The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [201]
“Not particularly.”
“No, no more wouldn’t I be. It’s a funny thing but I’ve settled down here wonderful. Never thought I should. It all seemed a bit too posh at first. Not like the old Scrubs. But it’s a real pretty place once you’re used to it. Wouldn’t mind settling here for a lifer if they’d let me. The trouble is there’s no security in crime these days. Time was, you knew just what a job was worth, six months, three years; whatever it was, you knew where you were. Now what with prison commissioners and Preventive Custody and Corrective Treatment they can keep you in or push you out just as it suits them. It’s not right.
“I’ll tell you what it is, chum,” continued Mr. Sweat. “There’s no understanding of crime these days like what there was. I remember when I was a nipper, the first time I came up before the beak, he spoke up straight: ‘My lad,’ he says, ‘you are embarking upon a course of life that can only lead to disaster and degradation in this world and everlasting damnation in the next.’ Now that’s talking. It’s plain sense and it shows a personal interest. But last time I was up, when they sent me here, they called me an ‘antisocial phenomenon’; said I was ‘maladjusted.’ That’s no way to speak of a man what was doing time before they was in long trousers, now is it?”
“They said something of the same kind to me.”
“Yes and now they’re giving you the push, just like you hadn’t no Rights. I tell you it’s made a lot of the boys uncomfortable your going out all of a sudden like this. Who’ll it be next time, that’s what we’re wondering?
“I tell you where you went wrong, chum. You didn’t give enough trouble. You made it too easy for them to say you was cured. Soapy and me got wise to that. You remember them birds as got done in? That was Soapy and me. They took a lot of killing too; powerful great bastards. But we got the evidence all hid away tidy and if there’s ever any talk of me and Soapy being ‘rehabilitated’ we’ll lay it out conspicuous.
“Well, so long, chum. Tomorrow’s my morning for Remedial Repose so I daresay you’ll be off before I get down. Come back soon.”
“I hope so,” said Miles and turned alone in his own room.
He stood briefly at the window and gazed his last on the cobbled yard. He made a good figure of a man, for he came of handsome parents and all his life had been carefully fed and doctored and exercised; well clothed too. He wore the drab serge dress that was the normal garb of the period—only certified homosexuals wore colours—but there were differences of fit and condition among these uniforms. Miles displayed the handiwork of tailor and valet. He belonged to a privileged class.
The State had made him.
No clean-living, God-fearing, Victorian gentleman, he; no complete man of the renaissance; no genteel knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even, noble savage. All that succession of past worthies had gone its way, content to play a prelude to Miles. He was the Modern Man.
His history, as it appeared in multuplet in the filing cabinets of numberless State departments, was typical of a thousand others. Before his birth the politicians had succeeded in bringing down his father and mother to penury; they, destitute, had thrown themselves into the simple diversions of the very poor and thus, between one war and the next, set in motion a chain-reaction of divorces which scattered them and their various associates in forlorn couples all over the Free World. The aunt on whom the infant Miles had been quartered was conscribed for work in a factory and shortly afterwards died of boredom at the conveyer-belt. The child was put to safety in an Orphanage.
Huge sums were thenceforward spent upon him; sums which, fifty years earlier, would have sent whole quiversful of boys to Winchester and New College and established them in the learned professions. In halls adorned with Picassos and Légers he yawned through long periods of Constructive Play. He never lacked the requisite cubic feet of air. His diet was balanced and on the first Friday of every month he was psychoanalysed. Every detail of his adolescence