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