When Last I Died

The Warden produced a cane. The boy eyed it with a certain degree of sullen speculation.

"Well?" said the Warden.

"I didn't steal anything. It was rhubarb leaves," said the boy.

"Then you deserve to feel sick. See that you eat your tea." He put the cane away, and the boy departed.

"Rhubarb leaves," said Mrs. Bradley thoughtfully.

"Yes. A good many of these boys are inveterate smokers when they come here, and we have to cure them. I have given up smoking, myself. I don't want boys coming into this room and smelling tobacco. I don't feel that that would be playing the game. But I can scarcely help it if the staff have an occasional pipe or cigarette. One can scarcely expect them to adopt all one's own standards."

"One could engage non-smokers, I suppose," said Mrs. Bradley, interested in a system which regarded the powers of self-denial of the staff as being inferior to those of the boys. The Warden, again scenting a witticism, made no direct reply. He said :

"It is very difficult to get these boys to see that certain things aren't good for them, and, of course, if they come here with the craving, they'll satisfy it somehow if they can. It is one of our many difficulties, to eradicate these tendencies."

Mrs. Bradley thought it might be not only difficult but impossible to eradicate the tobacco habit, judging by men, young and old, of her acquaintance, and some women, too, who were addicted to it.

"I suppose voluntary abstinence, for some reason which they can appreciate, would be the only means of overcoming it," she observed. "Athletes, for instance, voluntarily give up tobacco, among other things, I believe."

"It wouldn't work here. These boys have no esprit de corps," responded the Warden, looking disfavourably upon her.

"In that case it might be as well to let them smoke, if they can find anything to smoke, or even to offer a packet of cigarettes as a good-conduct prize," she suggested.

The Warden disregarded these flippancies, and asked, rather abruptly, whether she would like to see another group at work.

"No. I should prefer to take over a group myself, for a week," she said. The Warden, looking rather like a snake-charmer who has been asked by one of the spectators for leave to take over the management of his pets, replied vaguely and dubiously, whereat she cackled and did not renew the request. "Why is that boy Dinnie here?" she asked.

"He was employed by a receiver of stolen bicycles," replied the Warden. "He used to ride away on those left at the roadside. Ladies' bicycles were his speciality. He wasn't caught until he went outside his class and tried to ride off on a motor cycle."

"And Canvey?"

"Nasty little nark," said the Warden pardonably. "He used to push away babies left in perambulators, and then 'find them abandoned' and claim the reward, if there was one."

"And if there was not?"

"Then he and the woman he worked with used to wait a week and then abandon the babies themselves. One mother committed suicide, and another was injured for life by her husband because of that boy."

"And the woman he worked with," Mrs. Bradley gently remarked.

Her own methods with the boys were characteristic. She thought they needed stimulating, and applied psychological treatment, to their astonishment and her own amusement. She discovered very soon that they were afraid of her. One even went so far as to ask whether she was there to pick out the "mentals."

"We are all 'mentals,' my poor child," she remarked.

Nevertheless, at the end of two days she could tell the Warden where to lay hands upon his missing boys, for it was common knowledge where and how they had gone, and this common knowledge she soon shared.

"Word-associations," she replied, when, the lambs having been caused to return to their apparently unpopular fold, the Warden asked her to tell him how she had done it.

"My predecessor could have done with the same sort of help," he volunteered abruptly. "You knew, perhaps, that the loss of those two runaways cost him his job? He was not exactly asked to resign, but—well, it was clearly indicated that there was no future for him here."

"Why? Surely he was not dismissed because two boys contrived to get away?"

The Warden shrugged. "He had a private income, I believe. But there was a public inquiry, and one or two things came out. It seemed fairly certain, for one thing, that the escape had been assisted, if not actually engineered, by a member of the staff. That was what went so seriously against him. Of course, he wasn't popular, but still——"

"Extraordinary," said Mrs. Bradley, hoping to hear more.

"Couldn't trace it to anyone, though," the Warden gloomily continued. "But somebody seemed to have supplied them with files, for example."

"Don't they use files in the manual centre?"

"Yes, of course they do. But those are always checked at the end of one period and at the beginning of the next. They are always in order. No, these files came in from outside. Different make, and so on. It all came out."