The Pilgrim Hawk (5 page)

Presently we came to a crossroads; and there we did see the short silhouette of old Bidou headed in our direction: his peculiar march or trudge, and the shrugging of his shoulders inside a great cape. All his life he had gone booted like a common soldier and blackly wrapped up, which had been a boon to caricaturists and a kind of electoral trade mark; which now made it easy to avoid him. Mrs. Cullen asked if they might go on ahead and have a look at the famous old fellow.

Alex and I turned back alone toward her house, by a short cut through a dense plantation of young trees, with vernal branches of old trees rounded overhead. It was like walking inside a great recumbent telescope, pointed at the château half a kilometer away. In the nineteenth century, under the personal supervision of Viollet-le-Duc and his friend the author of
Carmen
, Chancellet had been entirely and fussily restored. In the round bit of sunshine afar off, the lens of our telescope, it looked too good to be true, amid the patchy flower beds and the moat, where a few ducks were splashing and lovemaking.

I was in as foolish a good humor as Cullen; everything seemed mysterious and sentimental. The rounded frame of branches in which we strolled, looking ahead into pinkish sunlight; the tidy little architecture enframed, with its associations literary as well as historical; the dying, absent-minded, erotic statesman exercising daily in an immutable circle around it; our odd guests walking to meet him, woman with hawk and greedy man, whose eyes turned golden when he looked at her, whose spit ran at the mere mention of his dinner—all were gathered around me, I vainly fancied, to make one great vague thing very simple and clear to me. What more could I ask? But it is always foolish to expect simplicity. All one can do is to substitute little facts for great speculations, little performances for immense desire, and call this, simplification.

The return by ourselves gave me a chance to question Alex about the Cullens. They had come to Tangier two or three years before for the pig-sticking. Madeleine rode ideally, but the rule of the club forebade women to carry a spear. Cullen had shown a definite lack of enthusiasm and indeed a lack of talent; however, he had gone out every day and not done badly. When one of the vile brave beasts appeared in the distance—flickering along the shrub, suddenly fleeing out across open ground like the shadow of a flying bird—the Irishwoman would gallop out with the very first riders; her husband following hard, looking as if he might fall any minute but not falling. At the last minute, when the spears began to point down along the shoulders of the horses, she would rein up short or turn aside. Suddenly she would not be there any longer, and Cullen still would be. Her ambition for him and his poor horsemanship—so it appeared to the others—betrayed him into prowess. Alex heard a club member say that once or twice at the kill his audacity and ferocity had been rather too much of a good thing; shocking. One morning his horse stepped into a hole and threw him right down beside the boar, a big wicked one already wounded; and he behaved with great sense and courage, and kept his horse away from its tushes, although he was not quite sober. His not being quite sober was the trouble in general.

One afternoon Mrs. Cullen had said as much to Alex. “Poor Larry, when we're in Ireland or in London with nothing to do, is inclined to overeat, and furthermore to drink far too much.” Alex must have been impressed by this confession, for she quoted some of it word for word. “Most things are a beastly bore for him, you know; that's his real weakness. But you can't say anything to a grown man about drinking, after all, can you? It's such a horrid little unimportant thing. They're proud, and they resent having to think of it. I had an aunt who talked about it, and it made my uncle worse.” As discreetly as she could therefore, she told Alex, she tried to keep him distracted; busy doing things, in good company which inspired him to do well; abroad, and outdoors as much as possible. He often complained that it was no way to live; but it had kept him fit and good-natured.

She was younger than he, Alex pointed out; and she had money of her own; and she was a clever, unconventional, and rather self-indulgent woman. Yet she devoted herself entirely to him, every instant, year in and year out. He on the other hand was not perfectly faithful, in spite of his devotion to her. When they were in Tangier a pretty young American named Baroness Levene came across from Malaga, and flirted with Cullen; and he obviously responded to it. One of the Tangier residents asked them all to dine, and while the men stayed in the dining room, Madeleine had been very rude to the little interloper. A day or two later she spoke of it apologetically. It was disgraceful of her, she assured Alex, to mind her husband's virile frivolity. She never doubted for an instant that he loved her, and no other woman. His response to the others was all make-believe or in fun. She alluded again to his deadly tedium; his need of some novelty to pass the time somehow, every day of his life, every hour; and his other weaknesses in direct consequence. A little philandering, like eating and drinking, gave him something to think about.

Whereas marriage was infinitely simple for her, she said; she never needed the attention of other men. She supposed this to be so settled and so apparent in her character that it bored men and they let her alone. Alex had observed a number of acceptable men not letting her alone in the least; rather smitten. Yet there seemed to be no affectation or insincerity in Mrs. Cullen's account of herself. Women who have been spoiled by the many, tormented by one, often have an air of innocence.

Alex had seen a great deal of them the following winter in London; and there they were engaged in a very odd sport indeed: underground activity of Irish rebellion. Cullen was perfectly and anciently Irish, and one of his brothers had been a friend of Casement's. Whereas Madeleine was not a Catholic; and she had Ulster blood and English blood; and as a child she had lived in Canada. Yet she was the rebel, or she ardently played the part of one; Larry followed. Alex heard him speak very angrily of the British, disgustedly of de Valera. But he loved joining in others' opinion, no matter what, and embellishing his repetition of it, as best he could—how could one tell what he thought? Perhaps it was hard for him to tell himself.

All that winter they were at home informally almost every evening to the oddest patriots. At first glance it looked like a literary salon. The ringleader was the poet McVoy: a young man of great conversation, with a half-rapacious, half-religious face. Alex also met a man who had done a little bombing, another with a bit of his cheek shot away, and certain bereaved and cruel women, and a bizarre priest. Their political opinion was all tinged with piety, even puritanism. They would have been ashamed to eat or drink or be merry in any way, with so much to be done for Eire. Cullen yielded to the general austerity. Furthermore, he told Alex, they could not afford to live well that winter, because of their contributions to the cause. Alex had never seen him in better form, lean and youthful and, if not exactly cheerful, amiable. Rebellion evidently served as an excellent exercise and diet. There was also amorous anxiety: he thought McVoy in love with Madeleine. Alex indeed thought so too. But all Madeleine appeared to want of the poet was to keep on his political high horse, in his fascinating conspiratorial vein, for Larry's amusement. Rioting and sabotage and perhaps even assassination—as it were sticking of the Ulster pig, mort of the English stag—with poor Larry in the thick of it, because it would be good for him... Suddenly all that ceased, Alex never heard why. They sublet their house and spent the summer in Vienna and Budapest. That was the summer Mrs. Cullen bought her first hawk, the tiercel that died of the croaks.

This little information Alex gave me as we sauntered slowly through the ex-minister's park. Now we were back near our gate, under the great beeches. Alex had been a little anxious lest the Cullens get lost. But there in the broken light, pallid shade, there they came at a brisk pace, engaged in a vivacious discussion of some sort, which they ceased as soon as they saw us. “He's a dear, your old politician,” Mrs. Cullen said. “He spoke to us, and then what do you suppose he did? He did bird imitations for Lucy; I mean to say, he whistled at her.”

Evidently Cullen preferred French politicians to Irish. “A good old boy! He did a nightingale and a lark and some bird I didn't know. He told us what it was, but it was French. Quite good.”

“And Larry, wasn't he cheerful and civil? Perhaps he thought that if he kept whistling long enough, Lucy would answer. Wasn't it funny?”

I thought it touching as well as funny: that old man had been whistling to his compatriots like that for half a century, and as a rule a majority had answered; but, alas, nothing much had come of it, for France.

Now Mrs. Cullen was ready to feed Lucy. But her chauffeur and Jean, who had gone to the neighbor's dovecot, had not returned. Foolish Eva felt sure they were in a ditch somewhere, or quarreling, or lost. So we sat down again; and I like a fool inquired what they thought of French and English and German politics. Cullen was out of breath but he sniffed wonderfully and cleared his throat, preliminary to an opinion. “Please, Larry, no politics,” his wife requested, smiling at me to make it less impolite.

She was fondling Lucy, gazing at her eye to eye, slowly shaking her head at her; and the wicked beak moved in exact obedience to the tip of her nose as if it were magnetized. “Lucy's hungry,” she said solemnly.

“Feel her breast.” She took my hand and held it against the tasseled plumage; and indeed there was a humming and stiffening in it, like a little voltage of electricity. Her eyes were moist and explosive; and the instant her mistress's eyes released them, down they went to the gauntlet, as if expecting a feathery form in agony to materialize out of the leather.

“Feel her feet,” Mrs. Cullen added; and I did, while she explained that birds always have a higher temperature than animals. Fever heat; and yet they were slick and dry like a serpent. I could feel what they wanted to do, what they wanted to have, swelling in them and ticking the dull minutes meanwhile with little throbs. My pleasure in touching them was half embarrassment; and it set my mind running back to the thought I had left off an hour ago; that this hawk's hunger was like amorous appetite. I call it thought—and it is thought now, as I remember and try to tell it—but at the time it was only a vague flashing daydream. It all came together like one large composite phrase: old bachelor hungry bird, aging-hungry-man-bird, and how I hate desire, how I need pleasure, how I adore love, how difficult middle age must be!

Then, I lamented to myself, if your judgment is poor you fall in love with those who could not possibly love you. If romance of the past has done you any harm, you will not be able to hold on to love when you do attain it; your grasp of it will be out of alignment. Or pity or self-pity may have blunted your hand so that it makes no mark. Back you fly to your perch, ashamed as well as frustrated. Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable. So there you sit, and you try to sit still, and doze and dream to save trouble. It is the kind of thing you have to keep quiet about for others' sake, politeness's sake: itching palm and ugly tongue and unsighted eye and empty flatulent physiology as a whole; and your cry of desire, ache, ache, ringing in your own ears. No one else hears it; and you get so tired of it yourself that you can't wait to grow old...

Thus in an instant I foolishly imagined myself growing old; and meanwhile Mrs. Cullen had not ceased speaking with that single-minded vivacity of hers, but a little somber. “Since we caught Lucy,” she said, “she's never had a mouthful to eat except out of my hand, and I've always worn the same glove. Think what it must mean to her!”

It was an impressive unpleasant object, that glove, stiffened and discolored by a hundred little sanguinary banquets. It resembled things you see in cases in anthropological museums; fetishes of awful religion, sacrificial utensils, witch-doctors' kits. And the feet with crescent toenails trod it so passionately that you wondered how the wrist inside endured it.

“You know, she's not really attached to me personally,” Mrs. Cullen said. “If I gave you the glove she'd be yours instead of mine. It's as simple as that, I think. It's what's called behaviorism, isn't it? Would you like to try it? Try taking her a moment.”

She turned around and held Lucy some five or six inches below the chair-back, and after a moment's hesitation Lucy hopped up there. Mrs. Cullen's hand was large and mine is not; so that I was able to squeeze into the gauntlet. It surprised me to see that she wore another large diamond on that hand, which under the pressure of the leather had bruised her finger a little... Then I held my wrist five or six inches above the chair-back; and Lucy, with her belief in food-stained leather added to her belief in the highest possible perch, hopped again.

“That's what they call an inferiority complex, don't they?” Cullen proudly demanded, not to be outdone by his wife's use of that other catchword. “Madeleine can't understand one thing about psychology.”

“Very well, Larry. I tell you she's hungry,” his wife answered. And by the tone of her voice you would have thought her the hungry one.

I drew a deep breath, in which I got the hawk odor, slightly bloody, slightly peppery. I had noticed it before, but without distinguishing it from Mrs. Cullen's French scent. The body, well balanced on its hot feet, weighed less than I had supposed. At the least move her talons pricked the leather and pulled it a bit—as fashionable women's fingernails do on certain fabrics—though evidently she held them as loose and harmless as she could. Only her grip as a whole was hard, like a pair of tight, heated iron bracelets.

Alex offered her congratulations upon Lucy's evident peace of mind with me; I would make a good falconer. That reminded me of my father and his magic with animals which filled me with envy and antipathy when I was a boy. He could force a crazy colt to its knees, or castrate a young boar, or chloroform a desperate trapped owl; and their wretched muscles relaxed and surrendered, their eyes blinked in perfect gentleness in alignment with his eyes. His eyes, or perhaps it was his hands, seemed able to promise them something. Half my life, I said to myself, has been discovering that my character is not the antithesis or the contradiction of his; here was a new kinship. Perhaps I could cope with horse or hog or doomed bird too, if I had to; perhaps even with a wild antipathetic son, disinclined to live—who knows? This was a gratifying thought but not altogether happy: vast vague potentiality of things I did not wish to do in any case.