The Pilgrim Hawk (3 page)

Their enthusiasm about themselves and all that exactly appertained to them, always overflowing, coolly playing and bubbling over in mild agitation like a fountain, held your attention and mirrored itself in your mind; little by little you began to bubble with it. One of Alex's obvious characteristics was lack of curiosity; and I think that was chiefly fear of arousing or authorizing others' inquiry about herself. Perhaps selfishness reassured her and made her less shy. In any case, that afternoon she eagerly asked questions, including some that I had in mind; and Mrs. Cullen was charmed to answer; and Cullen was charmed to listen and give back his approximate echoes. Thus an odd kind of compatibility was established, in which I too gradually let myself be included, somewhat to my surprise.

For one thing, the bird charmed me so that nothing else mattered much. And it served as an embodiment or emblem for me of all the truly interesting subjects of conversation that these very sociable, traveling, sporting people leave out as a rule: illness, poverty, sex, religion, art. Whenever I began to be bored, a solemn glance of its maniacal eyes helped me to stop listening and to think concentratedly of myself instead, or for myself.

Furthermore the Cullens began to puzzle me, to charm me in that sense. Whether or not I finally arrive at a proper understanding of people, I often begin in the way of a vexed, intense superficiality. And indeed they were mere male and female of that species of well-to-do British which haunts the entire world with excess of energy and sedate manner. They were self-absorbed, coldly gregarious, mere passers of time. But nothing about them was authentically sedate or even peaceful. There Cullen plumply sat in Alex's softest armchair, his legs more widely spread or loosely crossed than you would expect of a conventional gentleman; licking his lips under his fringy mustache; evidently thinking of his dinner; interrupting his wife's conversation at regular intervals as if that were his life work. Yet he seemed to be constantly fighting against some strange feeling, and to be somehow outwitted by it. Whenever he spoke, his wife smiled or at least tilted her head toward him. This, I felt, was chiefly good breeding on her part; many of his remarks, and especially his tone of voice, seemed unpleasant. But between remarks, in her glances at him, there was affection as bright as tears. And during the loving fuss she made over the great bird on her arm, she kept shifting her eyes in his direction, imploring him to try to like it too. It might have been a baby, and he a lover; or was it the other way around?

Alex expressed surprise that they should willingly leave Ireland at this lovely time of year. Mrs. Cullen answered that, in season or out, there was nothing much to do in Ireland except hunt. “And our terrible sons pinch our hunters when they come home. We can't afford to keep enough for them. I can't bear a horse that others have been riding.”

She also alluded mildly to the diminishment of the old quiet kind of fortune like theirs. The banshee in the drafty corridor or the weedy hedge crying not the deaths of relatives but increase of taxes, decrease of rents and investments... Indeed they still appeared rich, in hand-woven silk with diamonds, in tweed as soft as silk, stopping at the Plaza-Honoré, en route to Budapest in a Daimler. But all that in fact is cheaper than an old country house full of guests, and the requisite stable and kennel and larder and cellar, and servants enough. Having closed Cullen Hall, Mrs. Cullen pointed out, they were in a position to accept invitations half the year; and the continent was cheap.

Evidently her telling us this vexed Cullen. He warmly informed us that one of his neighbors, a drunken idiot anyway, had sold everything that the entail permitted, and two of his cousins were obliged to rent; and so it went all over the British Isles. Their own circumstances were neither discreditable nor hopeless. There were still certain inheritances due them, on his side, not Mrs. Cullen's. His sons might be considered grown men, except by their mother; but they were still engaged in that great postponement, education, which is expensive. His brother and sister were happy to have them during their long vacations; but as a rule they preferred to loiter at Cullen Hall with two or three servants who were too old to dismiss anyway; and they hunted with the neighbors. It is easy for youngsters to get on with new people, even such as the latest in their county, a manufacturing peer named Bild, a Jew; not at all easy for him.

Mrs. Cullen said a word in defense of Lord Bild. Thank heaven it was he who had bought the estate adjoining Cullen Hall, on their youngsters' account especially. Although of common Germanic origin he was very strict about manners and sportsmanship and keeping fit; more so than they were. Neighborly influence is like education; the best teachers belong to the races and classes which have been learning themselves just lately.

Now Cullen had risen and was standing at his wife's elbow, shaking his finger at the falcon teasingly. I thought that the bird's great eyes showed only a slight natural bewilderment; whereas a slow sneer came over his face and he turned pale. It was the first revelation I had of the interesting fact that he hated Lucy. He would willingly have sacrificed a finger tip in order to have an excuse to retaliate, I thought; and I imagined him picking up a chair or a coffee table and going at her with smashing blows. What a difference there is between animals and humans! Lucy no doubt would be disgustingly fierce when her time came; but meanwhile sat pleasantly and idly, in abeyance. Whereas humanity is histrionic, and must prepare and practice every stroke of passion; so half our life is vague and stormy make-believe.

Mrs. Cullen merely looked up at her husband and said in a velvety tone, “The trouble with Ireland, from my point of view, is that they don't like our having a falcon. Naturally Lord Bild disapproves; but I don't mind him. He's so unsure of himself; he's a Jew furthermore; you can scarcely expect him to live and let live. But our other neighbors and the family are almost as tiresome.”

Cullen thrust the teasing hand in his pocket and returned to his armchair. Her eyes sparkled fast, perhaps with that form of contrition which pretends to be joking. Or perhaps it pleased her to break off the subject of their Irish circumstances and worldly situation and to resume the dear theme of hawk, which meant all the world to her.

The summer before, she told us, an old Hungarian had sold her a trained tiercel. “I took him with me last winter when we stayed with some pleasant Americans in Scotland. There's a bad ailment called croaks, and he caught that and died. They had installed their American heating, which I think makes an old house damp; don't you? Then their gamekeeper trapped Lucy and gave her to me. Wasn't that lucky? I've always wanted a real falcon, a haggard, to man and train myself.”

In strict terminology of the sport, she explained, only a female is called a falcon; and a haggard is one that has already hunted on her own account, that is, at least a year old when caught.

Except for that one deformed bit of one foot, Lucy was a perfect example of her species,
Falco peregrinus
, pilgrim hawk. Her body was as long as her mistress's arm; the wing feathers in repose a little too long, slung across her back like a folded tent. Her back was an indefinable hue of iron; only a slight patine of the ruddiness of youth still shone on it. Her luxurious breast was white, with little tabs or tassels of chestnut. Out of tasseled pantaloons her legs came down straight to the perch with no apparent flesh on them, enameled a greenish yellow.

But her chief beauty was that of expression. It was like a little flame; it caught and compelled your attention like that, although it did not flicker and there was nothing bright about it nor any warmth in it. It is a look that men sometimes have; men of great energy, whose appetite or vocation has kept them absorbed every instant all their lives. They may be good men but they are often mistaken for evil men, and vice versa. In Lucy's case it appeared chiefly in her eyes, not black but funereally brown, and extravagantly large, set deep in her flattened head.

On each side of the upper beak there was a little tooth or tusk. Mrs. Cullen explained that the able bird in the prime of life uses this to snap the spinal cord of its quarry, which is the most merciful death in nature. It reminded me of the hooked gloves which our farmers wear to husk corn; and so in fact, I thought, it must work: the falcon in the sky like a large angelic hand, stripping the meat of pigeon or partridge out of its feathers, the soul out of its throat.

I think Mrs. Cullen was the most talkative woman I ever met; and it was hawk, hawk, all afternoon. A good many inhabitants of the British Isles are hell-bent all their lives upon killing some wild animal somehow, and naturally are keen about the domestic animals which assist them. Others, who know all about human nature, nevertheless prefer to converse about animals, perhaps because it is the better part of conversational valor. Mrs. Cullen's enthusiasm was nothing like that, and it probably would have annoyed or alarmed the majority of her compatriots. As it seemed to me after listening awhile, she felt welling up in her mind some peculiar imagination, or some trouble impossible to ignore, which she tried to relieve by talking, with a kind of continuous double meaning. I think she would never have admitted the duplicity, and perhaps could not have expressed herself in plain terms. People as a rule do mean much more than they understand.

She informed us, for example, that in a state of nature hawks rarely die of disease; they starve to death. Their eyesight fails; some of their flight feathers break off or fall out; and their talons get dull or broken. They cease to be able to judge what quarry is worth flying at; or their flight slows up so that even the likely quarry gets away. Or, because they have lost weight, the victim is not stunned by their swooping down on it. Or when they have clutched it, they cannot hang on long enough to kill. Day after day they make fools of themselves. Then they have to depend upon very young birds or sick birds, or little animals on the ground, which are the hardest of all to see; and in any case there are not enough of these easy conquests to keep them in flesh. The hungrier they get, the more wearily and weakly they hunt. And the weaker they get, the more often they go hungry, in a miserable confusion of cause and effect. Finally what appears to be shame and morbid discouragement overcomes them. They simply sit on the rocks or in a tree somewhere waiting to die, as you might say philosophically, letting themselves die.

“I met a man on the staff of our great madhouse in Dublin last year,” Mrs. Cullen added. “I was curious to see what it was like; so he took me with him one afternoon on a tour of inspection. Some of the mad people reminded me of hawks, exactly.” The lethargically mad, sitting with their hands in their laps, imaginarily exhausted, unable to speak above a whisper, with burning but unfocusable eyes, unable to concentrate...

Cullen cleared his throat boisterously, perhaps to protest against the curiosity of women or against this folly of reading meaning into the ways of mere birds.

Falconers believe that hunger must be worse for falcons than for other birds and animals, Mrs. Cullen said. It maddens them, with a soreness in every feather; an unrelievable itching in their awful feet; a bloody lump in their throats, with the light plumage wrapped loose around like a bandage. This painful greed, sick single-mindedness, makes it possible to tame them and to perfect the extraordinary technique of falconry, which is more than any other bird can learn. You hear it in their cry—
aik, aik
—as Mrs. Cullen then imitated it for us, ache, ache—a small flat scream with a bubbling or gargling undertone, as if their mouths were full of scalding water. “I suppose human beings never feel anything like it.”

“But Madeleine, Madeleine, we're never hungry,” her husband protested with a chuckle in which there was great satisfaction. “How can we tell?”

She begged him not to be silly. She had known people who had starved, Irish republicans hiding from the Black and Tans, Germans in 1922, and had inquired of them; and they had described it as rather a soft cool drowsy feeling.

I wondered about this. Although I had been a poor boy, on a Wisconsin farm and in a slum in Chicago and in Germany in 1922, I could not recollect any exact sensation of hunger, that is to say, hunger of the stomach. And I thought—as the relatively well-fed do think—of the other human hungers, mental and sentimental and so on. For example, my own undertaking in early manhood to be a literary artist. No one warned me that I really did not have talent enough. Therefore my hope of becoming a very good artist turned bitter, hot and nerve-racking; and it would get worse as I grew older. The unsuccessful artist also ends in an apathy, too proud and vexed to fly again, waiting upon withheld inspiration, bored to death... Naturally I did not speak of this to Alex and the Cullens. It seemed rude and somehow abnormal even to be thinking of it, while they sat exchanging information about real life, really starving nations and greedy species of bird.

Whereupon our present bird mantled, that is, stood a moment on one leg, shook the other leg and wing downward, and spread that half of her plumage in a long fan, gazing at me, blinking or winking at me. But because my writing had gone badly all spring I could not bear to give her more than a passing thought with reference to that. I began to think of her as an image of amorous desire instead. That is the great relief of weariness of work in any case; the natural consolation for its not going well. Or perhaps the Cullens' feeling about each other suggested it to me. No doubt art is too exceptional to be worth talking about; but sex is not. At least in good countries such as France and the United States during prosperous periods like the twenties, it must be the keenest of all appetites for a majority of men most of their lives.

And highly sexed men, unless they give in and get married and stay married, more or less starve to death. I myself was still young then and I had been lucky in love. But little early quarrels and failures warn one; and in the confidences of friends and in gossip about other men, one discovers the vague beastly shape of what to expect. Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. Love-life goes on indefinitely, with less and less likelihood of being loved, less and less ability to love, and the stomach-ache of love still as sharp as ever. The old bachelor is like an old hawk.