Twelve Stories and a Dream (3 page)

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.

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once
or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic
hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket
trick, packs of cards that LOOKED all right, and all that sort of
thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without
warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so
conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in. I
had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth—a modest-sized
frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where
the chicks run about just out of patent incubators, but there it was
sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the
corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and
a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its
position; but here it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of
Gip's pointing finger made a noise upon the glass.