“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.
The Magic Shop
I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that LOOKED all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in. I had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth — a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just out of patent incubators, but there it was sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position; but here it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of Gip’s pointing finger made a noise upon the glass.
“If I was rich,” said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing Egg, “I’d buy myself that. And that” — which was The Crying Baby, Very Human — and that,” which was a mystery, and called, so a neat card asserted, “Buy One and Astonish Your Friends.”
“Anything,” said Gip, “will disappear under one of those cones. I have read about it in a book.
“And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny —, only they’ve put it this way up so’s we can’t see how it’s done.”
Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother’s breeding, and he did not propose to enter the shop or worry in any way; only, you know, quite unconsciously he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear.
“That,” he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle.
“If you had that?” I said; at which promising inquiry he looked up with a sudden radiance.
“I could show it to Jessie,” he said, thoughtful as ever of others.
“It’s less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles,” I said, and laid my hand on the door-handle.
Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we came into the shop.
It was no common shop this; it was a magic shop, and all the prancing precedence Gip would have taken in the matter of mere toys was wanting. He left the burthen of the conversation to me.
It was a little, narrow shop, not very well lit, and the door-bell pinged again with a plaintive note as we closed it behind us. For a moment or so we were alone and could glance about us. There was a tiger in papier-mache on the glass case that covered the low counter — a grave, kind-eyed tiger that waggled his head in a methodical manner; there were several