The Club of Queer Trades | Page 3

dignity, "a
private detective, and there's my client."
A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being
given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man
walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table,
and said, "Good evening, gentlemen," with a stress on the last syllable
that somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and
social. He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt
black moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was
contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.
Basil immediately said to me, "Let us come into the next room, Gully,"
and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
"Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly."
The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain
Major Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about
a quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do
not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he
was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who
recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes
of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits
he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One
enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion--the
cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his
blue eyes glittered like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had
remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round

Roberts at Candahar.
"Well, Major," said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
himself into a chair, "what is the matter with you?"
"Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover," said the Major, with
righteous indignation.
We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
"I beg your pardon."
"Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
Something. Preposterous."
We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the
reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major
Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The
eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of
Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of
the most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man
in black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.
Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
enthusiastic one. 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 water-colour), 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 was one of those men
who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather than three,
so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like a

pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have
believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a
few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a
whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the
back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and
discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind
the scenes of a theatre. But