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.