“You know something of my story. Let me tell you just a little more of it, and, please, if it interests you enough, question me on any point you will. I shall not shrink from answering. If a man is known to have murdered two of his friends, there cannot be much left that it is worth his while to conceal. First, I would like to speak of my early training. If I had been brought up in the gutter, you could make some allowance for that, and give me some credit for any good qualities I had shown, however cheerfully you might see me hanged for my crimes. It is not usual to suppose that any such allowance may have to be made for a man brought up to luxury and to every sort of refinement, and yet such a man too may be the victim of influences which would kill the good in most characters even more than they have in mine. You may have heard a little about my people, and perhaps know that their views and ways were not quite usual; I am not going to say one word against them (I am not that sort of man, whatever I may be), but there were two things in my boyhood harder for me than the ordinary Englishman can well imagine. I was brought up in the actual enjoyment of considerable wealth and the expectation of really great wealth, and just when I was grown up the wealth and the expectations suddenly vanished. That has happened to many men who have been none the worse for it. But then I was brought up soft. You know I am not a limp man or a coward; but I had all the bringing up of one; cared for hand and foot, never doing a thing for myself (my good people had great ideas of republican simplicity, but they were only literary ideas). None of the games, none of the sport that other boys get; no rubbing shoulders with my equals at school; no comradeship but only the company of my elders, mostly invalids. Few people know what it is to be brought up soft. But there was worse than that. You” (he was addressing Callaghan) “were piously brought up. Oh, yes, you were really. I daresay your home was not a strict one, and you were not carefully taught precepts of religion and morality or carefully shielded from the sight of evil (perhaps quite the contrary, for I have not the pleasure of knowing much about you, Mr. Callaghan), but I am quite sure that you had about you at home or at school, or both, people among whom there was some tacit recognition of right and wrong of some sort as things incontrovertible, and that there was some influence in your childhood which appealed to the heart. But in my childhood nothing appealed to the heart, nothing was incontrovertible, above all, nothing was tacit. Everlasting discussion, reaching back to the first principles of the universe, and branching out into such questions as whether children should be allowed popguns. That was my moral training, and that was all my moral training. It was very sound in principle, I daresay—and I am not going to pose as an interesting convert to the religious way of looking at things, for I am not one—but it did not take account of practical difficulties, and it was very, very hard on me. Not one man in ten thousand has had that sort of upbringing, and I do not suppose you can realise in the least how hard that sort of thing is.
“So,” he continued, “I found myself at twenty-one suddenly made poor; more accustomed than most lads to think life only worth living for refinements which are for the wealthy only; taught not to take traditional canons of morality for granted; taught to think about the real utility of every action; landed in a place like Saigon, and thrown in the society of the sort of gentry who, we all know, do represent European civilisation in such places; sent there to get a living; thoroughly out of sympathy with all the tastes and pleasures of the people round me, and at the same time easily able to discover that for all my strange upbringing I was by nature more of a man than anyone else there. As a matter of fact, there was only one decent man there with intellectual tastes, and that was Peters; but Peters, who was only two or three years older than I, and, as I own I fancied, nothing like so clever, took me under his protection and made it his mission to correct me, and it did not do. You can easily imagine how, in the three years before Longhurst came on the scene, I had got to hate the prospect of a life of humdrum, money-grubbing among those people in the hope of retiring with a small competence some day when my liver and my brain were gone; you would not have thought any the better of me if I had become content with that. At any rate I did not. I meant to be quit of it as soon as I could, and I meant more. I resolved before I had been three weeks in the place to make money on a scale which would give me the position, the society and the pursuits for which I had been trained. I resolved in fact to make the sort of place for myself in the world which every man, except the three men in this room and Thalberg, thinks I have secured. If I had no scruples as to the way in which I should carry out that resolve, I differed from the people around me only in knowing that I had no scruples,
