Twelve Stories and a Dream Read Free Page 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