“Yes, I agree with you there,” said Don Whelpton. “But what’s the answer?”
“There isn’t any simple answer. Don’t imagine I’m bitten by a reforming bug. I’m not by nature a reformer, I only tried to answer your question honestly, and to strike a balance sheet for myself, hoping that the job I’ve spent my life on wouldn’t look futile in retrospect. Obviously we need more and better prisons, so that there is less overcrowding. Even more obviously we need more and better warders, they’re the crux of the problem. And I can imagine no job more difficult to do well than being in charge of criminals and trying to deal with them in such a way that they’re better men when they finish their sentence than they were when they started it. I suppose if I really had a social conscience, I should volunteer to be a warder when I retire, instead of farming at Fellcock. But leaving that for the moment, I should like to think I’d propelled one convict in the right direction. Rory Macshane has got good quality in him. I should be sorry to think’ life held nothing better for him than life in prison, interspersed by wild and futile escapes and eventual recapture.”
“I quite agree,” said Don Whelpton. “I went to see your Rory Macshane. I talked to Brigadier Warrington, who was S.B.O. at Stalag X and knew about Rory’s escape. Rory Macshane has courage and endurance and determination and loyalty. Warrington knew him pretty well. The Brigadier and I are going to see the Commissioner and the Home Secretary and you had better come with us. I’m going to make myself responsible for Rory’s behaviour when I apply for him as a crew member and a trainee in ‘Operation Survival,’ if you remember what that is. He’s got a high survival value, has Rory Macshane, and that’s a great asset in conditions when inertia can undermine the will to live.”
“ ‘Operation Survival,’ ” mused Macdonald, “or ‘Man against the Frozen North’; you train the Air Force personnel in the technique of survival if they’re forced down in the arctic wastes.”
“That’s it,” agreed Don Whelpton. “It’s the Eskimos who do most of the training, because it’s they who have developed the technique of survival in their own environment, but we, myself and other chaps like me, who know that survival is possible in the most improbable conditions, have to rid these chaps of the fear that hypnotises them all at first. In short, it’s the state of mind that matters, whether in the jungle (for the jungle is neutral, as a survivor told us), or in the desert or in an open boat in the ocean, thousands of miles from land.”
“Or on a walk from Lower Silesia to the Swiss frontier,” added Macdonald, studying the big man opposite to him. Don Whelpton, well over six feet, with immensely broad sloping shoulders, long arms and a hatchet face, rough hewn as it were, with a big jutting nose and a long chin: he resembled a Viking to Macdonald’s mind. He had behind him a history of adventure and of expeditions to the most inhospitable quarters of the earth’s surface. He had trained in sail before joining the mercantile marine and he had survived some hazardous passages around the Horn, west to east and east to west. And with all this impulse of adventurousness, this drive to be off again, exploring, testing his own powers of endurance, he had yet developed the sense of benevolence which made him feel a concern for Rory Macshane and other toughs with a dubious record behind them. Meeting Macdonald’s contemplative gaze, Whelpton said:
“I’ve probably got much more in common with Macshane than you have, Super. I wasn’t born good—far from it—and I can remember some dubious enterprises in my youth which might have attracted your attention if you’d been in the offing. I was lucky; the only person who ever caught me out in my devilments—poaching, pinching, and the rest —was an uncle who’d been at sea all his life. He sent me off on the three-masted barque Wirramirra and I was kept at work too hard to have time for indulging my own antisocial tendencies. We had to work, to save our own lives and the craft we sailed on. It was good training. Well, I’m prepared to take Macshane on, because I believe the sort of work I can offer him will satisfy his thirst for adventure and endeavour. What I should like to do with him is to set him up as a trapper in the far northwest and see if he makes out —as I think he will.” Whelpton laughed. “Well, you came to me because something was nagging at you about the defects of our penal system, as you call it If between us we set one ex-convict on a road which develops what’s best in him rather than what’s worst, we shan’t have wasted our time; and the experiment may even provide you with ammunition when you argue with your bosses over the defects of the system you serve.”
“Well, you’re doing the work and taking the risk in the case of Rory Macshane,” said Macdonald. “It’s up to me to look out for other cases where I could do the work and take the risk.”
“And good luck to you,” responded Don Whelpton.
THE END
Dishonour Among Thieves Page 15
