The Great Bench Schism
ベンチ大分裂
What had begun as a disagreement about a plaque had, by the third week, escalated into something the local newspaper insisted on calling the Great Bench .
This was, of course, a wild , though not, it must be admitted, an entirely unwelcome one.
Little Wibbling had not enjoyed a proper scandal since the church roof fund vanished into somebody's conservatory, and the town fell upon this one like starving gulls upon a chip.
Overnight, the green became a battlefield, the bench its throne, and the two rival camps its warring dynasties.
On one side stood the Alfredians, led by Mrs Crumb, who spoke of sentiment, memory, and the sacred wishes of the departed.
On the other massed the Albertines, rallied by Mr Binks, who spoke of accuracy, precedent, and the awful that opens whenever a committee bends the truth.
Between them, like a small brass Switzerland, sat the plaque, still blank.
Mr Thorne, sensing an opportunity for , proposed a third option: that the bench bear his own name, for services rendered.
When pressed on the nature of these services, he cited long residence, which was true, and tireless work, which was a fiction of truly heroic proportions.
Posters appeared in the post office window overnight, as though the town were electing a government rather than labelling furniture.
"A BENCH DIVIDED CANNOT STAND," proclaimed one, ignoring the fact that the bench in question stood perfectly well and had cost forty pounds.
The vicar, who had hoped to remain , made the fatal error of sitting on the bench to eat his sandwich, and was accused by both sides of taking a position.
Miss Featherstone watched the town tear itself apart over a slab of wood with the weary air of a woman who had seen it all before, because she had.
"It is only a bench," she reminded the committee, and was met with the sort of silence that greets a heretic.
To the townsfolk, it had ceased some time ago to be a bench at all.
It had become a symbol, a cause, a hill upon which reputations were prepared, if necessary, to die.
The baker refused to serve the butcher; the butcher retaliated by questioning the baker's sourdough.
Old friendships, painstakingly built over decades of mild disapproval, dissolved in a single afternoon.
Mrs Crumb declared that she would sooner see the bench sink into the earth than surrender a single letter of Alfred.
Mr Binks announced, with the of a man renouncing a throne, that accuracy was a hill worth dying on.
Neither of them, it should be noted, had ever exchanged more than a nod with the late Mr Pockle while he lived.
The dead man, who in life could not fill a room, now commanded an entire town from beyond the grave.
Journalists from the county paper arrived, sniffing the delicious scent of grown adults behaving like schoolchildren.
A photograph appeared beneath the headline "SPLINTERS OF WAR," featuring the bench looking, if anything, faintly embarrassed.
Miss Featherstone read the article twice, sighed once, and reached for the committee's constitution.
If the town would not see reason, she reflected, then it must be made to procedure, which was infinitely worse.
"We shall," she announced at the next meeting, "resolve this properly, by the rules."
And with those five terrible words, the Great Bench entered a phase from which no participant would emerge with dignity .