CHAPTER V.
THE WASPS: THEIR FURY OF IMPROVISATION.
When the wasp on a summer's day enters at the window, with its loud, aggressive, and menacing _zou! zou! zou!_ everybody is on his guard. The child trembles, the mother suspends her work, even the husband lifts his eyes: "Insolent, impudent intruder!" and he arms himself with a handkerchief.
Meanwhile, the superb insect, having flown into every corner, and cast around the room a rapid and scornful glance, departs with a loud noise, not condescending to notice the unfriendly welcome accorded to him. His only reflection has been this: "A paltry house! Not a fruit, not a spider, not a fly, not the smallest bit of meat!"
Then he makes a descent on the shop of the country butcher: "Butcher, my custom is yours. I am desirous of dealing with you. Do not hesitate, foolish miser. Cut me a good slice of meat, and I will pay you for it; I will kill all your flesh-flies. Let us agree to be friends. We are both born to kill."
The slow dull animals of the genus _Man_ are much scandalized at the proceedings of the wasp. It acts, it does not talk. But if it deigned to speak, its apology would be simple. A word would suffice. It is the being on whom Nature imposes the terrible destiny of suppressing time. We speak of the ephemera which lives a few hours: the period is sufficient for a creature that does nothing. The true ephemera is the wasp. In a brief six months' summer (not more than four months of full activity) it has to accomplish, not only the cycle of the individual life--to be born, to eat, to love, to die--but, what is far more onerous, the cycle of a prolonged social life, the most complicated which any insect is required to perform. What the bee leisurely elaborates in several years, the wasp must realize immediately. Much more than the bee! For the latter makes its honeycombs in a completed house (the hive, the hollow of the rock, the trunk of a tree); but the wasp must improvise without as within, the ramparts of the city no less than the city itself.
Four months to create everything, to make and unmake a people, and a people of lofty organization!
Learn, ye idle races which mutter that in fourscore years ye have no time, learn to despise it. It is a purely relative affair. There is never any time for the flat-bellied snail, were it to crawl through centuries. There is always time for heroic activity, firm will, and resolute energy.
The wasp dies. Its city of thirty thousand souls, improvised by a revolution, as by a thundering stroke of genius and courage, subsists as a testimony to its labours. Solid, eminently substantial, conscientiously wrought, and seemingly intended for eternity!
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Let us note the starting-point.
A miserable fly, which in winter has survived the destruction of its race, issues all a-dust from its hiding-place. Thank Heaven, it is the spring-time! Does it seek to enjoy the sun? No, it will not allow itself a day's repose. What is its first duty? To love with a rapid and burning love, to go straight to its goal, to seize and take up as it passes that vital force which will create an entire people. Love on the wing,--no delay,--everything made to bear on the great social aim!
Savage and alone, with its idea and its hope, this mother of the future commonwealth creates in the first place its citizens, some thousands upon thousands of labourers. You have already learned that among insects every worker is a female. These too are workers, but the harsh necessities of toil suppress in them their sex. They love with a lofty devotion. The austere virgin looks for no other spouse than the community.
The chain of ardent labour is continued from the mother to her daughters. Her task was to beget: it is theirs to build. The fury of improvisation is the same in them, however, as it was in her. According to the region and the climate, the tribe, the species, and the work vary. Here they will excavate underground the cave in which they construct their edifice, isolating it from the soil, and preserving it from damp. There they suspend it in the air, and build it of strong coarse pasteboard to defy the heaviest rains. To make this paper or pasteboard, they hasten to the forest, where they select some thoroughly prepared wood, which has been long soaking, and has been already steeped by Nature just as we steep flax. Then within, with a strong sharp tooth (for theirs are not the graceful probosces of bees intended to kiss flowers), they gnaw, and tear, and loosen, and sever the rebellious filaments, pound them into pulp as we do the linen rags, and knead them with a heavy tongue. After the paste has been mixed with a viscous and adhesive saliva, it is spread out into thin layers. With teeth closed like a press, the work is completed. The elementary substance of the pasteboard is prepared.
A second industry now commences. The paper manufacturer is transformed into a mason. It has not the beaver's tail to serve as a trowel, but with the American wasp a sort of palette on the leg serves the same purpose. The operation is not the same here as in Guiana. The mason of Cayenne, having built up the walls, has only to suspend to them a succession of floors or platforms, following in that dry hot land the type of our human habitations. But the European mason, working with pasteboard, in a damp climate, where even in the summer heavy rains are frequent, adopts a different plan: _a house within a house_, a hive completely isolated from the envelope which encloses it. This is the most successful device for an ardent and chilly people, whose life-flame needs careful guarding.
As it is without, so it is within. As the house, so too the inhabitant. We men are not yet sufficiently acquainted with the influence exercised upon our moral dispositions by our habitations. This duplication of walls, this potent envelopment of a people so completely shut up under its strong twofold enclosure, largely contributes to the unity of the commonwealth.
Observe another singularity: shall we call it a trivial one? No; to the serious observer it is of importance. The city has two gates; its people enter by the one, and pass out by the other, so that no confusion can take place, and no collision between the ingressing and egressing crowds. This plan is adopted by all people who economize time, and wish to transact their business expeditiously. In London, the rule is the same as with the wasps: on the one side those who are coming, on the other those who are going; each person keeps to the right; these take one footpath, those another. No such impediment is met with in the Strand as the idlers of our Rue Vivienne, who incessantly convert themselves into a serious obstacle, and swim laboriously in the confusion they create.
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But to return to our subject.
What is the object of these constructions? Is this robust being, endowed with such an intensity of vital force, more afraid of the air than numbers of delicate insects,--than the nervous spider, which has only a house of thread, or even lives under a leaf? Therein lies the lofty mystery of life for the higher insect. It is this which stimulates the universal genius of the ant either above ground or under ground. It is this which inspires the activity, the persevering toil and economy of the bee. What, then, is it? The _love of the future_,--the yearning to perpetuate and eternize that which one loves. All their love centres in their offspring.
To love the child and the future; to toil in view of time and of that which as yet is not; to exhaust their vitality and die of work, that posterity may have less cause to labour,--a noble ideal, assuredly, of society, wherever it may be. One can well understand it in those who have time before them, and a life to make use of, like men and bees. But that this insect which has no time, which perishes in the evening, should love the time that will never be its own, should immolate its little life for the sake of the life that is to come, should devote to the child of to-morrow its solitary day, is a sacrifice peculiar to the wasp: it is original and sublime!
There is not a minute to lose; and the mother incessantly increases the burden. Besides the female workers, she produces some few males who do not work, whose little and very brief function scarcely prevails as an excuse for their inactivity. Among those tragical and serious insect-races, Nature, as if to divert herself a moment by a comical distraction, has made the poor little males ordinarily squat and obese, innocent little Falstaffs, who are guarded like a seraglio of unimportant servants. The caricature is complete in the case of the male bee, which, alleging that it neither knows how to glean abroad nor to build at home, passes the time in humming before its bee-hive (like our young cigar-smoking idlers).
Among the wasps life is so tense, burning, and keen, that the very males, slothful as they may be, dare not abandon themselves to complete indolence. Yonder ladies, who do not jest, and who have stings of which the males are deprived, might look upon their idleness sourly, and stir them up with dagger-thrusts. So they have conceived the idea of working without work; they have the air of doing something,--a small part of the domestic labour, cleaning, and sweeping. If any one dies, the ceremony of interment provides them with a pretence; with the effort of carrying a slight weight they sweat and groan, and several put their shoulders together. In a word, they are very ridiculous. And I am confident that their terrible companions laugh at them.
Theirs truly is an onerous undertaking. Twenty or thirty thousand mouths to feed, is a very extensive household. If they were only gifted with the prudent activity of bees, their community would perish of famine. What they need is a violent, furious, murderous rapidity,--all the appearances of an immense gluttony,--all the love and devotion which Sparta had for the art of thieving. But the secret of their power, which is plainly discernible in them if we observe them but a moment, is their magnificent insolence, their superb contempt for all other beings, and their firm conviction that the whole world is their inheritance. If we consider, it is true, their wonderful energy, compared with which lions and tigers are mere races of sheep,--and their prodigious yearly effort of improvisation,--and, finally, their absolute devotion to the public welfare,--we shall not find in all nature creatures relatively of greater power, nor which possess a clearer right to value themselves highly.
Our modern minds, however, find a difficulty in admiring the violence of the antique virtues. Their boundless love of the commonwealth is pushed to an almost criminal excess. Who has not marked with how ferocious an ardour they hunt the bees! Yet certain species of wasps can make honey; but only in fine climates, which, knowing no winter, allow the wasps an interval of peaceful labour. Here the case is different. Their life, cut short in six months, compels them to resort to measures of cruel simplicity. Honey is needed for their children. Thereupon they attack the bee, and take it prisoner; with their pliable body, whose waist is a mere thread, they so curve the extremity as to stab the prisoner underneath with their deadly sting; when thus stricken, the wasp saws it with three strokes of its teeth, and leaves the head and corselet to palpitate for some time longer, while the belly, filled with honey, the barbarian carries off as a gift for its young.
It feels no remorse. The death of others apparently does not cause a pang to this creature, which knows that it too will die to-morrow.
What do I say?
Our virgins of Tauris do not wait until Nature lays upon them her heavy hand and the ignoble leaden shroud of winter. They have borne the sword; they will die by the sword. The republic ends in a general massacre. The children, recently, ay, and still, so dear, are slain; dilatory children whom cold and want would kill to-morrow; their sisters, aunts, and affectionate nurses securing them at least the advantage of dying by the hands of those who love them. This latter gift, a speedy death, is freely bestowed on numerous unfortunates who had no thought of soliciting it,--on little useless males, even on young workers who were born late, and cannot boast of a constitution sufficiently strong to resist the winter.
Let it not be said that the heroic race of wasps is ever seen to request the humiliating hospitality of the smoky roofs of man, and, for the sake of living a little longer, to expose its melancholy remains in the shambles of a spider's web! No, children! No, sisters! Die! The republic is immortal. Some one of us, favoured by the yearly miracle and great lottery of Nature, will be called upon to recommence the entire work. And if but one remains, it is enough. Should the world perish, a single true heart would suffice to re-create it.