The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Read online

  From somewhere in John’s mind came the memory of a vulgar jingle he had not heard since his nursery days.

  Big fleas have little fleas upon their back to bite them,

  And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

  His tired gaze fell on the soiled pink cushion. He would have to get it re-covered.

  He would have to buy new drapes, too….

  White roses were nodding fatly in the rinsed October sunlight that afternoon as John Godolphin sat on the terrace. A broken rocking horse and a Spam-can bucket lay on the warm terra-cotta tiles as last remaining relics of Sebastiano’s younger brothers and sisters. It didn’t matter. Later he would search out his former servants. He could persuade them to come back, he knew. Order would be restored.

  Little Mario arrived so silently that John did not see him until he was standing very still on the edge of the terrace. He was wearing a U.S. Army fatigue blouse which reached almost to the ground, like a shirt. He smiled tentatively. John smiled back.

  “They have taken Sebastiano to prison,” said Mario in Italian.

  “Yes.”

  “And they have taken Gino. They will hang Gino.” Mario moved a step nearer. He was peering behind John towards the hidden glories of the salon. “They will hang Gino because of me. I told them he had killed Rosa and they believed me.”

  He seemed lost in the wonder of this fact—that the police had believed him.

  “You were a very good boy,” said John. He took out his wallet and selected a thousand-lira bill. He held it towards the child. “And this is for you.”

  Mario came close to the bill and looked down at it from round black eyes. Then his eyes went up to John’s face.

  “No. I do not take money.”

  “You foolish boy, of course you must take it.”

  Little Mario glanced at the upholstered porch chair next to John. He moved to it, paused, gazing at it, and then started slowly to climb into it. Once there, he rolled back against the blue cushions with a grunt of contentment.

  “It is beautiful here. So beautiful. Where I live, everything poor, poor.”

  John stirred in his chair.

  Little Mario had plucked a big, cabbagy rose and was stroking his soft olive cheek with it. He glanced at John and then glanced away shyly.

  “The police believed me when I said I saw Gino killing Rosa. But perhaps that was a lie. Perhaps it was you I saw killing Rosa.” From a pocket in the fatigue blouse he produced the butt of one of John’s monogrammed cigarettes. “Perhaps you frightened me and bribed me with money not to tell that I found this cigarette by the body. Perhaps everything I said against Gino and Sebastiano was a lie.”

  Suddenly little Mario grinned at John. There was a gaping hole in the smile. He must have lost a baby tooth since morning. John felt an old weariness creeping through him like the shadow of a cloud across a sunny meadow. Was this then the destined pattern? Was it to be a circle?

  “I could sleep in the room where Sebastiano slept,” said the dreamy, singsong voice. “The room with the big, big bed. And my mother will please you very much. I know it, Signore. She cooks the spaghetti good, good.”

  Little Mario stirred luxuriously in the porch chair. He dropped the rose. It fell on the warm tiles by the empty Spam-can.

  A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

  And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

  LONGFELLOW

  PORTRAIT OF A MURDERER

  This is the story of a murder. It was a murder committed so subtly, so smoothly that I, who was an unwitting accessory both before and after the fact, had no idea at the time that any crime had been committed.

  Only gradually with the years, did that series of incidents, so innocuous-seeming at the time, fall into a pattern in my mind and give me a clear picture of exactly what happened during my stay at Olinscourt with Martin Slater.

  Martin and I were at an English school together during the latter half of the First World War. In his fourteenth year Martin was a nondescript boy with light, untidy hair, quick brown eyes, and that generic schoolboy odor of rubber and chalk. There was little to distinguish him from the rest of us except his father, Sir Olin Slater.

  Sir Olin, however, was more than enough to make Martin painfully notorious. Whereas self-respecting parents embarrassed their children by appearing at the school only on state occasions such as Sports Day or Prize-giving, Sir Olin haunted his son like a passion. Almost every week this evangelical baronet could be seen, a pink, plump hippopotamus, walking about the school grounds, his arm entwined indecently around Martin. In his free hand he would carry a large bag of chocolates which he offered to all the boys he met with pious adjurations to lead nobler, sweeter lives.

  Martin squirmed under these paraded embraces. It was all the worse for him in that his father suffered from a terrible disease of the throat which made every syllable he uttered a pathetic mockery of the English language. This disease (which was probably throat cancer) had no reality for Sir Olin. He did not believe that other people were even conscious of his mispronunciations. At least once every term, to our irreverent delight and to Martin’s excruciating discomfort, he was invited to deliver before the whole school an informal address of a religious nature—or a pi-jaw as we called it. When I sat next to Martin in Big School, suppressing a disloyal desire to giggle, I used to watch my friend’s knuckles go white, as his father, from the dais, urged us “laddies” to keep ourselves strong and pure and trust in the Mercy of God, or, as he pronounced it, the “Murky of Klock.”

  Sir Olin’s pious solicitude for his own beloved “laddie” expressed itself also in the written word. Every morning, more regular than the rising of the English sun, there lay on Martin’s breakfast plate the blue envelope with the Slater coat-of-arms. Martin was a silent boy. He never spoke a word to hint that Sir Olin’s effusiveness was a torment to him, even when the derisive titter parodied down the table: “Another lecker for the lickle lackie.” But I noticed that he left these letters unopened unless his sensitive fingers, palpating the envelopes, could detect banknotes in them.

  Most of the other boys tended to despise Martin for the solecism of such a parent. My own intimacy with him might well have been tainted with condescension had it not been for the hampers of “tuck” which Lady Slater sent from Olinscourt. Such tuck it was, too—coming at a period when German submarines were tightening all English belts. Being a scrawny and perpetually hungry boy, I was never more prepared to be chummy with Martin Slater than when my roommate and I sneaked off alone together to tackle those succulent tongues, those jellied chickens, those firm, luscious peaches, and those chocolate cakes stiffened with mouth-watering icing.

  Martin shared my enthusiasm for these secret feasts, but he had another all-absorbing enthusiasm which I did not share. He was an inventor. He invented elaborate mechanical devices, usually from alarm clocks of which there were always five or six in his possession in different stages of disembowelment. He specialized at that period in burglar alarms. I can see now those seven or eight urchins that he used to lure into our room at night with sausage rolls and plum cake; I can almost hear my own heart beating as we waited in the darkness to witness in action Martin’s latest contrivance for foiling housebreakers.

  These thrilling episodes ended summarily, however, when an unfeeling master caught us at it, confiscated all Martin’s clocks, and gave him a hundred lines for disturbing the peace.

  Without these forbidden delights, the long, blacked-out nights of wartime seemed even darker and colder. It was Martin who evolved a system whereby we could dispel the dreary chill which settled every evening on the institution like a miasma, and warm up our cold beds and our undernourished bodies. He invented wrestling—or rather, he adapted and simplified the canons of the art to suit the existing contingency. His rules were simple almost to the point of being non-existent. One took every possible advantage; one inflicted as much pain as one reasonably dared; one was utterly unscrupulous t
owards the single end of making one’s opponent admit defeat with the phrase: “I give in, man. You win.”

  It didn’t seem to do us much harm thus to work out on one another the sadism that is inherent in all children. It warmed and toughened us; perhaps in some subtle way it established in us an intimacy, a mutual respect.

  Though Martin had the advantage of me in age and weight, I was, luckily, more wiry and possibly craftier. As I gradually got on to Martin’s technique I began to develop successful countermeasures. So successful were they, in fact, that I started to win almost nightly, ending up on top with monotonous regularity.

  And that was the first, the greatest mistake I ever made in my dealings with Martin Slater. I should have known that it is unwise to win too often at any game. It is especially unwise when one is playing it with a potential murderer, who, I suspect, had already conceived for any subjugation, moral or physical, a hatred that was almost psychopathological and growing in violence.

  I experienced its violence one night when, less scrupulous than Hamlet towards Claudius, he attacked me as I knelt shivering at my bedside going through the ritual of “saying my prayers.” The assault was decidedly unfair. It occurred before the specified safety hour and while the matron was still prowling. Also, though props and weapons were strictly inadmissible, he elected on this occasion to initiate his attack by throwing a wet towel over my head, twisting it round my neck as he pulled me backwards. It was a very wet towel, too, so wet that breathing through it was quite out of the question.

  With his initial, almost strangling jerk backwards, my legs had shot forward, underneath the bed, where they could only kick feebly at the mattress springs, useless as leverage to shake off Martin, who had seated his full weight on my face, having pinioned my arms beneath his knees. I was a helpless prisoner with a wet towel and some hundred pounds of boy between me and any chance of respiration.

  Frantically I gurgled my complete submission. I beat my hands on the floor in token of surrender. But Martin sat relentlessly on. For a moment I knew the panic of near suffocation. I clawed, I scratched, I bit; but I might have been buried a hundred feet under the earth. Then everything began to go black, including, as I afterwards learned, my own face.

  I was saved mercifully by the approach of the peripatetic matron, who bustled in a few moments later and blew out the candle without being aware that one of her charges had almost become Martin Slater’s first victim in homicide.

  Martin apologized to me next morning but there was a strange expression on his face as he added: “You were getting too cocky, man, licking me every night.”

  His more practical appeasement took the form of inviting me to Olinscourt for the holidays. I weighed the disadvantages of four weeks under Sir Olin’s pious tutelage against the prospect of tapping the source of those ambrosial hampers. Inevitably, my schoolboy stomach decided for me. I went.

  To our delight, when we first arrived at Olinscourt we found Sir Olin away on an uplift tour of the reformatories and prisons of western England. He might not have existed for us at all had it not been for the daily blue envelope on Martin’s breakfast plate.

  Lady Slater made an admirably unobtrusive hostess—a meek figure who trailed vaguely round in low-heeled shoes and snuff-colored garments which associate themselves in my mind with the word “gabardine.” Apart from ordering substantial meals for us “growing boys” and dampening them slightly by an aroma of piety, she kept herself discreetly out of our way in some meditative boudoir of her own.

  Left to our devices, Martin spent long days of feverish activity in his beautifully equipped workshop, releasing all the inventive impulses which had been frustrated at school and which, as he hinted apologetically, would be thwarted again on the return of Sir Olin. Being London bred, there was nothing I enjoyed more than wandering alone round the extensive grounds and farm lands of Olinscourt, ploddingly followed by a dour Scotch terrier called Roddy.

  The old rambling house was equally exciting, particularly since on the second day of my visit I discovered a chamber of mystery, a large locked room on the ground floor which turned out to be Sir Olin’s study. Martin was as intrigued as I by the closure of this room which was normally much used. Inquiries from the servants elicited only the fact that there had been alterations of an unknown nature and that the room had been ordered shut until Sir Olin’s return.

  This romantic mystery, which only Sir Olin could solve, made us almost look forward to the baronet’s return. He arrived unexpectedly some nights later and appeared in our room, oozing plump affection, while we were having our supper—Martin’s favorite meal and one he loved to spin out as long as possible. That evening, however, we were never to finish our luscious salmon mayonnaise. Ardent to resume his spiritual wrestling match with his beloved laddie, Sir Olin summarily dismissed our dishes and settled us down to a session known as “The Quiet Quarter,” which was to provide one of the most mortifying of our daily ordeals at Olinscourt.

  It started with a reading by Sir Olin from a book written and privately published by himself, entitled: Five Minute Chats with a Growing Lad. When this one-sided “chat” was over Sir Olin sat back, hands folded over his ample stomach, and invited us with an intimate smile to tell him of our problems, our recent sins and temptations. We wriggled and squirmed awhile trying to think up some suitable sin or temptation; then the baronet relieved the situation by a long impromptu prayer, interrupted at last, thank heavens, by the downstairs booming of the dinner gong. Then, having laid benedictory hands on our heads, Sir Olin kissed us both—me on the forehead and Martin full on the mouth—and dismissed us to our beds.

  There, for the first time since my arrival at Olinscourt, Martin leaped on me with a sudden savagery far surpassing anything he had shown at school. With his fingers pressed against my windpipe, I was helpless almost immediately and more than ready to surrender.

  “Swear you won’t tell the chaps at school about him kissing us good night,” he demanded thickly.

  “I swear, man,” I stuttered.

  “Nor about those pi-jaws he’s going to give us every evening.”

  It was not until I had given my solemn oath that he released me.

  Next morning it became immediately apparent that with Sir Olin’s return the golden days were over. With his return, too, Lady Slater had departed on some missionary journeyings of her own, a fact which suggested that she enjoyed her husband’s presence no more than we did. In the place of her short but fervent grace, Sir Olin treated us and the entire staff of servants to ten minutes of family prayers—all within sight and scent of the lemon glory of scrambled eggs, the glistening mahogany of sausage and kippers, which sizzled temptingly on the side table.

  But at least the baronet solved the mystery of the locked study, solved it quite dramatically, too. Immediately after breakfast on his first day at home, he summoned us into the long, book-lined room and announced with a chuckle: “Lickle surprise for you, Martin, laddie. Just you both watch that center bookcase.”

  We watched breathlessly as Sir Olin touched an invisible switch and smoothly, soundlessly, the bookcase swung out into the room, revealing behind it the dull metal of a heavy door. And in the center of this heavy door was a gleaming brass combination switch.

  “Oh, Father, it’s a secret safe!” Martin’s face lighted up with enthusiasm.

  Sir Olin chuckled again and took out a heavy gold hunter watch. Opening the back of it as if to consult some combination number, he started to turn the brass knob to and fro. At length, as on oiled wheels, the heavy door rolled back, disclosing not a mere safe, but a square, vault-like chamber with a small desk and innumerable drawers of different sizes, suggesting the more modern bank-deposit strongrooms. He invited us to enter and we obeyed, trembling with excitement. Sir Olin showed us some of the wonders, explaining as he did so that his object in withdrawing his more liquid assets from his London bank had been to protect his beloved laddie’s financial future from the destructive menace of German
zeppelins. He twisted a knob and drew out a drawer glittering with golden sovereigns. He showed us other mysterious drawers containing all that was negotiable of the Slaters’ earthly treasure, labelled with such titles as “Mortgages,” “Insurance,” “Stocks and Shares,” “Treasury Notes,” etc., etc. It suggested the romances of William LeQueux and the fantasies of H. G. Wells.

  Confronted by this elaborate manifestation of parental solicitude, Martin asked the question I had expected: “Has it got a burglar alarm, Father?”

  “No. No.” Sir Olin’s plump fingers caressed his son’s hair indulgently. “Why don’t you try your hand at making one, laddie, in your spare time?”

  I was soon to learn, however, that spare time was a very rare commodity with Sir Olin about. The baronet, a passionate English country gentleman himself, was determined to instill a similar enthusiasm in his only son and heir. Every morning after breakfast Martin, yearning for his workshop, was obliged to make the rounds of the estate with his father, following through barn and stable, over pasture and ploughland, listening to an interminable monologue on how Sir Olin, the eleventh baronet, with the aid of God, was disposing everything perfectly for the twelfth baronet, the future Sir Martin Slater. I usually tagged along behind them with Sir Olin’s only admirer, the dour Roddy, staring entrancedly at the sleek flanks of cows whose cream would enrich next term’s tuck hampers; at pigs whose very shape suggested sausage rolls of the future; at poultry whose plumpness I translated dreamily into terms of drumsticks, second joints, and slices of firm white breast.

  Every day Sir Olin brought us back from our cross-country tramps at exactly five minutes to one, which left us barely time to wash our hands for lunch. And after lunch until tea, the baronet, eager to share Martin’s playful as well as his weighty moments, took us riding or bowled googly lobs to us at the cricket nets, in a vain attempt to improve our batting style in a game that we both detested.

  Tea at four-thirty was followed by our only real period of respite. For at five o’clock, punctual as Sir Olin’s gold hunter, his estate agent arrived from Bridgewater, and the two of them were closeted together in the library until seven o’clock, when the dressing gong sounded and Sir Olin put documents and ledgers into his strongroom and the agent took his leave.