The Queer Feet: a short story by G K Chesterton

“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

The Invisible Man: a short story by G K Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English critic, poet and novelist who was well known as one of the most colourful and provocative writers of his day. He was seen by many as a latter-day Samuel Johnson, not only for his common sense and incisive wit, but also for his physically large appearance.

“The Invisible Man” was the fifth story written by G K Chesterton about his priest/detective Father Brown. It appeared in his original collection of Father Brown stories, entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown”, in 1911.

The Story

The setting of the story is Camden Town, a district of north London. A young man, John Turnbull Angus, walks into a café and proposes marriage to the waitress, Laura Hope, who appears to be the only member of staff on the premises. One assumes that the two are not complete strangers to each other, but this is not made clear. She turns him down but, because he refuses to take no for an answer, she tells him the story of her complicated love-life.

She had been living at her father’s pub, The Red Fish, which was somewhere out of town, when she had been the subject of marriage proposals from two suitors, neither of whom she found attractive. One was a very short man, almost a dwarf, named Isidore Smythe. The other, tall and thin but with a terrible squint, was James Welkin. Laura did not want to marry either of them, but neither did she want to hurt their feelings, so she came up with the plan of announcing that she could not marry anyone who had not made his way in the world. The two men promptly set off to seek their fortunes as if, in Laura’s words, “they were in some silly fairy-tale”.

A year has passed, and Laura is now running the café but in real fear that she has been tracked down by James Welkin, the suitor with the squint. She keeps hearing his voice when there is no-one to be seen. She has received letters from Isidore Smythe, who is a now successful businessman, but as she reads the letters she can hear Welkin’s distinctive laugh.

Angus hears a noise in the street and walks through into the confectioner’s shop that adjoins the café to find a man who can only be Isidore Smythe. He points out that a strip of paper has been pasted on the shop window bearing the message “If you marry Smythe he will die”. Smythe also mentions that he has had threatening letters left at his flat, but nobody has seen anyone who could have brought them. Angus offers to help Smythe, and Laura, by putting the matter into the hands of a private detective that he knows and who lives nearby. He is Flambeau, a reformed former French master criminal who is a character that appears in many of the Father Brown stories.

Angus escorts Smythe back to his flat, which is on the top floor of Himalaya Mansions. On the way he notices billboard advertisements for the product that has made Smythe his fortune, namely large clockwork dolls that perform household duties under the general name of “Smythe’s Silent Service”.

When they reach Smythe’s flat, Angus notices that the place is full of these machines that perform their functions at the touch of button. He also sees a scrap of paper on the floor with a message that reads: “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you”.

Angus heads off to fetch Flambeau, but before he leaves he instructs four people, a cleaner, a commissionaire, a policeman and a chestnut seller, to keep a close eye on the premises and report back to him if anyone enters the building while he is away.

Angus finds Flambeau, who is being visited by Father Brown. As the three of them walk back to Himalaya Mansions it starts to snow. On arrival, Angus hears from all four “guards” that nobody has entered the building in his absence, but Father Brown is not so sure, because he can see footprints in the snow that tell a different story.

When  they reach Smythe’s flat they find a bloodstain on the floor but no Smythe. Back on ground level, Father Brown asks the policeman to investigate something on his behalf, and when he returns he says that Smythe’s body has been found in the nearby canal. Father Brown then regrets that he forgot to ask if a light brown sack has also been found.

The solution of the mystery revolves around the fact that, according to Chesterton and Father Brown, people tend to observe only what they expect to regard as being out of the ordinary. Nobody saw anyone enter Himalaya Mansions, although they would all have seen the postman do so but dismissed this occurrence because it was unremarkable. A postman does not count as a person in such a context.

As a postman, James Welkin was able to deliver all the letters and messages to Laura and Isidore Smythe, and to take away the latter’s small body in his postman’s sack. Laura could hear Welkin’s voice but not see Welkin himself, because the voice was remarkable but a postman doing his rounds was not. The murderer was invisible because he was all too visible, being as much a part of the background scenery as the trees and the houses. Even the sight of a postman leaving the building with a sack that was fuller than when he entered was apparently not sufficiently out of the ordinary to attract attention.

Does it work?

It’s a reasonable thought on which to hang a story, but does it really stand up to scrutiny? One thing to bear in mind is that this story was written in Edwardian England when the class system held sway and everyone with any money employed servants to perform menial tasks for them. Chesterton hints at this very strongly with his description of Smythe’s mechanical servants who line the walls until called into service to perform a specific task. There is a telling line here in that they are described as “only automatic machines and nobody would have looked at them twice”. This would have been how many middle-class people regarded their human servants.

However, even if the reader is willing to accept that a middle-class person could regard a postman as an invisible public servant, does this really work in the scenario of the story? The people who are asked to keep a lookout are not middle-class but working-class, and of the same social status as a postman. Would a cleaner or chestnut seller really allow a postman to be invisible in the same way that a much wealthier householder would? The commissionaire actual states that he would ask any man, “duke or dustman”, what his business was on entering the building, but would he really have made a distinction between a dustman and a postman in this regard, even to the extent that the latter  was “invisible” to him?

It is on this point of class distinction that the story rests in terms of its acceptability to the reader. It is probably true to say that it would have been read differently by its original readers in class-ridden England than by members of today’s much more classless society.

© John Welford