Angels and Insects

by A. S. Byatt

  If he had a place, it was in the spaces between the cushioned family softnesses and the closed-away servile hierarchies in the attics and cellars and back rooms. In the schoolroom, for instance, where he found himself sometimes idly observing the inhabitants of the glass hive and the inverted glass anthill, both successfully established and busily at work. He went there when he knew the children were out playing or walking, and there occasionally he would find Matty Crompton, whose status in the household, he sometimes ruefully thought, had the same uncertainty as his own. They were both poor, both semi-employed, both, now, relations of the masters but not masters. He did not say this to Miss Crompton, who was more guarded with him since his marriage, and addressed him with punctilious respect. He did begin to wonder how she spent her days, as he began also to notice the hard work of creatures like the beetle-boiling sprite, and came to the conclusion that Matty Crompton was required to ‘make herself useful’ without any demeaning named post. Women were better at making themselves useful, he supposed. Houses such as this were run for and by women. Harald Alabaster was master, but he was, as far as the whirring of domestic clocks and wheels went, a deus absconditus, who set it all in motion, and might at a pinch stop it, but had little to do with its use of energy.

  It was a chance suggestion of Matty Crompton’s, however, that put him in the way of purposeful activity again. He found her, one late spring morning, sitting at the table in front of the ant heap with a china saucer of fragments of fruit and cake and meat, and a large notebook, in which she was busily writing.

  ‘Good morning. I hope I don’t disturb you.’

  ‘By no means. I am conducting experiments upon the behaviour of these fascinating creatures. You will no doubt find my researches crude—’

  He demurred, and asked what she was studying.

  ‘I have been putting various foods upon the surface of the earth in the tank and counting the number of ants who hurry to avail themselves of the food and how rapidly they dispose of it, and in what way. Come and look—they are greatly attracted to fragments of melon and grapes—it has taken half an hour almost exactly for this scrap of sweet fruit to become no more than a living pincushion. They always begin in the same way, by biting into the fruit and absorbing it—burying their bodies in it if it can be done—from below, and sucking it slowly dry. Whereas small scraps of ham are lifted bodily—by several ants at once—and inserted into the nest through cracks in the surface—where they are handed to other ants. You cannot but admire the spirit of co-operation. You cannot but admire the way in which they communicate to each other the existence of the melon or ham, the number of ants needed to suck or transport it. Their processes appear to be random but are so purposeful—all this swarming I do believe can be translated into messages given and received. I do hope my formica prima is not drowned in juice. She has not stirred for quite ten minutes.’

  ‘You are at the point of recognising individual ants?’

  ‘For some hours together I can follow one—if ever I have some hours—but can think of no method of marking one so that I would know it again. I have, I think, observed that some ants are considerably more active than others, they stir up others to act, they change task or direction. But I can never stay long enough at one time.’

  ‘If we were to stain one with cochineal—its fellows might reject it—’

  ‘That would be a way, possibly—but would the colour appear—?’

  ‘May I see your book?’

  He looked at her incisive, careful drawings, in pencil, in Indian ink, of ants feeding, ants fighting, ants rearing up to regurgitate nectar for each other, ants stroking larvae and carrying cocoons.

  ‘You put me to shame, Miss Crompton. I have been secretly worrying myself about the—the cutting-short of my hoped-for researches into insect life in the Amazon basin—by present good fortune—and here are you, doing what I should be doing, observing the unknown world which is to hand.’

  ‘My sphere is naturally more limited. I look naturally closer to hand.’

  He felt her glance surveying him, assessing him. She said, ‘If you were to wish to make a study of the great ant heap from which this colony originated—for example—I am sure both I and the children could be co-opted as humble helpers, and counters—’

  ‘I have noticed nests of both Acanthomyops fuliginosus and of the slave-making Formica sanguinea near our original citadel. A comparative study might yield much interest—’

  ‘We cannot see what goes on inside, as here—’

  ‘No, but we can devise ways and means of seeing very much. I am grateful to you, Miss Crompton.’ He was about to say, ‘You have restored me to a kind of hope,’ but realised in time that this was inappropriate, even faintly disloyal.

  This conversation took place, as far as he could later remember, in the spring of 1861, shortly after the birth of Agnes and Dora. He had been at Bredely almost exactly a year. Later, he was to see the conversation as the origin of the increasingly ambitious study of the ant communities, and to a lesser extent the beehives in the Hall grounds, which was to be conducted over the next three years by himself and a team of helpers—the schoolroom children and Miss Mead, the gardener’s boy and his little brother, and the watchful and efficient Matty Crompton herself. Ants are seasonal creatures, who live intensely in the Summer months and sleep through the cold days. William was beginning to discover in 1861 that his own life was to be subject to such seasonal fluctuations. Eugenia’s renewal of interest in him, after the little girls were safely in the nursery with Peggy Madden and her full-blown breasts, thus coincided with the events in the field to which Miss Crompton was inviting him to pay attention. Eugenia the young matron was no longer ready to join in any communal saunter along the river bank, let alone grubbing about in the earth of the Elm Copse, but she did appear there once or twice, delicious and vulnerable in white muslin, with sky-blue ribbons, and a little white parasol, and stand, waiting, for his attention, which she rewarded with a slow, secret little smile. Mostly she would then turn away and make her slow way back to the house, knowing that he must follow, that he would drop his trowel and hurry to join her, that his permitted hand would rest lovingly on her blue sash as, with a certain consciousness, they made their way indoors, into their own rooms. Nevertheless, in a somewhat haphazard way, in that first year, several nests were found and named.

  There was the Mother Nest, with a six-foot mound and an estimated four-foot underground city, nicknamed irreverently Osborne Nest, for Queen Victoria’s Summer retreat, by the vivacious Margaret. There were its satellites or colonies, Elm Tree Bole, Bramble Patch Colony and Stonewall Nest, and one that had fallen into disuse, named by Miss Mead, who had a poetic touch, The Deserted Village. It was Miss Mead, too, who was responsible for the Elm Tree Bole, an accurate description of the site of the thriving young nest in the tree stump, but also a reference to Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ describing the expatriate nostalgia for an English Spring which William had felt so strongly in the seasonless warmth of the Tropics.

  Oh, to be in England

  Now that April’s there

  And whoever wakes in England

  Sees, some morning, unaware,

  That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

  Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

  While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

  In England—now!

  It was not until the subsequent Spring, in 1862, that his contrary yearnings for the tropical smells, and the howler monkeys and the space of the river and the easy-going people he had known, were to begin to work with their own energies. In 1861 he told Miss Mead and Matty Crompton how much this poem had meant to him, how the tiny leaves had become etched on his imagination, the spring freshness, and they said how interesting it all was. The Mother Nest and its satellites were all cities of the Wood Ants, Formica rufa. Cities were also discovered of the Jet-Black Ants—Acanthomyops fuliginosus, the Yellow Lawn Ants, Acanth
omyops umbratus, and the Blood-red slave-makers, Formica sanguinea. Miss Mead wanted to name the citadels of these last Pandemonium, after Milton’s city of demons, and stood in the clearing, her spectacles shining in the sunlight, and recited Paradise Lost.

  ‘… but chief the spacious hall …

  Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air

  Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings.’

  ‘Those were bees,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘It goes on,

  As bees

  In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,

  Pour forth their populous youth about the hive

  In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers

  Fly to and fro, or on the smoothèd plank,

  The suburb of their straw-built citadel,

  New rubbed with balm, expatiate and confer

  Their state affairs: so thick the aery crowd

  Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given,

  Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed

  In bigness to surpass earth’s giant-sons,

  Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room

  Throng numberless, like that pygmean race

  Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves,

  Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side

  Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,

  Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon

  Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth

  Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance

  Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;

  At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.

  ‘We should rename the beehive Pandemonium if we are to have Miltonic references.’

  William observed that Milton was accurate about his bees, and that Miss Crompton knew her Milton extraordinarily thoroughly.

  ‘I was made to commit that passage to memory as an example of heroic comparison,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘I cannot say I am sorry—it is very beautiful—and I cannot claim the learning was difficult. I have a quick and retentive memory. But if we call the beehive Pandemonium, what name shall we give to the home of the Blood-red slave-makers?’

  ‘It is a horrible trade,’ said Miss Mead, with unexpected vehemence. ‘I have never wept so over a book as I wept over Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I pray nightly for the cause of President Lincoln.’

  The first shots had just been fired in the war between the states. Opinions were divided in Bredely about the issue—much of the family money came from the Lancashire cotton trade—which was therefore not on the whole discussed. William told Miss Mead that he had seen slavery at work on the Brazilian rubber plantations, and agreed that it was evil, though it worked differently in that country where few of the population were racially pure, either white, black or Indian.

  ‘Several of my own most agreeable companions there’, he said, ‘were liberated Negroes, men of strong principles and kindly dispositions.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Matty Crompton.

  ‘And there is a law forbidding the Portuguese to enslave the Indians by buying them as infants from the chiefs of the tribes. This has led to a curious euphemism used by the Portuguese traders in human flesh. They use the word “ransom”—resgatar—to mean that they purchase people. The Manáos tribe are very warlike and enslave their captives, who are then “ransomed” from them by the Portuguese and taken into slavery. So that resgatar is the general word for child-purchase along the river. And the concept of ransom—in both the theological and humane sense—is thereby debased.’

  ‘How very terrible,’ said Miss Mead. ‘And you saw these things.’

  ‘I saw things I should not dream of telling you,’ said William, ‘for fear of giving you nightmares. I also saw inconceivable human kindness and good fellowship, especially amongst those of black and mixed race.’

  He felt Miss Crompton’s keen look again. She was like a bird, sharp-eyed and watchful. She said, ‘I wish you would tell us more. We should not live in ignorance of the rest of the world.’

  ‘I will save my traveller’s tales for the Winter firesides. Now, we must name the Blood-red Ants’ nest.’

  ‘We might call it Athens with perfect justice,’ said Miss Crompton, ‘since the Greek civilisation we so much admire was founded on slavery, and I daresay could not have shone so brightly without it. But its architecture—if it can be called architecture—is less glorious.’

  The small inhabitants of the place hurried beneath and between their feet, nervous and irritable, carrying scraps and threads of this and that.

  ‘I propose Red Fort,’ said William. ‘That sounds warlike enough, and brings in the colour of the sanguinea.’

  ‘Red Fort let it be,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘I shall embark on its geography and history, if not ab urbe condita then from our discovery of it.’

  * * *

  And once or twice more he found her diligently at work, recording episodes in the lives of hive and city. The Wood Ants all over that part of Surrey chose Midsummer Day for their nuptial flight. No one was prepared for this in 1861—indeed, the young adults and the schoolroom inhabitants were all partaking of a strawberry picnic on the lawn when the swarming began, and hundreds of frantic, tumbling winged creatures, male and female, dropped out of the sky into the cucumber sandwiches and the silver cream jugs, scurrying away in attached pairs, drowning in strawberry juice and Orange Pekoe, scrambling across spoons and lace doilies. Eugenia was much put out, and plucked various errant males out of her collar with a fastidious pout of disgust, helped by William, who brushed the clinging feet from her hair and her sunshade. The little girls ran up and down squealing and flapping. Miss Crompton took out her sketchbook and drew. When Elaine tried to peep at her drawings she snapped the book shut and put it away in her basket, turning her attention to the battle between Alabasters and ants, shaking out the tablecloth with a forceful crack and putting away the butter. The dead and dying lay in stiff silky heaps of silver and black. The cook was sweeping them from the kitchen windowsill with a broom. As the servants hurried in with the picnic things, William caught another glimpse of his little beetle-sprite, trotting grimly across the grass with the heavy tea urn. Miss Crompton, relieved of the responsibility, took out her sketchbook again. William—it was the end of his second honeymoon—followed Eugenia indoors to change her dress, to make sure no swarming creature was caught in any frill or fold of starched cotton.

  In the Winter, fretted by cold, both human in Eugenia and climatic, William had his first real argument with Harald Alabaster. The cold was not good for Harald, either. The Studium was as far from the kitchen and its heating appliances as it could be, to preserve the master of the house from cooking smells and smoke, but it was therefore, even with a fire burning in its grate, cold to work in. Winter brought liveliness to the younger men in the house. Edgar and Lionel were always out, shooting or hunting, coming back with heavy burdens of bleeding creatures, feathers and fur spattered with blood, and blood often on their hands and clothing, too. Their liveliness made their father’s isolation appear greater. He seemed almost confined to his Studium and almost invisible if he took walks along the corridors, or hovered in the doorway of his wife’s hot little nest. He sent a servant to ask William to come and look at a new passage he had put together on evidences of divine providence.

  ‘I thought you might care to look this over, the more because it has certain arguments in it—certain illustrations—which fall very much in your province. I have come at the argument from the direction of mystery and the certainty of love. Perhaps you will be so good as to look it over.’

  He held out his pages, written in a tiny, precise script, just beginning to show evidences of the shakiness of elderly hands, the weakening of nerves and muscles. The paper had been much worked and reworked, and resembled a kind of stitched patchwork, with paragraphs crossed out with black bars, reinserted higher or lower, circled and divided. William sat down in his father-in-law’s chair and tried to ma
ke sense of it, with mounting irritation. It was a new rehearsal of old arguments, some of which Harald had already, in conversation, rejected as untenable.

  ‘I will praise thee,’ cries the author of the 139th Psalm, ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.’ And the Psalmist continues quite as if he were aware of the current debates about the origin of living creatures and the development of embryos. ‘My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.’

  We have all had these intuitions, these breathings, of awe at being fearfully and wonderfully made, and it is our natural instinct to assume a maker of such intricacy, which our developed minds may hardly believe to have come about by blind chance. The Psalmist here forestalls the theorists of development by his knowledge of the perfection of substance and the continuous fashioning which goes to make living beings. He writes earlier of God’s loving care of the unborn infant, in verse 13, ‘For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.’ It is not unreasonable to ask in what way such a Deity differs from that force which Mr Darwin calls Natural Selection, when he writes, ‘It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being …”