“The Queer Feet” is the third story in the
first book of Father Brown stories by G K Chesterton (1874-1936), entitled “The
Innocence of Father Brown” (published in 1911). It revolves around a clever
piece of deduction by Chesterton’s priest/detective, but it depends on a highly
contrived situation and a statement about human behaviour that, if it applied
in 1911, certainly does not do so today.
The situation is the annual dinner of an
exclusive men’s club called The Twelve True Fishermen. Their dinner is at the
equally exclusive, not to say bizarre, Vernon Hotel in London’s Belgravia. The
restaurant only has one table, at which 24 people can sit, but if there only 12
diners, as on this occasion, they can sit in a row and have a view of the hotel
garden. The restaurant employs fifteen waiters, who therefore outnumber the
guests.
Another fact that is essential to the story
is that The Twelve True Fishermen are most interested in the fish course of
their dinner, and for this purpose they supply their own cutlery of ornate
silver knives and forks, shaped like fish, each with a large pearl in the
handle.
On the day of the dinner a crisis occurs
when one of the fifteen waiters suffers a severe stroke and is taken to a room
upstairs. As the waiter is a Catholic he asks for a priest to hear his last confession,
which is why Father Brown is on the premises. The waiter has asked Father Brown
to write out a long document, the nature of which is not fully explained by
Chesterton. The hotel manager agrees that Father Brown can do this work in a
room that is next to a passageway that leads from the waiters’ quarters to the
terrace where the guests are mingling and is next to the dining table. This
room has no direct access to the passageway but is linked to the hotel’s
cloakroom.
While he is working in this room, Father
Brown is aware of the sound of footsteps in the passageway. He deduces that
they are all made by the same feet, because of the slight creak of one of the
shoes, but they keep switching from a fast walking pace, almost on tiptoe, to a
steady heavy pace. This keeps on happening until there is a complete pause,
followed eventually by a running pace made by the same feet.
Father Brown then goes through into the
cloakroom, just in time for a man to come up and ask for his coat from the person
he assumes to be the cloakroom attendant. Father Brown then demands that the
man hand over the knives and forks that he has stolen.
The story is then told from the perspective
of the diners and waiters. Two courses of the dinner take place, followed by
the fish course, after which a waiter collects the plates and the cutlery. A
second waiter then arrives and is horrified to discover that the table has
already been cleared. It then becomes apparent that the special knives and
forks, with their pearls, are nowhere to be found. Father Brown then appears
with the stolen items and explains how he was able to reclaim them.
The story revolves around the footsteps
heard in the passageway. Father Brown has deduced that the rapid walk is
typical of that of a waiter on duty as he dashes about taking orders and
serving dishes, however the solid walk matches that of an aristocratic
gentleman. Clearly this is one man pretending to be two.
The guests and the waiters are dressed
almost identically, so it would not be difficult for a guest to assume that a
strange face belonged to a waiter and for a waiter to assume that he was a
guest. The only difficult moment for the thief would have been when the waiters
lined up before the meal and might have been discovered, by his fellow waiters,
to be out of place. However, he was able to avoid this problem by standing just
round a corner.
It is a clever idea, but does it really
stand up to examination? As with most of Chesterton’s stories there are weak
points that are not properly explained.
For one thing, the reader is not told how
Father Brown knows about the special cutlery. He has been called into the hotel
to deal with an emergency, is sequestered in a locked room, and has no reason
to know anything about the arrangements on hand for the dinner. However, he is
able to demand that the thief hands over the silverware.
Another difficulty is that the thief does
know about the silverware and how the dinner is organised. This is an exclusive
club which guards its secrets, but there is no clue given as to why the thief
would have known about the dinner, the special cutlery, or the vacancy caused
by a waiter’s sudden illness.
It also seems odd that, with a complement
of fifteen waiters, only one would clear the table of all twelve plates and 24
pieces of cutlery. Surely, with more waiters than diners, the most efficient
procedure would have been for each diner to have their own waiter who would
deal with them exclusively? However, the plot of the story would have fallen
apart if this had happened.
If there is a passageway along which
waiters and guests might be expected to walk, why does only one waiter/guest do
so? There is no indication that Father Brown picks out the distinctive steps
from among many others, but that they are the only ones to be heard. This is
surely highly unlikely, as is the idea that any guest would feel the need to
visit the waiters in their quarters, which is assumed here.
As mentioned above, this story is just too
contrived to be really successful. There are too many features that seem
improbable and put in place just to make the plot work. The story also fails to
work for the modern reader who would find it extraordinary that waiters walk in
a distinctively different way from diners. Perhaps they did more than a century
ago, but today?
© John Welford
