The Flying Goat by H.E. Bates Read Free Book Online Page B

Bronson kept his full-dress uniform, sword and various accoutrements. One night Irma cut off some of her hair and went downstairs, intending to put the hair into the breast-pocket of one of Bronson’s tunics. In the darkness the lid of the box slipped out of her hands and crashed.
    The Bronsons’ bedroom was immediately above, and Bronson heard the crash and came downstairs. He switched on the electric light and saw Irma standing beside the box, in her nightgown. He had come down hurriedly, without a dressing-gown, and for a moment he was too embarrassed to speak. Irma stood trembling. Then just as he was going to speak he heard a door open upstairs, and he knew Mrs. Harris was coming down.
    Something made him put out the light. In complete silence, he and the girl stood in the darkness, trying to deny each other’s existence. They heard Mrs. Harris shuffle downstairs in her carpet slippers, and after about thirty seconds Bronson felt her hand stab at the light.
    The words were ready on Mrs. Harris’s lips, like bullets waiting to be fired. They exploded straight at Bronson, rapid-firing: ‘I got you. I caught you. I got you, I caught you.’
    Neither Bronson nor Irma could speak. Mrs. Harris took silence for guilt. She swivelled round and fired a double shot upstairs:
    â€˜Mrs. Bronson! Mrs. Bronson!’
    Bronson stood white, tragically silent. He heard his wife’s voice in reply and her movements as she came downstairs. He stood quiet, more nervous than Irma, still not saying anything, aware of his predicament and yet doing nothing, seeing himself only as the victim of some unhappy and apparently unchaste circumstance over which he had no control.
    Mrs. Harris fired a fusillade of bitter triumph as Mrs. Bronson came and stood in the light of the doorway:
    â€˜They ain’t moved, they ain’t said nothing. That’s how I found ’em. In their nightgowns. That’s how I found ’em. I knew it had been going on for a long time, but not like this, not like this!’
    Irma began to cry. Bronson and his wife stood with a kind of paste-board rigidity, stiffened by some inherent aristocratic impulse not to give way beforepeople out of their class. They knew they had nothing to fear, yet they saw themselves confronted by the iron suspicion of Mrs. Harris as by a firing squad. In Mrs. Harris’s small distracted grey eyes there was a touch of madness, inspired by triumph. She spoke with the rapid incoherence of someone sent slightly insane by a terrible discovery. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I know what I’m going to do. I know and I’m going to do it. If you’re not ashamed, I am. I’m ashamed. I’m – ’
    At this moment Irma fainted.
    â€˜No wonder! No wonder! Gettin’ her down here in her nightgown, on the sly. Gettin’ her down here – ’
    The insane dangerous stupidity of it all only struck the Bronsons into dead silence. And in silence, as never before, Mrs. Harris saw guilt.
    The next afternoon the Bronsons moved to other quarters. Irma, shut up in her room, heard Lieutenant Bronson’s large tin box go clanking out of the hall like a coffin.
    In less than a month there was hardly a soldier left in the town. In the papers Irma read about the regiment going to the Dardanelles, and read Bronson’s name, a little later, among the killed.
    More than two years later she read how Mrs. Bronson too had been killed. In Mexico, where she had gone to clear up some of Bronson’s affairs, she had been hit, while sitting in a café, by a stray bullet in a local revolution.
    Irma envied Mr. and Mrs. Bronson, the dead. She began to feel that she was going about with a bullet in her own heart, and was only gradually beginning to understand, by the pain of longer silences between herself and her mother, who had fired it.

A Funny Thing
    My Uncle Silas and my Uncle Cosmo belonged to different worlds; but