The Club of Queer Trades, G. K. Chesterton [book series for 12 year olds .TXT] 📗

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 and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked up a quill-pen.

“Shall I cross it?” he asked, opening a chequebook.

“Really,” began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, “since Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before his family, I⁠—”

“Here you are, Ugly,” said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction of the quite nonchalant officer. “Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes,” replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. “As a matter of fact I want it now. I want to see my⁠—er⁠—business man.”

Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, “Receiver of stolen goods, perhaps.” What he did say was:

“A business man? That’s rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.”

Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like ill-temper:

“He’s a thingummy-bob, a house-agent, say. I’m going to see him.”

“Oh, you’re going to see a house-agent, are you?” said Rupert Grant grimly. “Do you know, Mr. Keith, I think I should very much like to go with you?”

Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a little; his brow blackened sharply.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “What did you say?”

Rupert’s face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony, and he answered:

“I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along with you to this house-agent’s.”

The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.

“Oh, in God’s name, come to my house-agent’s! Come to my bedroom. Look under my bed. Examine my dustbin. Come along!” And with a furious energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.

Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation was certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil and I tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other that we had both noticed this.

Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent. Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more