The Courtesy of Death by Geoffrey Household Page B

light around him and was continually turning round in case the unknown was following him. It was. We did in fact
make some distance towards the entrance before the lights went out; but it was impossible to get ahead of the pair or to attack from behind.
    Just in time we had passed the stretch of track with the foul drop on the right and were now in one of the finest caverns, high and with many openings, though most of them were dead ends. The
only sane course was to stay exactly where we were till the time of the meeting. If we were not to exhaust ourselves looking for each other, we had to keep in actual, physical touch.
    I asked Fosworthy what on earth Aviston-Tresco and that grim-faced brute Jedder were doing in his circle, some of whom would refuse to swat a mosquito. He accused me in his most academic tone of
not paying attention to his precious synthesis and had another shot at it—now very much clearer since he was not distracted into mysticism by the presence of the paintings.
    I will explain it very shortly at the risk of losing the metaphysical undertones. His unworldly, kindly little sect believed that all living things were individual radiations from a Whole and
therefore equally worthy of respect. Yet they could not help seeing, being surrounded by a rural, traditional society, that the hunters of foxes, the fishers of trout and the shooters of game had a
far more sympathetic understanding of animals than they did.
    Put it this way! If a tame fox could choose the most loving and generous boss for himself, he would certainly pick a master of fox hounds, not a well-intentioned Fosworthy.
    This, however, did not bother them so much as the paradox of Aviston-Tresco. All of them felt great admiration for him, yet his profession involved as much killing as healing. They were groping
for the common ground between those who detested killing, those who had to do it and those who found it healthy and natural, when Jedder discovered the paintings. There were these ancestors of ours
accepting that there was no difference between themselves and the animals, certain that the spirits of all continued to exist, yet killing to eat as steadily as any sabre-tooth tiger.
    So all of them arrived at the madly logical conclusion that since Life was one and survival unavoidable, killing was immaterial. But admittedly it caused pain and inconvenience. Therefore it
must be carried out with formality and a request for forgiveness.
    Absurd? Well, meet the eyes of any bird or animal which is dying by your hand! In the last throes the eyes, which at first were terrified, accept what is coming. I have never said ‘Forgive
me!’ but I recognise that I have wanted to. I cannot pretend to know, as those fanatics did, what the mammoth was thinking as its life drained out, but I am sure what that brilliantly
perceptive artist and his fellow hunters were thinking.
    I have no way of reconstructing the steps by which a vet, a handful of vegetarians and a few sportsmen came to find consolation in the same creed. Obviously they were all intensely religious in
the sense that they wanted answers to unanswerable questions. Before I turned up, it had never occurred to Aviston-Tresco and Jedder that taking the life of a man was no different to taking that of
an animal, but once they had convinced themselves that Fosworthy and I threatened their peace, it did occur to them.
    ‘What caused the row?’ I asked him.
    ‘I told you. I wanted my woman. I said that what happens to love after dissolution was the only essential, that it was nonsense to talk of momentary inconvenience. A bird in the
hand—if I may permit the vernacular to simplify my argument—is worth two in the bush. It was all so vital to me that I did, as Tom Aviston-Tresco said, threaten to make the controversy
public and the cave too. I fear that sometimes my voice grows too excited. They thought I was out of my mind. People do, you know. I think you yourself were at first