I shall never trust in logic again. You have said that I hold life cheap. You’re right. I do. Your own included. (Rises.)
Brandon. What do you mean?
Rupert (suddenly letting himself go—a thing he has not done all the evening, and which he now does with tremendous force, and clear, angry articulation). What do I mean? What do I mean? I mean that you have taken and killed—by strangulation—a very harmless and helpless fellow-creature of twenty years. I mean that in that chest there—now lie the staring and futile remains of something that four hours ago lived, and laughed, and ran, and found it good. Laughed as you could never laugh, and ran as you could never run. I mean that, for your cruel and scheming pleasure, you have committed a sin and a blasphemy against that very life which you now find yourselves so precious. And you have done more than this. You have not only killed him; you have rotted the lives of all those to whom he was dear. And you have brought worse than death to his father—an equally harmless old man who has fought his way quietly through to a peaceful end, and to whom the whole Universe, after this, will now be blackened and distorted beyond the limits of thought. That is what you have done. And in dragging him round here to-night, you have played a lewd and infamous jest upon him—and a bad jest at that. And if you think, as your type of philosopher generally does, that all life is nothing but a bad jest, then you will now have the pleasure of seeing it played upon yourselves.
Brandon (pale and frozen). What are you saying? What are you doing?
Rupert. It is not what I am doing, Brandon. It is what society is going to do. And what will happen to you at the hands of society I am not in a position to tell you. That’s its own business. But I can give you a pretty shrewd guess, I cos (Coming forward to chest
[ 85 ]
