by Otto Penzler
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 bank notes 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-melting 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 house-breakers.
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 nonexistent. One took every possible advantage; one inflicted as much pain as one reasonably dared; one was utterly unscrupulous toward 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 technic I began to develop successful counter measures. 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 toward 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 backward. 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 backward, 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 afterward 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 prove 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 a while 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—m
e 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, booklined room and announced with a chuckle: “Lickle surprise for you, Martin, laddie. Just you both watch that center bookcase.”
We watched breathless 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-dial.
“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, vaultlike chamber with a small desk and innumerable drawers of different sizes, suggesting the more modern bank-deposit strong rooms. 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, labeled with such titles as MORTGAGES, INSURANCE, STOCKS AND SHARES, TREASURE NOTES, etc., etc.
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 plowland, 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 strong room and the agent took his leave.
Needless to say, Martin and I daily blessed the estate agent’s name, though it was, infelicitously enough, Ramsbotham. And, needless to say, his arrival was the signal for us to scoot off, me to my wanderings, Martin to his workshop, until suppertime.
Suppertime itself, once the most blissful moment of the day, lost its glory; for Sir Olin, unlike his wife, was quite indifferent to food. Eager for his “Quiet Quarter,” he allowed us a scant twelve minutes to feed the inner boy. His appearance, dressed in a claret-colored dinner jacket, meant the instant removal of our plates, and many a succulent morsel did I see snatched from me. Martin loved good food as much as I did, but being a truer epicure than I, was incapable of gobbling. He frequently had to endure “The Quiet Quarter” and his father’s good-night kiss on an almost empty stomach.
A few days later Sir Olin introduced yet another torture for Martin. The Baronet decided that his son was now old enough to learn something about the business side of an estate that would one day be his. Three times a week, therefore, Martin was required to be present from five to seven o’clock in the library with his father and Ramsbotham. This left him only two hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for tinkering in his beloved workshop. It meant also that, at least three times a week, his supper period was even further curtailed.
I think it was about this time I began to notice a change in Martin. He became even more silent and his face was pale and set with dark lines under his eyes. These, I suspect, were caused partly by the fact that he made up for the lost time in his workshop by sneaking out to it in the middle of the night. I say I suspect this, for he never took me into his confidence; but on two occasions when I happened to wake after midnight his bed was empty and through the open window I could see a flickering light in the workshop.
—
My guess is that the final stage really started on Saturday night at the end of my third week at Olinscourt. The dressing gong had just sounded and, as I happened to pass the library, I heard the tinkle of a bell. I was surprised, since the telephone there rang very seldom and usually only for something important. Martin, who had joined me on the stairs, voiced my unspoken hope.
“Say, man, d’you think perhaps that’s someone calling Father away or something jolly like that?”
And later, as I was hurrying through my bath, there was the sound of a car starting, and from the window Martin announced excitedly:
“There’s old Ramsbum’s car, and I do believe I see Father in it with him. He hasn’t come up to dress yet. Wait while I go down to the library to see.”
He returned in a few minutes with the good news that his father, not being there, had presumably left with Mr. Ramsbotham, which meant we could linger pleasantly over supper. It was a delicious supper too—fresh trout followed by raspberries and cream—and was brought up by no less a person than Pringle, the head butler. “Excuse me, Master Martin,” he said with an apologetic cough, “but do you happen to know if Sir Olin will be down to dinner?”
“I think he went to Bridgewater with Mr. Ramsbotham.” Martin’s mouth was full of green peas. “I know he was asked to give a talk at the boys’ reformatory there some Saturday. And someone rang him up on the telephone.”
“I see, sir, but he didn’t mention it to me, sir.” Pringle withdrew in starchy disapproval and left us the pleasant realization that there would be no “Quiet Quarter” and no
good-night kiss.
And there were no family prayers next morning, since Sir Olin had not returned. It was to be presumed that he had been exhausted by reforming reformatory boys and had consequently spent the night in Bridgewater with Mr. Ramsbotham. And, as it was a Sunday, no question was raised as to his absence.
Martin, bright-eyed, rushed off to his workshop immediately after breakfast and I decided on a stroll. It was then that happened one of those tiny incidents that seemed trivial at the time, but seen in later perspective, appear most significant.
I had whistled for Roddy, usually so anxious to share my walks abroad, but no scampering feet answered my summons. I whistled again. Then I started to look for him, calling:
“Hey, Roddy…rats…!”
The sound of whining from the study at last solved the problem. Roddy had apparently found a rat of his own, for he was scratching at the central bookcase with a strange crooning sound.
I induced him to follow me, but later when I turned to look back, he had vanished. And that, in itself, was quite unprecedented.
Another seemingly unimportant incident occurred later that morning when I arrived home from my walk. The day was hot and I had taken off my school blazer before going out, hanging it on a peg in the hall, near the front door. When I got back a blazer was there, but it was hanging upside down. As I unhooked it a number of letters dropped from the pockets. They were from Sir Olin to his son and I realized at once that Martin had gone in to lunch ahead of me, taking my blazer by mistake. I picked up the letters—all of them as I thought—shoved them back into the pockets and promptly forgot the whole thing. I doubt even if we bothered to effect an exchange of coats.
