The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott Page B

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.
    â€œStay 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