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.

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.