The Pilgrim Hawk (6 page)

I happen to be a trifle long-sighted; and now Lucy was so close that I could not quite see her in focus; and I have always had a fear of going blind. One good flutter, one simple thrust, and she could have slit an eyelid or ruptured an eyeball in an instant. She did not shuffle much on the borrowed gauntlet. But the vague dilated dark of her eye, the naked ring around it, the inner eyelids opening and closing as instantly as bubbles, seemed worse than restlessness. I was ashamed to tell her mistress that I was afraid. No doubt the chances of her actually hurting me were negligible. Mrs. Cullen's half-supercilious glance at us was reassuring. Still, I felt rather as if I had a great thought of death concentrated and embodied and perched on me. Whatever had possessed me, I wondered, to think of this Lucy—bloodthirsty brute with a face like a gouge, feet like two sets of dirty scalpels—as significant of love? Perhaps those two things, imaginary death and hopeless desire, always lie close together in one's mind, foolishly interchangeable.

Mrs. Cullen meanwhile, with vacated wrist, seemed the most restless woman in the world. She kept crossing and uncrossing her perfect stilted feet; leaning this way and that in the soft armchair; clasping and un-clasping her jeweled fingers. It suggested one more explanation of her attachment to Lucy; falconry made her sit still. Perhaps too she was slightly jealous of my successful deputyship. “The real reason Lucy likes you so much,” she murmured, “is that it's getting on toward mealtime. She fancies you may have a little steak or half a pigeon in your pocket. You look promising to her. What do you suppose has become of your cook? I do hope he and Ricketts haven't gone off to get drunk together.”

She rose and tripped across to the great window. She tripped back and paused beside us and teased Lucy as Cullen had done, but in the opposite spirit. The star sapphire slid a little from one teasing finger to the next, which Lucy observed with interest. It looked like an unsocketed eye, I thought.

“Oh, Alex,” Mrs. Cullen said, “you're so intelligent. I'm afraid you think me very sentimental. I'm not really. I do not want a falcon to be attached to me personally. When animals get that sort of feeling, it's too awful. Knowing the sound of your voice, liking the way you smell, wanting to be touched, all that. I hate it. It's such a parody of us, it's worse than we are. A bird like Lucy is so simple and straight. You make a promise and she expects you to keep it, that's all. She knows what she wants, and who gives it to her, and that's that.”

Cullen grunted, and assured us that his wife didn't mean a word of this cynical stuff. But he did agree about one thing: “Birds are selfish as the devil. That's why I can't care for them. I'd rather have a dog, I tell you.”

“Do you hear, Lucy? He'd rather have a dog.” She said this in the way of wicked affectation, perhaps toying with the idea of being hated by him for it.

Then she turned briskly to me: “I'll take her back now, Mr. Tower, if you please. I think she'll bate in a minute.”

Once more we exchanged the glove. Once more Lucy considered, on the rough leather, the stain of yesterday's meals and the hope of today's and tomorrow's, and leaped up with alacrity. Her mistress carefully fondled her to prevent her bating, but she bated nevertheless.

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.