"Chesterton, G K - The Tremendous Adventures Of Major Brown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

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Chapter 1
The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dorй, 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