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—this
man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one
vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the
inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all
these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be
chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the
discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. And surely of
all honoured names none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as
poor Filmer’s, the timid, intellectual creature who solved the
problem over which the world had hung perplexed and a little fearful
for so many generations, the man who pressed the button that has
changed peace and warfare and well-nigh every condition of human life
and happiness. Never has that recurring wonder of the littleness of
the scientific man in the face of the greatness of his science found
such an amazing exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must
remain, profoundly obscure—Filmers attract no Boswells—but the
essential facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there
are letters, and notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole
together. And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with
that, of Filmer’s life and death.The
first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is a document
in which he applies for admission as a paid student in physics to the
Government laboratories at South Kensington, and therein he describes
himself as the son of a “military bootmaker” (“cobbler” in
the vulgar tongue) of Dover, and lists his various examination proofs
of a high proficiency in chemistry and mathematics. With a certain
want of dignity he seeks to enhance these attainments by a profession
of poverty and disadvantages, and he writes of the laboratory as the
“gaol” of his ambitions, a slip which reinforces his claim to
have devoted himself exclusively to the exact sciences. The document
is endorsed in a manner that shows Filmer was admitted to this
coveted opportunity; but until quite recently no traces of his
success in the Government institution could be found.It
has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zeal for
research, Filmer, before he had held this scholarship a year, was
tempted, 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 computers employed by a well-known Professor in
his vicarious conduct of those extensive researches of his in solar
physics—researches which are still a matter of perplexity to
astronomers. Afterwards, for the space of seven years, save for the
pass lists of the London University, in which he is seen to climb
slowly to a double first class B.Sc., in mathematics and chemistry,
there is no evidence of how Filmer passed his life. No one knows how
or where he lived, though it seems highly probable that he continued
to support himself by teaching while he prosecuted the studies
necessary for this distinction. And then, oddly enough, one finds him
mentioned in the correspondence of Arthur Hicks, the poet.
“You
remember Filmer,” Hicks writes to his friend Vance; “well, HE
hasn’t altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the nasty
chin—how CAN a man contrive to be always three days from
shaving?—and a sort of furtive air of being engaged in sneaking in
front of one; even his coat and that frayed collar of his show no
further signs of the passing years. He was writing in the library and
I sat down beside him in the name of God’s charity, whereupon he
deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems he
has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all
people—with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!—of stealing. He has
taken remarkable honours at the University—he went through them
with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt
him before he had told me all—and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as
one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing—with
a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously,
positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious
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, and
I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence
I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction...”A
curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer in
or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in
anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse
of him is lecturing on “rubber and rubber substitutes,” to the
Society of Arts—he had become manager to a great plastic-substance
manufactory—and at that time, it is now known, he was a member of
the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the
discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great
conception without external assistance. And within two years of that
paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out a number
of patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways the completion
of the divergent inquiries which made his flying machine possible.
The first definite statement to that effect appeared in a halfpenny
evening paper through the agency of a man who lodged in the same
house with Filmer. His final haste after his long laborious secret
patience seems to have been due to a needless panic, Bootle, the
notorious American scientific quack, having made an announcement that
Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of his idea.Now
what precisely was Filmer’s idea? Really a very simple one. Before
his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines,
and had developed on the one hand balloons—large apparatus lighter
than air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent, but
floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the
other, flying machines that flew only in theory—vast flat
structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines
and for the most part smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting
the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered them impossible,
the weight of the flying machines gave them this theoretical
advantage, that they could go through the air against a wind, a
necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical
value. It is Filmer’s particular merit that he perceived the way in
which the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon and
heavy flying machine might be combined in one apparatus, which should
be at choice either heavier or lighter than air. He took hints from
the contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic cavities of birds.
He devised an arrangement of contractile and absolutely closed
balloons which when expanded could lift the actual flying apparatus
with ease, and when retracted by the complicated “musculature” he
wove about them, were withdrawn almost completely into the frame; and
he built the large framework which these balloons sustained, of
hollow, rigid tubes, the air in which, by an ingenious contrivance,
was automatically pumped out as the apparatus fell, and which then
remained exhausted so long as the aeronaut desired. There were no
wings or propellers to his machine, such as there had been to all
previous aeroplanes, and the only engine required was the compact and
powerful little appliance needed to contract the balloons. He
perceived that such an apparatus as he had devised might rise with
frame exhausted and balloons expanded to a considerable height, might
then contract its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by an
adjustment of its weights slide down the air in any desired
direction. As it fell it would accumulate velocity and at the same
time lose weight, and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could
be utilised by means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in
the air again as the balloons expanded. This conception, which is
still the structural conception of all successful flying machines,
needed, however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it
could actually be realised, and such toil Filmer—as he was
accustomed to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in
the heyday of his fame—“ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave.” His
particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the contractile
balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery and
manufacture of that new substance he had, as he never failed to
impress upon the interviewers, “performed a far more arduous work
than even in the actual achievement of my seemingly greater
discovery.”But
it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard upon
Filmer’s proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly five
years elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber
factory—he seems to have been entirely dependent on his small
income from this source—making misdirected attempts to assure a
quite indifferent public that he really HAD invented what he had
invented. He occupied the greater part of his leisure in the
composition of letters to the scientific and daily press, and so
forth, stating precisely the net result of his contrivances, and
demanding financial aid. That alone would have sufficed for the
suppression of his letters. He spent such holidays as he could
arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the door-keepers of leading
London papers—he was singularly not adapted for inspiring
hall-porters with confidence—and he positively attempted to induce
the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a
confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of
Frogs. “The man’s a crank and a bounder to boot,” says the
Major-General in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open
for the Japanese to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in
this side of warfare—a priority they still to our great discomfort
retain.And
then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his
contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves of a
new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial model of
his invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment, desisted
from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy that seems to
have been an inseparable characteristic of all his proceedings, set
to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have directed the making of
its parts and collected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but its
final putting together was done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not
make the affair large enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely
ingenious use of what were then called the Marconi rays to control
its flight. The first flight of this first practicable flying machine
took place over some fields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent,
and Filmer followed and controlled its flight upon a specially
constructed motor tricycle.The
flight was, considering all things, an amazing success. The apparatus
was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge, ascended
there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence very
nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again,
circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford
Bridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off
his tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced perhaps
twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strange
gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint. Every one could then
recall the ghastliness of his features and all the evidences of
extreme excitement they had observed throughout the trial, things
they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn he had an
unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.Altogether
there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those for the
most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor saw the ascent but
not the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical
apparatus on Filmer’s tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two
members of the Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an
unofficial spirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders
and two lady cyclists seem almost to complete the list of educated
people. There were two reporters present, one representing a
Folkestone paper and the other being a fourth-class interviewer and
“symposium” journalist, whose expenses down, Filmer, anxious as
ever for adequate advertisement—and now quite realising the way in
which adequate advertisement may be obtained—had paid. The latter
was one of those writers who can throw a convincing air of unreality
over the most credible events, and his half-facetious account of the
affair appeared in the magazine page of a popular journal. But,
happily for Filmer, this person’s colloquial methods were more
convincing. He went to offer some further screed upon the subject to
Banghurst, the proprietor of the New Paper, and one of the ablest and
most unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurst instantly
seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes from the
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,
unrivalled journalistic nose. He had seen the whole thing at a
glance, just what it was and what it might be.At
his touch, as it were, Filmer’s long-pent investigations exploded
into fame. He instantly and most magnificently was a Boom. One turns
over the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite
incredulous recognition of how swift and flaming the boom of those
days could be. The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in
flying, state by a most effective silence that men never would, could
or should fly. In August flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes
and aerial tactics and the Japanese Government and Filmer and again
flying, shouldered the war in Yunnan and the gold mines of Upper
Greenland off the leading page. And Banghurst had given ten thousand
pounds, and, further, Banghurst was giving five thousand pounds, and
Banghurst had devoted his well-known, magnificent (but hitherto
sterile) private laboratories and several acres of land near his
private residence on the Surrey hills to the strenuous and violent
completion—Banghurst fashion—of the life-size practicable flying
machine. Meanwhile, in the sight of privileged multitudes in the
walled-garden of the Banghurst town residence in Fulham, Filmer was
exhibited at weekly garden parties putting the working model through
its paces. At enormous initial cost, but with a final profit, the New
Paper presented its readers with a beautiful photographic souvenir of
the first of these occasions.Here
again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance comes
to our aid.
“I
saw Filmer in his glory,” he writes, with just the touch of envy
natural to his position as a poet passe. “The man is brushed and
shaved, dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon
Lecturer, the very newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes,
and altogether in a state of extraordinary streakiness between an
owlish great man and a scared abashed self-conscious bounder cruelly
exposed. He hasn’t a touch of colour in the skin of his face, his
head juts forward, and those queer little dark amber eyes of his
watch furtively round him for his fame. His clothes fit perfectly and
yet sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made. He speaks
in a mumble still, but he says, you perceive indistinctly, enormous
self-assertive things, he backs into the 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 out of breath and going
jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched. His is a state of
tension—horrible tension. And he is the Greatest Discoverer of This
or Any Age—the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age! What strikes
one so forcibly about him is that he didn’t somehow quite expect it
ever, at any rate, not at all like this. Banghurst is about
everywhere, the energetic M.C. of his great little catch, and I swear
he will have every one down on his lawn there before he has finished
with the engine; he had bagged the prime minister yesterday, and he,
bless his heart! didn’t look particularly outsize, on the very
first occasion. Conceive it! Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the
Glory of British science! Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold
peeresses say in their beautiful, clear loud voices—have you
noticed how penetrating the 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. One imagines
something in the way of that interview, ‘toil ungrudgingly and
unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps—I don’t know—but perhaps
a little special aptitude.’”So
far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the New Paper is in
sufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the machine
swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church appears
below it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer sits at
his guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth stand
around him, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely in the
rear. The grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst,
and looking with a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands
the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, still beautiful, in spite of the breath of
scandal and her eight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face
does not admit a perception 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 are
very exterior facts. About the real interest of the business one is
necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the
time? How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present inside
that very new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny,
penny, six-penny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged
by the whole world as “the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age.”
He had invented a practicable flying machine, and every day down
among the Surrey hills the life-sized model was getting ready. And
when it was ready, it followed as a clear inevitable consequence of
his having invented and made it—everybody in the world, indeed,
seemed to take it for granted; there wasn’t a gap anywhere in that
serried front of anticipation—that he would proudly and cheerfully
get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.But
we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness in such
an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer’s private
constitution. 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
drifting about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a
little note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we
have the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,—the
idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical
security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing
for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so in the
air. It must have dawned upon him quite early in the period of being
the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision of doing this
and that with an extensive void below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth
he had looked down a great height or fallen down in some excessively
uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit of sleeping on the wrong side
had resulted in that disagreeable falling nightmare one knows, and
given him his horror; of the strength of that horror there remains
now not a particle of doubt.Apparently
he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier days of
research; the machine had been his end, but now things were opening
out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above there.
He was a Discoverer and he had Discovered. But he was not a Flying
Man, and it was only now that he was beginning to perceive clearly
that he was expected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was present
in his mind he gave no expression to it until the very end, and
meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst’s magnificent
laboratories, and was interviewed and lionised, and wore good
clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an 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 had been starved, might be
reasonably expected to enjoy.After
a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model had failed
one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer’s guidance, or he
had 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
the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation for all the
world like an archbishop in a book, and it came down in the Fulham
Road within three yards of a ‘bus horse. It stood for a second
perhaps, astonishing and 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 and stared
as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him. His long,
white hands still gripped his useless apparatus. The archbishop
followed his skyward stare with an apprehension unbecoming in an
archbishop.Then
came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road to relieve
Filmer’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
careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his
mind. His care over the strength and soundness of the apparatus was
prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the
doubtful part could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant,
fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were for the most
part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer
in the New Paper, and reviled it bitterly to his wife, and MacAndrew,
the second assistant, 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 and
MacAndrew just exactly how every part of the flying machine was to be
controlled 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 through the skies.Now
I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to define
just what he was feeling, and to take a definite line in the matter
of his ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite
easily. If he had had it clearly in his mind he could have done
endless things. He would surely have found no difficulty with a
specialist to demonstrate a weak heart, or something gastric or
pulmonary, to stand in his way—that is the line I am astonished he
did not take,—or he might, had he been man enough, have declared
simply and finally that he did not intend to do the thing. But the
fact is, though the dread was hugely present in his mind, the thing
was by no means sharp and clear. I fancy that all through this period
he kept telling himself that when the occasion came he would find
himself equal to it. He was like a man just gripped by a great
illness, who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects to be
better presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of the machine,
and let the assumption that he was going to fly it take root and
flourish exceedingly about him. He even accepted anticipatory
compliments on his courage. And, barring this secret squeamishness,
there can be no doubt he found all the praise and distinction and
fuss he 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 that impartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to her
eyes, standing out conspicuously as he did ruling his monster in the
upper air, he had a distinction that Hicks was not disposed to find.
And somehow they must have had a moment of sufficient isolation, and
the great Discoverer a moment of sufficient courage for something
just a little personal to be mumbled or blurted. However it began,
there is no doubt that it did begin, and presently became quite
perceptible to a world accustomed to find in the proceedings of the
Lady Mary Elkinghorn a matter of entertainment. It complicated
things, because the state of love in such a virgin mind as Filmer’s
would brace his resolution, if not sufficiently, at any rate
considerably towards facing a danger he feared, and hampered him in
such attempts at evasion as would otherwise be natural and congenial.It
remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt for
Filmer and just what she thought of him. At thirty-eight one may have
gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise, and the
imagination still functions actively enough in creating glamours and
effecting 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 touch of the quality of a potent incantation, and women have
ever displayed an unreasonable disposition to imagine that when a man
has powers he must necessarily have Power. Given so much, and what
was not good in Filmer’s manner and appearance became an added
merit. He was modest, he hated display, 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 opinion
that Filmer, all things considered, was rather a “grub.” “He’s
certainly not a sort of man I have ever met before,” said the Lady
Mary, with a quite unruffled serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a
swift, imperceptible glance at that serenity, decided that so far as
saying anything to Lady Mary went, she had done as much as could be
expected of her. But she said 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 in
fact—that flying should be finally attained and overcome. Filmer
saw it dawn, watched even in the darkness before it dawned, watched
its stars fade and the grey and pearly pinks give place at last to
the clear blue sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the
window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst’s Tudor
house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and
substances of things grew into being out of the amorphous dark, he
must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations
beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park,
the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing
of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts and
fluttering flags that Banghurst had considered essential, black and
limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst all these things a great
shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and terrible portent for
humanity was that shape, a beginning that must surely 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 a narrow and
personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the small
hours—for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor
editor who, before all understood compression. And about five
o’clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of
the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time with sunlight
and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer. MacAndrew, who was also
an early riser, met him near the machine, and they went and had a
look at it together.It
is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency of
Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number he
seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into
the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in
conversation with her old school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and
although Filmer had never met the latter lady before, he joined them
and walked beside them for some time. There were several silences in
spite of the Lady Mary’s brilliance. The situation was a difficult
one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. “He
struck me,” she said afterwards with a luminous self-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 to help him
when one didn’t know what it was?”At
half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park were
crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along the belt
which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over the
lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park, in a series of
brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmer
walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely and
conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president of the
Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady
Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst
was large and copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were
filled in by Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer
walked between them saying not a word except by way of unavoidable
reply. Behind, Mrs. Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and
shapely conversation of the Dean with that fluttered attention to the
ampler clergy ten years of social ascent and ascendency had not cured
in her; and the Lady Mary watched, no doubt with an entire confidence
in the world’s disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort
of man she had never met before.There
was some cheering as the central party came into view of the
enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.
They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a
hasty glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies
behind them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated
since the house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse,
and he cut in on 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
he isn’t feeling WELL.”
“A
little queer,” exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary’s eyes.
“It may 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
you were 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—Your assistants—Of course, if you feel out of condition
and disinclined—”
“I
don’t think Mr. Filmer would permit THAT for a moment,” said Lady
Mary.
“But
if Mr. Filmer’s nerve is run—It might even be dangerous for him
to attempt—” Hickle coughed.
“It’s
just because it’s dangerous,” began the Lady Mary, and felt she
had 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 up
and met the Lady Mary’s eyes. “I want to go up,” he said, and
smiled whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. “If I could
just sit down somewhere for a moment out of the crowd and sun—”Banghurst,
at least, was beginning to understand the case. “Come into my
little room in the green pavilion,” he said. “It’s quite cool
there.” He took Filmer by the arm.Filmer
turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. “I shall be all
right in five minutes,” he said. “I’m tremendously sorry—”The
Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. “I couldn’t think—” he
said to Hickle, 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 weakness it
was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormous
families, as “neurotic.”
“Of
course,” said Hickle, “it isn’t absolutely necessary for him to
go up because he has invented—”
“How
COULD he avoid it?” asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadow
of 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 had met
Filmer’s eye.
“YOU’LL
be all right,” said Banghurst, as they went towards the pavilion.
“All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, you know.
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 of
fact I’m almost inclined NOW—. No! I think I’ll have that nip
of brandy first.”Banghurst
took him into the little room and routed out an empty decanter. He
departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps five minutes.The
history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals
Filmer’s face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of the
stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out,
and then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind
the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward
with a tray.The
apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant
little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau—for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was
hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of
books. But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he
sometimes played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of
the mantelshelf was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in
it. As Filmer went up and down that room wrestling with his
intolerable dilemma he went first towards the neat little rifle
athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neat little 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 there were
several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by a
lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst’s butler opened
the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says,
what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst’s
household had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer’s
mind.All
through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man
should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact—though
to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible—that
Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the
deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed “like
a party that has been 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 impossible thing for man. “But he might have
tried it,” said many, “after carrying the thing so far.”In
the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke down
and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept, which must
have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruined
his life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew for
half-a-crown. “I’ve been thinking—” said MacAndrew at the
conclusion of the bargain, and stopped.The
next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less
conspicuous in the New Paper than in any other daily paper in the
world. The rest of the world’s instructors, with varying emphasis,
according to their dignity and the degree of competition between
themselves and the New Paper, proclaimed the “Entire Failure of the
New Flying Machine,” and “Suicide of the Impostor.” But in the
district of North Surrey the reception of the news was tempered by a
perception of unusual aerial phenomena.Overnight
Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument on the exact
motives of their principal’s rash act.
“The
man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his science
went he was NO impostor,” said MacAndrew, “and I’m prepared to
give that proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson,
so soon as we’ve got the place a little more to ourselves. For I’ve
no faith in all this publicity for experimental trials.”And
to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failure
of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting with
great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions;
and Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless
of public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations
and trying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his
pyjamas—he had caught sight of the ascent when pulling up the blind
of his bedroom window—equipped, among other things, with a film
camera that was subsequently discovered to be jammed. And Filmer was
lying on the billiard table in the green pavilion with a sheet about
his body.