Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page B

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 cottongloves, 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 ofthe 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