CHAMPION OF LOST CAUSES (ENG) by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand [Brand, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Published: 2016-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Brutus great? Because he dared to strike one of twenty-three wounds into the body of Caesar. What made the Corday divine? Because she stabbed a dirty, diseased madman in his bath.

"There are more celebrated murderers. We make statues of them. That was because they worked on a larger scale. Your Alexander and Hannibal, who nearly destroyed beautiful Italy. Who weeps for the eighty thousand Romans of Cannes? No one! But who will not weep for the wretched end of great Hannibal?

"But divorce yourself from prejudice, Mr. Loring. Make an effort—a muscular effort of the mind. What could be more divine than at a stroke to turn a living, breathing, loving, hating, aspiring human being into so many pounds of fertilizer? What, I say, is more glorious than murder? To take out a life on the point of your knife, or on your rapier end in the days when men still were not afraid to be happy; even to blow a bullet into the head of an enemy and know that his soul has been knocked out of his body a thousand times more swiftly than your bullet entered it?

"Now, sir, will you not be prepared to say a word on behalf of murder? And do you not shrink and wince when you think of such a pitiful driveling ass as Peter Charles actually putting his gun to the breast of a human life and taking it? It is putting the lightning bolt in the hands of the starveling. Brrr!"

He shivered daintily, and Loring smiled a rather cold appreciation.

"I see that you are a philosopher, Mr. Zanten."

"Good heavens, sir, that is the last of insults! I a philosopher? No, no! I am contented to live on what meets the eye and the ear; I don't have to turn a mountain into a cloud or a man into a dream of a man in order to read new meanings into 'em."

"Very well. But in the meantime you've chilled me to the bone with your ideas. Let's have a drink."

"I'll be glad to go with you. But I shall not drink. I never drink except between eleven and one."

"You keep your head clear, then? Don't like the stuff?"

"Not at all. To be drunk, properly, is divine. To see the colors of the world and of life brightened and sweetened, to gain sudden belief in the goodness of man, the beauty of woman, the rightness of fatherhood and of marriage, the justice of laws, the benevolence of government, the perfection of art—why, sir, to deny one's self the rite of drunkenness is to deliberately close the gate of heaven—perhaps the only heaven there is."

"Such a thinker," smiled Loring. "And yet not an atheist?"

"Not so great a fool as that! Lock out of my mind the delightful possibility of an intelligent first cause? No, no! I shudder at the thought! Abandon the hope of that exquisite dialogue which shall ensue when I face the Maker and justify my sins to Him?

"Tush! I spend hours framing

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