Guided Sleep Meditation & Sleep Hypnosis from Sleep Cove - Sleep Mystery Episode - Father Brown Investigates

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Starting point is 00:01:58 I hope everyone enjoyed last week's episode, which was a sleep hypnosis for anxiety and I hope it gave some people some relief in these hard times we're currently living in. This week's episode is back to some fiction content where we visit Father Brown, the priest detective as he visits a luxury hotel with an exclusive party happening

Starting point is 00:02:28 and he hears some curious footsteps in the corridor where he is working. I really hope you enjoy it tonight. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Is there something interfering with your happiness or is preventing you from achieving your goals? Better help well assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist.

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Starting point is 00:04:11 I'd also like to thank all the people who have been leaving me amazing reviews on Apple Podcasts or I'd like to thank AllStars for the beautiful review they are left this week thank you so much and thank you to everyone as I read every single one If you would like to support the podcast as well, please leave me a review as it helps expand the podcast reach to more people and therefore help more people out there. And let's begin. The Queer Feet taken from the Short Story Collection of the Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton.

Starting point is 00:04:57 If you meet a member of that select club, the 12 true fisherman, 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 supposingly that you have the star defying audacity to address such a being, you will ask him why. he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed, but you will leave behind you a mystery, as yet unsolved, and a tale worth telling. If, to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture, you were to meet a mild, hard-working little priest named Father Brown, and were to ask him, what he thought was the most singular luck of his life, he would probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had averted a crime and perhaps saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is perhaps a little proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his. And it is possible that he might refer to it, but since it is immeasurably unlikely that you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find the 12 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.

Starting point is 00:06:56 The Vernon Hotel, at which the 12 true fishermen held their annual dinners, was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchal society, which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product, an exclusive commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, by actually. actually turning away people. In the heart of a plutocracy, tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. The positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London, which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it.

Starting point is 00:08:01 If there were an expensive restaurant, which by a mere caprice of its proprietor, was 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. It was a small hotel and a very inconvenient one, but its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a particular class.

Starting point is 00:08:34 One inconvenience in particular was held to be of vital importance, the fact that practically only 24 people could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the celebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air and a sort of veranda, overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London. Thus it happened that even the 24 seats at this table could only be enjoyed in warm weather, and this making the enjoyment yet more difficult made it yet more desired.

Starting point is 00:09:14 The existing owner of the hotel was a Jewish man named Lever, and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it difficult to get into. Of course he combined with this limitation in the scope of his enterprise, the most careful polish in its performance. The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe and the demeanour of the attendance

Starting point is 00:09:42 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 15 of them all told 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

Starting point is 00:10:11 and indeed there were generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who died The club of the 12 true fishermen would not have considered to dine anywhere 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 club was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual dinner the fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures is if they were in a private house, especially the celebrated set of fish knives and forks,

Starting point is 00:10:56 which were, as it were, the insignia of the society, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish, and each loaded at the hilt 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 repast. The society had a vast number of ceremonies and observances, but it had no history and no object.

Starting point is 00:11:30 That was where it was so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the twelve fishers, unless you were already a certain sort of person. You never even heard of them. It had been in existence 12 years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice president was the Duke of Chester. If I have in any degree conveyed to the atmosphere of this appalling hotel,

Starting point is 00:12:03 the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything about it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my friend, friend Father Brown, came to find himself in that golden galley. As far as that it is concerned, my story is simple or even vulgar. There is in the world a very aged writer and demagogue who breaks into the most refined retreats with the dreadful information that all men are brothers and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse, it was Father Brown's trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down

Starting point is 00:12:55 with a paralytic stroke that afternoon, and his employer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send for the nearest popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father Brown, we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that the cleric kept it to himself, but apparently it involved him in writing out a note or statement for the conveying of some message or the writing of some wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence, which you would have not shown equally

Starting point is 00:13:35 in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with a room and writing-gained. materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any difficulty or sea. 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 borderland or ante room in the Vernon Hotel. No people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were 15 waiters. There were 12 guests.

Starting point is 00:14:20 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 afar off, might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr Leaver at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate the disgrace. When you enter, as you never will,

Starting point is 00:14:56 the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short passage, decorated with a few dingy but important pictures, and come to the main festival and lounge, which opens onto your right, into passages or leading into the public rooms and on your left is a similar passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel

Starting point is 00:15:19 immediately on your left hand is the corner of a glass office which abuts upon the lounge a house within a house so to speak like the old hotel bar which probably once occupied its place in this office sat the reprimed

Starting point is 00:15:39 representative of the proprietor. Nobody in this place ever appeared in person if he could help it, and just beyond the office on the way to the servant's quarters was the gentleman's cloakroom, their last boundary of the gentleman's domain. But between the office and the cloakroom was a small private room without other outlet, sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters,

Starting point is 00:16:09 such as lending a duke £1,000, or declining to lend him sixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that he permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a mere priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this one, Only it will never be known, I can nearly state that it was very nearly as long, but the last two or three paragraphs of it were the least exciting and absorbing. For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a little to allow his thoughts to wonder,

Starting point is 00:17:01 and his animal senses which were commonly keen to awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on. His own forgotten little room was without a light, and perhaps the gathering 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.

Starting point is 00:17:40 When he became conscious of the thing, he found what it was, only the ordinary patter of feet passing the door, which in a 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 dreamily, 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.

Starting point is 00:18:23 The footsteps outside, at any given moment, were such as one might hear in any hotel, and yet taken as a whole, there was something very strange about them. There were no other footsteps. It was always a very silent house for the few familiar guests went at once to their own apartments and the well-trained waiters were told to be almost invisible

Starting point is 00:18:54 until they were wanted. One could not conceive any place where there was less reason to apprehend anything irregular, but these footsteps were so odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular. Father Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table, like a man trying to learn a tune of the piano.

Starting point is 00:19:22 First there came a long rush of 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, numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the last echoing 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 was certainly the same pair of boots, partly because, as had been said, there were no other boots about, and partly because there had a small but unmistakable creek in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions, and on this apparently trivial question, his head almost split.

Starting point is 00:20:26 He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of the invisible pair of legs. The man was either walking very fast down one half the corridor in order. order to walk very slow down the other, or he was walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing

Starting point is 00:21:12 darker and darker, like his room. Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid. He began to see, as he began to see as he was as in a kind of vision, the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in a natural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathed religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself with a more exactness what the step suggested. Taking the slow step first, it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still.

Starting point is 00:22:06 It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer orders, inner oligacy, sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but generally and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or sit in a constrained attitude. No, the heavy yet springy step was a kind of careless emphasis, not especially noisy,

Starting point is 00:22:39 yet not caring of what noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of this earth. It was a gentleman of Western Europe and probably one who had never worked for his living. Just as he came to the solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker one and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked that though this step was much more swifter, it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man was walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but with something else, something that he could not remember.

Starting point is 00:23:33 He was maddened by one of those half-memories that make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard the 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 outlet on the passage, but yet on one side into the glass office and in the other into the cloak room beyond, he tried the door into the office and found it locked. Then he looked at the window and now a square pane full of coloured cloud cleft by livid sunset and for it instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.

Starting point is 00:24:28 The rational part of him, whether the wiser or not, regained his supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he shut out the door and would come later to release him. He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds outside. He reminded himself that there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as to catch the last stormy evening night, he resolutely plunged once more into the almost completed record. He had written for about 20 minutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light, then suddenly,

Starting point is 00:25:19 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 with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked. This time, he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming along the cross. coming along the corridor, like the paths of a fleeing and leaping panther.

Starting point is 00:25:54 Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearing excitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office, like a sort of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old, slow, swaggering stamp. Father Brown flung down his painting. 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, and his office was a sinecure. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloakroom opened on the lighted corridor in the form of the

Starting point is 00:26:47 form of a sort of counter or half door, like most of the counters across, which we have all handed umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately above the semi-circular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination on Father Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim sunset window behind him. but it threw an almost theatrical light on the man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor he was an elegant man in a very plain evening dress tall but with an air of not taking up much room

Starting point is 00:27:33 one felt he could have slid along like a shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive his face now flogged blown back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious, the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners good-humoured and confident. A critic could only say that his black coat was a shade below his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd way.

Starting point is 00:28:08 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 aimable 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 back to look for the coat. It was not the first menial work he had done in his life. He brought it and laid it on the counter. Meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeding in his waistcoat pocket said laughing, I haven't got any silver. You can keep this.

Starting point is 00:28:51 He threw down half a sovereign and caught up 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. Often, the Catholic Church, which is wedded to common sense, did not approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself, but it was real inspiration, important at rare crises, when whosoever shall lose his head, the same shall save it. I think, sir, he said civilly, that you have some silver in your pocket.

Starting point is 00:29:42 The tall gentleman stared. Hang on, 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 at 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,

Starting point is 00:30:18 still coloured with the afterglow of the storm. Then he seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaulted over as easily as an acrobat, and towered above the priest, putting one hand on the counter, one tremendous hand upon his collar. Stand still, he said in a hacking whisper, I don't want to threaten you, but... I do want to threaten you, said Father Brown,

Starting point is 00:30:47 in a voice like a rolling drum. I want to threaten you with a worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched. You're a rum sort of cloakroom clerk, said the other. I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau, said Brown, I am ready to hear your confession. The other stood gasping for a few moments and then staggered back into a chair.

Starting point is 00:31:17 The first two courses of the dinner of the 12 true fishermen had proceeded with placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu and if I did it would not convey anything to anybody. It was written in a sort of super-french employed by cooks but quite unintelligible to Frenchmen. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvres should be various and manifold to the point of madness.

Starting point is 00:31:49 They were taken seriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the whole dinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soup course should be alight and unpretending, a sort of simple and astir vigil for a feast of fish that wants to come. The talk was that strange slight talk which governs the British Empire which governs it in secret

Starting point is 00:32:18 and yet would scarcely enlighten an ordinary Englishman even if he could overhear it. Cabinet ministers from both political parties were alluded to by their Christian names with a sort of bold benignity. The radical chancellor of the exchequer whom the whole Tory party was supposed to be cursing for his extortions

Starting point is 00:32:44 was praised for his minor poetry or his saddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all liberals was supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and on the whole praised as a liberal. It seemed somehow,

Starting point is 00:33:02 that politicians were very and very important. And yet anything seemed important about them, except their politics. Mr. Audley the chairman was an amiable elderly man who still wore Gladstone Collis. He was a kind of symbol of all that phantasmal and yet thick society. He had never done anything,

Starting point is 00:33:28 not even anything wrong. He was not fast, and he was not particularly rich. He was simply in the thing, and there was an end of it. 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,

Starting point is 00:33:59 with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public, his appearances were always successful and his 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 that this was no time for trifling and was called Abel. In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases, suggesting that there was some difference between a liberal and 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 certain old-fashioned statesman And seen from behind He looked like the man the empire wants

Starting point is 00:35:07 Seen from the front He looked like a mild self-indulgent bachelor With rooms in the Albany Which he was As had been remarked There were 24 seats at the terrace table And only 12 members of the club Thus they could occupy

Starting point is 00:35:25 the terrace in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of the garden, the colours of which was still vivid, though evening was closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. 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 trooped into their seats, it was the custom for some unknown reason, for all the 15 waiters to stand aligning the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had never heard of them before.

Starting point is 00:36:18 But before the first chink of knife and fork, this arm was. army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required to collect and distribute the place, darting about it in deathly silence. Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course, had disappeared in convulsions of courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent, to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important thing, course, the fish course, was being brought on. There was, how shall I put it, a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted to the eyes of the vulgar in a sort of monstrous pudding about the size and shape

Starting point is 00:37:15 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. So it did for all I know. This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence, and it was only when his plate was nearly empty when the young Duke made the ritual remark. They can't do this anywhere but here. Nowhere, said Audley in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his vulnerable head a number of times. Nowhere, assuredly, except here.

Starting point is 00:38:13 It was represented to me that at the cafe, Angles. Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. It was represented to me that the same could be done at the Café-en-Glais. Nothing like it, sir. He said, shaking his head ruthlessly like a hanging judge, nothing like it. Overrated place. said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking by the look of him for the first time for some months. Oh, I don't know, said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, he's jolly good for some things, you can't beat it at.

Starting point is 00:39:03 A waiter came swiftly along the room and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread, but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness, of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar.

Starting point is 00:39:28 They felt as you and I would feel if an inanimate world disobeyed, if a chair run away from us. The waiter stood staring for a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at a table, a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time. It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible modern abyss

Starting point is 00:39:54 between the souls of the rich and the poor. A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty bottles and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would have asked him with comrade-like clearness of speech what the devil he was doing, but these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or a friend. That something had gone wrong with the servants was merely a dull hot embarrassment. They did not want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over.

Starting point is 00:40:40 The waiter at a standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round and ran madly out of the room. When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated with southern fierceness. Then the first winter went away, leaving the second waiter and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth waiter had joined this hurried synod,

Starting point is 00:41:13 Mr. Ordley felt it necessary to break the silence in the interests of tact. He used a very loud cough instead of the presidential hammer and said, Splendid work young mootches doing in Burma. Now no other nation in the world could have. A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow and whispered in his ear, So sorry, important, might the proprietor speak to you. The chairman turned in disorder And with a dazed stare

Starting point is 00:41:49 Saw Mr Leaver coming towards them With his lumbering quickness The gate of the good proprietor Was indeed his usual gate But his face was no means usual Generally it was a genial copper brown And now it was a sickly yellow You are pardon me

Starting point is 00:42:10 Mr Audley He said with asthmatic breathlessness. I have great apprehensions, your fish plates, so they are cleared away with a knife and fork on them. Well, I hope so, said the chairman with some warmth. You see him, painted the excited hotel keeper. You see the waiter who took them away? You know him? Know the waiter? answered Mr. Audley indignantly, certainly not. Mr. Leaver opened his hands with a gesture of agony. I never sent him, he said.

Starting point is 00:42:53 I don't know one or why he came. I send my waiter to take away the place, and he find them already away. Mr. Ordley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the empire wants. None of the company could say anything except the man of wood, Colonel Pound, who seemed galvanised into a natural life. He rose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he had half forgotten how to speak. Don't you mean, he said, that somebody has stolen our silver fish service?

Starting point is 00:43:39 The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater helplessness, and in a flash all the men at the table were at their feet. Are you all waiters here? demanded the colonel in his low, harsh accent. Yes, they're all here, I noticed it myself, cried the young Duke, pushing his boyish face into the inmost, ring. Always count them as I come in, they look so queer standing up against the wall. But surely one cannot exactly remember, began Mr. Audley with heavy hesitation. I remember exactly, I tell you, cried the Duke excitedly. There never has been more than 15 waiters at this place, and there was no more than 15 tonight. I, I'll swear, no more, no less.

Starting point is 00:44:43 The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise. You say, you say, he stammered, that you see all my 15 waiters. As usual, assented the Duke, what is the matter with that? Nothing, said Lever with a deepening accent, only you did not. for one of them is dead upstairs. There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be because so supernatural is the word death that each one of those idle men looked for a second at his soul

Starting point is 00:45:28 and saw it as a small dried pea. One of them the Duke, I think, even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth, Is there anything we can do? He is a priest, said Lever not untouched. Then as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their positions. For a few weird seconds, they had really felt as if their 15th waiter might be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment.

Starting point is 00:46:07 like beggars. But the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous, broke it abruptly and with brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair and strode to the door. If there was a 15th man here, friends, he said the 15th fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front and bagged doors and secure everything, then we'll talk. the 24 pulls of the club are worth recovering. Mr. Audley seemed to first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly to be in such a hurry about anything, but seeing the Duke dashed down the stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.

Starting point is 00:46:56 At the same instant, a sixth waiter ran into the room and declared that he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of the silver. The crowd of diners and attendance that tumbled how to scouter down the passages divided into two groups. Most of the fishermen followed the proprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit.

Starting point is 00:47:24 Colonel Pound with the chairman, the vice president and one or two others darted down the corridor leading to the servants' quarters as the more likely line of escape. As they did so, they passed the dim alcove or cavern of the cloakroom and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably an attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it. Hello there, called out the Duke. Have you seen anyone pass? The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said,

Starting point is 00:48:01 Perhaps I've got what you are looking for, gentlemen. They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went back to the back of the cloakroom and came back with both hands full of shining silver which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives. You, you, began the Colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last,

Starting point is 00:48:36 then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things. First that the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman, and second that the window of the room behind him was burst. If if someone had passed violently through, valuable things to deposit in a cloak-room, aren't they? remarked the clergyman with cheerful composure. Did you steal those things? stabbled Mr. Aldley with staring eyes.

Starting point is 00:49:07 If I did, said the cleric pleasantly, at least I am bringing them back again. But you didn't, said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken window. To make a clean breast of it, I didn't, said the other with some humour, as he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. But you know who did, said the colonel.

Starting point is 00:49:32 I don't know his real name, said the priest placidly, but I know something of his fighting weight and a great deal about his spiritual difficulties. I have formed the physical estimate that he was trying to throttle me and the moral estimate when he repented. Oh, I say, repented, cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of laughter. Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him.

Starting point is 00:50:05 Odd isn't it, he said, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous and without fruit for God or man. But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are your knives and forks. You are the twelve true fishers and there are all your silver fish

Starting point is 00:50:37 but he has made a fissure of men. Did you catch this man? asked the Colonel frowning. Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. Yes, he said I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world

Starting point is 00:51:02 and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. Those a long silence. All the other men present drifted away to carry the recovered silver to their comrades or to consult the proprietor about the queer condition of affairs. But the grim-faced colonel still sat sideways on the counter, swinging his long lanky legs, and biting his dark mustache. At last he said quietly to the priest.

Starting point is 00:51:34 He must have been a clever fellow, but I think I know a cleverer. He was a clever fellow, answered the other, but I'm not quite sure of what other you mean. I mean you, said the colonel with a short laugh. I don't want to get the fellow jailed. Make yourself easy about that. But I'd give a good many silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair,

Starting point is 00:52:03 and how you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you're the most up-to-date devil of the present company. Father Brown seemed to rather like the satirine candor of the soldier. Well, he said smiling, I mustn't tell you anything of the man's identity, or his own story, of course, but there's no particular reason. why I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out for myself. He hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity and sat beside Colonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate.

Starting point is 00:52:45 He began to tell the story as easily as if he were telling it to an old friend by a Christmas fire. You see, Colonel, he said. I was shut up in that small. room there doing some ritey. When I heard a pair of feet in the passage doing a dance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funny little steps, like a man walking on a 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 feat, I swear, and they came in rotation. First the run, and then the walk, and then the run again.

Starting point is 00:53:33 I wondered at first idly, then asked why a man should act these two parts at once. One walk I knew, it was just like yours, Colonel. It was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something, who strolls about rather because he is physically alert than because he is mentally impatient. I knew that I knew the other walk too, but I could not remember what it was. What wild creatures had I met on my travels that tore along on tiptoe in that extraordinary style? Then I heard a clink of play somewhere, and the answer stood up as plain as St. Peter's. It was the walk of a waiter.

Starting point is 00:54:21 The walk when the body slanted forward, the eyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, the coat-tails and napkin flying. Then I thought for a minute, and half more, and I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if I was going to commit it. Colonel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker's mild grey eyes were fixed upon the ceiling, with almost empty wistfulness. A crime, he said slowly, is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised.

Starting point is 00:55:03 Crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark. I mean that the centre of it is simple, however much the fulfilment, may be complicated. Thus in Hamlet, let us say, the grotesqueness of the gravedigger, the flowers of the mad girl, the fantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost, and the grin of the skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain tragic figure of a man in black. Well, this also, he said, getting slowly down from the same.

Starting point is 00:55:51 from his seat with a smile. This also is the plain tragedy of a man in black. Yes. He went on, seeing the colonel look up in some wonder. The whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as in Hamlet, there are the Rococo its crescences. Yourself, let us say, there is the dead waiter. Who was there? But he could have not been there. There is the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted it into air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on one quite simple fact, some fact that it is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it. This large and subtle, and in the ordinary course, most profitable.

Starting point is 00:56:51 crime was built on the plain fact that a gentleman's evening dress is the same as a waiters. All the rest was acting and thundering good acting too. Still, said the Colonel, getting up and frowning at his boots, I'm not sure that I understand. Colonel, said Father Brown, I tell you that this archangel of impudence who stole your folks walked up. and down this passage, 20 times, in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He did not go and hide in dim corners, where suspicion might have searched for him.

Starting point is 00:57:35 He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and everywhere that he went, he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask me what he was like. You have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight. You are waiting with all the other grand people in the reception room at the end of the passage there, with a terrace just beyond. Whenever he came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter, with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out onto the terrace, did something to the tablecloth, and shot back again towards the office and the waiter's quarters. By the time he had come under the eye of the office clerk and the waiters, he had become another man in every inch of his body, in every indistinctive gesture.

Starting point is 00:58:30 He strolled among the servants with the absent-minded insolence, which they have all seen in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the dinner party should pace all parts of the house, like an animal at the zoo. They know that nothing marks the smart set more than a habit of walking where one chooses. When he was magnificently wary of walking down that particular passage, he would wheel round and pace back past the office. In the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as if by a blast of magic and went hurrying forwarding. again among the twelve fishermen as an obedient attendant. Why should the gentleman look at the chance waiter?

Starting point is 00:59:23 Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the proprietor's private quarters, he called out breezily for a siphon of soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said Jean Lee that he would carry it himself, And he did. He carried it quickly and correctly through the thick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course it could not have been kept up long, but it had only had to be kept up to the end of the fish course. His worst moment was when the waiter stood in a row, but even when he contrived to lean against the wall,

Starting point is 01:00:09 just round the corner in such a way that for that important instant, the waiters thought him a gentleman, while the gentleman thought him a waiter. The rest went like Winky. If any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languid aristocrat. He had only to tine himself two minutes before the fish was cleared, become a swift servant, and clear it himself. He put the plates down on the sideboard, stuffed the silver into his breast pocket, giving it a bulgy look, and ran like a hair. I heard him coming, till he came to the cloakroom.

Starting point is 01:00:51 There he had only to be a plutocrat again. A plutocrat called away suddenly on business. He had only to give his ticket to the cloakroom attendant and go out again elegantly as he had come in. Only, only I happened to be a cloakroom attendant. What did you do to do to you? to him, cry the Colonel with unusual intensity. What did he tell you? I beg your pardon, said the priest immovably. This is where the story ends. And the story begins?

Starting point is 01:01:30 muttered Pound, I think I understand his professional trick, but I don't seem to have got hold of yours. I must be going, said Father Brown. They walked together along. along the passage to the entrance hall, where they saw the fresh, fractled face of the Duke of Chester, who was boundling buoyantly along towards them. Come along, pound, he cried breathlessly, I've been looking for you everywhere. The dinner's going again in spanking style, and old orderly has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to start some new ceremony, don't you know, to commemorate the occasion. I say, you really got the goods back. What do you suggest? Why, said the

Starting point is 01:02:21 Colonel, eyeing him with a great sodonic approval, I should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats instead of black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter. Oh, hang it all, said the young man, and gentlemen never look. looks like a waiter. Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose, said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering laughter on his face. Reverend Sir, your friend must have been a very smart man to act the gentleman. Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace coat to the neck, for the night was stormy and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand. Yes, he said, it must be very hard work to be a gentleman,

Starting point is 01:03:15 but do you know, I have sometimes thought that it must almost be as laborous to be a waiter. And saying, Good evening, he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace of pleasures.

Starting point is 01:03:30 The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk walk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.

Guided Sleep Meditation & Sleep Hypnosis from Sleep Cove - Sleep Mystery Episode - Father Brown Investigates

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