Angels and Insects

by A. S. Byatt

  He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience. His father was a successful butcher and a devout Methodist, who had sent his sons to a good local school, where they had learned Greek and Latin and some elementary Mathematics, and had required them to go to chapel. Butchers, William had observed, categorising even then, tend to be well-fleshed men, outward-looking and with strong opinions. Martin Adamson, like his son, had a mane of dark, shining hair, a long, solid nose, and sharp blue eyes under straight brows. He took pleasure in his craft, in anatomising the slain, in delicate knifework and artistry with sausages and pies, and he was dreadfully afraid of Hell Fire, whose flames flickered at the edge of his daily imagination and consumed his dreaming nights. He provided prime beef for mill owners and mine owners in their places, and scrag end and faggots for miners and factory workers in theirs. He was ambitious for William, but without specificity. He wanted him to have a good trade, with possibilities of expansion.

  William trained his eye in the farmyard and amongst the bloody sawdust of the slaughterhouse. In the life he finally chose, his father’s skills were of inestimable value in skinning, and mounting, and preserving specimens of birds and beasts and insects. He anatomised ant-eaters and grasshoppers and ants with his father’s exactness reduced to microscopic scales. In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation for the sins of pride, of lack of humility, of self-regard, of sloth, of hesitation in pursuing greatness. He tried schoolmastering and supervising wool-carders, and wrote in his journal of his distress at his success in these tasks—he was a good Latin teacher, he saw what his students did not see, he was a good supervisor, he could detect laziness and ameliorate real grievances—but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was going nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read those circular and painful journals now, with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man.

  The journals had changed when he began collecting. He had taken to long walks in the countryside—the part of Yorkshire where he lived consisted of foul black places amongst fields and rough land of great beauty—and he had at first walked in a state of religious anxiety, combined with a reverence for Wordsworth’s poetry, looking for signs of Divine Love and order in the meanest flowers that blew, in bubbling brooks and changing cloud formations. And then he had begun to take a collecting-box, bring things home, press them, categorise them, with the aid of Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants. He discovered the Crucifers, the Umbellifers, the Labiates, the Rosaceae, the Leguminosae, the Compositae, and with them the furious variety of forms which turned out to mask, to enhance the underlying and rigorous order of branching families, changing with site and climate. He wrote for a time in his journal of the wonders of divine Design, and his self-examination gave way insensibly to the recording of petals observed, leaf forms noted, marshes, hedges and tangled banks. His journal was for the first time alive with a purposeful happiness. He began also to collect insects, and was amazed to discover how many hundreds of species of beetle existed in a few square miles of rough moorland. He haunted the slaughterhouse, making notes on where the blowflies preferred to lay their eggs, how the maggots moved and chewed, the swarming, the pullulation, a mass of mess moved by an ordering principle. The world looked different, and larger, and brighter, not water-colour washes of green and blue and grey, but a dazzling pattern of fine lines and dizzying pinpoints, jet-black, striped and spotted crimson, iridescent emerald, sloppy caramel, slime-silver.

  And then he discovered his ruling passion, the social insects. He peered into the regular cells of beehives, he observed trails of ants passing messages to each other with fine feelers, working together to shift butterfly-wings and slivers of strawberry-flesh. He stood like a stupid giant and saw incomprehensible, purposefully intelligent beings building and destroying in cracks of his own paving stones. Here was the clue to the world. His journal became the journal of an ant-watcher. This was in 1847, when he was twenty-two. In that year, in the Mechanics’ Institute at Rotherham, he met a fellow amateur entomologist who showed him the reports of Henry Walter Bates in the Zoologist, on Coleoptera and other matters. He wrote to Bates, including some of his own observations about ant societies, and received a kind reply, encouraging his work, and adding that Bates himself ‘with my friend and co-worker in the field, Alfred Wallace’ was planning an expedition to the Amazons in search of undiscovered creatures. William had already read Humboldt and W. H. Edwards’ highly coloured account of the wild luxuriance, the frolicking and joyous coatis, agoutis and sloths, the gaudy trogons, motmots, woodpeckers, chiming thrushes, parrots, manakins and butterflies ‘the bigness of a hand and of the richest metallic blue’. There were millions of miles of unexplored forest—it could lose in its brilliant virgin depths another English entomologist beside Wallace and Bates. There would be new species of ants, to be named perhaps adamsonii, there would be space for a butcher’s son to achieve greatness.

  The journals began to intermingle a rapt, visionary note with detailed practical sums for outfitting, for specimen boxes, with names of ships, with useful addresses. William set out in 1849, one year later than Wallace and Bates, and returned in 1859. Bates had given him the address of his agent, Samuel Stevens, who had handled and sold the specimens shipped back by all three collectors. It was Stevens who had introduced William to the Reverend Harald Alabaster, who had inherited his baronetcy and his Gothic mansion only on the death of his childless brother in 1848. Alabaster was an obsessive collector, who wrote long letters to his unknown friend, which arrived at infrequent intervals, and asked about the religious beliefs of the Natives as well as the habits of the hummingbird hawk-moth and the Saüba ant. William wrote back to him, the letters of a great naturalist from an untrodden wilderness, spiced with an attractive self-deprecating humour. It was Harald Alabaster who had told him of Wallace’s calamitous fire at sea in 1852, in a letter that had taken almost a year to reach him. William had somehow supposed that this was a statistical insurance against another naturalist being wrecked on the return voyage, but it had not been so. The brig, Fleur-de-Lys, had been rotten and unseaworthy, and William Adamson, unlike the vaguer Wallace, had not been properly insured against the loss of his collection. He was still full of the survivor’s simple pleasure in being alive when Harald Alabaster’s invitation reached him. He packed up what he had saved, which included his tropical journals and the most valuable butterflies, and set off for Bredely Hall.

  His tropical journals were much stained—by the paraffin in which their box had once been doused to prevent their being eaten by ants and termites, by traces of mud and crushed leaves from canoe accidents, by salt water like floods of tears. He had sat alone under a roof woven of leaves in an earth-floored hut, and scribbled descriptions of everything: the devouring hordes of army ants, the cries of frogs and alligators, the murderous designs of his crew, the monotonous sinister cries of the howler monkeys, the languages of various tribes he had stayed with, the variable markings of butterflies, the plagues of biting flies, the unbalancing of his own soul in this green world of vast waste, murderous growth, and lazily aimless mere existence. He had peered into these pages by the light of burning turtle oil, and had recorded his solitude, his smallness in the face of the river and the forest, his determination to survive, whilst comparing himself to a dancing midge in a collecting bottle. He had come to be addicted to the written form of his own language, which he spoke hardly at all, although he was fluent in Portuguese, the lingoa geral spoken by most of the natives, and several tribal tongues. Latin and Greek had given him a taste for languages. Writing gave him a taste for poetry. He read and reread Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which he had by him, and an an
thology of Choice Beauties of our Elder Poets. It was to this he turned now. It must have been one in the morning, but his blood and his mind were racing. He was not ready for sleep. He had bought a new notebook, an elegant green with marbled covers, in Liverpool, and now opened its first blank page. On this he copied out a poem by Ben Jonson which had always intrigued him and had now suddenly taken on a new urgency.

  Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

  Before rude hands have touched it?

  Have you marked but the fall o’ the snow,

  Before the soil hath smutched it?

  Have you felt the wool o’ the beaver?

  Or swan’s down ever?

  Or have smelled o’ the bud o’ the briar?

  Or the nard i’ the fire?

  Or have tasted the bag o’ the bee?

  O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

  That was what he wanted to set down, exactly. O so white! O so soft! O so sweet, he wanted to say.

  Beyond that was unknown territory. He remembered a sentence from a fairy story of his childhood, a sentence spoken by a Prince of Araby about the lovely Princess of China, brought briefly to him in her sleep by mischievous spirits. ‘I shall die if I cannot have her,’ the Prince had said, to his servant, to his father and mother. William poised his pen above his paper and wrote,

  ‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

  He thought for some time, pen in hand, and then wrote again, under the first line,

  ‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

  He added,

  Of course I shall not die; that is absurd—but that old statement from an old tale seems best to reflect the kind of landslide, or whirlpool-gulf, that has taken place in my soul since this evening. I believe I am a rational being. I have survived, retaining my sanity and cheerfulness, near-starvation, prolonged isolation, yellow fever, treachery, malice, and shipwreck. I remember as a little boy, on reading my Fairy Book, a premonition of terror rather than delight about what human love might be, in that sentence, ‘I shall die if I cannot have her.’ I was in no hurry for love. I did not seek it out. The rational plan I had made for my life—the romantic plan no less, which now coincides with the rational, both implying a return, after a reasonable rest, to the forest—left no space for the search for a wife, for I believed I felt no particular need for one. In my delirium in the boat, it is true, and earlier under the ministrations, or torments, of that filthy hag in whose house I cured myself of the fever, I did dream from time to time of a kindly female presence, as something deeply needed, unreasonably forgotten, as though the phantom were weeping for me as I was weeping for her.

  Where am I taking myself? I am writing in almost as high a delirium as I experienced then. Conventional wisdom would be shocked that I even allowed the idea of union with her to enter my mind—for in conventional wisdom’s eyes, our stations are unequal, and more than that, I am penniless and with no prospects. I would not be swayed by such wisdom myself—and have no respect for artificial ranks and places, which are supported by inbreeding of stock, and by time-wasting frivolous pursuits—I am as good a man, take me for all in all, as E. A. and have, I dare swear it, used my intelligence and my bodily courage to greater purpose. But how would that consideration weigh with any such family, constructed exactly to reject any such intr …

  The only rational course is to forget the whole matter, suppress these inopportune feelings, make an end.

  He thought for a moment, and then wrote for a third time,

  ‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

  He slept well, and dreamed that he was pursuing a flock of golden birds through the forest, which settled and preened and allowed him to approach, and then rose and wheeled away, crying in high voices, only to settle again, just out of reach.

  Harald Alabaster’s study, or den, was next to Bredely’s small chapel. It was hexagonal in shape, with wood-panelled walls and two deep windows, carved in stone in the Perpendicular style: the ceiling too was carved stone, pale grey-gold in colour, a honey-comb of smaller hexagons. There was an unusual roof-light at the centre of this, reminiscent of the Lantern of Ely Cathedral, under which the large Gothic desk was imposingly set, giving the room the appearance of a chapter house. Round the walls were both tall, arched bookcases full of polished leather, and deep-drawered cabinets. There were also three free-standing hexagonal, glass-topped display cabinets, in lustrous mahogany, inside one of which reposed, on their pins, several of William’s earlier captures, the Heliconeae, the Papilionidae, the Danaidae, the Ithomiidae. Above the cases hung texts, written out with careful penmanship in Gothic script, and bordered with charming designs of fruit, flowers, foliage, birds and butterflies. Harald Alabaster pointed them out to William Adamson.

  ‘My daughter Eugenia takes pleasure in working these designs for me. I think they are very pleasing—prettily penned, and carefully executed.’

  William read aloud,

  ‘There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:

  The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer;

  The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks;

  The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands;

  The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.

  Proverbs 30, 24–8’

  ‘It is Eugenia who made this elegant arrangement of the Lepidoptera also. I fear it is not done upon quite scientific principles, but it has the intricacy of a rose window made of living forms, and does show forth the extraordinary brilliance and beauty of the insect creation. I am particularly taken with the idea of punctuating the rows of butterflies with the little iridescent green scarabs. Eugenia says she got the idea from silk knots in embroidery.’

  ‘She was describing the work to me last night. She obviously has a very precise hand in handling specimens. And the result is very fine, very delightful.’

  ‘She is a good girl.’

  ‘She is very beautiful.’

  ‘I hope she will also be very happy,’ said Harald Alabaster. He did not sound, William thought, listening for every nuance of meaning, entirely convinced that this would be the case.

  Harald Alabaster was tall, gaunt, and slightly stooping. He had a bony, ivory version of the family face, the blue eyes a little watery, the lips buried in the fronds of a patriarchal beard. The beard, and his abundant hair, were largely white, but the original blond lingered here and there, giving the white a stained, brassy look, a paradoxical tarnish. He wore a clerical collar and a black loose jacket over baggy trousers. Over this he wore a kind of monkish gown, black and woollen, with long sleeves and a sort of cowl. This could have had a practical purpose—the far reaches of the hall were bitterly cold, even with fires lit in all the fireplaces, which they mostly were not. William, who had corresponded with him for many years, but was now meeting him for the first time, had imagined a younger, more substantial man, solid and cheerful like the collectors he had met in London and Liverpool, men of business and intellectual adventure together. He had brought down his salvaged treasures, which he now laid out on Alabaster’s desk, unopened.

  Harald Alabaster pulled a kind of dangling bell-rope by his desk, and a soft-footed servant came in with a coffee tray, poured the coffee, and went out.

  ‘You are fortunate to have escaped with your life; we must give thanks for that—but the loss of your specimens must have been a very severe setback. What will you do, Mr Adamson, if you do not think it impertinent to ask?’

  ‘I have hardly had time to think. I had hoped to sell enough to be able to stay in England for some time, write about my travels perhaps—I kept extensive journals—and earn enough money to equip myself to return to the Amazon. We have barely begun to pick up twigs, Sir, those of us who have worked there—there are millions of unexplored miles, unknown creatures … I have particular problems I propose to solve—I have co
me to be particularly interested in ants and termites—I should like to make a prolonged study of certain aspects of their life. I believe for instance that I may have a better explanation for the curious habits of the leafcutter ants than that put forward by Mr Bates, and I should like also to find the next of the army ants—the Eciton burchelli—which has never been done. I have even wondered if they are perhaps perpetual travellers who form only temporary encampments—this is not the nature of the ants we know—but these forage so extensively, so ferociously, it may be that they must be perpetually on the move in order to survive. And then there is the interesting problem of the way in which—and this would reinforce the observations of Mr Darwin—certain ants that inhabit certain Bromeliads appear to have affected the form of the plants over the millennia, so that the plants actually seem to build chambers and corridors for their insect guests in the natural process of growth. I should like to see if this can be demonstrated; I should like—I am sorry, I am talking disjointedly on and on—I forget my manners. You have been so kind in your letters, Sir, the receipt of which was one of the very rare moments of luxury in my time in the forest. Your letters, Sir, came with necessities like butter and sugar, wheat and flour which we never saw—and were more welcome. I rationed the reading, so as to savour them longer, as I rationed the sugar and flour.’

  ‘I am glad to have given so much pleasure to anyone,’ said Harald Alabaster. ‘And I hope I may be able to help you now in more material ways. In a moment we will examine what you have brought back—I will give you a good price for anything I require, a good price. But I wonder if … I ask myself … would you care to make a part of this household for a period of time sufficient to …