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TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM

BY H. G. WELLS


CONTENTS

1. Filmer

2. The Magic Shop

3. The Valley of Spiders

4. The Truth About Pyecraft

5. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland

6. The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost

7. Jimmy Goggles the God

8. The New Accelerator

9. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation

10. The Stolen Body

11. Mr. Brisher's Treasure

12. Miss Winchelsea's Heart

13. A Dream of Armageddon




1. FILMER

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.

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