The Pilgrim Hawk (9 page)

“Oh, Mr. Tower, can you get me the other half of that pigeon?” she begged. “The pigeon I fed her. She hasn't, I hope she hasn't, gone far away.”

Upon which her husband behind us chimed in as usual, worse than usual: “Madeleine, Madeleine, surely they've cooked it. That's the dinner, you know, pigeons with white currants.”

She took notice of that. She swung around and answered in a devilish voice, “Of course they have not cooked it.” For one second I thought she might strike him; perhaps he did too. He wrinkled his nose and flung up his hands.

I started toward the kitchen and she followed, explaining, “I'll never catch her without a lure. Thank heaven it was a small pigeon, she'll still be hungry.” She gave me a perhaps affectionate pat on the shoulder which amounted to a push.

Then she ran back to the window, and there gave a wonderful small shriek. It should have been hawklike, I said to myself; what it really made me think of was a valkyrie, a very small valkyrie. For in spite of my admiration of Lucy and sympathy for the other two, I was enjoying all this.

I met Alex at the kitchen door, and she had the half-pigeon. Mrs. Cullen called to us, “What in God's name did I do with my bag? My extra leash is in it. She must have broken hers.”

Alex ran for the bag, handing me the pigeon. I dropped it, and it smudged the parquet. Jean and Eva were there beside me, but they were too thrilled to do any mopping now. Then Mrs. Cullen lost one shoe and stumbled into an armchair; and her husband knelt and tried to put it back on, fumbling around her silky ankle with those freckled fingers which could so easily have snapped it in two like a twig—until she lost patience and kicked the other shoe off, over his shoulder, and rose to go in her stocking-feet.

“Stay here, all of you,” she ordered. “Please, please, let me go alone.” She paused a moment on the threshold staring across the pond at heedless Lucy. She held her gloved fingers up to her mouth as you do when you blow a kiss. Then she swung around toward us, demanding, with a kind of loud lump in her throat, “Where in God's name is her hood? How wicked! Who did it? One of you, how wicked!”

It was poor Eva who answered, with her primitive sensibility, primitive expectation of blame: “Oh, Madame, Madame, Jean and I never left the kitchen,” and began to cry.

Alex told her to hush, which she did, more or less. As I watched our angry birdcatcher, I still kept one eye on these other watchers, so assorted and attractive, there inside the house in a row close to the plate-glass window in the last murky sunshine. I thought that Alex glanced oddly back at me; perhaps my eyewitnessing and slight complicity had given me an odd expression. Certainly she hated this disorder: obscure common blundering around her house, and general self-betrayal, with the servants goggle-eyed. On the other hand catching a great runaway bird was the sort of problem she loved. Her mild brown eyes lit up, and she breathed like a happy child. Ricketts came tiptoeing in and stood behind us as close to Eva as he dared. Whereupon Jean began whispering to her in Italian,
prestissimo
, until Alex hushed him too. Eva dabbed her eyes with the corner of the towel, another corner of which had pigeon's blood on it. As for Cullen, his face was quite mottled with his mixed emotions; heaven knows what they were.

As Mrs. Cullen left us, across the lawn, along the left side of the pond, I was struck by the change this emergency had made in her appearance and carriage. Perhaps it was chiefly her going in stocking-feet. When she first descended from the Daimler, how delicately she had stumbled on the cobblestones; then foolishly tripped back and forth on the waxed parquet, and weakly strolled in the park! That French or Italian footwear of hers with three-inch heels not only incapacitated her but flattered her, and disguised her. Now her breasts seemed lower on her torso, out of the way of her nervous arms. Her hips were wide and her back powerful, with that curve from the shoulder blades to the head which you see in the nudes of Ingres. She walked with her legs well apart, one padding footfall after another, as impossible to trip up as a cat.

Suddenly she must have remembered that she had brought an extra leash but no extra hood. She hurried back along the water and across to the rustic bench, where she picked up the one Cullen had removed and let fall; then set out again, by the right bank, more slow and catlike as she approached her quarry. What followed took only a few moments. We heard the falconer's cry:
hai, hai
, a desolate sound, which probably has not varied much in the three or four thousand years of falconry, for it is based on eternal acoustics, agreeable to the changeless ears of hawks. I loved to hear it. Lucy's head stirred swiftly around in response to it. I wanted her to cry back,
aik
, which she did not. They were too far away for us to see much. We saw the swing of Mrs. Cullen's arm as she tossed the piece of the pigeon over the hedge, toward the foot of the post; and after a breathless instant, we saw Lucy's descent upon it, down in one smooth rush, like a large, dusky, finished flower off its stem. Instantly the birdcatcher bent over, lurked along the hedge, and squattingly slipped around behind it. Then we had to wait, wait—until she briskly stood up and started back toward us with Lucy hooded on her wrist, where she belonged. Before hooding her, I suppose, she let her have a few good beakfuls of the unscheduled pigeon so that even this mishap or misdemeanor should be a lesson to her, as it was to us all in a sense.

Inside the house, before the great window, we were smiling from ear to ear, and murmuring or exclaiming each in his or her way. Only Cullen was deathly still, not even puffing. I moved far enough away from him to see his face, and found there, added to the bibulous pink, a pale light of wild relief, reprieve, even rapture, as if that horrid bird on his wife's arm returning to haunt him again had been his heart's desire. It was too much of a good thing; he was sober perhaps, but tormentedly sentimental; I should not have trusted him an instant.

Mrs. Cullen came down the left side of the pond, the long way. The sun, muffled all afternoon, was setting brightly. Some of its beams turned back up from the water, broken into a sparkle, through which we could not see her well. There were vague irises and something else up to her ankles; and branches of lilac occasionally hung between us and her. Her face looked to me calm, careless. Her hair still absurdly fell down one cheek; now and then she blew it out of her eyes. Dress disarranged and petticoat showing and stocking-feet and all, she walked back proudly, taking her time; a springy walk that reminded me of Isadora Duncan.

The five of us happy onlookers trooped out on the lawn to meet her. “Isn't it wonderful?” she rejoiced. “You see, she's perfectly manned. She understands. Otherwise I could never have caught her. I'll be hunting with her in no time. Larry, go and find the other leash; which I left on the bench.” And she decidedly emphasized the I. She too wished him not to admit what he had done.

He went meekly for the leash. The servants returned to the kitchen. Mrs. Cullen asked permission to retire and put herself to rights, declining Alex's offer of company and assistance. “No more weathering for you, my haggard Lucy,” I heard her mutter as she left us.

I had not dared hope that Lucy—haggard that she was, with only two months of the least comfortable phase of captivity to look back upon, and none of the pleasure of the chase so far, and one toe still sore from the trap—would allow herself to be caught. That had made the little spectacle of her capture or surrender the more exciting for me. On the other hand I had not wanted her to escape. I had not pictured her setting out lonelily over Normandy toward Scotland, or whatever resort in the summer she might instinctively choose. Given my sentimental imagination, it was an odd lapse. And it made me aware of my really not wanting Larry Cullen to escape from Mrs. Cullen either, or vice versa. Perhaps I do not believe in liberty, or I regard it as only episodic in life; a circumstance that one must be able to bear and profit by when it occurs; a kind of necessary evil. When love itself is at stake, love of liberty as a rule is only fear of captivity.

Alex thought a drink would help at this juncture, and started to the balcony; but with one glance in Cullen's direction and another in mine, she returned and sat down. Cullen slumped in his armchair, gazing at apparently nothing, in that calm which is only the entire expenditure of energy; the coming down of a dull curtain upon the drama in head or heart. But probably it was only entr'acte. There was something turgid if not turbulent throughout his aging bulky frame; his jaws stirred a bit in his double chin; his bloodshot eyes kept lighting up.

Then we heard a persistent ringing of the bell in Alex's room, and Alex went anxiously to see what it meant, and came back and informed us that Mrs. Cullen had decided to return to town at once, before dinner. She had a brother in Paris, and she had telephoned him; something had gone wrong in Paris, and he needed her. I did not believe a word of this, and Alex's expression confirmed my disbelief. Evidently it did not surprise Cullen. He sighed hard, which perhaps referred to
pigeons aux groseilles
; but he said nothing even about that.

Alex left it to me to inform Jean and Eva of the superfluity of their dinner. I could scarcely tell how Eva took it, not well in any case: she gaped at me and fled to her bedroom. Jean on the other hand chose to be superior and calm. Something always went wrong, he observed, when the English upper classes came to see poor Mademoiselle, in their automobiles as big as buses driven by idiotic little boys. In his opinion also the boy Ricketts had something to do with the escape of Madame Cullen's eagle. At that moment the idiot was paying a visit to the
bistrot
or bar at the corner. I let Jean go after him. The announcement of the Cullens' change of plan might somewhat relieve his evident personal desire to put him out of the house.

Meanwhile with a certain simplicity our unhappy guests gathered up their belongings here and there: severed leash and mislaid lipstick and cigarette case with a diamond button. As we waited in the hallway for the Daimler to be brought around Mrs. Cullen quietly asked, “Dear Alex, you don't need a new chauffeur, do you?”

As it happened Alex did need one. “What luck! I wish you'd take Ricketts,” Mrs. Cullen quietly continued. “I'll be giving him notice when we get to Budapest. And I know he hates Ireland, and he speaks quite decent French. He's very good, very fast, and a mechanic and all that.” And she recommended him in other particulars as well, including semi-genteel birth.

Cullen beside me was shuffling and loudly hemming, and at last could not hold his peace. “But Madeleine, really, my dear woman, you're fantastic. We've never had anybody as good as Ricketts. What in the world!”

Slightly embarrassed, Alex said that indeed they might have difficulty in finding a chauffeur in Hungary in summer; it should not be decided in haste on her account. Perhaps she sensed what was coming; I did.

“Oh, I shall easily find another,” Mrs. Cullen said, “or I can do without. You see, Ricketts doesn't like Lucy. He laughs at me up his sleeve. I doubtless am an old fool, but I cannot have people around me who think so.” She said this in a great sad false way; and it was unmistakably intended for her husband.

Again I could not see his banal but significant face when I wished, to read the emotion in it; we stood shoulder to shoulder facing our dear women. There was still some of that fine pre-bolshevik distillation on his somewhat accelerated and audible breath; but its troublesome effects must have passed. We all kept silent for a moment.

Mrs. Cullen was quite willing to look either of us in the eye; but her sparkle was all extinguished. It would have seemed healthier, more rational, if her eyes had looked angry; they looked nothing at all, nullified. Lucy was hooded now; under her mistress's chin the frivolous topknot on the stitched leather nodded very slightly; and Mrs. Cullen's crooked Irish face as a whole was not much more expressive than that. Her serenity, her stoical wit, her obscurity, were a sort of mental or moral craftsmanship; ornamentation. Inside all that, I suspected, her spirit was as blind as Lucy's. The point of not allowing a hawk to see is to keep it from being frightened; and I hoped that Mrs. Cullen's grand, mean manner served that purpose as well. I was afraid it did not.

Along the cobblestones under the plane trees I heard the Daimler come purring, not a moment too soon. By that time I also felt—as it seemed, aching in my bones and running in my veins and tempering my nerves—something like the mixture of hot and cold, good and bad, which troubled the difficult hearts of this odd couple.

Unrequited passion; romance put asunder by circumstances or mistakes; sexuality pretending to be love—all that is a matter of little consequence, a mere voluntary temporary uneasiness, compared with the long course of true love, especially marriage. In marriage, insult arises again and again and again; and pain has to be not only endured, but consented to; and the amount of forgiveness that it necessitates is incredible and exhausting. When love has given satisfaction, then you discover how large a part of the rest of life is only payment for it, installment after installment... That was the one definite lesson which these petty scenes of the Cullens illustrated. Early in life I had learned it for myself well enough. It was on Alex's account that I minded. To see the cost of love before one has felt what it is worth is a pity; one may never have the courage to begin.

There stood the Daimler; and Cullen and I helped Mrs. Cullen and Lucy up into it, while Ricketts, cap in hand, held the door. I observed that in fact Ricketts was laughing, in a silent subaltern way; but surely it was not at his mistress or her bird. Thin lips very red, rough eyelashes very shadowy: the effect of a Moorish-Italian kiss behind the kitchen door, I fancied. Or perhaps—for Cockneys are a malicious breed—the mere discomfiture of Jean amused him. He glanced over my shoulder, then up at a likely window, and so did I; but I did not discover the Mediterranean couple peeping out anywhere.