Angels and Insects

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘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 de
eply. 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.

  Matty Crompton gave a name, at least a first name, to the child he thought of as his beetle-sprite, whom she recruited to keep an eye on the nest of the Blood-red Ants, on her afternoons off. Her name, it turned out, was Amy, and Miss Crompton asserted that it would do her good to get a bit of fresh air, having no family and nowhere to go, and to earn a few extra pennies. She sat with the gardener’s boy, who had to be dissuaded from dropping stag beetles down her neck, but was observant. It was these two who alerted William and Miss Crompton to the change in the activities of the slave-makers. Tom said he had noticed several of the red ants, as he put it, ‘prowling around like’, near the Stonewall Nest, and one day, sent by Tom, Amy came running across the lawn crying, ‘Come quick, come quick, Tom says the Bloody Ants are coming up in a fizzing great army, he says, he says, come quick something is up, he says. I saw them mysen, they are like gravy boiling, do come.’ She was still a thin, bowed, pinched little thing, but the project, and Tom, had put some colour into her cheeks, and she was developing a bird-like prettiness of which she was wholly unconscious.

  William and Matty sallied forth, armed with camp-stools and notebooks, and were there in time to observe the slave-makers’ forces, after a great deal of excited waving of antennae and legs and apparently inane running-about, suddenly get out, purposefully, led by an advance guard of particularly excited scouts, across the thirty yards or more that separated their smaller mounds from the Elm Tree Bole. They poured out in various regiments, accompanied, as William duly noticed, by a sizeable force of Wood Ant slaves, whose behaviour appeared to be identical to that of their masters.

  William wrote up what they observed, and read it aloud later to Matty Crompton and the rest of the inhabitants of the schoolroom.

  The great Slaving Raid took place on a hot June day, when the temperature had been rising steadily for some time, and with it the activities of the Blood-red Ants, as reported to our historians by our spies and pickets. We were led to speculate whether slave-raids, like other large exoduses and population changes, are instigated by the heat of the Sun. Ants do not move in cool weather, and sleep at night, even in the balmiest Summer days; they are cold-blooded, and need external warmth to get their desires and designs in motion. Be that as it may, the approach of Midsummer roused the Blood-red citizens to an increasing hum of conversation and activity. Messages came in more and more speedily and frequently. More and more scouts could be seen spying on the peaceful foraging of the Wood Ants, or busily trampling out trails between their nest and that of their unsuspecting victims.

  Finally, at some signal, awaited eagerly by the gossiping and seething crowds who had rushed in readiness to the agora on their hill-top, the red armies divided into four parties, which set out in direct lines across the terrain—following well-mapped routes, used, we suspected, on previous raids. When the four regiments had taken up their positions around the Elm Tree Bole Nest, the leaders of all four could be observed like little Napoleons rushing excitedly along the ranks, stirring up valour and determination with strokes of their antennae and agitated bodily movements. Suddenly the 1st Sanguine Troopers moved into concerted action, storming their way towards the entrances—so carefully barricaded at night, now gaping open to the incitatory sunlight. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th Regiments patrolled the positions they had taken up, with increasing forcefulness and ferocity.

  The Wood Ants sallied forth bravely to beat off the thieves and kidnappers. Waving their antennae, hurrying furiously, they bit at the legs and heads and feelers of the busy Bloody Ants, attempting, often with success, to grasp the invaders and sting them to death. We observed that the Sanguine Ants did not retaliate unless they were wholly impeded from progress. They had one purpose only—to snatch the unhatched infants from the Nursery, and to bear them back, in their fine jaws, to their own fortress. Whilst the martial Wood Ants battled to delay them, the tenders of the helpless young snatched up their infant sisters and tried to bear them away to safety. Most strange was to see Wood Ants, identical in appearance to the inhabitants of Elm Tree Bole, rushing forwards into the corridors of the castle, seizing cocoons and bearing them, not to safety, but out again to the ramparts and the waiting, protective corps of sanguinea who would be the rearguard for their safe passage back to the Red Fort. We were sufficient in numbers, as observers, to make quite sure, from repeated trackings of individual sanguinea and Wood Ants, that the residents of Elm Tree Bole did not distinguish between the ruddy foreigners, and their slaves of their own race, attacking both impartially.

  It was all over remarkably quickly. There were very few casualties. The Blood-red Ants had not come to slaughter, and had moved so swiftly, so single-mindedly, that the Wood Ant defenders—retaliating as they would to aggressive territorial invasions by their own kind—had been baffled and bewildered, and had allowed their attackers to make their limited assault without very effective opposition. Back streamed the victorious invaders, carefully bearing the captured nestlings whose fate was to live and die as sanguinea, not as true Wood Ants, to feed and nourish little sanguinea, to respond to the Summer sun by massing to attack their forgotten parents and sisters. They do not appear to have depleted the nursery inhabitants so severely as to disrupt the way of life of the Elm Tree Bole, which resumed, after the excitement, much as it had been. They did not, as human soldiers do, rape and pillage, loot and destroy. They came, and saw, and conquered, and achieved their object, and left again. It is believed that slave-making raids are made not more than once a year, so we were lucky to have—as the Red Ants themselves did—good spies to alert us to this interesting event.

  The English slave-makers are not so specialised as certain other larger slave-makers are. These are known as the Amazons, though they do not originate in the Amazon basin but are commonly found in Europe and North America. The Amazona—for example Polyergus rufescens—never excavate nests nor care for their young. Their name is probably bestowed because like the classical Amazon warriors, who were all women, led by a fierce queen, they have substituted belligerence for the delicate domestic virtues associated with the female sex. Unlike the Blood-red Ants, the Amazons have developed such powerful tools and weapons of fighting and thieving that they are unable to perform any other function, and depend entirely on their slaves to feed them and polish their ruddy armour. Their jaws cannot seize prey; they have to beg their slaves for food; but they can kill, and they can carry. It might be argued that Natural Selection has perfected these creatures as fighting machines, but in the process has rendered them irrevocably dependent and parasitic. We may ask if there are not lessons to be learned by ourselves from this curious and extreme social state.

  ‘Nature does indeed teach us,’ said Miss Mead. ‘A terrible war is being waged at present across the Atlantic, to secure not only the liberation of the unfortunate slaves, but the moral salvation of those whose leisure and enrichment are sustained by their cruel labours.’

  ‘And we are urged’, said Matty Crompton, ‘to fight on the side of the slave-makers, to preserve the work, that is the daily bread, of our own cotton-mill workers. And our own philanthropists, in turn,
seek to rescue those machine-slaves from their specialised labour. I do not know quite where these thoughts may lead us.’

  ‘Analogy is a slippery tool,’ said William. ‘Men are not ants.’

  Nevertheless, in the hot days just after Midsummer, when they increased their vigilance in order to observe, if possible, the nuptial flight of the Queens and their suitors, he was hard put to it not to see his own life in terms of a diminishing analogy with the tiny creatures. He had worked so hard, watching, counting, dissecting, tracking, that his dreams were prickling with twitching antennae, advancing armies, gnashing mandibles and dark, inscrutable complex eyes. His vision of his own biological processes—his frenzied, delicious mating, so abruptly terminated, his consumption of the regular meals prepared by the darkly quiet forces behind the baize doors, the very regularity of his watching, dictated by the regularity of the rhythms of the nest, brought him insensibly to see himself as a kind of complex sum of his nerve-cells and instinctive desires, his automatic social responses of deference or required kindness or paternal affection. One ant in an anthill was neither here nor there, was dispensable, was nothing. This was intensified, despite his recognition of the grimly comic aspect of his reaction, by the recording of the fate of the male ants. This passage he did not read aloud to the whole team of researchers; he showed it in the Winter, after several rewritings, to his chief collaborator, Matty Crompton.

  We were fortunate also, in 1862, to be able to observe the spectacle of the wedding dance of the thousands of winged Queens and aspiring suitors, who swarmed on the Osborne Nest and the Elm Tree Bole as if at a given signal, a trumpet-sound, or the resonant hum of a gong. Vigilant young eyes had observed young males attempting to leave the nest some days earlier, and being held back by determined guardians until the appointed time. We had had some idea when that might be, for we had noted the exact date of the nuptial ceremonies during the previous Summer, when the whirling couples had plummeted, like so many Icaruses or falling angels, to a creamy suffocation, or death by drowning in a steaming cauldron of fragrant Mysore in the midst of our own strawberry picnic. The appointed day in 1862 was the 27th June, and the ball-guests emerged in clouds of gauze and took to the air in fragile spires. Many ants consummate their unions in flight, embracing each other high above the earth. The Wood Ants appear to mate in fact on the earth—the males of this species are nearer in size to the Queens than in many others, where the Queen may exceed her consort by twenty times or more in bulk, and can easily transport her lover through the empyrean. We were unable on this occasion to observe whether the Wood Ant Queen practises polyandry, though other species of ants are known to do so—we hope to be able to observe more closely next year. We did observe heaps of fiercely struggling and battling black bodies, wrapped in their diaphanous veiling, each Queen fought for by ten or twenty determined suitors, who will hang fiercely on to each other’s legs, to get a purchase anywhere at all—more like a battle in Rugby Football than the elegant minuet for which their silky robes might seem fitted. The little workers stand by and observe, occasionally pulling at one or other of the actors in this passionate drama. We might imagine them feeling a certain complacency at their immunity from the terrible desire, both murderous and suicidal as well as amorous, which drives the winged sexual creatures. They appear also to feel a certain organising interest in things going well, and will give a pull or a push or a tweak to one or other of the embracing combatants—we could not ascertain the purpose of these interventions, though in other breeds of more primitive ant, where mating takes place in the nest, the workers are known to control the access of the males to the Queens, choosing which shall be admitted to their presence and which shall be kept at bay with jaws and sting.