The Motion Is Carried
動議は可決された
The plaque returned from the engraver on a Wednesday, wrapped in brown paper and .
A ceremony was proposed, then a vote on the ceremony, then, this being Little Wibbling, a vote on the vote.
Mr Thorne, who had never knowingly missed a chance to address a seated audience, rose to move that the be "an occasion worthy of the town."
What followed was the finest speech of his life, which is to say the longest.
"Are we not a town of history?" he demanded.
"Are we not a people of memory? Are we not the guardians of everything our forebears held dear?"
The questions were, of course, entirely , requiring no answer and receiving, from a bewildered room, none.
"I say to you," Thorne thundered, discovering within himself reserves of he had never previously troubled to use, "that this is not merely a bench."
"It is a testament, a monument, a beacon."
The rolled out of him with such momentum that several members found themselves nodding before they had understood a word.
"Shall we be timid? Shall we be small? Shall we, of all the towns in the county, be the one that does things by halves?"
It was noticed, though not aloud, that doing things by halves was the single activity at which the committee genuinely excelled.
But rhetoric, like damp, seeps where reason cannot reach, and the room began, unmistakably, to warm.
"A grand !" someone called, and the phrase caught like dry gorse.
Mrs Crumb, who had come intending to oppose any expense whatsoever, found herself, to her considerable surprise, applauding.
Mr Binks, that fortress of scepticism, felt the ancient, pull of belonging to a crowd that agreed with itself.
"The motion," announced Miss Featherstone, sensing the tide and wisely declining to swim against it, "is that we hold a grand on the green, with refreshments."
"The word 'refreshments'," she added drily, "having been inserted at the vociferous insistence of the entire room."
Hands shot up with a unanimity the committee had not achieved in living memory.
"The motion," she declared, "is carried."
There is, it must be said, a particular in a vote carried unanimously, a warm and utterly false sense that one has, at last, been proven right.
The committee basked in it, each member privately taking credit for a harmony none of them had actually created.
Only Deirdre, clutching her minute book, felt the floor tilt beneath the celebration.
For she alone had seen the plaque unwrapped, and she alone had read, engraved in brass and quite beyond correction, the fatal words.
The engraver, working faithfully from the minutes she herself had forged, had reproduced her one small slip with flawless, gleaming permanence.
There, for the town and all , the bench was dedicated not to Alfred Albert Pockle, but to ALFRED ALBERT PICKLE.
It was, Deirdre thought numbly, a truly magnificent piece of engraving.
The town had voted, with one triumphant voice, to unveil in public the very mistake it had spent two months at war to avoid, and the motion, God help them all, had been carried.