The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat

(1913)

Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car
were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his,
and Pallant, the M.P. Woodhouse's business was the treatment and cure of
sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's
life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it
fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and
the new start which can be given by gold injections--and genius. He was
wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there
was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny
evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London
daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial
leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of
the evening paper's common shares, and was explaining the whole art of
editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with
coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh
experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture.
Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like a crane's
than a peacock's, took no shares, but gave us all advice.

'You'll find it rather a knacker's yard,' Woodhouse was saying. 'Yes, I
know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my
papers do. I've only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff.
It'll come out all right.'

Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for
exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely
straight for half a mile ahead without even a side-lane. 'That's just
what we depend on,' said the policeman unpleasantly.

'The usual swindle,' said Woodhouse under his breath. 'What's the name
of this place?'

'Huckley,' said the policeman. 'H-u-c-k-l-e-y,' and wrote something in
his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a
grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge
shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the
rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft),
and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once
bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.

'Damn it, man, you've got your silly fist on it! Take it off!' Woodhouse
shouted.

'Ho!' said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we
had trapped them. 'That won't do you any good either,' and he wrote once
more in his note-book before he allowed us to go.

This was Woodhouse's first brush with motor law, and since I expected
no ill consequences to myself, I