The Pilgrim Hawk

by Glenway Wescott

  Shame, I must say, was one thing which all this did not suggest. Across that great expanse of waxed parquet toward the garden door she sped ahead of us—her pretty feet on her too high heels wide apart, lest she skid and fall headlong—saying to Alex over her shoulder, “Excuse me. Please, dear. Don’t mind me. Let me go into the garden alone a minute.”

  On her wrist of course Lucy still perched, that is, rode, with some difficulty: her green-gold feet also wide apart, ducking or dipping to keep her balance, with characteristic indignation of her shoulders and that nervous puffing of breast-feathers which, as Mrs. Cullen had informed us, is a good sign in a hunting hawk. Hawks are not really tree-birds; and if in a state of nature Lucy had ever found herself on a perch as agitated as this female arm, blown by any such passionate wind as this, whatever this was—she would have left it instantly and sought out a rock. It was absurd. Even her little blind headgear with parrot feathers seemed to me absurd; it matched the French hat which her mistress was wearing at so Irish an angle, except that it was provided with secure drawstrings. In spite of my bewilderment and alarm, I began to laugh. It struck me as a completion of the cycle of the afternoon, an end of the sequence of meanings I had been reading into everything, especially Lucy. The all-embracing symbolic bird; primitive image with iron wings and rusty tassels and enameled feet; airy murderess like an angel; young predatory sanguinary de luxe hen—now she was funny; she had not seemed funny before. Perhaps all pets, all domesticated animals, no matter how ancient or beautiful or strange, show a comic aspect sooner or later; a part of the shame of our humanity that we gradually convey to them.

  Just then I saw what Mrs. Cullen had in her right hand, half concealed against her breast and behind Lucy’s wing: a large revolver. Alex must have seen it before I did. She was clinging to my elbow and whispering, “Stay back. Don’t laugh, don’t follow her.”

  I am not a judge of firearms, but this was a grim important object, glimmering, apparently brand-new and in working order. “Shall I try to take it away from her?” I asked Alex in a whisper.

  “Heavens, no. She’ll be all right. Don’t worry her.” Women, even some young girls, have this ability to guess at degrees of trouble; this equanimity of a trained nurse. And, with or without much affection, they sometimes suddenly know each other as if they were twins.

  There was more to it than that. Looking back on that moment I have wondered just how her friend’s passion appeared to Alex. How could she tell, as the disheveled creature fled ahead of us into the garden, that she was not going to kill herself? Then it occurred to me that in my friend’s character and way of life in those days there was a certain passivity; at least abstention from others’ lives. Whatever she did not understand about them might, she felt, be more awful than anything she could imagine. If others said that things were unbearable, she could well believe it. If the Irishwoman’s life had reached that point, the point of suicide, I think she might not have cared to interfere or prevent it.

  Outside on the terrace Mrs. Cullen stopped; and grasping the gun by the barrel, brought it back over her shoulder and hurled it high above the shrubs, far across the lawn, so that it splashed into the pond.

  This important gesture was too much for Lucy. Off the dear wrist she went, hung in a paroxysm once more. But this time it was not bating, not mystical dread or symbolical love of liberty; it was just ordinary loss of balance. Symbol or no symbol, I said to myself, if I were busy getting rid of a suicidal or murderous weapon I should hate to have a heavy hysterical bird tied to me, yanking my wrist, flapping in my face. Mrs. Cullen, the good sportswoman, did not mind. Perhaps because of her own hysteria—the real meaning of this episode pulling at her heartstrings and beating upon her intellect—she merely did the thing to do, as usual. Up went her embattled left arm over her head; stock-still she stood, until terrible Lucy grew tired, and recovered her self-control, and resumed her domestication.

  From our viewpoint, behind her, seeing her through the sunset-streaked window, against the background of the old park and the shrubs and the gray pond with ripples unclosing away from the place where the gun had gone down, Mrs. Cullen was beautiful. Throughout her somewhat bulky body—motherly torso and panting breast and round neck—there was wonderful strength; and between her absurd high heels and her fist in the rough glove, there was exact perpendicularity: the yard-wind wings now settling back on top. And the fact that she looked a bit ridiculous, disheveled and second-rate and past her prime, made it all the finer, I thought, as she turned and came slowly back indoors.

  There were tears in her eyes, but she chuckled, or pretended to, or tried to. “Darling Alex,” she said hoarsely, “did you ever have guests who behaved so madly? Don’t, please, don’t ever ask me what this was all about.”

  Then in her way, in a series of little dull, prosaic, but shameless statements, she told us what it was about. “You see, dear, why we can’t live in Ireland. It’s such a bad example for my silly sons.”

  My presence did not make her shy. For a moment that flattered me; upon second thought it seemed to me to have the opposite implication. Quite early in the afternoon, I suppose, she had perceived that Alex was not in love with me; therefore, in her view of life, I did not count, I was a supernumerary. What harm could I do with her secrets? Women are fantastic.

  Holding her left arm and Lucy well out of the way, she threw her right arm somewhat around Alex and kissed her. “Dear, dear friend,” she murmured. “You’re so clever, you’ll marry well when the time comes. Thank you so much for your patience with us.” Alex shrank a little as she always did from female affection, but the odd compliment seemed to please her.

  “Larry’s been threatening to leave me for weeks,” Mrs. Cullen added. “Oh, I’m so afraid he will one day. I don’t know what would become of him by himself, the fool, the old darling.”

  Poor Larry, I sighed; poor supernumerary me! Women are no respecters of men. I also felt a little indignation on Lucy’s account. Trapped out of the real wind and rock, and perverted rather than domesticated, kept blind and childish, at the mercy of every human absurdity, vodka and automobiles, guns and kisses: poor Lucy! She no doubt personified for Mrs. Cullen the deep problems of life; certainly Mrs. Cullen now devoted a large part of her life to her. Yet again and again, splendid falco’s position in fact, her proprietress’s handling of her, was in the way of a handkerchief or a muff or a hat. Absorbed in her narration of what had just occurred on the highway in the Daimler, Mrs. Cullen forgot about her and gestured a little with her left hand as well as her right. Lucy had to embrace the air desperately to stabilize herself; her plumage all thickened up and homely, sick-looking. It afforded me an instant’s characteristic grim amusement to think how often the great issues which I had taken this bird to augur come down in fact to undignified appearance, petty neurasthenic anecdote; bring one in fact at last to a poor domestication like Lucy’s. It also reminded me of the absurd position of the artist in the midst of the disorders of those who honor and support him, but who can scarcely be expected to keep quiet around him for art’s sake.

  “I don’t even know which of us Larry thought of shooting,” Mrs. Cullen said. “Wife or chauffeur or haggard. I dare say I never shall know, unless some day he does it. The minute you closed your door, he began saying things at the top of his voice about Lucy and Ricketts. It upset Ricketts, and there was a car coming toward us, and for a moment I really thought we would crash. I told Ricketts to stop at the side of the road, and instead he turned back here, with two other cars speeding around the corner. That was what made the little Frenchman in the Renault angry. In the midst of which poor Larry began to threaten us with the revolver. It was in the side pocket of the car. I can’t imagine when he put it there, or where he got it. You know, I think the Frenchman saw it. Lucky for us he didn’t call the police.”

  She began to have an almost cheerful expression. If you have been lonelily excited a long while, expecting the worst to happen, with no validation for your
fear in fact, no excuse that others would understand—perhaps the trouble in question must always come as a slight relief. At least you know then that you have not morbidly made it all up out of whole cloth.

  “I’ll tell you an odd thing about myself,” she said, with her vaguest smile. “I happen to be a very good shot; and d’you know, all the while I was trying to take that beastly gun away from Larry—with Ricketts driving like a fool, and poor Lucy on my arm so awfully in the way—I kept calculating every instant just where the bullet would go if he pulled the trigger. The trajectory and all that. I suppose I’m a born sportswoman; how childish it is! At the last moment I simply can’t take things quite seriously. I suppose that’s what made me good at lions in Kenya years ago.”

  She frowned and sighed then, as if ashamed of her coldness or lightheartedness. “Now Ricketts of course is quite out of patience with Larry. I suppose I shall have to give him notice; what a pity! If Larry wasn’t quiet after I got out of the car, I expect Ricketts knocked him out. He did once before. There’s nothing I can do; Larry is as strong as an ox. But I’d have gone mad, I’d have killed Ricketts—if I had waited to see what happened. Ricketts is so damned English; the instant he clenches his fist he makes a smug face, like a governess. But I dare say it’s time to go back now; I’ve been cowardly long enough; perhaps at this point I can be of some comfort to my man.”

  She intended to give Alex another kiss, but Alex avoided it. “Oh, Alex, I do,” she lamented, “do love that great fool desperately. Whatever shall I do with him? Oh, well, we’ll see. Do you think I must get rid of Lucy? It was astonishing, you know, how well Larry hawked, last summer in Hungary. I thought he’d enjoy it so.”

  Then she laughed, and all afternoon I think she had not laughed; rather a bad sound, two loud liquid feverish notes. “Ho, ho, perhaps this may have done him good. He has bated, don’t you know.”

  So she took her second departure. “Good-bye, Mr. Tower. Good-bye, Alex, dear child. I shall miss you. Larry will be ashamed to see you after all this, I’m afraid. Don’t come out to the car; it would embarrass them.” She slipped across the hall and out the door, opening it only a little and immediately slamming it.

  “Well!” exclaimed Alex, as we returned to the living room, and her delivery of that syllable made me laugh: ooo-ell; the soft bark of a very small dog.

  After so much disorder we thought it would be indiscreet to seem impatient for our dinner. We wandered into the garden, sighing, tired. “I hope Jean and Eva did not see this last bit of melodrama,” Alex said. “It’s not the kind of idea I should like him to get into his head and develop. He’s no Cullen; he’s an imitative Italian, and he might not muff it.”

  “That great comfortable greedy easy old boy,” I mumbled, meaning Cullen. “Did you dream he had murder in him? Vodka or no vodka.”

  “But it was suicide surely, not murder,” said Alex. “Madeleine Cullen has no imagination.”

  “I wonder. It overlaps in any case. People do kill themselves just because they want to murder someone,” I replied in my quibbling way. “Someone they love.”

  Alex made a little face, expressive of skepticism of everything and practically universal disapproval. “You know, he wasn’t really very drunk.”

  “Two shakerfuls of prewar vodka,” I reminded her.

  “No matter. That’s not much for those immense Irishmen. I’ve seen him drunk and it wasn’t anything like this. Or perhaps he pretended to be drunk for your benefit; and to have an excuse for what was happening anyway, what was bound to happen. You’re such a sober creature, my dear; you naturally overestimate other people’s intoxication.”

  Her saying that made me suddenly unhappy. I thought of the wicked way I had watched him as he drank, the grandiose theories of drunkenness I had spun for myself meanwhile; and I blushed. Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing; cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.

  But my dear Alex then sensed, as a good young woman should, my doubt and weak self-criticism; and she smiled. “You must tell me what he said to you, before you forget it. I gathered from your expression that he’d been weeping on your shoulder.”

  Then Eva, with even less etiquette than usual, came out of the kitchen waving a napkin, huskily imploring us to hurry in to dinner, half-spoiled in any case, she thought. As if to point the moral of the changes of the day from a cook’s angle, Jean sent in to us eight pigeons, a veritable sheaf of asparagus, and two good-sized tarts. It was perfect; and melodrama all afternoon evidently gave us appetite. Eva shed a sequence of tears as she served, mutely and prettily, with a wan smile whenever I looked at her, like a seventeenth-century Magdalen. Jean brought the tart himself and thanked us for our overeating, as if it had been a special effort to console him.

  After he had served our coffee in the living room, I told Alex what I had seen from the kitchen window. I was surprised to learn that she too had seen it, from her bedroom window, while Mrs. Cullen lay stretched on the bed with her eyes shut. But she had missed the jackknife. Then I tried to remember and report to her Cullen’s confession to me, man to man over our vodka, which entertained her, although I think it shocked her.

  Then she went to write a note and send a telegram, and she did not return for three-quarters of an hour. I sat there by myself, not even trying to read. I was still excited; and I fell into a form of fatigued stupidity which, while it lasts, often seems to me an important intellectual effort. It was an effort to compress the excessive details of the afternoon into an abstraction or two, a formula or a moral; in order to store that away in my head for future use, and yet leave room for something new, for the next thing. Morally speaking, those Cullens had crowded me out of myself. I also hoped to distinguish a little more clearly between what the Cullens meant to me and certain fine points of my own meaning to myself which had fascinated me in the midst of their afternoon’s performance. Of course it was not possible.

  I have learned—but again and again I forget—that abstraction is a bad thing, innumerable and infinitesimal and tiresome; worse than any amount of petty fact. The emotion that comes blurring my retrospect is warmer and weaker than the excitement of whatever happened, good or bad. It is like a useless, fruitless vegetation, spreading and twining and fading and corrupting; even the ego disappears under it... Therefore I scarcely noticed how long my dear friend stayed away in her bedroom; and therefore I was glad when she came back. For me, putting a stop to so-called thought is one of the functions of friendship.

  It was not writing or telegraphing which had kept her; it was Eva weeping and denouncing Jean, laughing and worshiping Jean. They had quarreled about Ricketts, and after that he had gone to the village to get drunk. He would kill her, he had said, and sooner or later he might well, Eva thought; certainly he would beat her the minute he returned. He was the most jealous man alive, in her opinion, and she worshiped him.

  In any case she was much to blame. She had a way of obviously reveling in the sense of her own beauty whenever a new man appeared in the kitchen; a look of being at the mercy of circumstances, or perhaps at the man’s mercy. Neighbor or workman or tradesman would appear; and casually Eva would come up, and stand close by, with a sleepy stare, letting her eyes drop sideways in their wide sockets amid African eyelashes, giving off her sweetness like a flower bed—while Jean watched her, admiring and suffering, until his storm broke.

  Alex had asked what made her behave so; why she flirted with men like Ricketts if she loved Jean and wanted to be at peace with him. Seriously she had explained that, when she flirted, it gave him a chance to come between her and the rival, which made her feel his love, and to that of course she promptly yielded; and her yielding also gave him assurance that she loved him. “And if you please, terrible fe
male that she is,” said Alex, “she laughed as she explained it, deep in her fat throat.

  “But she would not go on laughing. This time, she thinks, it has gone too far. He will beat her, and he may kill her, and tutti quanti. Therefore she began to cry again, and she wanted to tell me their story again, from the beginning. I pretended to lose my temper and sent her to bed.

  “I shall have to dismiss them, you know, if they go on like this,” Alex added. “The lower classes have a way of making one ashamed of one’s sex.”

  She always had trouble with servants. The trouble really was that her kind interest in them, if aroused at all, soon went too far. Shrinking from them, but pinned down by them at last, she gave a great deal of the warmth that lay in her. But between their demands upon her, she fancied that she had no sympathy for them at all. She often said that she wished she could be served by machinery.

  The door stood open; but amid the breath of the garden, it seemed to me that I could detect, at least I could strongly remember, Lucy’s little body odor of blood and honey. The talk of Jean and Eva and Ricketts had carried my imagination again to the Cullen triangle: the virtuous passionate hard-hearted woman, the sad man, and the bird; and I had a new notion. It was that Mrs. Cullen now loved Cullen less than she intended; and lived with him, lived for him, perhaps only to fulfill a dear bootless contract with herself. In any case she loved Lucy, and I hoped she would refuse to give her up.

  In the garden, over by the kitchen door, we heard a few notes of mellow laughter. Jean had returned and it had not gone according to Eva’s expectation. Laughter, and a rustle and scuffle—the make-believe fighting that when all goes well, relaxes and relieves the true struggle of love—and footsteps diminishing toward the far corner of the garden hidden by the plane trees. The moon that night was not a fine carved shape. It hung under a little loose cloud; only a piece of pallor, a bit of anti-darkness. The air was as warm as Tangier but one could not lie outdoors, I thought, for the grass would be splashed with dew.