"I know I must. He ought to be told. He has a right to know. He might
resent it later if we didn't tell him now."
"Very well, sister. I leave it to you."
The door having closed on this friend, Tom Whitelaw, so to call him
henceforth, made his way into the room where the Christmas Tree was
presently to be lighted up. But he had no heart for the spectacle.
There was something new. In the grip of the forces which controlled his
life he felt helpless, small. Even his companions in misfortune, as
all these children were, could be relatively light-hearted. They could
clap their hands when the Tree began to burn with magic fires, and take
pleasure in the presents handed out to them. He could not. He was
waiting for something to be told to him--something he had a right to
know.
One by one, the presents were cut from the Tree; one by one the
children went up to receive this addition to what Santa Claus had
brought them in the morning. His own name was among the last. When it
was called he went forward perfunctorily at first, and then with a
sudden inspiration.
His package was handed him, not by one of the matrons but by a beaming
young lady from outside. As she bent to deliver it he had his question
ready.
"Please, miss, what's cyanide of potassium?"
He had repeated the words to himself so often during the half hour
since first hearing them that he pronounced them distinctly. The young
lady laughed.
"Why, I think it's a deadly poison." She turned to the matron nearest
her. "What is cyanide of potassium? This dear little boy wants to know."
But the dear little boy had already walked soberly back to his seat.
While the other children made merry with their presents he sat with his
on his lap, and reflected. Poison was something that killed people. He
knew that. In one of the houses where they had lived a woman had taken
poison, and two days later he had seen her carried out in a long black
box. The impression had remained with him poignantly.
He had no inclination to cry. Tears could bring little relief in this
kind of cosmic catastrophe. If his mother had taken poison and was to
be carried out in a long black box, everything that had made up his
world would have collapsed. He could only wait submissively till the
thing he ought to know was told to him.
It was told when the giving of the presents was over, and the children
flocked out of the room to get ready for their Christmas supper. Miss
Honiton was waiting near the door.
"Come into my office, dear. I want to ask you a few questions."
Miss Honiton's office was a mixture of office and sitting room, in that
it had business furniture offset by photographs and knicknacks. Sitting
at her desk, she turned to the lad, who stood as if to attention, a
long thin sympathetic face, stamped with practical acumen.
"I wanted to ask you if besides your mother you have any relations."
His dark blue eyes, deep set beneath his bushy brows, she thought the
most serious and earnest she had ever seen in any of the hundreds of
homeless little boys she had had to deal with.
"No, miss."
"No brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts?"
"No, miss."
"Didn't your mother ever take you to see anyone?"
"No, miss."
"Well, then, didn't anyone ever come to see her?"
"No, miss."
To the point she was trying to reach she went round by another way.
Where did they live? How long had they lived there? Where had they
lived before that? How long had they lived in that place? He answered
to the best of his recollection, but when it came to their flittings
from tenement to tenement, and from town to town, his recollection
didn't take him very far. Miss Honiton soon understood that she might
as well question a bird as to its migrations.
For a minute she said nothing, turning over in her mind the various
ways of breaking her painful news, when he himself asked, suddenly:
"Is my mudda dead?"
The question was so direct that she felt it deserved a direct answer.
"Yes, dear."
"Did she"--he pulled himself together for the big words--"did she take
cyanide of potassium?"
"Yes, dear; so I understand."
"Will they take her away in a long black box?"
"She'll be buried, dear, of course. There'll have to be a funeral
somewhere."
"Can I go to it?"
"Yes, dear, certainly. I'll go with you myself."
He said nothing more, and Miss Honiton felt the futility of trying to
comfort him. There was no opening for comfort in that stony little
face. All she could suggest to break the tension was to ask if he
wouldn't like his supper.
He went to his supper and ate it. He ate it ruminantly, speechlessly.
What had happened to him he could not measure; what was before him he
could not probe. All he knew of himself was that he had become a clod
of misery, with almost nothing to temper his desolation.
Two big tears rolled down his cheeks without his being aware of it.
They did not, however, escape the eyes of a little girl who sat near
him.
"Who's a cry-baby?" she shrieked, to the entertainment of the
lookers-on. She pointed at him with her spoon. "A grea' big boy like
that cryin' for his momma!"
He accepted the scorn as a tonic. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for
his momma," were the words with which he kept many a pang during the
next few days from being more than a tearless anguish.
Miss Honiton was as good as her word as to going with him to the rooms
which housed the long black box. This he understood to be all that
now represented his mudda. She had tried to explain the place as an
"undertaker's parlor," but the words were outside his vocabulary. In
the same way the why and the wherefore of the ceremony were outside his
intelligence. He and Miss Honiton went into the dim room, and stood
near the thing he heard mentioned as "the body." After some mumbled
reading they went out again, and back to the Swindon Street Home.
Back in the Swindon Street Home he was still without a wherefore or a
why. He got up, he washed, he dressed, he ate, he went to bed again. He
was in a dormitory now with three other little boys, all of them too
deep in the problems of parents in jail or in parts unknown to offer
him much fellowship. They cried when they were left alone in bed, or
they cried in their sleep; but they cried. It was his own pride, and in
no small measure his strength, that he didn't cry, unless he cried in
dreams.
Everyone was good to him, Mrs. Crewdson and Miss Honiton especially,
but no one could give him the clue to life which instinctively he
clutched for. That one didn't stay forever in the Swindon Street Home
he could see from observation. The children he had found there went
away; other children came. Some of these stayed but a night or two.
None of them stayed much longer. By those sixth and seventh senses
which children develop when they are in trouble he divined that
conferences were taking place on his behalf. Now and then he detected
glances shot toward him by the matrons in discussion which told him
that he was being talked about. It was easy to deduce that he was in
the Swindon Street Home longer than was the custom because they didn't
know what to do with him. He inferred that they didn't know what to do
with him from the many questions which many people asked. Sometimes it
was a man, more times it was a woman, but the questions were always
along the lines of those of Miss Honiton as he came out from the
children's Christmas Tree. Had he any relatives? Had he any friends?
If he had they ought to look after him. It was hard for these kindly
people to believe that he had no claim whatever on any member of the
human race.
He began to hear the words, a State ward. Though they meant nothing
to him at first, he strove, as he always did, with new words and
expressions, to find their application. Then one evening, as Mrs.
Crewdson was putting him to bed, she told him that that was what he had
become.
"You see, darling, now that your father and mother are both dead, the
whole country is going to adopt you. Isn't that nice? And it isn't
everything. You're going to have a home--not a home like this--what we
call an institution--but a real home--with a real father and mother in
it, and real brothers and sisters."
He took this stolidly. He was not to be moved now by anything that
could happen. A waif on the world, the world had the right to pitch him
in any direction that it chose. All he could do with his own desires
was to beat them into submission. He mustn't cry! His fears and his
griefs alike focussed themselves into that resolve. It was the only way
in which he could translate his stout-hearted will to endure.