“Thanks. That’s what I wanted you to do,” rejoined Macdonald. “I spoke just now of a balance sheet. I’ve been trying to cast my own. I’ve spent the greater part of my adult life in pursuing criminals and I want to ponder over the results of that pursuit in terms of personality, including that of the criminal, who is a human being himself.”
“Well, your balance sheet will be a damned sight more interesting than mine,” said Don Whelpton. “It’s too often forgotten that the criminal is a human being, having some of the impulses of decent humanity which we like to think is a characteristic of us all. Moreover, decent humans are sometimes capable of criminal impulses. Now, looking back on your years of pursuit, your own form of hunting, for that’s what it is, are you satisfied of its justice and efficacy?”
“It’s difficult to give an unqualified answer,” rejoined Macdonald. “A policeman’s job is a necessary one, inasmuch as the average honest law-abiding citizen must be protected from the thief and the murderer. I don’t think anybody would dispute that. It’s the policeman’s duly to round up the lawbreakers, but not to be a judge or jury, thank God. Judgment and sentencing must be the most onerous job of all. You asked me if I were satisfied with the efficacy of the system, the penal code of this country. The answer is that, having had experience of it at first hand for half a lifetime, I’m not really satisfied. Sending a criminal to prison may punish him by depriving him of his liberty and the amenities of life, but it doesn’t improve him or make him less of a criminal. If a young thief is sent to prison, he’s a worse character at the end of his sentence; he’s associated with other criminals and something about the recidivist mentality is catching, as bodily disease is catching.”
“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
