Angels and Insects (6 page)

‘How beautiful all this is,’ she said. ‘How
lucky
I always feel to live just here, of all spots on the earth. To see the same flowers come out every spring in the meadows, and the same stream always running. I suppose it must seem a very
bounded
existence to you, with your experience of the world. But my roots go so deep …’

‘When I was in the Amazons,’ he answered simply and truthfully, ‘I was haunted by an image of an English meadow in spring—just as it is today, with the flowers, and the new grass, and the early blossom, and the little breeze lifting everything, and the earth smelling fresh after the rain. It seemed to me that such scenes were
truly
Paradise—that there was not anything on earth more beautiful than an English bank in flower, than an English mixed hedge, with roses and hawthorn, honeysuckle and bryony. Before I went, I had read highly coloured accounts of the brilliance of the tropical jungle, the flowers and fruits and gaudy creatures, but there is nothing there so
colourful
as this is. It is all a monotonous sameness of green, and such a mass of struggling, climbing, suffocating vegetation—often you cannot see the sky. It is true that the weather is like that of the Golden Age—everything flowers and fruits perpetually and simultaneously in the tropical heat, you have always
Spring, Summer and Autumn at once, and no Winter. But there is something inimical about the vegetation itself. There is a kind of tree called the Sipó Matador—which translates, the Murderer Sipó—which grows tall and thin like a creeper and clings to another tree, to make its way up the thirty, forty feet to the canopy, eating its way into the very substance of its host until that dies—and the Sipó perforce crashes down with it. You hear the strange retorts of crashing trees suddenly in the silence, like cracks of gunshot, a terrible and terrifying sound I could not for some months explain to myself. Everything there is inordinate, Miss Alabaster. There is a form of the violet, there—see, here are some—that grow to be a huge tree. And yet
that
is in so many ways the innocent, the unfallen world, the virgin forest, the wild people in the interior who are as unaware of modern ways—modern evils—as our first parents. There are strange analogies. Out there, no woman may touch a snake. They run to ask you to kill one for them. I have killed
many
snakes for frightened women. I have been fetched considerable distances to do so. The connection of the woman and the snake in the garden is made even out there, as though it is indeed part of some universal pattern of symbols, even where Genesis has never been heard of—I talk too much, I bore you, I am afraid.’

‘Oh no. I am quite fascinated. I am glad to hear that our Spring world in some sense remains your ideal. I want you to be happy here, Mr Adamson. And I am most intrigued by what you have to say of the women and snakes. Did you live entirely without the company of civilised peoples, Mr Adamson? Among naked savages?’

‘Not entirely. I had various friends, of all colours and races, during my stay in various communities. But sometimes, yes, I was the only white guest in tribal villages.’

‘Were you not afraid?’

‘Oh, often. Upon two occasions I overheard plots to murder me,
made by men ignorant of my knowledge of their tongue. But also I met with much kindness and friendship from people not so simple as you might suppose from seeing them.’

‘Are they really naked, and painted?’

‘Some are. Some are part-clothed. Some wholly clothed. They are greatly given to decorating their skins with vegetable dyes.’

He was aware of the limpid blue eyes resting on him, and felt that behind her delicate frown she was considering his relations with the naked people. And then felt that his thoughts smutched her, that he was too muddied and dirty to think of her, let alone touch at her secret thoughts from his own secret self. He said, ‘Those floating grasses, even, remind me of the great floating islands of uprooted trees and creepers and bushes that make their way along the great river. I used to compare those to
Paradise Lost
. I read my Milton in my rest-times. I thought of the passage where Paradise is cast loose, after the Deluge.’

Matty Crompton, without lifting her eyes from the stream surface, provided the quotation.

‘Clever Matty,’ said Eugenia. Matty Crompton did not answer, but made a sudden plunge and twist with her fishing net and brought up a thrashing, furious fish, a stickleback, large, at least for a stickleback, rosy-breasted and olive-backed. She tipped it out of the net into the jar with the other captives, and the little girls crowded round to look.

The creature gasped for a moment and floated inert. Then it could be seen to gather its forces. It blushed rosier—its chest was the most amazing colour, a fiery pink overlaid, or underlaid, with the olive colour that pervaded the rest of it. It raised its dorsal fin, which became a kind of spiny, draconian ridge, and then it became an almost invisible whirling lash, attacking the other fish, who had nowhere, in their cylindrical prison, to hide. The water boiled. Eugenia began to laugh, and Elaine began to cry. William came to the rescue, pouring fish from jar to jar until, after some gasping on grass, he had managed to isolate the rosy-waistcoated aggressor in a jar of his own. The other fish opened and closed their tremulous mouths. Elaine crouched over them.

William said, ‘It is very interesting that it is only this very
aggressive
male who has the pink coat. Two of the others are male, but they are not flushed with anger, or elation, as he is. Mr Wallace argues that females are dull because they keep the nests in general, but this father both makes and guards his own hatchery until the fry swim away. And yet he remains an angry red, perhaps as a warning, long after the need to attract a female into his handsome house has quite vanished.’

Matty said, ‘We have probably orphaned his eggs.’

‘Put him back,’ said Elaine.

‘No, no, bring him home, let us keep him awhile, and put him back when we have studied him,’ said Miss Mead. ‘He will build another nest. Thousands of fish eggs are eaten every minute, Elaine, it is the way of Nature.’

‘
We
are not Nature,’ said Elaine.

‘What else are we?’ asked Matty Crompton. She had not thought out her theology, William said to himself, without speaking out loud. Nature was smiling and cruel, that was clear. He offered his hands to Eugenia, to help her up the bank of the stream, and she took hold with her hands, gripping his, through her cotton
gloves, always through cotton gloves, warmed by her warmth, impregnated by whatever it was that breathed from her skin.

It was difficult to know what Harald Alabaster did all day. He did not go out, as his sons did, though he was occasionally to be observed taking a solitary twilight stroll amongst the flower-beds, his hands clasped in the small of his back, his head down. He did not appear to occupy himself with what he had so assiduously, if indiscriminately, collected. That was left to William. When William went to the hexagonal Studium to report progress, he was given a glass of port or sherry, and listened to intently. Sometimes they spoke—or William spoke—of William’s projected work on the social insects. Then one day Harald said, ‘I do not know whether I have told you I am writing a book.’

‘Indeed you have not. I am most curious to know what kind of book.’

‘The kind of impossible book everyone now is trying to write. A book which shall demonstrate—with some kind of intellectual respectability—that it is not impossible that the world is the work of a Creator, a Designer.’

He stopped, and looked at William under his white brows, a canny, calculating look.

William tried silently to weigh up the negative: ‘it is
not impossible
’.

Harald said, ‘I am as aware as you must be that all the arguments of force are upon the other side. If I were a young man now, a young man such as you, I would be compelled towards atheistic materialism by the sheer beauty, the intricacy, of the arguments of Mr Darwin, and not only Mr Darwin. It was all very well
then
for Paley to argue that a man who found a watch, or even two interlocking cogs of a watch, lying on a bare heath, would have presumed a Maker of such an instrument. There was then no other explanation of the intricacy of the grasp of the hand, or the web of
the spider, or the vision of the eye than a Designer who made everything for its particular purpose. But now we have a powerful, almost entirely satisfactory explanation—in the
gradual
action of Natural Selection, of slow change, over unimaginable millennia. And any argument that would truly seek to find an intelligent Creator in His works must take account of the beauty and force of these explanations, must not sneer at them, nor try to refute them for the sake of defending Him who cannot be defended by weak and
partial
reasonings …’

‘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.” ’