by H. E. Bates
No, he said. The idea of training a goat to fly was a mistake, that’s all. Jethro could see that. No, what he did do was to breed a goat that could fly – you see how I mean, a sort of miracle. Jethro was a very religious chap – Salvation Army meetings, playing in the band, believing in the Bible and all that. And suddenly that’s how he saw it. I want a flying goat, he thought, and if I want it badly enough and ask God then God will perform a miracle and see that I get it. If God doesn’t approve I shan’t get it and then I shall know it was wrong to ask for it. So he mated two of his goats and prayed for a miracle to happen and waited. He prayed twice a day, morning and night, for a kid that could fly. He knew all about miracles. If five thousand people could be fed with two loaves and five small fishes, or if somebody could raise a boy from the dead or if a sick man could pick up his bed and walk then why shouldn’t an ordinary chap like himself get a simple thing like a goat that could fly? Ask yourself. It was reasonable.
‘And now you’re going to tell me,’ I said, ‘that in due course the kid was born and it could fly from birth like a bird?’
It was, he said, and it could. The second day of its life it began to jump up in the air. Like a lamb, only higher. Then the third it jumped higher still. The fourth day it flew over its mother. Flew, not jumped. Then by the end of the week it was flying over fences. It flew over a row of kidney-beans in Jethro’s garden. Inside a month it could fly over a haystack. It was a lovely white colour, and Jethro told me it was so light that you could hold it in your hand like a ball of cotton wool.
‘Then what?’ I said.
Well, Jethro had another idea. It was through the Grace of God that I got the goat, he thought. The right thing to do is to devote it to the service of God in return. So he put it up to the Salvation Army – told them how God had wrought a miracle for him, tried to make them see how this flying goat was proof of the power of prayer, asked them to come and see it for themselves. Up to that time he’d kept it secret. Now he wanted all the world to know about it. Well, they were very sniffy, the Salvation Armyists. It looked like sacrilege. The power of prayer and miracle was kept for serious things – healing, faith, help in time of trouble, sin and sorrow and so on. A flying goat looked a bit like taking a rise out of the Almighty. Well, they argued and disagreed and then argued again, but at last Jethro persuaded them. The Salvation Armyists gathered in a field behind Jethro’s house and waited for the goat to fly. It didn’t do anything. It didn’t even lift its feet off the ground. Well, just what we thought, they said, just what we expected. The man has not only made fools of us but has taken the name of God in vain. We’ll see about this, and they did, to the extent that Jethro never set foot in the Salvation Army hall again and never played the euphonium for them any more.
‘But still,’ I said, ‘the goat could fly?’
Yes, he said, the goat could fly. It flew better and better as it grew older and older. Jethro never trained it. Just fed it and it flew. The only thing Jethro used to do was whistle it home, and then when it came home it used to circle round and round like a homing pigeon. Well, soon after the Salvation Armyists turned him down Jethro had another idea. He decided to take the goat on tour. That’s how he got in with the circus. At first, Jethro told me, they didn’t believe him. Then when they saw that goat flying over a circus tent the circus folk went crazy. It was just the craziest thing ever seen in a circus. Better than man-eating lions, performing seals, dancing ponies and all that. Everybody had seen things like that, but nobody had ever seen a flying goat. It was a sensation. It went everywhere. Everywhere you went you saw the circus-bills about Jethro Watkins’s flying goat.
‘It’s funny I never heard of it,’ I said.
Funny, he said, I should think it is funny. Everybody’s heard of Jethro Watkins’s flying goat. Everybody.
‘Except me,’ I said. ‘Well, what happened then?’
Well, Jethro thought he could do better for himself than the circus. So he struck out on his own. And that began the real sensational stuff. You know, flying off the top of the Tower at Blackpool and all that. You mean to say you never heard of that?
‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t say I ever heard of it.’
It was in all the newspapers, he said. Pictures of it. Millions of people there. Don’t you know what happened? A newspaper offered Jethro five thousand pounds if the goat would fly off the top of the Tower. Well, it flew off the top of the Tower and flew round over the sea for a few minutes and then settled on the pier. But that was nothing. You must have heard all about the time when it flew away from Belle Vue Manchester and was missing over the Pennines for a night and a day and then came flying home to Jethro’s old home here as cool as you like? Why, he said, that was the biggest sensation of the lot.
‘I bet it was,’ I said. ‘Now tell me it flew the Channel.’
Well, it did, he said, but that isn’t what I was going to tell you about. I was going to tell you about the time it had kids.
‘Don’t tell me they could fly,’ I said.
One could, he said, but not the other. That was funny, wasn’t it? One kid was black, and one was white, and it was the white one that could fly. Jethro said it was marvellous. Better than the mother. The second day after it was born Jethro took it out and it flew twice round the church steeple. Well, if a goat could do that on the second day of its life, what was it going to do when it was a year old?
‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’
Well, he said, that was the sad thing. Jethro died. He was always a fat chap and I think he must have got fatty heart or something. Anyway the day he got the young goat to loop the loop the excitement must have been too much for him. He dropped down dead.
‘The excitement,’ I said, ‘would have been too much for anybody. What happened to the goats after Jethro died?’
Well, he said, that’s another funny thing. Nobody seems to know.
‘They just flew away,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’
Well, nobody knows, he said. There were a lot of goats sold at auction after Jethro was dead, but none of them could fly.
‘How many times did you see the flying goat?’ I said. ‘I mean you, yourself.’
Well, he said.
‘Didn’t you ever see it at all?’
Well, he said, to tell the truth I didn’t. I heard all about it, but I never got the chance to see it.
‘Didn’t you ever know anybody who saw it?’ I said.
No, he said, I can’t say I did. Not exactly.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘didn’t you ever know anybody who knew anybody who’d seen it?’
No, he said, if it comes to that, I didn’t. Not exactly.
‘Then,’ I said, ‘tell me who told you all about it?’
Jethro, he said.
I didn’t say anything this time.
Don’t you believe it? he said.
‘Oh! yes,’ I said, ‘I believe it.’
After all, he said, it takes no more believing than the feeding of five thousand people with two loaves and five small fishes, does it?
‘Oh, no!’ I said.
After all, he said, you can make yourself believe in anything if you want to, can’t you?
‘Oh! yes!’ I said.
Well, he said, it’s been very nice. I think I’ll be getting along.
‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute. Just sit down. It’s my turn to tell you something. I’d like to tell you about my uncle Walter’s musical pig. Now when I was a boy my uncle Walter had a pig that played the trombone. I don’t mean it was a pig that played the trombone with the trombone. I mean it was a pig that played the trombone without a trombone. Now this pig had a litter – ’
The Late Public Figure
The offices of the Argus and Express Printing Works, which printed and had printed for forty-five years The Nulborough Weekly Argus and Express, were in a state of excitement. The proprietor, founder and at one time editor of the paper, Mr. Charles Macauley Montague, a public fig
ure in the town, had died suddenly in the night.
In the front office, which had been partitioned off from the printing rooms by a match-boarding partition, varnished yellow, the editor, Stacey, was beating the fist of first one hand, then another, then both, on the edge of the varnished roll-top desk. It was a hot day in August and the heat of weeks had burnt the walls against the fly-specked windows to soft blisters. Resin had long since oozed, for the same reason, out of the pine knots, to be boiled to reddish blisters which past summers had dried and cracked. The panels of thick ridged glass in the factory-type windows somehow let in the heat and then imprisoned it. The catches of the windows would not open and dust lay thick on the obsolete files and unpinned lays of galleys, on the desks and window-sills, and on the ancient handle-type wall telephone. Across the ceiling a steel shafting ran and revolved, let in and out of the room by two holes cut in the match-board partition like holes in a fowl-house. Mysteriously propelled, bright as a silver pencil, this piece of machinery seemed the only up-to-date thing, and certainly the only clean thing, in the office, which smelled like a long shut book suddenly opened in a chapel-pew. The place had the air of some ill-managed dead letter office long behind the times, ill-conditioned, unprosperous and hopelessly lost. Yet for forty-five years, back to the week when the first file had been pinned up in 1892, The Argus and Express had been run at a profit. Stacey, the editor, knew all about this, had seen the books, and knew that Mr. Charles Macauley Montague would leave about, perhaps, fifty thousand pounds. What he did not know, beyond this, was anything very much about Mr. Montague himself. He realised that he did not know enough to write the obituary notice the occasion demanded.
‘I tell you I’ve got to know something about him! Don’t you see?’ He beat his fists on the edge of the table as he talked to Hanson, the works manager. ‘I want a special. An obituary number. I want to put his career in, his history – what he’s done, what he’s been! And all you can do is to stand there and say you don’t know anything. To-day’s Thursday and the deadline’s to-morrow morning.’
‘You’ve been here as long as I have, Mr. Stacey. Six years.’
‘Yes, I know. But you’ve lived here. In the town. All your life.’
‘Yes, but – ’
‘All right, all right.’ Stacey took up a paper from the desk. He was a young man with very black hair and a pale yellow face, with the sun-tired oily eyes of someone who had spent too long, at one time, in the tropics. He had spent two years editing a paper in Madras, from where he had gone, for another three years, to Calcutta. Yet the heat of the Argus office seemed to him impossibly terrific, unbearable. The back-glaze from the shining yellow varnish hurt his eyes, kindling the fatigue behind them.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you don’t know anything perhaps you can check these facts. Say “No” if I’m wrong.’ He began to read from the paper: ‘Aged 71, founded Argus in 1892, chairman Liberal Association 1906-14, elected Urban District Council 1919, chairman 1925, continued in council till death, vice-chairman League of Nations Union Local Branch 1925-30, Church Trustee Baptist Church 1920-32, sidesman similar period, president Local Temperance Reform Committee 1895-1914, active interest Moral Welfare 1920 onwards, active interest Young Men’s Christian Association similar period, Carnegie Library Committee 1923-30, speaker and later chairman Pleasant Saturday Evenings commencing 1893, surrendered editorship of paper 1930.’
He ceased reading. The works manager did not speak. ‘Well, all correct?’
The works manager said yes, he thought it was all correct.
‘But that’s just his activities,’ Stacey said. ‘I want the man. The personality. You know anything about that? I mean about how he was educated, how he started? He wasn’t married, was he? You know why he came here? What made him choose this dead-alive hole to start a paper in?’
‘No, Mr. Stacey, I don’t.’
‘Is there anybody in the works who would know?’
The works manager thought a moment. ‘Rankin might. He started here as a boy. He – ’
‘All right! Send Rankin up.’
While the works manager had gone Stacey took off his coat and with his fists tried hard to bang open a window, to let in some air. The windows seemed as if screwed down and would not budge. He sat down at the table in an ill-temper and turned over papers not seeing what he read.
Then the door opened and Rankin, a small man of sixty, foreman of the downstairs room, came in. He was a man who did not say much and was even then a long time saying it. His words were like a jumble of pins, which he had to sort out, and then stick in, slowly, but sharply, so that there should be no mistaking their point.
‘You knew Mr. Montague a long time?’ Stacey said.
‘Longer,’ Rankin said, and slowly he stuck in the pins of his words, his eyes slightly ironic behind his black-rimmed glasses, ‘than you’d think.’
‘What was his personal history? You know anything about his activities in this town besides his Liberal Association and church affairs – things like that?’
Rankin, thought, then spoke. ‘He was our landlord.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘You know,’ Rankin said, ‘where I live? In Lime Street?’
Stacey had a vision of small bay-windows, fern-decorated, in a little boulevard of limes.
‘Not trees,’ Rankin said. ‘Just lime – ordinary lime. There was a pit there once, and then it petered out, and a man named Hobbs put up two rows of houses. Mr. Montague owned that property.
‘That’s interesting, but – ’
‘You ought to see our house. I go to dinner,’ Rankin said, ‘at half-past twelve. Come in and have a look at us about one.’
Stacey said, without really meaning it, that he would go in. The slow careful speech of Rankin bored him a little. He wanted to open the door on the pretext of getting some air and so let the man out, but suddenly Rankin was talking again, rather faster.
‘You wouldn’t remember,’ he said, ‘the soldiers we had billeted on us during the war, would you? The first battalion Royal Welch. They came in 1915. December, just before Christmas. They marched here – marched thirty-five miles, and it rained and sleeted all the way, nine hours.’
‘Yes,’ Stacey said, ‘but what has it got to do with Mr. Montague?’
‘I’m trying to tell you,’ Rankin said, in his slow pin-pricking voice. ‘You ever seen soldiers after a nine-hour march in the rain? Them chaps couldn’t have been wetter if they walked all day in rivers. We had three billeted on us – kids, about eighteen. And Mr. Montague and his sister had three. It upset my missus, seeing them boys. She rushed out and got mutton bones and had hot stew ready by the time they’d had a bath in the kitchen. Of course you wasn’t supposed to do things like that for ’em. They’d got regulation rations, and all that. But you couldn’t sit still and see kids starved through and not do a thing.’
‘You seem to have forgotten,’ Stacey said, with patience, ‘that you’re talking about Mr. Montague.’
‘No, no,’ Rankin said. ‘No. Everybody in Nulborough did the same for them boys – got ’em stew and tea and cocoa and all the like o’ that – everybody. All except Mr. Montague.’
Stacey did not speak. He sat quite still. He felt a small aperture in his mind open and let in a small slit of light.
‘All except Mr. Montague,’ Rankin said, ‘and Miss Montague. No stew for them kids, no cocoa, not a drop o’ tea. No bath. You couldn’t wonder what happened – one of ’em got pneumonia and died, and in a week the other two asked to be moved.’
Stacey, watching the small aperture of light in his mind grow larger, could not speak. Then Rankin said a surprising, irrelevant thing.
‘He never had more than half an egg for his breakfast. Mr. Montague half an egg, Miss Montague half an egg.’
Rankin stood silent, looking at Stacey. It was as though he had finished sticking in the pins of his words, as though he had at last made a pattern of them, like the pa
ttern on a pin-table. He seemed to stand there and say: ‘Now it’s your turn. You shoot. See if you can get the ball in the right hole,’ his small ironical print-black eyes speaking for him.
Stacey did not speak, and Rankin, after asking if there was anything more that he needed, turned to go. Stacey stopped him at the door.
‘You know anybody else,’ he said, ‘who might tell me anything?’
Rankin said: ‘Miss Montague might.’ He paused. ‘I say she might. But Brierley’s the man you ought to see. Started here as compositor in 1892 and worked himself up to manager. Left just before you came. I say left.’
‘Where’s he live?’
‘Eighteen Denmark Street. You’ll pass it on the way up to Miss Montague.’
As Rankin left the office, Stacey remembered something and called after him: ‘I’ll drop in and see you about one.’ Alone, he contemplated the small aperture of light in his mind. He tried to bring pressure on it, as he had done on the window, in order to make it open wider. In this uncertain state of mind, he got his keys out of his desk and unlocked the door which led into Mr. Montague’s office and went in. He looked cursorily over Mr. Montague’s desk and went to open and shut one or two of the pigeon-drawers, not at first reading anything. Then journalistic curiosity got the better of him, and he sat down on the old-fashioned swivel-chair and began to read, here and there, some of Mr. Montague’s papers. He found a copy of Mr. Montague’s birth certificate; it showed his registration as a child in a small town in the county of Essex, his father a solicitor’s clerk, his mother described as a machinist. The date was 1865. In the same drawer he found envelopes containing copies of Mr. Montague’s life policies. Below them were letters from Mr. Montague’s London brokers, and from them it seemed that Mr. Montague had held substantial holdings in steel generally, and in arms particularly. One letter acknowledged the transference, in Mr. Montague’s name, of some £8000 from investment in Public Utilities to investment in the share organizations manufacturing arms. Turning over more papers, Stacey came across a series of hotel bills. These were all for hotels in various parts of London, but appeared otherwise to have nothing to do with each other. Then Stacey noticed that they were bills, always, for double rooms taken and vacated on the same days of the week, Friday and Saturday. In another drawer he found two bills, both from the same hotel, dated as recently as July of the current year. The hotel was near Paddington Station and he put one of the bills in his pocket.