Angels and Insects (15 page)

‘And my argument from love—from paternal love?’

‘It is resonant. But I would answer as Feuerbach answers,
“Homo homini deus est
”, our God is ourselves, we worship ourselves. We
have made our God by a specious analogy, Sir—I do not mean to give offence, but I have been thinking about this for some years—we make perfect images of ourselves, of our lives and fates, as the painters do of the Man of Sorrows, or the scene in the Stable, or as you once said, of a grave-faced winged Creature speaking to a young girl. And we worship these, as primitive peoples worship masks of terror, the alligator, the eagle, the anaconda. You may argue anything at all by analogy, Sir, and so consequently nothing. This is my view. Feuerbach understood something fundamental about our minds. We need loving kindness in
reality;
and often we do not find it—so we invent a divine Parent for the infant crying in the night, and convince ourselves all is well. In reality, many cries remain unheard in perpetuity.’

‘That is not a refutation.’

‘In the nature of the case, it cannot be. It leaves the matter exactly where it first stood. We desire things to be so, and so we create a tale, or a picture, that says, we are so and so. You might as well say, we are like ants, as that ants may develop to be like us.’

‘Indeed I might. We are all one life, I believe, shot through with His love. I believe, I hope.’

He took back his papers with careful hands, in which the papers shivered. The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appeared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. William watched the hands fold the wavering papers and was fined with pity for them, as for sick and dying creatures. The flesh under the horny nails was candlewax-coloured, and bloodless.

‘It may be an emotional deficiency in myself, Sir, that I cannot feel the strength of the argument. I have been much changed by the pattern of my life, of my work. My own father was very much in the image of a terrible Judge, who preached rivers of blood and destruction, and whose own profession was bloody too. And then the vast disorder—the indifference to human scale and preoccupations—in
the Amazon—I have not been left with a propensity to find kindness in the face of things.’

‘But I hope you have found it here. For you must know that
we
must count your coming as a special Providence—to make a new life for dear Eugenia, and now for your little ones—’

‘I am most grateful—’

‘And happy, I hope, contented, I hope,’ the tired old voice insisted in the sharp air, hanging there in a question.

‘Very happy, of course, Sir. I have all I wished for, and more. And when I come to think about my future—’

‘That shall be provided for, as you richly deserve, have no fears. There can be no thought of leaving Eugenia as yet—you would not so disappoint her—her happiness is young—but in due course, you will find all your needs can be answered, amply so, have no fears. I regard you as my dear son, and I intend to provide for you. In due course.’

‘I thank you, Sir.’

There was frost on the inside of the windows, and watery tears, involuntary damp, round the red rims of the clouded eyes.

William was not invited to join in the amusements of Lionel and Edgar, though Eugenia did ride out to the Meets, in a velvet habit, and come back flushed and smiling. There was a tacit conspiracy, he could almost have called it a conspiracy, to assume that, not being a pure gentleman, he would not have the skill or bravery for these gentlemanly pursuits, however resourcefully he had endured the Amazon. He went on long country walks, most frequently alone, sometimes with Matty Crompton and the schoolroom young. He was expected also to join in the evening games, in the drawing-room, where Lady Alabaster liked to play dominoes, or spillikins, or Black Maria, and where charades were occasionally organised, very ambitiously. He caused a great deal of laughter once, by likening these to the village feasts of the Indians, where
everyone was fantastically dressed, and he had once met a dancing brown figure in a red-checked shirt and straw hat with a net and a box whom he recognised as a parody of himself. Great gales of laughter were aroused too by a particularly witty enactment of AM A ZON, in which AM was represented by Lionel as Abraham hearing the Voice of God out of the burning bush, a wonderful creation of yew boughs and red silk and tinsel made by Matty Crompton, A was represented by the children and Miss Mead, enacting a schoolroom alphabet lesson, in which apples were plucked from a paper tree, bees flew from a hive, and an animated Crocodile snapped at everyone’s heels. ZON was a love scene in which Edgar, in full evening dress, pinned a beautiful silver girdle (zone) around Eugenia’s waist—she was wearing a new silver and lemon ballgown, and her appearance aroused a huge round of applause. AMAZON was William himself, paddling a canoe made from an upturned bench behind paper reeds and dangling woollen vines, observed by a tribe of feathered and painted Indian children led by Matty Crompton in an imposing cloak painted with feathers, and a mask painted like a hawk. Tissue-paper butterflies danced in the hothouse plants stacked on the stage, and colourful snakes made of string and paper hissed and wriggled dramatically.

William congratulated Miss Crompton on the scenery of this
tour de force
, when he met her next day, winding up the crimson ribbons and folding the tinsel of the Burning Bush.

‘It was easy to see whose was the inventive mind behind all these beautiful objects,’ he said.

‘I do what comes to hand, as well as I can,’ she said. ‘Such activities stave off boredom.’

‘Are you often bored?’

‘I try not to be.’

‘That is not an answer.’

‘I suppose we all feel we have greater capacities than are called for in our daily lives.’

She gave him her sharp look as she said this, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she had only answered his intrusively personal question in order to draw him out. He was beginning to be a little afraid of Matty Crompton’s sharpness. She had never treated him other than very benevolently, and had never put herself forward in any way. But he sensed a kind of suppressed, fierceness in her which he was not wholly sure he wanted to know more about. She had herself very much in her own control, and he thought he preferred to leave things that way. However, he answered, because he needed to speak, and he could not speak to Harald or to Eugenia on these matters. It would be wrong. Wrong now, at least, wrong at this juncture.

‘I do feel something of the kind myself, from time to time. It is strange that in the Amazons I woke daily from a dream of mild English sunshine, of simple and wonderful things such as bread, and butter, instead of endless cassava. And now I wake from dreams of the forest curtain, of the movement of the river, of my
work
, Miss Crompton. I do not have my work, my own work here, though my life could not be more pleasant, nor my new family kinder.’

‘You work, I believe, with Sir Harald, on his book.’

‘I do, but I am not really
needed
, and my views—in short, my views do not wholly agree with his. He desires me to play
advocatus diaboli
to his arguments, but I fear I distress him and add little to the advancement of the work—’

‘Perhaps you should write your own book.’

‘I have no settled opinions to advance, and no wish to convert anyone to my own rather uncertain views of things.’

‘I did not mean
opinions
.’ There was a possible curl of contempt—he could not decide—in the incisive voice. ‘I meant a book of facts. A book of scientific facts, such as you are uniquely qualified to write.’

‘I have meant to write a book of my travels—such books have been very successful, I know—but all my detailed notes, all my
specimens were lost in the shipwreck. I have not the heart to invent, if I could.’

‘But nearer to hand—nearer to hand, lie things you could observe and write about.’

‘You have suggested this before. I am sure you are right—I am most grateful to you. I do intend to begin a close study of the Elm Copse nests just as soon as they return to life in the Spring—but a scientific study will take many years, and much rigour, and I had hoped—’

‘You had hoped—’

‘I had hoped to be able to set out again on another foreign journey to collect more information about the untravelled world—I wish to do that—Sir Harald suggested, more or less promised, that he might be sympathetic—’

Matty Crompton closed her sharp mouth tightly. She said, ‘The book I should like to see you write is not a major scientific study. Not the work of a lifetime. It is a book I think might prove useful—and dare I say it—
profitable
to you, in the quite near future. I believe if you were to write a
natural history
of the colonies over a year—or two years, if you were to feel the need was absolute—you would have something very interesting to a very general public, and yet of scientific value. You could bring your very great knowledge to bear on the particular lives of these creatures—make comparisons—bring in their Amazonian relatives—but told in a
popular
way with anecdotes, and folklore, and stories of how the observations were made—’

She looked him in the eye. Her own dark eyes gleamed. He caught at her idea.

‘It might be interesting—it might be fun—’

‘Fun,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘The children could be usefully employed. I myself would be proud to assist. Miss Mead would do what she could. I see the children as characters in the drama. There
absolutely has to be drama, you know, if the work is to appeal to the general public.’

‘You should write it yourself, I think. It is all your idea, and you should have the credit.’

‘Oh no. I have not the requisite knowledge—nor the spare time, though it is hard to say where my days go to—I do not see myself as a writer. But as an
assistant
, Mr Adamson, if you would accept me. I would be honoured. I can draw—and record—and copy if necessary—’

‘I am quite extraordinarily grateful. You have transfigured my prospects.’

‘Hardly. But I do believe it may answer. With good will and hard work.’

In the Spring of 1862, then, around the time of the birth of Robert Edgar, the organised ant-watch began. The city and its satellite suburbs were mapped and all their entrances and exits carefully recorded. Drawings were made of the way in which the gates of the city were closed at night with barricades of twigs behind which the watchers slept. Maps were made of the paths of the foraging ants, and judicious investigations were made of the nursery chambers, the eggs, grubs and cocoons which formed both the city’s population and its living treasure. A kind of census was taken of guests and parasites in the community. There was a thriving population of aphid ‘cattle’ in the Elm Tree Bole, assiduously stroked and petted by their ant-keepers to induce the secretion of drops of sweet honey-dew, eagerly sipped and stored. There were a great many wandering guests, whose presence was encouraged or tolerated—the beetle, Amphotis, who would solicit sips of nectar from returning workers, but who, in turn, appeared to secrete some marvellous manna which its hosts energetically scraped and licked from its wing-cases and thorax, another beetle, Dinaida, which seemed to
lie quietly around the corridors, gulping up a few eggs when no one was watching. The whole process of cleaning the nest was observed and documented, as convoys of ants flowed out to the huge rubbish mound bearing mouldered foodstuffs, unsavoury droppings and the corpses of their dead or dying sisters. Many of the internal processes of the nest—the Queen’s industrious parturition, the workers’ perpetual grooming and nourishment of her, their carrying-off and nursing of eggs, their shifting of eggs and larvae to nurseries that were warmer or cooler—could be seen in the glass-sided nest in the schoolroom, where the young girls, in good moods, would be set to document a nursery, or the Queen, for an hour or two together. William made a study of the foodstuffs brought into two particular entrances over the whole period, and thought he discerned distinct seasonal variations in what was chosen, and offered, depending on the needs of the larvae for secretions, or later for insect-flesh, and the lessening needs, in the latter part of the year, to provide for these myriads of dependent mouths. William and Miss Crompton together began to construct a military history of the whole society, which turned out to bear a remarkable resemblance, in some ways, to human warfare, with sudden invasive attacks by one army on the neighbouring stronghold of another community. They observed both successful sieges and fights which resulted in stalemates and simultaneous retreats. Matty Crompton made some very spirited drawings of battling formicae; she sat on a grass hummock whilst William lay full-stretch on the earth identifying the waves of attackers and defenders.

‘How anything can
survive
with a hair for a waist, puzzles me,’ she said. ‘They seem so vulnerable, with their bristling little feet and their delicate antennae, and yet they are armed with stings and savage jaws, they can slice and pierce as well as any knight in armour, and they are armoured moreover. What would you say to a few cartoon-like illustrations for your text—here, I have drawn
one with a stiletto, and there with a staring helmet and a kind of heavy
wrench
.’

‘I should think it might add greatly to the human interest’, said William. ‘Have you observed how they can sever antennae and legs and cut each other in half so very quickly? And have you observed how many of the combatants advance to meet an adversary with several helpers clinging to their legs? Now, what possible advantage can such assistance be? Is it not rather an
impediment?

‘Let me see,’ she said, dropping to her knees beside him. ‘Why, so they do. How endlessly
interesting
they are. See this poor soul bend round to sting an adversary who has a terrible vice-grip on her head. They will both die, like Balin and Balan, I should think.’

She was wearing a brown cotton skirt, and a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbow. Her face was shadowed by a rather ragged straw hat, with a limp crimson ribbon, which were her usual ant-watching garments. He knew all her wardrobe by now; it was not extensive; two cotton skirts, a Sunday dress, in Summer, in navy poplin, with a choice of white starched collars, and perhaps four different shirts, in various fawns and greys. She was thin and bony; he found himself abstractedly studying her wristbones, and the tendons on the back of her brown hands, as she drew. Her movements were quick and decisive. A flick, a sweep, a series of little hooks and curves, and there was an exact diagrammatic rendering of ant-jaws crunching ant-legs, ant-thorax and ant-gaster contorted either in pain or in effort to inflict it. Beside these informative images trotted tiny anthropomorphised ant-warriors, with swords, bucklers, tridents and helmeted heads. She was absorbed in her work. William found himself suddenly sharply inhaling what must have been her peculiar smell, a slightly acid armpit smell, inside the cotton sleeves in the sunlight, mixed with a tincture of what might be lemon verbena, and a whiff of lavender, either from her soap, or from the herbs in the drawer where her
shirts were laid up. He breathed more deeply. The hunter in him, now in abeyance, had a highly developed sense of smell. There were jungle creatures whose presence he sensed with all sorts of senses undeveloped in urban Englishmen, he supposed—a pricking in the skin, a fluctuation in the soft nasal lining, a ripple in the scalp, a perturbation of his sense of balance. These had tormented him in London streets, where they had over-responded to fried onions and sewage, to the garments of the urban poor and the perfumes of ladies. He sniffed again, secretly and quietly, the scent of Miss Crompton’s outdoor identity. Later in Eugenia’s bedroom, when she had reclaimed him, and he was buried in the smells of her fresh sheets and her fluid sex, her hot hair and her panting mouth, that sharp little smell returned briefly like a ghost of the outdoors, and he puzzled for a moment, as he pressed Eugenia into the plump mattress, over what it could be, and remembered the severed feelers and Matty Crompton’s busy wrists.