"I had better see Canvey." The Frog touched the buzzer which had already brought a boy to act as messenger. "Get Canvey, Williams, please. All right, Margaret, thank you.... We use Christian names with one another here. It helps the atmosphere," he remarked to Mrs. Bradley when the boy and the housekeeper had gone.
Ganvey was a rat-faced boy with handsome, wide-open eyes, affording a strange impression of cunning and frankness mingled. Call the cunning lack of self-confidence, and the frankness an attempt, probably an unconscious one, to compensate for this, and you had a different portrait of the boy and not necessarily a less faithful one, Mrs. Bradley surmised.
"What's the matter with you that you couldn't eat your dinner?" the Warden inquired. He prided himself, Mrs. Bradley had discovered, upon taking a personal interest in each boy. That this might prove embarrassing and even disagreeable to the boy, obviously never entered his head.
"Sir, I don't like sausage-meat, sir. It makes me sick, sir," responded Canvey, bestowing on the interlocutor his wide gaze.
"Nonsense, boy. Did you eat your pudding yesterday?"
"Sir, yes, sir."
"Your vegetables?"
"Yes, sir."
"No, you did not!" thundered the Warden. "You did not eat your vegetables."
The boy remained silent, but he did not drop his eyes, and he and the Warden stared at one another, until the Warden, apparently the weaker character, added :
"Well?"
"Sir?"
"Your vegetables."
"I felt ill, sir."
"No, no. You didn't feel ill. You've been smoking. Have you been stealing tobacco from the staff?"
"Sir, no, sir."
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."
"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."