The Pilgrim Hawk

by Glenway Wescott

  “I’ve let her have all my money,” he said proudly. “She isn’t as pretty as she was; but you know, I let her go to London for all her dresses, or Paris; and she has two maids. Before I married her I had a man to look after me; I gave him up. Now we need this chauffeur, Ricketts, because we’re always on the go. I have to keep an eye on him too, because he has an eye for a pretty woman. Funny thing, one day when we were shooting in Scotland with those Americans, I thought Ricketts was insolent about Mrs. Cullen, and I’d have killed him. But she said I imagined it.”

  All alcoholism in a nutshell, I foolishly mused. And while he, poor man, counted his sports and his travels on his fingers, I meanly ticked off the drunkard’s faults and pitfalls of drink as it were on my fingers —indiscretion and boastfulness and snobbism; and sentimentality so nervous that it may switch any minute to the exact opposite; and the sexual note and the sadistic note, undesirable desire, improbable murder. All of it of course a bit unreal and unrealizable in fact...

  What exaggeration I had drifted into! Cullen really was not in very bad shape; I have spent afternoons with a hundred drunker men. The point is that I exaggerated at the time, item by item as he talked along; and I think he sensed it and played up to it: a fatalist and a play-actor. The presence of my fastidious Alex and his overwrought wife downstairs—my wishing they would hurry up and join us, and my dreading it at the same time—made his loose talk more exciting than it would have been in ordinary circumstances. I had been too happy all afternoon, thinking meanwhile of unhappiness; which is a heady combination. Sometimes I am as sensitive as a woman to others’ temper or temperament; and it is a kind of sensitivity which may turn, almost by chance, for them or against them. Perhaps at the end of our tête-à-tête I was not much soberer than my companion.

  I began to wonder whether, after all, he was not going to tell me the little tale of anxiety or jealousy that winter in London which Alex had half told me in the park. And then he did.

  “That winter in London one of our patriots,” he began, “had the insolence to fall in love with my wife. A brute of a young fellow named McVoy who was a poet. It got very sticky then. I made up my mind to show them the door, the lot of them. But the more I worried about it, the easier it was for my wife to get around me and have her own way. I didn’t want to be unjust to her; and if I’d made a scene before I knew what was up, you see, I might never have known. Terrible, the power a woman has over a man of my nature. You see that side of it, don’t you?”

  He told it tranquilly enough, though with some breathing between words. He reached out and grasped the cocktail shaker; and having helped himself, kept a tight hold on it. Once or twice he slipped off the tall stool and took steps up and down, carrying the shaker with him instead of his glass, to gesture with; coming back to drink and refill. I had not poured any of this second shakerful for myself; it was almost empty. The whites of his eyes grew more and more untidy, the hazel pupils a harder color; sense of humor and self-knowledge dying down in them. The strong though puffy fingers fixed on the large silver vessel, melting the frostiness off it in patches. I thought of wresting it away from him; emptying it slyly down the little chromium sink; perhaps pretending to be getting drunk myself, and jollying and bullying him along downstairs . . . Naturally I did nothing; I looked and listened; I nodded. I wiped the copper top of the bar more than it needed, like a bartender. Probably even bartenders feel a little ignominious curiosity amid their professional boredom.

  “One fine day there had to be an end of it, McVoy and all that. Especially one night. The police misunderstood something about him, and were waiting for him at his lodgings; so we had to put him up for the night. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I kept hearing him sneaking around in the dark after my wife, I thought. All imagination; I’ve too much imagination anyway. My wife and I shared a bedroom; we always do; and he’d never have had the courage to come in there.

  “Then I had a disgusting dream. I woke up standing beside my wife’s bed. There was a moon, and I could see her, and she was sleeping. But I couldn’t sleep. So about three o’clock I got up and took a knife from the butler’s pantry. I thought I’d tackle McVoy with it. But my wife woke up and came and followed me, across the hall. When she saw the knife naturally it frightened her terribly. And the funny thing was, she frightened me too: there on the landing in her white nightgown. She made me give her the knife and go back to our bedroom. The wonder is we didn’t wake McVoy. If we had, there’d have been an awful fuss, I expect. But he slept through it all. Or perhaps he was listening and hiding, scared, under his bed.

  “After that I think my wife saw my point of view about it, and was sorry for me. She wept, and it wasn’t like her to weep. In a way I was sorry for her too. Think of it, Tower! Think of a common little fellow like that coming to your house, whinnying like a horse around a respectable married woman. He’d have had only himself to blame if I had knifed him. After that Mrs. Cullen sent them all packing, believe me. All the rebels.”

  He picked up the shaker and shook it hopefully. Now there was only the clunk of small ice in diluted cream, to which I was deaf: a poor host at last, now that it was too late. My feeling about it all really was an absurd mixture. I felt a certain compassion; all the world loves a lover, and especially I do. I also longed to laugh aloud and to tease him. I also itched to tell him the miserable truth about himself, and rather vengefully than for the good it might do. There are a number of circumstances in which the truth does no good; and oh, this was one. I began to feel a mixture of sadness with my malice; a fellow feeling in spite of myself.

  Drunkenness does superimpose a certain peculiarity and opaqueness of its own—monotonous complexion, odd aroma, pitch of voice, and nervous twitch— on the rest of a man’s humanity; over the personality that you have known sober. But worse still is the transparency and the revelation, as it were sudden little windows uncurtained, or little holes cut, into common recesses of character. It is an anatomy lesson: behold the ducts and sinuses and bladders of the soul, common to every soul ever born! Drunken tricks are nothing but basic human traits. Ordinary frame of mind is never altogether unlike this babble of morbid Irishman. I felt the sickish embarrassment of being mere human clay myself. It seems to me that only art has the right to make one feel that. I am inclined to detest anyone who makes me feel it, as you might say, socially.

  “God, Tower, it’s tragic,” my man sighed. “There’s always something. Now I have to keep an eye on our damned Ricketts.” He kept it on me for a while then, flashing it or rolling it; sometimes as simply as Othello, sometimes with the imagination and abstraction of a eunuch.

  “You know, Tower, it’s very interesting. My wife and I are the ideal married couple, so to speak. It’s real love. She wouldn’t look at another man. I’m as good a man as ever in spite of my age; it runs in the family; and I understand women. Oh, it’s not all roses; it never was all roses. There were times when I thought I’d leave her, after some of the mistreatment she’s given me. At least I could pretend to, and she might learn to treat me better. All it would need to summon her back would be a wink and a beckoning. She’d do it; she’d stoop her proud neck, I tell you; she’d come on her hands and knees. But I’d never humiliate her, Tower; I never have. To me she’s still the proud ignorant girl as I married her; the prettiest in all Dublin.

  “The worst mistreatment I’ve had to bear, you know, is this hawk. There are things only a common fellow could bear peaceably, and a hawk is one of ’em. Funny about hawks, you know, they can’t learn to control themselves. They make their messes when they feel the need. Oh, well, you saw it with your own eyes; I sympathized with you. It happens in the hotel, the maids mop up after it, and I can’t tell you how ashamed I am. I can’t look the man at the desk in the face; he might make a joke of it. Madeleine has to tell him what we want; I won’t go near him... Funny about women, isn’t it? They haven’t the same natural shame about things that men have. Let’s face it: that’s why the church has to keep them i
n their place, they can’t help it. I suppose if they had finer feelings, we men would get left out in the cold, wouldn’t we? They’d have none of our kisses. So there you are.

  “My wife’s a fine trainer of hawks; her crooked old Hungarian admits it himself. But that is one way she can’t subdue ’em; it’s their nature. She can’t teach me much either. She’s got to get rid of that hawk, pretty quick; I won’t stand for it. You see, I love her, Tower; that’s the trouble. Suppose I want to put my arm around her, and she has that hawk on her arm. Can I? No, Larry, no, dear, you’ll break a feather, a very important flight feather! Day after day now on the way to Hungary I’ll have to sit there pushed over in the corner of the back seat out of Lucy’s way; and I tell you, it makes me sick.

  “She’s been keeping it in our bedroom, because it doesn’t like the bathroom. She’s sorry for it. I lie awake all night hearing it stir on the perch, and I never forget it for a minute. When I’m beginning to fall asleep I think it’s coming to attack me with its nasty beak. You can’t imagine what it means to me. I dream of it. I dream sometimes it’s an obscene thing; and that wakes me and I reach my arm over to my wife’s bed; but she’s asleep and takes no notice of me. I tell you, it’s not healthy. I dream sometimes it’s death. You know, I had an old uncle who saw ghosts, in a big house we had in Galway. I inherited that kind of feeling, you see, and Lucy brings it on. I’ll tell you another dream. When I was a boy my old nurse taught me to weave osier baskets; and the other night I dreamed Lucy was a basket. Her feathers weren’t right for it because they were sticky, but I wove her; and I gave her to my wife. But this is the end! No more Lucy!”

  That was a lovely moment, to my way of thinking. My animosity toward this fool husband suddenly wafted away. It is a manner of self-revelation that I especially delight in: by means of loose imagery, and dreams, and careless connection of odd bits of memory as they come. Even as he spoke I hoped that I should be able to remember every word.

  For alcohol is a god, as the Greeks decided when it was first introduced from the East, although a god of vengeance. The drinker becomes the drunkard. Everyone is to blame. The soberest man or woman in the world at some time or another has helped the sad process along in some poor dear drinker’s case. For example, I think someone must have looked at Cullen in his youth when drunkenness became him, and so loved or admired him in it that he began to regard that as the secret of love and admiration. There are men who master the trick of drink, and practically never take a drop without being made admirable by it. I have known one or two; they were extraordinary men in other ways as well.

  But even for the average man, even in the poorest booze-fight—between the vanity of the beginning and the sickness at last—there is a fine moment. It is the mark of its oriental origin and the proof of the Greek belief in it. The fumes seem suddenly mixed with more light and air than usual, and it is the right mixture. The silly self-consciousness clears up; the chip falls from the shoulder. Your friend is drinking, and you are not, or not much; so naturally there is an undercurrent of quarrel between you; now suddenly it ceases, peaceful. His tipsy mind is as it were sitting quiet, like an oracle on a tripod, under the influence not of alcohol simply, but of himself, his very nature, his fatality, his childhood. Whatever has been kept secret, damped in ashes, smothered and contemptible, begins to come out; and for the average man there is no harm in it. The murderous man may murder then, the madman talk nonsense; who cares? For most of us the ashes are bad, the secrecy mistaken, the contempt and self-contempt contemptible—and the raking of the ashes is good. For a moment, drunk as a lord, instead of coarseness and looseness you have the intuition of a child or an old woman...

  Of course it does not last long. Ordinarily when it has occurred, befuddlement and some bodily incompetence are in the offing. Too much delight in it may cause one to keep the worst company in the world all one’s life. But certainly it is one of the main things in human nature, worth experiencing and worth watching. Cullen did not quite reach it that afternoon, on vodka and cream in Alex’s silly de luxe bar. But I thought he was about to, when we were interrupted. As I really did not like him anyway I did not care much.

  It was Alex who interrupted us, coming into the big room under the balcony and calling to me. She wanted me to visit Jean and Eva in the kitchen, and encourage them about the impromptu dinner and hurry them up. She had been hearing strange tones of voice out there; and she was afraid that if she went herself, Jean might make speeches and Eva might weep.

  It was a large, unmistakably French kitchen: the stove in a deep niche of brick; dim walls and array of copper; the open doorway and windows full of little landscape with afternoon sunlight slanting across it. The Cullens’ chauffeur was there with our two servants, and somehow it seemed to me dramatic as well as picturesque. Jean was the classic manservant, a type that you find more or less the same all around the Mediterranean: doubtless very good-looking and amorous as a boy; forty now and the worse for wear, with a bald spot and dark jowls and several teeth missing; a man broken to harness but still apt to show off his emotions, and still amorous. He had acquired Eva in Morocco; and she certainly had Moorish blood though she called herself Italian. She was half his age and lovely, although of an increasing billowy fatness; pale in the way that seems sallow at times, silvery at other times. Ricketts was a fine Cockney, bright-eyed and sharp-nosed. He sat at the table in the middle of the room in a spoiled young male attitude, with a bottle of wine half empty and half a plate of Eva’s little Moorish cakes.

  Dinner was flourishing; that I could tell by the smell of it. Along with which I breathed the early summer wafting in: a tart exhalation of the sod, a scent of some shrub that was like a dark candy. In spite of the open door, the stove going full tilt for the squabs and the strawberry tart made the room hot, which brought out the men’s untidy healthy body odor. Eva had one of those cheap North African perfumes in a little cake like a rubber eraser, and had put that on to excess, which, alas, I fancied, was for the young Englishman’s benefit. And the mood of the room, the morality or psychology of the three together, was as confusing as this fragrant air in it. Eva stood and stared at Ricketts. Her great eyes were a little reddened; probably she had been weeping; at the moment she was smiling vaguely. Ricketts poured the sour red wine down his throat half a glass at a time; and between throatfuls looked up at her with a becoming brightness. Jean pretended to be busy beside the stove with his back to them. But he agitated the pots and pans, and flashed glances over his shoulder, and replied to my questions about the tart and the cheese with a little more obscurity and more assurance than I liked.

  Then I happened to look outdoors. It pleased me to be able to see, in a little interval between two shrubs, the dreamy hawk hunched up on the rustic bench. And then, to my amazement, I saw Cullen on the left coming across the lawn. Very slowly, with a kind of noticeable alcoholic endeavor not to be noticed; on tiptoe, and as if the grass were a loud and slippery surface like a ballroom floor . . . Instantly I sensed that it was abnormal and scandalous. But I could not run out to see what he was up to, without making a little scandal myself. Jean and Eva and Ricketts would follow or at least watch. So there I stood, acting absent-minded, murmuring about the Camembert and the iced hock.

  Cullen vanished for a moment behind one of those two shrubs near Lucy’s perch. When he reappeared he was crouching, and hitching along on the balls of his feet, and steadying himself with one hand, closer and closer to her. The grotesque furtive approach indicated for one thing that he had no rational plan, no serious intention. For Lucy was hooded as well as leashed; she could not see him. He kept stretching out one hand, very tense; but he could scarcely have reached her from that quadruped position. I began to think it funny. But from the bedroom window Alex and Mrs. Cullen could have seen him as well as I: that was a pity . . .

  Perhaps it occurred to him. He scrambled to his feet, and somewhat assumed an attitude of knowing what he was about, and leaned over the bench with his back to
me. Perhaps he was undoing the knot or knots of the leash. Evidently he was not alarming Lucy much; she opened her wings a few inches, as if expecting to be picked up. But he drew back, and to my dismay, my disgust, thrust his hand in his pocket and brought out a large pocketknife and opened it. Murder at last, I thought. It was Lucy’s turn; no more Lucy!

  Before I even got started to run out and stop him, he simply pushed her hard off the back of the bench, recoiling away from her at the same time. It was obvious how afraid of her he was. With a large indignant flutter she landed on the grass. He had cut the leash; he had not cut her throat. Also he had unhooded her. On the grass for a moment she took a rapid confused look in every direction. Then with a great lift of her legs and two or three strokes of her wings, she climbed up on top of the air, and above the lawn, and across the pond. It was lovely. Her searching looks still, this way and that—to discover why she had been loosed, what quarry there was for her—made her appear to be shaking her head, saying no, no.

  I lost sight of her when she passed behind a tree; again, when she rose beyond the scope of the kitchen window. Down she came then, with neck and wing and tail and legs all out—in the shape of a six-pointed star, big and dim, collapsing. She rested her weight on the air again for an instant, and alighted on a post in the far corner of the garden. It was one of two posts from which Eva hung Alex’s lingerie to dry early in the morning. The gesture of alighting was lovely: her rigid hands clutching the top of the post like a living victim. It might have been a little angel seizing a tall man by the hair. Then there she sat, still wondering what in the world—what, in terms of a hawk’s simple murderous instinct—this liberation meant.

  Meanwhile, of course Cullen too had gazed up at her, gazed across the pond at her. Now like a ninny he waved good-bye, good-bye. Then he turned and ambled back through the bushes. Jean and Eva and Ricketts, in their matrimonial or adulterous absorption, had not seen a thing. I was thankful for that; I also felt a childish optimism because of it. I waited a bit, to give Cullen time to get settled in the living room. Then I dashed out of the kitchen, and knocked at Alex’s bedroom door, and shouted through it to Mrs. Cullen. I simply said that Lucy was no longer on her perch. Then I hastened away to see what state of mind Cullen was in. There he sat in the living room, one leg over the arm of his easy chair, stoutly puffing; sorrowful and also smug, I thought, and somewhat sobered by his exploit; that at least was a blessing.