Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson
in the moral virtues of respect for sanitation and punctilious cleanliness. There is, however, even a more admirable psychological fact behind than this, for it appears that the rubbish which scatters them most promptly is not their own but their neighbors’. Their own rubbish, it is true, sends them off quickly enough, but the exodus is, if possible, accelerated by employing that from an adjoining nest. To have their own litter lying about makes home intolerable, but that their neighbors should “shoot” theirs also upon them is the very extremity of abomination. Life under such conditions is at once voted impossible, and rather than exist where the next-door people can empty their dust-bins and slop-pails over their walls, they go away headlong. A panic of disgust seizes upon the whole colony, and the bonds of society snap and shrivel up on the instant, like a spider’s web above a candle-flame. Without a thought of wife or child, of household gods or household goods, they rush tumultuously from the polluted spot. No pious son stays to give the aged Anchises a lift; none loiters to spoil the Egyptians before he goes; none looks back upon the doomed city. Forward and anywhere is the motto of the pell-mell flight; all throw down their burdens that they may run the faster, and shamefully abandon their shields that their arms may not impede their course. Big and little, male and female, old and young, all scamper off alike over the untidy thresholds, and there is no distinction of caste under the common horror of a home that requires sweeping up.
Such a spectacle is truly sublime, for behind the ants there is no avenging Michael-arm, that they should thus precipitately fall into “hideous rout;” no Zulu impi; no hyena horde of Bashkirs, as there was after the flying Tartars; no remorseless pursuit of any kind. Indeed, persecution and fiery trials they confront unmoved, so there is no element of fear in their conduct.
It arises entirely from a generous impatience of neighbors’ untidy habits, from a superb intolerance of dirt. When was such an example ever set, or when will it ever be followed, by human beings? No single city, not even a village, is ever recorded to have been abandoned on account of uncleanliness; and yet what a grand episode in national history it would be, if such had happened—had the men of Cologne, for instance, ever gone out into the country-side and all encamped there, in dignified protest against the “six-and-seventy separate stinks” of their undrained city! No instance even is on record of a single householder rushing from his premises with all his family rather than endure cobwebs and dust; nor, indeed, of a single child refusing to stay in its nursery because it was untidy. We are still, therefore, far behind the Colombia ant in the matter of cleanliness.
In another aspect, perhaps, this impetuous detestation of dirt is not altogether admirable; for, as I have noticed, it argues a declension in industry from the true ant standard. Thus, the very creatures that urge so headlong a career, when the neatness of their surroundings is threatened, are marvels of diligence in collecting the very leaves which afterwards distress them so much. This assiduity has long been noted. In Cornwall the busy murians, as the people call the ants, are still supposed to be a race of “little people,” disestablished from the world of men and women for their idle habits, and condemned to perpetual labor; while in Ceylon the natives say that the ants feed a serpent, who lives under ground, with the leaves which they pick off the trees, and that, as the reptile’s appetite is never satisfied, the ants have to work on for ever. From West to East, therefore, the same trait of unresting diligence has been remarked; and, in one respect, it is no doubt a deplorable retrogression in the Colombia ants that the mere sight of rubbish should thus dishearten them. Yet, looked at from a higher standpoint, their consuming dislike of uncleanly surroundings is magnificent, for they do not hesitate to sacrifice all that is nearest and dearest, to risk even their public character, so long as sufficient effect can be given to their protest and sufficient emphasis laid upon their indignation. Anything short of flight, immediate and complete, without condition or reservation, would fail to meet the case or adequately represent their feelings. To them the degradation of submitting to a neighbor’s cinders and egg-shells seems too despicable to be borne; and rather than live in a parish where the vestry neglects the drains and the dustbins, they abandon their hearths and homes for ever. We human beings cannot all of us afford to show the same superb horror of defective sanitation, but we can admire the ants who do, and can hold them up as models to all slatterns and sluts, parochial or domestic.
1 ↑ The Ichneumon, Viverrinæ.
In Hot Weather
PART II.
THE INDIAN SEASONS.
I.
IN HOT WEATHER.
“And the day shall have a sun
That shall make thee wish it done.”
IS Manfred speaking of the hot weather, of May-day in India? The hot weather is palpably here, and the heat of the sun makes the length of the twelve hours intolerable. The mango-bird glances through the groves, and in the early morning announces his beautiful but unwelcome presence with his merle-melody. The köel-cuckoo screams in a crescendo from some deep covert, and the crow-pheasant’s note has changed to a sound which must rank among nature’s strangest—with the marsh-bittern’s weird booming, the drumming of the capercailzie, or the bell-tolling note of the prairie campanile. Now, too, the hornets are hovering round our eaves, and wasps reconnoitre our verandahs. “Of all God’s creatures,” said Christopher North, “the wasp is the only one eternally out of temper.” But he should have said this only of the British wasp. The vespæ of India, though, from their savage garniture of colors and their ghastly elegance, very formidable to look on, are but feeble folk compared with their banded congener of England, the ruffian in glossy velvet and deep yellow, who assails one at all hours of the summer’s day, lurking in fallen fruit, making grocers’ shops as dangerous as viper-pits, an empty sugar-keg a very cockatrice den, and spreading dismay at every picnic. But the wasp points this moral—that it requires no brains to annoy. A wasp stings as well without its head as with it.
Flies, too, now assume a prominence to which they are in no way entitled by their merits. Luther hated flies quia sunt imagines diaboli et hæreticorum; and, with a fine enthusiasm worthy of the great Reformer, he smote Beelzebub in detail. “I am,” he said one day, as he sat at his dinner, his Boswell (Lauterbach) taking notes under the table, “I am a great enemy unto flies, for when I have a good book they flock upon it, parade up and down upon it, and soil it.” So Luther used to kill them with all the malignity of the early Christian. And indeed the fly deserves death. It has no delicacy, and hints are thrown away upon the importunate insect. With a persistent insolence it returns to your nose, perching irreverently upon the feature, until sudden death cuts short its ill-mannered career. In this matter my sympathies are rather with that Roman Emperor who impaled on pins all the flies he could catch, than with Uncle Toby who, when he had in his power a ruffianly bluebottle, let it go out of the window—to fly into his neighbor’s house and vex him. The only consolation is that the neighbor probably killed it.
The sun is hardly up yet, so the doors are open. From the garden come the sounds of chattering hot-weather birds. “While eating,” said the Shepherd, “say little, but look friendly;” but the starlings (to give them their due and to speak more point-device—the “rose-colored pastors”) do not at all respect the advice of James Hogg, for while eating they say much, looking the while most unfriendly. They