【英文原著类】The Club of Queer Trades(奇异商贸俱乐部).pdf

The Club of Queer Trades
The Club of Queer
Trades
by
1
The Club of Queer Trades
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 plexity 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'
pany 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