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Stephanie Johnson

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