There you are! Lots of boys have the impulse to be cruel, to kill. Lots of boys want to hunt down animals in jungles and kill them, be detectives and hunt down men and hang them — which amounts to the same thing. But they don’t all go out and be naughty in the same way as I have been naughty. I shouldn’t have been encouraged — given a big sexual thrill in that way.
I would still be a nice shy boy, doing nothing wrong — I mean to say nothing actually illegal — if it hadn’t been for Her.
She enjoyed being ill-treated. I would have been too timid even to suggest that kind of game. She suggested it. She made me feel that my manhood depended upon my power to hurt. If they hang me, they ought to hang Her. They cut Peter Kürten’s head off for seventy crimes of violence. What did they do to the woman who brought out what was in him? Nothing. Is this justice?
The Murderer went to his bookshelf and read what Professor Hübner had said:
‘_Sadism is infinitely many-sided and comprises a wide field, including anything from dreams of torturing animals, the exaggerated punishment of children, of fire-mania, to lust-murders, which are generally arrived at by a series of progressive actions. A certain tendency to cruelty was born in Kürten. Everything else has been acquired. In his case the meeting with the woman twice his age with the masochistic tendencies; the reading of works of sexual pathology, combined with his ego. tistical megalomania, were responsible for the extent of his sadism. This developed gradually_.’
‘And what about me?’ said the Murderer, ‘what about me?’
The best thing was to put it out of his mind for the time being. The thing of which he had frequently dreamed with pleasurable shudders had happened. It was going to happen again. But he felt a certain delicacy about it. If anyone talked to him of it, he would feel embarrassed.
But he thanked God that his mind could focus itself upon big, noble issues.
Almost with tears in his eyes, the Murderer thought of Mankind, for he liked to think of himself as the kindest and sweetest of men, full of noble sentiments, and motivated by a desire to benefit mankind. He devoted a considerable proportion of his daydreaming to fantasies of conquest, or sometimes of self-immolation.
Sometimes he saw himself as a martyr.
Down in the smoky torture-chamber behind his everyday mind he stretched himself on an imaginary rack by the wild, leaping light of flaring flambeaux. The winches creaked; the ropes snapped taut and shrieked as they strained over the blocks. The torturers gasped and grunted as they threw their weight upon the windlasses. But he, the hero, made no sound, except for the snapping of his dislocated joints. He smiled quietly into the faces of the executioners. ‘Now will you talk?’ He only smiled. The Hooded Inquisitor made a sign. The torturers put out their strength. In the dancing torchlight the strong muscles of their shoulders and backs seemed to jump and tremble like imprisoned things that wanted to burst their way out. The agony was unbearable: yet he bore it. ‘Now will you give us the names of your confederates?’
He smiled. At last, as he lay dying (one of his legs had come off) the Inquisitor said to him in a voice of awe: ‘You’re an obstinate heretic, but by all His Saints, you are a man!’
Sometimes — it depended upon his mood, which in turn depended upon the events of the day — he was riding into a conquered city upon a great white horse.
From head to foot he was encased in sombre, black armour. The lurid light of a blazing building writhed upon hauberk, gorget, and cuisse. His visor, thrown back, left uncovered his face, which was noble and proud, stern but pure. Behind him rode his Knights clad all in steel; and behind them marched his Men-at-Arms under a forest of gleaming spears. As he rode, thousands of the townsmen he had liberated came thronging about him, weeping with gratitude, fighting for one little bit of the dung of his horse which they would preserve as a holy relic.
‘_God bless the Liberator!_’ He rode on; stern, preoccupied. In the great castle taken from the Tyrant he sat upon a great velvet chair, magnificent in a robe of velvet blacker than night, embroidered with gold arabesques, and did justice. Cold and clean but terrible was the justice of the Liberator! The Baron Otmar starved the poor? Then let him be bound with silken cords and left to die of hunger in sight of a table laid with innumerable dishes of savoury meat … but give him a cup of water every day, so that he may live long enough to know the meaning of hunger.
The Baron Something had worked his vassals to death? Then let him be imprisoned in a cell in which there was a cage containing ten thousand starving rats and let this cage be devised so that only by the forward and backward movement of a stiff, heavy lever could the rats be prevented from escaping. Let him work that one out! And in the streets oxen were being roasted whole, wine spurted from the fountains, and everyone cried: ‘God bless the Liberator!’
Again, he was the captain of a great liner. In the middle of one dreadful night, there was a grinding crash. The ship had struck an iceberg and was sinking fast. Women and children first! He brandished a big, blue revolver. Back there, you dogs, and let the women and children get into the boats first! A man — an enormous, handsome Greek god of a man, who had always showed off his superior muscles and weight — leapt forward, mad with panic. The revolver spat yellow fire, and the handsome face became, abruptly, like strawberry jam. All the other men stood, cowed, while the women and the children got into the boats. Everyone on deck got off. Only he, the captain, was left. ‘For God’s sake, Skipper, come down.’ No, the weight of one more passenger might sink the boat; he would go down with his ship. But as the boats pulled away (he could hear everybody saying that the captain was a saint and a hero) he heard a little whimpering cry. Somewhere a girl was imprisoned. He lifted beams of a ton weight, tore down barriers of broken iron, smashed bulkheads with a blow of the fist, and there she was, radiant and beautiful, but terrified. The fear of death was upon her. ‘There, there little woman…’ The shock of the collision had torn off all her outer garments. He took her on deck. The ship was settling. The boats had disappeared. ‘This is the end,’ he said. They locked in an unbreakable embrace as the ship went down… .
The Murderer was always thankful that he was not selfish like other men, and rejoiced in his social-mindedness. He could not meet a beggar in the street without giving away a coin or two and saying a few sympathetic words. He was a member of two or three societies devoted to the abolition of corporal punishment, and what not. He would have been among the first to protest against the use of pigs and goats in the atom-bomb test at Bikini. There were occasions when he saw himself as a great militant humanitarian. He was something of a Socialist. He knew that Good must be pitiless. In fantasy, he was the man who, with his own hand, cut to pieces the Justice of the Peace who ordered the birching of a small boy; and, although it was not expedient to say so, he saw Herr Hitler’s point. The pure man must be strong. Purity and strength are correlated. He must be like pure iron — malleable, yet the strongest thing in the world. Out of his malleability must be forged… for the sake of example a Knife … a Knife to cut the throat of Evil.
And then he was in a quiet town. Once again he was the Liberator — pure and passionate yet cold, a Leader, a god. Under the cover of the Law-Protected roofs — here, there, everywhere, waiting for his word — his legions waited. He gave the Word. From Ealing to Barking, from Enfield to Harrow, the mob arose. The screams of the evil-doers rose high above the thunder of applause. This was the Night of the Long Knife … and in due course he sat in judgement. Lisping, shrugging, gesticulating, shuffling, the Ringleaders of the Adversaries were brought before him. Should he kill them? Yes, but not immediately. They and theirs must be stamped out, stamped out utterly for ever. ‘Question them!’ and then he was looking down, while stretched upon a rack someone gibbered and told everything out of a bleeding mouth.