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– and there witnessed a man flagellated to the point ofunconsciousness. He enjoyed it!"
"Delicious!" Swinburne shuddered.
"Maybe so, if your tastes run to it," agreed Burton. "However,flagellation is one thing, murder is quite another!"
Milnes sat beside Burton, leaning close.
"But, I say, Richard," he murmured, "don't you ever wonder atthe sense of freedom one must feel when performing the act ofmurder? It is, after all, the greatest taboo, is it not? Break thatand you are free of the shackles imposed by civilisation!"
"I'm no great enthusiast for the false pleasures and insidioussuppressions of civilisation," said Burton. "And, in my opinion,Mrs. Grundy-our fictitious personification of all things oh sopure, polite, restrained, and conventional requires a thoroughshagging; however, as much as I might rail against the constraintsof English society and culture, murder is a more fundamental matterthan either."
Swinburne squealed with delight. "A thorough shagging! Oh,bravo, Richard!"
Milnes nodded. "False pleasures and insidious suppressionsindeed. Pleasures which enslave, suppressions which pass judgement.Where, I ask, is freedom?"
"I don't know," answered Burton. "How can one quantify soindefinite a notion as freedom?"
"By looking to nature, dear boy! Nature red in tooth and claw!One animal kills another animal. Is it found guilty? No! It remainsfree to do what it will, even-and, in fact, certainly-to killagain! As de Sade himself said: `Nature has not got two voices, youknow, one of them condemning all day what the other commands."'
Burton emptied his glass in a single swallow.
"For sure, Darwin has demonstrated that Nature is a brutal andentirely pitiless process, but you seem to forget, Milnes, that theanimal which kills is most often, in turn, itself killed by anotheranimal, just as the murderer, in a supposedly civilised country, ishanged for his crime!"
"Then you propose an i
James Hunt, passing to join a conversation between Bradlaugh andBrabrooke on the other side of the room, stopped long enough torefill Burton's glass.
"Yes, I do believe some such law exists," said Burton. "I findthe Hindu notion of karma more alluring than the Catholic absurdityof original sin."
"How is Isabel?" put in Bendyshe, who'd stepped across to jointhem.
Burton ignored the mischievous question and went on, "At leastkarma provides a counterbalance-a penalty or reward, if you like-toacts we actually perform and thoughts we actually think, ratherthan punishing us for the supposed sin of our actual existence orfor a transgression against a wholly artificial dictate ofso-called morality. It is a function of Nature rather than ajudgement of an unproven God."
"By Jove! Stanley was correct when he wrote that you're aheathen!" mocked Bendyshe. "Burton joins with Darwin and says thereis no God!"
"Actually, Darwin hasn't suggested any such thing. It is otherswho have imposed that interpretation upon his Origin ofSpecies."
"`There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wisebath she need of an author,"' quoted Swinburne. "De Sadeagain."
"In many respects I consider him laughable," commented Burton,"but in that instance, I wholeheartedly agree. The more I studyreligions, the more I'm convinced that man never worshippedanything but himself."
He quoted his own poetry: "Man worships self his God is man; thestruggling of the mortal mind to firm its model as 'twould be, thepea fect of itself to find. "
Milnes took a drag from his cigar and blew a smoke ring, whichrose lazily into the air. He watched it slowly disperse and said,"But this karma business, Richard-what you are proposing is thatone way or another, through some sort of entirely natural process,a murderer will receive retribution. Do you then count man'sjudgement-the death penalty-to be natural?"
"We are natural beings, are we not?"
"Well," interrupted Bendyshe, "I sometimes wonder aboutSwinburne."
It was a fair point, thought Burton, for Swinburne was a veryu
Few poets looked so much a poet as Algernon CharlesSwinburne.
"But that aside," said Bendyshe, "what if the murderer avoidsthe noose?"
"Guilt," proposed Burton. "A gradual but inescapable degradationof the character. A degenerative disease of the mind. Maybe adescent into madness and self-destruction."
"Or perhaps," offered Swinburne, "a tendency to mix withcriminal types until the murderer is himself, inevitably,murdered."
"Well put!" agreed the famous adventurer.
"Interesting," pondered Milnes, "but, I say, we all know thatmurders are committed either in the heat of passion, or else withintent by an individual who's already in an advanced-if that's theappropriate word-state of mental decay. What if, though, a murderwas calculated and committed by an intelligent man who performs theact only out of scientific curiosity? What if it were done only totranscend the limitations that tell us it shouldn't be done?"
"An idle motive," suggested Burton.
"Not at all, dear boy!" declared Milnes. "It's a magnificentmotive! Why, the man who would undertake such an act would risk hisimmortal soul for science!"
"He would undoubtedly see sense and back away from theexperiment," said Burton, his voice slurring slightly, "for oncecrossed, that barrier allows no return. However, his decision wouldbe based on self-determined standards of behaviour rather than onany set out by civilisation or on notions of an immortal soul; foras you say, he's an intelligent man."
"It's strange," said Henry Murray, who up until now had listenedin silence. "I thought that you, of all of us, would be the onemost likely to approve the experiment."
"You should take my reputation with a pinch of salt."
"Must we? I rather enjoy having a devil in our midst." Swinburnegri
Sir Richard Francis Burton considered the susceptible young poetand wondered how to keep him out of trouble.
Burton was not a Libertine himself, but they considered him anhonorary member of the caste and delighted in his knowledge ofexotic cultures, where the stifling laws of civilisation wereremarkable only by their seeming absence. He enjoyed drinking anddebating with them, especially this evening, for it kept his mindengaged and helped to stave off the despondency that had beencreeping over him since he'd returned from Bath.
By one o'clock in the morning, though, it was dragging at himagain, made worse by alcohol and exhaustion, so he bid his friendsfarewell and left the club.
The evening was bitterly cold-unusual for September-and theroads glistened wetly. The thickening pall wrapped each gas lamp inits own golden aureole. Burton held his overcoat tight with onehand and swung his cane with the other. London rustled and murmuredaround him as he walked unsteadily homewards.
A velocipede chattered past. They had started to appear on thestreets two years ago, these steam-driven, one-man vehicles, andwere popularly known as "pe