The Club of Queer Trades - G. K. Chesterton (best e book reader for android .TXT) 📗
- Author: G. K. Chesterton
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At length Shorter was cornered.
“Come, come, Mr Grant,” he panted, “you can’t do anything to me. It’s quite legal. And it doesn’t do any one the least harm. It’s only a social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.”
“I don’t blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”
“No, no,” said Mr Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They don’t belong to Captain Fraser.”
“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter’s bald head belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.”
“No,” said Grant, “I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you go to Mrs Thornton’s dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why not?”
“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”
“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in. Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid shawl.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that, eh?”
The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
“Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”
He laughed again.
“Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking) are Professional Detainers.”
“And what on earth’s that?” I asked.
“It’s really very simple, Mr Swinburne,” began he who had once been the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young city man. “It is really nothing very important. We are paid by our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser—” and with that he hesitated and smiled.
Basil smiled also. He intervened.
“The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is— er—what is I believe described as `the romance of his life’. He wanted that two hours with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as to let him have the field to himself.”
“And of course,” said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, “as I had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady, I had to come with something rather hot and strong—rather urgent. It wouldn’t have done to be tame.”
“Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the man respectfully, “always very grateful for any recommendation, sir.”
The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil’s admirable Burgundy.
“It’s wonderful how common it’s getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy from morning till night. I’ve no doubt you’ve often knocked up against us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you with hunting stories, when you’re burning to be introduced to somebody, he’s from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours, just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons’, she’s from our bureau. The Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”
“There is one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why you are both vicars.”
A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in Essex.
“That may have been a mistake, sir,” he said. “But it was not our fault. It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain. We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars. Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas.”
The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that “the moon” had been not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.
He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.
I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no good.
Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells; they had the heat of the thieves’ kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If Keith’s tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity of being a scamp.
He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil’s opposing him, however banteringly.
I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I could not swallow Lieutenant Keith’s autobiography.
“You don’t seriously mean, Basil,” I said, “that you think that that fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad Mullah and—”
“He has one fault,” said Basil thoughtfully, “or virtue, as you may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style; he is too veracious.”
“Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,” said Rupert contemptuously, “be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor.”
“No, he’s extremely fond of change of scene,” replied Basil dispassionately, “and of living in odd places. That doesn’t prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don’t understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.”
“So far from paradox,” said his brother, with something rather like a sneer, “you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?”
“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly. “For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”
“Well, your lieutenant’s truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything I ever heard of,” said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. “Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?”
“I believe Keith’s words,” answered the other. “He is an honest man.”
“I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,” said Rupert cynically.
“I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely in himself,” I said mildly; “his mode of life—”
Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his head.
“I say, Grant,” he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door, “I’ve got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me a hundred pounds? There’s a good chap.”
Rupert
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