A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

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Hillyard's life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been
many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined
it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its
impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him
altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without
tradition.

His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not
the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin's
boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps
in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another. The boy had
been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered
its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and
dispersed them to their homes at four. No boy was proud that he went to
school at St. Eldred's, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought
that it was a breach of the school's traditions. The school meant so
many lessons in so many class-rooms, and no more.

Hillyard was the only child. Between himself and his parents there was
little sympathy and understanding. He saw them at meals, and fled from
the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.

"You never heard of such a jumble of books," he said to Stella Croyle.
"Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt
of Islam, Tennyson. I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart--absolutely
every line of it, and pages of Browning. The little brown books! I would
walk miles to pick one of them up. My people would find the books lying
about the house, and couldn't make head or tail of why I wanted to read
them. There were two red-letter days: one when I first bought the two
volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey. That's
the author to bowl a boy over. The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the
Confessions--I could never get tired of them. I remember buying an ounce
of laudanum at a chemist's on London Bridge and taking it home, with
the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to
drink it out of a decanter."

Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now
with parted lips.

"And did you?" she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.

Hillyard shook his head.

"The taste was too unpleasant. I drank about half an ounce and threw the
rest away. I was saved from that folly."

Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.

"Yes," she said rather listlessly.

Yet Hillyard might almost have become a consumer of drugs, such queer
and wayward fancies took him in charge. It became a fine thing to him to
stay up all night just for the sake of staying up, and many a night he
passed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even
dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break. It seemed to him soft and
wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie comfortably between
sheets. And then came another twist. When all the house was quiet, he
would slip out of a ground-floor window and roam for hours about the
lonely roads, a solitary boy revelling even then in the extraordinary
conduct of his life. There was in the neighbourhood a footpath through a
thick grove of trees which ran up a long, high hill, and, midway in the
ascent, crossed a railway cutting by a rustic bridge.

"That was my favourite walk, though I always entered by the swing-gate
in fear, and trembled at every movement of the branches, and continually
expected an attack. I would hang over that railway bridge, especially on
moonlit nights, and compose poems and thoughts--you know--great, short
thoughts." Hillyard laughed. "I was going to be a poet, you
understand--a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems
were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my
strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed 'Lethe,'
but I could never hear that they were published."

Stella Croyle laughed, and Hillyard went on. "From the top of the hill I
would strike off to the west, and see the morning break over London. In
summer that was wonderful! The Houses of Parliament. St Paul's like a
silver bubble rising out of the mist, then, as the mist cleared over the
river, a London clean and all silver in the morning light! I was going
to conquer all that, you know--I--

"'Silent upon a peak of Peckham Rye.'"

"I wonder you didn't kill yourself," cried Stella.

"I very nearly did," answered Hillyard.

"Didn't your parents interfere?"

"No. They never knew of my wanderings. They did know, of course, that I
used not to go to bed. But they left me alone. I was a bitter
disappointment in every way. They wanted a reasonable son, who would go
into the agency business, and they had instead--me. I should think that
I was pretty odious, too, and we were all of passionate tempers.
Besides, with all this reading, I didn't do particularly well at school.
How could I when day after day I would march off from the house, leaving
a smooth bed behind me in my room? We were thorny people. Quarrels were
frequent. My mother had a phrase which set my teeth on edge--'Don't you
talk, Martin, until you are earning your living'--the sort of remark
that stings and stays in a boy's memory as something unfair. There was a
great row in the end, one night at ten o'clock, when I was sixteen, and
I left the house and tramped into London."

"What in the world did you do?" cried Stella.

"I shipped as a boy on a fruit-tramp for Valencia in Spain. And I
believe that saved my life. For my lungs were beginning to be
troublesome."

The fruit-tramp had not been out more than two days when the fo'c'sle
hands selected the lad, since he had some education, to be their
spokesman on a deputation to the captain. Martin Hillyard went aft with
the men and put their case for better food and less violence. He was not
therefore popular with the old man, and at Valencia he thought it
prudent to desert.

Stella Croyle had turned towards him again. There was a vividness in his
manner, an enjoyment, too, which laid hold upon her. It was curious to
her to realise that this man talking to her here in the Bayswater Road,
had been so lately a ragged youth scouting for his living on the quays
of Southern Spain.

"You were at that place--Alicante!" she cried.

"Part of the time."

"And there Mario Escobar saw you. I wonder why he was frightened lest
you too should have seen him," she added slowly.

"Was he?"

"Yes. He was sitting on the same side of the table as you, so you
wouldn't have noticed. But he was opposite to me; and he was afraid."

Hillyard was puzzled.

"I can't think of a reason. I was a shipping clerk of no importance. I
can't remember that I ever came across his name in all the eighteen
months I spent in Alicante."

When Martin Hillyard was nineteen, Death intervened in the family feud.
His parents died within a few weeks of each other.

"I was left with a thousand pounds."

"What did you do with them?"

"I went to Oxford."

"You? After those years of independence?"

"It had been my one passionate dream for years."

"The Scholar Gipsy," "Thyrsis," the Preface to the "Essays in
Criticism," one or two glimpses of the actual city, its grey spires and
towers, caught from the windows of a train, had long ago set the craving
in his heart. Oxford had grown dim in unattainable mists, no longer a
desire so much as a poignant regret, yet now he actually walked its
sacred streets.

"And you enjoyed it?" asked Stella.

"I had the most wondrous time," Hillyard replied fervently. "There was
one bad evening, when I realised that I couldn't write poetry. After
that I cut my hair and joined the Wine Club. I stroked the Torpid and
rowed three in my College Eight. I had friends for the first time. One
above all"

He stopped over-abruptly. Stella Croyle had the impression of a careless
sentinel suddenly waked, suddenly standing to attention at the door of a
treasure-house of memories. She was challenged. Very well. It was her
humour to take the challenge up just to prove to herself that she could
slip past a man's guard if the spirit moved her. She turned on Hillyard
a pair of most friendly sympathetic eyes.

"Tell me of your friend."

"Oh, there's not much to tell. He rowed in the same boat with me. He had
just what I had not--traditions. From his small old brown manor-house in
a western county to his very choice of a career, he was wrapped about in
tradition. He went into the army. He had to go."

"What is his name?"

Stella Croyle interrupted him. She was not looking at him any more. She
was staring into the fire, and her body was very still. But there was
excitement in her voice.

"Harry Luttrell," replied Hillyard, and Stella Croyle did not move. "I
don't know what has become of him. You see, I had ninety pounds left out
of the thousand when I left Oxford. So I just dived."

"But you have come up again now. You will resume your friends at the
point where you dived."

"Not yet. I am going away in a week's time."

"For long?"

"Eight months."

"And far?"

"Very."

"I am sorry," said Stella.

It had been the intention of Hillyard to use his first months of real
freedom in a great wandering amongst wide spaces. The journey had been
long since planned, even details of camp outfit and equipment and the
calibre of rifles considered.

"I have been at my preparations for years," he said. "I lived in a
cubbyhole in Westminster, writing and writing and writing, but when I
thought of this journey to be, certain to be, the walls would dissolve,
and I would walk in magical places under the sun."

"Now the New Year reviving old desires,
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires"

Stella Croyle quoted the verses gaily, and Hillyard, lost in the
anticipation of his journey, never noticed that the gaiety rang false.

"And where are you going?" she asked.

"To the Sudan."

It seemed that Stella expected just that answer and no other. She gazed
into the fire without moving, seeking to piece together a picture in the
coals of that unknown country which held all for which she yearned.

"I shall travel slowly up the White Nile to Renk," Hillyard continued,
blissfully. He was delighted at the interest which Mrs. Croyle was
taking in his itinerary. She was clearly a superior person. "From Renk,
I shall cross to the Blue Nile at Rosaires, and travel eastward again to
the River Dinder----"

"You are most fortunate," Stella interrupted wistfully.

"Yes, am I not?" cried Hillyard. It looked as if nothing would break
through his obtuseness.

"I should love to be going in your place."

"You?"

Hillyard smiled. She was for a mantelshelf in a boudoir, not for a camp.

"Yes--I," and her voice suddenly broke.

Hillyard sprang up from his chair, but Stella held up her hand to check
him, and turned her face still further away. Hillyard resumed his seat
uncomfortably.

"You may meet your friend Harry Luttrell in the Sudan," she explained.
"He is stationed somewhere in that country--where exactly I would give a
great deal to know."

They sat without speaking for a little while, Stella once more turning
to the fire. Hillyard watching her wistful face and the droop of her
shoulders understood at last the truth of Hardiman's description. The
mask was lain aside. Here indeed was a Lady of Sorrows.

Stella Croyle was silent until she was quite sure that she had once more
the mastery of her voice. It was important to her that her next words
should not be forgotten. But even so she did not dare to speak above a
whisper.

"I want you to do me a favour. If you should meet Harry, I should like
him to have news of me. I should like him also--oh, not so often--but
just every now and then to write me a little line."

There were tears glistening on her dark eyelashes. Hillyard fell into a
sort of panic as he reflected upon his own vaunting talk. Compared with
this woman's poignant distress, all the vicissitudes of his life seemed
now quite trivial and small. Here were tears falling and Hillyard was
unused to tears. Nor had he ever heard so poignant a longing in any
human voice as that on which Stella's prayer to him was breathed. He was
ashamed. He was also a little envious of Harry Luttrell. He was also a
little angry with Harry Luttrell.

"You won't forget?"

Stella clasped her hands together imploringly.

"No," Hillyard replied. "Be very sure of that, Mrs. Croyle! If I meet
Luttrell he shall have your message."

"Thank you."

Stella Croyle dried the tears from her cheeks and stood up.

"I have been foolish. You won't find me like that again," she cried, and
she helped Hillyard on with his coat. She went to the door to see him
out, but stopped as she grasped the handle.

All Hillyard's talk about himself had passed in at one ear and out at
the other. But every word which he had spoken about Harry Luttrell was
written on her heart. And one phrase had kindled a tiny spark of hope.
She had put it aside by itself, wanting more knowledge about it, and
meaning to have that knowledge before Hillyard departed. She put her
question now, with the door still closed and her back to it.

"You said that Harry _had_ to join the army. What did you mean by that?"

Hillyard hesitated.

"Did he not tell you himself?"

"No."

Hillyard stood between loyalty to his friend and the recollection of
Stella Croyle's tears. If Luttrell had not told her--why then----

"Then I don't well see how I can," he said uncomfortably.

"But I want to know," said Stella, bending her brows at him in
astonishment that he should refuse her so small a thing. Then her manner
changed. "Oh, I do want to know," she cried, and Hillyard's obstinacy
broke down.

Men have the strangest fancies which compel them to do out of all
reason, even the things which they hate to do, and to put aside what
they hold most dear. Fancies unintelligible to practical people like
women--thus Stella Croyle's thoughts ran--but to be taken note of very
carefully. High-flown motives from a world of white angels, where no
doubt they are very suitable. But men will use them as working motives
here below, with the result that they wreck women's hearts and cause
themselves a great deal of useless misery.

Stella's hopes and her self-esteem had for long played with the thought
that it might possibly be one of those impracticable notions which had
whipped Harry Luttrell up to the rupture of their alliance; that after
all, it was not that he was tired of a chain. Yes, she wanted to know.

"Luttrell only told me once, only spoke about it once," said Hillyard
shifting from one foot to the other. "The week after the eights. We
rowed down to Kennington Island in a racing pair, had supper there----"

"Yes, yes," Stella Croyle interrupted. Oh, how dense men could be to be
sure! What in the world did it matter, how or when the secret was told?

"I beg your pardon," said Hillyard. "But really it does matter a little.
You see, it was on our way back, when it was quite dark, so dark that
really you could see little but the line of sky above the trees, and the
flash of the water at the end of the stroke. I doubt if Luttrell would
have ever told me at all, if it hadn't been for just that one fact, that
we were alone together in the darkness and out on the river."

"Yes, I was wrong," said Stella penitently. "I was impatient. I am
sorry."

More and more, just because of this detail, she was ready to believe
that Harry Luttrell had left her for some reason quite outside
themselves, for some other reason than weariness and the swift end of
passion.

"Luttrell's father, his grandfather and many others of his name had
served in the Clayford Regiment. It was his home regiment and the
tradition of the family binding from father to son, was that there
should always be Luttrells amongst its officers."

"And for that reason Harry----" Stella interrupted impetuously.

"No, there is more compulsion than that in Harry's case," Hillyard took
her up. "Much more! The Clayfords _ran_ in the South African War, and
ran badly. They returned to England a disgraced regiment. Now do you see
the compulsion?"

Stella Croyle turned the problem over in her mind.

"Yes, I think I do," she said, but still was rather doubtful. Then she
looked at the problem through Harry Luttrell's eyes.

"Yes, I understand. The regiment must recover its good name in the next
war. It was an obligation of honour on Harry to take his commission in
it, to bear his part in the recovery."

"Yes. I told you, didn't I? Harry Luttrell was cradled in tradition."

Hillyard saw Mrs. Croyle's face brighten. Now she had the key to Harry
Luttrell. He had joined the Clayfords. And what was his fear at
Stockholm? The slovenly soldier! Yes, he had given her the real reason
after all during that dinner on the balcony at Hasselbacken. He feared
to become the slovenly soldier if he idled longer in England. It was not
because he was tired of her, that the separation had come. Thus she
reasoned, and she reasoned just in one little respect wrong. She had the
real secret without a doubt, that "something else," which Sir Charles
Hardiman divined but could not interpret. But she did not understand
that Harry Luttrell saw in her, one of the factors, nay the chief of the
factors which were converting him into that thing of contempt, the
slovenly soldier.

"Thank you," she said to Hillyard with a smile. She stood aside now from
the door. "It was kind of you to bring me home and talk with me for a
little while."

But it seems that her recovery of spirits did not last out the night.
Doubts assailed her--Harry Luttrell was beneath other skies with other
preoccupations and no message from him had ever come to her. Even if
his love was unchanged at Stockholm, it might not be so now. Hillyard
rang her up on the telephone the next morning and warm in his sympathy
asked her to lunch with him. But it was a pitiful little voice which
replied to him. Stella Croyle answered from her bed. She was not well.
She would stay in bed for a day and then go to a little cottage which
she owned in the country. She would see Hillyard again next year when he
returned from the East.

"Yes, that's her way," said Sir Charles Hardiman. He met Hillyard the
day before he sailed for Port Said and questioned him about Stella
Croyle discreetly. "She runs to earth when she's unhappy. We shall not
see her for a couple of months. No one will."

CHAPTER V

HILLYARD'S MESSENGER

Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of
April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder. From time to time his
shikari would lead his camels and camp-servants out on to an open
clearing on the high river bank and announce a name still marked upon
the maps. Once there had been a village here, before the Kalifa sent his
soldiers and herded the tribes into the towns for his better security.
Now there was no sign anywhere of habitation. The red boles of the
mimosa trees, purple-brown cracked earth, yellow stubble of burnt grass,
the skimming of myriads of birds above the tree-tops and shy wild
animals gliding noiselessly in the dark of the forest--there was nothing
more now. It seemed that no human foot had ever trodden that region.

Hillyard's holiday was coming to an end, for in a month the rainy season
would begin and this great park become a marsh. He went fluctuating
between an excited eagerness for a renewal of rivalry and the
interchange of ideas and the companionship of women; and a reluctance to
leave a country which had so restored him to physical well-being. Never
had he been so strong. He had recaptured, after his five years of London
confinement, the swift spring of the muscles, the immediate response of
the body to the demand made upon it, and the glorious cessation of
fatigue when after arduous hours of heat and exertion he stretched
himself upon his camp-chair in the shadow of his tent. On the whole he
travelled northwards reluctantly; until he came to a little open space
ten days away from the first village he would touch.

He camped there just before noon, and at three o'clock on the following
morning, in the company of his shikari, his skinner and his donkey-boy
he was riding along a narrow path high above the river. It was very
dark, so that even with the vast blaze of stars overhead, Hillyard could
hardly see the flutter of his shikari's white robe a few paces ahead of
him. They passed a clump of bushes and immediately afterwards heard a
great shuffling and lapping of water below them. The shikari stopped
abruptly and seized the bridle of Hillyard's donkey. The night was so
still that the noise at the water's edge below seemed to fill the world.
Hillyard slipped off the back of his donkey and took his rifle from his
boy.

"_Gamus!_" whispered the shikari.

Hillyard almost swore aloud. There was a creek, three hours' march away,
where the reed buck came down to drink in the morning. For that creek
Hillyard was now making with a little Mannlicher sporting rifle--and he
had tumbled suddenly upon buffalo! He was on the very edge of the
buffalo country, he would see no more between here and the houses of
Senga.

It was his last chance and he had nothing but a popgun! He was still
reproaching himself when a small but startling change took place. The
snuffling and lapping suddenly ceased; and with the cessation of all
sound, the night became sinister.

The shikari whispered again.

"Now they in their turn know that we are here." He enveloped the
donkey's head in a shawl that he was carrying. "Do not move," he
continued. "They are listening."

Shikari, skinner, donkey-boy, donkey and Hillyard stood together,
motionless, silent. Hillyard had come out to hunt. Down below the herd
in its dumb parliament was debating whether he should be the hunted.
There was little chance for any one of them if the debate went against
them. Hillyard might bring down one--perhaps two, if by some miraculous
chance he shot a bullet through both forelegs. But it would make no
difference to the herd. Hillyard pictured them below by the water's
edge, their heads lifted, their tails stiffened, waiting in the
darkness. Once the lone, earth-shaking roar of a lion spread from far
away, booming over the dark country. But the herd below never stirred.
It no more feared the lion than it feared the four men on the river bank
above. An hour passed before at last the river water plashed under the
trampling hoofs.

Hillyard threw his rifle forward, but the shikari touched him on the
arm.

"They are going," he whispered, and again the four men waited, until the
shikari raised his hand.

"It will be good for us to move! They are very near." He looked towards
the east, but there was no sign yet of the dawn.

"We will go very cautiously into the forest. We shall not know where
they are, but they will know everything we are doing."

In single file they moved from the bank amongst the mimosas, the donkey
with his head covered, still led by the boy. Under the cavern of the
branches it was black as pitch--so black that Hillyard did not see the
hand which the shikari quietly laid upon his shoulder.

"Listen."

On his left a branch snapped, ahead of them a bush that had been bent
aside swished back on its release.

"They are moving with us. They are all round us," the shikari whispered.
"They know everything we do. Let us wait here. When the morning breaks
they will charge or they will go."

So once again the little party came to a halt. Hillyard stood listening
and wondering if the morning would ever come; and even in that time of
tension the habit of his mind reasserted its sway. This long, silent
waiting for the dawn in the depths of an African forest with death at
his very elbow--here was another sharp event of life in vivid contrast
with all the others which had gone before. The years in London, the
letter-box opposite the Abbey where he had posted his manuscripts at
three in the morning and bought a cup of coffee at the stall by the
kerb--times so very close to him--the terms at Oxford, the strange
hungry days on the quays of Spain, the moonlit wanderings on the
footpath over the rustic ridge and up the hill, when he composed poems
to the moon and pithy short, great thoughts--here was something fresh to
add to them if he didn't go down at daybreak under the hoofs of the
herd! Here was yet a further token, that out of the vicissitudes of his
life something more, something new, something altogether different and
unimagined was to come, as the crown and ultimate reason of all that had
gone before. Once more the shikari's hand touched him and pointed
eastwards. The tree-trunks were emerging from the darkness. Beyond them
the black cup of the sky was thinning to translucency. Very quickly the
grey light widened beyond this vast palisade of trees. Even in here
below the high branches, it began to steal vaporous and dim. About them
on every side now the buffalo were moving. The shikari's grip tightened
on Hillyard's arm. The moment of danger had come. It would be the smash
of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees
kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled
horns until long after he was dead, or--the new test and preparation to
add to those which had gone before!

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