“No, my dear. How could he? I myself—the mother that bore you, Mary—I couldn’t think it right that a woman who had deliberately deserted her husband and home should have the care of a little, innocent child.”
“Oh, my baby!”
She sobbed and cried, but she had not yet capitulated. Grandmother, however, had gauged pretty accurately the force of the baby-motif.
“Before I came away, on my long, lonely journey,” she said slowly, “I went up to the nursery, to say good-bye to Bobbie. He had on his blue overall—the one you embroidered for him last summer, Mary—was it only last summer?—and he was playing with his engine, on the nursery floor, his dear, round face was so solemn....”
“Oh, don’t—don’t——”
But grandmother, the tears streaming from her eyes, relentlessly continued: “Darling, his big blue eyes looked up at me, and his little voice asked: ‘Where’s Mummie?’”
Did grandmother’s—even grandmother’s—conscience misgive her, at the quotation? That it was verbally correct, I have no doubt—but what of the intonation?
My grandmother’s poignant rendering of “Where’s Mummie?” no doubt contained all the pathetic appeal of bewildered and deserted childhood throughout the ages....
But mine—the original “Where’s Mummie?...” I have no recollection of it, of course, but I do remember myself at four years old—a stolid, rather cynical child, utterly independent by temperament, and reacting strongly even then against a perpetually emotional atmosphere. And one knows the way in which small children utter those conventional enquiries which they unconsciously know to be expected of them ... the soft, impersonal indifference of the tone, the immediate re-absorption, without waiting for a reply, in the engrossing occupation of the moment....
Mary held out for a little while longer, but the heart went out of her resistance after the pitiful sound of that “Where’s Mummie?” as my grandmother rendered it.