Revision Summary: The Midnight Visitor (Footprints without Feet)
1. Unit at a glance
- Contains only one prose story, “The Midnight Visitor” by Robert Arthur; no poem is included in the unit.
- Central focus: a secret agent using quick thinking instead of physical action or gadgets.
- Highlights the gap between romantic expectations of espionage and its ordinary reality.
- Emphasises presence of mind in a sudden life-threatening situation.
- Shows how ordinary details (a window, a waiter, a story about a balcony) can be turned into tools of survival.
- Common theme: intelligence and calm can triumph over armed threat.
2. Prose
Summary
Fowler, a young romantic writer, visits Ausable, an American secret agent living in a gloomy Paris hotel. Expecting glamour and danger, Fowler instead meets a fat, American-accented man. In Ausable’s room they encounter Max, another secret agent holding a gun and waiting for an important report on missiles. Ausable complains about a balcony that supposedly allows entry from the next room. When a knock sounds at the door, Ausable claims it is the police. Max escapes through the window to hide on the non-existent balcony and falls to his death. The visitor is only the waiter with drinks.
Setting
A small, musty room on the sixth floor of a gloomy French hotel in Paris at night.
Main characters
- Ausable: a fat, middle-aged American secret agent with a Boston accent who relies on his wits.
- Fowler: a young, romantic writer disappointed by the lack of glamour in espionage.
- Max: a slender, crafty rival agent who enters with a pistol to steal the report.
Sequence of key events
- Ausable and Fowler enter the room; Max appears with a gun demanding the report.
- Ausable sits down and irritably mentions the balcony as a security problem.
- A knock is heard; Ausable says it must be the police he had called for protection.
- Max, believing the story, climbs onto the window sill to hide on the balcony.
- The door opens to reveal only the waiter with drinks; Max screams as he falls.
- Ausable reveals there never was a balcony.
3. Poem
No poem is present in this unit.
4. Themes and messages
The writer shows that presence of mind and quick thinking are more valuable than physical strength or dramatic appearances. Ausable turns Max’s own assumptions against him by inventing a believable balcony story and using the waiter’s knock, proving that “there is no balcony.”
5. Literary devices
- Irony: “Ausable did not fit any description of a secret agent Fowler had ever read.”
- Imagery: “the night was pressing blackly” against the window.
- Contrast / irony of situation: Fowler expects “the crack of pistols, drugs in the wine” but meets a “sloppy fat man.”
- Suspense through dialogue: “What is that? Who is at the door?” creates sudden tension.
6. Vocabulary
- espionage: spying
- prosaic: ordinary, dull
- wheezed: spoke while breathing noisily
- passably: just well enough
- missiles: weapons that can be guided automatically
- shrilly: in a high, piercing voice
- countenance: facial appearance
- passkey: master key
7. Exam pitfalls
- Assuming Ausable is a typical glamorous spy (the text repeatedly shows the opposite).
- Forgetting that the balcony is completely invented by Ausable.
- Thinking the police actually arrive (the text clearly states “There were no police”).
- Missing that Ausable’s plan develops from the moment he sees Max and uses the unexpected knock.