The Pilgrim Hawk (4 page)

Civilized human beings have learned how to avoid literal starvation and the fear of death and real enslavement; so at least it seemed in the twenties. They have this kind of thing instead: fear of old age, loss of charm, lack of love. Therefore I caught myself gazing at my young unmarried Alex anxiously, sentimentally, and at her Irish guests with idle envy. But the Irish wife's uneasiness and the husband's captivated but uncomfortable look reminded me that I was making a false distinction. There is not as much sweet safety in marriage as one hopes. Hunger and its twin, disgust, are in it too; need and greed; and passage of time, the punishment. Of course true love and lust are not the same, neither are they inseparable, nor indistinguishable. Only they reflect and imitate and elucidate each other.

Looking back upon that afternoon's talk and thought, I am inclined to hold Mrs. Cullen responsible for this daydreaming of mine, personal worry and exhilaration, which made me inattentive to what she said now and then. In a woman as energetic and attractive as that, the hint of hidden emotion and the sense of double meaning naturally are exciting; and the excitement leads in one's own private direction. But as it were in a mirror, looking at myself, I could see something of her character and plight before the circumstances of the afternoon betrayed her. I think that was what she instinctively wanted.

Meanwhile she had gone on answering Alex's questions: something about the craftsmen who outfit falcons, generation after generation of avian haberdashers especially in India, and which bell resounds the clearest through the grass and bushes and breezes, and what hood is least likely to ulcerate the waxen lids and lips; and something about an ancient Persian text with a thrice-hyphenated title which is still the best handbook of falconry. I wanted to know all this, yet I failed to pay attention.

Then Lucy bated, that is, threw herself headlong off the fist. The leather jesses around her legs and the leash looped through Mrs. Cullen's fingers held her ignominiously, upside down. It was a painful sight, like an epileptic fit or an insane fit. There was no possibility of the thongs breaking; I half-expected her lean bright legs to snap instead. I expected her to scream, aik! But the only sound was the jingling of her bell and the convulsion of her plumage, air panting through her plumage. The tail feathers and the flight feathers, shooting out rigidly, threshed against herself and against her mistress from head to foot. Mrs. Cullen, not the least disconcerted, raised her left arm straight up over her head, and stood up and stood quite still, only turning her face away from the flapping and whipping. Her equanimity impressed me as much as her strength.

In a minute Lucy gave up little by little. It was extraordinary: you could see her self-control returning, recurring in one feather after another. Then she hung peacefully like a mere turkey or goose hooked up in a butchershop; only for an instant. The long wings began again, but in a different exertion: hugging the air, bracing against the air, until her talons got a grip on the gauntlet and she succeeded in pulling herself up again where she belonged. There she stared or glared at us, blinking the rush of blood back out of her embarrassed eyes and pulling her plumage together.

With a sigh and a half-smile Mrs. Cullen brought her burdened and shaken arm down, and seated herself again in the straight chair. Some such hopeless attempt to escape, crazy fit of freedom, comes over all domesticated falcons at fairly regular intervals, she explained, especially in their first year or two; all their lives if they have not been well manned. “They never get over being wild. It's like malaria or that other intermittent fever, the one you have to be so careful about in the Orient.”

Lucy happened to be an unusually frank, active bird, so that you could often tell when her trouble was to be expected; by a soft repeated tinkle of her bells or a steady pull at one of her jesses. The leather might of course be loose or worn out. “And instead it pinches her, which makes her angry, and everything seems hopeless,” Mrs. Cullen concluded. “She can't help it, can't bear it. It's like committing suicide.”

“Give me liberty or give me death, ha, ha,” cried Cullen, seeming to expect special applause from us because we were Americans, or perhaps because Alex's name was Henry like the American who first expressed that sentiment. His wife gave him that look of hers which was the opposite of applause; and he took it as usual. His hazel eyes stood out like jewels; the tip of his tongue brightened his lips.

Meanwhile she was slowly caressing Lucy's lower plumage and tired feet. She might have been a trained nurse and Lucy her patient, after a bout of illness or craziness. Or she might have been in love and Lucy her beloved, pleasure absentmindedly ebbing... And every word she uttered added a little to the confused significance. “Sometimes I can prevent her independent fits. The way a governess gets to know a child, and can see its tantrums beginning and distract it somehow . . . Being stroked like this often does the trick. At first I used a dried pigeon's wing as you're supposed to, but this suits Lucy as well.”

Idly she went on with it: two dimpled fingers with long tinted nails and heavy rings just brushing the spent feathers. “Or if I notice it in time, I lift her over my head for a moment. She likes to perch as high as possible, so she can look down upon everything around her. I think it must frighten her to see things higher than she is. We're like that sometimes ourselves, aren't we?” she added, smiling gently.

Time after time her transitions like this—from hawk to human, objective to subjective—startled me. To be sure, any woman greatly in love must know how a flattery in time saves trouble, how the illusion of superiority counteracts the illusion of inferiority, as well as any governess. But it had not occurred to me that her love for Cullen was great in that sense: cunning, instructive, curative.

Falcons, she informed us, do not breed in captivity. Various attempts have been made to induce them to, but with no success. Thus, the entire sport has to start again from scratch for each falconer, whenever he trains a new playmate. Little by little the perfectly wild creature surrenders, individually, in the awful difficulty of hunger. But surrender is all, domestication is all; they never feel at home. You can carry male and female side by side on the same cadge year in and year out; nothing happens. They will cease to fight but they stay solitary. Scorn of each other for giving in, or self-scorn, seems to break their hearts. They never build a nest or lay an egg. Not one chick or eyas is ever reared in bondage. There is no real acceptance or inheritance of the state of surrender.

Mrs. Cullen mentioned, as a kind of exception, the make-hawks: old good-natured birds which some professionals use in the training of the young wild ones. But even their influence must be in the way of a rationalization of necessary evil, inculcation of vice, making the best of a bad bargain. For they too are born in the vacant rocks or uncomfortable trees; and they too keep sterile.

“Like schoolmasters,” crowed Cullen. That appealed to my sense of humor. But Cullen's smile was a leer if I ever saw one, and evidently embarrassed his wife and Alex; so I kept from smiling.

Mrs. Cullen then quoted Buffon's famous sentence about falcons: “
L'individu seul est esclave; l'espèce est libre
.” Buffon had been her father's second-best author, after Scott. Her French accent was incorrect but very pretty. Only the individual hawk is a slave; the species is free...

Then Alex spoke up, in what was a loud voice for her: “Oh, dear, it is the opposite of human beings. We are slaves in the mass, aren't we? Only one man can hope to free himself; one at a time, then another, and another.”

“Oh, I dare say,” Mrs. Cullen assented. “Yes, perhaps.” But she smiled patronizingly. I think she was congratulating herself upon knowing a freer and stronger type of humanity than our pampered, subtle, self-questioning American type; and perhaps she did: Irish republicans, wild Hungarians with hawks, Germans during their defeat.

“But it is true, isn't it?” Alex insisted. “The man who really loves freedom is the exception.”

“Oh, quite. How right you are,” our lady falconer dubiously murmured.

But her husband disagreed. “No, Alex! What a disgusting idea! Love of liberty is the deepest instinct we have—if you will excuse my saying so.”

We silently considered this for a moment; the three of us, it seemed, regretfully. Alex wanted freedom more than anything; and if others as a rule did not, she might have a lonely life. In any case it would take a better man than Cullen to dispel her young misanthropy. I myself regretted never having been able to decide what to think: how much liberty is a true human motive, and how much is wasteful and foolish? And for the first time that afternoon Mrs. Cullen gazed at her husband sadly, that is, weakly. She agreed with him, I felt sure. But there are circumstances in which it may be obvious that at least one human being requires freedom; and you bitterly regret that it is so: because you need to keep that one captive.

“Why, hang it all,” Cullen still sputtered, “why, independence is the only thing that is human about hawks. Don't you agree, Madeleine?”

She slightly turned her back to him and contemplated Alex and me rather unkindly. It was the careful absence of expression, absence of frown, that you see on a clever lecturer's face when the irrelevant questioning or heckling begins. There was also a sadness about it which, if I read it aright, I have often felt myself. She did not want us to take her hawk, her dear subject-matter, her hobby and symbol—whatever it meant to her—and turn it this way and that to mean what we liked. It was hers and we were spoiling it. Around her eyes and mouth there were lines of that caricatural weariness which is peculiar to those who talk too much.

Indeed our sociability as a whole had gone off; something a little sour and dark had developed in it. We had been sitting there too long. Alex, I fancied, was counting the minutes until they departed. But suddenly she grew hospitable. “You'll stay to dinner, Madeleine, won't you? Please, Larry, do. I can promise you a good dinner,” she added with an indulgent smile.

I wondered whether she had mentioned this invitation to Jean and Eva, and whether the short notice would exasperate or inspire them. Mrs. Cullen also thought of that. “Servants are devils, don't you know. Mine used to behave madly, when extra people turned up at Cullen Hall.”

Poor Alex was accustomed to the madness of servants; but, as she explained, this new couple did not mind surprises. She had found them in Tangier, where the secretary of the pig-sticking club had engaged them to cook in camp for several tentfuls of unmarried members. With only primitive utensils, a few iron kettles and a spit over an outdoor fire, and unpredictable guests at all hours, it evidently was child's play for them, and a welcome opportunity to show off. One afternoon a French general and a party of eight had motored out from the town, and some thoughtless fellow had asked them to stay. Jean had taken a boar killed that morning, and by slicing it thin, rubbing it with certain herbs which grew there underfoot amid the tents, and marinating it in four bottles of brandy, rendered it quite edible by nightfall. Alex was inclined to think of her entire lifetime as an emergency of that sort. So she had hired the proud pair and secured passports for them and embarked them for France and Chancellet. And this, she told Mrs. Cullen, was what she had hired them for.

“If we do stay,” Mrs. Cullen said, “my bird will have to be fed, toward six o'clock.” Alex in any case intended to suggest to Jean a dish of pigeons baked with white currants. He would procure them from a neighbor who had an immense old dovecot; and one could be brought back alive for Lucy. The reminiscence of the brandied wild pig, the prospect of
pigeons aux groseilles
, charmed Cullen; you could see the gourmandise shining on his rosy lips.

Alex went to the kitchen, and by her comfortable air when she came back I judged that Jean was well disposed. Then she suggested our taking a walk until dinner-time, which also charmed Cullen, though his appetite did not need whetting. “By Jove,” he said, “I do look forward to those squabs.”

They were disappointed to learn that the park was not Alex's property. It belonged to the nation, along with the little château de Chancellet in the midst of it. Bidou, the illustrious aged ex-minister, was permitted to live there. But he kept the gates open in the daytime, and the entire village strolled in and out. Meeting all classes when he took his daily exercise perhaps made him think proudly how democratic a statesman he had been all his life. He gave everyone a
bonjour
. He especially liked meeting Alex because she was an American and he vaguely remembered having advocated the payment of the war debts.

“Oh, aren't politicians a bore?” Cullen exclaimed with an odd proud laugh. “Worse than poets.”

“Larry, please,” his wife said in haste, “please let's not talk about that.” I wondered what that meant.

Alex unlocked the little gate on the far side of the pond, and we strolled along an
allée
of ancient beeches. She warned us that if Bidou should appear in the distance, she would have to turn back. He had a way of inviting her to dine, and Mme. Bidou had asked her not to accept on account of the failing of his health, the folly of his old manhood.

We all felt happier now that we were outdoors. It was beautiful in the park. The trees had been so lovingly tended ever since a pupil of Lenôtre's set them out that each had developed its maximum character. The way they stood in informal groups, or in line, or alone at a little distance, seemed not only to conform to the art of parks but to express their feelings about each other: idiosyncrasies of affection or obedience, pride or pain. And unlike human characters in such an assembly, they promised or threatened nothing more; no episodes or developments.

Cullen walked up ahead with Alex. Now in the open air he not only laughed but shouted; so that I could hear him telling her a yarn about an old English politician who had attached himself to a young married woman. And one day he and the husband had gone out alone together on the moor for a bit of rough shooting; and he had shot the husband by accident, so to speak. Then he had married her. But he had worried about it all the rest of his life, which was not long; and he had impoverished her in his will. It was ancient gossip: I had heard it before; and at the time I did not see any oddity in Cullen's telling it, except that it seemed funny to him and not to me. When love is diabolic, I thought, a triangle is the simplest form it can take; and a convenient form, if it cannot be endured. The lovers to be pitied perhaps are those who have no one to hate—what they long to kill, and what the killing would be for, incorporated in one and the same person, the one they love—whose rough shooting therefore can take place only in imagination, and never ends.