The Goshawk

  But the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice. Soft you. You were to be quiet, to be patient, to be safe. He was not a blackamoor really, but a rock, a safety, an invariable refuge for winged creatures. They must trust him. Even as Macbeth, even meditating those bloody instructions which, being taught, returned to plague their inventor, the voice was kind and protective. The foulest slaughter provoked the tone only to a world-sadness. Besides, this Duncan — the voice modulated endlessly on, and the hand held out a dead rabbit.

  Or it was a tuneless song by candlelight at four in the morning, a voice wandering from tone to tone in the cold barn, while the mind wondered whether the hawk had possibly shown a preference for Gilbert and Sullivan or for Italian opera. On the whole he seemed to like Shakespeare best.

  Another picture had been of the man generally not attracted by raw meat, who must stand by the criss-crossed lattice of the window and unflinchingly draw out the entrails of a duck that had just been rather badly shot from behind, with a bare and stinking hand, while the hawk threw pieces of offal and feathers with a head-shake into his face, at which he must not startle the hawk by flinching.

  The last picture would show him meeting the postman, a garrulous and charming man with many memories of the late duke. They conversed together for several minutes. The reminiscences about the duke poured on — how he used to take his coat off to help in the saw pit (the headmaster, he noted, who presided over the school which once was the ducal mansion did not do this) or where he had his brickworks. The postman smiled and laughed: so did the austringer, waiting to get away with his letters. But all the time he was startling the postman considerably by mewing at him between his teeth, a reflex action which by now went with patience unconsciously.

  ‘Postscript to tomorrow’s plan,’ I wrote industriously in the day-book, as soon as I had loosed the hawk in the mews, ‘if Gos does not come to me at first I must try staying with him until he does. The idea of staying fifteen minutes in every hour has not worked very well. So I had better finish my breakfast early, take pen, paper and books with me, and devote the day. I can sit on the oven.’

  And naturally enough none of it happened. From the first it was unrelieved failure. The deadly bird spent the whole Wednesday in the rafters, refusing to come down. I managed to fight off the fear of his imminent starvation during that day and most of Thursday, attempting every form of blandishment to persuade him into a voluntary approach. I stood for an hour on end, holding out two pigeon’s wings with a piece of washed meat between them. I tried silence instead of exhortation, remaining motionless for twenty minutes with eyes half closed. Gos only ruffled up his feathers in perfect peace, stood on one leg and went to sleep. For thirty-six hours now the accursed overlord had eaten nothing, but he would merely sit there ironically and go to sleep. It was too much. On the Thursday morning I suddenly gave him a malevolent glance and left the mews, trembling with indignation. I could have thrown the meat-bag at him.

  By the afternoon I had got a step ladder and chased him from rafter to rafter until a dangling jess was close enough to snatch. I had tied him sulkily to the perch. What I had set out to do had been to starve him into submission, but what I had actually done was to submit for fear of doing so.

  Gos now seemed as wild as when he had first been taken out of his basket, and at last I thought that there was nothing to be done except to watch him again for three nights. It was not necessary, but it gave the feeling that something was being done — a needed feeling, when one saw a hawk quite wild again after two weeks’ work.

  So the second watch began and ended. It was the same as the first. Its details sang in the ear, details of further and further familiarization with an eyas paralysed by fury and overfeeding. I tried to sleep on a camp bed in the mews for an hour every now and then, but it was too painful after a short time: sleeping with one arm held out sideways, supported by a tea case, and the hawk sitting on it. It was a dog’s sleep, fitful and shot with starts. The single watcher tended to become bad tempered and to have difficulty in remembering that the almost constant bates were due to fear and not to obstinacy. The hideous, bilious and pot-valiant princeling was upside down as often as he was the right way up, and for the attendant, who must not coerce him by force, patience became almost a physical effort, like running. Patience, hard thing. And sleep: the thought of it was constantly in the mind, with exquisite words of poetry that spoke about it. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, much comfort....

  With breath foul and bulging eye, the panting hawk suffered the first night and much of the next day: the second night was spent in dancing foxtrots to a wireless which stood beside a barrel of beer. It was not that one drank enough to become incapable or stupid, but alcohol now seemed the only way of continuing to live. It was in the second night that one got a kind of second-wind in sleep, an ability to perk up and enjoy oneself, to feel suddenly that it was good and amusing to put a wrist-watch on the right hand with the right hand (the austringer is forced to be uni-dexterous) and to be able to say: well, whatever happens, it has been worth while to be alive.

  But at 3 a.m. on the third night I lay down on the camp bed, the hawk having capitulated once more, with Gos on my fist. At four o’clock I rose up purposefully. With eyes fixed in the head, eyes that saw the proximate object only automatically but were strained in spirit on the imaginary goal, the watchman perfunctorily set the hawk upon its perch. He looked not at the bird nor tea chest, but with set, semi-conscious face, a berserk, moved stumblingly to bed. The door was closed, the key turned, by separate and unrecognized fingers. Not Tarquin, not Claudius, more irresistibly pursued their intents. A Frankenstein monster, moving subconsciously, he undressed as he went. Opposition would have been fruitless, bayonets would have been brushed aside, regiments with presented weapons would have opened into a path before those red pupils with their dervish irises which could penetrate man or stone. The boots at the foot of the stairs, the coat at the top of them, the breeches on the floor — in my shirt I tumbled into the double feather bed which had been reserved for guests, but which was now wantonly raped, blue sheets, blue blankets, blue eiderdown, golden bedspread: and there slept unshaken by messenger or trump, until eleven o’clock next morning.

  [1]A falcon could be got into the desirable state of hungry amenability, and keenness to kill, by giving her a feed or two of beef steak which had been soaked for 24 hours and wrung out. This kept her delicate stomach working, but, the goodness being gone, she remained hungry. It was called washed meat.

  CHAPTER III

  SITTING on the floor at ten-twenty in the evening, with a glass of neat whisky and the new wireless set, alone (it was the ultimate bliss to be alone at last) I found a man singing mournfully to some thin stringed instrument. On either side of him the thunderous Sunday orchestras of Europe rolled out their massive melodies: but he, eastern and unbelievable ancient, went on with his unillusioned chant. Where was he, this muezzin, this older civilization? I should not know, nor find him again.

  But it was the music of a grown-up race: grown-up, middle-aged, even actually old. Our adolescent exuberance, our credent classical music and full-believing orchestras were pretentious beside his thin recitative. He knew, where we believed. One thought of the march of civilization: the power swinging triumphantly westward with the sun: the new masters springing up in their unnecessary and pubic vigour: Rome and the British Empire. In each case they had fallen back into old age, their horrid vitality evaporated: into being grown-up and no longer needing to assert themselves: into wisdom: into that sad but accepting chant.

  How good! To belong to an older civilization: not a dominant one, but one which had reached knowledge. We should reach our own peace eventually. Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin and all the rest of them: they would bring us to the preliminary ruin perhaps in our own lifetime. And then, we should be able to crawl out to knowledge. Out of the waste and murder, out of the ruin, with power eventually gone on westwards, we should emerge to sing u
ncredulously accompanied by one balalika or zither.

  His was a lullaby which knew the fate of man.

  To divest oneself of unnecessary possessions, and mainly of other people: that was the business of life.

  One had to find out what things were not necessary, what things one really needed. A little music and liquor, still less food, a warm and beautiful but not too big roof of one’s own, a channel for one’s creative energies and love, the sun and the moon. These were enough, and contact with Gos in his ultimately undefiled separation was better than the endless mean conflict between male and female or the lust for power in adolescent battle which led men into business and Rolls-Royce motor cars and war.

  I did not disapprove of war, but feared it much. What did it matter however? It might kill us a score of years before we should in other circumstances die. It was pointless, cruel, wasteful, and to the lonely individual terrible: but it did not matter in the least whether he survived or not. I should be killed, likely, and my civilization perhaps wiped out.

  But man would not be wiped out. What did it matter then? That one dictator for his own megalomania should destroy a culture: it was a drop only beside the sum of cultures and perhaps a good thing. In the world which I had run away from I had found so much wickedness in our present development that one could have no definite feelings about its termination: and, as for myself, I was wind in any case.

  In the end one did not need European civilization, did not need power, did not need most of one’s fellow men, who were saturated with both these: finally would not need oneself.

  It did not matter, so long as man survived. If after the battle this race could be left mature, nothing would have been lost. Let the Empire and the glory pass away with a Wagnerian crash, so long as the voice and the zither still mentioned their patient melody on the unburdened air. A few peaks of human achievement would survive: peaks of patience and conquest by culture: peaks of maturity in education. Since China, since Assyria, but not since Hitler or Stalin, man had reconciled the eagle.

  Monday

  We were back again in the stage of manning the hawk to the outside world, a stage which entailed carrying him on the fist all day. It was possible sometimes to relieve the tedium of these day-long vigils by taking him fishing at Black Pits, where, in the effort to deceive the subtlety of those large, sly carp which had probably been introduced there by the monks of Luffield Abbey, it was possible to roll two patiences into one. By tying a string to the first joint of the fishing rod (a string whose other end could be held between the teeth), it was possible to fish one-handed, while the hawk sat on the other, and we did at one time or another kill two fish of about a pound each.

  But the amusing thing was that on this Monday, on a spontaneous motion, Gos accepted his first bath. There was a little puddly backwater off the main stew, and in it a heavy board with a nail driven through. I paddled out and tied the leash to the nail, then introduced Gos to the board. He did not want to stand on it at first, for it was low and strange, but soon — ancestrally — he almost twigged. You could see the racial unconscious voice speaking to his bird brain in parables. With an arrogant and dainty motion he stepped on to the board.

  I stood back from him two or three yards, with hands on hips, to await developments. When a position was so painful that it had to be changed for another, I moved like the shadow on a sundial. The entertainment was worth it.

  Gos cocked his head on one side and stared at the water. Odd, he was saying to himself, probably dangerous, but yet I like it. What is it? He put in his beak, leaning forward with every precaution, to see what it tasted of. (Hawks were one of the few creatures which did not regularly drink water except as a laxative: none needed to be provided for them in the mews.) It did not taste of anything, so he put in his beak again. Curious. He looked over his shoulder at the bigger bit of the stuff behind him, roused his feathers with a rattle, inspected the reeds, the landing stage, me motionless. He thought of flying to the landing stage, less than a yard away, and then gave up the idea. He walked down the slope of the plank into the water. All the time I did not know whether he would accept a bath or not.

  Gos stopped in about an eighth of an inch of water and looked at his refracted toes. He bit one of them to see if it was there. When he noticed that it was there he diverted his attention and bit some of the water. He then bit his jesses and the plank, at points where both of them were wet. It was exceedingly strange.

  Gos slipped on the wet plank, with an undignified lurch, went into quite half an inch of water, and hurried back to recover his composure. He bit his toe again. It was rather nice.

  With the utmost caution he walked down the plank again and considered the possibility of stepping off into two inches. It was evidently a rash step; so he merely made a pass at it with one leg, withdrawing the talon pensively half-way through.

  Gos generally looked terrible, terrible in the sense that an eagle or a vulture had that look. In the strong sunlight which shone on the lake — at last the weather was pretending to turn for haymaking — he certainly looked beautiful. But the cruelty had gone out of his aspect. He was only a funny and silly little Gos, whose transparent mind showed him to be an infant still, as it struggled with the elements of hydrostatics.

  The sun shone on him, giving him a blue nimbus round his head. The cere flesh about his nostrils was supposedly yellow, as were the irises of his eyes. But that luminous eye (his main feature; it glared out, a focus to all the rest of him, from under frowning brows, the optic of an insane assassin) was genuinely luminous, like the paint on the hands of a wrist watch. Luminous paint, phosphorus: it was blue really, just as much as it was yellow. So the sunlight on Gos took a blue tinge from the hairy whiskers which he wore about his cere and eyelid, carried it on to the eye itself, haloed the whole head in a tint exquisitely elusive, of bird flesh — neither blue nor yellow.

  Gos concentrated his attention backward, without looking round, and dipped the tip of his tail in the extraordinary medium. It was fun. He stood and considered the matter, rousing his feathers again. When he roused he looked exactly like a fir-cone. In other manifestations he sometimes would hunch himself up like a penguin, when he was hungry, or go soft like an owl, when he was sleepy.

  Now, taking me so much by surprise that I could scarcely keep from laughing, the absurd princeling blew out all his feathers, lifted his tail in the air, and, like an old lady sitting down in a tram or lifting her bustle to get at a purse among the petticoats, sat down suddenly, shiftily, luxuriously, in the puddle. I had never seen a bird sit down before, for the gesture was quite unlike the laying hen’s. With ludicrous rapture Gos squatted in the puddle, got up, and, putting his head between his legs, looked at himself from underneath. It was the concentration of attention backward, the strange mixture of pride and affection and anxiety for these parts, the ungainly and somewhat private motion with which he immersed the proud posterior: it was these, and the indignity. The infant Tarquin had suddenly become a charlady at Margate.

  Tuesday

  It seemed that we were beginning to turn the corner at last. The principle of regulating the hawk’s conduct through his belly was becoming clearer every night. I had a plan now by which I kept him in the mews every other day, going to him every forty-five minutes with little pieces of food, but insisting that he must properly jump to the fist in order to get them. I, for my part, would stand before him with the tit-bit, teasing him by voice and gesture, holding the meat just out of reach, giving him an occasional stroke or prod with it, but always drawing back to insist on a real jump. He, for his part, would try every shift to get the morsel without doing his full duty: he would lean forward to the stretch of his balance for a sudden peck, would walk up and down his perch in a torment of indecision, would suddenly strike out a terrible grab with one of his fierce talons, making me fear for my fingers. ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ introduced each visit. Purposely I was beginning to feed him less (although, as the treatment began to be effect
ive, his increasing amenability made one yearn to reward him by feeding him more), in order that he should be hungry enough to jump quickly at the next visit.

  I was happy and would sit to read by the fire in the evenings with a contented heart. I found in Barnard’s Mediaeval England that the Bishop of Ely once excommunicated a thief who stole a hawk from the cloisters of Bermondsey. Some crimes, one reflected, were worthy of excommunication.

  Wednesday

  On every second day the time-table of visits was varied by carrying the hawk for walks which lasted about six hours, walks which had lost much of their pleasure because the summer had again relapsed into its sullen mood of rain. On this Wednesday, which was windy as well as wet, I shot a high spectacular pigeon, sweeping over in a gust of sousing air. I brought it straight back to Gos, after the rain had wetted me to the skin, and spent the next half hour standing with the hawk in a draughty loose-box trying to make him jump for the leg.

  This brought home a new lesson about falconry. The single austringer cannot afford to be ill. Walking home from Tom’s in the afternoon there suddenly came what seemed to be a premonition of influenza, the hot, shaking touch of pain and chill. Now what was to be done! With a mind delighted by its interests, a heart soaring to fight such airy problems of bird bones — suddenly the body rose in treachery, raised rebel standards, stabbed one in the back. I made myself hot chocolate, put cherry brandy in it, built a fire in the study and read about Medieval History rather depressedly till bed. If I did get too ill to attend to Gos, I should have to ask the nearest neighbour to feed him twice a day — by putting a brick inside the gauntlet, and tying four strips of beef securely to it, and putting it down beside the bow perch.