in the matter--might very well have suggested to the author a more
suitable ending to the story of Elsie than the one he made choice of. I
will even be so venturesome as to say what that ending should be. Let
us imagine the girl capable of love, even of “a dull ache of passion,”
doomed by the serpent-nature in her, which was physical if anything, to
a prolonged existence, serpent-like in its changes, waxing and waning,
imperceptibly becoming dim as with age in the wintry season, only to
recover the old brilliant beauty and receive an access of strength in
each recurring spring. Let us imagine that the fame of one so strange
in life and history and of so excellent an appearance was bruited far
and wide, that many a man who sought her village merely to gratify an
idle curiosity loved and remained to woo, but feared at the last and
left her with a wound in his heart. Finally, let us imagine that as her
relatives and friends, and all who had known her intimately, stricken
with years and worn with grief, faded one by one into the tomb, she
grew more lonely and apart from her fellow-creatures, less human in
her life and pursuits; joy and sorrow and all human failings touching
her only in a faint vague way, like the memories of her childhood, of
her lost kindred, and of her passion. And after long years, during
which she has been a wonder and mystery to the villagers, on one of
her solitary rambles on the mountain occurs the catastrophe which the
author has described--the fall of the huge overhanging ledge of rock
under which the serpent brood had their shelter--burying her for ever
with her ophidian relations, and thus bringing to an end the strange
story of “Elsie Venner Infelix.”
XVIII
WASPS
One rough day in early autumn I paused in my walk in a Surrey orchard
to watch a curious scene in insect life--a pretty little insect comedy
I might have called it had it not brought back to remembrance old days
when my mind was clouded with doubts, and the ways of certain insects,
especially of wasps, were much in my thoughts. For we live through and
forget many a tempest that shakes us; but long afterwards a very little
thing--the scent of a flower, the cry of a wild bird, even the sight of
an insect--may serve to bring it vividly back and to revive a feeling
that seemed dead and gone.
In the orchard there was an old pear-tree which produced very large
late pears, and among the fruit the September wind had shaken down that
morning there was one over-ripe in which the wasps had eaten a deep
cup-shaped cavity. Inside the cavity six or seven wasps were revelling
in the sweet juice, lying flat and motionless, crowded together.
Outside the cavity, on the pear, thirty or forty blue-bottle flies had
congregated, and were hungry for the juice, but apparently afraid to
begin feeding on it; they were standing round in a compact crowd, the
hindmost pressing on and crowding over the others: but still, despite
the pressure, the foremost row of flies refused to advance beyond the
rim of the eaten-out part. From time to time one of a more venturesome
spirit would put out his proboscis and begin sucking at the edge; the
slight tentative movement would instantly be detected by a wasp, and
he would turn quickly round to face the presumptuous fly, lifting his
wings in a threatening manner, and the fly would take his proboscis off
the rim of the cup. Occasionally hunger would overcome their fear; a
general movement of the flies would take place, and several would begin
sucking at the same time; then the wasp, seeming to think that more
than a mere menacing look or gesture was required in such a case, would
start up with an angry buzz, and away the whole crowd of flies would go
to whirl round and round in a little blue cloud with a loud, excited
hum, only to settle again in a few moments on the big yellow pear and
begin crowding round the pit as before.
Never once during the time I spent observing them did the guardian
wasp relax his vigilance. When he put his head down to suck with the
others his eyes still appeared able to reflect every movement in the
surrounding crowd of flies into his little spiteful brain. They could
crawl round and crawl round as much as they liked on the very rim, but
let one begin to suck and he was up in arms in a moment.
The question that occurred to me was: How much of all this behaviour
could be set down to instinct and how much to intelligence and temper?
The wasp certainly has a waspish disposition, a quick resentment, and
is most spiteful and tyrannical towards other inoffensive insects.
He is a slayer and devourer of them, too, as well as a feeder with
them on nectar and sweet juices; but when he kills, and when the
solitary wasp paralyses spiders, caterpillars, and various insects
and stores them in cells to provide a horrid food for the grubs which
will eventually hatch from the still undeposited eggs, the wasp then
acts automatically, or by instinct, and is driven, as it were, by an
extraneous force. In a case like the one of the wasp’s behaviour on
the pear, and in innumerable other cases which one may read of or see
for himself, there appears to be a good deal of the element of mind.
Doubtless it exists in all insects, but differs in degree; and some
Orders appear to be more intelligent than others. Thus, any person
accustomed to watch insects closely and note their little acts would
probably say that there is less mind in the beetles and more in the
Hymenoptera than in other insects; also that in the last-named Order
the wasps rank highest.
The scene in the orchard also served to remind me of a host of wasps,
greatly varying in size, colour, and habits, although in their
tyrannical temper very much alike, which I had been accustomed to
observe in boyhood and youth in a distant region. They attracted me
more, perhaps, than any other insects on account of their singular
and brilliant coloration and their formidable character. They were
beautiful but painful creatures; the pain they caused me was first
bodily, when I interfered in their concerns or handled them carelessly,
and was soon over; later it was mental and more enduring.
To the very young colour is undoubtedly the most attractive quality
in nature, and these insects were enamelled in colours that made them
the rivals of butter flies and shining metallic beetles. There were
wasps with black and yellow rings and with black and scarlet rings;
wasps of a uniform golden brown; others like our demoiselle dragon-fly
that looked as if fresh from a bath of splendid metallic blue; others
with steel-blue bodies and bright red wings; others with crimson
bodies, yellow head and legs, and bright blue wings; others black and
gold, with pink head and legs; and so on through scores and hundreds
of species “as Nature list to play with her little ones,” until one
marvelled at so great a variety, so many singular and beautiful
contrasts, produced by half-a-dozen brilliant colours.
It was when I began to find out the ways of wasps with other insects
on which they nourish their young that my pleasure in them became
mixed with pain. For they did not, like spiders ants, dragon-flies,
tiger-beetles, and other rapacious kinds, kill their prey at once,
but paralysed it by stinging its nerve centres to make it incapable
of resistance, and stored it in a closed cell, so that the grub to be
hatched by and by should have fresh meat to feed on--not fresh-killed
but live meat.
Thus the old vexed question--How reconcile these facts with the idea
of a beneficent Being who designed it all--did not come to me from
reading, nor from teachers, since I had none, but was thrust upon me
by nature itself. In spite, however, of its having come in that sharp
way, I, like many another, succeeded in putting the painful question
from me and keeping to the old traditions. The noise of the battle of
Evolution, which had been going on for years, hardly reached me; it
was but a faintly heard murmur, as of storms immeasurably far away “on
alien shores.” This could not last.
One day an elder brother, on his return from travel in distant lands,
put a copy of the famous _Origin of Species_ in my hands and advised me
to read it. When I had done so, he asked me what I thought of it. “It’s
false!” I exclaimed in a passion, and he laughed, little knowing how
important a matter this was to me, and told me I could have the book if
I liked. I took it without thanks and read it again and thought a good
deal about it, and was nevertheless able to resist its teachings for
years, solely because I could not endure to part with a philosophy of
life, if I may so describe it, which could not logically be held, if
Darwin was right, and without which life would not be worth having. So
I thought at the time; it is a most common delusion of the human mind,
for we see that the good which is so much to us is taken forcibly away,
and that we get over our loss and go on very much as before.
It is curious to see now that Darwin himself gave the first comfort
to those who, convinced against their will, were anxious to discover
some way of escape which would not involve the total abandonment of
their cherished beliefs. At all events, he suggested the idea, which
religious minds were quick to seize upon, that the new explanation
of the origin of the innumerable forms of life which people the
earth from one or a few primordial organisms afforded us a nobler
conception of the creative mind than the traditional one. It does not
bear examination, probably it originated in the author’s kindly and
compassionate feelings rather than in his reasoning faculties; but it
gave temporary relief and served its purpose. Indeed, to some, to very
many perhaps, it still serves as a refuge--this poor, hastily made
straw shelter, which lets in the rain and wind, but seems better to
them than no shelter at all.
But of the intentionally consoling passages in the book, the most
impressive to me was that in which he refers to instincts and
adaptation such as those of the wasp, which writers on natural history
subjects are accustomed to describe, in a way that seems quite just
and natural, as _diabolical_. That, for example, of the young cuckoo
ejecting its foster-brothers from the nest; of slave-making ants, and
of the larvae of the Ichneumonidae feeding on the live tissues of the
caterpillars in whose bodies they have been hatched. He said that
it was not perhaps a logical conclusion, but it seemed to him more
satisfactory to regard such things “not as specially endowed or created
instincts, but as small consequences of one general law”--the law of
variation and the survival of the fittest.
XIX
BEAUTIFUL HAWK-MOTHS
In the late summer I often walk by flowery places of an evening,
or at some late hour by moonlight, in the hope of seeing that rare
night-wanderer, the death’s-head moth; but the hope is now an old one,
so worn and faded that it is hardly more than the memory of a hope.
Why, I have asked myself times without number, am I so luckless in my
quest of an insect which is not only a large object to catch the eye
but has a voice, or sound, as well to attract a seeker’s attention?
On consulting others on this point, some of them lepidopterists and
diligent collectors, they have assured me that they have never once had
a glimpse of the living free _Acherontia atropas_ going about on his
flowery business.
A few years ago, while on a ramble in a southern county, I heard
of a gentleman in the neighbourhood who had a taste for adders and
death’s-head moths and was accustomed to collect and keep them in
considerable numbers in his house. My own partiality for adders induced
me to call on him, and we exchanged experiences and had some pleasant
talk about these shy, beautiful and (to us) harmless creatures. I am
speaking of adders now; I had not yet heard of his predilection for
the great moth; when he spoke of this second favourite I begged him to
show me a specimen or two. Turning to his wife, who was present and
shared his queer tastes, he told her to go and get me some. She left
the room, and returned by and by with a large cardboard box, such as
milliners and dressmakers use; removing the lid, she raised it above my
head and emptied the contents over me--a shower of living, shivering,
fluttering, squeaking or creaking death’s-head moths! In a moment they
were all over me, from my head right down to my feet, not attempting to
fly, but running, quivering, and shaking their wings, so that I had a
bath and feast of them.
At that moment it mattered not that I was a stranger there, in the
library or study of a country house, with those two looking on and
laughing at my plight. It is what we feel that matters: I might have
been standing in some wilderness never trodden by human foot, myself an
unhuman solitary, and merely by willing it I had drawn those beautiful
beings of the dark to me, charming them as with a flowery fragrance
from their secret hiding-places in a dim world of leaves to gather upon
and cover me over with their downy, trembling, mottled grey and rich
yellow velvet wings.
Even this fascinating experience did not wholly satisfy me: nothing,
I said, would satisfy me short of seeing the undomesticated moth
living his proper life in the open air. He smiled and shook his head.
Useless to look for such a thing! _He_ had never seen it and didn’t
believe that I ever would; he couldn’t say why. He got his moths by
paying sixpence apiece for the chrysalids to workmen in the potato
fields and rearing them himself; in this way he obtained as many as he
wanted--sixty or seventy or eighty every year.
I can only hope that time will prove him wrong, and I go on as before
haunting the flowery places in the last light of day and when the moon
shines.
Another surprisingly beautiful moth which, they say, is as rarely
seen as the _Acherontia_ is the crimson underwing. Once only have I
been able to observe this lovely moth flying about--and it was in a
room! I was staying with friends at the Anglers’ Inn at Bransbury on
the Test when one evening after the lamps were lit the moth appeared
in our sitting-room and remained two days and nights with us in spite
of our kind persecutions and artful plans for his expulsion. It was
early September, with mild sunny days and misty or wet nights, and in
the evening, when the room was very warm, we would throw the windows
and doors open, thinking of the delicious relief it would be for our
prisoner to pass out of that superheated atmosphere, that painful
brightness, into his own wide, wet world, its darkness and silence and
fragrance, and a mysterious signal wafted to him from a distance out
of clouds of whispering leaves, from one there waiting for him. Then
with fans and hats and folded newspapers we would try to fan him out,
but it only made him wild--wild as a newly caught linnet in a cage; he
would dart hither and thither about the room, now among us, now over
our heads, still refusing to go out. We didn’t want him to go, so that
after religiously doing our best for him we were pleased to have him
stay. We even tried to make him happy as our guest by offering him
honey and golden-syrup and placing flowers in vases all about the room,
but he would accept nothing from us.
At rest on a wall or curtain he appeared as a grey triangular patch,
ornamented, when viewed closely, with mottlings of a dusky hue; but on
lifting his fore-wings, the lovely crimson colour of the underwings
was displayed. No crimson flower, no sea-shell, no sunset cloud, can
show a hue to compare in loveliness with it. Another hidden beauty was
revealed when the lamps were lighted to start him flying up and down
the room over our heads, always keeping close to the low ceiling. He
then had a surprisingly bird-like appearance, and the under-surface
of the bird-shaped body being pure white and downy he was like a
miniature martin with crimson on the wings. He was then at his best,
our “elf-darling”; no one dared touch him even with a finger-tip lest
that exquisitely delicate down should be injured. I have frequently had
humming-birds blunder into a room where I sat and fly round seeking
an exit, but never one of these, for all the glittering scale-like
feathers, seemed so perfectly beautiful as our dark crimson underwing.
On the third evening, to our regret, we succeeded in getting him to fly
out.
Now, we asked, what had the books-about-moths-makers to tell us
concerning this particular elf-darling? I proceeded to get out my
work on Butterflies and Moths--one recently published. It gave a
description of the insect--colour and measurements; then, under the
heading of “general remarks,” came the following: “This moth will never
be seen, but by judicious sugaring as many as half-a-dozen specimens
may be obtained in a single night.” That was all! It was a shock to
us, and we wondered whether any of our naturalists had tried the plan
of “judicious sugaring” to obtain a few specimens of that rarer, more
elusive creature, the fairy, before its final extinction in Britain.
The memory of those two evenings with a crimson underwing brings to
mind just now yet another enchanting evening I spent in the valley of
the Wiltshire Avon. It was June, just before hay-cutting, and for most
of the time, until the last faint underglow had faded and the stars
were out, I was standing motionless, knee-deep in the plumy seeded
grasses, watching the ghost-moths, as I had never seen them before, in
scores and in hundreds, dimly visible in their whiteness all over the
dusky meadow, engaged in their quaint, beautiful, rhythmic love-dance.
It was the wide silent night and the moths’ strange motions and
whiteness in the dark that gave it a magic on that occasion. Seen by
daylight or lamplight it is Lord de Tabley’s “owl-white moth with mealy
wings,” or one of them, and nothing more.
Moths are mostly haunters of the twilight and the dark, but we have
one of the larger and highly distinguished species, the humming-bird
hawk-moth, which flies abroad by day, even during the hottest seasons,
and visits our gardens in the full blaze of noon. It has no glory of
colour like the crimson underwing and death’s-head moth, nor ghostly
white, yet it outshines all the others in beauty and in the sense of
wonder and delight its appearance produces. Here I will quote part of a
letter written to me some years ago by a lady who wanted to know if I
could identify an insect she was particularly interested in, from her
description. She had seen it when a child in the garden at her early
home in Wiltshire, and never since, nor had she ever discovered what it
was.
“When I was a child,” the letter says, “I had a great fancy for a
rare, strange, fascinating insect called by the children of my day the
Merrylee-dance-a-pole. Only on the hottest and longest of summer days
did the radiant being delight our eyes; to have seen it conferred high
honour and distinction on the fortunate beholder. We regarded it with
mingled awe and joy, and followed its erratic and rapid flight with
ecstasy. It was soft and warm and brown, fluffy and golden, too, and
created in our infantile minds an indescribable impression of glory,
brilliance, aloofness, elusiveness. We thought it a being from some
other world, and during each of its frequent sudden disappearances
among the flowering bushes we held our breath, fearing it would return
no more, but had flown right through the blossoming screen and back to
the sun and stars. To me it was an apparition of inexpressible delight,
and I longed to be a Merrylee-dance-a-pole myself to fly to unheard-of,
unthought-of, undreamed-of beautiful flowery lands.”
A descriptive passage this by one who is not a literary person, a
student of expression anxiously seeking after the “explicit word,” yet
an expression rare and beautiful as the thing described: one reads it
with a quickened pulse. Who should dream of finding its like anywhere
in the thousand books of British Butterflies and Moths which our
exceedingly industrious lepidopterists have produced during the last
six or seven decades? Yet these same thousand volumes were written less
for the scientific student of entomology than for the general reader,
or for every person who on seeing a white admiral or a privet moth
wants to know what it is and goes to a book to find out all about it.
These writers all fail in the very thing which one would imagine to
be most important in books intended for such a purpose--the power to
convey to the reader’s mind a vivid image of the thing described. One
would like to know what the professional entomologist or writer of
books about moths would say of the passage I have quoted from a letter
asking for information about an insect. Probably he would say that the
lady wrote more from the heart than the head, that writing so she is
rhapsodical and as inaccurate as one would expect her to be, although
one is able to identify her Merrylee-dance-a-pole as the _Macroglossa
stellatarum_.
It would be perfectly true--she is inaccurate, yet succeeds in
producing the effect aimed at while the accurate writers fail. She
succeeds because she saw the object as a child, emotionally, and after
thirty years was still able to recover the precise feeling experienced
then and to convey to another the image in her mind. We may say that
impressions are vivid and live vividly in the mind, even to the end of
life, in those alone in whom something that is of the child survives
in the adult--the measureless delight in all this visible world,
experienced every day by the millions of children happily born outside
the city’s gates, but so rarely expressed in literature, as Traherne,
let us say, expressed it; and, with the delight, the sense of wonder in
all life, which is akin to, if not one with, the mythical faculty, and
if experienced in a high degree is a sense of the supernatural in all
natural things. We may say, in fact, that unless the soul goes out to
meet what we see we do not see it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not
a blade of grass.
XX
THE STRENUOUS MOLE
We read in the books of the astounding strength and energy of this
creature that “swims in the earth,” as they say, just as a diving auk,
guillemot, or puffin does in the water. The energy of a squirrel that
runs up a very tall tree-trunk, darts along a far-reaching horizontal
branch, flings himself from the end of it to the branch of another
tree, and is a hundred feet high and away before you can finish
speaking a sentence of twenty words, is nothing to compare with the
feats of the mole underground. But, being out of sight, he is out of
mind, on which account his most remarkable qualities are not properly
appreciated. He is also a small beast--no bigger than a lady’s gloved
hand--consequently his strength, like that of the beetle, does not
matter to us. It would matter a great deal if moles grew to the size
of cows and bulls. In or under London they would excavate numberless
tunnels which would serve as subways for the foot-passengers and for
the tubular railways. This would be an advantage, but as a set-off they
would, in throwing up their hills, cause a considerable amount of
damage. A mole of that size would easily overturn the Royal Exchange,
and even Westminster Palace would be tumbled down, burying our
congregated law-givers in its ruins.
The life of the mole is an amazingly strenuous one; his appetite
surpasses that of any other creature of land or sea, and he does not
“eat to burstness” only because his digestion is just as powerful and
rapid in its action as his digging muscles. He feeds like a Gargantua,
and having dug out and devoured his dinner, he digs again to where a
spring exists, and refreshes himself with copious draughts of cold
water.
The West Country field labourer, who gets through his two or three
gallons of cider at a sitting, is a poor drinker in comparison. After
digging and eating and drinking, he goes to sleep, and so soundly does
he sleep that you could not wake him by beating drums and firing guns
off over his head. Out of this condition he comes very suddenly, like a
giant refreshed, and goes furiously to work again at his digging.
If by chance you catch a mole above ground and seize him with your
hand you find him a difficult creature to hold. The prickly hedgehog
and slippery snake or eel are more easy to manage. You are puzzled
by finding that you cannot keep your grip on him, and, if you are a
novice, he will probably slip back through his skin until his head is
in your hand, and then, when half-a-dozen of his needle-like teeth are
deep in your flesh, you will be glad to drop him.
He is not, when caught, a submissive creature, nor has he a friendly
or social disposition: in the rutting season the moles have the most
savage battles; the floors and walls of the tunnels are washed with
blood, and he that falls is worried to death, and his corpse devoured
by the victor.