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The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat
by
‘I’ve only my week-ends free,’ I said, ‘and you seem to spend yours there pretty regularly–with the side-car. I was afraid–‘
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said cheerily. ‘We’re quite an old engaged couple now. As a matter of fact, it happened after “the gravid polled Angus” business. Come along this Saturday. Woodhouse says he’ll run us down after lunch. He wants to see Huckley too.’
Pallant could not accompany us, but Bat took his place.
‘It’s odd,’ said Bat, ‘that none of us except Ollyett has ever set eyes on Huckley since that time. That’s what I always tell My people. Local colour is all right after you’ve got your idea. Before that, it’s a mere nuisance.’ He regaled us on the way down with panoramic views of the success–geographical and financial–of ‘The Gubby’ and The Song.
‘By the way,’ said he, ‘I’ve assigned ‘Dal all the gramophone rights of “The Earth.” She’s a born artist. ‘Hadn’t sense enough to hit me for triple-dubs the morning after. She’d have taken it out in coos.’
‘Bless her! And what’ll she make out of the gramophone rights?’ I asked.
‘Lord knows!’ he replied. ‘I’ve made fifty-four thousand my little end of the business, and it’s only just beginning. Hear that!’
A shell-pink motor-brake roared up behind us to the music on a key-bugle of ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.’ In a few minutes we overtook another, in natural wood, whose occupants were singing it through their noses.
‘I don’t know that agency. It must be Cook’s,’ said Ollyett. ‘They do suffer.’ We were never out of earshot of the tune the rest of the way to Huckley.
Though I knew it would be so, I was disappointed with the actual aspect of the spot we had–it is not too much to say–created in the face of the nations. The alcoholic pub; the village green; the Baptist chapel; the church; the sexton’s shed; the Rectory whence the so-wonderful letters had come; Sir Thomas’s park gate-pillars still violently declaring ‘The Earth is flat,’ were as mean, as average, as ordinary as the photograph of a room where a murder has been committed. Ollyett, who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas, dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my feelings when he said: ‘Is that all–after all we’ve done?’
‘I know,’ said Ollyett soothingly. ‘”Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers.” I’ve felt the same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me. But they do suffer.’
The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir Thomas’s park to tell the Hall that ‘The Earth was flat’; a knot of obviously American tourists were kodaking his lodge-gates; while the tea-shop opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying postcards of the old font as it had lain twenty years in the sexton’s shed. We went to the alcoholic pub and congratulated the proprietor.
‘It’s bringin’ money to the place,’ said he. ‘But in a sense you can buy money too dear. It isn’t doin’ us any good. People are laughin’ at us. That’s what they’re doin’…. Now, with regard to that Vote of ours you may have heard talk about….’
‘For Gorze sake, chuck that votin’ business,’ cried an elderly man at the door. ‘Money-gettin’ or no money-gettin’, we’re fed up with it.’
‘Well, I do think,’ said the publican, shifting his ground, ‘I do think Sir Thomas might ha’ managed better in some things.’
‘He tole me,’–the elderly man shouldered his way to the bar–‘he tole me twenty years ago to take an’ lay that font in my tool-shed. He tole me so himself. An’ now, after twenty years, me own wife makin’ me out little better than the common ‘angman!’
‘That’s the sexton,’ the publican explained. ‘His good lady sells the postcards–if you ‘aven’t got some. But we feel Sir Thomas might ha’ done better.’