The Goshawk

  Thursday

  I got up at six and stood in the middle of the room, wondering whether it was illness. After some minutes, I decided that probably, on the whole, it was not: a decision which was confirmed by experience during the rest of the day.

  It was a day typical of this successful week. For fifteen minutes in every hour the man stood before his bird master, holding a pigeon’s wing well out of reach, coaxing, whistling, mewing as usual. I teased him by rattling the feathers on the edge of his perch, finally by tickling his beak with them, but always evading the snatch of his clutch. It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon of an otherwise banting day that the monster flew up to my shoulder. I ducked in fear of assassination, and, having recovered courage, got him gently back to glove. He flew thus, an appreciable distance, three times during the rest of the day, went for an hour’s walk in the evening, and parted from me at night in an affectionate mood.

  My setter bitch, though she scanned my face very closely, could never determine mood from expression. She waited for the tone of voice and, though I tested her with ferocious scowls and beaming smiles, drew no conclusions about the state of mind except by ear, or by recollection of painful or pleasant scenes in similar past circumstances. It was not so with Gos. Not only did he detect my feelings in my face, but by now I was able to detect at least two feelings in his. I could tell by his expression, without the aid of sound or movement, whether he was in a good temper or not. His whole countenance would alter like a human being’s. At one time he would be a maniac, his eyes sunken and glaring, his brows frowning, his mouth open, his expression that of a crazy archduke in Bavaria. At the next, beak closed, brows raised, eyes normal, he was nothing more formidable than an infant Gos, ridiculous, inquisitive, confiding, almost a despicable pet.

  Friday

  In the afternoon Gos went for a walk across the fields to my old friend Chapel Green. A chapel had been built here in the reign of Henry III, and dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr. When Browne Willis visited Luffield Abbey it was still standing, but had been converted into a dwelling house by splitting it into two semi-detached cottages. The cottages still stood, going rapidly into ruin: and a small farmstead of later date, built just across the way, was following their example. Both were equally decayed. The occasional tramps who had slept in one or the other had left a few comforts — a rotten sack stuffed with straw, or a bit of a box pulled conveniently into a corner. The boys had written obscene remarks in the farmstead — but they had left the ancient chapel undefiled. It stood in the fields, a mile from anywhere.

  The place was soundly cursed against man: so it throve with its old virility. Its ash trees were enormous, and its nettles. The setter chased a rabbit out of them, which ran blindly right up to my feet before it turned about and ran the other way. It was a startling piece of life in this unliving place, and it expected to see me no more than I to see it. We took each other for departed spirits, and perhaps the rabbit was one. The parson, I dare say.

  The older cottages had been the chapel. In each gable wall the Early English windows and doors remained, filled in with rubble and plaster. It now greeted the visitor fifty yards downwind with a churchyard smell. I looked about me, hardly believing my senses, for it was the veritable smell of death. The ground round the chapel stood higher than the hay-field beside; as all old churchyards did, heaped up with the common and coffinless clay of centuries that had returned to their own dust. I wondered whether there had been a graveyard at the chapel in the old days, and whether, if so, the old bones would be grateful to see a goshawk again. Many must have carried hawks round here (‘a sparrow-hawk for a priest’, said the Boke of St. Albans, ‘the musket for a holy-water clerk’), but not for hundreds of years now. The indistinguishable earth felt ready to turn over in its repose, to mutter as farm-labourer’s bones muttered when agricultural machinery went by above the tomb, or as huntsman strove to articulate when hounds met beside his grave. The eyes in the earth would have been different to the eyes which confronted one along the roads today; would have looked at the real points, not the imaginary ones; would have been critical and appreciative, immediately noticing the hunger trace and the missing feathers of the tail. The old words still used would have been a link between them and me.

  Our forefathers had been small men. Their gloves, their armour, and other few bits, we could no longer put on. The doorway in the chapel gable would have made me stoop.

  I thought of the small race now underground, strangers of a vanished species safe from comprehension, almost from imagination: monks, nuns, and the eternal villein. I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer ‘with grey goshawk in hond’. They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other.

  Meanwhile the smell really was of the grave. A charnel house, some very insanitary and sluttish family of rustic hedgehogs? Gos bated at the smell.

  I ran it to earth in a small, square drain, well-head or cellarette (I did not stop to inquire), on the north side of the chapel. It was a dead sheep which somebody had concealed there, rather than take the trouble of burying it. An Amy Robsart of a sheep, shuffled into the same dust as the villein’s on holy ground: it was more than dead. Suicides were buried on the north side, I believed. But the deadness of this disgraced sheep was not unpleasant. As I lifted the lid of the drain the flies swarmed out with a roar, leaving behind them millions of those maggots which float-fishermen called gentles. The sheep seethed with them, yellow and pullulating, like a sack of oats poured into the hole: but live oats, busy, dry-sounding, crackling with life. The smell struck against the uvula, giving a dry feeling in the throat. The same maggots had been on the villeins, and would be on me.

  I shut the trap door rather hurriedly, but not with revulsion: hurriedly because the smell felt pestilential, although it did not feel unpleasant. I mean that this phosphoric and bony atmosphere had the aura of actually being able to breed disease, which was not in itself an unpleasant thing. It was a thing to shun, but not a thing to regard with loathing. Disease was virile, because it worked. You could feel it with fear, but not with contempt. It was only the things for which I had contempt that made me feel unpleasant.

  The air of death, I smelt it vigorously. It was a challenge to life. It was a tonic. The villeins, St. Thomas the Martyr, the Dayrells who had built the chapel, the sheep, and later me: but perfectly acceptable, almost pleasant. They were living and busy maggots, clean, vital, symbolical of an essential life-force perfectly persisting. They were much more lively than the sheep had ever been.

  Saturday

  The horn woke me, from a dream of foxhunters. The hounds were back in the Ridings again, cub-hunting when much of the hay was still uncarried, and winter had already been prophesied. The men were there in red coats as the sun rose, coats for which they had been grateful at their setting forth: the loud hulloas of encouragement spoke to the young entry amid glimpses of colour and the continual undisciplined noise of guerilla warfare.

  As far as Gos was concerned, it was the alternate day on which he was visited at forty-five minute intervals. I was trying to get him to come at once to my glove, and now had ceased to stay and tempt him for the full quarter of an hour. If he did not come by the time I had whistled the old hymn twice, I would go away: and it was not until six o’clock in the evening that he was to learn this lesson.

  In the intervals of all these visits I assisted at the cub-hunting (it was nice to have the hunt brought right to one’s mews) or sat in the sun making spare jesses and leash, watching them. Early in the day there had been two women sitting on shooting sticks, staring blankly at the outside of Sawpit Wood, when a young sow badger came out of it and ran straight at them. An enormous woodlouse made of shaving brushes, a trundling grey hearth rug, the poor, shortsighted thing chose the one part of Sawpit Wood for her exit which was directly faced by those long-suffering women. The women sat with forced and unnatural composure on their shooting sticks, drape
d about with pet fox terriers on leads, and passed off the badger as decorously as possible. They did not know what to do with it.

  The badger solved the problem by trolloping back into the wood, there to be slain some twenty minutes later.

  But the sometime fox-hunter had begun to think. They sat there, those two enduring ladies on shooting sticks, and looked at the badger. Women did not naturally enjoy destruction, for their instinct was to create. These two had been made to get up at five o’clock in the morning, when all amounts of paint and powder could make few ladies look their best; had been moved to array themselves in chic sporting tweeds and ‘sensible’ gum boots which yet made it difficult to walk and not comfortably warm in the early hours: had been taken out into an unknown woodland in a heavy dew, with nothing to sit upon but a kind of prop, to participate in a mystery which was beyond their comprehension. Absolutely terrified at heart, they sat there resolutely on the little posts and peered at the wood, convinced that the best method of self-defence was complete inertia. Surrounded by a lot of howling dogs, bustled with apparent aimlessness by two or three howling men in red, they were sure of one thing only: that whatever they did with the badger was sure to be wrong. They looked at it with glassy eyes, and very sensibly did nothing.

  It was the enormous hoax of fox-hunting which had brought them out. What a magnificent hoax it was! Lord Hillingdon, who was hunting the dog pack himself, two whips, and the hounds, were having the time of their lives. They were doing something direct: in the case of the peer something very like what would be done when Gos was first flown at a pheasant — if ever I got that far. The master was in the middle of a patient and exciting art, seeking to train his own quadrupeds in the sole and skilful pursuit of another quadruped by direct personal effort. No doubt his eyes were on Rattler or Rantipole with the same anxious apprisal as I could feel in mine on Gos. So far, so true. But at some time in the history of fox-hunting it had been discovered that a Field was a necessary evil. The people helped to hold up the cubs in the autumn, and nowadays their financial contributions often maintained the hunt. A few genuine lovers of the chase (who could be estimated at much less than ten per cent of the average Field) followed Lord Hillingdon because they partly appreciated his real interests and because they themselves enjoyed to perfect another quadruped in jumping over obstacles. There were not enough of these to hold up cubs nor to support a good establishment financially.

  So an anonymous genius had invented the fox-hunting legend. The great hoax had been perpetrated with every resource of a Machiavellian psychologist. Fear, Pavlov told us, was the mainspring of human activity.

  Those two unfortunate women squatting on their little pegs, those ninety out of every hundred later in the season, they were held in thrall by fear: afraid that if they did not do it they could not be of gentle birth; afraid that if they did not jump over the hedge that Mrs. Skinflint jumped over then Lady Industrial Revolution would think they were afraid; afraid that their hats were not on straight, that their crops were in the wrong hand or upside down, that their noses wanted a touch of powder, that the secretary would swear at them if they did come out, that the county would not call on them if they didn’t; afraid of being cursed for being in front, afraid of being sneered at for being behind; afraid of talking about the colour of men’s coats (often a deep mulberry) because they did not know whether it ought to be called scarlet, or pink, or red; afraid that a hunting crop ought really to be called a hunting whip, or a riding crop, or a riding whip, or a crop, or a whip, or a switch, or God knows what: terrified by a 100,000 taboos which were so irrational as to make it hopeless to be sensible about them and so numerous as to make it hopeless to remember them without being sensible: petrified by the suspicion, often a well-founded suspicion, that the horse they were sitting on would fall down and hurt: tangled up in a maze of fears so cunningly contrived that they were finally afraid of being afraid, the unfortunate scapegoats came out twice weekly to their Calvary, and often took to drink in their effort to forget about it in between.

  The ostrich when alarmed buried his head in the sand. As far as my two sacrificial victims were concerned, the badger was not there.

  But the badger, she too was worth thinking about. She was a young sow, for I opened her mouth and looked at her teeth when she was dead. You could kill a badger by knocking it on the nose, although hounds found it difficult to kill them by breaking them up, on account of the tough skin. The nose was their heel of Achilles. Mine had been killed like that: and now, scarcely torn, was slung over a gate by the whip and left to my reflections, while the riot went elsewhere. Brock: the last of the English bears: I had been proud that her race lived in the same wood with me. She had done nobody any harm. Her home was tidy, her habits industrious by night, her claws and forearms agriculturally strong. Hob would be a good name for a badger.

  She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer’s glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes. She was dead. What could I use her for? Surely, being killed, some definite good would ensue.

  But I could think of nothing I could use her for. I could not eat her: I could not make her into shaving brushes or an ornament, because I had a shaving brush and badgers at this time of the year were in a kind of moult: I could not congratulate myself that she was no longer in a position to steal chickens, for probably she never had stolen them. For a little time I thought of skinning and stuffing her head to put beside the fox-mask in my small study, as a memorial to this great day. But I did not want to remember the day. I did not want to remember a young, shortsighted, retiring, industrious, ultimately prolific female who had been turned back by two frightened ladies, cornered by lusty and unlettered puppies, knocked on the nose by a peer.

  I was ashamed for poor badger. No skill of mine had gone into her slaughter and there was no sense in it for me. For the hounds there was said to be some kind of sense in this otherwise useless murder, and therefore for the master of those hounds. I was not ashamed for him.

  Only, vaguely wishing that foxhounds might confine themselves to destructive animals, I dropped the dead head a little sadly but without recriminations: a ‘sentimental slaughterer’ as the green-blooded intellectuals put it. Never mind. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger’s wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits.

  Sunday

  It was a sabbath of ripe flavour. A flea, to begin with, had somehow violated the sanctity of the castle. He had failed to wake me more than to the borders of consciousness, for austringers sleep deep, but he had bitten all over. Then, for austringers were allowed to sleep till nine o’clock on Sundays, I was woken by the arrival of the milk. I got up, covered with flea bites and fully conscious that it was a holy day, and set a kettle on to boil: then, sitting naked on a chair in the kitchen with my feet in a basin of ammonia and hot water I washed myself carefully over the flea-bites, put on clean silk and a black suit, made a cup of tea, fetched Gos from the mews, and walked two miles across the fields to church. I left him outside on a tombstone, with the setter to guard him and the glove.

  My neighbour had cooked a fine Sunday dinner, and by half past one I judged that Gos — now sitting on a bow perch out of doors — would be hungry enough to fly two yards for his meat on an extra long leash: but I judged incorrectly. From that moment until eight o’clock at night I sat on the kitchen chair outside the back door, within the hawk’s line of vision, and walked round him every fifteen minutes with a fragment of food. When not offering him these bribes I was trying to cope, from the chair and elsewhere, with another side of his manning not mentioned before.

  You must remember that a goshawk is the most highly strung member of a family which breathes much faster than does the human being — and, in the latter, quick respiration and forcible motion of the heart are a sign of mania. For Gos the world was a place in which life took place on a much more vivid level than o
n mine, a place in which he could see further and more quickly than I could. For him everything was danger and exaggeration, life was a qui-vive far more taut than anything known to us. However quickly I might have tried to bring my hand toward his head, his head would have more quickly turned in the direction of my hand. Not only could angry words, or frowns, or strangers, or loud noises upset him, but also sudden movements. It had been necessary all through his early manning to regulate one’s actions, and as much as possible those of other people, so that he should not be subjected to anything sudden, in sound or sight. This state of affairs, however, could obviously not be allowed to continue throughout his life. For the sake of comfort and peace of mind, it was necessary to accustom him to suddenness, unless I wanted to live the rest of my life in slow motion. Now, therefore, it was necessary to make him tolerate movements less leisurely than what I had been forced to offer him hitherto. Holding him on the left hand, I would raise my right hand quickly to take a cigarette out of my mouth, and the result would be a bate. The movement would have to be repeated again and again, at varying intervals of time, until he was accustomed to quick cigarettes. Sitting on that sabbath kitchen chair, I would suddenly spring up, or move in an unusual way, or speak unexpectedly and loud. Each experiment would have to be repeated a hundred times, until he began to accept me as a spontaneous creature not necessarily static.

  Another trouble was that I was dressed in my Sun day suit of black. Until then I had purposely, and perhaps wrongly, worn the same riding breeches and check coat all the time, hoping to get him used to a certain person as seen by his brilliant eye. At tea-time I changed back into the accustomed clothes, except for the stockings. He was friendlier thereafter, although he kept looking at my legs, and it was not until eight o’clock that, having failed to make him come, I took him gently up, gave him a small piece of liver, and carried him without fuss to bed.