Angels and Insects (10 page)

‘You could remain here,’ Harald said, ‘amongst this family, for the present, you and Eugenia, so that when, as you may well wish to do, you make another voyage, she is among her own people. You will naturally not wish to make changes immediately, you may be very happy here, I think. I hope you will make journeys later, if you wish. I hope you will. I hope I may be of substantial help to you in that. And I hope in the meantime you will consent to give me your time in conversation with the generosity you have shown so far. I do hope so. I find I can make my way much better through the tangles of thought about ourselves and the world we are in, with the benefit of the clarity of your mind. We might even write down our discussions as a kind of philosophical dialogue.’

He was to pay, he saw, with his thoughts. That was something he could easily afford, something he could do as he breathed air, or consumed meat and bread. And during the time between Eugenia’s acceptance of him, and their wedding, which was as short as it could be, so that Rowena’s marriage should not be delayed, giving time just for the making of bride-clothes, William talked to Harald Alabaster. He himself had given up his father’s religion of torment, suffering and promised bliss with a sigh of relief—Christian’s sigh of relief when the burden fell from his shoulder after the Slough of Despond. But Harald was partly sunk in the Slough. His thoughts were a torment to him, his own intellectual rigour a source of deprivation and pain.

He talked often of the folly of those who argued unconvincingly for the existence of God, or the truths of the Bible—and this damaged their own cause. How
dare
William Whewell argue that the lengths of the days and nights were adapted to the duration of sleep of Man? asked Harald. It was painfully and gloriously clear that the whole Creation lived and moved in a rhythm of response to the heat and light of the Sun and to its withdrawal: the sap rose in trees, flowers opened and shut, men and beasts drowsed or
hunted, Summer followed Winter. We must not put ourselves in the centre of things unless we could truly perceive we
were
there. We must not make God in our own image, or we made ourselves look fools. It was because he hoped, hoped sometimes beyond belief, that a Divine Creator would be proved beyond reasonable doubt, that he could not abide arguments about male nipples and the rudimentary tail of the human embryo, which saw that Creator as a fumbling craftsman who had changed his mind in mid-work. A man might behave thus, a God could not, if they but thought clearly, unclouded by emotion, for a moment. And yet there were arguments from the analogy between the Divine Mind and the human mind which he accepted, which supported him, which he did not discard.

‘What do you make of the argument from beauty?’ he asked William.

‘What form of beauty, Sir? Beauty in women, beauty in forests, beauty in the heavens, beauty in creatures?’

‘In all these. I would wish to argue that our human ability to love beauty in all these things—to love symmetry, and glorious brightness, and the intricate excellence of leaf-forms, and crystals, and the scales on snakes and wings of butterflies—argues in us something disinterested and spiritual. A man admiring a butterfly is more than a brute beast, William? He is more than the butterfly itself.’

‘Mr Darwin believes the beauty of the butterfly exists to attract his mate, and the beauty of the orchid is designed to facilitate its fertilisation by the bee.’

‘I retort—neither bee nor orchid has our exquisite sensation of joy at seeing the perfection of the colours and forms of these things. And we may imagine a Creator who created the whole world out of delight in his making the variety of species, of stones and clay and sand and water, may we not? We may imagine such a Creator very precisely because we ourselves have an indwelling need to make works of art which can satisfy no base instinct of mere survival, or
perpetuation of the species, but are only beautiful, and intricate, and food for the spirit?’

‘A sceptic, Sir, would retort that our own works—as you speak of them—are not unlike Paley’s watch, which he said would lead anyone to deduce a Maker, were he ever to find two interlocking cogs. Maybe the sense of wonder at beauty—at form—you speak of, is no more than what makes us human, rather than brutes.’

‘I believe, with the Duke of Argyll, that the superfluous brilliance of the birds of Paradise is a strong argument that perhaps in some sense the original world
was
made for the delight of man. For they cannot delight in themselves as we delight in them.’

‘They dance for their mates, as do turkeys and peacocks.’

‘But you do not feel your own sense of wonder corresponds to something
beyond
yourself, William?’

‘I do indeed. But I also ask myself, what has this sense of wonder to do with my moral sense? For the Creation we so admire does not appear to have a Creator who cares for his creatures. Nature is red in tooth and claw, as Mr Tennyson put it. The Amazon jungle does indeed arouse a sense of wonder at its abundance and luxuriance. But there is a spirit there—a terrible spirit of
mindless striving
or apathetic inertia—a kind of vegetable greed and vast decay—which makes a mindless natural force much easier to believe in. For I think you will not accept the old deists’ arguments that tigers and strangling figs were designed to prevent the miseries of old age in deer and of rotting in tree trunks, any more than you accept Whewell’s ideas about day and night.’

‘The world has changed so much, William, in my lifetime. I am old enough to have believed in our First Parents in Paradise, as a little boy, to have believed in Satan hidden in the snake, and in the Archangel with the flaming sword, closing the gates. I am old enough to have believed
without question
in the Divine Birth on a cold night with the sky full of singing angels and the shepherds staring up in wonder, and the strange kings advancing across the
sand on camels with gifts. And now I am presented with a world in which we are what we are because of the mutations of soft jelly and calceous bone matter through unimaginable millennia—a world in which angels and devils do not battle in the Heavens for virtue and vice, but in which we eat and are eaten and absorbed into other flesh and blood. All the music and painting, all the poetry and power is so much illusion. I shall moulder like a mushroom when my time comes, which is not long. It is likely that the injunction to love each other is no more than the prudent instinct of sociability, of parental protectiveness, in a creature related to a great ape. I used to love to see paintings of the Annunciation—the angel with his wings dipped in the rainbow, of which the butterfly and the bird of Paradise were poor, imperfect echoes, holding the white and gold lily and going down on his knee to the thoughtful young girl who was about to be the Mother of God, love made flesh, knowledge given to us, or lent. And now all that is as it were erased, and there is a black backcloth on an empty stage, and I see a chimpanzee, with puzzled eyes and a hanging brow and great ugly teeth, clutching its hairy offspring to its wrinkled breast—and is
this
love made flesh?

‘I know my answer—it
is
—if God works at all he works in the ape towards Man—but I cannot measure my loss, it is the pit of despair itself. I began my life as a small boy whose every action was burned into the gold record of his good and evil deeds, where it would be weighed and looked over by One with merciful eyes, to whom I was walking, step by unsteady step. I end it like a skeleton leaf, to be made humus, like a mouse crunched by an owl, like a beef-calf going to the slaughter, through a gate which opens only one way, to blood and dust and destruction. And then, I think, no brute beast could have such thoughts. No frog, no hound even, could have a vision of the Angel of Annunciation.
Where does it all come from
?’

‘It is a mystery. Mystery may be another name for God. It has
been well argued that mystery is another name for Matter—we
are
and have access to Mind, but Matter is mysterious in its very nature, however we choose to analyse the laws of its metamorphoses. The laws of the transformation of Matter do not explain it away.’

‘Now you argue on my side. And yet I feel all these arguments are
nothing
, the motions of minds that are not equipped to carry them through.’

‘And there too is hope, as well as dread. Where do
they
come from, our minds?’

Away from the hexagonal stadium, much attention was being paid to the mysteries of the mundane and the material. Eugenia and Rowena, and the other girls too, for there was to be a bevy of bridesmaids, were always undergoing fittings. A steady stream of dressmakers, milliners and seamstresses wove their paths in and out of the various nurseries and boudoirs. Odd glimpses could be had of the young ladies standing still, cocooned in silk, whilst the neat, self-effacing little attendants, their mouths bristling with pins and their hands busily snapping scissors, went round and round them. New bedrooms were in preparation for William and Eugenia. She occasionally brought him patterns of silk twill or damask to approve. He had no sense that
disapproval
was possible, and in any case was indifferent enough to his creature comforts to be mildly amused by all this industry and tastefulness, though he was less delighted to find himself the object of the attentions of Lionel Alabaster’s tailor and valet, who made him a wardrobe consisting not only of his wedding-suit, but of suitable gentlemen’s country wear, breeches, jackets, boots. As time drew on, the kitchens began to smell delightfully of the baking of batches of cakes and jellies and puddings. William was expected now, as he had not quite been before, to sit in the smoking-room with Edgar and Lionel and Robin Swinnerton and their friends, whose conversation had only two topics, the mysteries of breeding horses and hounds, and the
laying of bets and taking of dares. After several glasses of port, Edgar would, invariably, begin to recount the high moments of his life. The time he and Sultan had flown over the wall into the Far Paddock, where they had almost broken their necks. The time he had jumped Ivanhoe in through the window of the Hall for a bet, and skidded the length of it on a Turkey carpet. The time he had swum the river in flood on Ivanhoe, and nearly been swept away.

William liked to sit quietly in his corner during these relations, invisible, he hoped, in a cloud of smoke. The veins stood out on Edgar’s temples and down his neck. He had both brute strength and a nervous spirit, like his horse. His voice varied between a deeply melodious mumble and a kind of strangled shout that was painful to hear. William judged him. He thought he was likely to die of an apoplexy in the not too distant future, and that this would be of no consequence, since his existence was entirely without aim or value. He imagined the poor horse, snorting and sliding on the Hall floor, its silk haunches twisted with stress. And the man, laughing as he laughed in action,
making
it dance on stone, as it would never have done in nature. William had not entirely thrown off his father’s censorious religion. He judged Edgar Alabaster in the eye of the God he no longer believed in, and found him wanting.

One evening, only a week before the wedding, he became aware that Edgar judged him, too. He was sitting back invisibly whilst Edgar told a tale of driving a gig through narrow gaps in seven hedges, and must have allowed his thoughts to appear on his face, for he found Edgar’s hot, red face disagreeably close to his own.

‘
You
must not have the nerve or the strength to do that, Sir. You sit there and smile fatuously, but
you
could not bring such a thing off.’

‘No doubt I could not,’ said William pacifically, his legs stretched in front of him, his muscles relaxed, as he knew they should be, faced with such aggression.

‘I do not like your attitude. I have never liked it. I believe you sneer in your heart.’

‘I do not mean to sneer. Since we are to be brothers, I hope I would not give such an appearance. It would be most wrong.’

‘Ha.
Brothers
, you say. I don’t like that. You are underbred, Sir, you are no good match for my sister. There is bad blood in you, vulgar blood.’

‘I do not accept either “bad” or “vulgar”. I
am
aware that I am no good match, in that I have few prospects and no fortune. Your father and Eugenia have done me the great kindness of overlooking that. I hope you may come to accept their decision.’

‘You should wish rather to fight me. I insulted you. You are a miserable creature without breeding or courage. You should stand up, Sir, and face me.’

‘I think not. As for breeding, I count my father as a good man, and an honest man, and a kind man, and I know no other
good
reasons for respect except his high achievement. As for courage, I think I may claim that to have lived ten years in great hardship on the Amazon, to have survived murder plots and poisonous snakes, and shipwreck and fifteen days on a lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic may reasonably compare with driving a poor horse into a house through a window. I think I know what true courage is, Sir. It does not consist in fisticuffs as a response to insults.’

‘Well said, William Adamson,’ said Robin Swinnerton. ‘Well said, my fellow bridegroom.’

Edgar Alabaster clawed at William’s coat collar. ‘You shall not have her, do you hear? She is not for such as you.
Stand up
.’

‘Please do not breathe in my face. You resemble an angry dragon. You will not provoke me into disgracing a house and family I hope to belong to.’

‘Stand up.’

‘In the Amazons, the young men of the tribes who make themselves
stupid with spirits behave as you do. They often end by killing each other inadvertently.’

‘I should not care if you were killed.’

‘No. You would care if you were. Eugenia might care deeply if I were. She has already—’

He had not known where he was going. He was appalled that his tongue, even in anger, had run as far as Eugenia’s dead lover. The effect on Edgar of even that half-allusion, choked off, was startling. He went white, drew himself up awkwardly and dusted down his trousers repeatedly with heavy hands. William thought, Now he will really try to kill me, and waited for the blow, turned to avoid it, to leap sideways to kick at the groin. But Edgar Alabaster merely made an incoherent, choking sound, and went out of the room, still beating his clothes with his hands. Lionel said, ‘I beg you not to—not to make too much of Edgar. He is wild in his cups, and he is quiet after, he often does not remember what has passed. It was the drink insulted you.’