Read Burton & Swinburne 1 - The Strange Affair Of Spring Heeled Jack for Free Online

“Congratulations!”
    “On what?”
    “On shooting that bounder Speke! Surely it was you who pulled the trigger? Please say it was so!”
    Burton threw himself into a chair and lit a cigar.
    “It was not.”
    “Ah, what a shame!” exclaimed Milnes. “I was so hoping you could tell us what it feels like to murder a man. A white man, I mean!”
    “Why, yes, of course!” put in Bradlaugh. “You killed that little Arab boy on the road to Mecca, didn't you?”
    Burton accepted a drink from Henry Murray.
    “You know damned well I didn't!” he growled. “That bastard Stanley writes nothing but scurrilous nonsense!”
    “Come now, Richard!” trilled Swinburne, in his excitable, high-pitched voice. “Don't object so! Do you not agree that murder is one of the great boundaries we must cross in order to know that we, ourselves, are truly alive?”
    The famous explorer sighed and shook his head. Swinburne was youngjust twenty-four-and possessed an intuitive intelligence that appealed to the older man; but he was gullible.
    “Nonsense, Algy! Don't let these Libertines mesmerise you with their misguided ideas and appallingly bad logic. They are incorrigibly perverse, especially Milnes here.”
    “Hah!” yelled Bendyshe from across the room. “Swinburne's as perverse as they come! He has a taste for pain, don't you know! Likes the kiss of a whip, what!”
    Swinburne giggled, twitched, and snapped his fingers. As always, his movements were fast, jerky, and eccentric, as if he suffered from Saint Vitus's dance.
    “It's true. I'm a follower of de Sade.”
    “It's a common affliction,” noted Burton. “Why, I once visited a brothel in Karachi-on a research mission for Napier, you understand-”
    Snorts and howls of derision came from the gathering.
    -and there witnessed a man flagellated to the point of unconsciousness. 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 at the sense of freedom one must feel when performing the act of murder? It is, after all, the greatest taboo, is it not? Break that and you are free of the shackles imposed by civilisation!”
    “I'm no great enthusiast for the false pleasures and insidious suppressions of civilisation,” said Burton. “And, in my opinion, Mrs. Grundy-our fictitious personification of all things oh so pure, polite, restrained, and conventional requires a thorough shagging; however, as much as I might rail against the constraints of English society and culture, murder is a more fundamental matter than either.”
    Swinburne squealed with delight. “A thorough shagging! Oh, bravo, Richard!”
    Milnes nodded. “False pleasures and insidious suppressions indeed. Pleasures which enslave, suppressions which pass judgement. Where, I ask, is freedom?”
    “I don't know,” answered Burton. “How can one quantify so indefinite 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 remains free to do what it will, even-and, in fact, certainly-to kill again! As de Sade himself said: `Nature has not got two voices, you know, 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 and entirely pitiless process, but you seem to forget, Milnes, that the animal which kills is most often, in turn, itself killed by another animal, just as the murderer, in a supposedly civilised country, is hanged for his crime!”
    “Then you propose an innate natural law of justice from which we can never break free, a law that transcends culture, whatever its stage of development?”
    James Hunt, passing to join a conversation between Bradlaugh and Brabrooke