Twelve Stories and a Dream | Page 7

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