by H. G. Wells
Produced by Aaron Cannon, and Stephanie Johnson
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM
By H. G. Wells
CONTENTS
1. Filmer
2. The Magic Shop
3. The Valley of Spiders
4. The Truth About Pyecraft
5. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
6. The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost
7. Jimmy Goggles the God
8. The New Accelerator
9. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
10. The Stolen Body
11. Mr. Brisher's Treasure
12. Miss Winchelsea's Heart
13. A Dream of Armageddon
1. FILMER
In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men--thisman a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorousintellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorableinjustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands,one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as thediscoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer ofsteam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. And surely of all honourednames none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's,the timid, intellectual creature who solved the problem over which theworld had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations,the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare andwell-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never has thatrecurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face ofthe greatness of his science found such an amazing exemplification.Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure--Filmersattract no Boswells--but the essential facts and the concluding sceneare clear enough, and there are letters, and notes, and casual allusionsto piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes, puttingthis thing with that, of Filmer's life and death.
The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is a documentin which he applies for admission as a paid student in physics to theGovernment laboratories at South Kensington, and therein he describeshimself as the son of a "military bootmaker" ("cobbler" in the vulgartongue) of Dover, and lists his various examination proofs of a highproficiency in chemistry and mathematics. With a certain want of dignityhe seeks to enhance these attainments by a profession of poverty anddisadvantages, and he writes of the laboratory as the "gaol" of hisambitions, a slip which reinforces his claim to have devoted himselfexclusively to the exact sciences. The document is endorsed in a mannerthat shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted opportunity; but untilquite recently no traces of his success in the Government institutioncould be found.
It has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zealfor research, Filmer, before he had held this scholarship a year, wastempted, by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate income,to abandon it in order to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour computersemployed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious conduct of thoseextensive researches of his in solar physics--researches which are stilla matter of perplexity to astronomers. Afterwards, for the space ofseven years, save for the pass lists of the London University, in whichhe is seen to climb slowly to a double first class B.Sc., in mathematicsand chemistry, there is no evidence of how Filmer passed his life. Noone knows how or where he lived, though it seems highly probable that hecontinued to support himself by teaching while he prosecuted the studiesnecessary for this distinction. And then, oddly enough, one finds himmentioned in the correspondence of Arthur Hicks, the poet.
"You remember Filmer," Hicks writes to his friend Vance; "well, HEhasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the nasty chin--howCAN a man contrive to be always three days from shaving?--and a sort offurtive air of being engaged in sneaking in front of one; even hiscoat and that frayed collar of his show no further signs of the passingyears. He was writing in the library and I sat down beside him in thename of God's charity, whereupon he deliberately insulted me by coveringup his memoranda. It seems he has some brilliant research on hand thathe suspects me of all people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--ofstealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University--he wentthrough them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I mightinterrupt him before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking hisD.Sc. as one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I wasdoing--with a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spreadnervously, positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid theprecious idea--his one hopeful idea.
"'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach in it,Hicks?'
"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding, andI thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence Ialso might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction..."
A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer inor near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipatinga provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him islecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts--hehad become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory--and atthat time, it is now known, he was a member of the AeronauticalSociety, albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body,preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without externalassistance. And within two years of that paper before the Society ofArts he was hastily taking out a number of patents and proclaiming invarious undignified ways the completion of the divergent inquiries whichmade his flying machine possible. The first definite statement to thateffect appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a manwho lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after his longlaborious secret patience seems to have been due to a needless panic,Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack, having made anannouncement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of hisidea.
Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one. Beforehis time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines, andhad developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus lighter thanair, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent, but floatinghelplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the other, flyingmachines that flew only in theory--vast flat structures heavier thanair, propelled and kept up by heavy engines and for the most partsmashing at the first descent. But, neglecting the fact that theinevitable final collapse rendered them impossible, the weight of theflying machines gave them this theoretical advantage, that they couldgo through the air against a wind, a necessary condition if aerialnavigation was to have any practical value. It is Filmer's particularmerit that he perceived the way in which the contrasted and hithertoincompatible merits of balloon and heavy flying machine might becombined in one apparatus, which should be at choice either heavier orlighter than air. He took hints from the contractile bladders of fishand the pneumatic cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement ofcontractile and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded couldlift the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted by thecomplicated "musculature" he wove about them, were withdrawn almostcompletely into the frame; and he built the large framework which theseballoons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes, the air in which, by aningenious contrivance, was automatically pumped out as the apparatusfell, and which then remained exhausted so long as the aeronaut desired.There were no wings or propellers to his machine, such as there had beento all previous aeroplanes, and the only engine required was the compactand powerful little appliance needed to contract the balloons. Heperceived that such an apparatus as he had devised might rise with frameexhausted and balloons expanded to a considerable height, mightthen contract its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by anadjustmen
t of its weights slide down the air in any desired direction.As it fell it would accumulate velocity and at the same time loseweight, and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could be utilisedby means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in the air againas the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the structuralconception of all successful flying machines, needed, however, a vastamount of toil upon its details before it could actually berealised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed to tell thenumerous interviewers who crowded upon him in the heyday of hisfame--"ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave." His particular difficulty wasthe elastic lining of the contractile balloon. He found he needed a newsubstance, and in the discovery and manufacture of that new substance hehad, as he never failed to impress upon the interviewers, "performeda far more arduous work than even in the actual achievement of myseemingly greater discovery."
But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard uponFilmer's proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly five yearselapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber factory--heseems to have been entirely dependent on his small income from thissource--making misdirected attempts to assure a quite indifferentpublic that he really HAD invented what he had invented. He occupiedthe greater part of his leisure in the composition of letters to thescientific and daily press, and so forth, stating precisely the netresult of his contrivances, and demanding financial aid. That alonewould have sufficed for the suppression of his letters. He spent suchholidays as he could arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with thedoor-keepers of leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted forinspiring hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attemptedto induce the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains aconfidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs."The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General inhis bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japaneseto secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side ofwarfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.
And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for hiscontractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves of a newoil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial model of hisinvention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment, desisted from allfurther writing, and, with a certain secrecy that seems to have been aninseparable characteristic of all his proceedings, set to work uponthe apparatus. He seems to have directed the making of its parts andcollected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but its final puttingtogether was done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not make the affairlarge enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely ingenious use ofwhat were then called the Marconi rays to control its flight. The firstflight of this first practicable flying machine took place over somefields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed andcontrolled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.
The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success. Theapparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thencevery nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again,circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind the BurfordBridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off histricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced perhapstwenty yards towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strangegesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint. Every one could thenrecall the ghastliness of his features and all the evidences of extremeexcitement they had observed throughout the trial, things they mightotherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn he had an unaccountablegust of hysterical weeping.
Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those forthe most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor saw the ascent butnot the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical apparatuson Filmer's tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two members ofthe Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an unofficialspirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders and two ladycyclists seem almost to complete the list of educated people. There weretwo reporters present, one representing a Folkestone paper and theother being a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whoseexpenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement--andnow quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement may beobtained--had paid. The latter was one of those writers who can throwa convincing air of unreality over the most credible events, and hishalf-facetious account of the affair appeared in the magazine page ofa popular journal. But, happily for Filmer, this person's colloquialmethods were more convincing. He went to offer some further screed uponthe subject to Banghurst, the proprietor of the New Paper, and one ofthe ablest and most unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurstinstantly seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes fromthe narrative, no doubt very doubtfully remunerated, and Banghurst,Banghurst himself, double chin, grey twill suit, abdomen, voice,gestures and all, appears at Dymchurch, following his large, unrivalledjournalistic nose. He had seen the whole thing at a glance, just what itwas and what it might be.
At his touch, as it were, Filmer's long-pent investigations explodedinto fame. He instantly and most magnificently was a Boom. One turnsover the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite incredulousrecognition of how swift and flaming the boom of those days could be.The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in flying, state bya most effective silence that men never would, could or should fly. InAugust flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes and aerial tacticsand the Japanese Government and Filmer and again flying, shoulderedthe war in Yunnan and the gold mines of Upper Greenland off the leadingpage. And Banghurst had given ten thousand pounds, and, further,Banghurst was giving five thousand pounds, and Banghurst had devoted hiswell-known, magnificent (but hitherto sterile) private laboratories andseveral acres of land near his private residence on the Surrey hillsto the strenuous and violent completion--Banghurst fashion--of thelife-size practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the sight ofprivileged multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst townresidence in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden partiesputting the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost,but with a final profit, the New Paper presented its readers with abeautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.
Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance comesto our aid.
"I saw Filmer in his glory," he writes, with just the touch of envynatural to his position as a poet passe. "The man is brushed and shaved,dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon Lecturer, thevery newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes, and altogetherin a state of extraordinary streakiness between an owlish great man anda scared abashed self-conscious bounder cruelly exposed. He hasn't atouch of colour in the skin of his face, his head juts forward, andthose queer little dark amber eyes of his watch furtively round him forhis fame. His clothes fit perfectly and yet sit upon him as though hehad bought them ready-made. He speaks in a mumble still, but he says,you perceive indistinctly, enormous self-assertive things, he backs intothe rear of groups by instinct if Banghurst drops the line for a minute,and when he walks across Banghurst's lawn one perceives him a little outof breath and going jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched.His is a state of tension--horrible tension. And he is the GreatestDiscoverer of This or Any Age--the Greatest Discoverer of This or AnyAge! What strikes one so forcibly about him is that he didn't somehowquite expect it ever, at any rate, not at all like this. Banghurst isabout everywhere, the energetic M.C. of his great little catch, andI swear he will have every one down on his lawn there before he hasfinished with the engine; he had bagged the prime minister yesterday,and he, bless his heart! didn't look particularly outsize, on the veryfirst occasion. Conceive it! Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, theGlory of British science! Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, boldpeeresses say in their beautiful, clear loud voices--have you noticedhow penetrating t
he great lady is becoming nowadays?--'Oh, Mr. Filmer,how DID you do it?'
"Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer. Oneimagines something in the way of that interview, 'toil ungrudginglyand unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps--I don't know--but perhaps alittle special aptitude.'"
So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the New Paper is insufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the machineswings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church appearsbelow it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer sits at hisguiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth stand aroundhim, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely in the rear. Thegrouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst, and lookingwith a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands the Lady MaryElkinghorn, still beautiful, in spite of the breath of scandal and hereight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face does not admit aperception of the camera that was in the act of snapping them all.
So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all, they arevery exterior facts. About the real interest of the business one isnecessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the time?How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present inside thatvery new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny, penny,six-penny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged by thewhole world as "the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age." He hadinvented a practicable flying machine, and every day down among theSurrey hills the life-sized model was getting ready. And when it wasready, it followed as a clear inevitable consequence of his havinginvented and made it--everybody in the world, indeed, seemed to takeit for granted; there wasn't a gap anywhere in that serried front ofanticipation--that he would proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascendwith it, and fly.
But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulnessin such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's privateconstitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is.We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been driftingabout in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a littlenote to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have thesoundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,--the idea that itwould be after all, in spite of his theoretical security, an abominablysickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing for him to flap about innothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It must have dawned uponhim quite early in the period of being the Greatest Discoverer of Thisor Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with an extensive voidbelow. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great heightor fallen down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habitof sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable fallingnightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength of thathorror there remains now not a particle of doubt.
Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier daysof research; the machine had been his end, but now things were openingout beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above there. Hewas a Discoverer and he had Discovered. But he was not a Flying Man, andit was only now that he was beginning to perceive clearly that he wasexpected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was present in his mind hegave no expression to it until the very end, and meanwhile he went toand fro from Banghurst's magnificent laboratories, and was interviewedand lionised, and wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived inan elegant flat, enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse,wholesome Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he hadbeen starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.
After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model hadfailed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance, or hehad been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop. At any rate,it suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little too steeply as thearchbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation for all the world likean archbishop in a book, and it came down in the Fulham Road withinthree yards of a 'bus horse. It stood for a second perhaps, astonishingand in its attitude astonished, then it crumpled, shivered into pieces,and the 'bus horse was incidentally killed.
Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up andstared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him. His long,white hands still gripped his useless apparatus. The archbishop followedhis skyward stare with an apprehension unbecoming in an archbishop.
Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road to relieveFilmer's tension. "My God!" he whispered, and sat down.
Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had vanished,or rushing into the house.
The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly for this.Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow and very carefulin his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his mind. His careover the strength and soundness of the apparatus was prodigious. Theslightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the doubtful part couldbe replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant, fumed at some of thesedelays, which, he insisted, were for the most part unnecessary.Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer in the NewPaper, and reviled it bitterly to his wife, and MacAndrew, the secondassistant, approved Filmer's wisdom. "We're not wanting a fiasco, man,"said MacAndrew. "He's perfectly well advised."
And whenever an opportunity arose Filmer would expound to Wilkinson andMacAndrew just exactly how every part of the flying machine was to becontrolled and worked, so that in effect they would be just as capable,and even more capable, when at last the time came, of guiding it throughthe skies.
Now I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to definejust what he was feeling, and to take a definite line in the matter ofhis ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite easily. Ifhe had had it clearly in his mind he could have done endless things. Hewould surely have found no difficulty with a specialist to demonstrate aweak heart, or something gastric or pulmonary, to stand in his way--thatis the line I am astonished he did not take,--or he might, had he beenman enough, have declared simply and finally that he did not intend todo the thing. But the fact is, though the dread was hugely present inhis mind, the thing was by no means sharp and clear. I fancy that allthrough this period he kept telling himself that when the occasion camehe would find himself equal to it. He was like a man just gripped by agreat illness, who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects tobe better presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of the machine,and let the assumption that he was going to fly it take root andflourish exceedingly about him. He even accepted anticipatorycompliments on his courage. And, barring this secret squeamishness,there can be no doubt he found all the praise and distinction and fusshe got a delightful and even intoxicating draught.
The Lady Mary Elkinghorn made things a little more complicated for him.
How THAT began was a subject of inexhaustible speculation to Hicks.Probably in the beginning she was just a little "nice" to him with thatimpartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to her eyes, standingout conspicuously as he did ruling his monster in the upper air, he hada distinction that Hicks was not disposed to find. And somehow they musthave had a moment of sufficient isolation, and the great Discoverer amoment of sufficient courage for something just a little personal tobe mumbled or blurted. However it began, there is no doubt that it didbegin, and presently became quite perceptible to a world accustomedto find in the proceedings of the Lady Mary Elkinghorn a matter ofentertainment. It complicated things, because the state of love insuch a virgin mind as Filmer's would brace his resolution, if notsufficiently, at any rate considerably towards facing a danger hefeared, and hampered him in such attempts at evasion as would otherwisebe natural and congenial.
It remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt forFilmer and just what she thought of him. At thirty-eight one mayhave gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise, and theimagination still functions actively enough in creating glamours andeffecting
the impossible. He came before her eyes as a very central man,and that always counts, and he had powers, unique powers as it seemed,at any rate in the air. The performance with the model had just a touchof the quality of a potent incantation, and women have ever displayed anunreasonable disposition to imagine that when a man has powers he mustnecessarily have Power. Given so much, and what was not good in Filmer'smanner and appearance became an added merit. He was modest, he hateddisplay, but given an occasion where TRUE qualities are needed,then--then one would see!
The late Mrs. Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her opinionthat Filmer, all things considered, was rather a "grub." "He's certainlynot a sort of man I have ever met before," said the Lady Mary, with aquite unruffled serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a swift, imperceptibleglance at that serenity, decided that so far as saying anything to LadyMary went, she had done as much as could be expected of her. But shesaid a great deal to other people.
And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day dawned,the great day, when Banghurst had promised his public--the world infact--that flying should be finally attained and overcome. Filmer saw itdawn, watched even in the darkness before it dawned, watched its starsfade and the grey and pearly pinks give place at last to the clear bluesky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of hisbedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's Tudor house. And as thestars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grewinto being out of the amorphous dark, he must have seen more and moredistinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near thegreen pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privilegedspectators, the raw, new fencing of the enclosure, the sheds andworkshops, the Venetian masts and fluttering flags that Banghurst hadconsidered essential, black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidstall these things a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange andterrible portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that mustsurely spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men,but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but anarrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the smallhours--for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editorwho, before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if notbefore, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house intothe park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels andthe fallow deer. MacAndrew, who was also an early riser, met him nearthe machine, and they went and had a look at it together.
It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgencyof Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number heseems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into theshrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghornthere. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her oldschool friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never met thelatter lady before, he joined them and walked beside them for some time.There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's brilliance. Thesituation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not masterits difficulty. "He struck me," she said afterwards with a luminousself-contradiction, "as a very unhappy person who had something to say,and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one tohelp him when one didn't know what it was?"
At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park werecrammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along the beltwhich circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over thelawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park, in a series ofbrilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmerwalked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely andconspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president of theAeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady MaryElkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst was largeand copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were filled in byHickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked betweenthem saying not a word except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs.Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation ofthe Dean with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten yearsof social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the LadyMary watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world'sdisillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort of man she had nevermet before.
There was some cheering as the central party came into view of theenclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hastyglance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies behindthem, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated since thehouse had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse, and he cut inon Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.
"I say, Banghurst," he said, and stopped.
"Yes," said Banghurst.
"I wish--" He moistened his lips. "I'm not feeling well."
Banghurst stopped dead. "Eh?" he shouted.
"A queer feeling." Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was immovable."I don't know. I may be better in a minute. If not--perhaps...MacAndrew--"
"You're not feeling WELL?" said Banghurst, and stared at his white face.
"My dear!" he said, as Mrs. Banghurst came up with them, "Filmer says heisn't feeling WELL."
"A little queer," exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary's eyes. "Itmay pass off--"
There was a pause.
It came to Filmer that he was the most isolated person in the world.
"In any case," said Banghurst, "the ascent must be made. Perhaps if youwere to sit down somewhere for a moment--"
"It's the crowd, I think," said Filmer.
There was a second pause. Banghurst's eye rested in scrutiny on Filmer,and then swept the sample of public in the enclosure.
"It's unfortunate," said Sir Theodore Hickle; "but still--I suppose--Yourassistants--Of course, if you feel out of condition and disinclined--"
"I don't think Mr. Filmer would permit THAT for a moment," said LadyMary.
"But if Mr. Filmer's nerve is run--It might even be dangerous for him toattempt--" Hickle coughed.
"It's just because it's dangerous," began the Lady Mary, and felt shehad made her point of view and Filmer's plain enough.
Conflicting motives struggled for Filmer.
"I feel I ought to go up," he said, regarding the ground. He looked upand met the Lady Mary's eyes. "I want to go up," he said, and smiledwhitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. "If I could just sit downsomewhere for a moment out of the crowd and sun--"
Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. "Come into mylittle room in the green pavilion," he said. "It's quite cool there." Hetook Filmer by the arm.
Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. "I shall beall right in five minutes," he said. "I'm tremendously sorry--"
The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. "I couldn't think--" he said toHickle, and obeyed the compulsion of Banghurst's pull.
The rest remained watching the two recede.
"He is so fragile," said the Lady Mary.
"He's certainly a highly nervous type," said the Dean, whose weaknessit was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormousfamilies, as "neurotic."
"Of course," said Hickle, "it isn't absolutely necessary for him to goup because he has invented--"
"How COULD he avoid it?" asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadowof scorn.
"It's certainly most unfortunate if he's going to be ill now," said Mrs.Banghurst a little severely.
"He's not going to be ill," said the Lady Mary, and certainly she hadmet Filmer's eye.
"YOU'LL be all right," said Banghurst, as they went towards thepavilion. "All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, youknow. You'll be--you'd get it rough, you know, if you let another man--"
"Oh, I want to go," said Filmer. "I shall be all right. As a matter offact I'm almost inclined NOW--. No! I think I'll h
ave that nip of brandyfirst."
Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an emptydecanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps fiveminutes.
The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervalsFilmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of thestands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out, andthen it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind thegrand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward with atray.
The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasantlittle room very simply furnished with green furniture and an oldbureau--for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hungwith little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But asit happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with onthe top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin withthree or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer went up and downthat room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went first towardsthe neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neatlittle red label
".22 LONG."
The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.
Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and therewere several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by alath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler opened thedoor and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says, what hadhappened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's household had guessedsomething of what was going on in Filmer's mind.
All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a manshould behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guestsfor the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though toconceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that Banghursthad been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the deceased. Thepublic in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed "like a party that hasbeen ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul in the train to London,it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying was a quite impossiblething for man. "But he might have tried it," said many, "after carryingthe thing so far."
In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke downand went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept, which musthave made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruinedhis life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew forhalf-a-crown. "I've been thinking--" said MacAndrew at the conclusion ofthe bargain, and stopped.
The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, lessconspicuous in the New Paper than in any other daily paper in the world.The rest of the world's instructors, with varying emphasis, according totheir dignity and the degree of competition between themselves and theNew Paper, proclaimed the "Entire Failure of the New Flying Machine,"and "Suicide of the Impostor." But in the district of North Surrey thereception of the news was tempered by a perception of unusual aerialphenomena.
Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument onthe exact motives of their principal's rash act.
"The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his sciencewent he was NO impostor," said MacAndrew, "and I'm prepared to give thatproposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson, so soon aswe've got the place a little more to ourselves. For I've no faith in allthis publicity for experimental trials."
And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failureof the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting withgreat amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions;and Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless ofpublic security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations andtrying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his pyjamas--hehad caught sight of the ascent when pulling up the blind of his bedroomwindow--equipped, among other things, with a film camera that wassubsequently discovered to be jammed. And Filmer was lying on thebilliard table in the green pavilion with a sheet about his body.