A Question of Trust: Class 10 English · Chapter 4

4.1 Before you read

Suppose a bank wants to know how safe its online systems are. Sometimes it hires someone who once broke into such systems, because nobody understands an attacker's tricks better. Now turn the question around: when two crooks strike a deal, will either of them keep his word? People have argued about this for centuries, and two old English sayings sum up the two sides.

The first, set a thief to catch a thief, means that the best person to trap a wrongdoer is someone who knows the same tricks. The second, honour among thieves, claims that criminals stay loyal to one another even while they cheat everyone else. It is often said with a raised eyebrow, because experience suggests otherwise.

In this story you meet Horace Danby, a locksmith whom everyone takes for an honest man, on the afternoon he sets out to rob a country house in England. Read it like a mystery. The writer hides his clues in plain sight, and the last page changes the meaning of the pages before it.

4.2 Reading the story

The whole story fits into one summer afternoon and a morning two days later. We have split it into four parts so that you can revise it in order: Horace's secret life, the break-in, the meeting with the lady, and the twist. Fig. 4.2 lays out the main events before you go part by part.

4.2.1 Part I: The respectable burglar

Horace Danby is the sort of man a town respects. A bachelor of about fifty, he makes locks for a living and does well enough to employ two helpers. At home a housekeeper worries about his health, though apart from summer bouts of hay fever he is rarely unwell. The narrator, however, lets us in on a secret straight away: Horace is respectable, but his honesty has a gap in it.

The gap is a once-a-year burglary. Horace's passion is for rare and costly books, far beyond what a locksmith's income can buy. Each year, therefore, one carefully planned safe-cracking pays for twelve months of collecting, and an agent makes the purchases so that the books cannot be traced to him. He knows prison from the inside: fifteen years ago he served one sentence there, in the prison library.

This year's target is Shotover Grange, a country house. For a fortnight he has studied its layout, wiring, paths and garden. The family is away in London, and on this bright July afternoon the two servants left in charge go off to the cinema. Horace sees them go. Then, his tool bag slung on his back, he leaves his hiding place behind the garden wall. The safe holds jewels worth about fifteen thousand pounds. Even selling them off piece by piece, he reckons on five thousand at the least. That would fund another year, including three tempting books due to be sold that autumn.

4.2.2 Part II: Inside Shotover Grange

Getting in is easy. The housekeeper, Horace has observed, keeps the kitchen-door key on an outside hook. Gloved as always, so that no fingerprint is left behind, he lets himself in with it. A small dog in the kitchen wakes and wags its tail. Horace's rule for dogs is simple: greet them by name and be friendly. He greets this one as Sherry and walks on.

In the drawing room a mediocre painting conceals the safe. Looking at it, Horace briefly weighs a switch from books to art, then drops the idea: paintings eat up wall space, and books suit a small house. On the table, a huge vase of flowers starts his nose itching. With four clear hours before the servants come back, he sets out his tools. A safe holds no fears for a man who has spent his life among locks. The burglar alarm is cheaply made, so he steps into the hall and snips its wire.

Horace feels a little scornful of rich owners. This very house had featured in a magazine, which showed readers its floor plan and the drawing room, and even revealed what the painting concealed. Yet his own body is working against him. Each time he comes back to the flowers, the sneezing gets worse, until he is pressing a handkerchief to his face.

Suddenly someone in the doorway enquires whether he is suffering from a cold or from hay fever. Caught off guard, Horace blurts out the truth and sneezes again. The speaker calmly suggests identifying the plant to blame and getting medical help, “if you're serious about your work”, and adds that his sneezing was audible from the top of the house.

4.2.3 Part III: The lady in red

The speaker stands in the doorway with Sherry rubbing against her legs: a young, attractive woman dressed in red, with a gentle voice that has steel beneath it. Crossing the room, she sets the ornaments on the mantelpiece in order. She tells the dog off for its fuss, as though she had been gone for a month. Then she turns to Horace with a smile: her return, she says, has been well timed, even if a burglar was the last thing she expected to find.

Horace takes heart from her amusement. Handled the right way, he thinks, she might let him off the hook. What follows is a battle of wits in which Horace tries every move he knows: escape, a half-hearted threat that he quickly withdraws, excuses and, finally, a plea with a promise to give up crime. She meets each move calmly. She is not frightened, she reminds him that the police are a phone call away, and she even lectures him on the danger people like him pose to the public. His excuses only make her laugh. At last she remarks on how afraid of prison he is and, shaking her head, admits to a weakness for the wrong kind of people.

Then comes the turning point. She helps herself to a cigarette from a silver box, and Horace, sensing an ally, whips off his gloves to hold out his lighter. She agrees to let him go on one condition. Her story: the jewels should have gone to the bank before the family left for London, as she had promised her husband, but she never took them out of the safe, and tonight she needs them for a party. Horace guesses the rest: she has forgotten the numbers that open the safe. He promises to have it open within the hour, though he must break it. She waves the damage aside. Her husband will be away for a month, and the safe can be repaired by then.

4.2.4 Part IV: The twist

Horace keeps his side of the bargain: the safe yields in under an hour, the lady gets her jewels, and he leaves in high spirits. His good resolution survives exactly two days. By the third morning the thought of those books has him eyeing another safe. He gets no further. Before midday a policeman arrests him for the theft of the jewels from Shotover Grange.

The police have all the proof they need: having opened the safe bare-handed, Horace has left his prints across the room. His story that the owner's wife asked him to open it convinces nobody. As for the owner's wife, she is sixty, grey-haired and sharp of tongue, and she calls his tale nonsense. The charming young lady in red was never the lady of the house. She was an impostor, a thief like him, and a cleverer one. This is the story's twist.

The ending comes full circle. Horace, whose one earlier term was spent in a prison library, is now the prison's assistant librarian, among books he will never own. His thoughts often return to the charming woman in red, a professional in his own line of work, who beat him at his own game. Mention “honour among thieves” in his hearing, and he loses his temper.

4.3 Thinking about the text

The textbook's Think about it questions ask you to look back at the story like a detective. Answers on this story earn marks for evidence, so support every claim with something a character says or does.

4.3.1 Horace Danby: a thief with a difference

The narrator calls Horace “good and respectable — but not completely honest”, and the phrase fits him closely. In daily life he is everything a neighbour could want: hard-working, polite, kind to animals and never violent. Even his dishonesty is limited and controlled. He steals once a year, takes only what one year of book-buying needs, and strikes when the house is empty.

That is why he is no ordinary thief. A typical burglar steals to live, or out of greed, and grabs whatever he can carry. Horace already earns an honest income. His motive is a passion for rare books, a cultured hobby. Even his threat to the lady is a bluff that he withdraws at once. Yet the story never excuses him. He still breaks into other people's homes, and his claim that he robs only the rich is a convenient story he tells himself.

4.3.2 How the lady fooled him

Did you suspect the lady before the end? On a first reading most people do not, because we see her through Horace's eyes. On a second reading the clues stand out. Fig. 4.5 lines them up in the order they appear.

Notice how little she has to say outright. She never introduces herself. Her behaviour does the persuading, and when she reaches the problem of the safe she lets Horace supply the explanation himself. A trick works best when the victim fills in the gaps. Horace misses all of this, for several reasons:

• Surprise and relief. He is caught mid-sneeze, and when she smiles instead of screaming, relief clouds his judgement.
• A convincing act. She knows the dog's name, behaves like the mistress of the house and even lectures him about protecting society.
• A believable story. A forgetful rich wife, a party that night and a husband away for a month all sound ordinary.
• Fear of prison. He wants a way out so badly that he grabs the first one offered.
• Pride and a blind spot. He thinks he is charming her and enjoys showing off his skill. It never occurs to him that a well-dressed young woman could be in his own trade.

4.3.3 Where the planner slipped

Horace prepares like a professional, so his downfall comes from small human slips rather than poor planning. Fig. 4.6 shows how each slip led to the next.

Notice the pattern. Horace's mistakes are not mistakes of skill but of character. He is overconfident, scorning careless owners while ignoring his own weakness. He is vain, enjoying the role of a gentleman helping a lady. And he is restless for more books, which shows that his promise to reform was empty. Gloves, the one precaution he never forgets on a job, are exactly what he drops when someone flatters him.

4.3.4 Title, irony and the two sayings

The title. Trust runs through every scene. Horace's town trusts him, wrongly. Horace trusts the lady because she seems to trust him, and she counts on that trust to get the jewels. In the end nobody trusts the one true thing Horace says. So the title asks a real question: whom can you trust, and can one thief ever trust another?

Irony. Irony is a gap between what we expect and what happens, and this story is built on it:

• A burglar who plans every detail is beaten by a stranger he never planned for.
• The thief is robbed: another thief uses his skill and walks off with the prize.
• A man who lives by locks ends up locked away.
• The gloves he wears to avoid prints come off just when they matter most.
• A woman in the middle of a crime lectures him about protecting society from criminals.
• Horace loves books, and he gets his wish, as an assistant librarian in prison.

On a second reading you also notice the writer's foreshadowing. The lady's advice to see a doctor if he is serious about his work sounds kindly, but it is one professional mocking another. Her fondness for “the wrong kind of people” sounds like sympathy, yet it quietly tells us what she is.

The two sayings. Now return to the question from Section 4.1. The story bears out set a thief to catch a thief: only a thief could read Horace so well and use his skill, and she catches him more surely than the police could have. It mocks honour among thieves: she strikes a deal with a fellow criminal and then leaves him to take the blame. That is why the phrase makes Horace so angry.

Themes. The story is a light, entertaining crime tale, but it leaves you with some serious ideas:

• Appearances deceive: a respectable man is a burglar, and a charming lady is a thief.
• Crime does not pay, however clever or careful the criminal.
• Overconfidence blinds us to our own weaknesses.
• Honesty cannot be part-time: being honest eleven months a year does not make a person honest.
• Trust must be earned, and checking it is not an insult.

4.4 Talk about it

The textbook ends with two questions for discussion. Neither has a single right answer, but a good answer takes a clear side, gives reasons from the story, and is fair to the other view.

Was Horace's punishment fair? Weigh both sides before you decide.

A balanced view: Horace was punished for the right reason in the wrong case. He entered Shotover Grange to rob it, so he could hardly claim innocence. What feels unjust is that the cleverer criminal escaped, and that is exactly the irony the writer wants us to enjoy.

Can a good goal excuse a wrong act? Horace believes his motive, a love of books, makes his crimes almost harmless. Most people would answer that the end does not justify the means: a good goal pursued by harming others stops being good. Fig. 4.7 shows the two ways of weighing it.

4.5 Suggested reading

4.6 Board exam practice

In recent CBSE papers, Footprints without Feet stories are tested mainly through short answers of about 40–50 words and long answers of about 100–120 words; extract-based questions usually come from First Flight. The extract practice below still trains the close reading that every answer needs. Plan before you write: Fig. 4.8 shows a simple structure.