The Insects

by WILLIAM SANSOM

1

THE MOTH

LYING in bed, I was close to the candle flame. Only the edge of the pillow, the white tabletop, the candle pot, constituted a world; this naked light threw out a spherical halo beyond which all grew dark. For some time the bright yellow flame burned upright, unwavering, erect as an emblem. No breath could touch it.

A moth flew in, a small moth, gray as a leaf. The flame shuddered, then reached higher, gathering itself into a pillar of renewed and eminent strength. It drew itself up to receive the moth. And this moth never wheeled, never fluttered: it flew like a soft bullet straight for the flame, so swiftly that its opened wings were never seen, on so direct a course that one might have imagined it whipped back to the wick by an elastic attachment.

It flew straight for the wick, clutched this black post high up with its forelegs, pressed its whole body upright, against the wick within the blue base of the flame. One moment it had been flying, the next it was clutched thus rigid in adoration. It never moved. Its black eyes gazed fervently into the yellow fire above. It stared up at the yellow fire that had already burned off its foremost antennae, with black eyes fixed in deep fanatical understanding. Slender whitish legs clasped the black wick, like hands wrung in prayer. And its wings! Its wings flowed downwards like a knight’s mantle, clasped high, spreading bravely over the armor of its body down to the platform of pale candle grease.

Never again did this moth move. Never once did it shudder, it made no movement of recoil, it remained only clenched rigid in terrible prayer. This was no stupid blundering — its black eyes, perched up on the gray body, stared with understanding. The impeccable direction of its flight, the embrace, the enduring adoration — all were purposed and predetermined; it was no dumb sacrifice, but a fine self-immolation, as clean as the fire that now slowly shriveled up its head, collapsed the eyes as they gazed upwards, withered the poor clinging body.

I saw this. I saw it on August 23 last summer. I could have saved the moth, at least I could not have saved it — for such an act was too private, too perfect for blundering fingers from another world to disturb. I would have pushed it clumsily into the air, when, of course, it would have fluttered about blindly, its fine purpose soiled, to return at some later date, exhausted and stupid, to some similar flame.

THE BEETLE

Lying on the cliffside, I saw a bright green beetle. Its carapace shone with a jeweled green, pale emerald, like emerald water-paint washed palely over white paper; but really more brilliant, as though a powdered dew glittered from within.

But I might never have seen this beetle, for the leaves of a salty rock plant that grew all round were colored an exactly similar pale green. The leaves were small, thick, and heart-shaped like the beetle itself. They were fat as cactus leaves, fat with pale water tissues, and they clustered low to the rock over a straggling wide area. It was plain that the beetle had grown to imitate these leaves among which it lived. But its legs betrayed it. Leaves never walk away. And this one walked away alone from its forest across the bare volcanic rock.

Instantly one felt afraid for this beetle. Its green showed so brilliant a target against the black rock. The beak would have swooped down, a thousand beaks would have been instantly attracted, the beetle would not be there. But witlessly the beetle lumbered forward, feeling its way slowly and awkwardly across the desert of rock. It crossed a distance of what must have meant for it a thousand paces, and came to the edge of a precipice.

Beneath lay a rock pool. A new world of water, alien to the beetle, where strange drowned hairs waved, where shells slept, where perhaps the only movement was a slight bubbling of sand as a limpet thrust out its blind, toeless foot and dragged itself one, only one, pace forward. The beetle paused above this new world. Its feelers waved at the gleaming water. It tasted fresh enchantments, it savored the grand limitless vista of new ground, new life, horizonless possibilities, space.

It seemed to take a decision. Its green back opened, the two curved plates of armor slid apart like soundless doors, and from under each plate emerged a thin transparent membrane. Wings — the beetle was going to fly! New land was to be won, every risk of the air scorned, all those unknown dangers of the glittering deep were to be tried! The beetle stretched its wings wide. They were so thin, pliable like dried flakes of saliva, soft pieces among so much armor. But they were to bear the brilliant green beetle on a great voyage.

The beetle stretched its wings, fluttered them — one was agonized that they might be wrenched off among such heavy textures — and then the armor closed again, the wings folded and disappeared, the beetle turned and slowly, — the sigh could almost be heard, the smile of resignation seen, — slowly ambled back to its accustomed vegetation.

THE FLY

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” snorted the little fly, bucking like a foal. “Ho! Ho!” it snorted at me as I lay back in my bath.

The fly stood on the white enameled rim of the bath. My bathroom is white in everything, white tiles on the walls, white rubber on the floor, white heating engines, white pipes running everywhere, white taps, a white bath. Yes, the only black occurrence in all these intricate fields of white was the fly, which stood alone, quite alone, on the side of the bath, a very small fly. Was it a dwarf fly? Was it a very young fly? I would never know. I could only accept it as a minute edition of what I had always known was a fly, a small creature at that. It stood there against so much white and with the whitish steam rising round it, a little black fly, quite alone.

I never heard it speak. That, of course, was my imagination. And even if it had spoken, there was no reason to suppose that it would have addressed me, or even that it had noticed me at all. Possibly, probably, it never saw me — but that is neither here nor there. The fly — it simply stood, thinking hard, with an abominable self-assurance about its raised snout, expressing in every facet of its attitude a precocious omniscience that sneered singsong at the wide white world: “Ho! Ho!” Sometimes it would race backwards, bucking like a foal, for it stood high on its many thin legs.

What a huge world confronted this little black pegasus in motor goggles! What vast tracts of smooth enamel, what complexities of mountain and valley lay bare to its exploring eye. What irregular pipe strata, what phenomena of taps and hooks, what chains and bowls and baskets and pipes, pipes, pipes — each a giant’s causeway for the small inquisitive visitor. It was not a world like, say, the candle world of the moth, circumscribed and urgent. It was, for instance, no beetle’s world, where candidly one chose, despite other dreams, to cultivate one’s own rock garden. It was a world innocent of action — it contained only curiosity; and this, to judge from the size of the fly, was inexhaustible.

The fly began to walk hither and thither. It stepped to the edge of the bath rim, took a look, stopped, lowered its head to think, dropped out its long trunkish tongue — as if this itself were a deposition of thought—waited ponderously, turned back. It wandered to the bath-side overhanging the water, stepped backwards twitching exasperated wings. Then along the rim towards the taps, flicking forward quickly, cavorting to one side, then again advancing; now and then it dropped the black sucker from its face.

Arrived at the taps it disappeared. It strutted behind one of the taps as though it had business there of abounding importance — but in a moment, quite unconcerned, as though such business was to be disposed of with no more than a flick of the back leg, appeared again, and began the long descent down the plug chain.

Where was it going? Was its intention matched by purpose? What was it at? Did it eat to live, live to cat, eat at all? Where did it procure its food? Presumably its food appeared magically from nowhere, was consumed, and no questions asked? Did this beast, then, have no connections with its food, neither contact nor interest in the real source of its vitality? Had it, further, contact with anything? Was it not, on the opposite hand, superbly unconnected, without any real contacts, propelled everywhere only by curiosity and a sense of its own strutting importance? “Ho! Ho?”

It fell off the chain into the bath. There on the surface of the water it rested still for a moment, completely absorbed. One could hear its thoughts: “Hmm. Water. Water, eh?” it thought. “We-ell, interesting — certainly interesting, but hardly of real importance. Dangerous? To an extent — fortunately the surface tension seems to hold — I’m pretty light. Of course, it might give. I’d be drowned. Let’s see, so and so many million Chinese are drowned every five years; that’s such and such a number of Chinese per square mile, a recurrent phenomenon, hardly variable. Little else to this drowning business — Chinese — water — ”

Presently it pulled itself together, paddled its legs about, and eventually arrived, a little the wetter, at the plug chain. It climbed out onto the white enameled rings, shook itself, tested its drenched wings, ascended by leg the chain.

Arrived at the taps again, it stood for a while rubbing its back legs, raising these almost horizontally, washing them as though it were washing and stretching a pair of slender black gloves; then it paused once more, deep in thought, and then stepped off again.

It disappeared over the rim of the bath, to assume somewhere hidden from my view an upside-down position.

THE UNKNOWN

Lying in my invalid chair outside the greengrocer’s and buying a few potatoes, I was stung in the right ankle by an unseen insect. Its sting penetrated through a woolen sock, in the dark underworld of my trouser cuffs, a low-lying foot or so from the pavement. Mark this — I had been lying still, buying potatoes. Mine was no ankle flung to the attack. I was passively stung, by something untouched and even unseen.

The pain tore in sharply as a barbed needle thrust. I looked along my trousers. Nothing. No wasp. It felt, of course, like a wasp sting, a wasp perhaps dying of cold among the October apples. Perhaps — ? Perhaps a black widow from a rotten nectarine? A bitter red ant, polished jet sacs fierce with formic acid? The lightning legs of some tortuous millipede wriggling everywhere for heat?

I never knew. The insect passed unseen. The pain soon subsided, there was not much swelling, there was enough alcohol in my system to counteract any upstart virus. And the insect came from nowhere, stabbed, and was gone. Maybe it had a purpose, but when purpose is not immediately apparent, action is soon classed as irresponsible. We are taught, the older our race becomes, that there is a purpose for everything. Only our ignorance assigns to the wayward act a lack of purpose.

2

STEAM TUGS AND GRAY TAPE

It is difficult to say finally whether it was a good thing or a bad thing when we dropped the bed on the street. But drop the big wood bed we did, with a loud singing of springs and groaning of the wood, hard in front of the grim granite door of an empty school used now for storing bombed-up furniture — and instantly there flowed onto the gray pavement what appeared to be a thick brown oiled liquid.

But in variance to the usual way of a liquid — a commendable instinct to flow without argument and without hesitation in one direction in search of its own level — this liquid from the bed sprouted anxiously in all directions; rivulets of brown darted everywhere like little lost snakes nosing in the dust for a smell of home. My companion was dancing up and down, his overalls drawn up from his ankles like a woman’s skirts threatened by mice. He was shouting wildly, “Steam tugs! Steamers, boy — all alive—oh, steam tugs! Oh, hundreds of ‘em!”

This I knew meant bugs.

We retreated to the fire van from which we had unloaded the bed and other pieces of furniture. It was a difficult moment. We shook ourselves, we danced. But presently reassured we called to others of the firemen in the convoy to come and see our bugs. By now this slow army of brown was streaming all over the pavement. We kicked them, we stamped on them, we shook the bed and more fell out and we slaughtered these too. But many, we knew, remained behind in the bed.

We decided, of course, that it would be criminal to store this bed with the other furniture. The school hall was stacked high with salvaged pieces, stacked close, the goods of each house labeled together, yet for want of space abutting into each other. There were towers of furniture, plateaus of furniture, piers of furniture jutting into the center of the hall like runs of dominoes. Wardrobes, chests, tables, chairs, pianos, mattresses, bedding, and occasionally some startling Victorian contrivance, something that looked like a large golden-brown egg on stilts, or a strange boxlike nest of mahogany pillars supporting nothing and enclosing only the air. In all, a vast array of furniture — and an unlimited banquet for those with a taste for wood.

So we propped the bed up against the street wall and someone went in search of authority. He came back with a man in gray.

A short man, old and sad, who in his hands grasped a little frayed ledger. His suit was dusty, his mustache straggled gray to its faded yellow ends, his checks hung in starved gray creases; there was a gray gleam on his spectacles, the bloom of wet slate reflected on afternoon windows. “That bed — ” he announced, licking his pencil with a feeble smack of authority. The indelible lead purpled his tongue.

One of the firemen, unimpressed and sweating, told him: “It’s got bugs in it. You can’t take it in “you’d have the whole place running.”

The gray clerk frowned, shook his head slowly, and eyed the bed with distaste. “But it’s down for ‘ere, ain’t it?” he said. And then, suspiciously, “You see ‘em?”

One of the firemen immediately started shaking the bed and the clerk waved his pencil. “All right, all right,” he grumbled, all hope lost. “We know, we know.” Then he pursed his lips and applied himself to the ledger. It seemed that he was seeking for some definite course of action that he could not himself provide.

We waited while he scratched about the frayed pages with his stubbed black fingernails. It took him a long time to find what he wanted. But when he did, his murmurings and peerings ceased abruptly, he snapped his purple tongue off the pencil, he spoke with sudden sharpness. “What address,” he said, “did you get this bed off of?”

We had been working there all through the dusty afternoon and knew too well. “75 - Street, King’s Cross.”

There was a glitter almost of blue behind the spectacles as he looked up. He swung the ledger round at us. “And that’s for ‘ere. See? 75 -

Street. Wrote ‘ere.”

We protested. “But we know that — that’s not the point — ”

He shrugged his shoulders. “ If it’s down for 'ere, ‘ere it goes.”

“And infect all the other stuff?”

He looked at us with pity, with disappointment, with infinite patience. “It’s wrote ‘ere,” he said. Only that. And he repeated it as often as we protested. He said he saw our point, that it would be criminal to taint all the other furniture. Yet he could not fail, at the same time, to see the course of his own duty as written. He saw both sides of the question with maddening clarity, yet seemed quite unable to make the two converge. It was as though we discussed two entirely separate beds. Perhaps, we asked, he was in the hands of some superior? No — it appeared that he alone was in charge. One could only assume that he was obeying some queer convention of order; or proceeding with one of those immaculate acts of individual justice that upset everyone else’s applecart.

At last, as none of us moved, he suddenly changed his tactic. His face assumed a gray smile of sweet reasonableness, he put his head appealingly on one side and asked: “But what are you goin’ to do with ‘er then if you don’t? Where you goin’ to take ‘er?”

Someone said: “Leave it in the street.”

This appalled him. He stared in horror, he gasped, “What! In the street?” And then, lowering his voice in awe, “You can’t go leavin’ things about in the street!”

“Then burn it.”

At this the clerk broke into high laughter. “That’s a good one, that is!” He laughed. “Why, you can’t go round burnin’ up their things! What’d they say? Now, gentlemen,” — he began purpling his tongue again, — “we can’t burn ‘er, we can’t leave 'er in the street, you don’t want to take ‘er along of you, and she’s down for ‘ere. It looks to me, gentlemen, like there’s nothing else for it but in she goes. Eh?”

He looked at each of us in turn with a sort of wry benevolence, proud of his speech, ready to face up to facts — hard facts at that — and at the same time prepared generously to include us one and all in his assessment of matters.

But one of the firemen had found a piece of chalk and he was already writing Verminous in large white letters on the varnished woodwork. We others repeated our refusal to take the bed to school. The clerk then called over his shoulder to two figures lurking in the deep granite shadows of the portico behind. They stepped forward, revealing themselves in the battle dress of the local borough, and stood, disinterested but patient, while the clerk told them: “Steamers — down for ‘ere — part of 75’s lot — ” They shifted about nervously, one of them went over and seemed to stroke the bed. They both tried their best, in the many subtle ways of men skilled in avoiding decisions, to remain “of half a mind.”

After waiting another five minutes while the clerk brandished his list and the men murmured pathetically, we, with the sweat drying on us and the afternoon’s dust clogging our throats, had had enough. We compromised by carrying the bed into a stone vestibule where there was no other furniture and writing the word Bugs in large white letters on the floor.

As we left I took a last glance back at the little gray clerk. The door was closing. He still stood by the bed, edging perhaps a little nearer to it, ledger in hand, with his two henchmen still snuffling like shadows behind. He stood watching the door, waiting for it to close.