The Queer Feet

If you meet a member of that select club, “ The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter.

If you were to meet a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the greatest luck of his life, he would probably reply that his best luck was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had prevented a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. But since it is very unlikely that you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find “ The Twelve True Fishermen,” or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution which can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners^[59]. It was that topsy-turvy product. That is, it was a thing which paid^[60] not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of a square in Belgravia^[61]. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenient one. But its inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was of vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four people could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the celebrated terrace table, which stood on a sort of veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London, so even the twenty-four seats could only be enjoyed in warm weather. The existing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it difficult to get into. But this limitation of his enterprise in size matched the perfect performance. The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and the manners of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them. It was much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness, as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed, there was generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have agreed to dine anywhere but in such a place; and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of demonstrating all their treasures, especially the celebrated set of fish knives and forks which were, as it were^[62], the symbol of the society, being made of silver in the form of a fish, and each decorated with one large pearl. These were always laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most magnificent in that magnificent meal. The society had a lot of ceremonies, but it had no history and no object; it was just so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers. It had been in existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.

Therefore, the reader may wonder how I came to know anything about it, and how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to find himself in that institution. As far as that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. As it happened, one of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish employer had agreed to send for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father Brown we are not concerned^[63], for the reason that that cleric kept it to himself; but he was obliged to write out some note or statement. So Father Brown, with a meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be given a room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man who disliked any difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned. There was never any anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover, the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere glimpse of him might speed up a crisis in the club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a smart plan^[64]. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short passage, and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, in which sat the representative of the proprietor, and just beyond the office, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak room. But between the office and the cloak room was a small private room without other exit, sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters, such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or refusing to lend him sixpence. On that occasion, Mr. Lever permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour used by the priest. The story which Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this one, only it will never be known.

The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on; his little room was without a light. As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document, he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a regular noise outside. When he became conscious of the thing he found what it was: just the ordinary patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikely matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds, he got to his feet and listened intently, with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands, now not merely listening, but listening and thinking also.

There was something very strange about the footsteps. There were no other steps. It was a very silent house, for the guests went at once to their own apartments, and the well-trained waiters were told to be invisible until they were wanted. Nothing irregular could happen there. But these footsteps were so odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular.

First, there came rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp. The moment the last stamp had died away, the run of light, hurrying feet would come again, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, because they had a small but unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? The man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slow at one end to have the pleasure of walking fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, his thoughts grew more vivid; he began to have a vision of the fantastic feet hopping along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle^[65], or they sit still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. That heavy, springy step belonged to a gentleman of Western Europe, and probably one who had never worked for his living.

Just as he came to this conclusion, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran past the door. This step was much swifter and it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct exit to the passage. He tried the door into the office, and found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now purple of the sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil^[66] as a dog smells rats.

He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to set him free. He reminded himselfthat there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work. He had written for about twenty minutes, then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had walked, this time he ran. Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man. Yet, when the sound had reached the office, it suddenly changed again to the slow gait.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the only guests were at dinner. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the cloak room ended up with a half-door, like a counter, across which we have all handed umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light above the arch of this opening in which he saw the man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant, tall man in very plain evening dress. His face was dark and vivacious, the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners confident; a critic could only say that his black coat even bulged and bagged in an odd way. The moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against the sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out with amiable authority: “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to go away at once.”

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look for the coat. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing: “I haven't got any silver; you can keep this.” And he threw down half a sovereign, and took his coat.

Father Brown's figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.

“I think, sir,” he said civilly, “that you have some silver in your pocket.”

The tall gentleman stared. “Hang it^[67],” he cried, “if I choose to give you gold, why should you complain?”

“Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold,” said the priest mildly; “that is, in large quantities.”

The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more curiously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked back at Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyond Brown's head, still coloured with the sunset. Then he seemed to make up his mind^[68]. He put one hand on the counter, jumped over as easily as an acrobat and stood above the priest, putting one tremendous hand upon his collar.

“Stand still,” he said, in a whisper. “I don't want to threaten you, but —”

“I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, “I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched^[69].”

“You're a strange sort of cloak-room clerk,” said the other.

“I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,” said Brown, “and I am ready to hear your confession.”

The other stood staring for a few moments, and then staggered back into a chair.

The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had gone with success. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvres should be various to the point of madness. There was also a tradition that the soup course should be light to prepare the guests for the coming feast of fish. The talk was about politics and politicians. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who was a kind of symbol of the society. He had never done anything – not even anything wrong. He was simply in the thing; no party could ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. In private, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table, and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace in the most luxurious style, along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite, enjoying a view of the garden, the colours of which were still vivid. The chairman sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end of it. When the twelve guests first walked into their seats it was the custom for all the fifteen waiters to stand lining the wall, while the fat proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had never heard of them before. But only the one or two stayed to collect and distribute the plates rushing about in deathly silence. Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared long before. But when the fish course was being brought on, there was a sort of his shadow in the air, which told that he was nearby. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. This course was dealt with in silence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual remark: “They can't do this anywhere but here.”