The Goshawk (9 page)

Now, taking me so much by surprise that I could scarcely keep from laughing, the absurd princeling blew out all his feathers, lifted his tail in the air, and, like an old lady sitting down in a tram or lifting her bustle to get at a purse among the petticoats, sat down suddenly, shiftily, luxuriously, in the puddle. I had never seen a bird sit down before, for the gesture was quite unlike the laying hen's. With ludicrous rapture Gos squatted in the puddle, got up, and, putting his head between his legs, looked at himself from underneath. It was the concentration of attention backward, the strange mixture of pride and affection and anxiety for these parts, the ungainly and somewhat private motion with which he immersed the proud posterior: it was these, and the indignity. The infant Tarquin had suddenly become a charlady at Margate.

It seemed that we were beginning to turn the corner at last. The principle of regulating the hawk's conduct through his belly was becoming clearer every night. I had a plan now by which I kept him in the mews every other day, going to him every forty-five minutes with little pieces of food, but insisting that he must properly jump to the fist in order to get them. I, for my part, would stand before him with the tit-bit, teasing him by voice and gesture, holding the meat just out of reach, giving him an occasional stroke or prod with it, but always drawing back to insist on a real jump. He, for his part, would try every shift to get the morsel without doing his full duty: he would lean forward to the stretch of his balance for a sudden peck, would walk up and down his perch in a torment of indecision, would suddenly strike out a terrible grab with one of his fierce talons, making me fear for my fingers. ‘The Lord's my Shepherd' introduced each visit. Purposely I was beginning to feed him less (although, as the treatment began to be effective, his increasing amenability made one yearn to reward him by feeding him more), in order that he should be hungry enough to jump quickly at the next visit.

I was happy and would sit to read by the fire in the evenings with a contented heart. I found in Barnard's
Mediaeval England
that the Bishop of Ely once excommunicated a thief who stole a hawk from the cloisters of Bermondsey. Some crimes, one reflected, were worthy of excommunication.

On every second day the time-table of visits was varied by carrying the hawk for walks which lasted about six hours, walks which had lost much of their pleasure because the summer had again relapsed into its sullen mood of rain. On this Wednesday, which was windy as well as wet, I shot a high spectacular pigeon, sweeping over in a gust of sousing air. I brought it straight back to Gos, after the rain had wetted me to the skin, and spent the next half hour standing with the hawk in a draughty loose-box trying to make him jump for the leg.

This brought home a new lesson about falconry. The single austringer cannot afford to be ill. Walking home from Tom's in the afternoon there suddenly came what seemed to be a premonition of influenza, the hot, shaking touch of pain and chill. Now what was to be done! With a mind delighted by its interests, a heart soaring to fight such airy problems of bird bones — suddenly the body rose in treachery, raised rebel standards, stabbed one in the back. I made myself hot chocolate, put cherry brandy in it, built a fire in the study and read about Medieval History rather depressedly till bed. If I did get too ill to attend to Gos, I should have to ask the nearest neighbour to feed him twice a day — by putting a brick inside the gauntlet, and tying four strips of beef securely to it, and putting it down beside the bow perch.

I got up at six and stood in the middle of the room, wondering whether it was illness. After some minutes, I decided that probably, on the whole, it was not: a decision which was confirmed by experience during the rest of the day.

It was a day typical of this successful week. For fifteen minutes in every hour the man stood before his bird master, holding a pigeon's wing well out of reach, coaxing, whistling, mewing as usual. I teased him by rattling the feathers on the edge of his perch, finally by tickling his beak with them, but always evading the snatch of his clutch. It was at about four o'clock in the afternoon of an otherwise banting day that the monster flew up to my shoulder. I ducked in fear of assassination, and, having recovered courage, got him gently back to glove. He flew thus, an appreciable distance, three times during the rest of the day, went for an hour's walk in the evening, and parted from me at night in an affectionate mood.

My setter bitch, though she scanned my face very closely, could never determine mood from expression. She waited for the tone of voice and, though I tested her with ferocious scowls and beaming smiles, drew no conclusions about the state of mind except by ear, or by recollection of painful or pleasant scenes in similar past circumstances. It was not so with Gos. Not only did he detect my feelings in my face, but by now I was able to detect at least two feelings in his. I could tell by his expression, without the aid of sound or movement, whether he was in a good temper or not. His whole countenance would alter like a human being's. At one time he would be a maniac, his eyes sunken and glaring, his brows frowning, his mouth open, his expression that of a crazy archduke in Bavaria. At the next, beak closed, brows raised, eyes normal, he was nothing more formidable than an infant Gos, ridiculous, inquisitive, confiding, almost a despicable pet.

In the afternoon Gos went for a walk across the fields to my old friend Chapel Green. A chapel had been built here in the reign of Henry III, and dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr. When Browne Willis visited Luffield Abbey it was still standing, but had been converted into a dwelling house by splitting it into two semi-detached cottages. The cottages still stood, going rapidly into ruin: and a small farmstead of later date, built just across the way, was following their example. Both were equally decayed. The occasional tramps who had slept in one or the other had left a few comforts — a rotten sack stuffed with straw, or a bit of a box pulled conveniently into a corner. The boys had written obscene remarks in the farmstead — but they had left the ancient chapel undefiled. It stood in the fields, a mile from anywhere.

The place was soundly cursed against man: so it throve with its old virility. Its ash trees were enormous, and its nettles. The setter chased a rabbit out of them, which ran blindly right up to my feet before it turned about and ran the other way. It was a startling piece of life in this unliving place, and it expected to see me no more than I to see it. We took each other for departed spirits, and perhaps the rabbit was one. The parson, I dare say.

The older cottages had been the chapel. In each gable wall the Early English windows and doors remained, filled in with rubble and plaster. It now greeted the visitor fifty yards downwind with a churchyard smell. I looked about me, hardly believing my senses, for it was the veritable smell of death. The ground round the chapel stood higher than the hay-field beside; as all old churchyards did, heaped up with the common and coffinless clay of centuries that had returned to their own dust. I wondered whether there had been a graveyard at the chapel in the old days, and whether, if so, the old bones would be grateful to see a goshawk again. Many must have carried hawks round here (‘a sparrow-hawk for a priest', said the
Boke of St. Albans
, ‘the musket for a holy-water clerk'), but not for hundreds of years now. The indistinguishable earth felt ready to turn over in its repose, to mutter as farm-labourer's bones muttered when agricultural machinery went by above the tomb, or as huntsman strove to articulate when hounds met beside his grave. The eyes in the earth would have been different to the eyes which confronted one along the roads today; would have looked at the real points, not the imaginary ones; would have been critical and appreciative, immediately noticing the hunger trace and the missing feathers of the tail. The old words still used would have been a link between them and me.

Our forefathers had been small men. Their gloves, their armour, and other few bits, we could no longer put on. The doorway in the chapel gable would have made me stoop.

I thought of the small race now underground, strangers of a vanished species safe from comprehension, almost from imagination: monks, nuns, and the eternal villein. I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer ‘with grey goshawk in hond'. They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other.

Meanwhile the smell really was of the grave. A charnel house, some very insanitary and sluttish family of rustic hedgehogs? Gos bated at the smell.

I ran it to earth in a small, square drain, well-head or cellarette (I did not stop to inquire), on the north side of the chapel. It was a dead sheep which somebody had concealed there, rather than take the trouble of burying it. An Amy Robsart of a sheep, shuffled into the same dust as the villein's on holy ground: it was more than dead. Suicides were buried on the north side, I believed. But the deadness of this disgraced sheep was not unpleasant. As I lifted the lid of the drain the flies swarmed out with a roar, leaving behind them millions of those maggots which float-fishermen called gentles. The sheep seethed with them, yellow and pullulating, like a sack of oats poured into the hole: but live oats, busy, dry-sounding, crackling with life. The smell struck against the uvula, giving a dry feeling in the throat. The same maggots had been on the villeins, and would be on me.

I shut the trap door rather hurriedly, but not with revulsion: hurriedly because the smell felt pestilential, although it did not feel unpleasant. I mean that this phosphoric and bony atmosphere had the aura of actually being able to breed disease, which was not in itself an unpleasant thing. It was a thing to shun, but not a thing to regard with loathing. Disease was virile, because it worked. You could feel it with fear, but not with contempt. It was only the things for which I had contempt that made me feel unpleasant.

The air of death, I smelt it vigorously. It was a challenge to life. It was a tonic. The villeins, St. Thomas the Martyr, the Dayrells who had built the chapel, the sheep, and later me: but perfectly acceptable, almost pleasant. They were living and busy maggots, clean, vital, symbolical of an essential life-force perfectly persisting. They were much more lively than the sheep had ever been.

The horn woke me, from a dream of foxhunters. The hounds were back in the Ridings again, cub-hunting when much of the hay was still uncarried, and winter had already been prophesied. The men were there in red coats as the sun rose, coats for which they had been grateful at their setting forth: the loud hulloas of encouragement spoke to the young entry amid glimpses of colour and the continual undisciplined noise of guerilla warfare.

As far as Gos was concerned, it was the alternate day on which he was visited at forty-five minute intervals. I was trying to get him to come
at once
to my glove, and now had ceased to stay and tempt him for the full quarter of an hour. If he did not come by the time I had whistled the old hymn twice, I would go away: and it was not until six o'clock in the evening that he was to learn this lesson.

In the intervals of all these visits I assisted at the cub-hunting (it was nice to have the hunt brought right to one's mews) or sat in the sun making spare jesses and leash, watching them. Early in the day there had been two women sitting on shooting sticks, staring blankly at the outside of Sawpit Wood, when a young sow badger came out of it and ran straight at them. An enormous woodlouse made of shaving brushes, a trundling grey hearth rug, the poor, shortsighted thing chose the one part of Sawpit Wood for her exit which was directly faced by those long-suffering women. The women sat with forced and unnatural composure on their shooting sticks, draped about with pet fox terriers on leads, and passed off the badger as decorously as possible. They did not know what to do with it.

The badger solved the problem by trolloping back into the wood, there to be slain some twenty minutes later.

But the sometime fox-hunter had begun to think. They sat there, those two enduring ladies on shooting sticks, and looked at the badger. Women did not naturally enjoy destruction, for their instinct was to create. These two had been made to get up at five o'clock in the morning, when all amounts of paint and powder could make few ladies look their best; had been moved to array themselves in
chic
sporting tweeds and ‘sensible' gum boots which yet made it difficult to walk and not comfortably warm in the early hours: had been taken out into an unknown woodland in a heavy dew, with nothing to sit upon but a kind of prop, to participate in a mystery which was beyond their comprehension. Absolutely terrified at heart, they sat there resolutely on the little posts and peered at the wood, convinced that the best method of self-defence was complete inertia. Surrounded by a lot of howling dogs, bustled with apparent aimlessness by two or three howling men in red, they were sure of one thing only: that whatever they did with the badger was sure to be wrong. They looked at it with glassy eyes, and very sensibly did nothing.

It was the enormous hoax of fox-hunting which had brought them out. What a magnificent hoax it was! Lord Hillingdon, who was hunting the dog pack himself, two whips, and the hounds, were having the time of their lives. They were doing something direct: in the case of the peer something very like what would be done when Gos was first flown at a pheasant — if ever I got that far. The master was in the middle of a patient and exciting art, seeking to train his own quadrupeds in the sole and skilful pursuit of another quadruped by direct personal effort. No doubt his eyes were on Rattler or Rantipole with the same anxious apprisal as I could feel in mine on Gos. So far, so true. But at some time in the history of fox-hunting it had been discovered that a Field was a necessary evil. The people helped to hold up the cubs in the autumn, and nowadays their financial contributions often maintained the hunt. A few genuine lovers of the chase (who could be estimated at much less than ten per cent of the average Field) followed Lord Hillingdon because they partly appreciated his real interests and because they themselves enjoyed to perfect another quadruped in jumping over obstacles. There were not enough of these to hold up cubs nor to support a good establishment financially.