Free The Goshawk by T.H. White

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