The Pilgrim Hawk (2 page)

To my mind,
The Pilgrim Hawk
stands unembarrassed beside Ford Madox Ford's
The Good Soldier
, F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
, and Henry James's “The Aspern Papers.” Those particular titles come to mind because they are all stories about disastrously intense passions and desires, narrated by someone untroubled by either, or, at best, by passions and desires that prove disastrously easy to manage. Each book offers, in one way or another, a narrative keyhole through which the reader is invited to peer at scandalous and salacious acts, and each implies that whatever cannot be seen through the keyhole is at least as significant as what can. Finally, each shares the conviction that, as far as human affairs are concerned, it may be better to live hugely and tragically, even in the service of some grand, ardent mistake, than submit to the seductions of mildness, reason, and order.

It is James, however, whom Wescott most nearly resembles. Ford and Fitzgerald produce their internal combustions at least in part by subjecting cosseted characters to ordained accidents, by creating collisions between comfort and chaos, but Wescott, like James, produces all his sparks from within: what fascinates him are devastating events that spring directly from character.
The Pilgrim Hawk
could be the work of a particularly brilliant clockmaker—a clockmaker capable of creating a mechanism of gears, springs, and pulleys that, when set in motion, obeys every known law of cause and effect but results, ultimately, in chaos. There is a sense, in Wescott as in James, that the mechanism requires no outside intervention: no matter how many times we wind the clock it will always tick along, with flawless precision, toward the same undoing.

The Pilgrim Hawk
is, in short, a work of brilliance, and brilliance is not a word one often gets to apply to obscure books more than sixty years old. It was Wescott's second novel, following his well-received book
The Grandmothers
. He would publish one more,
Apartment in Athens
, in 1945, and then live another forty years publishing only essays and journals. There is, to my knowledge, little information about why he stopped writing fiction, though I tend to believe that writers who stop writing do so for reasons as ultimately mysterious as those that drove them to attempt writing in the first place. Whether the general neglect of Wescott's book stems from his long period of relative silence, or from the book's foreignness (it is a profoundly European book written by an American, and difficult to categorize), its stern and rather drab title (one wonders what would have happened to
The Great Gatsby
if Fitzgerald had obeyed his early inclination to call it
The High-Bouncing Lover
), or some more fundamental flaw in the world's ability to keep track of its gifts and glories, I can't help but believe that it will not only survive but, ultimately, prosper. Those of us who love books, as well as those of us who write them, are sometimes called upon for prodigious acts of patience.

—M
ichael
C
unningham

For Nelson

March to July, 1940;

Stone-blossom and New York

THE CULLENS WERE Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble. They were on their way to a property they had rented in Hungary; and one afternoon they came to Chancellet to see my great friend Alexandra Henry. That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America, and she met my brother and married him.

Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.

Chancellet must be a painful place in the forties, although one of the least changed in France, I suppose, because it is unimportant. As I remember, there was a school of what is now romantically called celestial navigation, with a modest flying field and a few hangars, two or three kilometers away, at Pelors; but if that is in use now the foreigners must have it. In our day, day in and day out, the old Duchesse de Challot and her poor relations and friends in tight coats on wind-broken mounts used to hunt in the forest of Pelors. We could hear their hunting horns which sounded like a picnic of boy sopranos, lost. Meanwhile perhaps there have been anti-aircraft guns for the defense of Paris embedded all amid the earths of foxes: angry radio stammering in the well-kept branches. Now at least the foxes and the thrushes can come back. The old ex-cabinet-minister whose château and little park adjoined Alex's garden is dead.

Her house was just a section of the village street: two small dwellings and a large horse-stable combined and rebuilt and expensively furnished in the plain modern style. She or her architect made a mistake in the planning of the ground floor. The dining room and the chief guest-room were on the street, which is also the highway to Orléans and the tourist country of the Loire; so that the reckless French traffic practically brushed the walls, and heavy trucks alarmed one all night. Not only Alex's bedroom but the kitchen and pantry opened into the spacious and quiet garden. This delighted the new servants whom Alex had brought up from Morocco, a romantic pair named Jean and Eva. They promptly took a far corner of it under some plane trees for their own use; and all spring they passed every spare moment there, quarreling and occasionally weeping during the day, but like clockwork making peace and sealing it with kisses in the twilight or moonlight . . .I mention this odd location of the servants' quarters because, that afternoon of the Cullens' visit, I went to speak to Jean and happened to look out the kitchen window and saw Cullen in the garden, futilely giving way to his awful jealousy, emancipated from love for a few minutes.

There had been no mention of their coming, or perhaps I had forgotten it. I heard the doorbell ring, then ring again. Jean and Eva must have been outdoors or napping. Alex had put through a telephone call to London upon some little annoying matter of business, and wished not to be disturbed. So I went to the door; and there was the long dark Daimler entirely occupying the cobbled space between the house and the highway, and there stood the Irishman about to ring a third time. “Oh, how d'ya do, is this Miss Henry's house, my name's Cullen,” he said; and turned to help Mrs. Cullen out of the car, which was a delicate operation, for she bore a full-grown hooded falcon on her wrist. A dapper young chauffeur also helped. She was dressed with extreme elegance and she wore the highest heels I ever saw, on which, with one solicitous male at each elbow, she stumbled across the ancient cobblestones, the bird swaying a little and hunching its wings to steady itself.

I told them my name, and they repeated it after me and shook hands with a somewhat grand and vague affability. “I brought my hawk,” Mrs. Cullen unnecessarily announced. “She's new. I thought Alex wouldn't mind. And I hope you too,” she added and paused a moment, with bright eyes to flatter me just in case I felt entitled to authority of some sort in Alex's house, “I hope you won't mind.” She had no way of knowing who or what I was: casual caller or one of Alex's kinsmen or perhaps a sweetheart.

Her eyes were a crystal blue, unmistakably Irish; and she was unmistakable in other ways too, in spite of her brisk London voice and fine French dress. Her make-up was better than you would have expected of a lady falconer; still you could see that her skin was naturally downy and her snub nose tended to be pink. There was also a crookedness, particularly in the alignment of her nostrils and her voluble little lips. How rare pulchritude is among the Irish, I said to myself; therefore what a trouble is made when it does appear: Emer and Deirdre, Mrs. O'Shea and Mrs. McBride. Then my glance fell upon Mrs. Cullen's snowy dimpled fingers, with a considerable diamond on one, a star sapphire on another. Between her sleeve and the rough gauntlet to which the falcon clung, her wrist showed like a bit of Easter lily; and her ankle was a match for it, perfectly straight in a mere glimmer of stocking. No doubt these fine points were enough to entitle her to a certain enchantment and disturbance of the opposite sex: her husband for one.

Meanwhile Jean had come running in a fine embarrassment, buttoning his white jacket; and I sent him to inform his mistress of the arrival of her guests and to guide their chauffeur to the garage, while I tried to usher them into the living room. But Mrs. Cullen went on explaining the hawk. “Her name's Lucy. Don't you think she's sweet? She's Scottish; I've only had her five or six weeks. A gamekeeper near Inverness trapped her, but she's all right, only one toe bent in the trap. D'you see, this toe?” She paused on the threshold and held up the gloved hand and wrist on which Lucy perched, and I saw: gripping the rugged and stained leather, one sharp talon that did not grip straight. The stain on the leather was dried blood.

“I call her Lucy because my old father used to make me read Scott to him in the winter whenever the weather got too beastly to hunt. I thought Alex would like to see her.”

“We had to bring her anyway,” her husband loudly chimed in. “The most awful things happen if we leave her in the hotel. She frightens the chambermaids, and they scream and weep. I have to give immense tips.”

He was a large man, not really fat but with bulk and softness irregularly here and there, not so much in the middle as up and down his back, all around his head, in his hands. His British complexion suggested eating and drinking rather than hunting and shooting; certainly nothing about him suggested hawking. His hazel eyes were a little bloodshot, wavering golden now and then; and he had a way of opening and shutting his lips, like an unsympathetic pout, or a dispirited kiss, under the tufts of his mustache.

We were about to sit down in the living room when they both noticed it, and evidently felt obliged to comment. “What a splendid room, splendid,” they said; “most unusual and modern and comfortable.” It was not splendid, but it was very large: the entire former stable with the hayloft removed so that the roof constituted the ceiling, with old chestnut rafters gothically pointing up twenty-five or thirty feet; the woodwork darkly waxed and the walls painted white. It reminded me of a village church. At regular intervals all around hung certain modern pictures with only blunt rudimentary drawing and overflowing color, like stained glass. But on as fine a day as this, modern art was dimmed and dwarfed by the view of the garden and the park beyond it, Alex's architect having removed almost a third of the wall on that side and put in two great panes of plate glass.

Mrs. Cullen tripped over to this great window and courteously exclaimed once more: “Splendid garden. What luck to have a pond!” It was what the French call an English garden; no formal flower beds—a few blossoms amid the grass, paths along the water, and shrubs flourishing, in the muffled brilliance of late May. The characteristic Seine-et-Oise sky, foamy cloud and weak blue, lay at our feet also, daubed in a soft copy on the surface of the pond. In the background every tree was draped in a slightly different shade of the same ecstatic color.

But as Mrs. Cullen stood facing all this, I had an impression of indifference and mere courtesy; her look did not take in much. A little narrow frown, an efficient survey, only to discover if there was anything in it for her personally; and there was not. In a moment the light eyelashes began to flutter again, and the blue pupils loosened, merely sparkling. Her prolonged and expressive looks were all for her husband or her hawk.

Now, what seeing the garden chiefly reminded her of was that the hawk could not see: its entire head except the beak encased in its plumed Dutch hood. “Poor Lucy, blind as a bat,” she murmured; and very deftly, taking one drawstring in her teeth and the other between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she unhooded it. It also frowned, and stared circularly at the room and blinked at the window. Then it opened out and rearranged the whitish and bluish feathers around its throat; combed its head between its tethered legs; smoothed its cheek against its powerful shoulder.

Mrs. Cullen paced up and down, evidently trying to decide which armchair would suit her and Lucy best. Then Alex came in from her long-distance business, with apologies for not welcoming them at once. They replied with another round of compliments upon the house and garden, and there was a new introduction of the falcon. “Lucy, for Lucy Ashton, Lucy of Lammermoor,” Mrs. Cullen explained. “Don't you remember her song?
Easy live and quiet die, Vacant hand and heart and eye
.”

To my amusement Cullen hummed a few notes of the Mad Scene from
Lucia
in a manly Irish treble. His wife hushed him by murmuring his name, which was Larry; and went on informing Alex that they were at the Plaza-Honoré, busy shopping in Paris, eager to leave for Hungary via Strasbourg on the morrow. I was impatient for them to cease this small talk and be seated, because I wanted to sit down and admire the falcon comfortably, and to ask certain questions. At last Mrs. Cullen requested a straight chair, which I brought from the dining room.

I was much impressed by Alex's enthusiasm during this first part of the Cullens' visit. It reminded me that she must be lonely here in France with only myself and my cousin and a few other friends rather like us. She had spent a number of years in Scotland with her father, and in Morocco, and journeying around the Orient; and in London also the acquaintances of her girlhood had been outdoor people like these two, self-centered but without any introspection, strenuous but emotionally idle. It was a type of humanity that she no longer quite respected or trusted, but evidently still enjoyed.