There was not yet any reason to despair. A telephone-message was instantly sent to the fishermen at the port, another to the coastguards, another to the lifeboat, that a kitchen table with a cargo of ladies on it was coming rapidly down the river, and no effort must be spared to arrest its passage out to sea. But, one after the other, as the short winter afternoon waned, came discouraging messages from the coast. The flood had swept from their moorings all the fishing boats anchored at the port or drawn up on the shore above high-water mark, and a coast-guardsman had seen an unintelligible object go swiftly past the mouth of the river before the telephone-message was received. He could not distinguish what it was, for the fog out in the Channel had spread to the coastline, and it had seemed to him more like the heads and necks of four sea-serpents playing together than anything else. But when interrogated as to whether it might be the legs of a kitchen table upside down he acknowledged that the short glimpse which he obtained of it before it got lost in the fog would suit a kitchen table as well as sea-serpents. He had said sea-serpents because it was in the sea, but it was just as like the legs of a kitchen table, which had never occurred to him as possible. His missus had just such a kitchen table – but as he seemed to be diverging into domestic reminiscences, the Mayor of Tilling, who himself conducted enquiries instead of opening the whist drive at the Institute with a short speech on the sin of gambling, cut him off. It was only too clear that this imaginative naturalist had seen – too late – the kitchen table going out to sea.

The lifeboat had instantly responded to the SOS call on its services, and the great torrent of the flood having now gone by, the crew had been able to launch the boat and had set off to search the English Channel, in the blinding fog, for the table. The tide was setting west down the coast, the flood pouring out from the river mouth was discharged east, but they had gone off to row about in every direction, where the kitchen table might have been carried. Rockets had been sent up from the station in case the ladies didn’t know where they were. That, so the Mayor reflected, might conceivably show the ladies where they were, but it didn’t really enable them to get anywhere else.