THE GOAT (6)
By:
February 6, 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.
I said: ‘That’s what happens to everyone sooner or later.’
And she said: ‘But he knows it.’
And I: ‘Why shouldn’t he? What’s the difference between two hours and twenty years?’
Then she used what, I suppose, was her strongest argument. She grabbed me with both hands and said: ‘Look!’ I expect she must be very good at her movement, whatever it is, because she can make one see things through her eyes. Besides, she reminded me of a girl I knew in the Fulham Branch, ever so long ago, who ran away later with an Austrian painter, and then became a Moravian or something — I’d been very fond of her in the way one used to be when one was still very sensitive to things and people. So, for a moment, thinking of her, I saw the man below through this other woman’s feeling for him, so that my heart beat too, with horror of approaching and inevitable death, and I tried, too, to know how it would be if I had been the chosen one.
Then she breathed too loud in my ear, and I came back with a bump into myself, away from him, and I said: ‘Yes, but you look at the others.’
So she looked in turn, at the rest of the people in the hall, and then round at the others in the gallery, and saw their faces, which were mostly full of some terrific intellectual curiosity and sometimes — ‘They’re glad!’ she said. And then, as if she were answering me, though goodness knows I hadn’t said it: ‘But when one man dies for the people, he has to be somehow Divine, and he must surely choose it. Not a poor frightened rabbit!’
I said: ‘We can’t afford to give up the Good. They’re food, their minds are eaten like bread by those who love them. Why take them of all people? And it doesn’t make any difference whether the one man chooses or not: it’s the people, not him, that it all matters to!’
She looked again, and said: ‘But they’re not being saved!’
I said: ‘Not these ones. After all, we’re mostly Haves; we’re supposed to be able to save ourselves. It’s the ones who’ll see it at the docks who may be saved: the ones who die by factory accidents, and shunting engines, and over-loaded ships — or simply through not getting quite enough to eat or quite enough room to live. It’s not much to give them — one man among so many! Do you realize, by the way, that it’s just a hundred and three years since the Reform Bill? And as to us: you’re all soft, aren’t you? Like people used to be.’
She said, violently: ‘I have never let myself lose Love! — whatever else I lost.’
I wondered what the other things were that she had lost, and I began to try and explain the idea of hardness: of accepting the world as it is, not so as to stop trying to alter it, but so as not to break oneself and one’s own usefulness as a tool in doing so: not to think that everyone is like oneself, and ought to want the same help and the same good, but to let them go their own way: to live less by logic and more by experience. But it was like talking to a child. Well, I suppose some people never do grow up.
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.