The Flying Goat by H.E. Bates Page B

irony, it was the director who saved her both from it and from herself.
    â€˜That child,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘I can’t stand it. Why does she make it cry like that?’
    The child, holding his breath, had gone from crimson to faint purple in the face, in the fury of his frustration. The waves of torturing sound beat against the great cushion of Mrs. Victor’s body and shook her nerves. She got up.
    â€˜It’s no use, I shall have to go.’
    At that moment the nurse snatched up the child, put him into a large white perambulator, snatched the bun from his hands and threw it into the lake again. In a moment, as the perambulator moved off, the screams of the child began to die away.
    â€˜Well, that’s better,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘Even so, I think I must go.’
    I must go too, the girl thought. But if I get up I shall faint.
    â€˜Good-bye,’ Mrs. Victor held out her hand. ‘Think of me starving.’ She held in her large moist hand the girl’s thin one. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again.’
    â€˜Good-bye,’ the girl said.
    Mrs. Victor walked away along the edge of the lake. The girl sat staring at the water. Ducks and birds and light and bread revolved like a lucky wheel against the sun.

The Machine
    Every evening, up at the farm, we saw the same men go past, out towards the villages, at the same time. They were coming home from the factories down in the valley: men escaping from the machine.
    And though we got to know them well by sight, first the young chaps, racing hard, with flying mufflers, then the old stagers, the old tough shoe-finishers still wearing polish-blackened aprons, then the man with the black cork-leg and only one pedal to his bicycle, there was one we knew really well. His name was Simmons. We called him Waddo.
    When Waddo went past we lifted hands from hoes or rakes, or even waved a cabbage that we might be cutting, and hailed him. ‘Way up!’ we called.
    â€˜Waddo!’ he shouted, and sailed on.
    But three times a year, at hay-time, harvest and threshing, when we needed extra hands, he stopped to help us. He rode his pink-tyred semi-racing bike into the stack yard, unstrapped his dinner-basket, rolled up his sleeves and lookedround at us, as we stood stacking corn or unloading hay, with a look of tolerant contempt. As though to say, ‘You poor miserable devils. Bin here since morning and all you done is stack up three ha’porth o’ hay. Well, spit on me big toe, spit on it. If you ain’t a bleedin’ limit.’ It was the look of a giant for a degenerate collection of pitch-fork pygmies. Waddo himself stood five feet three.
    But when he came into that yard we were transformed. He flung himself to work with an almost daemonic fury of strength. The muscles of his small arms were tight as clock-work springs under the white factory-blanched flesh. His little head, with thin wire-brush hair worn bald at the temples, was like a bullet that might have gone off at any moment with an explosive bang of enthusiasm or disgust. He worked swiftly, with the slight puffed swagger of a man of mountainous physique, incessantly talking, always comic, spitting mouthsful of patient disgust for us who worked so hard all day and did nothing. There was some extra volcanic force in Waddo, who never tired, never gave up, and was never beaten. Coming from the machines, he was like a machine himself. ‘Waddo,’ we’d say to him, ‘blowed if you don’t go on wheels.’
    â€˜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