‘Thank you!’ ’Dal answered, and in that broken tone one heard the last fetter riveted.  ’Good evening, boys!  I’ve just come from—­now—­where the dooce was it I have come from?’ She turned to the impassive files of the Gubby dancers, and went on:  ’Ah, so good of you to remind me, you dear, bun-faced things.  I’ve just come from the village—­The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.’

She swept into that song with the full orchestra.  It devastated the habitable earth for the next six months.  Imagine, then, what its rage and pulse must have been at the incandescent hour of its birth!  She only gave the chorus once.  At the end of the second verse, ’Are you with me, boys?’ she cried, and the house tore it clean away from her—­’Earth was flat—­Earth was flat.  Flat as my hat—­Flatter than that’—­drowning all but the bassoons and double-basses that marked the word.

‘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.’