The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped it with the cataleptic kick of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’, multiplied by the West African significance of ‘Everybody’s doing it’, plus twice the infernal elementality of a certain tune in Dona et Gamma when for all practical purposes, literary, dramatic, artistic, social, municipal, political, commercial, and administrative, the Earth was flat, the Rector of Huckley wrote to us – again as a lover of accuracy – to point out that the Huckley vote on ‘the alleged flatness of this scene of our labours here below’ was not unanimous; he and the doctor having voted against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it could have been none other) flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley was News. The Bun also contributed a photograph which cost me some trouble to fake.

  ‘We are a vital nation,’ said Ollyett while we were discussing affairs at a Bat dinner. ‘Only an Englishman could have written that letter at this present juncture.’

  ‘It reminded me of a tourist in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara. Just one figure in a mackintosh. But perhaps you saw our photo?’ I said proudly.

  ‘Yes,’ Bat replied. ‘I’ve been to Niagara, too. And how’s Huckley taking it?’

  ‘They don’t quite understand, of course,’ said Ollyett. ‘But it’s bringing pots of money into the place. Ever since the motor-bus excursions were started—’

  ‘I didn’t know they had been,’ said Pallant.

  ‘Oh yes. Motor char-à-bancs – uniformed guides and key-bugles included. They’re getting a bit fed up with the tune there nowadays,’ Ollyett added.

  ‘They play it under his windows, don’t they?’ Bat asked. ‘He can’t stop the right of way across his park.’

  ‘He cannot,’ Ollyett answered. ‘By the way, Woodhouse, I’ve bought that font for you from the sexton. I paid fifteen pounds for it.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ asked Woodhouse.

  ‘You give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is fourteenth-century work all right. You can trust me.’

  ‘Is it worth it – now?’ said Pallant. ‘Not that I’m weakening, but merely as a matter of tactics?’

  ‘But this is true,’ said Ollyett. ‘Besides, it is my hobby, I always wanted to be an architect. I’ll attend to it myself. It’s too serious for The Bun and miles too good for The Cake.’

  He broke ground in a ponderous architectural weekly, which had never heard of Huckley. There was no passion in his statement, but mere fact backed by a wide range of authorities. He established beyond doubt that the old font at Huckley had been thrown out, on Sir Thomas’s instigation, twenty years ago, to make room for a new one of Bath stone adorned with Limoges enamels; and that it had lain ever since in a corner of the sexton’s shed. He proved, with learned men to support him, that there was only one other font in all England to compare with it. So Woodhouse bought it and presented it to a grateful South Kensington which said it would see the earth still flatter before it returned the treasure to purblind Huckley. Bishops by the benchful and most of the Royal Academy, not to mention ‘Margaritas ante Porcos’, wrote fervently to the papers. Punch based a political cartoon on it; the Times a third leader, ‘The Lust of Newness’; and the Spectator a scholarly and delightful middle, ‘Village Haussmania’. The vast amused outside world said in all its tongues and types: ‘Of course! This is just what Huckley would do!’ And neither Sir Thomas nor the Rector nor the sexton nor any one else wrote to deny it.

  ‘You see,’ said Ollyett, ‘this is much more of a blow to Huckley than it looks – because every word of it’s true. Your Gubby dance was inspiration, I admit, but it hadn’t its roots in—’

  ‘Two hemispheres and four continents so far,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Its roots in the hearts of Huckley was what I was going to say. Why don’t you ever come down and look at the place? You’ve never seen it since we were stopped there.’

  ‘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 ear-shot 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.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’ said Woodhouse.

  ‘There’s
nothin’ we can trace ’ome to ’im in so many words, but we think he might ’ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard to that votin’ business—’

  ‘Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!’ the sexton roared, ‘or you’ll ’ave me cuttin’ my throat at cock-crow. ’Ere’s another parcel of fun-makers!’

  A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men and women immediately descended. We went out to look. They bore rolled banners, a reading-desk in three pieces, and, I specially noticed, a collapsible harmonium, such as is used on ships at sea.

  ‘Salvation Army?’ I said, though I saw no uniforms.

  Two of them unfurled a banner between poles which bore the legend: ‘The Earth is flat.’ Woodhouse and I turned to Bat. He shook his head. ‘No, no! Not me … If I had only seen their costumes in advance!’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Ollyett. ‘It’s the genuine Society!’

  The company advanced on the green with the precision of people well broke to these movements. Scene-shifters could not have been quicker with the three-piece rostrum, nor stewards with the harmonium. Almost before its cross-legs had been kicked into their catches, certainly before the tourists by the lodge-gates had begun to move over, a woman sat down to it and struck up a hymn:

  Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,

  Spread ther light from shore to shore,

  God hath given man a dwelling

  Flat and flat for evermore.

  When ther Primal Dark retreated,

  When ther deeps were undesigned,

  He with rule and level meted

  Habitation for mankind!

  I saw sick envy on Bat’s face. ‘Curse Nature,’ he muttered. ‘She gets ahead of you every time. To think I forgot hymns and a harmonium!’

  Then came the chorus:

  Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,

  Spread ther light from shore to shore –

  Oh, be faithful! Oh, be truthful!

  Earth is flat for evermore.

  They sang several verses with the fervour of Christians awaiting their lions. Then there were growlings in the air. The sexton, embraced by the landlord, two-stepped out of the pub-door. Each was trying to outroar the other. ‘Apologising in advarnce for what he says,’ the landlord shouted: ‘You’d better go away’ (here the sexton began to speak words). ‘This isn’t the time nor yet the place for – for any more o’ this chat.’

  The crowd thickened. I saw the village police-sergeant come out of his cottage buckling his belt.

  ‘But surely,’ said the woman at the harmonium, ‘there must be some mistake. We are not suffragettes.’

  ‘Damn it! They’d be a change,’ cried the sexton. ‘You get out of this! Don’t talk! I can’t stand it for one! Get right out, or we’ll font you!’

  The crowd which was being recruited from every house in sight echoed the invitation. The sergeant pushed forward. A man beside the reading-desk said: ‘But surely we are among dear friends and sympathisers. Listen to me for a moment.’

  It was the moment that a passing char-à-banc chose to strike into The Song. The effect was instantaneous. Bat, Ollyett, and I, who by divers roads have learned the psychology of crowds, retreated towards the tavern door. Woodhouse, the newspaper proprietor, anxious, I presume, to keep touch with the public, dived into the thick of it. Every one else told the Society to go away at once. When the lady at the harmonium (I began to understand why it is sometimes necessary to kill women) pointed at the stencilled park pillars and called them ‘the cromlechs of our common faith’, there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rearguard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across the green towards Woodhouse, who was talking to the police-sergeant near the park-gates. We were not twenty yards from him when we saw Sir Thomas Ingell emerge from the lodge and rush furiously at Woodhouse with an uplifted stick, at the same time shrieking: ‘I’ll teach you to laugh, you—’ but Ollyett has the record of the language. By the time we reached them, Sir Thomas was on the ground; Woodhouse, very white, held the walking-stick and was saying to the sergeant:

  ‘I give this person in charge for assault.’

  ‘But, good Lord!’ said the sergeant, whiter than Woodhouse. ‘It’s Sir Thomas.’

  ‘Whoever it is, it isn’t fit to be at large,’ said Woodhouse. The crowd suspecting something wrong began to reassemble, and all the English horror of a row in public moved us, headed by the sergeant, inside the lodge. We shut both park-gates and lodge-door.

  ‘You saw the assault, sergeant,’ Woodhouse went on. ‘You can testify I used no more force than was necessary to protect myself. You can testify that I have not even damaged this person’s property. (Here! take your stick, you!) You heard the filthy language he used.’

  ‘I – I can’t say I did,’ the sergeant stammered.

  ‘Oh, but we did!’ said Ollyett, and repeated it, to the apron-veiled horror of the lodge-keeper’s wife.

  Sir Thomas on a hard kitchen chair began to talk. He said he had ‘stood enough of being photographed like a wild beast’, and expressed loud regret that he had not killed ‘that man’, who was ‘conspiring with the sergeant to laugh at him.’

  ‘’Ad you ever seen ’im before, Sir Thomas?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘No! But it’s time an example was made here. I’ve never seen the sweep in my life.’

  I think it was Bat Masquerier’s magnetic eye that recalled the past to him, for his face changed and his jaw dropped. ‘But I have!’ he groaned. ‘I remember now.’

  Here a writhing man entered by the back door. He was, he said, the village solicitor. I do not assert that he licked Woodhouse’s boots, but we should have respected him more if he had and been done with it. His notion was that the matter could be accommodated, arranged and compromised for gold, and yet more gold. The sergeant thought so too. Woodhouse undeceived them both. To the sergeant he said, ‘Will you or will you not enter the charge?’ To the village solicitor he gave the name of his lawyers, at which the man wrung his hands and cried, ‘Oh, Sir T., Sir T.!’ in a miserable falsetto, for it was a Bat Masquerier of a firm. They conferred together in tragic whispers.

  ‘I don’t dive after Dickens,’ said Ollyett to Bat and me by the window, ‘but every time I get into a row I notice the police-court always fills up with his characters.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that too,’ said Bat. ‘But the odd thing is you mustn’t give the public straight Dickens – not in My business. I wonder why that is.’

  Then Sir Thomas got his second wind and cursed the day that he, or it may have been we, were born. I feared that though he was a Radical he might apologise and, since he was an M.P., might lie his way out of the difficulty. But he was utterly and truthfully beside himself. He asked foolish questions – such as what we were doing in the village at all, and how much blackmail Woodhouse expected to make out of him. But neither Woodhouse nor the sergeant nor the writhing solicitor listened. The upshot of their talk, in the chimney-corner, was that Sir Thomas stood engaged to appear next Monday before his brother magistrates on charges of assault, disorderly conduct, and language calculated, etc. Ollyett was specially careful about the language.

  Then we left. The village looked very pretty in the late light – pretty and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.

  ‘You’ll turn up on Monday, I hope,’ said Woodhouse, when we reached town. That was his only allusion to the affair.

  So we turned up – through a world still singing that the Earth was flat – at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large Corn Exchange and the small Jubilee memorial. We had some difficulty in getting seats in the
court. Woodhouse’s imported London lawyer was a man of commanding personality, with a voice trained to convey blasting imputations by tone. When the case was called, he rose and stated his client’s intention not to proceed with the charge. His client, he went on to say, had not entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances could not have entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of public charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the part of Sir Thomas’s estate. At the same time, no one acknowledged more sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had been made by those entitled to make them. But, as a matter of fact – here he became the man of the world colloguing with his equals – certain – er – details had come to his client’s knowledge since the lamentable outburst, which … He shrugged his shoulders. Nothing was served by going into them, but he ventured to say that, had those painful circumstances only been known earlier, his client would – again ‘of course’ – never have dreamed— A gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked at Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes. Frankly, as they could see, it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with this – er – unfortunate affair. He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw the charge in toto, and at the same time to express his client’s deepest sympathy with all who had been in any way distressed, as his client had been, by the fact and the publicity of proceedings which he could, of course, again assure them that his client would never have dreamed of instituting if, as he hoped he had made plain, certain facts had been before his client at the time when … But he had said enough. For his fee it seemed to me that he had.