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