The Pilgrim Hawk

by Glenway Wescott

After that, Mrs. Cullen heaved a greater sigh than before, not because it had been a harder struggle, but because her own light but significant remarks had hurt her at last, I fancied. And now she added that, simple though hawks all were, you could never really trust one. “Oh, I shall have to be so careful, never to fly Lucy at things she cannot catch and kill. The least failure makes her hopeless. My man in Hungary says that if she misses her quarry twice, I must call it a day and keep her hooded; otherwise it’s risky. Because if she should miss a third time she might leave me; fly off and never return. They’re all alike: the haggard you’ve hunted with for years; even the eyas you have taken from the nest and babied all its life . . .”

  “Damned ungrateful, I say,” Cullen jeered.

  “No, Larry. Lucy gives up her freedom and stays with me because it’s a better life, more food and more fun. If it doesn’t work, after all, what’s the use? If my falconry isn’t good enough...”

  Cullen giggled. I didn’t. For it is the way religious faith goes, in the sense of God’s failure; and it is the way true love ends: missing the third time. That much of life I already knew; I had missed twice. I glanced at Alex, wondering if the mysterious turn this small talk was taking troubled her too. But her face had its pretty well-bred passivity; I could not tell. The light in the Irishwoman’s eyes was fantastic, focused like glass on her great weak husband, then on me for just a moment with something like embarrassing affection. She and I understood each other.

  She seemed to me a very passionate woman, but it was a kind of plural passion, all confused or crossed: work and play and sense of beauty, the maternal and the conjugal and the misanthropic, mixed. Perhaps that is a peculiarity of childless women. Female character has a great many secondary traits and minor talents; the wear and tear of motherhood may weaken them or stamp them out. It is anarchy if they all flourish.

  “Tower,” she said, “you would make a good falconer. Why don’t you take it up, in the States? And you too, Alex. Everyone should have some hobby, some pet, I think. And all the other pets really are too awful.

  “Ugh, how I despise dogs!” she then exclaimed in a dull disgusted tone of voice. “Do you know what dogs remind me of? It’s not a nice thing to say but I do mean it. Prostitutes; all things to all men, and all that. And all shapes and sizes, from adapting themselves to everything and everybody for centuries, with no integrity. Men love them for that; it’s flattering.

  “Falcons have never changed. Forty centuries of falconry, think of it! And still wild; every feather as it was, and the same everywhere. I tell you, there’s nothing like it in nature. Cats have more character than dogs, if they only weren’t so damned amorous. Kittens to be drowned every few months, isn’t it awful!”

  My well-bred Alex in spite of herself made a little shocked face. It startled me too, because just then like a fool I had been thinking of Mrs. Cullen as a childless woman. What about those wild Irish sons of hers, shifting for themselves at Cullen Hall, riding and spoiling her favorite hunters, hunting with Lord Bild? I said a kind of prayer for them. That is, I hoped that they really were wild. Cullen had spoken of them as practically mature men; but perhaps he himself was not mature enough to judge of it. I hoped that they did not love their mother much. If they were at all backward or sensitive it was good of her, wise of her, to keep out of Ireland.

  At this point wild Lucy flung up her wings and let her mute drop to the floor. Mrs. Cullen cheerfully apologized, and also proudly called our attention to its whiteness. It meant that Lucy was in excellent health. A healthy falcon’s mute is the cleanest wastage in nature, and by no stretch of imagination could Alex or I have been offended by it. Cullen offendedly stirred his great body about in the great soft armchair; his face got redder; his light eyes protruded. But they protruded at us rather than it. Perhaps he feared, or perhaps hoped, that we would somehow express disapprobation or disgust. Alex rang for Eva, and of course that simple creature did not mind; it rather amused her. She fetched a towel and some wax, and knelt beautifully, and gave the parquet a very good restoration.

  During which, Jean came rushing in, sweaty and pleased with himself. When he saw his dear beauty there on her knees he made a gleeful sound and gave her a tap as he passed, which made her blush. He and Ricketts in the Daimler had had a blowout on the back road. But dinner would not be much delayed; for while Ricketts had changed the tire, he had seated himself by the roadside and dressed the pigeons with his jackknife.

  Mrs. Cullen asked him how large Lucy’s pigeon was; and he sent Eva after it: a rumpled thing in a basket with warm damned eyes. She instructed them to wring its neck and chop it in half and bring it back, with its feathers and half the giblets. Meanwhile she asked me to move the straight chair into a dusky corner under the staircase. Though the least shy hawk in the world, Lucy would not feed properly outdoors or with a light in her eyes. Next Mrs. Cullen requested a number of towels to protect her dress, and Eva brought a worn-out tablecloth; and Alex helped tie this under her chin like a bib and spread it out over her lap. She sat with her pretty legs far apart, no longer a fashionable woman but rather like a gypsy or a priestess; or as if this were to be some surgical operation or painful travail.

  Whereupon Jean returned with the portion of pigeon. He let two or three drops of blood and a bit of gizzard fall on the waxed floor; and again Eva cheerfully mopped up. Mrs. Cullen took the half-bird in the hand on which Lucy perched, pinching it between gloved forefinger and thumb, at Lucy’s feet; turning it temptingly. At first Lucy stared at Alex and me so insolently that we drew a few steps away from the staircase. Jean and Eva also wanted to watch, but Alex reminded them that we too were hungry.

  I had been hearing so much and thinking so romantically of hawk-hunger that I expected a lunge and a grab, like a wolf or a cat; it was not so at all. It took two or three minutes for Lucy’s appetite to develop, to accumulate. In a state of nature, no doubt it depends upon the fun of pursuit, voluptuous air in her wings, and the hovering and teasing; and there would not be any real spasm of Lucy’s love of food until the instant she felt food in her beak. Now there had to be time for some equivalent of all that to take place in her narrow mind; time at least to regret it. The tedium of this conjugal kind of repast had to be overcome somehow; so she doubted and deliberated and imagined.

  “Damn your pride, Lucy,” Mrs. Cullen muttered; then murmured to us in her schoolgirl French, because Lucy did not understand French, “L’appétit vient en mangeant.” Upon which I reminded myself that on the whole, throughout life as a whole, the appetites which do not arise until we have resolved to eat, which we cannot comprehend until we have eaten, are the noblest—marital, aesthetic, religious...

  At last Lucy’s curly breast did throb; a few feathers bristled up; her wings stood out a few inches; her greenish fists clenched on the glove; then her whole body began to point down beak first like a water-diviner’s stick. She set her feet a little farther apart on her mistress’s wrist. Then she stooped straight between them and thrust into the piece of pigeon. Mrs. Cullen held it tight. Lucy braced her legs and pulled and straightened back up with a morsel, which after a moment she shifted away into her throat and, with a sinuous motion or a toss, swallowed.

  Until the end, until there was no more pigeon, Mrs. Cullen had to encourage her to keep her mind on what she was doing. “The important thing,” she said, “is to get her to take feathers enough. Her digestion depends a good deal on that.”

  When Lucy paused and raised her weird face between mouthfuls, it seemed spiritual rather than sensual; a bigoted face. There was no histrionic angry temper, no showing off. Thoroughly and slowly it went on to the end, with meditation upon every feather, every crumb of meat, every sip of blood—sacramental. Once or twice, because she did not like the way some wisp of plumage or tiny tendon felt—or because she liked it extremely—she shook her head hard; and a spot of blood appeared on Mrs. Cullen’s bib, a feather drifted to the floor. Perhaps you could not have watched it if you were squeamish;
neither Alex nor I were. But after the fourth or fifth beakful Lucy had a bad moment, modesty or imaginary repletion, and Mrs. Cullen asked us to move still farther away; and we were glad to go. We sat down beside Cullen in front of the big window.

  It interested me to observe, or to guess at, his feeling about this. When his wife first called for Lucy’s banquet he had pulled a long face. I think that may have been only fond anxiety, lest in her serving of it she appear to Alex and me coarse, or comical. He kept his eyes averted, but it was not disgust, surely, for it put him in mind of his own eating. He talked to us of that with enthusiasm and in great detail. In Paris the past week someone had sent them away out on the Avenue Jean Jaurès for a steak; year after year they always telephoned a certain small unsuccessful restaurant to prepare a supreme cassoulet which took two days; and so forth. Which brought him finally to the present, the great casserole of pigeons which Jean was preparing. At that point, I think, Alex regarded him almost with detestation.

  The half-pigeon out of the way, Mrs. Cullen decided to put Lucy outdoors to weather, as it is called. We followed her into the garden where she selected the back of a rustic bench as a suitable perch. But there had been signs of more than usual nervousness during the feeding: it seemed best to leave her hooded. Because of the unaccustomed warmth of the afternoon, after Scotland, Mrs. Cullen said, she had a slight headache; and she retired with Alex to the bedroom for some aspirin and a moment’s repose.

  Then I offered Cullen a cocktail. He rose with enthusiasm and followed me to what I called the choir loft, that is, the balcony, where Alex’s decorator had seen fit to install a bar, in the fashion of the twenties: all chromium and copper with a fine hierarchy of glasses and remarkable liquors in odd bottles. My Irishman had never seen the like of it. There was a magnum of prewar vodka; and I suggested a kind of modified Alexander with that in it instead of gin. Missing a syllable, he thought it charming of me, and so American, to serve a drink named after our hostess. I tried to set him right on that point but he was too charmed to care. The drink itself also suited him and for a while he concentrated on it, without a word.

  The ladies did not return, so presently I mixed a second shakerful; and Alex’s silver shaker was large. It was indiscreet, perhaps a little perverse, and in a way characteristic of me. As a rule I dislike being with people who have had too much to drink. It often brings on in me a kind of misanthropic fit: pity verging upon repugnance, and a mean sense of humor which they sometimes notice. But just because I am aware of the old-maidishness and even injustice of this, whenever the hospitality of the bottle is up to me I am inclined to overdo it.

  Cullen in fact had been a little tight all afternoon, and I had not realized it. Now as he got tighter I saw that it was the same thing. They had arrived at Chancellet about two-thirty; so probably it had happened at luncheon, perhaps at breakfast. That explained his wife’s anxious and resentful air, and her rude motherly snubs to keep him in order. He must have been in misery the last few hours, while we failed to offer him anything: thoughtlessness on my part, perhaps prudence or dislike on Alex’s. She of course knew him well and must have noticed.

  Perhaps the unnoticeable sort of heavy daytime drinker has the worst trouble; certainly they are more troublesome to others than they think. And others—sobersides like myself—are often more unjust to them than to their reeling, roaring, festive confreres. Half the time they themselves are only half aware of any incapacity or lack of charm. Or perhaps they know, and they think that you do not, and you do, and of course it is not manners to tell them so. They make an effort, often a heroic effort; and you feel that you have to respect and applaud that, whether or not it is fun for you.

  But the worst injustice must be when you scarcely know them, and you judge them without reference to their habit, as in my case with Cullen that afternoon. He had simply seemed to me mediocre; old for his age, and weak for his size, dull, vain, and rather cross. No one had warned me that I was not seeing him at his best. It was his character, for all I knew, the nature of the creature; take it or leave it. That is to say, I had left it. So now I felt a slight embarrassment and grudging contrition.

  Perhaps at other times, I reminded myself, his character was ideal; his mind vigorous; his great physique fresh and energetic. That would explain the love his wife bore him. Suppose you have learned to like or to love such a man when he was sober; and you happen to dislike him when he is not; and he doesn’t know the difference or can’t help it. The temptation to interfere, the fond hope of reformation, must be very great. Thus I began to think indulgently of Mrs. Cullen’s selfish nervousness and sharp tongue. Although, if what I had seen that afternoon was the worst of it, certainly she exaggerated and overemphasized the plight she was in with him. An ordinary boring conceited uneasy childish man! Yet out of his petty instability she seemed to expect something odious or dangerous to develop any minute—as if she felt the ground underfoot move a bit, like a landslide starting, and caught glimpses of little creeping sickening things close to the surface, coming up! Love itself is an exaggeration, and very likely to lead to others.

  After the first pouring of the second round, suddenly Cullen began a long complaint of the merry chase she led him year in and year out: her Mediterranean cruises, her falcons, her Irish republicans. No home to speak of, no creature comforts; nothing like the good time Alex and I had here in Chancellet, this pretty bar for example. Nothing but wild men, wild birds, and two silly maids to mop up after the birds instead of a good cook: hotel food all the year round, never a leg of boar soaked in brandy or squab with currants.

  At first, I think his outburst embarrassed him as well as me. For he explained that if I were an Englishman he would not be talking to me in this way; nor, for that matter, if he were an Englishman! But the Irish are like Americans in this respect. He had been in the States three or four years when he was a young fellow; therefore he felt the likeness. “The English never talk freely, as we’re talking now. They’re sly; they simply rule, and have their own way about everything. Britannia rules the waves and so on. You know, Tower, my wife’s English . . .”

  These little distinctions of nationality were what reminded him of their winter in London with the Irish republicans. He not only disliked that type of Irish; their political principle seemed suspect to him. “They’re not really republicans, that’s just talk. They’re anarchists. It was beastly for me. I’m a fool, I’d do anything in the world for my wife, and she does whatever strikes her fancy. She kept asking those patriots to the house. It cost me a pretty penny too, I can tell you. I had to pay for a lot of pamphlets, I had to support two widows, I had to hire halls for their meetings. Then, if you please, some of ’em said they needed some guns and bombs. Can you believe it? Only I don’t think they got any bombs. Nothing happened. It would serve the English right if they did blow things up, you know. I suppose my wife’s little friends just pocketed the money; or they bought a poor make of bomb that wouldn’t do. Nothing happened.”

  He also complained that they were comic little characters, not gentlemen. And all their women appeared half-crazed with loving them, weeping in the corridor, losing their tempers with each other; some of them occult, some religious, and all of course talking Ireland, Ireland. Not a class of women that a man of a sensual nature would look twice at, not if he had any self-respect; nothing soft or sweet or tidy about them. “But I must say I enjoyed it for a while,” he admitted, “seeing how that class of people get on and hearing their stories. I could always shut them up when I felt like it, or chuck them all altogether, you understand, because I had the money.”

  Of course I had begun to feel my misanthropy; but still his monologue amused me, especially the vulgar touches like this last. No doubt he was a quite good county aristocrat of that modest rank which as a rule is less mixed than any other. But not even aristocracy can be expected to give good examples of itself all the time. It seems rather to secrete commonness little by little, and to keep it in reserve, along with
those odds and ends of mere human nature which aristocratic manners are intended to hide. And every generation or two it purges itself, in the form of some odd son or daughter, perfect little shopkeeper or predestined courtesan, upon whom manners wear thin.

  Cullen silently ruminated two or three minutes; and when he began again it was in the middle of a new bit of subject matter. Probably it seemed to him that he had told me something which he had been saying to himself, something about his wife. “Make no mistake, Tower, I respect my wife.” And he went on to assure me, or to warn me, that anyone who doubted it or slighted her in the least was quite likely to be knocked down by him; in fact he had done it once. She was like a swan in his opinion; pure as snow, with never a harmful thought all her life. “Only she’s thoughtless,” he added. “She never thinks of anything except what she happens to want. She’s spoiled. When I met her she was the prettiest girl in Dublin. Lovely breasts for one thing. And ankles; you saw her ankles! Her family wasn’t well off either; I took her without a penny; and I’ve spoiled her.”

  Aristocracy had nothing to do with it. It was my own fault; the vodka and cream had done it. Alcohol is the great leveler. Given a stiff drink, the true descendant of princes boasts of it as if it were not true, the multimillionaire feels poor, and Tristan talks to you about Isolde like a pimp, I said to myself. My malice was beginning to keep pace with my companion’s folly.

  “I spoiled her myself,” he continued. “That’s why she’s so restless. Damn it, Tower, for years now she’s kept me on the go like a gypsy. We’ve done everything.” He held up one large moist freckled hand and counted on its unsteady fingers the things they had done: salmon fishing and photography and pig-sticking and now hawking. They had also been everywhere, and he counted places too, with a boastful as well as pathetic intonation: Norway and America and Java and Morocco and Africa—to say nothing of that winter when she had insisted on Irish rebellion, the most expensive thing on earth.