Section 6. There came another guest to the meal--the rector of the fashionable church which the family attended at home. He was a young man, renowned for the charm of his oratory; smooth-shaven, pink-and-white-cheeked, exquisite in his manners, gracious and insinuating. His ideas and his language and his morals were all as perfectly polished as his finger-nails; and never before in his life had Thyrsis had such a red rag waved in his face. But he had come there for the dinner, and he attended to that, and let Dr. Holland provide the flow of soul; until at the very end, when the doctor was sipping his _demi-tasse_.
The conversation had come, by some devious route, to Vegetarianism; and the clergyman was disapproving of it. That made no difference to Thyrsis, who was not a vegetarian, and knew nothing about it; but how he hated the arguments the man advanced! For that which made the doctor an anti-vegetarian was an attitude to life, which had also made him a Republican and an Imperialist, a graduate of Harvard and a beneficiary of the Apostolic Succession. Because life was a survival of the fittest, and because God had intended the less fit to take the doctor’s word as their sentence of extermination.
The duty of animals, as the clergyman set it forth to them, was to convert plant-tissue into a more concentrated and perfect form of nutriment. “The protein of animal flesh,” he was saying, “is more nearly allied to human tissue; and so it is clearly more fitted for our food.”
Here Thyrsis entered the conversation. “Doctor Holland,” he said, mildly, “I should think it would occur to you to follow your argument to its conclusion.”
The other turned to look at him. “What conclusion?” he asked.
“I should think you would become a cannibal,” Thyrsis replied.
And then there was silence at the table. When Dr. Holland spoke again it was to hurry the conversation elsewhere; and from time to time thereafter he would steal a puzzled glance at Thyrsis.
But this the boy did not see. His thoughts had gone whirling on; here, in this elegant dining-room, the throes of creation seized hold of him. For this was the image he had been seeking, the phrase that would embrace it all and express it all--the concentrated bitterness of his poisoned life! Yes, he had them! He had them, with all their glory and their power! They were Cannibals. _Cannibals_!