The Pilgrim Hawk (11 page)

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 female 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.

“You'll never marry, dear,” I said, to tease Alex. “Your friend Mrs. Cullen thinks you will, but she has no imagination. You'll be afraid to, after this fantastic bad luck.”

“What bad luck, if you please?” she inquired, smiling to show that my mockery was welcome.

“Fantastic bad object lessons.”

“You're no novelist,” she said, to tease me. “I envy the Cullens, didn't you know?” And I concluded from the look on her face that she herself did not quite know whether she meant it.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1940 by Glenway Wescott, renewed 1968 by Glenway Wescott

Introduction copyright © 2001 by Michael Cunningham

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Paul Cadmus, Mannikins, 1951; © Jon F. Anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus; licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; photograph courtesy DC Moore Gallery, NY

Cover design: Katy Homans

First published by Harper and Brothers in 1940

Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Glenway Wescott in care of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Wescott, Glenway, 1901–

The pilgrim hawk : a love story / Glenway Wescott.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-940322-56-0

1. Americans—France—Fiction. 2. Irish—France—Fiction. 3. Novelists—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. 5. Hawks—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3545.E827 P5 2001

813'.52—dc21

00-011548

eISBN 978-1-59017-485-2
v1.0

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