such a
thing?

LARRY. I don't think Mr Keegan minds. [To Keegan] What's the true
version of the story of that black man you confessed on his
deathbed?

KEEGAN. What story have you heard about that?

LARRY. I am informed that when the devil came for the black
heathen, he took off your head and turned it three times round
before putting it on again; and that your head's been turned ever
since.

NORA [reproachfully]. Larry!

KEEGAN [blandly]. That is not quite what occurred. [He collects
himself for a serious utterance: they attend involuntarily]. I
heard that a black man was dying, and that the people were afraid
to go near him. When I went to the place I found an elderly
Hindoo, who told me one of those tales of unmerited misfortune,
of cruel ill luck, of relentless persecution by destiny, which
sometimes wither the commonplaces of consolation on the lips of a
priest. But this man did not complain of his misfortunes. They
were brought upon him, he said, by sins committed in a former
existence. Then, without a word of comfort from me, he died with
a clear-eyed resignation that my most earnest exhortations have
rarely produced in a Christian, and left me sitting there by his
bedside with the mystery of this world suddenly revealed to me.

BROADBENT. That is a remarkable tribute to the liberty of
conscience enjoyed by the subjects of our Indian Empire.

LARRY. No doubt; but may we venture to ask what is the mystery of
this world?

KEEGAN. This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and
penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise
are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one
another in the name of love; where children are scourged and
enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the
weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing,
and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of
imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of
justice. It is a place where the hardest toil is a welcome refuge
from the horror and tedium of pleasure, and where charity and
good works are done only for hire to ransom the souls of the
spoiler and the sybarite. Now, sir, there is only one place of
horror and torment known to my religion; and that place is hell.
Therefore it is plain to me that this earth of ours must be hell,
and that we are all here, as the Indian revealed to me--perhaps
he was sent to reveal it to me to expiate crimes