by A. S. Byatt
‘I believe you are quite right in that, Sir. I believe that would be the only way to proceed.’
‘I do not know your own views on these matters, Mr Adamson. I do not know if you hold any religious beliefs.’
‘I do not know myself, Sir. I believe not. I believe I have indeed been led by my studies—by my observations—to believe that we are all the products of the inexorable laws of the behaviour of matter, of transformations and developments, and that is all. Whether I really believe this in my heart of hearts I do not know. I do not think that such a belief comes naturally to mankind. Indeed, I would agree that the religious sense—in some form or another—is as much part of the history of the development of mankind as the knowledge of cooking food, or the tabu against incest. And in that sense, what my reason leads me to believe is constantly modified by my instincts.’
‘That sense that the idea of the Creator is as natural to man as his instincts will play an important part in what I hope to write. I am in a great puzzle about the relations between instinct and intelligence in all the creatures: does the beaver design the dam, does the bee understand—or in any way think—the intricate hexagonal geometry of her cells, which always are adapted to their space, however that is formed? It is our own free intelligence, Mr Adamson, that leads us to find it impossible to conceive this infinitely wonderful universe, and our own intelligence within it, looking before and after, reflecting, contriving, contemplating, reasoning—without a Divine Intelligence as source of all our lesser ones. We cannot conceive of it, and there can be only two reasons for this incapacity. One, because it is so, the Divine First Cause is intelligent, and IS. Two, the opposite, which has been better and better argued of late—that we are limited beings, like any arthropod or stomach-cyst. We make God in our image, because we cannot do otherwise. I cannot believe that, Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.’
‘My own lack of faith’, said William hesitantly, ‘comes partly from the fact that I grew up amongst a very different sort of Christian from yourself. I remember one particular sermon, on the subject of eternal punishment, in which the preacher bade us imagine that the whole earth was merely a mass of fine sand, and that at the end of a thousand years, a grain of this sand flew away into space. Then we were told to imagine the slow advance of ages—grain by grain—and the huge time before the earth would even appear to be a little diminished, and then thousands of millions of millions of aeons—until the globe was smaller—and so on and on until at last the final grain floated away, and then we were told that all this unimaginable time was itself only one grain in the endless time of infinite punishment—and so on. And we were given a horribly lively, exceedingly imaginative picture of the infinite torment: the hissing of burning flesh, the tearing of nerves, the piercing of eyeballs, the desolation of the spirit, the unceasing liveliness of the response of body and soul to pure pain, which never dulled nor failed through all those millennia of ingenious cruelty—
‘Now that I think is a God made in the image of the worst of men, whose excesses we all tremble at, yet,’ in a lower voice, ‘I think I have perceived from time to time that cruelty too is instinctive in some of our species at least. I have seen slavery in action, Sir Harald, I have seen a little of what ordinary men may do to men when it is permitted by custom—
‘I felt cleansed when I rejected that God, Sir, I felt free, and in the clear light, as another man might feel upon suffering a blinding conversion. I know a lady who was driven to suicide by such fears. I should add that my father has completely cut me off and rejected me, in consequence. That is a further reason for my present poverty.’
‘I hope you are happy here.’
‘Indeed I am. You have been most kind.’
‘I should like to propose that you assist me also with the book. No, no—do not mistake me—not with the writing. But with debate from time to time. I find I need conversation, even opposition, to try out, to clarify my ideas.’
‘I should be honoured, whilst I am here.’
‘You will be eager to be off again, I know. To return to your travelling. I hope to be of very material assistance to that end, in due course. It is our duty either to seek out Nature’s secret places and ways, or to support and encourage those who are able to do so.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now, Darwin, in his passage on the eye, does seem, does he not, to allow the possibility of a Creator? He compares the perfecting of the eye to the perfecting of a telescope, and talks about the changes over the millennia to a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and he goes on to remark that if we compare the forces that form the eye to the human intellect “we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers.” Mr Darwin invites us to suppose that this intently watching power is inconceivable—that the force employed is blind necessity, the law of matter. But I say that in matter itself is contained a great mystery—how did it come to be at all—how does organisation take place—may we not after all come face to face in considering these things with the Ancient of Days, with Him who asked Job, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast any knowledge. When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Darwin himself writes that his transparent layers form “a living optical instrument as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man.” ’
‘So he does. And it is easier for us to imagine the patient attention of an infinite watcher than to comprehend blind chance. It is easier to figure to ourselves shifts and fluctuations in transparent jelly with the image of the floating grains from the world of sand in the sermon—one may almost come at the imagination of blind chance in that way—grain by random grain—infinitesimal yet cumulative …’
Matty Crompton reminded William of the promise she had extracted about the glass hive and the formicary. The glass hive was constructed under William’s direction, the width of the comb of honey, with an entrance hole for the bees cut in the nursery window, and black cloth curtains placed over its walls. The bees were procured from a tenant farmer and inserted, buzzing darkly, into their new home. For the ants, a large glass tank was carried from the nearest town, and set up on its own table on a green baize cloth. Matty Crompton said that she herself would accompany William in search of the ants themselves. She had observed trails of several sorts of ants in the elm coppice last Summer. They set out together with two buckets, various jars, boxes and test-tubes, a narrow trowel and several pairs of tweezers. She had a quick step, and was not given to conversation. She led William straight to what he immediately saw to be a very large Wood Ants’ nest, the work of generation upon generation, backed up against an elm-stump, and thatched with a high dome of twigs, stalks and dry leaves. Little ragged chains of ants could be observed entering and leaving.
‘I have attempted to keep these insects myself,’ said Matty Crompton, ‘but I have a deathly touch, it appears. No matter how beautiful a house I build, or how many flowers and fruits I offer, the creatures simply curl up and die.’
‘You probably had not captured a Queen. Ants are social beings: they exist, it appears, only for the good of the whole nest, and the centre of the nest is the Queen ant whose laying and feeding the others all tend ceaselessly. They will kill her and drag her away, it is true, if she ceases to produce young—or abandon her, when she will rapidly starve, for she is unable to fend for herself. But they exist to lavish attention on her when she is in her prime, on her and her brood. If we are to make a mimic community, we must capture a Queen. The worker ants lose their will to live without the proximity of a Queen—they become immobile and listless, like young ladies in a decline, and then give up the ghost.’
‘How shall we find a Queen? Must we break open the city? We shall do a great deal of damage …’
‘I will look about and try to find a fairly recently established nest,
a young community that can be transferred more or less entire.’
He paced up and down, turning over leaves with a stick, following small convoys of ants to their cracks and crannies in roots and earth. Matty Crompton stood watchfully by. She was wearing a brown stuff dress, severe and unornamental. Her dark hair was plaited around her head. She was good at keeping still. William felt a prick of pleasure at the return of his hunting, scanning self, which had been unexercised inside the walls of the Hall. Under his gaze the whole wood-floor became alive with movement, a centipede, various beetles, a sanguine shiny red worm, rabbit pellets, a tiny breast feather, a grass smeared with the eggs of some moth or butterfly, violets opening, conical entrance holes with fine dust inside, a swaying twig, a shifting pebble. He took out his magnifying lens and looked at a patch of moss, pebbles and sand, and saw a turmoil of previously invisible energies, striving, striving, white myriad-legged runners, invisible semi-transparent arthropods, button-tight spiderlings. His senses, and his mind attached to them, were like a magnetic field, pulled here and there. Here was a nest of Jet-black Ants, Acanthomyops fuliginosus, who lived in small households inside the interconnected encampments of the Wood Ants. Here, on the edge of the coppice, was a trail of slave-making ants, Formica sanguinea. He had always wanted to study these in action. He said so to Matty Crompton, pointing out the difference between the Wood Ants, Formica rufa, with their muddy-brown heads and blackish-brown gasters, or hind parts, and the blood-red sanguinea.
‘They invade the nests of the Wood Ants, and steal their cocoons, which they rear with their own, so that they become sanguinea workers. Terrible battles are fought by raiders and defenders.’
‘They resemble human societies in that, as in many things.’
‘The British slave-makers appear to be less dependent on their slaves than the Swiss Formica rufescens observed by Huber, who remarks that the workers of this species do no other work than capturing slaves, without whose labour their tribe would certainly become extinct, as all the child-rearing, and the food-gathering, are done by slaves. Mr Darwin observes that when these British Blood-red Ants migrate, they carry their slaves to the new home—but the more ferocious Swiss masters are so dependent, they require to be carried helplessly in the jaws of their slaves.’
‘Maybe they are all perfectly content in their stations,’ observed Matty Crompton. Her tone was neutral, so extraordinarily neutral that it would have been impossible to detect whether she spoke with irony or with conventional complacency, even if William had been giving her his complete attention, which he was not. He had found a meagre roof of thatch which he was ready to excavate. He took the trowel from her hands and removed several layers of earth, bristling with angry ant-warriors, littered with grubs and cocoons. A kind of seething attack accompanied his next moves, as he cut into the heart of the nest. Miss Crompton, on his instructions, gathered up the workers, grubs and cocoons in large clods of earth, interlayed with twigs and leaves.
‘They bite,’ she observed tersely, brushing her minute attackers from her wrists.
‘They do. They make a hole with their mandibles and inject formic acid through their gaster, which they curve round, very elegantly. Do you wish to retreat?’
‘No. I am a match for a few justifiably furious ants.’
‘So you could not say with the Fire Ants or the tucunderas in the forest, who made me suffer torments for weeks when I unwarily stirred them up. In Brazil the Fire Ant is King, they say, and rightly. It cannot be kept down, or diverted, or avoided—men leave their houses to escape its ravages.’
Matty Crompton, tightlipped, picked individual ants out of her cuffs and scattered them in the collecting boxes. William followed a tunnel, and came upon the brood-chamber of the ant Queen.
‘Here she is. In her glory.’
Matty Crompton peered in.
‘You would not suppose her to be of the same species as her rapid little servants—’
‘No. Though she is less disproportionately gross than the termite Queens, who are like huge inflated tubes, the size of haystacks compared to their docile little mates, who are in attendance in the same chamber, and the workers, who clamber all over them, cleaning and repairing and carrying away the endless succession of eggs as well as any debris.’
The Queen of the Wood Ants was only half as large again as her daughter-workers/servants. She was swollen and glossy, unlike the matt workers, and appeared to be striped red and white. The striping was in fact the result of the bloating of her body by the eggs inside it, which pushed apart her red-brown armour-plating, showing more fragile, more elastic, whitish skin in the interstices. Her head appeared relatively small. William picked her up with his forceps—several workers came with her, clinging to her legs. He placed her on cottonwool in a collecting-box and directed Miss Crompton in the collection of various sizes of worker ants and grubs and cocoons from various parts of the nest.
‘We should also take a sample of the earth and the vegetable matter, from which they have made their nest, and note what they appear to be eating—and the little girls may usefully experiment with their preference in foods, if they have patient natures, when they are in their new home.’
‘Should we not search for male ants also?’
‘There will be none, at this time of the year. They are only present in the nest in June, July and possibly August. They are born sometimes—it is thought—from eggs laid by unfertilised workers—a kind of parthenogenesis. They do not long survive the mating of the Queens in the Summer months. They are easy to recognise—they have wings and hugely developed eyes—and they do not appear to be in any way able to fend for themselves, or build, or forage. Natural Selection appears to have favoured in them the development of those skills which guarantee success in the nuptial dance, at the expense of the others—’
‘I cannot help observing that this appears to be the opposite to human societies, when it is the woman whose success in that kind of performance determines their lives—’
‘I have thought along those lines myself. There is a pleasing paradox in the bright balldresses, the floating of young girls in our world, and the dark erectness of the young men. In savage societies, as much as in birds and butterflies, it is the males who flaunt their beauty. But I do not know that the condition of the Queen here is much happier than that of the swarms of useless and disregarded suitors. I ask myself, are these little creatures, who run up and down, and carry, and feed each other lovingly, and bite enemies—are they truly individuals—or are they like the cells in our body, all parts of one whole, all directed by some mind—the Spirit of the Nest—which uses all, Queen, servants, slaves, dancing partners—for the good of the race itself, the species itself—’
‘And do you go on, Mr Adamson, to ask that question about human societies?’
‘It is tempting. I come from the North of England, where the scientific mill owners and the mine owners would like to make men into smoothly gliding parts of a giant machine. Dr Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufacturers wishes that workers could be trained to be co-operative—“to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.” Robert Owen’s experiments are the bright side of that way of thinking.’
‘That is interesting, but it is not the same question,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘The will of the mill owners is not the Spirit of the Nest.’
William’s brow furrowed as he thought this out. He said, ‘It might be. If you were to suppose the mill owners in their machine-making to be equally in fact obeying the will of the Spirit of the Hive.’
‘Ah,’ said Matty Crompton with a kind of glee. ‘I see where you are. A modern Calvinism by the back door, the nest door.’
‘You think a great deal, Miss Crompton.’
‘For a woman. You were about to add, “for a woman”, and then refrained, which was courteous. It is my great amusement, thinking. I think as bees sun themselves, or ants stroke aphids. Do you not thin
k we should provide an artificial ant-paradise with aphids, Mr Adamson?’
‘Indeed we should. We should surround it with plants beloved of aphids if it can be contrived. If their presence can be tolerated in the schoolroom.’
* * *
The little girls gathered to observe the ants with mingled squeals of fascination and repulsion. The ants set about excavating and organising their new home with exemplary industry. Miss Mead, an elderly soft-faced person with thinning hair and sprouting hairpins, made little speeches to the little girls about the kindness of the ants, who laboured for the good of each other, who could be observed greeting passing sisters with little drinks of nectar from their stored supply, who caressed each other, and nursed their unborn sisters in the egg, or in their larval form, with loving care, moving them from dormitory to dormitory, cleaning and feeding with unselfish devotion. Margaret jabbed Edith in the side with a quick elbow and said, ‘See, you are a little grub, you are just a little grub.’
‘You are all three grubbier than you should be,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘You have spread the earth much further than necessary, well beyond your pinafores.’
Miss Mead, who was obviously accustomed to ignoring small tiffs, embarked in a dreamy voice on the story of Cupid and Psyche.
‘Ants, my dears, have been seen as human helpers since the remotest antiquity. The story of the unfortunate Princess Psyche illustrates this. She was so beautiful, and so beloved of all who saw her, that the Goddess of Beauty, Venus, grew jealous of her, and told her son Cupid to punish the beautiful girl. The King, her father, was told that he had offended the gods, and must be punished by the wedding of his lovely daughter to a terrible flying serpent. He must dress her as a bride and carry her to the top of a terrible crag to await her monstrous bridegroom.’