When Last I Died Read online

  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."

  "Their associates outside?"

  "Curiously enough, no. They were two rather freakish specimens, as it happened, and had no associates at all in the sense that you mean. One of them had committed a murder. He was quite simply a pathological case, and had no business here at all. On the other hand, there was no trace whatever of a criminal background. He came of the most respectable middle-class people. The other was a bit more up our street, but had no criminal associates. He worked entirely on his own, I understand, and had been employed at racing stables until he got the sack for stealing. He then became the terror of his neighbourhood. Went in for handbag snatching, and once cut a woman's head open. A little beauty, he must have been."

  "Most of the staff are new to me," Mrs. Bradley remarked. "But of course, it is ten years since I was here. The housekeeper you have now, for instance——"

  "Yes, they are all new except the man who takes the woodwork, and the physical training instructor."

  "The kitchen staff, I see, has been augmented."

  "Yes. I believe that, before my time, besides the housekeeper, they had no one but a kitchen-maid, which left the unfortunate housekeeper responsible for all the cooking. But now we have two cooks and a scullery maid as well. They all live 'out,' however, except the housekeeper and one of the cooks. Those two have to be on duty for breakfasts."

  "Interesting," said Mrs. Bradley. "I wonder whether, the authorities would encourage me in making a minor psychological experiment? I should like to take a house from the beginning of May until the end of September and have some of the boys to visit me there. If I had three boys each week for twenty or twenty-one weeks, that would give a short holiday to about two-thirds of your numbers, would it not?"

  "The authorities would never allow it; and I should not like it myself," replied the Warden frankly. "We dare not spoil these boys. Sentiment, unfortunately, does not do. I am afraid they would take every possible advantage of such a scheme."

  "Including making their escape. I know. That is what makes it interesting," said Mrs. Bradley. The Warden shook his head.

  "It would never do. It wouldn't be good for them. After all, they're here as a punishment, you know."

  "I am afraid so, yes. A terribly immoral state of affairs."

  "And for guidance as well; and for the protection of society."

  "I know. If I were a caged tiger, do you know the people who would have to be protected against me if ever I made my escape?"

  "Yes, yes, all very well. I admit these boys have a grievance against society. But what can we do?"

  "I told the Government of ten years ago what we could do," said Mrs. Bradley. "Well, I shall look about for my house at the seaside, and when I find it I shall come to you again."

  The Warden felt that he could afford to smile, and therefore smiled. He even attempted light humour.

  "I could tell you of the very place," he said. "I have the address in my desk here. It once belonged to the aunt of the former housekeeper. Perhaps you remember her from your previous visit? She would still have been here then. About six years ago she retired, having inherited her aunt's money, but was dead within the year. Tried for murder, acquitted, and then committed suicide, poor creature, because people were so unkind. Sounds like something on the films, but it's perfectly true. The house belongs to an old servant now, I believe, who is glad to let it in the summer."

  "Boys or no boys, I should like to have that address," said Mrs. Bradley.

  "'No boys,' is more likely to be correct," said the Warden, almost good-naturedly. He could afford to be pleasant to the somewhat terrifying old woman, he concluded. She had brought back his truants for him, and, in any case, she was leaving the Institution in the morning.

  "Cynical old thing!" said Caroline Lestrange, looking up from Mrs. Bradley's letter.

  "No," said Ferdinand, glancing at their son, Derek, aged seven, who was advancing purposefully to the table with a set of the game called Tiddleywinks. "No, indeed she isn't. If mother says they ought to be put out, she is probably perfectly sincere and perfectly right. They must be the most unhappy little devils on earth, those delinquent kids. You can't really do anything for most of 'em. They're a mess, like Humpty Dumpty when he fell off the wall. She goes on to ask
whether we'd care to lend her Derek for a bit. I'm all for it. She needs him, I expect, to get the taste of the others out of her mouth."

  His son came up and planted the game on the table. Then he surveyed his parents sternly.

  "You can both choose your colour," he said, "and I'll have what's left. There's blue and green and red and yellow and purple and white. I don't use the white. I only use the green and purple and yellow and blue and red. I don't like white. Do you like white, mother?"

  "No, thank you, darling," Caroline replied.

  "I'm not going to play," said his father, basely. "I've got this letter from Gran and I'd better answer it."

  He fled, pursued by the joint maledictions of his wife and son, who, thereafter, forgot him, and settled down to Tiddleywinks until it was Derek's bedtime.

  "Would you like to go and stay with Gran at the seaside for a bit?" asked Caroline, when she went in to say good-night. Her son's reply was brief but warm, and so by the middle of the following week all arrangements had been made.

  The house which Mrs. Bradley had rented was about a hundred yards from the sea, and was, from the child's point of view, admirably situated. Mrs. Bradley had fitted up her dressing-room for him, and there he had a camp bed and a chest of drawers. On the top of this antiquated but useful piece of furniture he placed the model of a Viking ship made for him by a cousin. This was so much his most cherished possession that it could not be left at home.

  The house was that of which Mrs. Bradley had heard from the Warden. Unattractive from the outside, and furnished in accordance with the taste of an earlier period, it was comfortable and convenient enough, and grandmother and grandson enjoyed one another's company and the pleasures of the sea and the shore. Permission had not, so far, been granted for any of the Warden's boys to join them.

  George, Mrs. Bradley's chauffeur, one of the servants she had brought with her, had become mentor to the little boy, and introduced him to the wonders of the internal combustion engine and to the vocabulary of the mechanically-minded. The weather, on the whole, was fine, and although Mrs. Bradley deplored the ostrich-outlook of the authorities in refraining from granting their blessing to her holiday scheme for the Home Boys (as they were euphemistically entitled), she enjoyed the sea air, the old-fashioned house, and, until the last week of the child's visit, the innocuous gossip of the village.

  During this last week, however, she was surprised and annoyed when the little boy said suddenly, one evening when he was having his supper, and only an hour before his bedtime,

  "Gran, what lady was murdered in this house?"

  "Murdered?" said Mrs. Bradley. She had no time to prepare an answer. "Oh, I expect they mean poor old Aunt What's-it. I've forgotten her name."

  "Does her ghost walk?"

  "Why should it?"

  "Somebody told me it did."

  "Had this person seen it?"

  "No. What would it look like, Gran?"

  "Exactly like the person, I suppose."

  "I don't want to see it, Gran."

  "No such luck. I've tried hard to see them, many and many a time. It isn't a scrap of good. I've come to the conclusion there are no such things. People are such liars, unfortunately."

  "Do you think Miss Peeple was telling me lies, Gran? She said Miss Bella killed Aunt Flora, and Aunt Flora's spirit can't rest."

  "Well, she's a funny old thing, and not very sensible, you know——"

  "George says she's batty and sees double. Is it the same thing, Gran?"

  "Exactly the same thing," said Mrs. Bradley, paying her usual mental tribute to her chauffeur.

  "Yes ... but I think I'm glad I'm sleeping in the next room, Gran. Do you think I could move my bed in beside yours?"

  "I think it would be great fun," said Mrs. Bradley. In the morning she said to the postmistress, in the course of a conversation engineered to lead up to the question:

  "What is this tale that the house I have rented is haunted?"

  "It's only Peggy Peeple's nonsense," said the postmistress. "Although you can't wonder at her, poor thing. There's plenty about here to swear the old lady was murdered. They do say it was her niece, Miss Bella Foxley, the one that inherited the money."

  "Wasn't someone tried for it?—the niece, or some other relative?" said Mrs. Bradley, innocent of all real knowledge of the subject, but determined to get to the bottom of it.

  "Oh, no, not for that. It was never brought in as murder, that wasn't. Oh, no! It's only people's wickedness to talk the way they do, but, of course, she did come in for the money, Miss Bella did, and then she was tried for murdering her cousin, and that set people off again. But the poor thing committed suicide in the end—drowned herself, so I heard—and some thought it was remorse that made her do it. But all that talk about her aunt, there was nothing so far as we knew, though they do say no smoke without fire."

  Other customers came in then, and the conversation was abandoned. Neither did Mrs. Bradley find any occasion to resume it during her grandson's visit, for every time after that that she visited the shop, Derek happened to be with her.

  At last the time came for him to return home, but he suggested that he should stay another week, so, despite his parents' protests that they missed him, and wanted him back, stay he did until the following Thursday.

  During his visit Mrs. Bradley had heard, at intervals, of a holiday task he had been set. He went to school, but Caroline preferred that it should be a day school until he was nine.

  The last day of his visit was wet. He woke up to a rainy morning, and although he pressed his nose to the glass of the window for nearly half an hour before he aroused his grandmother, the rain showed no sign of ceasing.

  He was a philosophical child, and, when he did wake her up, he merely remarked that it was raining. Mrs. Bradley, however, viewed the inclement weather with some concern, and at breakfast voiced her thoughts.

  "Too bad it should be wet for your last day. What would you like to do?"

  Her grandson looked up from his plate.

  "It would be a good idea to do my holiday task," he replied in his serious way. "I've got all my scraps; some I brought with me and the others I've collected down here. But, you see, Gran, I haven't a book to paste them in, and I haven't any paste."

  "I dare say we could find a book," said Mrs. Bradley.

  "Well, I have sort of found a book," said the little boy. "I found it on the shelf in your bedroom cupboard; only it's partly wrote in."

  "Written in?"

  "Yes; so I thought if I showed it to you and you said I could have it, perhaps we could make some paste and perhaps you've got a brush. A piece of paper would do, only I'd rather have a brush. It does it neater. Do you think I'll get the prize Gran?"

  "Do you think you'll get the prize?"

  "I expect so. If I could have a brush."

  "In that case we must certainly provide a brush. Go and ask George about it. Perhaps he'll run you down to the village in the car, and then you could choose one for yourself."

  "Oh, may I really, Gran? Oh, thanks!"

  "Perhaps I'd better see the book before you go. If it isn't quite the thing, you could see what they've got at the village shop."

  "They haven't got anything, because I asked. They've only got the miserable-est little drawing-books and exercise books and things. This one I found has got stiff-covers and it's thick. I suppose," he added, as a gloomy afterthought, "it really belongs to Miss Hodge."