The Midnight Visitor · Class 10 English · Footprints Without Feet: 60 flashcards
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1. Who wrote 'The Midnight Visitor'?
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Robert Arthur.
2. How is Ausable unlike the secret agents of books and films?
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He is fat — very fat — wheezes when he speaks, dresses sloppily, and has kept a strong American accent from Boston after twenty years in Paris. His work arrives by ordinary telephone call, and he lives in a small room on the top floor of a gloomy hotel.
3. Where does Ausable come from, and how long has he been in Paris?
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He came from Boston, in America, and has been in Paris for twenty years — without ever losing the accent.
4. Which languages does Ausable speak?
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French and German, both passably — that is, just well enough.
5. Describe the setting of the story.
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A gloomy French hotel with a musty corridor, and Ausable's small room on the sixth and top floor, with a single ordinary window against which the night presses blackly.
6. Who is Fowler?
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A young writer, romantic in outlook, who had wanted to meet a real secret agent and spends the story as a disappointed — then frightened — spectator.
7. What had Fowler imagined a spy's life would be like?
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Mysterious figures in the night, the crack of pistols and drugs in the wine — the list Ausable recites back to him.
8. What had Fowler's evening actually consisted of?
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A dull evening at a French music hall with an untidy fat man, whose only business of the night was an ordinary telephone call making an appointment in his room.
9. What does the glossary say 'prosaic' means?
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Ordinary — the word used for the telephone call that replaces the messages Fowler had hoped for.
10. How does Ausable know that Fowler is disappointed?
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Nobody tells him. He reads it from his guest and describes it in detail, chuckling to himself as he unlocks the door — the same habit of observation that later saves him.
11. What comfort does Ausable offer Fowler?
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That he will presently see a paper for which several men and women have risked their lives, and which may some day affect the course of history — drama of a different kind.
12. What is Fowler's first authentic thrill of the day?
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The moment the light comes on and he sees a man standing halfway across the room with a small automatic pistol in his hand.
13. How does Ausable react to finding Max in his room?
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He blinks a few times, greets him by name, says wheezily that Max has given him quite a start, and remarks that he had thought he was in Berlin.
14. Where had Ausable believed Max to be?
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In Berlin.
15. What does Max look like?
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Slender and a little less than tall, with features suggesting the crafty, pointed face of a fox; apart from the gun there is nothing especially menacing about him.
16. What has Max come for?
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The report on some new missiles that is being brought to Ausable that night. He says it will be safer in his hands.
17. What does the glossary give for 'missiles'?
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Weapons directed by remote control or automatically.
18. What does 'espionage' mean?
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Spying — the word Ausable uses when listing what Fowler had been told about him.
19. Why does the story insist that Ausable looks nothing like a spy?
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Because the whole plot depends on appearance being unreliable. Max looks like the spy of fiction and loses; Ausable looks like nobody and wins by talking.
20. What are the only weapons Ausable uses in this section?
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Observation and conversation — he watches, deduces, describes and keeps everything sounding ordinary.
21. How did Max actually get into Ausable's room?
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With a passkey. He says so himself, and adds that he did not know about the balcony — it might have saved him some trouble if he had.
22. How does Ausable say Max got in?
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Over the balcony — he complains that it is twice inside a month that somebody has found a way into his room that way.
23. What does Ausable threaten to do about it?
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To raise the devil with the management, grimly, because they have still not dealt with the balcony.
24. Whose balcony does Ausable say it is?
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Not his — it belongs to the next apartment, and only extends under his window.
25. What history does Ausable give for the room?
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That it used to be part of a larger unit, and that the next room — through the door he points at — used to be the living room, which had the balcony.
26. How does Ausable say the balcony can be reached?
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From the empty room two doors down — and somebody did exactly that last month.
27. What has the management promised?
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To block the balcony off — and they have not done it.
28. Why is the balcony story so convincing?
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Because it is full of circumstantial detail, explains an earlier break-in, is addressed to Fowler as information rather than to Max as an argument, and takes the form of a complaint against the hotel — and because Max has just admitted he knows nothing about the outside of the room.
29. What time was the appointment, and how long did Ausable say it was away?
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The appointment was for twelve-thirty. Max guessed half an hour; Ausable corrected him to thirty-one minutes.
30. What does Ausable say he wishes he knew?
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How Max had learned about the report.
31. How does Max answer that?
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He smiles evilly and says that his side would like to know how Ausable's people got the report — but no harm has been done, since he will have it back that night.
32. Who does Ausable say is knocking at the door?
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The police — he says he asked them to check on him, because so important a paper deserved a little extra protection.
33. How does Fowler react to the knocking, and how does Ausable?
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Fowler jumps; Ausable simply smiles.
34. What three things does Ausable point out to Max after the knock?
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That if he does not answer the door the police will enter anyway; that the door is unlocked; and that they will not hesitate to shoot.
35. What does Max decide to do?
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To go outside on to the balcony. He backs to the window, swings a leg over the sill and orders Ausable to send them away, threatening to shoot and take his chances otherwise.
36. How does Max keep control as he climbs out?
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He keeps his body twisted so that the gun still covers Ausable and Fowler, and holds the window frame with his free hand.
37. What happens at the exact moment the doorknob turns?
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Max pushes off from the sill with his left hand to drop to the balcony — and as he drops he screams once, shrilly.
38. What does 'shrilly' mean?
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Piercingly; in a high pitch.
39. What weapons does Ausable use in this section?
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None. A complaint, an explanation, a guess about who is knocking, and three pieces of information — all of it ordinary conversation.
40. Who is really at the door?
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Henry, the waiter, bringing the drink Ausable had ordered for his return — though this is only revealed afterwards.
41. Who was really at the door?
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Henry, a waiter, bringing the drink Ausable had ordered for when he returned — a tray, a bottle and two glasses.
42. What did the waiter do in the room?
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He announced the drink, set the tray on the table, uncorked the bottle deftly and left — noticing nothing at all.
43. How does Fowler react when the waiter leaves?
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White-faced, he stares after him and manages only the beginning of a question about the police.
44. What is Ausable's first revelation?
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That there were no police — only Henry, whom he was expecting.
45. Why was the knock never a danger to Ausable?
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Because he had ordered a drink for his return, so a knock at the door could only be the waiter. What frightened the others was, to him, a delivery — which is why he smiled.
46. What is the last line of the story?
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That the man outside will not return — because there is no balcony.
47. Why is the ending fatal for Max?
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Because the room is on the sixth and top floor, a fact given in the opening paragraph, and he stepped out of the window believing there was a balcony beneath it.
48. What does the story tell us about what happened in the street?
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Nothing at all. Max is never mentioned again; the reader has only the single shrill scream and the height of the room.
49. Why does Ausable reveal the police first and the balcony second?
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Because the smaller surprise answers the question Fowler actually asked and prepares the ground; by the time the second lands, the reader has already accepted that nothing was what it seemed.
50. What is 'presence of mind', as the textbook defines it?
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The ability to think fast, and to behave coolly and sensibly, when danger takes you unawares.
51. What are the four parts of Ausable's presence of mind?
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Noticing (what the passkey remark gave away); staying ordinary (the blink, the grumble, the thirty-one minutes); improvising (a complaint turned into an escape route); and knowing what another person will believe.
52. How does the story treat the theme of appearance and reality?
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The man who looks exactly like a secret agent is destroyed, while the fat, wheezing, sloppily dressed one wins without leaving his chair. Every unglamorous detail of the opening exists to set this up.
53. What is understatement, and where does the story use it?
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Deliberately saying less than the situation warrants. A man falls six floors, and the story answers with a waiter uncorking a bottle, a sigh and the words 'my young friend'.
54. Who is the midnight visitor of the title?
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Max is the obvious answer — the armed visitor in the room at midnight. But the visitor who actually arrives at the door is Henry with a tray, and it is that arrival which decides everything.
55. What does the reader never learn?
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What happened in the street, whether anyone came, what became of the pistol, and what the report contained.
56. Why does the reader share Fowler's ignorance?
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Because the story is told from close beside him and never enters Ausable's thoughts, so we are fooled by exactly the same trick as Max.
57. Did Ausable plan all this in advance?
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Almost certainly not. The balcony begins as a grumble, becomes useful only after Max's remark about the passkey, and turns into an escape route only when a knock he could identify arrives at the door.
58. What does the waiter's calmness add to the scene?
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Everything. He has no idea anything has happened, which makes the horror of what has just occurred entirely the reader's business.
59. What might Fowler have learned that evening?
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The story does not say. But a writer who wanted figures in the night and pistol shots has watched an unimpressive man defeat a loaded gun by talking, which is a lesson about spies and about stories.
60. What are the three suggested readings printed with this story?
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'After Twenty Years' by O. Henry, 'The Stolen Bacillus' by H. G. Wells and 'The Face on the Wall' by E. V. Lucas.
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