The Council of Seven

by J. C. Snaith

The Lord Bishop of Blackhampton was in the middle of his prayer when the noble illumination which the prelate had referred to as a light in a great darkness began to fizzle. By the time the prayer was at an end the light had gone out.

A feeling of anticlimax smote the gathering when Sir Augustus Bimley rose to address it. Endor Must Go had been taken at its word. The delegates to the Charwoman’s Conference felt a sense of desolation, which the fervent language they now heard could not remove. Moreover, Britain’s Best, etc., was fairly under way, his eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, when suddenly there happened a strange thing.

The U. P. masterpiece in sky signs had not been merely snuffed out; it had been eclipsed. But in a literal sense it was now outshone. From above the City Hall in gigantic letters there flamed suddenly forth across Market Square the amazing legend:

JOHN ENDOR IS JANNOCK

The effect was immediate; and it was dramatic. It broke up the meeting. Indignation, moreover, ran so high that it came within an ace of producing a riot in the heart of the city. The friends of the U. P. candidate so deeply resented having such an important piece of their ordnance stolen and used against them, that some of the more turbulent spirits needed persuasion from the police to return quietly to their homes.

Next day the Blackhampton Mercury and other U. P. journals sternly demanded a public inquiry into the whole affair. None was needed really, for everybody knew the cause. All over the City it was said that “the Old Man had got at” the electricians, the chief constable and the city engineer. In the statelier words of the Planet newspaper, “Such an episode reflected the deepest discredit upon the city of Blackhampton.” All the same, it was a coup. The enemy’s Long Tom had been audaciously taken from under its nose. It was now being used with deadly effect by the other side.

An attempt was made to bring to book the culprit-in-chief, but it was not successful. Such a bird was too old to be caught napping. And for some mysterious reason the efforts that were made to repair the mischief fared no better. In spite of every precaution, the electric current of “Endor Must Go” failed night after night, while neither the British climate nor untoward circumstance was allowed to interfere with the opposition sky sign “John Endor is Jannock.”

This sinister fact brought woe to the camp of Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim. The moral effect was considerable; the whole city was kept laughing. It was just the sort of thing, said the U. P. agent, that was likely to lose the election. In the meantime, the comedy of the Firework Fizzle was worked for all it was worth by its ingenious author. At every public meeting, in alluding to it, Sir Munt was able to make new points, while the original devisers of the stunt waxed more furious. All kinds of analogies, humorously damaging, were drawn from this affair. Soon all the world began to see that every audacious stroke of badinage was one nail the more in the enemy’s coffin.

Presently a whisper arose that the greatest and most up-to-date of all Stunt elections was going to end, like the wonderful sky sign, in a fizzle. Certainly that fizzle had grown symbolical. The U. P. was in danger of being hoist with its own weapons. Even the other side—for generations Blackhampton had been notoriously a “sporting” city—did not try to minimize the humor and the significance of the case. At the end of a week of nightly fiascos, while John Endor Is Jannock seemed to wax ever brighter in the heavens and its vis-à-vis more dismally waned, the sportsmen of Blackhampton—even the dogs were held to be sportsmen in Blackhampton—took a continual delight in the affair. Sir Munt had surpassed himself. He looked like winning the election off his own bat.

Blackhampton grew prouder than ever of its Old Man. He had an amazing faculty of “getting right home.” And there were other shots in his locker. The U. P. airships, hovering proudly above Market Square, grew subject to mysterious deflations. But the greatest coup of all, the Old Man’s masterstroke, was the “running in” of Aunt Mittie, that voluble and truculent lady, on a charge of brawling, and her admonition from the bench of the City Hall.