Twelve Stories and a Dream (2 page)

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.