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 notblack. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to addresssuch a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does itto avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed. Butyou will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worthtelling.
If (to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were to meeta mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to askhim what he thought was the most singular luck of his life, he wouldprobably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the VernonHotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merelyby listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is perhaps a littleproud of this wild and wonderful guess of his, and it is possible thathe might refer to it. But since it is immeasurably unlikely that youwill ever rise high enough in the social world to find "The TwelveTrue Fishermen," or that you will ever sink low enough among slums andcriminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story atall unless you hear it from me.
The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annualdinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchicalsociety which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was thattopsy-turvy product--an "exclusive" commercial enterprise. That is, itwas a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turningpeople away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunningenough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positivelycreate difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spendmoney and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionablehotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, societywould meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If therewere an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietorwas only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursdayafternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of asquare in Belgravia. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenientone. But its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting aparticular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was held to be ofvital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four peoplecould dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was thecelebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort ofveranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London.Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table couldonly be enjoyed in warm weather; and this making the enjoyment yet moredifficult made it yet more desired. The existing owner of the hotel wasa Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making itdifficult to get into. Of course he combined with this limitation in thescope of his enterprise the most careful polish in its performance.The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and thedemeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of theEnglish upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like thefingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It wasmuch easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter inthat hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness,as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed, there was generally atleast one waiter to every gentleman who dined.
The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented to dineanywhere but in such a place, for it insisted on a luxurious privacy;and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other clubwas even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annualdinner the Fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures,as if they were in a private house, especially the celebrated setof fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the insignia of thesociety, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish,and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were alwayslaid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the mostmagnificent in that magnificent repast. The society had a vast numberof ceremonies and observances, but it had no history and no object; thatwas where it was so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anythingin order to be one of the Twelve Fishers; unless you were already acertain sort of person, you never even heard of them. It had been inexistence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-presidentwas the Duke of Chester.
If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel,the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anythingabout it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as myfriend Father Brown came to find himself in that golden galley. As faras that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. There is inthe world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the mostrefined retreats with the dreadful information that all men arebrothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it wasFather Brown's trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, hadbeen struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewishemployer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to sendfor the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to FatherBrown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that that clerickept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in writing out a noteor statement for the conveying of some message or the righting of somewrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence which he wouldhave shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with aroom and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kindman, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of anydifficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusualstranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on somethingjust cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the VernonHotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance.There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be asstartling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find anew brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover,the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mereglimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr.Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, thedisgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you passdown a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures,and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your rightinto passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similarpassage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediatelyon your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts uponthe lounge--a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel barwhich probably once occupied its place.
In this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in thisplace ever appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond theoffice, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloakroom, the last boundary of the gentlemen's domain. But between theoffice and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet,sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters,such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining to lend himsixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever thathe permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by amere priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which FatherBrown was writing down was very likely a much better story than thisone, only it will never be known. I can merely state that it was verynearly as long, and that the last two or three paragraphs of it were theleast exciting and absorbing.
For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began alittle to allow his thoughts to wander and his animal senses, which werecommonly keen, to awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawingon; his own forgotten little room was without a light, and perhaps thegathering gloom, as occasionally happens, sharpened the sense of sound.As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document,he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside,just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train. When hebecame
conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the ordinarypatter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikelymatter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened tothe sound. After he had listened for a few seconds dreamily, he got tohis 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 merelylistening, but listening and thinking also.
The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear inany hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was something very strangeabout them. There were no other footsteps. It was always a very silenthouse, for the few familiar guests went at once to their own apartments,and the well-trained waiters were told to be almost invisible untilthey were wanted. One could not conceive any place where there was lessreason to apprehend anything irregular. But these footsteps were soodd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular. FatherBrown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table, like a mantrying to learn a tune on the piano.
First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light manmight make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stoppedand changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarterof the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the lastechoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light,hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It wascertainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been said)there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a smallbut unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head thatcannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial questionhis head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seenmen run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in orderto walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no otherdescription would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs. Theman was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in orderto walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slowat one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other. Neithersuggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker anddarker, like his room.
Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cellseemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind ofvision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural orsymbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance? Or some entirelynew kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself withmore exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: itcertainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walkwith a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant ormessenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorerorders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightlydrunk, but generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they standor sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, witha kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring whatnoise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of this earth. It wasa gentleman of western Europe, and probably one who had never worked forhis living.
Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quickerone, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarkedthat though this step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless,almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associatedin his mind with secrecy, but with something else--something that hecould not remember. He was maddened by one of those half-memories thatmake a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swiftwalking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea inhis head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on thepassage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the otherinto the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, andfound it locked. Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full ofpurple cloud cleft by livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil asa dog smells rats.
The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained itssupremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he shouldlock the door, and would come later to release him. He told himself thattwenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric soundsoutside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left tofinish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as tocatch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once moreinto the almost completed record. He had written for about twentyminutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light;then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.
This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man hadwalked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked.This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps comingalong the corridor, like the pads of a fleeing and leaping panther.Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearingexcitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office like a sortof whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old slow,swaggering stamp.
Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door tobe locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. Theattendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because theonly guests were at dinner and his office was a sinecure. After gropingthrough a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloak roomopened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter orhalf-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handedumbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately abovethe semicircular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination onFather Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dimsunset window behind him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on theman who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.
He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an airof not taking up much room; one felt that he could have slid along likea shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive.His face, now flung back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious,the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners good humouredand confident; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shadebelow his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an oddway. The moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against thesunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called outwith amiable authority: "I want my hat and coat, please; I find I haveto go away at once."
Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to lookfor the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in hislife. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strangegentleman 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 asovereign, and caught up his coat.
Father Brown's figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instanthe had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lostit. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did notapprove of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was realinspiration--important at rare crises--when whosoever shall lose hishead the same shall save it.
"I think, sir," he said civilly, "that you have some silver in yourpocket."
The tall gentleman stared. "Hang it," he cried, "if I choose to give yougold, why should you complain?"
"Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold," said the priestmildly; "that is, in large quantities."
The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still morecuriously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked backat Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyondBrown's head, still coloured with the after-glow of the storm. Then heseemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaultedover as easily as an acrobat and towered above the priest, putting onetremendous hand upon his collar.
"Stand still," he said, in a hacking whisper. "I don't
want to threatenyou, but--"
"I do want to threaten you," said Father Brown, in a voice like arolling drum, "I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, andthe fire that is not quenched."
"You're a rum sort of cloak-room clerk," said the other.
"I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau," said Brown, "and I am ready to hearyour confession."
The other stood gasping for a few moments, and then staggered back intoa chair.
The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen hadproceeded with placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu; andif I did it would not convey anything to anybody. It was written ina sort of super-French employed by cooks, but quite unintelligible toFrenchmen. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvresshould be various and manifold to the point of madness. They were takenseriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the wholedinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soupcourse should be light and unpretending--a sort of simple and austerevigil for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange,slight talk which governs the British Empire, which governs it insecret, and yet would scarcely enlighten an ordinary Englishman even ifhe could overhear it. Cabinet ministers on both sides were alluded toby their Christian names with a sort of bored benignity. The RadicalChancellor of the Exchequer, whom the whole Tory party was supposed tobe cursing for his extortions, was praised for his minor poetry, or hissaddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all Liberalswere supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole,praised--as a Liberal. It seemed somehow that politicians were veryimportant. And yet, anything seemed important about them except theirpolitics. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man whostill wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all thatphantasmal and yet fixed society. He had never done anything--not evenanything wrong. He was not fast; he was not even particularly rich.He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party couldignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly wouldhave been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was ayoung and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth,with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence andenormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful andhis principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it,and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said thatthis was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in aclub of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly,like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treatedthem a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the companyby phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberaland a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certainold-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man theempire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgentbachelor, with rooms in the Albany--which he was.
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 terracein the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side ofthe table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view ofthe garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening wasclosing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat inthe centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand endof it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was thecustom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to standlining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fatproprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if hehad never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife andfork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two requiredto collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions ofcourtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent,to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the importantcourse, the fish course, was being brought on, there was--how shall Iput it?--a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which toldthat he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyesof the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shapeof a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interestingfishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. TheTwelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fishforks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding costas much as the silver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know.This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it wasonly when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritualremark: "They can't do this anywhere but here."
"Nowhere," said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speakerand nodding his venerable head a number of times. "Nowhere, assuredly,except here. It was represented to me that at the Cafe Anglais--"
Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removalof his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. "Itwas represented to me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais.Nothing like it, sir," he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like ahanging judge. "Nothing like it."
"Overrated place," said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the lookof him) for the first time for some months.
"Oh, I don't know," said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, "it'sjolly good for some things. You can't beat it at--"
A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. Hisstoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindlygentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinerywhich surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anythingunexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel ifthe inanimate world disobeyed--if a chair ran away from us.
The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on everyface at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horriblemodern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historicaristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with emptybottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat wouldhave asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil hewas doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man nearto them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrongwith the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did notwant to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. Theywanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter,after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned roundand ran madly out of the room.
When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was incompany with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulatedwith southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving thesecond waiter, and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourthwaiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr. Audley felt it necessary tobreak the silence in the interests of Tact. He used a very loud cough,instead of a presidential hammer, and said: "Splendid work youngMoocher's doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world couldhave--"
A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering inhis ear: "So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?"
The chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Levercoming towards them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the goodproprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no meansusual. Generally it was a genial copper-brown; now it was a sicklyyellow.
"You will pardon me, Mr. Audley," he said, with asthmaticbreathlessness. "I have great apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they arecleared away with the knife and fork on them!"
"Well, I hope so," said the chairman, with some warmth.
"You see him?" panted the excited hotel keeper; "you see
the waiter whotook them away? You know him?"
"Know the waiter?" answered Mr. Audley indignantly. "Certainly not!"
Mr. Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. "I never send him,"he said. "I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take awaythe plates, and he find them already away."
Mr. Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man theempire wants; none of the company could say anything except the man ofwood--Colonel Pound--who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. Herose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed hiseyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he hadhalf-forgotten how to speak. "Do you mean," he said, "that somebody hasstolen our silver fish service?"
The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greaterhelplessness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.
"Are all your waiters here?" demanded the colonel, in his low, harshaccent.
"Yes; they're all here. I noticed it myself," cried the young duke,pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. "Always count 'em as Icome in; they look so queer standing up against the wall."
"But surely one cannot exactly remember," began Mr. Audley, with heavyhesitation.
"I remember exactly, I tell you," cried the duke excitedly. "There neverhave been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were nomore than fifteen tonight, I'll swear; no more and no less."
The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise."You say--you say," he stammered, "that you see all my fifteen waiters?"
"As usual," assented the duke. "What is the matter with that!"
"Nothing," said Lever, with a deepening accent, "only you did not. Forone of zem is dead upstairs."
There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be(so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men lookedfor a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One ofthem--the duke, I think--even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth:"Is there anything we can do?"
"He has had a priest," said the Jew, not untouched.
Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For afew weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter mightbe the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under thatoppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. Butthe remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; brokeit abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chairand strode to the door. "If there was a fifteenth man here, friends," hesaid, "that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the frontand back doors and secure everything; then we'll talk. The twenty-fourpearls of the club are worth recovering."
Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanlyto be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down thestairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.
At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared thathe had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace ofthe silver.
The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down thepassages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed theproprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit. Colonel Pound,with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted downthe corridor leading to the servants' quarters, as the more likely lineof escape. As they did so they passed the dim alcove or cavern ofthe cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably anattendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.
"Hallo, there!" called out the duke. "Have you seen anyone pass?"
The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said:"Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen."
They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went to the backof the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver,which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took theform of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.
"You--you--" began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last.Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, thatthe short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second,that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone hadpassed violently through. "Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room,aren't they?" remarked the clergyman, with cheerful composure.
"Did--did you steal those things?" stammered Mr. Audley, with staringeyes.
"If I did," said the cleric pleasantly, "at least I am bringing themback again."
"But you didn't," said Colonel Pound, still staring at the brokenwindow.
"To make a clean breast of it, I didn't," said the other, with somehumour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. "But you knowwho did," said the, colonel.
"I don't know his real name," said the priest placidly, "but I knowsomething of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritualdifficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying tothrottle me, and the moral estimate when he repented."
"Oh, I say--repented!" cried young Chester, with a sort of crow oflaughter.
Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. "Odd, isn'tit," he said, "that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so manywho are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit forGod or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little uponmy province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there areyour knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there areall your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men."
"Did you catch this man?" asked the colonel, frowning.
Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. "Yes," he said, "Icaught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is longenough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bringhim back with a twitch upon the thread."
There was a long silence. All the other men present drifted awayto carry the recovered silver to their comrades, or to consult theproprietor about the queer condition of affairs. But the grim-facedcolonel still sat sideways on the counter, swinging his long, lank legsand biting his dark moustache.
At last he said quietly to the priest: "He must have been a cleverfellow, but I think I know a cleverer."
"He was a clever fellow," answered the other, "but I am not quite sureof what other you mean."
"I mean you," said the colonel, with a short laugh. "I don't want to getthe fellow jailed; make yourself easy about that. But I'd give a goodmany silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair, and howyou got the stuff out of him. I reckon you're the most up-to-date devilof the present company."
Father Brown seemed rather to like the saturnine candour of the soldier."Well," he said, smiling, "I mustn't tell you anything of the man'sidentity, or his own story, of course; but there's no particular reasonwhy I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out formyself."
He hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity, and sat besideColonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate. Hebegan to tell the story as easily as if he were telling it to an oldfriend by a Christmas fire.
"You see, colonel," he said, "I was shut up in that small room theredoing some writing, when I heard a pair of feet in this passage doing adance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funnylittle steps, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager; then came slow,careless, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar.But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came inrotation; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. Iwondered at first idly and then wildly why a man should act these twoparts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, colonel. Itwas the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something, who strollsabout rather because he is physically alert than because he is mentallyimpatient. I knew that I knew the other walk, too, but I could notremember what it was. What wild creature had I met on my travels thattore
along on tiptoe in that extraordinary style? Then I heard a clinkof plates somewhere; and the answer stood up as plain as St. Peter's. Itwas the walk of a waiter--that walk with the body slanted forward, theeyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, thecoat tails and napkin flying. Then I thought for a minute and a halfmore. And I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if Iwere going to commit it."
Colonel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker's mild grey eyeswere fixed upon the ceiling with almost empty wistfulness.
"A crime," he said slowly, "is like any other work of art. Don't looksurprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come froman infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, hasone indispensable mark--I mean, that the centre of it is simple, howevermuch the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus, in Hamlet, let us say,the grotesqueness of the grave-digger, the flowers of the mad girl, thefantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost and the grin ofthe skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plaintragic figure of a man in black. Well, this also," he said, gettingslowly down from his seat with a smile, "this also is the plain tragedyof a man in black. Yes," he went on, seeing the colonel look up in somewonder, "the whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as inHamlet, there are the rococo excrescences--yourselves, let us say. Thereis the dead waiter, who was there when he could not be there. There isthe invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and meltedinto air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quitesimple fact--some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystificationcomes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it. Thislarge and subtle and (in the ordinary course) most profitable crime, wasbuilt on the plain fact that a gentleman's evening dress is the same asa waiter's. All the rest was acting, and thundering good acting, too."
"Still," said the colonel, getting up and frowning at his boots, "I amnot sure that I understand."
"Colonel," said Father Brown, "I tell you that this archangel ofimpudence who stole your forks walked up and down this passage twentytimes in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. Hedid not go and hide in dim corners where suspicion might have searchedfor him. He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, andeverywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask mewhat he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight.You were waiting with all the other grand people in the reception roomat the end of the passage there, with the terrace just beyond. Wheneverhe came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter,with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out on to theterrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towardsthe office and the waiters' quarters. By the time he had come under theeye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man inevery inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled amongthe servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seenin their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from thedinner party should pace all parts of the house like an animal at theZoo; they know that nothing marks the Smart Set more than a habit ofwalking where one chooses. When he was magnificently weary of walkingdown that particular passage he would wheel round and pace back pastthe office; in the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as bya blast of magic, and went hurrying forward again among the TwelveFishermen, an obsequious attendant. Why should the gentlemen look ata chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walkinggentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In theproprietor's private quarters he called out breezily for a syphon ofsoda water, saying he was thirsty. He said genially that he would carryit himself, and he did; he carried it quickly and correctly through thethick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course, it could nothave been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end ofthe fish course.
"His worst moment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then hecontrived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a waythat for that important instant the waiters thought him a gentleman,while the gentlemen thought him a waiter. The rest went like winking. Ifany waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languidaristocrat. He had only to time himself two minutes before the fish wascleared, become a swift servant, and clear it himself. He put the platesdown on a sideboard, stuffed the silver in his breast pocket, giving ita bulgy look, and ran like a hare (I heard him coming) till he came tothe cloak room. There he had only to be a plutocrat again--a plutocratcalled away suddenly on business. He had only to give his ticket tothe cloak-room attendant, and go out again elegantly as he had come in.Only--only I happened to be the cloak-room attendant."
"What did you do to him?" cried the colonel, with unusual intensity."What did he tell you?"
"I beg your pardon," said the priest immovably, "that is where the storyends."
"And the interesting story begins," muttered Pound. "I think Iunderstand his professional trick. But I don't seem to have got hold ofyours."
"I must be going," said Father Brown.
They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where theysaw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was boundingbuoyantly along towards them.
"Come along, Pound," he cried breathlessly. "I've been looking for youeverywhere. The dinner's going again in spanking style, and old Audleyhas got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want tostart some new ceremony, don't you know, to commemorate the occasion. Isay, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?"
"Why," said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, "Ishould suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead ofblack. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like awaiter."
"Oh, hang it all!" said the young man, "a gentleman never looks like awaiter."
"Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose," said Colonel Pound, with thesame lowering laughter on his face. "Reverend sir, your friend must havebeen very smart to act the gentleman."
Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for thenight was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.
"Yes," he said; "it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, doyou know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious tobe a waiter."
And saying "Good evening," he pushed open the heavy doors of that palaceof pleasures. The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a briskwalk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.
The Innocence of Father Brown Page 3