The Flying Goat (24 page)

Heads were nodded. For a long time, watching the rain, sun or frost over the grey asphalt of the playground, they had said this, sometimes impatiently, often ill-naturedly, now and again with pity. Now, once again, they gazed out at the sun on the cheap, dirty bricks of the buildings on all sides and shaking their heads said:

‘It's a shame. He ought to go.'

At the decrepit figure coming in a little later they scarcely glanced, however. He was the last to come. Red and green exercise books were waiting for him also. As he sat down to them and adjusted his glasses and took up the pen, his hands and beard were shaking.

‘Niger, nigre, nigrum…nigros…' he corrected.

Yellowish beads of sweat gathered and stood as if ready to fall on his white brow. The air of feebleness about his white hair and beard grew stronger. Red stains, like cuts, smothered his white fingers and nails.

The room was stuffy, full of the same leaden, tiring air as the class-room had been, where the boys had given not one moment's peace, infuriating and perplexing to him, so that he had once confused a dative with an ablative and had translated ‘salus' to mean salt instead of salvation.

It was Thursday. A feeling of emptiness pressed him, for every Thursday he made a resolution to fast, to prevent obesity. A sensation of hunger growled in him and he pressed his paunch against the table edge. It was like pressing some flat, useless bladder there.

The door opened. A servant entered with coffee for the masters. He looked up, and then, remembering again that it was Thursday, shook his head.

‘In any case,' he thought, ‘coffee is not good for me.'

Spoons began tinkling their high notes among the bass murmur of conversation. The science-master, his coffee cup in his acid-stained hands, walked over to him, asked, ‘Can I borrow your blotting-paper, Mr Saul?' and took it, spilling coffee on the books as he did so.

‘Niger, nigra, nigrum' merged their blue-black in a pool of brown.

It would be five minutes before the blotting paper would be returned. Probably it would never be returned.

He went on correcting, making thin red scars. Outside a sudden cloud swamped the sun, diluting the autumn lemon and bronze, bringing the thought of winter a moment nearer. With apprehension the Latin-master glanced up. Winter he could not endure in the chill rooms and draughty corridors, with the pinched faces of the boys staring at his own sagging yellow face, life would be insufferable. And every year now for five or six years, winter had brought jaundice and pains of the heart.

‘Niger, nigra, nigrum' seemed to go on eternally.

A bell rang. Black gowns floated through the door and vanished.

Following them, seeing them as the embodiment of progress, vigorous ideas, clever and perhaps cynical reflections on a life which had been only half as long as his own, he was suddenly oppressed with misgiving. He knew that these figures, these young men, expected him to retire. And often he thought that perhaps he ought to make way, ought to accept pension, since he had now been able to claim it for three years, and say farewell and vanish.

In the classroom again the air was oppressive. He sat down, took off his spectacles, forgot to put them on again and saw the faces of the boys as blurred white masks.

‘Hic, hunc, hoc,' a boy began.

That was wrong, but he said nothing. Of what use to attempt perfection, of what use any longer? He felt old, empty, devoid of desire and purpose. Perhaps he had gone on too long.

Suddenly some lovely hexameter of Virgil ran like a soft thread through his mind, allying him briefly to something poignant, deep and far away, to his youth; then it desisted, isolating him from memory, leaving him without illusions, without desires, a nervous, irascible, obese little figure teaching Latin in an obsolete way to boys who would never understand.

With drab, morose eyes he stared at the pale heads. Here and there was a scuffling. Ordinarily he would have risen, pounced irately on the offender, and seizing the ‘crib' or note in school-boy's code, have torn it up and punished mercilessly.

But today he did nothing, said nothing.

A boy said: ‘Hic, honc, hac…'

The rest were laughing at him.

‘Less noise! Translate exercise fourteen in your notebooks,' he croaked out in a nerveless voice.

How often had he said that? What good came of it?

And suddenly he resolved that at the end of the hour he would go to the headmaster and explain as best he could, pleading ill health and saying that he wished to apply for the pension and leave at the end of the term. His hands were shaking. His stomach gnawed and ached. Once he had an operation for cataract and now his eyes were hurting him again. Life seemed deprived of something, of its aim, its precious spirit.

At the end of the lesson he gathered his little blue Virgil, red grammar and notebooks together, and going to the headmaster began explaining in a nervous voice, like a boy dreading reproval:

‘My health is declining…I have not the necessary…what can I do? Perhaps…and the thought of the winter…at my age…'

A week later he handed in his resignation, which was accepted, and at the end of the term he went away.

Now, in the common room sometimes someone who remembers him will casually ask: ‘Does anyone ever hear of old Saul? Where is he? What's he doing now?'

But there is silence. No one has heard.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym "Flying Officer X". His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950).

Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958
.
The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates
.

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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

First published in Great Britain in 1933 by Jonathan Cape Ltd

‘Pensioned Off' first published in 1929 in the
New Adelphi

This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 1929, 1933 Evensford Productions Limited

The moral right of the author is asserted.

Bloomsbury Reader is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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eISBN: 9781448214969

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