THE GOAT (7)
By:
February 13, 2025
“The Goat: Cardiff, A.D. 1935” was first published in Naomi Mitchison’s 1929 collection Barbarian Stories. Compare with “The Lottery” (The New Yorker, 1948), for which Shirley Jackson would become famous. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8.
Tom had been arguing too, but I’m not quite sure what about — I don’t know how the other man started! But they were talking hard, first about shipping statistics, and then about the carrying trade and how and why it has shifted from one country to another. It was interesting and soothing and very remote from the shipowner himself. I listened for some time. It was difficult to tell what was happening below, particularly now that it was all a little blued with cigar smoke. I was not going to do what I knew was silly and wasteful: put myself into that man’s mind again. He was, at any rate, sitting calmly enough, drinking occasionally, with a small group round him that changed sometimes.
It was still raining when we went out, and still this restless, trembling, whispering crowd. ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘shall we go down to the docks?’ I heard his voice a little sharp and eager on the consonants and knew that inside he was really much more excited than I was.
There was no possibility of driving or even getting a tram. We walked through the town, taking short cuts through odd, deserted little streets with draggled greengrocers’ shops at the corners and every window shut. Tom has that curious sense of direction in a town that always seems to me to depend less on geography than on a kind of feeling for the angles of street crossings. Neither of us talked much; I suppose we were really both sharing too much emotion.
When we got to the docks it didn’t seem possible to come near the place; one couldn’t even see how many deep the crowd was. Great patches of it were singing, rather impressively, though not so much as if they had been all Welsh: hymns, of course, and sometimes one of the strike songs, ‘Now she calls,’ or ‘The Workers’ Morning,’ either in English or, better, in Welsh, that hid the curious poverty in language in the original. Sometimes even the respectable old ‘Red Flag’ — though I remember the time when that was exciting enough. Occasionally a music-hall song started, and then petered out. I don’t like crowds much, or that way of losing oneself; I’d sooner get frankly drunk or drugged without any pretence. Besides — I know the world is a bad place and that my class hasn’t on the whole been or done much good, with all the chances it has had, I mean; I know it is time for a change, and that now there is no longer any fountain-head of nations wherever it was in Central Asia to pour in that fierce new wine of conquest and break the old bottles, the best way to get a new civilization is probably through a turning upside down. But I know, too, that it will be a very long time — not long for history, but desperately long for the individual — before this barbarous crowd, from whom one is, really, so far apart, begins to produce their new Arts and Literature. It’s a bad business being at the end of a period of civilization. But all the more reason to be hard, as so much of Rome was hard, and perhaps to be stupid, as the Byzantines were stupid. So Tom and I stood about with our shoes and stockings soaked through, at the edge of that crowd, and knew how little we and they understood one another.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.