Among other topics, Gerald Eversley found that Miss Venniker did not altogether dissent from his estimate of sport. Here again her opinion was originally her mother’s. Sport was the one point of difference, though of perfectly amicable difference, between Lord Venniker and his wife. He, like all Englishmen of his rank, was a devotee of the great goddess Diana. Without hunting and shooting, life would have appeared to him intolerable, if it had not been unintelligible.
Gerald Eversley, as this story has shown, was no sportsman. It is probable that, like a good many people who have not in their youth enjoyed the opportunity of becoming sportsmen, he did scant justice to the motives and sentiments of sport. In speaking of sport as cruel, he was apt to forget that the cruelty is just what the sportsmen are unaware of. They would like it as well, perhaps better, if the excitement could be obtained without any cost of animal suffering. And, after all, the opponents of sport are not above eating a grouse or a partridge. But one day, when Lord Venniker and Harry had gone out shooting, Gerald Eversley asked Miss Venniker, with whom he was walking, what she felt about sport.
‘I cannot say I quite like it,’ was her answer.
He continued. ‘It always seems to me so strange that people should like killing and actually be proud of it. Your father, for instance, and Harry, who are so kind-hearted. People seem to be made heartless by sport. They lose their humanity—I mean, they lose it for the moment. I suppose it is a survival from the time when men lived in daily terror of wild beasts and paid honour to those who destroyed them.’
‘I am sure,’ she said warmly, ‘papa and Harry are not cruel; nobody is kinder than papa; but they enjoy the fun and exercise so much they never think of any cruelty in sport.’
‘It is the word “sport,” said Gerald, ‘that I object to as much as the thing. No doubt it is necessary that the animals should be killed for human life. But the killing of them is a painful necessity; it is a thing to be done reluctantly, not a thing to be fond of or proud of. That anybody should shoot hundreds of beautiful living creatures and leave others to perish in silent agony, and then that he should make a boast of what he has done and call it “sport”—that is what strikes me as so surprising. It will not be so always. I think the time will come when sportsmen will be looked upon only as a superior kind of butchers.’
‘Well, I don’t mind you calling them so,’ said Miss Venniker, adding, with a laugh, ‘all except papa and Harry, of course. But I think that time will be a long while in coming.’
‘You may disapprove a thing,’ said Gerald, ‘without condemning the people who do it. No one can be blamed for being in advance of his age. Mr. Newton, of Olney, never enjoyed sweeter hours of communion with God than when he was sailing to the West Indies with a cargo of slaves.’
There was a slight pause, and then Miss Venniker resumed.
‘What I do wish,’ she said, ‘is that when some rare beautiful bird makes its way to England it were not immediately shot by somebody. That seems so selfish. One man gets the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—of shooting it, but how many would be pleased if England could become once more the home of beautiful creatures that are now extinct!’