Читать книгу The Insect Man - Eleanor Doorly - Страница 8

“A cigale is called a cicada in English and it is not a grasshopper.

“The Insect Man says that a long, long time ago, before there were any books, some wise man in India wanted to teach people to save their grain in harvest to be ready for the cold weather. So he told them a parable of a little singing beast, who starved in the winter because he had no savings, and could not borrow from the ant. And the little singing beast had no name in Europe, because he didn’t live here and people have an awkward way of not giving names to things they have never seen, which makes translation very difficult. So Æsop, a Greek, who wanted to repeat the fable of the singing beast, and was careless about the right name, called him or her, a cicada. But any ploughman, who dug up the cicada’s sleeping chrysalis in winter, could have told him what nonsense it was to think a cicada ever lived in the winter. La Fontaine just went on with Æsop’s mistake. And the man who did the picture in La Fontaine’s book, a man called Grandville, drew a grasshopper, a sauterelle, not a cicada at all. He drew the ant dressed up as a good housekeeper and the grasshopper bowing at her door beside great sacks of corn, with her guitar under her arm and her thin frock clinging round her, blown by the cold wind.

“I don’t know anything about a sauterelle, except that he is a big green grasshopper who lives in the more northern part of France where La Fontaine lived. But the little, dear, delicate cicada lives in the South where the Insect Man lived, and he is my special Insect Man. He had two plane-trees opposite his house, under which he used to sit all day long, and watch, and watch, and watch the cicada and learn all about it, and this is what he saw: the cicada in the heat of the South, when everything is dried-up and all the insects dying of thirst, just settles on a branch of some shrub, pierces the bark and sucks the sap, singing the while. She doesn’t sing with her mouth, but has a whole arrangement of cymbals to make music in her tail. While the Insect Man watched, he saw all kinds of thirsty insects come up to drink the drops that oozed out and overflowed from the hole the cicada had made: wasps, flies, beetles ... but especially ants. He saw the littlest ones slip under the stomach of the cicada to get closer to the sap; and she, nice beast, just lifted herself up on her feet to make more room for the ants to drink easily. Fancy scandalising her after that! The bigger creatures took a sip; then flew away to try for something better and finding nothing, came back to try to drive the cicada away from the drink spring it had made.

“The Insect Man, whose name was Fabre, saw the miserable ants biting the cicada’s feet to make her move. Some of them pulled her by the end of the wing, some climbed on her back and tickled her sensitive feelers; one even seized her sucker and tried to pull it out of the hole, till at last, bothered by the tiny beasts, the giant left the spring, and, flying to another plant, began the story all over again. The beggar, the robber, is the ant; the industrious worker who shares so sweetly with unfortunate people is the cicada.

“But there is a lot more than that wrong in the fable. The cicada never eats flies or worms or grain. She never eats at all, she only drinks. Then, too, she never lives into the winter at all. She dies every year when it is still warm; and the Insect Man has seen the ants eating her thin, slim, dried-up body. So she is the ants’ food in winter and their drink provider in summer. She can’t live into the winter. She is alive about five summer weeks, that is all, just time enough to sing and to lay her eggs. Her eggs and her chrysalis live, in all, four years underground; four years in the dark for the sake of five weeks in the sunshine. No wonder, says the Insect Man, she sings all the days of the five weeks and makes a deafening shout about her joy at being alive.”

“Now the holiday, Penél?”

As we are taking the car to France, don’t you think it would be great fun to go to all the places where the Insect Man lived and write our own life of him as we go along?

“Not really? Not truly? Shall we really see the two plane-trees themselves and the very cicadas or, anyway, their great great grand-children?”

Not too fast, Geraldine, remember that the cicada lives only five weeks in the summer and that this is not summer, but spring!

“There!” said Mademoiselle, with a despairing little grimace, “I told you so!” as the wisp of blue cotton danced away in the breeze singing: “We’re off to the home of the Insect Man!”

“Stop!” called Giles to his sister, for he and Margaret had come up from the orchard with still more daffodils: “Come back and let us discuss this holiday! Before we decide on it, I think Penelope ought to tell Margaret and me something about this Insect Man, so that we may know if he lived in places we should like to visit and whether he did anything really interesting to make his life worth writing.”

He saw things that no one else had ever seen, said Penelope. Then, he put down what he saw and how he had seen it, so charmingly, in a great book, that you can open it anywhere and get a fascinating tale about little beasts. In that way he won two titles to fame: the one as a seer, or observer; the other as a writer.

He was just a little village boy who became a great scientist. He lived all his life among splendours: mountains, brilliant suns, medieval buildings as mighty as the palace of the popes at Avignon, Roman architecture as exquisitely fine as the triumphal arch at Orange. He lived among the spotless snows of high places and the tangled glory of the flowers of the South. He loved them all; but he chose for study some of the smallest living things, the insects.

He, like us, was always interested in little beasts, as Geraldine calls them; but, up to his time, learned students of insects, for the most part, only made collections of them and classified them. They knew, of course, how many legs they had and what shaped wings, but they had never thought of studying their characters.

“Their characters!” snorted Giles.

Yes, you have no idea what strange and sometimes awful characters insects have! What would you think of wives who always eat their husbands? But they have their virtues too and their startling skill. Fabre tells us that he was from the beginning interested in these strange splinters of life; but that one day he read an uncommon essay by a great student and that the effect was as if a spark had fallen into his mind and set it all alight. For the first time he realised that to collect insects in glass-topped boxes and to classify them under hard names was not the whole of insect science. There was something more: you could watch insects till you knew them, till they revealed to you their habits and tricks, their methods of doing things, their surgical skill, their reasons for their actions, their characters.

“Just give us an example of a tale, Penél,” said Giles.

It is almost a shame to tell them to you, you should read them for yourselves in Fabre’s own lovely language.

“Nevertheless, a tale! a tale! How else can we know if we want to hear anything more about the man?”