After the plain, old-fashioned dinner served by the owners of Jorny Springs, Charmian took a walk through the twilight. Shortly after she left the house Andy Jerome set off in the opposite direction, stating that he too would like a stroll. But when the great trees hid him from the house he made a swift circle back, and soon was on Charmian’s trail. He found her leaning over a fence, watching a dozen fat and shockingly muddy pigs in a stake-and-rider corral.
“I see you prefer to choose your own company,” he observed, as he rested his arms on the fence beside her. “I hope one more won’t constitute a crowd.”
“Aren’t they funny!” she laughed. “I love pigs and things like that. Cows and chickens and horses and everything. Do you know that I, as the head of the expedition to be, intend to make a hard-and-fast ruling at the very outset? It’s this: No one in the party will be permitted to kill any living thing.”
“Why, that’s a funny idea,” he laughed. “If a fellow can’t do a little hunting to pass away dull hours, how’s he going to amuse himself? And it may be that we’ll frequently find ourselves in need of fresh meat.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t approve of the slaughter of the innocents. I used to hunt myself, but I gave it up. I can’t bear to take a life. Man can’t create, yet in the winking of an eyelid he can and will destroy a life that he can never reproduce. It’s the same with a tree. One can cut down a tree in thirty minutes which nature has spent hundreds of years in growing. And man can’t replace it. Whenever I hear one of these giant redwoods fall groaning under the ax my heart fairly bleeds.”
“But man must live,” Andy pointed out.
“I don’t know whether he must or not,” she said seriously. “He’s made a complete botch of existence. Sometimes I wish the entire race were wiped out, so nature could begin all over again. Man is as barbarous to-day as he was a thousand years ago. The only difference is that he has invented new machinery with which to practise his barbarism.”
“Why, you’re a regular little cynic!” Andy accused.
“Perhaps. I have little patience with mankind, if that’s what you mean. The so-called lower animals have my love and sympathy. They haven’t made a farce of their lives, as we have. And vivisection—that’s what makes me wild! Man, by his own selfish indulgences, by his reckless living, his complete disregard of the laws of nature, has succeeded in shortening his life and depleting his physical vigour. So, in his eagerness to continue the debauch, scared stiff at thought of the yawning precipice just ahead of him, he turns in his cowardly way to the so-called lower animals. He robs these helpless creatures of their health and vitality in order to patch up his poor, miserable, worthless body. Like the five foolish virgins, men say to these wise virgins—these innocents of the earth who have conserved their oil of life—‘Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.’ Could anything be more cowardly, Mr. Jerome?”
“But aren’t the lower animals placed on this earth for the benefit of man?” asked Andy.