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

A Tradition of 1804: a short story by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is known as the author of a series of lengthy novels, which are not always an easy read. However, he also wrote a considerable number of short stories which modern readers might find more approachable. Here is an account of a particularly brief short story.

A very short story

“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” was one of the stories published by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) under the title “Wessex Tales”. Although most of the stories had appeared in a collection dated 1888, the final set of seven tales was published in 1912. Of these, “A Tradition of
Eighteen Hundred and Four”, at seven pages long, is easily the shortest. Hardy wrote the date “Christmas 1882” at the end of the story, which was when it first appeared in print (under a slightly different title, with “Legend” for “Tradition”) in an American Christmas annual. 

A summary of the story

The narrator of the story, following an introductory couple of paragraphs in the author’s voice, is “old Solomon Selby”, who retells an experience from when he was a child. After the story has been told, Hardy tells the reader that Solomon has been dead for ten years, so the time gap of about 70 years from then back to the events of the story makes perfect sense.

Solomon says that his father had been a shepherd all his life and lived “out by the Cove”. This can be understood to be Lulworth Cove, on the Dorset coast about midway between Weymouth and Swanage. It is a small, almost circular cove with a narrow entrance that is today a noted feature of the “Jurassic Coast”. As a child, Solomon had lived in a remote shepherd’s cottage, and the years he remembers best were 1803-5, because he was then of an age “when a child’s eyes and ears take in and note down everything about him” and also because those years were at the heart of the Napoleonic Wars between Great Britain and France.

People in England, and especially along the south coast, were particularly worried about the threat of invasion from France. They knew that Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered most of the continent of Western Europe, was intent on defeating Britain. Solomon relates that his father, when droving a flock of ewes to Sussex, had been able to see the French coast and caught sight of the sun glinting on the accoutrements of the vast army that Napoleon had assembled on the beaches and which he was preparing for the invasion. It was believed that some 160,000 men and 15,000 horses would make the crossing on a fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed boats, which were being built as part of the preparations.

Solomon introduces his uncle Job, a sergeant at foot, who reckoned that the invasion would take place on a calm night, using oars rather than sails. Napoleon’s problem was where he should land his troops, and, according to uncle Job, there was a lot of speculation about where this was likely to be. Most people agreed that the shortest crossing, towards Dover, was the least likely, given that that part of the coast would be the most heavily guarded, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Napoleon’s knowledge of potential landing places and troop concentrations was known to be slight, so people were wary about French spies coming ashore to “case the joint”.

The story then focuses on a night early in the year when the sheep flock needed to be tended right round the clock because the ewes were lambing. Young Solomon was called upon to help his father at such times, standing in for him when the latter needed to rest. On the night in question uncle Job had paid a visit to the house and, when it was Solomon’s turn to go out to the sheep-fold on the hill above the Cove, offered to accompany him. They settled down to rest in some straw with uncle Job telling the boy stories about his past adventures until Solomon fell asleep.

When he woke up, uncle Job had himself fallen asleep and Solomon became aware that there were two men, in military uniform, standing about twenty yards away. He watched by the light of the Moon as they looked at a roll of paper, pointed at various features, and spoke in a language which Solomon could not understand. 

He woke uncle Job and pointed the men out to him, having suspected that they were two French generals come to spy out the lie of the land. However, when uncle Job saw them he soon realised that one of the men was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, which was soon obvious to Solomon when the light from the Frenchmens’ lantern fell on the famous face that the boy had seen so often in pictures.

Uncle Job cursed that he did not have his flintlock pistol with him, and so Napoleon and his companion were able to slip back to their boat and escape, watched by Solomon and his uncle, to a larger boat waiting outside the Cove. Solomon ends his story by simply stating that, having reported the incident, uncle Job heard no more about it, and also saying that the expected invasion never took place. However, he remained convinced that Lulworth Cove was where the French army would have landed had it ever done so.

Could it have happened?

Hardy concludes with a paragraph that states, as mentioned earlier, that Solomon has been dead for ten years, and that his account was not generally believed “due to the incredulity of the age”. 

In his preface to the 1919 edition of “Wessex Tales” Hardy added a note to the effect that this story was purely fictional and that he had always thought it highly improbable, but that he had since been told that the tradition was a real one and that some people believed that Napoleon had actually visited the English coast on a spying mission. It is possible that this legend was not well known in Dorset, where it is hard to imagine that Hardy would not have been aware of it, because Hardy had originally set his story in Sussex and only moved it to Dorset between the different editions of the “Tales”. On the face of it, Sussex, with its long stretches of deserted low-lying coast, seems a more likely location for such an event, and the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte considering the prospect of sending 2,000 boats into Lulworth Cove, which is relatively small, seems little short of bizarre!

As a story, “A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” is not particularly memorable. It contains only one surprise, no characterisation worth mentioning, and little in the way of plot. It is simply a “what if” kind of story that poses a question that is interesting as far as it goes, and it is well written in that it keeps the reader’s interest, but that is probably the most that can be said about it.

© John Welford

The Three Strangers, a short story by Thomas Hardy

“The Three Strangers” is one of the stories included in Thomas Hardy’s collection of “Wessex Tales”, originally published in 1888, but the story first appeared on its own in “Longman’s Magazine” and bears the date of March 1883. Its first readers in Hardy’s native Dorset would have been well aware of the hard times then being experienced in the rural areas and would therefore have related sympathetically to the conditions hinted at in the story, which was set in the 1820s during a similar period of agricultural distress.

The setting is an isolated shepherd’s cottage on the downs not far from the county town of Casterbridge (Hardy’s name for Dorchester). The house, named Higher Crowstairs, is in an exposed location and therefore bears the brunt of all the wind and rain from whatever direction it may come. The weather is bad on the March night when the events of the story take place, during a celebratory party following the christening of the shepherd’s youngest child.

The reader is introduced to the residents and guests in the cottage, who number nineteen in all. Everything is very friendly and convivial in the cramped space of the cottage’s living room, where there is just enough space for dancing to the music of a violin and serpent (a wind instrument in the shape of a snake). Meanwhile, a stranger approaches the house and waits until the music dies down before knocking on the door. He is welcomed inside by the shepherd, sits in the chimney corner to dry off, and is given tobacco and the loan of a pipe. He tells the company that he is from “further up the country”.

He has hardly had time to get settled when there is a second knock at the door and another stranger comes in. He says that he is on his way to Casterbridge but would appreciate shelter from the rain, plus a mug of mead (an alcoholic drink made from honey) which he is sure the shepherd’s wife must have as he has seen her beehives outside. She is reluctant to give him much of this, but the shepherd is more hospitable and continues to refresh the stranger’s mug, much to his wife’s displeasure.

There is then a discussion as to what the second stranger’s profession might be, given that the shepherd’s wife has become very suspicious of him. The second stranger makes a game of it by dropping clues such as “the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers”. He then starts singing a song, with words of his own, that soon tell the reader (and then the assembled company), that he is the new hangman who is about to start his duties at the local jail.

People start whispering among themselves that he has come on this night because there is to be a hanging at the jail in the morning, this being of a poor man from several valleys away who, being unable to get work at his trade of clock-making, and with his family starving, had stolen a sheep and been arrested. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime before 1832, and it is clear from the conversation that the sympathy of the locals is with the man who is about to be hanged.

There is then a third knock at the door and another man enters, begins to ask the way to somewhere, but then catches sight of someone else in the room, turns deathly pale, and runs off. The firing of a gun is heard in the distance, and the second stranger, now revealed as the hangman, tells everyone that this is a signal that a prisoner has escaped from the jail, at which everyone assumes that it must be the condemned man, and that he must be the man who has just arrived and left in a hurry on seeing the hangman, although this ignores the fact that he could have had no idea as to what the hangman looked like.

One of the guests at the party is the local constable, who is called upon by the hangman to organise a search party, which he proceeds to do. All the males rush off, lanterns in hand, while the women go upstairs to attend to the baby who has started crying in distress at all the noise and hullaballoo. With the room empty, two people return, these being the first two strangers who proceed to help themselves to cake and mead before shaking hands and going their separate ways.

The search party eventually catches up with the third stranger, and there is a wonderfully comic interlude as the constable, who has clearly never been in such a situation before, proceeds to make an arrest, although the only words that come to mind for such an occasion are: “Yer money or yer life”! The man is then escorted back to the cottage, where two officers from the jail and a local magistrate have arrived. The constable presents his prisoner, only to be told that he has the wrong man.

As the reader might have guessed by now, the description of the wanted man fits the first stranger, not the third. The arrested man explains that he is the brother of the condemned man and had been on his way to visit him at the jail for the last time before his execution. On entering the cottage it had not been the sight of the hangman that had agitated him but that of his brother, and it was his fear of giving the game away and betraying the escapee that had caused him to flee the scene. Needless to say, the condemned man is never seen again, much to the relief of all concerned bar the hangman.

Hardy gives the impression that “The Three Strangers” is based on local folklore, as is evident from the concluding line: “The arrival of the three strangers … is a story as well known as ever in the country about Higher Crowstairs”. Be that as it may, it certainly has elements that fit the tradition of local myth, such as the familiar pattern of simple country folk outwitting the machinations of authority, which is a theme that has always proved popular. There are also echoes of the Christmas story, involving as it does the celebration of a birth, shepherds, the visit of three people from afar, and even a Herod character in the form of the hangman.

To a modern reader the story does not start well, due to Hardy’s convoluted prose style that produces the opening: “Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries may be reckoned the long, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are called …” Hardy is more readable when giving dialogue rather than description, but the story is six pages old before the first character says anything.

However, the effort of persevering is worthwhile, because once the story gets going it flows along at considerable pace. Particularly notable are the humour surrounding the constable, mentioned above, the interplay between the shepherd and his wife over how generous they should be towards the strangers, and the characterisations of the first two strangers. The overweening pride of the hangman, who rejoices in his trade, and the contrasting coolness under pressure of the condemned man, are very well done, with the scene in which the two return to the empty cottage and then part on amicable terms being a memorable one, especially as it lets the reader into a secret that is withheld from the other characters.

Given the dramatic nature of the tale, and the reliance on a single scene for most of the action, it should not surprise anyone that Hardy later dramatized the story as “The Three Wayfarers”. It was first performed in 1893 and by was staged by professional companies several times during Hardy’s lifetime.

All in all, this is a very enjoyable story that is worth the trouble to discover and read.

© John Welford