CHAPTER 2

Day after day went slowly by and Jenkins toiled along the painful road of life into which he had been so suddenly brought, bearing his burden of grief and pain and learning, learning all the time. Every hour he saw further into and through the mist of horror that surrounded him. He learnt greedily. He felt it was vitally necessary to learn everything about this terrible wrong that he saw being committed, if he wished in any way to remedy it. To fight a thing successfully you must know what it is: you must know what you are fighting.

He saw many volumes on the doctor’s bookshelves and asked permission to read them which was genially accorded him.

“You’ll find things to stagger you in them,” Sir Charles said pleasantly, “and lots of hard words. I don’t think you’ll get very far with them.” But Jenkins did get much farther than the doctor thought. He found the books were mostly volumes written by scientific men describing their own work, records of experiments they had made on living animals set out in full by themselves. And in spite of the stupid jargon of words surrounding them and the heavy language Jenkins saw that two things stood out very plainly, one, the hideous suffering of the animals thus used, the other the absolute uselessness and senselessness of the experiments as far as regarded Humanity. They were very enlightening books and so Jenkins found them. Then there was a big scrap book compiled by the doctor himself, that led Jenkins far along the road of understanding. This book contained newspaper cuttings of all descriptions bearing in any way on medical life and work.

Reports of coroners’ inquests especially those where the conduct of a doctor or nurse had been called in question and where invariably they had been triumphantly cleared by the coroner (usually himself a doctor) and votes of sympathy extended to them. These passages had been underscored with a red pencil and often a note of exclamation added to them, by the old cynic who had pasted them in. There were many announcements of wonderful cures and these were starred by a blue pencil and many pages further on in cuttings of a later date Jenkins would find these “cures” contradicted and dismissed as worthless hoaxes and a blue star was put against these also. Then there were long panegyrics on medical science in general and underneath these were mostly pencilled notes by the doctor, “Written by Smith,” “Good old Ted,” “Very good Charlie,” “That’s the stuff to give ’em,” and so on. Then there were pictures of Royalty opening hospital wards: Royalty going to balls in aid of hospitals, etc., and side by side with these, accounts of patients who had jumped from hospital windows: patients who had died on the operating table, patients who having lost their limbs or their sight by the mistreatment in hospitals went back to their garrets to hang themselves or gas themselves to death. Sometimes these columns were marked by exclamation marks, some times the juxtaposition was left to speak for itself. Jenkins could just imagine the face of the doctor with his tongue in his cheek, as he glued the cuttings in.

Jenkins spent many hours hanging fascinated over this volume.

From the vivisectors’ own books he learnt what vivisection really was, from the reports in the papers he learnt what the public thought it was and how they were assiduously taught by the press to regard it and medical science generally.

Then there were other means of self education, one of the best of which though the most painful was listening to the doctor’s conversation and that of his friends on those evenings when the great man had some friends or some young students in to visit him. Jenkins would be called upon to wait on them at a light supper with heavy drinks which they took in the doctor’s study.

Jenkins as has been said was not a scientific person, he was simply a man of common sense and the way those scientific men talked, the utter brutality and callousness of their jokes, their stories, their whole view of the sufferings of humanity, the confessions they made or rather perhaps one should say the boasts, of how they had acted in their hospital wards, made his blood run cold.

One thing he saw, emerged very clearly and restored somewhat to his mind the belief in eternal Justice. He saw that this Scientific Research, so unutterably wicked and cruel to the animals, was at the same time proving an unspeakable curse to humanity.

As he heard the talk of reckless experiments on patients unnecessary operations, over-doses of _X_-ray that burnt human insides out, and the joking and laughter over human agony, he recognized that Humanity was being justly punished and that the men, degraded by horrible experiments on animals were totally unfitted to have the care of sick and helpless men and women.

One night climbing to his room after attendance at one of these suppers and listening to the revolting talk, he went to bed, white and dizzy and shaking. In the darkness and stillness a question seemed to form itself within him and he examined it carefully bringing all the knowledge he had gained to bear upon it.

Ought he to kill this man?

Murder! That would be murder: a horrible idea, a horrible thought, a horrible word to the well-balanced, civilized mind; and to Jenkins, sober and straight-living, the typical good citizen without a trace of criminality in his disposition it was appalling.

Murder! No! On no account must one murder. It was an essentially wrong, unpardonable act. But would it be murder? he asked himself in his clear, hard-thinking though uneducated mind. Would it not be justifiable homicide? Let him consider. He must consider this question from all points. Here he was on the verge of a decision to commit an act forbidden by the law of his country, regarded with detestation by his fellows and condemned by religion. He would take the point of law first. The law allowed justifiable homicide. If that were the verdict, the accused was acquitted with honour.

On what grounds was that verdict given when one man killed another? First, self-defence. If the doctor attacked him and he feared his own life was in danger, he might kill the doctor with impunity. _His own life._ He might kill the doctor to save his own life.

Then why not to save something he valued much more highly? To save from agonising suffering those thousand of helpless innocent loving animals that the doctor would torture during his evil life? _Jenkins’ life_, what was that? Like all brave natures he had hardly a thought for it. A run-away horse, a woman in a canal, a child on a railway track, any of these might call for and receive its sacrifice at any time. Certainly to save even that one line of animals in the laboratory, slowly perishing in their long drawn out anguish he would have laid down his life, had that been able to help matters.

Therefore, if the law allowed him to murder to save his own life, why should it not allow him to murder to save something he valued infinitely more? Jenkins revolved this anxiously and slowly in his sedate mind till he came to the conclusion that the law should permit him this choice.

Then he took up another point: the law would certainly call it justifiable homicide if he saw the doctor murdering a man, woman or child, any human being, even an imbecile, and killed him in defence of any of those. Then why should he not kill him to save those thousands of poor patients that the doctor would certainly murder if allowed to live out his evil life to its natural close? Only that evening he had heard him saying to a student that he had performed a certain operation three thousand times and it had never done any good: only killed or crippled. Jenkins shuddered as he thought of the mutilated victims dragging out their ruined lives; women who had come to the doctor full of hope and faith and had been sent away according to his own statement, shattered wrecks. _But what could they expect?_ How could they come to a man for sympathy or expect him to be moved or restrained by any decent feeling when he spent his whole life wallowing in the most frightful mutilation of animals?

Jenkins marvelled at their folly.

But he must get back to his point as to the law. The law would allow him to kill the doctor if he were murdering _one_ woman, then why not when he was murdering thousands? Again, there was that paragraph in a daily paper stating that a certain serum had been “successfully tried on 300 children.” What about all the children on whom it had been unsuccessfully “tried”?

Jenkins seemed for a moment to see round him a plain covered with the small graves of children, done to death by the modern Moloch--Science. He would save the lives of many human victims as well as the animal victims if he extinguished this one evil existence.

Since Jenkins had come to the laboratory he had not seen one single useful experiment made, one single operation that might be excused by some people on the ground of its utility. He had seen cats filled with water till they burst, of what good is that to humanity? He had seen dogs distorted by rickets, and dogs put into boxes which were gradually heated while the doctor watched the animals inside through a glass window panting and writhing without water or air. He had seen the dogs dragged out in a desperate condition and expire within half an hour. How was humanity benefited? He had seen monkeys suffering cruelly from measles, to what end? He had seen animals covered with tar expiring in lingering agonies. What was the use?

He had seen the doctor take a clear eyed, healthy cat and deliberately induce an ulcer in one eye and watch it day by day, eating the organ away and when the work of destruction was complete he would set up an ulcer in the other eye, encouraged apparently rather than the reverse by its heartrending screams of pain and finally throw it back into its cage in total blindness and convulsions of agony. And the results? What had the Scientists to show?

A few of their vaunted remedies passed in review before him:

Insulin which the Scientists admitted amongst themselves to be more deadly than the diabetes it was supposed to cure.

Anti-toxin for diphtheria, dangerous and unknown as to its after effects while the simple Bella Donna was a known specific for the disease. The inoculation of anti-typhoid serum used in the war. Jenkins had been to the war and he knew that where the sanitation had been good, there had been no typhoid. Where the sanitation had been bad the anti-typhoid serum had not saved the troops. Typhoid had reigned in spite of it. And so on, and so on. In the whole long list of “discoveries” and “remedies” emanating from laboratories there was not one that he could find that had been proved of benefit, not one for which a simple common-sense substitute could not be found.

Useful, beneficial, good--any of this work? No, it was simply hellish and having seen it as he had at close quarters and recognising it for what it was, it was his duty to stop it in the only way he could.

It would not be murder, it would be homicide and justifiable a hundred times over.

Anger carried him away for a moment but he brought his thoughts back to calm consideration. What good would it do? The removal of this one man? Very little, he admitted sorrowfully. But it seemed to him, in the phrase of the war: “it was his bit.”

How often in the recruiting days the men had been told they were not to worry over the larger aspects, the greater issues of the war. They were not to say to themselves that the little which each man could do would not either win or lose the war. No, each man was to do “his bit.” If he killed one German it was good. If he killed ten, it was better. And if he shrank from killing a fellow man he was to remember that by so doing he was saving the lives of perhaps hundreds of his comrades.

The same reasoning seemed to apply here. He could not do much. He could not sweep away that cancer of modern civilization--medical scientific research. He could not influence the ending of it, any more than he could influence the ending of the war, but he could do his bit. He could kill this one man and by so doing save thousands of his fellow human beings and thousands of his no less fellow beings--the animals.

The human beings, really, Jenkins doubted if it were his mission to save. If they could be so blind, so stupid, so selfish and so cruel as to allow such work as the doctor’s, because they fancied they might gain something from it, it was only Divine Justice that they should be poisoned by the medicines manufactured so hideously. That the Insulin gained by the torture of dogs; the anti-toxins brought by the agony of horses; the small-pox vaccine scooped from the aching sores of cows and all the other vile and filthy products of the laboratory should give them death and disease instead of the relief they sought.

But for the sake of the animals, entirely innocent, unselfish, trusting, devoted, that this fiend would torture daily, year by year, if he lived, for their sake, Jenkins would “do his bit” and save them.

The next morning he rose, his head clear, his heart stout and determined. He had been sent there for some good reason and he seemed to see it clearly before him as Joan of Arc saw her mission revealed to her.

Possessing himself in patience, he would watch and wait till the opportunity came to take the doctor’s life and then he would take it as Jael slew Sisera, as Judith slew Holofernes. How many lives had he taken in the war? He could not remember but it must have been many: lives of good honest brave men fighting for their country as he was fighting for his, then should he hesitate now to take a life so mean, so worthless, so harmful not only to his fellow creatures the animals but also to his fellow men? Why should he not rid the world of this monster? A great calmness fell upon Jenkins as he made his resolve and from that hour, though he lived in pain, he had the courage lent him, of a man devoted to a cause.