
mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm
sorry those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of
these green omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane Square."

"I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us," I said
irritably. "How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a
mere private affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for
all I know, be private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's
drawing-room, would you think it bad taste to talk about it just
as if it was a confounded dado or an infernal etching?"

Basil laughed heartily.

"That's very forcible," he said. "As a matter of fact, though, I
know it's all right in this case. And there comes the green
omnibus."

"How do you know it's all right in this ease?" persisted his
brother angrily.

"My dear chap, the thing's obvious," answered Basil, holding a
return ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat
pocket. "Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives.
They're not the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I
want to get a paper before the omnibus comes."

"Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury. "Do you mean to
tell me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow
creature in pitch darkness in a private dungeon, because you've
had ten minutes' talk with the keepers of it and thought them
rather good men?"

"Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking the
ticket out of his mouth. "But this kind of good man doesn't
commit that kind of crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?"

The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along
the dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb,
and for an instant it was touch and go whether we should all have
leaped on to it and been borne away to the restaurant and the
theatre.

"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I simply
won't leave this street and this house."

"Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
"There's some black work going on there. If I left it I should
never sleep again."

Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.

"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate
further. You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two
young Oxford fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected
with this pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and all
that."

"I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we shall
enlighten you further about their ethics."

"And may I ask," said Basil gloomily, "what it is that you propose
to do?"

"I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this house;
secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly,
to knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house."

Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for
an instant with one of his sudden laughs.

"Poor little boys," he said. "But it almost serves them right for
holding such silly views, after all," and he quaked again with
amusement "there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it."

"I suppose you mean to help us?" said Rupert.

"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to prevent
your doing the poor chaps any harm."

He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking
indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the
door opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.

"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said. "I met two friends
outside who very much want to know you. May I bring them in?"

"Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable voice
of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by
the decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in
person. He was a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly
dark hair and a square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and a
sort of blazer of some incredible college purple.

"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase. This house
is more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its
snobbish exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the
place really."

"That," said Rupert, with a savage smile, "I can quite believe."

We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the
young inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with
magazines and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The
other youth, who stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob,
was big and burly, with dead brown hair brushed forward and a
Norfolk jacket. He was that particular type of man whose every
feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet who is, you would
say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.

"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been
effected. "I must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon
eminent men of science such as we. I've half a mind to chuck
my D.Sc. and turn minor poet."

"Bosh," answered Grant. "I never said a word against eminent men
of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which
supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a
sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people
talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about a
mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk about
the survival of the fittest they think they do understand it,
whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately
false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement has
made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking
unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically
about science."

"That is all very well," said the big young man, whose name
appeared to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense, science, like
mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood by
specialists. Still, the rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood
here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know one
note of music from another. Still, he knows something. He knows
enough to take off his hat when they play `God save the King'. He
doesn't take it off by mistake when they play `Oh, dem Golden
Slippers'. Just in the same way science--"

Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly
legitimate. Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an
arm round his throat, and bent the giant backwards.

"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and before
I knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the
purple blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a
whalebone, but I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise.
I twitched one of his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on
the single foot, and then we fell with a crash amid the litter of
newspapers, myself on top.

My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's
voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the
beginning.

". . . wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir,
and I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old
friends against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me,
therefore, in tying you up in this antimacassar, to make it as
commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be while. . ."

I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty
hands. Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was
Mr Burrows; how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was
held back by Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over his
whole frame. An instant after his head plunged forward like a
bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head over heels, a catherine
wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him. Simultaneously the
bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also to the
ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar, leaped
at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the
waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to
his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it now.

Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and
before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments,
could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in the
room. Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now
outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon
me, crushing me back into the corner upon the wreck of the paper
basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him against the
wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still dazed.

In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of
Basil come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.

"Now this," he said, "is what I call enjoying oneself."

I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the
bookcase, from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To
my astonishment his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like
those of a child heated by a favourite game.

I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on
top of me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to
him. He turned quickly to come to reinforce the two who were
mastering Basil. The latter's head was already sinking lower and
lower, like a leaking ship, as his enemies pressed him down. He
flung up one hand just as I thought him falling and hung on to a
huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards discovered, of
St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across the
room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily
out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air,
so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness
broke, and he sank, his enemies closing over him.

Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as
best he could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling
over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their
falls, but Rupert certainly the more so. I was still successfully
held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled papers and
magazines, like an immense waste-paper basket. Burrows and his
companion were almost up to the knees in them, as in a drift of
dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a sheet
of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some
fantastic trouser frill.

Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad
back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend
of effort in it as if my friend still needed some holding down.
Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying
on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge
fists and those of the footman were battering Basil's sunken head
like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's ankle out of his
sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly down
in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was being
forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face.
Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook
together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the
floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like
battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and
another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he
knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang
at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between
them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go and
turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and,
to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other
footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling
out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him,
seeing that the battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the
pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke
in a perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.

"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own way,
perhaps you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?"

"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his
captive, "this is what we call the survival of the fittest."

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the
latter phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself
again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood,
and knotting a handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding
from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:

"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear
and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison
downstairs."

"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a
leisured way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us," he said,
glancing round at the litter of the room, "we have all the
illustrated papers."

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him
even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I
passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs,
Basil's voice continuing conversationally:

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