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‘Wonderful,’ I said to Bat. ‘And it’s only “Nuts in May,” with variations.’

‘Yes–but I did the variations,’ he replied.

At the last verse she gestured to Carlini the conductor, who threw her up his baton. She caught it with a boy’s ease. ‘Are you with me?’ she cried once more, and–the maddened house behind her–abolished all the instruments except the guttural belch of the double-basses on ‘Earth‘–‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat–Earth was flat!’ It was delirium. Then she picked up the Gubby dancers and led them in a clattering improvised lockstep thrice round the stage till her last kick sent her diamond-hiked shoe catherine-wheeling to the electrolier.

I saw the forest of hands raised to catch it, heard the roaring and stamping pass through hurricanes to full typhoon; heard the song, pinned down by the faithful double-basses as the bull-dog pins down the bellowing bull, overbear even those; till at last the curtain fell and Bat took me round to her dressing-room, where she lay spent after her seventh call. Still the song, through all those white-washed walls, shook the reinforced concrete of the Trefoil as steam pile-drivers shake the flanks of a dock.

‘I’m all out–first time in my life. Ah! Tell a fellow now, did I get it across?’ she whispered huskily.

‘You know you did,’ I replied as she dipped her nose deep in a beaker of barley-water. ‘They cooed over you.’

Bat nodded. ‘And poor Nellie’s dead–in Africa, ain’t it?’

‘I hope I’ll die before they stop cooing,’ said ‘Dal.

‘”Earth was flat–Earth was flat!”‘ Now it was more like mine-pumps in flood.

‘They’ll have the house down if you don’t take another,’ some one called.

‘Bless ’em!’ said ‘Dal, and went out for her eighth, when in the face of that cataract she said yawning, ‘I don’t know how you feel, children, but I‘m dead. You be quiet.’

‘Hold a minute,’ said Bat to me. ‘I’ve got to hear how it went in the provinces. Winnie Deans had it in Manchester, and Ramsden at Glasgow–and there are all the films too. I had rather a heavy week-end.’

The telephones presently reassured him.

‘It’ll do,’ said he. ‘And he said my home address was Jerusalem.’ He left me humming the refrain of ‘The Holy City.’ Like Ollyett I found myself afraid of that man.

When I got out into the street and met the disgorging picture-palaces capering on the pavements and humming it (for he had put the gramophones on with the films), and when I saw far to the south the red electrics flash ‘Gubby’ across the Thames, I feared more than ever.

* * * * *

A few days passed which were like nothing except, perhaps, a suspense of fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world’s assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of wreckage–one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it–the full circuit of our orb–laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley–where and what it might be, and how it talked–it knew how it danced–and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a drop of pond water is exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But Huckley’s sheet was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind. For the precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there should be nothing of first importance in the world’s idle eye. One atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself–all by itself. And once well away, the fall of kingdoms could not have diverted it.