Twelve Stories and a Dream | Page 9

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