by A. S. Byatt
‘Please come with me. I have something to show you.’
She was wearing a blue dress, trimmed with tartan ribbons. There was a bad moment when it looked as though she meant to refuse, and then her face softened into a smile, and she turned, and came with him. He led her to the conservatory door.
‘Come in quickly, and close the door.’
‘Am I safe?’
‘With me, quite safe.’
He closed the door behind her. At first, in the sunny green and glinting glass, he thought he had failed, and then, as though they had been waiting for her, the creatures came out of the foliage, down from the glassy dome, darting, floating, fluttering, tawny orange, dark and pale blue, brimstone yellow and clouded white, damask dark and peacock-eyed, and danced round her head and settled on her shoulders, and brushed her outstretched hands.
‘They take your dress for the sky itself,’ he whispered. She stood very still, turning her head this way and that. More and more butterflies made their way through the air, more and more hung trembling on the blue sheen of the cloth, on the pearly-white of her hands and throat.
‘I can brush them off,’ he said, ‘if you find them disagreeable.’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘They are so light, so soft, like coloured air—’
‘It is almost a cloud—’
‘It is a cloud. You are a miracle-worker.’
‘It is for you. I have nothing real to give—no pearls, no emeralds, I have nothing—but I wanted so much to give you something—’
‘Life,’ she said. ‘They are alive. They are living jewels, or better than jewels—’
‘They think you are a flower—’
‘So they do, they do.’ She turned slowly round about, and the creatures rose and settled in undulating patterns.
The vegetation belonged to no place on this planet, and in some sense to all. English primroses and bluebells, daffodils and crocus shone amongst evergreen luxuriant tropical creepers, their soft perfumes mingling with exotic stephanotis and sweet jasmine. She turned round and round, and the butterflies circled, and the captive water splashed in its little bowl. He thought he would always remember her like this, whatever happened to her, to him, to them, in this glittering palace where his two worlds met. And so he did, from time to time, for the rest of his life: the girl in the blue dress with pale sunny head, amongst creepers and Spring flowers, and the cloud of butterflies.
‘They are so terribly fragile,’ she said. ‘You could hurt them by just touching, one careless pinch would be enough. I would never hurt one of those. Never. How can I thank you?’
He engaged her to come back in the evening, when instead of the butterflies, the moths would be flying, with their subtle hues, chalky and ghost-like, soft lemons, buffs, silver plumes. All day the little girls ran in and out of the conservatory exclaiming, crying out at the colours and motions. He did not extend the evening invitation to them. He hoped to be able to sit alone with her in the dusk for a short time, companionably. This was the reward he had promised himself, which shows how things had changed a very little, how he had changed towards her. He even once or twice went over Harald’s remarks, so full of some kind of charge of meaning, so ambivalently impenetrable. ‘Say nothing. Say nothing. Your feelings do you credit.’ Which feelings? His love, or his respect for her difference, her station? What would Harald say if he said, ‘I love Eugenia. I must have her or die’—no, not that, that was ridiculous—‘I love Eugenia; it is painful for me to stay in her presence, unless I may hope where I cannot expect to hope—’ What would Harald say? Had he imagined a paternal benignity in his gaze? Would paternal ire and outrage take over if he spoke? Did Harald respect his patience or his discretion?
When evening came, he had a newly hatching large cocoon, which he took along with him to the conservatory; watching it would be a kind of reasonable employment, whilst he waited to see if she would come. He sat on a low bench, overhung with trailing vines and a wandering passionflower. The glass wall was cold against his back in the night air. Here and there it reflected the shimmering halo of the lamps hidden amongst curtains of leaves. Here and there it was transparent and he could see dark, colourless grass, the empty sky and the thin silver paring of the moon. The moths were moving—a little cloud was round each lamp, which he had protected in cages of netting. It was not part of his plan to shrivel his flock. The colours were lovelier than he expected. Grass-green, paper-white, creamy-yellow, luminous grey. The large moth—it was an Emperor Moth, the only British Saturniid,—was working its way free, splitting the pupa, shaking out crumpled wing-tissue, staring with huge eyes and weakly fluttering plumed antennae. William never overcame his sense of pure wonder at this process. A complete, lively caterpillar, bright green, banded with brown streaks and yellow hairy warts, vanished inside the cocoon and became a kind of formless custard. And out of the custard came the Emperor Moth, with eyes inscribed on brown velvet and a fat body of mouse-coloured fur.
He heard the door click open, and heard her listening for him inside it. Then he heard her feet on the marble, slippered and soft, and the swish of her skirts. And then she was there, in a silvery evening gown, whose underskirt was lilac—Morpho Eugenia. The dark took from her face even the colour it normally had.
‘There you are. You always do what you say you will. Your moths are trying to perform suttee.’
‘As you see, I have netted the lights to protect them. I do not know why they are so driven to make burned offerings of themselves. I do not know if it can be explained as a function of any normally life-protecting strategy made null by our interfering habit of setting up bright artificial light. I have wondered if they navigate by moonlight and mistake candles for very bright heavenly bodies. I don’t find that an entirely satisfactory hypothesis. Won’t you sit down, and see if the moths think you are the moon, as the butterflies took you for flowers and the sky?’
She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.
‘What is that?’
‘A newly hatched Emperor Moth. A female. In a little time, when she is strong, I will take away her cage and release her.’
‘She seems very weak.’
‘It requires great force to break out of the pupa. The insects are all at their most vulnerable at the moment of metamorphosis. They can be easily snapped up by any predator.’
‘There are none here, I hope.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Good. How lovely it is, in the moonlight, with the moths going about so peacefully.’
‘This is what I promised myself for making your cloud of butterflies. This little time, sitting here quietly, with you. That is all.’
She bowed her head, as though studying the Emperor Moth intently. A moth blundered repeatedly against the pane, trying to get in, it appeared, and was joined by another. The tremulous female quivered and shook her wings.
‘Don’t answer this—and don’t think I speak to alarm you, or upset you—I only want to say, you cannot know how much these few moments can mean to me—how I shall remember them always—your closeness—your calm. If things were only different, I might say—quite different things to you—but I know how the land lies, I am reasonable, I have no hopes—except perhaps to be able to speak briefly and honestly to you, for I do not see how that can hurt you—’
Large insects were advancing along the the black floor, their wings outspread. More could be seen forcing themselves through a small hole in the pane of the conservatory door. More still sailed down from the roof, hurtling blindly forwards in the semi-dark. The small concussions of the creatures on the glass walls and roof increased in number and volume. They advanced, a disorderly, driven army, beating about Eugenia’s head, burring against her skin, thirty, forty, fifty, a cloud, the male Emperors propelling themselves out of the night towards the torpid femal
e. More came. And more. Eugenia tried to push them off, she brushed her skirts, she plucked at those lost in her sleeves, in the crevices of her dress. She began to cry.
‘Take them away. I don’t like these.’
‘They are the male Emperors. They are drawn by the female in some mysterious way. I will carry her to the other end of the conservatory—there—see—they follow her, and leave you—’
‘There is another, trapped here in my lace. I shall scream.’
He came back through the crowd of blindly struggling males, and put his fingers inside her lace collar to remove the intruder.
‘It must be scent—’
Eugenia was weeping. ‘It was terrible, like bats, like ghosts, it was foul—’
‘Hush. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
He was trembling. She put her arms about his neck and her head on his shoulder and hung there letting him bear her weight.
‘My dear—’
She wept.
‘I didn’t mean—’
She cried out, ‘It isn’t you—you tried to help. It is everything. I am so unhappy.’
‘Is it because of Captain Hunt? Do you still grieve for him so much?’
‘He didn’t want to marry me. He died because he didn’t want to marry me.’
William held her close while she wept.
‘That must be nonsense. Any man would want to marry you.’
‘It wasn’t really an accident. That is only what they say. He did it because he didn’t—want—to—marry—me.’
‘Why didn’t he?’ asked William, as one might question a child who sees an imaginary bogeyman where nothing is.
‘How should I know? Only, it is so. It is just clear to me—that he didn’t want—the wedding was arranged—the clothes, I had all my clothes, everything was bought, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the flowers, everything. And he—couldn’t bear—’
‘You torture me, saying this. My dearest wish in the world—as you must know—would be to be able to ask you to be my wife. Which I can never do, because you have a fortune, and I cannot support a wife, or even myself. I do know that. But it is unbearably painful to me to hear you speak in this way and not be able—myself—’
‘I do not need to marry a fortune,’ said Eugenia. ‘I have one of my own.’
There was a long silence. Several more single-minded male moths blundered past and joined the pulsing carpet of male bodies in the wire walls of the female’s cage.
‘What are you saying?’
‘My father is a kind man, and he believes in Christian fellowship, in the equality of everyone in the sight of God. He believes you are a man of great intellectual gifts which he thinks are very valuable, as valuable as lands and rent and things. He has said so to me.’
She looked at him with the same pink, swollen, vulnerable eyes.
‘There could be a double wedding,’ said Eugenia. ‘I should not be married after Rowena, not if I am to be married at all.’
He swallowed. A moth brushed his hot forehead. He smelled the ghosts of jungle smells and the sweet, thick breath of gardenias. A small moth, a Rosy Footman, was perched on Eugenia’s shining hair, under his chin. His heart thudded.
‘Shall I speak to your father? Tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ said Eugenia, and put up her mouth to be kissed.
William had supposed that Harald’s attitude to himself would change sharply the moment he raised the question of marrying Eugenia. Harald had been vaguely kind, and had appeared at times almost surprisingly grateful for William’s conversation and attention. Now, he told himself, this would change. The patriarch would brandish the protecting sword. He would be made to feel the presumption of his own lack of prospects and breeding. He would almost certainly be ejected. Eugenia’s total confidence that this would not be so only reflected her innocent trustfulness. He found himself divided against himself. I shall die if I cannot have her, his blood cried on its one note. And yet he dreamed dreams reminiscent of those induced by the caapi-spirits, dreams of flying fast over forests, of sailing at speed over the sea in a high wind, of fighting the rapids on the upper reaches of the Amazon, of beating his way through creepers with a machete.
He told Harald that he had long and silently loved Eugenia, and that it had only been revealed to him by accident that she returned, might return these feelings. He had not meant to go behind her father’s back, he had meant to say nothing, but now it appeared he must ask, and if he was refused he must go away. ‘I know most painfully that I have nothing to offer that could weigh against my lack of prospects.’
‘You have courage, and intelligence, and kindness,’ said Eugenia’s father. ‘All families stand in need of these qualities if they are to survive. And you have Eugenia’s love, apparently. I must tell you, I would give a great deal to see Eugenia happy. She has had great troubles and I had almost given up hope of her finding the power actively to seek her own happiness in this. She has her own fortune—which is entailed and will remain in her own hands—’
It might have been a fault of courage in William Adamson, or it might have been a proper delicacy or tact that he did not then raise any question about settlements, about arrangements for living, about his own prospects. It seemed worse than vulgar, being male, and bringing nothing, to ask what, if anything, he might receive. Harald talked on, easily, vaguely, making warm, imprecise promises. William was shrewd enough to see their imprecision, but he had no will, indeed no reason, to cavil or press for clarity.
‘You could remain here,’ Harald said, ‘amongst this family, for the present, you and Eugenia, so that when, as you may well wish to do, you make another voyage, she is among her own people. You will naturally not wish to make changes immediately, you may be very happy here, I think. I hope you will make journeys later, if you wish. I hope you will. I hope I may be of substantial help to you in that. And I hope in the meantime you will consent to give me your time in conversation with the generosity you have shown so far. I do hope so. I find I can make my way much better through the tangles of thought about ourselves and the world we are in, with the benefit of the clarity of your mind. We might even write down our discussions as a kind of philosophical dialogue.’
He was to pay, he saw, with his thoughts. That was something he could easily afford, something he could do as he breathed air, or consumed meat and bread. And during the time between Eugenia’s acceptance of him, and their wedding, which was as short as it could be, so that Rowena’s marriage should not be delayed, giving time just for the making of bride-clothes, William talked to Harald Alabaster. He himself had given up his father’s religion of torment, suffering and promised bliss with a sigh of relief—Christian’s sigh of relief when the burden fell from his shoulder after the Slough of Despond. But Harald was partly sunk in the Slough. His thoughts were a torment to him, his own intellectual rigour a source of deprivation and pain.
He talked often of the folly of those who argued unconvincingly for the existence of God, or the truths of the Bible—and this damaged their own cause. How dare William Whewell argue that the lengths of the days and nights were adapted to the duration of sleep of Man? asked Harald. It was painfully and gloriously clear that the whole Creation lived and moved in a rhythm of response to the heat and light of the Sun and to its withdrawal: the sap rose in trees, flowers opened and shut, men and beasts drowsed or hunted, Summer followed Winter. We must not put ourselves in the centre of things unless we could truly perceive we were there. We must not make God in our own image, or we made ourselves look fools. It was because he hoped, hoped sometimes beyond belief, that a Divine Creator would be proved beyond reasonable doubt, that he could not abide arguments about male nipples and the rudimentary tail of the human embryo, which saw that Creator as a fumbling craftsman who had changed his mind in mid-work. A man might behave thus, a God could not, if they but thought clearly, unclouded by emotion, for a moment. And yet there were arguments from the analogy between the Divine Mind and the human mind which he acc
epted, which supported him, which he did not discard.
‘What do you make of the argument from beauty?’ he asked William.
‘What form of beauty, Sir? Beauty in women, beauty in forests, beauty in the heavens, beauty in creatures?’
‘In all these. I would wish to argue that our human ability to love beauty in all these things—to love symmetry, and glorious brightness, and the intricate excellence of leaf-forms, and crystals, and the scales on snakes and wings of butterflies—argues in us something disinterested and spiritual. A man admiring a butterfly is more than a brute beast, William? He is more than the butterfly itself.’
‘Mr Darwin believes the beauty of the butterfly exists to attract his mate, and the beauty of the orchid is designed to facilitate its fertilisation by the bee.’
‘I retort—neither bee nor orchid has our exquisite sensation of joy at seeing the perfection of the colours and forms of these things. And we may imagine a Creator who created the whole world out of delight in his making the variety of species, of stones and clay and sand and water, may we not? We may imagine such a Creator very precisely because we ourselves have an indwelling need to make works of art which can satisfy no base instinct of mere survival, or perpetuation of the species, but are only beautiful, and intricate, and food for the spirit?’
‘A sceptic, Sir, would retort that our own works—as you speak of them—are not unlike Paley’s watch, which he said would lead anyone to deduce a Maker, were he ever to find two interlocking cogs. Maybe the sense of wonder at beauty—at form—you speak of, is no more than what makes us human, rather than brutes.’
‘I believe, with the Duke of Argyll, that the superfluous brilliance of the birds of Paradise is a strong argument that perhaps in some sense the original world was made for the delight of man. For they cannot delight in themselves as we delight in them.’
