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Filmer
H.G. Wells
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
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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
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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.
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