The Flying Goat (11 page)

‘I bleedin' well have to,' he'd say, ‘don't I?' And we knew, with his five-mile ride to work and his five miles back, his eight-hour day holding boots to the jaws of a stitcher in the factory, his seven children, his readiness to mow with his own hands, in his spare time, every blade of grass and every standing acre of corn in the parish, how true it was. ‘I got a day's work to git through in half,' he'd say. ‘Not like some folks.'

‘What you need on this place,' he'd say at last, ‘is machinery.'

In any discussion of the machine Waddo held us as it were at arm's length, in contempt. ‘Call yourself bleedin' farmers, and ain't got a machine on the place. No binder, no hay-turner, no root-cutter. No tater-riddler, no nothing. Blimey, spit on me big toe, spit on it. Ain't you up to date? Here you are scrattin' about like old hens scrattin' for daylight, when a couple o' machines'd bring you right bang-slap up with the times. Machines – that's what you want. Save yourself time and money. See! They do away with the men.'

The machine was his god. It was exemplified in his racing bike, in the stitcher which he fed all day with boots like some omnivorous steel brute at
the factory, in the threshing-drum we hired once every winter. Working so beautifully, swiftly and naturally with his own hands, he exalted the mechanism that could have cut out the element of man. It fed his devotion with the same daemonic energy as he worked, so that he preached at us with one hand on the futility of a machineless world and showed us, with the other, how incomparable and effective it could be. With the machinery of his two hands he swung a scythe with a masterly and precise beauty that no machine could ever have shown.

And at heart, I think, he knew it. He mowed very fast, as though carelessly, off-hand, apparently indifferent. He was often not so tall, by a foot, as the corn he cut. Head down, he had a certain air of detached dreaminess, as though the whole thing meant nothing to him at all.

Then, at the end of the swathe, he would turn and look back; and we would see, for a moment, the beauty of the work recaptured in his own eye, the small light of pleasure glinting out as though a bead of sweat had been caught in the pupil. He gazed, as we did, at the level alleys of stubble, short and straight as though the corn were sprouting
up white again, the golden-white corn stalks shining as if sun-oiled, the sienna-gold sweep of ears and the straight wall of standing corn, and he must have known that he was a master hand.

But always in time, the obsession of the machine caught him up again. ‘How many acres of wheat you got here? Ten? Gonna take us a week to move it. Now with a binder – '

We would say something about expense.

‘Expense! Spit on me big toe. You can't see for looking. Expense! You can save the bleedin' cost of the thing in a couple o' years. Save money, save men. Don't you see?'

Sometimes he would work on into the still August moonlight, tireless as a machine himself, mowing, whetting the scythe, dropping the scythe to fall flat on some escaping leveret, mowing again, still arguing, still abusing us, then biking off, at last, across the moon-dewed land with the energy of a man just beginning a cycle race.

‘Don't you want a light?' we'd say to him.

‘Light? Spit on me big toe, I s'll be home and in bed with the missus afore you can strike a match.'

He abused and decried us all through harvest and hay-making. At threshing he got his reward.
In the engine and drum he saw, at last, a sensible interpretation of life: a complicated system of power and steam, a miracle, a single unit doing the work of scores of men. ‘Some sense,' he'd say, ‘at last.'

He took a day off from the factory, then, to help us, arriving at six in the morning, and we saw then that we had never seen him except as a tired man. He skidded into the yard at full speed, bounced off his bicycle, seized his pitch-fork as though ready to lift a complete corn-stack with one finger. He argued vociferously, held us at the usual arm's length of contempt, laughed and joked and worked as always with the same casual and yet explosive and masterly rhythm. Working high up in the drum, on the edge of a maelstrom, he bawled down to us below with gigantic accents, though nobody could hear, feeding sheaves to the drum with the pleasure of a man feeding a favourite beast.

We threshed, one year, in November. The wind came down on us from the north-east, with intermittent bites of ice-rain, across bare land. The power of the wind roaring under the drum spouted up a terrific blast of chaff, all day long, that was like hail on the naked eyes. Above, chaff and chaff-dust
were winnowed from the cracks of the drum in fierce little clouds, as though she were spitting ice vapour. Higher still, on the roof of the drum, the men caught by the full force of wind and up-blown chaff and wind-blasted straw worked all day half-blinded.

Waddo was on the drum. Exhilarant in that terrific wind, he worked as though the wind shot him new energy. He bawled down at us with a mouth that, against the roar of drum and engine and wind, was quite soundless. But we understood, we felt the words in his expression of contemptuous triumph. ‘See? Didn't I tell you? Spit on me toe – didn't I tell you what a machine could save you?'

That day the rats began to run out of the first stack about eleven o'clock. We pursued and hemmed and cornered them, smashing them to lumps of grey-red jelly in the wind-littered straw. From above Waddo looked down on us like a director of operations, yelling and waving his fork.

As he stood there, jack-in-the-boxing, gesticulating, laughing, a rat leapt out of a sheaf he was lifting. We saw his own leap of energetic excitement
and knew the words he yelled by long habit and the shaping of his lips:

‘Spit on me big toe, spit on it! Waddo! Spit on me – '

We saw him slip. We knew how the iron-shod boots must have slid on the loose kernels of polished grain, on the straw-smoothed roof of the drum. He lifted a wild hand and he yelled and shouted. The engine-man threw on the brakes and we heard the shriek and moan of stopped machinery.

‘Waddo!' we yelled, ‘Waddo. For Christ's sake! Waddo!'

There was no answer; and in a world that stood still we knew that the machine had claimed him.

It was summer when the Arnoldsons first asked me to go and stay with them. I could not go. I did not go until the following winter, on January 5th. It was bitterly cold that day, with thin drifts of snow whipped up from the ground like fierce white sandstorms, and there was snow on the ground almost every day until I left, four days later.

The Arnoldsons lived about seven miles from the nearest town. The house is quite ordinary: plain red brick, double-fronted, with large bay-windows and a large brass-knockered front door and a spotless white doorstep. It is the colour of a new flower-pot and at the back in the garden there is a long pergola of bay-trees which is like a tunnel leading to nowhere.

Before that day in January I did not know any of the Arnoldsons except Laurence. We were at school together but we had not seen each other for fifteen years. He was an architect and I had written
a letter to a paper about country architecture and he had seen it and that was how the invitation to stay with them had come about. Laurence Arnoldson is a man of medium height with straight dark hair brushed back. He wears plain ascetic looking gold spectacles and is a man of meticulous habits; always paring his finger-nails, polishing his glasses, splitting life into millimetres. His craze for exactitude and his contempt for people who have no time for it have made him a prig. He holds his head very high and you can see him looking down his nose at the world. The best thing about him is his eyes: they are weak but they are a deep, rather strange shade of brown. There is something remote about them.

Laurence met me at the station that day in a fairly old but carefully kept Morris-Oxford, a four-seater. His father was with him. He sat in the front seat, huddled in a black rug, with a large shaggy grey scarf muffled round his head. The scarf covered almost all of his face except his eyes. As Laurence introduced me I saw that his father's eyes had exactly the same deep remote brownness as the son's. It was snowing a little at the time and Laurence had left the windscreen wiper working
and I could see the man's eyes mechanically following its pendulum motions. They slid to and fro like two brown ball-bearings moving in grey oil, fascinated by the clear glass arc made by the wiper in the furred snow.

Laurence's father did not speak to me and neither he nor Laurence exchanged a word as we drove slowly out into the frozen country. Their silence depressed me. I felt it had something to do with myself. Now and then I made a remark and once, about half a mile from the house, we passed a pond frozen over and I said something about skating and Laurence said:

‘Oh! Yes. That's the pond where my sister saw a fox walk across the ice yesterday.'

The Arnoldson's house stands on what was formerly a private estate and there is a private gravel road half a mile long leading up to it through fenceless fields that are planted with groups of elm and lime.

There is no Mrs. Arnoldson. She has been dead for thirteen years, and the house has been run for all that time by her sister, aunt Wilcox. It was aunt Wilcox who met us at the front door that afternoon, a dumpy woman with white hair
scraped back sharply from her soap-polished face. She came out of the house briskly, shook hands with me without waiting to be introduced and then helped Mr. Arnoldson out of the car. I thought at first he had been ill, but then as he stood upright I could see that there was nothing wrong with him and that he was really a big and rather powerful man. His hands were very large-boned and his head, hugely swathed in the great scarf, had a kind of ill-balanced power about it. It swayed slightly to and fro as he walked, as though it were loose on the spine. He did not speak to me.

Aunt Wilcox spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent. The Arnoldsons themselves are Yorkshire people and the house is furnished in Yorkshire fashion: a rocking-chair in every room, big dressers, patchwork cushions, heavy pink-and-gold tea services. In the large drawing-room the curtains are of some claret-coloured woollen material, with plush bobbles, and they hang from great mahogany rods by mahogany rings that are like the rings on a hoop-la. On the mantelpiece stand two large china dogs, spaniels, black and white. They face each other and they appear to be looking at the same thing. They are extraordinarily lifelike.

I had been upstairs to unpack my things and had come down again and was looking at these dogs when Laurence came in to say that tea was ready. We went across the hall into the opposite room. It was about four o'clock and the white reflected light of the fallen snow was prolonging by a few minutes the fall of darkness. We sat down to tea in this strange snow-twilight, aunt Wilcox and Mr. Arnoldson opposite each other at the ends of the table, Laurence and I opposite, I myself opposite the window. The room was the exact reflection of the other. At the windows were the same sort of heavy woollen-bobbled curtains and on the mantelpiece stood what might have been the same pair of china spaniels watching with extraordinary lifelike fixedness some invisible object between them.

We sat there eating and drinking, without saying much. Aunt Wilcox poured tea from a huge electroplated pot that might have held a gallon. The cups were like pink and gold basins.

I drink my tea very hot and suddenly, as aunt Wilcox was taking my empty cup, I saw someone coming up the road towards the house. I knew at once, somehow, that it was Laurence's sister. She
was wearing a big brown coat, but no hat. Every now and then she stepped off the road on to the grass and wandered off, as though looking for something. She was like someone playing follow-my-leader with herself. Once she wandered farther off than usual and in the half-darkness I lost her for a moment. Then I saw her again. She was running. She was running quite fast and all at once she fell down on her knees in the snow and then ran on again. She was still running when she came to the house.

Two minutes later she came in. Her knees and the fringe of her coat were covered with snow where she had fallen down and there was a small salt-sprinkling of snow on her hair. She was about twenty-three, but she looked much younger, and I shall never forget how she came in, out of breath, to look at us with the same remote brown eyes as Laurence's, intensely excited, with a stare that had nothing to do with earth at all.

‘I saw him again,' she said.

For a moment no one spoke. Then Laurence said:

‘Who? The fox?'

‘Yes. I saw him run over the pond again and
then I chased him up through the park and then just as I got near the house I lost him.'

No one spoke a word.

That evening, after supper, she told me more about the fox. She described him: how bright he was and how good-coloured and how it was only in snowy or frosty weather that she saw him, and as she described him I saw him, bright, quiet, his back feet slipping from under him a little as he sloped across the ice on the small pond. I saw him as she saw him, as she wanted me to see him.

She told me about the fox in two or three minutes. She talked rather quickly, but all her impressions were in reality created with her eyes; the images of fox and snow and frozen pond were thrown up in them with untarnishable clarity. Unlike a great many people she looked straight at me while talking. Her eyes were full of great candour. They looked straight forward, with natural ardour. You felt that they could never look sideways. They
had in them an unblemished honesty that was very beautiful and also very convincing, but also, in some way, empty.

For those two or three minutes we were alone. We had all had supper and we were going to play cribbage. Laurence had gone into his room to finish a letter and aunt Wilcox was in the kitchen. Mr. Arnoldson had gone upstairs to find a new pack of cards.

‘I'd like to come out in the morning,' I said, ‘and see this fox.'