A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

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Hillyard turned to him with a grin. The savage was not yet exorcised.

"Why?" he asked. "Why should I have missed one of them? It was my
business not to."

Jose Medina flung up his hands.

"I will not argue with you. We are not made of the same earth."

Hillyard's face changed to gentleness.

"Pretty nearly, my friend," he said, and he laid a hand on Jose Medina's
shoulder. "For we are good friends--such good friends that I do not
scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself."

Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed
and worked about the quays of Southern Spain. He touched the right chord
now with an unerring skill. Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the
loco Ingles! But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them--here was
an insidious flattery which no one of Jose Medina's upbringing could
possibly resist.

At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach. A
rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina's manager from Alicante beside the
boat on the sand. The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the
boat.

"We will take charge of the car," said Jose to his manager, and he
stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard. "This is my
adventure. I see it through to the end," he explained.

A mile away the felucca picked them up. Hillyard rolled himself up in a
rug in the bows of the boat. He looked up to the stars tramping the sky
above his head.

"And gentlemen in England now a-bed."

Drowsily he muttered the immemorial line, and turning on his side slept
as only the tired men who know they have done their work can sleep. He
was roused in broad daylight. The felucca was lying motionless upon the
water; no land was anywhere in sight; but above the felucca towered the
tall side of the steam yacht _Dragonfly_.

Fairbairn was waiting at the head of the ladder. The cases were carried
into the saloon and opened. The top cases were full of documents and
letters, some private, most of them political.

"These are for the pundits," said Hillyard. He put them back again, and
turned to the last case. In them were a number of small glass tubes,
neatly packed in cardboard boxes with compartments lined with cotton
wool.

"This is our affair, Fairbairn," he said. He took one out, and a look of
perplexity crept over his face. The tube was empty. He tried another and
another, and then another; every one of the tubes was empty.

"Now what in the world do you make of that?" he asked.

The tubes had yet to be filled and there was no hint of what they were
to be filled with.

"What I am wondering about is why they troubled to send the tubes at
all?" said Fairbairn slowly. "There's some reason, of course, something
perhaps in the make of the glass."

He held one of the tubes up to the light. There was nothing to
distinguish it from any one of the tubes in which small tabloids are
sold by chemists.

Hillyard got out of his bureau the letter in which these tubes were
mentioned.

"'They have been successful in France,'" he said, quoting from the
letter. "The scientists may be able to make something of them in Paris.
This letter and the tubes together may give a clue. I think that I had
better take one of the boxes to Paris."

"Yes," said Fairbairn gloomily. "But----" and he shrugged his shoulders.

"But it's one of the ninety per cent, which go wrong, eh?" Hillyard
finished the sentence with bitterness. Disappointment was heavy upon
both men. Hillyard, too, was tired by the tension of these last
sleepless days. He had not understood how much he had counted upon
success.

"Yes, it's damnably disheartening," he cried. "I thought these tubes
might lead us pretty straight to B45."

"B45!"

The exclamation came from Jose Medina, who was leaning against the
doorpost of the saloon, half in the room, half out on the sunlit deck.
He had placed himself tactfully aloof. The examination of the cases was
none of his business. Now, however, his face lit up.

"B45." He shut the door and took a seat at the table. "I can tell you
about B45."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE USES OF SCIENCE

It was Hillyard's creed that chance will serve a man very capably, if he
is equipped to take advantage of its help; and here was an instance. The
preparation had begun on the morning when Hillyard took the _Dragonfly_
into the harbour of Palma. Chance had offered her assistance some months
later in an hotel at Madrid; as Medina was now to explain.

"The day after you left Mallorca," said Jose Medina, "it was known all
over Palma that you had come to visit me."

"Of course," answered Martin.

"I was in consequence approached almost immediately, by the other side."

"I expected that. It was only natural."

"There is a young lady in Madrid," continued Jose Medina.

"Carolina Muller?"

"No."

"Rosa Hahn, then."

"Yes," said Jose Medina.

Jose rose and unlocking a drawer in his bureau took out from it a sheaf
of photographs. He selected one and handed it with a smile to Hillyard.
It was the portrait of a good-looking girl, tall, dark, and intelligent,
but heavy about the feet, dressed in Moorish robes, and extended on a
divan in Oriental indolence against a scene cloth which outdid the
luxuries of Llalla Rookh.

"That's the lady, I think."

Medina gazed at the picture with delight. He touched his lips with his
fingers, and threw a kiss to it. His sharp, sallow face suddenly
flowered into smiles.

"Yes. What a woman! She has real intelligence," he exclaimed fervently.

Jose Medina was in the habit of losing his heart and keeping his head a
good many times in an ordinary year.

"It's an extraordinary thing," Martin Hillyard remarked, "that however
intelligent they are, not one of these young ladies can resist the
temptation to have her portrait taken in Moorish dress at the
photographer's in the Alhambra."

Jose Medina saw nothing at all grotesque or ridiculous in this
particular foible.

"They make such charming pictures," he cried.

"And it is very useful for us, too," remarked Hillyard. "The
photographer is a friend of mine."

Jose was still gazing at the photograph.

"Such a brain, my friend! She never told a story the second time
differently, however emotional the moment. She never gave away a
secret."

"She probably didn't know any," said Hillyard.

But Jose would not hear of such a reason.

"Oh, yes! She has great influence. She knows people in Berlin--great
people. She is their friend, and I cannot wonder. What an intelligence!"

Martin Hillyard laughed.

"She seems to have fairly put it over you at any rate," he said. He was
not alarmed at Jose Medina's fervour. For he knew that remarkable man's
capacity for holding his tongue even in the wildest moments of his
temporary passions. But he took the photograph away from Medina and
locked it up again. The rapturous reminiscences of Rosa Hahn's
intelligence checked the flow of that story which was to lead him to
B45.

"So you know about her?" Jose said with an envious eye upon the locked
drawer.

"A little," said Martin Hillyard.

Rosa Hahn was a clerk in the office of the Hamburg-Amerika Line before
the war, and in the Spanish Department. She was sent to Spain in the
last days of July, 1914, upon Government work, and at a considerable
salary, which she enjoyed. She seemed indeed to have done little else,
and Berlin, after a year, began to complain. Berlin had a lower opinion
of both her social position and her brains than Jose Medina had formed.
Berlin needed results, and failing to obtain them, proceeded to hint
more and more definitely that Rosa had better return to her clerk's
stool in Hamburg. Rosa, however, had been intelligent enough to make
friends with one or two powerful Germans in Spain; and they pleaded for
her with this much success. She was given another three months within
which period she must really do something to justify her salary. So much
Martin Hillyard already knew; he learnt now that Jose Medina had
provided the great opportunity. To snatch him with his two hundred motor
feluccas and his eighteen thousand men from the English--here was
something really worth doing.

"What beats me," said Hillyard, "is why they didn't try to get at you
before."

"They didn't," said Medina.

Rosa, it seemed, used the argument which is generally sound; that the
old and simple tricks are the tricks which win. She discovered the hotel
at which Jose Medina stayed in Madrid, and having discovered it she went
to stay there herself. She took pains to become friendly with the
manager and his staff, and by professing curiosity and interest in the
famous personage, she made sure not only that she would have
fore-warning of his arrival, but that Jose Medina himself would hear of
a charming young lady to whom he appealed as a hero of romance. She knew
Jose to be of a coming-on disposition--and the rest seemed easy. Only,
she had not guarded against the workings of Chance.

The hotel was the Hotel de Napoli, not one of the modern palaces of
cement and steel girders, built close to the Prado, but an old house
near the Puerto del Sol, a place of lath and plaster walls and thin
doors; so that you must not raise your voice unless you wish your
affairs to become public property. To this house Jose Medina came as he
had many times come before, and Chance willed that he should occupy the
next room to that occupied by Rosa Hahn. It was the merest accident. It
was the merest accident, too, that Jose Medina whilst he was unpacking
his bag heard his name pronounced in the next room. Jose Medina, with
all his qualities, was of the peasant class with much of the peasant
mind. He was inquisitive, and he was suspicious. Let it be said in his
defence that he had enemies enough ready to pull him down, not only, as
we have seen, amongst his rivals on the coast, but here, amongst the
Government officials of Madrid. It cost him a pretty penny annually to
keep his balance on the tight-rope, as it was. He stepped noiselessly
over to the door and listened. The voices were speaking in Spanish, one
a woman's voice with a guttural accent.

"Rosa Hahn," said Hillyard as the story was told to him in the cabin of
the yacht.

"The other a man's voice. But again it was a foreign voice, not a
Spaniard's. But I could not distinguish the accent."

"Greek, do you think?" asked Hillyard. "There is a Levantine Greek high
up in the councils of the Germans."

Jose Medina, however, did not know.

"Here were two foreigners talking about me, and fortunately in Spanish.
I was to arrive immediately; Rosa was to make my acquaintance. What my
relations were with this man, Hillyard--yes, you came into the
conversation, my friend, too--I was quickly to be persuaded to tell.
Oh--you have a saying--everything in your melon patch was lovely."

"Not for nothing has the American tourist come to Spain," Hillyard
murmured.

"Then their voices dropped a little, and your B45 was mentioned--once or
twice. And a name in connection with B45 once or twice. I did not
understand what it was all about."

"But you remember the name!" Fairbairn exclaimed eagerly.

"Yes, I do."

"Well, what was it?"

It was again Fairbairn who spoke. Hillyard had not moved, nor did he
even look up.

"It was Mario Escobar," said Jose Medina; and as he spoke he knew that
the utterance of the name awakened no surprise in Martin Hillyard.
Hillyard filled his pipe from the tobacco tin, and lighted it before he
spoke.

"Do you know anything of this Mario Escobar?" he asked, "you who know
every one?"

Jose Medina shrugged his shoulders, and threw up his hands.

"There was some years ago a Mario Escobar at Alicante," and Jose Medina
saw Hillyard's eyes open and fix themselves upon him with an unblinking
steadiness. Just so Jose Medina imagined might some savage animal in a
jungle survey the man who had stumbled upon his lair.

"That Mario Escobar, a penniless, shameless person, was in business with
a German, the German Vice-Consul. He went from Alicante to London."

"Thank you," said Hillyard. He rose from his chair and went to the
window. But he saw nothing of the deck outside, or the sea beyond. He
saw a man at a supper party in London a year before the war began,
betraying himself by foolish insistent questions uttered in fear lest
his close intimacy with Germans in Alicante should be known.

"I have no doubt that Mario Escobar came definitely to England, long
before the war, to spy," said Hillyard gravely. He returned to the
table, and took up again one of the empty glass tubes.

"I wonder what he was to do with these."

Jose Medina had opened the door of the saloon once more. A beam of
sunlight shot through the doorway, and enveloped Hillyard's arm and
hand. The tiny slim phial glittered like silver; and to all of them in
the cabin it became a sinister engine of destruction.

"That, as you say, is your affair. I must go," said Jose, and he shook
hands with Hillyard and Fairbairn, and went out on to the deck. "_Hasta
luego!_"

"_Hasta ahora!_" returned Hillyard; and Jose Medina walked down the
steps of the ladder to his felucca. The blue sea widened between the two
vessels; and in a week, Hillyard descended from a train on to the
platform of the Quai D'Orsay station in Paris. He had the tubes in his
luggage, and one box of them he took that morning to Commandant Marnier
at his office on the left bank of the river with the letter which gave
warning of their arrival.

"You see what the letter says," Hillyard explained. "These tubes have
been very successful in France."

Marnier nodded his head:

"If you will leave them with me, I will show them to our chemists, and
perhaps, in a few days, I will have news for you."

For a week Hillyard took his ease in Paris and was glad of the rest in
the midst of those strenuous days. He received one morning at his hotel,
a batch of letters, many of which had been written months before. But
two were of recent date. Henry Luttrell wrote to him:

"_My battalion did splendidly and our debt to old Oakley is
great. There is only a handful of us left and we are
withdrawn, of course, from the lines. By some miracle I
escaped without a hurt. Everybody has been very generous,
making it up to us for our bad times. The Corps Commander
came and threw bouquets in person, and we hear that D.H.
himself is going out of his way to come and inspect us. I go
home on leave in a fortnight and hope to come back in
command of the battalion. Perhaps we may meet in London. Let
me hear if that is possible._"

The second letter had been sent from Rackham Park, and in it Millie
Splay wrote:

"_We have not heard from you for years. Will you be in
England this August? We are trying to gather again our old
Goodwood party. Both Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp will be
home on leave. There will be no Goodwood of course, but
there is a meeting at Gatwick which is easily reached from
here. Do come if you can and bring your friend with you, if
he is in London and has nothing better to do. We have all
been reading about him in the papers, and Chichester is very
proud of belonging to the same mess, and says what a
wonderful thing it must be to be able to get into the papers
like that, without trying to._"

Hillyard could see the smile upon Lady Splay's face as she wrote that
sentence. Hillyard laughed as he read it but it was less in amusement as
from pleasure at the particular information which this sentence
contained. Harry Luttrell had clearly won a special distinction in the
hard fighting at Thiepval. There was not a word in Harry's letter to
suggest it. There would not be. All his pride and joy would be engrossed
by the great fact that his battalion had increased its good name.

There was a closing sentence in Millie Splay's letter which brought
another smile to his lips.

"_Linda Spavinsky is, alas, going as strong as ever. She was
married last meek, in violet, as you will remember, to the
Funeral March of a Marionette and already she is in the
throes of domestic unhappiness. Her husband, fleshy, of
course, red in the face, and accustomed to sleep after
dinner, simply_ WON'T _understand her._"

Here again Hillyard was able to see the smile on Millicent Splay's face,
but it was a smile rather rueful and it ended, no doubt, in a sigh of
annoyance. Hillyard himself was caught away to quite another scene. He
was once more in the small motor-car on the top of Duncton Hill, and
looked out over the Weald of Sussex to the Blackdown and Hindhead, and
the slopes of Leith Hill, imagined rather than seen, in the summer haze.
He saw Joan Whitworth's rapt face, and heard her eager cry.

"Look out over the Weald of Sussex, so that you can carry it away with
you in your breast. Isn't it worth everything--banishment,
suffering--everything? Not the people so much, but the earth itself and
the jolly homes upon it!"

A passage followed which disturbed him:

"_There are other things too. My magnolia is still in bud. I
dread a blight before the flower opens._"

It was a cry of distress--nothing less than that--uttered in some moment
of intense depression. Else it would never have been allowed to escape
at all.

Hillyard folded up the letter. He would be going home in any case. There
were those tubes. There was B45. He had enjoyed no leave since he had
left England. Yes, he would go down to Rackham Park, and take Harry
Luttrell with him if he could.

Two days later the Commandant Marnier came to see him at the Ritz Hotel.
They dined together in a corner of the restaurant.

"We have solved the problem of those tubes," said Marnier. "They are
nothing more nor less than time-fuses."

"Time-fuses!" Hillyard repeated. "I don't understand."

"Listen!"

Marnier looked around. There was no one near enough to overhear him, if
he did not raise his voice; and he was careful to speak in a whisper.

"Two things." He ticked them off upon his fingers. "First, hydrofluoric
acid when brought into contact with certain forms of explosive will
create a fire. Second, hydrofluoric acid will bite its way through
glass. The thicker the glass, the longer the time required to set the
acid free. Do you follow?"

"Yes," said Hillyard.

"Good! Make a glass tube of such thickness that it will take
hydrofluoric acid four hours and a half to eat its way through. Then
fill it with acid and seal it up. You have a time-fuse which will act
precisely in four hours and a half."

"If it comes into contact with the necessary explosive," Hillyard added.

"Exactly. Now attend to this! Our workmen in our munition factories work
three hours and a half. Then they go to their luncheon."

"Munition factories!" said Hillyard with a start.

"Yes, my friend. Munition factories. We are short of labour as you know.
Our men are in the firing line. We must get labour from some other
source. And there is only one source."

"The neutrals," Hillyard exclaimed.

"Yes, the neutrals, and especially the neutrals who are near to us, who
can come without difficulty and without much expense. We have a good
many Spanish workmen in our munition factories and three of these
factories have recently been burnt down. We have the proof now, thanks
to you, that those little glass tubes so carefully manufactured in
Berlin to last four hours and a half and no more, set the fires going."

"Proof, you say?" Hillyard asked earnestly. "It is not probability or
moral certainty? It is actual bed-rock proof?"

"Yes. For once our chemists had grasped how these tubes could be used,
we knew what to look for when the workmen were searched on entering the
factory. Two days ago we caught a man. He had one of these little tubes
in his mouth and in the lining of his waistcoat, just a little high
explosive, so little was necessary that it must escape notice unless you
knew what to search for. Yes, we caught him and he, the good fellow, the
good honest neutral"--it would be difficult to describe the bitterness
and scorn which rang through Marnier's words, "has been kind enough to
tell me how he earned his German pay as well as his French wages."

Hillyard leaned forward.

"Yes, tell me that!"

"On his way to the factory in the morning, he makes a call."

"Yes."

"The one on whom he calls fills the tube or has it just filled and gives
it to the workman. The time fuse is set for four hours and a half. The
workman has so arranged it that he will reach the factory half an hour
after the tube is filled. He passes the searcher. At his place he takes
off his waistcoat and hangs it up and in the pocket, just separated from
the explosive by the lining of the waistcoat, he places, secretly, the
tube. The tube has now four hours of life and the workman three and a
half hours of work. When the whistle goes to knock off for luncheon, the
workman leaves his waist coat still hanging up on the peg and goes out
in the stream. But half an hour afterwards, half-way through the hour of
luncheon, the acid reaches the explosive. There is a tiny explosion in
that empty hall, not enough to make a great noise, but quite enough to
start a big fire; and when the workmen return, the building is ablaze.
No lives are lost, but the factory is burnt down."

Hillyard sat for a little while in thought.

"Perhaps you can tell me," he said at length. "I hear nothing from
England or very little; and naturally. Are we obtaining Spanish workmen,
too, for our munition factories?"

"Yes."

It was clear now why B45 was especially suitable for this work. B45 was
Mario Escobar, a Spaniard himself.

"And filling the tubes! That is simple?"

"A child could do it," answered Marnier.

"Thank you," said Martin Hillyard.

The next evening he left Paris and travelling all night to Boulogne,
reached London in the early afternoon of the following day. Twenty
months had passed since he had set foot there.

CHAPTER XIX

UNDER GREY SKIES AGAIN

Hillyard landed in England athirst for grey skies. Could he have chosen
the season of the year which should greet him, he would have named
October. For the ceaseless bright blue of sea and heaven had set him
dreaming through many a month past, of still grey mornings sweet with
the smell of earth and thick hedgerows and the cluck of pheasants. But
there were at all events the fields wondrously green after the brown
hill-sides and rusty grass, the little rich fields in the frames of
their hedges, and the brown-roofed houses and the woods splashing their
emerald branches in the sunlight. Hillyard travelled up through Kent
rejoicing. He reached London in the afternoon, and leaving his luggage
in his flat walked down to the house in the quiet street behind the
Strand whence Commodore Graham overlooked the Thames.

But even in this backwater the changes of the war were evident. The
brass plates had all gone from the door post and girls ran up and down
the staircases in stockings which some Allied fairies had woven on
Midsummer morning out of cobwebs of dew. They were, however, as unaware
as of old of any Commodore Graham. Was he quite certain that he wanted
to see Commodore Graham. And why? And, after all, was there a Commodore
Graham? Gracious damsels looked blandly at one another, with every
apparent desire to assist this sunburnt stranger. It seemed to Hillyard
that they would get for him immediately any one else in the world whom
he chose to name. It was just bitterly disappointing and contrarious
that the one person he wished to see was a Commodore Graham. Oh,
couldn't he be reasonable and ask for somebody else?

"Very well," said Hillyard with a smile. "There was a pretty girl with
grey eyes, and I'll see her."

"The description is vague," said the young lady demurely.

"She is Miss Cheyne."

"Oh!" said one.

"Oh!" said another; and

"Will you follow me, please?" said a third, who at once became
business-like and brisk, and led him up the stairs. The door was still
unvarnished. Miss Cheyne opened it, wearing the composed expression of
attention with which she had greeted Hillyard when he had sought
admission first. But her face broke up into friendliness and smiles,
when she recognised him, and she drew him into the room.

"The Commodore's away for a week," she said. "He had come to the end: no
sleep, nerves all jangled. He is up in Scotland shooting grouse."

Hillyard nodded. His news could wait a week very well, since it had
waited already two years.

"And you?" he asked.

"Oh, I had a fortnight," replied Miss Cheyne, her eyes dancing at the
recollection. It was her pleasure to sail a boat in Bosham Creek and out
towards the Island. "Not a day of rain during the whole time."

"I think that I might have a month then, don't you?" said Hillyard, and
Miss Cheyne opined that there would be no objection.

"But you will come back in a week," she stipulated, "won't you? The
Commodore will be here on Thursday, and there are things accumulating
which he must see to. So will you come on Friday?"

"Friday morning," Hillyard suggested.

Thursday was the day on which he should have travelled down to Rackham
Park, but if he could finish his business on Friday morning, he would
only lose one day.

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