Читать книгу Consider Her Ways - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 6

Table of Contents

As I have said, it pleased Her Majesty to give me discretionary powers for the organization of the expedition. I immediately secured the co-operation of five leaders in their respective fields. At first I was tempted to reserve at least one department to myself; but I feel convinced that it was wiser not to do so.

I secured "their co-operation"; for I realized that, though the powers conferred upon me were sufficient to command their services, it would have been inadvisable to use these powers. We were going to be absent for a space of years; we were going to be exposed to dangers from all sorts of sources; we were going to meet with unheard-of hardships and difficulties: unless we were bound to each other by the bonds of mutual esteem, loyalty, and even love, no exertion of authority would have sufficed to keep us together; and had we ever separated into smaller groups, we should have been doomed to extinction.

Each of these leaders was in turn to secure her own staff, being free to choose, from the vast bodies of ants learned or skilled in their respective fields, whomever they thought fittest for the work and best able to adapt themselves to the peculiar conditions and problems that were bound to arise in an enterprise of so vast a scope.

To myself I reserved no other privilege than that of convening the plenary meetings for the deliberation of such problems as concerned more than one group and of acting the part of a central clearing-house of ideas and a depositary of their findings.

In this way I brought into being five bodies, each consisting of from twenty-five to thirty-five individuals and aggregating 162 maxims. The leader of each group occupied with regard to its remaining members the same position which I occupied with regard to the whole body; and they were at liberty to group themselves into smaller bodies for the discussion of special problems. One of these groups consisted of geographers, one of botanists, one of zoologists, one of experts in communication, and finally one of expert scenters skilled in reducing the findings of any body into the briefest and most pregnant scent-form. The task of keeping the meteorological records was handed over to members of group four.

These, then, represented, apart from one other individual and myself, the brains of the expedition and its High Command.

This other individual was the far-famed Assa-ree, our general-in-chief, who was to be independent of the scientists, experts, and artists and responsible to myself alone. She was not told at the time that it had pleased Her Majesty to confer upon me absolute and unconditional vice-regal powers by virtue of which I held her life in my jaws. I will confess that, much as I shall have to praise her undoubted genius in the field, her unequalled courage in the face of an enemy, and her unheard-of ability to organize and to control large bodies of ants, she had one grievous fault which I feared as much as a source of evil as I appreciated its potentiality for good: she was ambitious; she was impatient of control and illy brooked any intervention between herself and Her Majesty. Since, at a later stage, tremendous issues forced me to make use of my powers and since she, as a consequence, did not return, I must enter into some detail.

There had been rumours that she was herself a "throw-back"--an individual not entirely normal and exhibiting characteristics which aligned her with certain ancestral types of retarded development. There had been talk that, though she had never had wings, she had encroached upon the royal prerogative of laying eggs--parthenogenetically produced--from which viable offspring had been raised by our callows who never suspected that these eggs were illegitimate. What lent these rumours an air of verisimilitude was the fact that, from season to season, our broods were found to contain numbers of "throw-backs" resembling an ancestral type of fighting ants more closely than true Attas. There had finally been rumours that treasonable thoughts were no strangers to Assa-ree's heart; that she aspired to the crown; or to a position, below the crown, of all but absolute power; and that, if she failed in her ambitions, she would not hesitate, should occasion offer, to desert her own nation and to join that nation's enemies. I had never credited these rumours; and, I am glad to say, they had never reached the antennæ of Her Majesty. There was, however, in our recent military history, one circumstance which made me suspect the nature of her powers; and that was the ease with which, on the occasion of the last invasion of our territories by an enormous army of Eciton Predator, she succeeded in side-tracking that army, so that we were never even troubled with their raids. It was rumoured that she had singly entered the hostile army and issued orders as coming from their own supreme command. But whatever her powers might be, I held to the fact that she had used them for the salvation of our people.

Yet, when I approached her on the present occasion, I could not rid myself of the impression that there was about her the faintest aura of a fecal odour such as is well-known to surround all Ecitons; and that was the reason why I solicited and obtained from Her Majesty the special power over life and death to which I have referred and which was given to me in the form of very small pellets of the three great royal perfumes: the perfume of Supreme Command, the perfume of favour, and the perfume of death.

When I first approached Assa-ree with my request for her co-operation in the interest of the expedition, I was, for the fraction of a second, conscious of an intensification of that fecal odour. But my disquietude was allayed by the readiness with which she embraced the plan. This was the more gratifying to me as, without some sort of military escort, the expedition could not have started. Her first demand, on the other hand, made me suspicious again. She asked for absolute authority, not only in training but even in levying the army. Unless she was given a free hand, she would not undertake the task. Yet, having gone so far, I did not see how I could refuse. In some mysterious way the conviction came to me that, unless I indulged her, I should make myself the means of driving her into open revolt; and I was too profoundly penetrated with the teachings of our penologists not to feel that her extraordinary gifts might be led into channels where they would work as readily for the good of our nation as, under different circumstances, they might work for its evil. Her next demand could, after this, no longer be denied: she asked for permission to secede from our city: she urged that a fighting body, drilled and organized, and mentally reoriented in such a way as to make them obey her own single will rather than the call of the community as such, would prove a serious source of disturbance within a commonwealth where voluntary devotion to the common weal was the central principle from which freedom flowed. In what she added she seemed to me to be playing with fire, though she tempered her plea with a peculiar ironical humour which was bending back upon herself. Her argument was that, among Attas, military gifts were necessarily associated with a retarded mentality, capable of holding on to only one idea at a time; we were fortunate, she scented, in having no small numbers of such backward members in our midst; for without them we should speedily succumb to a hostile world; so long as these were scattered as individuals among large numbers of fully civilized ants, they might never even be suspected of aberrant instincts; but the moment they were segregated and brought together in solid masses, they would necessarily begin to feel their mettle and become the cause of friction; they might even prove a serious danger to the state.

All which was so reasonable and so self-evident that I agreed in spite of my suspicion that Assa-ree was poking fun at me.

The next question was that of numbers. It so happened that there had just been a census; the total number of Attas, maxims, mediæ, and minims in our city had been found to be 435,313 souls, which number was, of course, subject to slight fluctuations from day to day. Callows were hatched, and old ants died. Now Assa-ree asked for ten thousand; and this estimate was so little above my own estimate of the number necessary, namely, eight thousand, that I conceded it without argument.

But here is the point. When, four months later, Assa-ree reported that her levy was complete and I reviewed the troops in person, I was struck by the fact that the ranks presented an alien aspect and that, above all, most of the officers seemed to have extraordinarily large and curved jaws. Yet I had seen an occasional individual like that in our city; what amazed me was the large number in which, on this occasion, I saw them assembled. But, as Assa-ree and myself walked along the front of the serried ranks of this army, the scent with which I was cheered, though it, too, partook of that fecal quality which I have mentioned, was so enthusiastic that I could not doubt the loyalty of these troops, no matter of what suspicious-looking elements they might be composed. So I suppressed my misgivings, arguing that, if we wanted fighting power in our escort, we had better take it as it offered itself; and that this army had that fighting power, there could be no doubt.

Yet my suspicions were revived once more. Bissa-tee, chief zoologist to Her Majesty and leader of the zoological group of the High Command, expounded it as her theory that even in communities devoted entirely to the arts of peace the birth rate rises when an extraordinary enterprise demanding the possible sacrifice of life is planned. She asked for a new census. When it was taken, she triumphed, of course. In spite of the fact that, according to Assa-ree, ten thousand individuals had been conscripted, the population of the city had risen to 435,328, or fifteen more than there had been before the draft. Even allowing for the correctness of Bissa-tee's theory, this seemed so amazing that I could not account for it.

I will anticipate and state that, years later, just before Assa-ree made her final bid for power, by means of the most detestable treason, I extracted from her an admission, which she made in the form of a boast, that, while she had indeed levied numbers of Attas exhibiting a military atavism (all of them closely related to her; in fact, being her illegitimate offspring), the minutest search for such individuals had failed to produce a levy, among the maxims and mediæ, of more than 2,114 able-bodied ants; the rest of the levy she had made up by winning over, no doubt using her fecal odour for the purpose, stray bodies of Ecitons, of the species Eciton Hamatum, our deadly enemies.

In a way I cannot but rejoice at the fact that neither I nor anyone else had the slightest knowledge or even suspicion of the extent of her treason at the time; had we had such a suspicion, we should never have started on our expedition; we should, instead, have rushed into civil war; and who knows what, with such an enemy, the outcome would have been? Our ignorance of the facts served the commonwealth in two ways: in the first place, we led a most dangerous potential enemy away from our country: more dangerous, in fact, than a purely Eciton army of ten times its number would have been; for against such an enemy our usual means of defence would have availed, whereas this highly trained and efficient fighting unit knew all about these means of defence and could have circumvented them, as they would undoubtedly have done had we, by even the slightest hesitation, betrayed any knowledge of its true nature and composition; in the second place, enormous as were the losses sustained in the course of our march through a largely hostile continent, the expedition was led to a successful issue; and the wealth of new knowledge acquired in its course has been made available for the future, for our nation and all antdom, if only by the survival of a single individual, namely, myself.

One last word with regard to the army. When I proposed eight thousand as the number to be levied, I had in mind that a third or a half of this number should be composed of Attas intermediate between the fighting and the carrier types. For in addition to those exclusively levied for purposes of defence and attack we needed a considerable number of individuals who would carry a supply of fungus-hyphæ* or roots in their infrabuccal chambers. I anticipated the possibility of meeting with climatic or other conditions which would force us to entrench for weeks or months at a time, and if, in times of unemployment, we had to go without our accustomed food, it might prove an unendurable hardship. I felt certain that we could always secure leaves suitable as a substratum for the cultivation of our fungi; but lack of seed would, in such a case, have been fatal. Besides, I had hit upon the plan of establishing, in favourable localities, hidden fungus-gardens on which we could fall back should hunger or defeat, by whatever enemy, force us into a hurried retreat. I am glad to say that, at least in this particular, the provision made by Assa-ree proved adequate, though it fell far short of what I had expected her to do.

* See appendix.