Eating People is Wrong Read Free

to eat for three more years in the university
refectory, to join sports clubs, and attend the students’ union dances held each Saturday night, sliding gracelessly through weekly waltzes and tangos, drinking down beer at the impromptu
bar, tempting girls out into the grounds in order to kiss them on damp benches; to throw tomatoes at policemen on three successive rag days, to go out in three years with perhaps as many
girlfriends, and finally to leave with a lower second or third class degree, passing on into teaching or business seemingly untouched by what, Treece thought, the university stood for –
whatever that was. Each year he wondered, is it worth it? Each year he planned to send out into the world, at last, a little group of discontented men who would share his own disgusts, his own firm
assurance in the necessity for good taste, honest feeling, integrity of motive; and each year the proposition came to seem odious as he foresaw the profound weariness and depression of spirit that
would overcome such people when, with too few vacancies in the faculties of universities, they would find themselves teaching in grammar schools in Liverpool or working in the advertising
department of soap factories in Newcastle. The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I’m a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to
extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.
    At this point Treece began, covertly, to inspect the third member of the tutorial group. He came as a slight shock of surprise. Unlike the others, he was not a youth and clearly had not come
straight from school. He had an extremely large head, moulded in great pocks and cavities and formed on, it seemed, almost prehistoric, pterodactylian lines. The front of his pate was bald, but,
starting in line with his ears, a great fan of unkempt black hair stood up; from out of large, eroded eyesockets, black shining eyes fixed Treece with a wet look that besought attention and
interest. ‘Who?’ wondered Treece, pausing in his discourse. He had forgotten the man’s name and wondered whether he should, in fact, be here at all; he looked the sort of man who
might have been passing the door and, seeing a tutorial about to start, had decided to participate. One could tell that he wanted to
know
. He was folded up tightly in a chair too small for
him, but he held his head up high, fearless and brave, careless of the shoddy little receptacle that held him. The holes in his pullover disclosed a shirt with a pattern of heavy stripes.
‘Well, now,’ he kept saying judicially from time to time; occasionally he nodded his head with slow, approving motions. While he went on talking, Treece furtively consulted the pile of
application forms left handy in a folder on his desk. Among the passport photographs pinned to their corners, he noticed one where the face of this disconcerting man peered fearlessly out, as if he
was ready to have this one published in
Time
; the heavy light from above and the inferior photography emphasized the large bone structure of the cranium and the shape of his excessively
large, wet mouth. The man’s name was Louis Bates, aged twenty-six. He had, the form revealed intriguingly, formerly been a teacher in a girls’ school. Then followed a gap of some time
during which he had not apparently been employed, but elsewhere on the form a bit of a hint was given to the nature of this pause; his experience, he said, included six months’ library work
in a mental hospital. Elsewhere, Bates had written, against the place marked
Interests
, in a large, European-style hand – ‘My interests are what the ultra-democrat would call
“highbrow” or “longhair”.’ This was a curious mixture of the promising and the absurd. Treece, possessed, paused and looked