by A. S. Byatt
How busy, how festive, how happy the dancing seemed! How tragic its outcome for almost all of the participants! The nuptial flight of the Wood Ants offers a supremely moving example of the inexorable secret work of Natural Selection, so that anyone observing it must be struck by how completely Mr Darwin’s ideas might seem to explain it. The males struggle mightily to possess the winged Queens; they must prove their strength of flight, their combative skills, their powers of attracting and gaining the trust of the wary female, spoiled as she is by choice of an almost infinite number of pressing lovers. And the Queens themselves, who emerge in their hundreds of hundreds, must possess strength and skill and cunning and tenacity to survive more than a very few moments after successful fecundation, let alone to start a nest. The time in the blue sky, the dizzy whirling in the gauzy finery lasts only a few hours. Then they must snap off their wings, like a young girl stepping out of her wedding veils, and scurry away to find a safe place to found a new nest-colony. Most fall prey to birds, other insects, frogs and toads, hedgehogs and trampling humans. Few indeed manage to make their way again underground, where they will lay their first eggs, nourish their first brood of daughters—miserable dwarfs, fragile and slow, these early children—and in due course, as the workers take over the running of the nursery and the provision of food, they will forget that they ever saw the sun, or thought for themselves, or chose a path to run on, or flew in the Midsummer blue. They become egg-laying machines, gross and glistening, endlessly licked, caressed, soothed and smoothed—veritable Prisoners of Love. This is the true nature of the Venus under the Mountain, in this miniature world a creature immobilised by her function of breeding, by the blind violence of her passions.
And what of the males? Their fate, even more poignantly, exemplifies the remorseless random purposefulness of Dame Nature, of Natural Selection. It is believed that early males of primitive ants were also in some sense workers, members of the community. But as the Societies of insects became more complex, more truly interdependent, the sexual forms of the creatures involved became more and more specialised. It is not generally known that worker-ants can and do, upon occasion, lay eggs, from which, it appears, only male children will emerge. But they appear to do this only if the Queen is ailing, or the nest is threatened. In general the Queens mother the whole society, and have changed in body to be able to do so, swollen with eggs, enough eggs fertilised from this one matrimonial encounter for a whole generation. Changes in bodily form according to function exist throughout the insect societies. There are ants whose heads exactly fit to plug the holes in the stems of plants where they live, which when not plugged are entrances and exits. There are ants known as Repletes, hung up in cellars like living wineskins, bloated with stored nectar. And the males, too, have become specialised, as factory-hands are specialised hands for the making of pin-heads or brackets. Their whole existence is directed only to the nuptial dance and the fertilisation of the Queens. Their eyes are huge and keen. Their sexual organs, as the fatal day approaches, occupy almost the whole of their body. They are flying amorous projectiles, truly no more than the burning arrows of the winged and blindfold god of Love. And after their day of glory, they are unnecessary and unwanted. They run hither and thither, aimlessly, draggle-winged. They are beaten back for the most part from the doors of their home nests, and driven away to mope and die in the cooling evenings of late Summer and early Autumn. Like the drones of the beehive they toil not, neither do they spin, though like the drones too, they are pampered in the early stages of their lives, tolerated pretty parasites, who dirty and disturb the calm workings of the nest, who must be fed on honey-dew and cleaned up after in the corridors. The drones, too, as Autumn approaches, meet with a terrible fate. One morning in the hive a mysterious Authority arms and alerts the worker-sisters, who descend on the sleeping hordes of velvet slugabeds, and proceed to tear them limb from limb, to pierce, to sever, to blind, to bundle bleeding out of doors, and remorselessly to refuse readmission. How profligate is Nature of her seeds, of her sons, making thousands that one may pass on his inheritance to sons and daughters.
‘Very eloquent,’ commented Matty Crompton, drily. ‘I am quite overcome with pity for these poor, useless male creatures. I must admit I had never seen them in that light before. Do you not think you may have been somewhat anthropomorphic in your choice of rhetoric?’
‘I thought that was our intention, in this History. To appeal to a wide audience, by telling truths—scientific truths—with a note of the fabulous. I have perhaps overdone it. I could tone it down.’
‘I am quite sure you should not—it will do excellently as it is—it will appeal greatly to the dramatic emotions—I have had an idea of writing some real fables of my own, to go with my little drawings of mestizo fairy-insects. I should like to emulate La Fontaine—the tale of the grasshopper and the ant, you know—only more accurately. And I have been making a collection of literary citations in a commonplace book, which I thought might be placed at the head of your chapters. It is important that the book be delightful as well as profound and truthful, is it not? I found a wonderful sonnet by poor mad John Clare, which, like Milton’s Pandemonium-beehive, seems to suggest that our idea of fairies may be only an anthropomorphising of insects. I like your Venus under the Mountain. She is related to the Little People under the Hill of all British fairy lore. I am convinced that many of the flying demons on church walls are inspired by stag beetles with their brows. How I go on! Here is the Clare. Tell me what you think. Rulers and labourers alike were men to him, you will see.’
What wonder strikes the curious, while he views
The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree
Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:
Pausing, annoyed, we know not what we see,
Such government and thought there seem to be;
Some looking on, and urging some to toil,
Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly;
And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil
One ant or two to carry, quickly then
A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.
Surely they speak a language whisperingly,
Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways
Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be
Deformed remnants of the fairy-days.
She was keen, she was resourceful, William thought. He half-wished he could confide in her about his own drone-nature, as he increasingly perceived it, though that, of course, was impossible for all sorts of reasons. He could not betray Eugenia, or demean himself by complaining of Eugenia. Moreover, to complain in this way would make him look foolish. He had yearned for Eugenia, and he had Eugenia, and he was bodily in thrall to Eugenia, as must, in this confined community, be apparent even to a sexless being like Miss Crompton.
It interested him, that he thought of her as sexless. That thought itself might have arisen out of some analogy with the worker ants. She was dry, was Matty Crompton. She did not, he was coming to see, suffer fools gladly. He was beginning to think that there were all sorts of frustrated ambitions contained in that sharp, bony body, behind those watchful black eyes. She was determined and inventive about the book. She was fiercely intent, not only on its production, but on its success. Why? He himself had an unspoken, almost unacknowledged vision of making enough money to be able to set out again for the Southern Hemisphere independent of Harald and Eugenia, but Miss Crompton could not want that, could not know that he wanted that, could not want him to go, when he added so much to the interest of her life. He did not think she was so altruistic a being.
The end of the Summer made him think rather sourly of the fate of the drones, not only in terms of himself and the ants, but in terms of other male members of the household. Harald was enmeshed in the problems of instinct and intelligence and his powers of thought seemed paralysed. Lionel had cracked his ankle jumping over a park wall for a dare, and was laid up on the terrace, on a rattan chaise longu
e, complaining loudly of his immobility. Edgar went riding, and paid long visits to various neighbouring squires. Robin Swinnerton and Rowena were back in the neighbourhood, still childless. Robin invited William to ride with him, and said that he envied him his luck: ‘A man feels a fool, you know, if an heir doesn’t put in an appearance in due course—and unlike Edgar, I don’t have little love-children all over the county to show I can father them if I choose.’
‘I know nothing about Edgar’s private life.’
‘A veritable centaur, or do I mean a satyr? A man of appetites—no girl is safe, they say, except the most unimpeachably respectable young creatures, who innocently set their caps at him and whom he avoids like the plague. He likes a rough and tumble, he says. I don’t think a man should behave as he does, though there’s no denying plenty do, maybe most.’
William, about to be righteously indignant, remembered various golden, amber and coffee-skinned creatures he had loved on hot nights—and smiled awkwardly.
‘Wild oats,’ said Robin Swinnerton, ‘according to Edgar, are stronger and more savoury than the cultivated kind. I always meant to save myself, to commit myself—to one.’
‘You have not been married long,’ said William uncomfortably. ‘You should not lose hope, I am sure.’
‘I do not,’ said Robin. ‘But Rowena is downcast, and looks somewhat enviously at Eugenia’s bliss. Your little ones are very true to type—veritable Alabasters.’
‘It is as though environment were everything and inheritance nothing, I sometimes think. They suck in Alabaster substance and grow into perfect little Alabasters—I only very rarely catch glimpses of myself in their expression—’
He thought of the Wood Ants enslaved by the sanguinea, who believed they were sanguinea, and shook himself. Men are not ants, said William Adamson to himself, and besides, the analogy will not do, an enslaved Wood Ant looks like a Wood Ant, tho’ to a sanguinea it may smell Blood-red. I am convinced their modes of recognition are almost entirely olfactory. Though it is possible they navigate by the sun, and that is to do with the eyes.
‘You are dreaming,’ said Robin Swinnerton. ‘I propose a gallop, if you are agreeable.
Early one morning, that Autumn, a disagreeable incident revealed the centaur or satyr in Edgar to William. William had risen early and was making his way to the stable yard when he heard a kind of choking sound in a scullery at one side of the corridor and turned aside to investigate. Inside the scullery was Edgar, bending over the sink, his back to William. In Edgar’s grasp, William saw slowly, was his little beetle-sprite, Amy, whose curls had become brighter and thicker over the Summer, though her face remained white and pointed. Edgar had bent her backwards, and had one hand over her mouth and one thrust into her bodice. His buttocks swelled behind him: his genitals were pushed up against Amy’s skirts. William said, ‘Amy?’
He wondered if he should retreat. Amy made an inarticulate cry. Edgar said, ‘I didn’t know you had an interest in this little thing.’
‘I don’t. Not a personal one. In her general wellbeing—’
‘Ah. Her general wellbeing. Tell him, Amy. Was I hurting you? Were my attentions unwelcome, perhaps?’
Amy was still bent back over the sink. Edgar withdrew his arm from her clothing with the deliberation of a trout-tickler leaving a trout stream. His fingermarks could be seen on Amy’s skin, round her mouth and chin. She gasped. ‘No, sir. No, sir. No harm. I am quite well, Mr Adamson. Please.’
William was not clear what the plea meant. Perhaps she was not clear herself. In any case, Edgar stepped back, and she stood up, head hanging, hands nervously rearranging her buttons and waistband.
‘I think you should apologise, Sir, and leave us,’ said Edgar coldly and heavily.
‘I think Amy should run away,’ said William. ‘I think she would do best to run away.’
‘Sir?’ said Amy in a very small voice, to Edgar.
‘Run off then, child,’ said Edgar. ‘I can always find you when I want you.’
His large pale mouth was unsmiling as he said this. It was a statement of fact. Amy ducked a vague obeisance at both men, and scuttled away.
Edgar said, ‘The servants in this house are no concern of yours, Adamson. You do not pay their wages, and I’ll thank you not to interfere with them.’
‘That little creature is no more than a child,’ said William. ‘And one who has never had a childhood—’
‘Nonsense. She is a nice little packet of flesh, and her heart beats faster when I feel for it, and her little mouth opens sweetly and eagerly. You know nothing, Adamson. I have noticed you know nothing. Go back to your beetles, and your creepy-crawlies. I won’t hurt the little puss, you can believe. Just add a bit of natural spice. Anyway, it’s none of your business. You are a hanger-on.’
‘And I have yet to learn what use you are to the world, or anyone in it,’ said William, his temper rising. Surprisingly, Edgar laughed at this, briefly, and without a smile.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I have noticed you know nothing.’
And he pushed past William and went out to the stables.
The book was put together in a provisional way during the Winter of 1862. Its final title was to be
THE SWARMING CITY
A Natural History of a Woodland Society,
its polity, its economy, its arms and defences,
its origin, expansion and decline.
William worked on it fairly steadily, and Matty Crompton read and revised the drafts, and made fair copies of the final versions. It had always been their intention to devote one more Summer to the checking and revision of the previous Summer’s observations. Two years’ data were better than one, and William wrote off with queries about comparative observations to various myrmecological parts of the world. The project of a publishable book was, by tacit consent, shared only by William and Miss Crompton: there was, in fact, no ostensible reason why this should have been so, but they both behaved from the beginning conspiratorially, as though the family should think of the ant-study as a family educational amusement, a gentleman’s use of leisure time, whilst they, the writers, knew differently.
The book took shape. The first part was narrative, a kind of children’s voyage of discovery into the mysterious worlds that lay around them. Chapter 1 was to be
THE EXPLORERS DISCOVER THE CITY
and William wrote sketches of the children, of Tom and Amy, of Miss Mead and her poetical comparisons, though he found himself unable to characterise either himself or Matty Crompton, and used a narrative voice that was a kind of royal or scientific We, to include both of them, or either of them, at given points in time. Miss Crompton brightened this passage considerably with little forgotten details of friendly rivalry between the little girls, or fragments of picnics carried off by the foraging ants.
The second chapter was
THE NAMING AND MAPPING OF THE COLONIES
and then followed the serious work of describing their workings:
Builders, sweepers, excavators.
The nursery, the dormitory, the kitchen.
Other Inhabitants: Pets, pests, predators,
temporary visitors and ant-cattle.
The Defence of the City: War and Invasion.
Prisoners of Love: The Queens, the Drones,
the Marriage flight and the Foundations
of new Colonies.
The Civic Order and Authority: What is the source
of power and decisions?
After this, William planned some more abstract, questioning chapters. He debated with himself on various possible headings:
Instinct or Intelligence
Design or Hasard
The Individual and the Commonwealth
What Is an Individual?