The Pilgrim Hawk (10 page)

Neither the Cullens nor Alex and I had the heart for much repetition of farewell. Cullen had tears in his eyes. We turned back to the house and shut the door before Ricketts could get the long car out onto the highway, amid cars coming toward him from Paris.

There had been just time for us to reach the living room and sit down and light cigarettes, when we heard a fearful grinding of brakes; then several cars honking as in panic; and a Frenchman shouting the usual insults. A moment after, a car drove in under our plane trees. I got up and looked out a small window on that side: it was the Daimler.

Alex and I hastened back through the hall to see what had happened. There we heard Mrs. Cullen's voice, very loud and exclamatory but incomprehensible; and she was pushing the doorbell, rattling the doorknob, and calling, “Alex, Alex!” As I opened the door she stepped back, turning away from us, gesticulating and exclaiming, “No, Ricketts, stay where you are. Larry, please! Now wait for me, Ricketts. Oh, dear, you fool, you fool!”

She stumbled on the cobblestones; Lucy was having a hard time. Then she returned to us and grasped Alex's arm and motioned us back inside the house. “Don't get out of the car, Larry, I'll attend to it,” she cried, over her shoulder.

“Alex, dear, I'm sorry, I've forgotten something. Poor damned fool,” she repeated. By the heartbroken tone of her voice I judged that the fool was not Ricketts.

That young man was not laughing now, nor smacking his lips upon any recollection of pleasure or rivalry. His lips were white; he was badly frightened. The Daimler stood at a very odd angle between two trees; he must have made a U-turn on the highway. A little farther along on the verge of a ditch stood an old Renault, with which, I supposed, they had narrowly escaped a collision. Its French driver stood beside it, still vehemently expressing himself, shaking his fist. But, oddly, neither the Cullens nor Ricketts even glanced in that Frenchman's direction. Something else must have happened; just before, just after, or at the same time. Inside the Daimler, Cullen had his great hand pressed over his mouth as if he were gnawing it, and he too was pale: the worst pallor in the world, like cooked veal. During the little drama of recapturing Lucy he had ceased to be drunk, I thought. But now I was afraid that he was going to be sick.

Alex and I followed Mrs. Cullen inside the house. She too was in a worse emotion and looked worse than before. Not only a portion of her lovely hair but her hat as well this time hung over one ear. There were beads of sweat on her brow and her upper lip. “Oh, Alex, do forgive us,” she kept saying, “I'm so ashamed, so ashamed”; and hurried past us into the living room.

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.”