The Club of Queer Trades quotes

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 passerby, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives.

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.

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.

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 watercolour), 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 spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene, the frame for a stunning and brutal personality.

The evening air was still, and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied cried to heaven for his blood.

“You know I must not turn round,” said the lady; “every afternoon till the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.”

I may be silly—in fact, I’m off my head—but I never could believe in that man—what’s his name, in those capital stories?—Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing.

Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.

It’s only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up—only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.”

“But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?”

“We have eternity to stretch our legs in,” replied the mystic.

“It can be an infinity of things. I haven’t seen any of them—I’ve only seen the letter. I look at that, and say it’s not criminal.”

Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.

“I scarcely ever,” he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, “hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once, without going to see it.”

And he led the way out into the purple night.

We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky.

We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream.

”

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth⁠—the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.

To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth—the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.

To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness.

I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good people.

And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world.

Besides—”

“The moment I saw that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being themselves, he was not being himself.

I saw that all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good.

And I saw that that man was trying to be evil.”

“Bosh,” he said. “On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical?

My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.

Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap.

and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to cremation.

So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or the devil.

So his house is filled with an endless succession of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands;

He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger, but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double.

He was a magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.

“I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,” he said gruffly, “to fail in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but that flashy half-caste jackanapes—”

Then that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the way he does now.

Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be bad to fight the old and the kindly.

And he fights the poor old chap savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate the man because a certain person admires him.

The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities.

But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.

The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a loud knock came at the door.

As Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the ice.

The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a fact it was not Basil.

I was handed a visiting card inscribed: “Rev. Ellis Shorter,” and underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, “Asking the favour of a few moments’ conversation on a most urgent matter.”

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation.

He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be kept back.

“I then proceeded,” he went on, with the same maddening conscientiousness of manner, “to Mr. Carr (not Mr. James Carr, of course; Mr.

“But I confess I did not like.

The chances of life are many, and it may doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many improbable.

Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!

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.

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.

“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.

“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?”

In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly.

But anyone with a knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the heart and core of the mob.

It soon became evident that something really important had happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon learned the nature of the difficulty.

“Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his greatcoat; “I thought you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here till I come back.”

It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they really show a resolution to depart.

We all followed Basil, and I cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished decisively with his greatcoat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.

… ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land.

It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God⁠—such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.

There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition.

“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn’t poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you’ve really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers.

Then you’ll know that there’s no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr. Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.

”

“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization.

That notion that civilization isn’t poetical is a civilised delusion.

Wait till you’ve really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you’ll know that there’s no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone;

Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly mystical in Basil’s supremacy.

But we only felt that there was a giant’s staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice above called to us out of heaven.

We hoisted ourselves up after him.

I saw that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper towards the sky.

But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost in space, like a falling star.

“Can nothing be done to stop Basil?” I called out.

The first is that though, when you are guessing about anyone who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing about anyone who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the most likely.

The second is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems fantastic.

If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written ‘The Elms’ over it, you wouldn’t have thought there was anything fantastic about that.

I myself was another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the weather.

Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about the most important things to total strangers.

It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about the most important things to total strangers.

It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil’s motley group of acquaintances was Professor Chadd.

I do not think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to me perfectly philosophical.

Why should a man be thought a sort of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself?

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”

“James, Mr. Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.”

The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out of the room.

“I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,” said Basil Grant, “but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the men who have deserved well of their commonwealth.

I’ve known men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be disappointed. Of course, if it is true—”

“If it is true,” said the woman fiercely, “it means that people who have never lived may make an attempt at living.”

Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed look in his eyes.

The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy—the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin.

For miracles should always happen in broad daylight.

The night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy—the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen in broad daylight.

The night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat drearily to the window.

The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But it is clear there is a limit to everything.

And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the British Museum Library.

”

The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of interest—first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of London. His brother Basil said of him: “

His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong.

But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right.” Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth telling.

His brother Basil said of him: “His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong.

But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right.

” Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth telling.

We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together.

The street was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun.

In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk.

We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of the mysterious milkman.

He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of milk, silver in the lamplight.

Suddenly, almost before we could note it, he disappeared down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really believed that the milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having vanished.

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.

“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.”

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.

”

I’m sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I’ve no more notion why you are there than the man in the moon.

A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture.

You were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.”

“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”

“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive grimly.

“I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”

This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others which I have narrated.

I had been through many wild days with Basil Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to have gone mad.

But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me.