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In the evenings he gets drunk at the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man, with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams. His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot.
'You'll 'ave to wait till that little blackbeetle in the office 'as gorn. 'Blackbeetle? she ses, staring. "'Office-boy, I ses. 'He'd better not see you at all. S'pose you go off for a bit and come back when I whistle? "Afore she could answer the boy came out of the office, ready to go 'ome.
An exploratory blackbeetle now and then was found immovable upon the stairs, or in an upper room, as wondering how he got there. Rats began to squeak and scuffle in the night time, through dark galleries they mined behind the panelling.
'I really do not wish to be abusive; but when I think of these poor little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of evolution that a blackbeetle can understand with their retinue of twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the vivisector's laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you cut off a dog's leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy, I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts, blackguards, impostors, quacks, liars, and, worst of all, credulous conscientious fools.
Even blackbeetles, as she often told herself, were God's creatures, and Mr Ogilvie, although he had deserted her, no doubt had finer sensibilities than a blackbeetle. So she did not wish to hurt him if she could avoid it; still, a proposal of marriage at the age of forty-seven would be rather a feather in her cap, and she was too true a woman to be indifferent to that coveted decoration.
Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like the old-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice? The nearest I have come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a cat retrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and making a dish of it.
"He would squash Heemskirk like a blackbeetle all the same," I remarked. "Rather!" she murmured. "And that wouldn't do," she added quickly. "Imagine the state poor papa would get into. Besides, I mean to be mistress of the dear brig and sail about these seas, not go off wandering ten thousand miles away from here."
Professor Huxley, in a remarkable passage, has imagined the possibility of the existence of beings rising higher and higher in intelligence, the consciousness ever expanding, and the reaching of a stage as much above the human as the human is above that of the blackbeetle. That is not a flight of the scientific imagination, but a description of a fact.
Why, with the nearest blackbeetle, to be sure." "A blackbeetle?" "Black or brown; it matters little. He will christen you the beast in Hebrew and Latin as well as Greek, and tell you her history down from the flood: next he will beg her of you, and out will come a cork and a pin, and behold the creature impaled. For that is how men love beetles.
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