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A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

A >> A.E.W. Mason >> The Summons




Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.

"They are off"; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the
sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against
the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the
buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible. Then silence came again for a
few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the
morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets
stormed the stars.

Hillyard drew a breath.

"Let us go on," he said.

They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that
morning smote upon his eyes. A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen
donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out
among the tree-boles.

Hillyard looked at his shikari. But the shikari neither spoke nor
altered the regularity of his face. Hillyard put no question in
consequence. The Arab was ten days' journey from the nearest village
and, even so, his back was turned towards it. He was moving from
solitude into solitude still more silent and remote. It was impossible.
Hillyard's eyes were playing him false.

He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the
vision would have gone. But there was the Arab still nearer to them and
moving with a swift agility. A ray of sunlight struck through the
branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something
the man carried--a carbine with a brass hammer. And the next moment a
sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive
him. For he heard the slapping of the Arab's loose slippers upon the
hard-caked earth.

Oh yes, the man was real enough. For the shikari suddenly swerved from
the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped. The two men
talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted.
Hillyard lit his pipe.

"Who is it, Hamet?" he cried, and the shikari turned with his companion
and came back.

"It is the postman," he said as though the delivery of letters along the
Dinder River were the most commonplace of events.

"The postman!" cried Hillyard. "What in the world do you mean?"

"Yes," Hamet explained. "He carries letters between Abyssinia and Senga
on the Blue Nile. He is now on his way back to Abyssinia."

"But how long does it take him?" Hillyard asked in amazement.

"He goes and returns once a year. The journey takes him four months each
way unless he meets with a party shooting. Then it takes longer for he
goes with the party to get meat."

Hillyard stared at the Arab in amazement. He was a lean slip of a man,
almost as black as a negro, with his hair running back above the
temples, and legs like walking-sticks. He stood wreathed in smiles and
nodding confirmation of Hamet's words. But to Hillyard, with the
emotions of the dark hour just past still shivering about him, he seemed
something out of nature. Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the
carbine from the postman's hand. It was an ancient thing of Spanish
manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.

"But this can't be of any use," he cried. "Is the man never attacked?"

Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at
all; and interpreted the conversation.

"No. He has only once fired his rifle. One night--oh, a long way farther
to the south--he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey
in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away. You
must know that all these little Korans he carries on his arms and round
his neck have been specially blessed by a most holy man."

The postman's shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck were circled about by
chaplets on which little wooden Korans were strung. He fingered them and
counted them, smiling like a woman displaying her jewels to her less
fortunate friends.

"So he is safe," continued Hamet. "Yes, he will even have his picture
taken. Yes, he can afford to suffer that. He will stand in front of the
great eye and the machine shall go click, and it will not do him any
harm at all. He has a letter for you." Hamet dropped from his enthusiasm
over the wonderful immunity of the postman from the dangers of
photography into a most matter-of-fact voice.

"A letter for me? That's impossible," cried Hillyard.

But the Arab was thrusting his hand here and there in the load on the
donkey's back and finally drew out a goatskin bag. Hillyard, like other
Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the
inefficiency of all Postmasters-general. A blight fell upon such
persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest
caricatures of bureaucrats. It could not be that the postal service was
now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance. Yet the Arab
drew forth a sealed envelope and handed it to Hillyard. And it bore the
inscription of his name.

Oh, but it bore much more than that! It was written in a hand which
Hillyard had not seen for seven years, and the mere sight of it swept
him back in a glory of recollections to Oxford, its towers and tall
roofs, which mean so much more to the man who has gone down than to the
youth who is up. The forest, with its patterns of golden sunlight and
its colonnades of trees crowding away into darkness, was less visible
than those towers to Hillyard, as he stood with the envelope in his
hand. Once more he swung down the High and across the Broad from a
lecture with a ragged gown across his arm. Merton and the House, New
College and Magdalen Tower--he saw the enchanted city across Christ
Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington,
and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy
used to roam. For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell.

He tore it open and read:

"_Some one in London is asking for you. Who it is I don't
know. But the message came through in a secret cipher and it
might be important. I think you should pack your affs. and
hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you._"

Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.

"He will find food in our camp," he said to Hamet, with a nod towards
the postman. "We may as well go on."

Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that
day. The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon
the camels. The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house
of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to
gather. He had one of the green volumes of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne"
in his pocket, but this morning the splendid Four for once did not
enchain him. Who was it in London who wanted him--wanted him so much
that cipher telegrams must find him out on the banks of the Dinder
River? Was this letter the summons to the something more and something
different? Was the postman to Abyssinia the expected messenger? The
miracle of that morning predisposed him to think so.

He sat thus for an hour, and then stepping daintily, with timid eyes
alert, a tall reed-buck and his doe came through the glade towards the
water. But they did not drink; they waited, cropping the grass.
Gradually, through a long hour, others gathered, tawny and yellow, and
dappled-brown, and stood and fed until--perhaps a signal was given,
perhaps a known moment had come--all like soldiers at a command, moved
down to the water's edge.

Six nights later Hillyard camped at Lueisa, near to that big tree under
which it is not wise to spread your bed. He took his bath at ten o'clock
at night under the moon, and the water from the river was hot. He
stretched himself out in his bed and waked again that night after the
moon had set, to fix indelibly in his memory the blazing dome of stars
above his head, and the Southern Cross burning in a corner of the sky.
The long, wonderful holiday was ended. To-morrow night he would sleep in
a house. Would he ever come this way again?

In the dark of the morning he struck westwards from the Dinder, across a
most tedious neck of land, for Senga and the Blue Nile.




CHAPTER VI

THE HONORARY MEMBER


At six o'clock in the evening Colin Rayne, a young civilian in the Sudan
Service, heard, as he sat on the balcony of the mess at Senga, the
rhythmical thud of camels swinging in to their rest in the freshness of
the night air.

"There's our man," he exclaimed, and running downstairs, he reached the
door just as Hillyard's twelve camels and his donkeys trooped into the
light. Hillyard was riding bareheaded, with his helmet looped to his
saddle, a young man, worn thin by sun and exercise, with fair burnt
hair, and a brown clean shaven face. Colin Rayne went up to him as he
dismounted.

"Captain Luttrell asked me to look after you. He has got some work on
hand for the moment. We'll see after your affs."

"Thank you."

"You might show me, by the way, where your cartridges are."

Hillyard selected the camel on which they were packed and Rayne called a
Sudanese sergeant to take them into the mess.

"Now we will go upstairs. I expect that you can do with a
whisky-and-soda," he said.

Hillyard was presented to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special
research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers
of this headquarters of a Province. They were all young, Hillyard
himself was older than any of them.

"Oh, we have got some married ones, too," said Rayne, "but they live in
houses of their own like gentlefolk."

"There are some Englishwomen here then?" said Hillyard, and for an
appreciable moment there was silence. Then a shortish, square man, with
a heavy moustache explained, if explanation it could be called.

"No. They were sent off to Senaar this morning--to be out of the way.
Wiser."

Hillyard asked no questions but drank his whisky-and-soda.

"I haven't seen Luttrell since we were at Oxford together," he said.

"And it's by an accident that you see him now," said Rayne. "The
Governor of Senga was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot down
by the bridge there six weeks ago. The road gave way suddenly under his
horse's hoofs. Some one was wanted here immediately."

"Yes, there's no doubt of that," said Mr. Blacker, the short square man,
with emphasis.

"Captain Luttrell had done very well in Kordofan," Rayne resumed. "He
was fetched up here in a hurry as Acting-Governor. But no doubt the
appointment will be confirmed."

Mr. Blacker added another croak.

"Oh, it'll be confirmed all right, if----" and he left his sentence in
the air; but his gesture finished it.

"If there is any Luttrell left to confirm," Martin Hillyard interpreted,
though he kept his interpretation to himself.

There certainly was in that room with the big balcony a grim expectation
of trouble. It was apparent, not so much in words as in an attention to
distant noises, and a kind of strained silence. The sound of a second
caravan was heard. It was coming from the north. Rayne ran to the rail
of the balcony and looked anxiously out. The street here was very broad
and the huts upon the opposite side already dark except at one point,
where an unshaded kerosene lamp cast through on open door a panel of
glaring light upon the darkness. Rayne saw the caravan emerge spectrally
into the light and disappear again.

"They are our beasts," he said in a voice of relief, and a minute later
he called down to the soldier in charge. He spoke in the Dinka language
and the soldier replied in the same tongue. Hillyard understood enough
of it now to learn that the women had arrived safely at Senaar without
any incident or annoyance.

"That's good," said Colin Rayne. He turned to Hillyard. "Luttrell's a
long time. Shall we go and find him?"

Both Blacker and Dr. Mayle looked up with surprise, but Hillyard had
risen quickly, and they raised no objection. Rayne walked down the
stairs first and led the way towards the rear of the building across an
open stretch of ground. The moon had not yet risen, and it was pitch
dark so that Hillyard had not an idea whither he was being led. Colin
Rayne stopped at a small, low door in a high big wall and knocked. A
heavy key grated in a lock and the door was opened by a soldier.
Hillyard found himself standing inside a big compound, in the midst of
which stood some bulky, whitish erection, from which a light gleamed.

Colin Rayne led the way towards the light. It was shining through the
doorway of a chamber of new wood planks with a flat roof and some
strange, dimly-seen superstructure. Hillyard looked through the doorway
and saw a curious scene. Two Sudanese soldiers were present, one of whom
carried the lantern. The other, a gigantic creature with a skin like
polished mahogany, was stripped to the waist and held poised in his
hands a huge wooden mallet with a long handle. He stood measuring his
distance from the stem of a young tree which was wedged tightly between
a small square of stone on the ground and the flat roof above. Standing
apart, and watching everything with quiet eyes was Harry Luttrell.

Even at this first glance in the wavering light of the lantern Hillyard
realised that a change had come in the aspect of his friend. It was not
a look of age, but authority clothed him as with a garment. Rayne and
Hillyard passed into the chamber. Luttrell turned his head and welcomed
Hillyard with a smile. But he did not move and immediately afterwards he
raised his face to the roof.

"Are you ready up there?"

An English voice replied through the planks.

"Yes, sir," and immediately afterwards a dull and heavy weight like a
full sack was dumped upon the platform above their heads.

"Good!"

Luttrell turned towards the giant.

"Are you ready? And you know the signal?"

The Sudanese soldier grinned in delighted anticipation, with a flash of
big white teeth, and took a firmer grip of his mallet and swung it over
his shoulder.

"Good. Now pay attention," said Luttrell, "so that all may be well and
seemly done."

The Sudanese fixed his eyes upon Luttrell's foot and Luttrell began to
talk, rapidly and rather to himself than to his audience. Hillyard could
make neither head nor tail of the strange scene. It was evident that
Luttrell was rehearsing a speech, but why? And what had the Sudanese
with the mallet to do with it?

A sudden and rapid sequence of events brought the truth home to him with
a shock. At a point of his speech Luttrell stamped twice, and the
Sudanese soldier swung his mallet with all his force. The head of it
struck the great support full and square. The beam jumped from its
position, hopped once on its end, and fell with a crash. And from above
there mingled with the crash a most horrid clang, for, with the removal
of the beam, two trap-doors swung downwards. Hillyard looked up; he saw
the stars, and something falling. Instinctively he stepped back and shut
his eyes. When he looked again, within the chamber, midway between the
floor and roof, two sacks dangling at the end of two ropes spun and
jerked--as though they lived.

Rayne had stepped back and stood quivering from head to foot by
Hillyard's side; Hillyard himself felt sick. He knew very well now what
he was witnessing--the rehearsal of an execution. The Sudanese soldiers
were grinning from ear to ear with delight and pride. The one person
quite unmoved was Harry Luttrell, whose ingenuity had invented the
device.

"Let it be done just so," he said to the soldiers. "I shall not forgive
a mistake."

They saluted, and he dismissed them and turned at last to Martin
Hillyard.

"It's good to see you again," he said, as he shook hands; and then he
looked sharply into Hillyard's face and laughed. "Shook you up a bit,
that performance, eh? Well, they bungled things in Khartum a little
while ago. I can't afford awkwardness here."

Senga was in the centre of that old Khalifa's tribe which not so many
years ago ruled in Omdurman. It was always restless, always on the
look-out for a Messiah.

"Messiahs are most unsettling," said Luttrell, "especially when they
don't come. The tribe began sharpening its spear-heads a few weeks ago.
Then two of them got excited and killed. That's the consequence," and he
jerked his head towards the compound, from which the two friends were
walking away.

Hillyard was to hear more of the matter an hour later, as they all sat
at dinner in the mess-room. There were thousands of the tribe, all in a
ferment, and just half a battalion of Sudanese soldiers under Luttrell's
command to keep them in order.

"Blacker thinks we ought to have temporised, and that we shall get
scuppered," said Luttrell. He was the one light-hearted man at that
table, though he was staking his career, his life, and the life of the
colony on the correctness of his judgment. Sir Charles Hardiman would
never have recognised in the man who now sat at the head of the mess
table the young man who had been so torn by this and that discrimination
in the cabin of his yacht at Stockholm. There was something of the
joyous savage about him now--a type which England was to discover
shortly in some strength amongst the young men who were to officer its
armies.

"I don't agree. I have invited the chiefs to see justice done. I am
going to pitch them a speech myself from the scaffold--cautionary tales
for children, don't you know--and then, if old Fee-Fo-Fum with the
mallet don't get too excited and miss his stroke, everything will go
like clockwork."

Hillyard wondered how in the world he was going to deliver Stella
Croyle's message--a flimsy thing of delicate sentimentality--to this man
concerned with life and death, and discharging his responsibilities
according to the just rules of his race, without fear and without too
much self-questioning. Indeed, the Luttrell, Acting-Governor of Senga,
was a more familiar figure to Hillyard than he would have been to
Stella Croyle. For he had shaken off, under the pressure of immediate
work and immediate decisions, the thin and subtle emotions which were
having their way with him two years before. He had recaptured the high
spirit of Oxford days, and was lit along his path by that clear flame.

But there were tact and discretion too, as Hillyard was to learn. For
Mr. Blacker still croaked at the other end of the table.

"It's right and just and all that of course. But you are taking too high
a risk, Luttrell."

The very silence at the table made it clear to Hillyard that Luttrell
stood alone in his judgment. But Luttrell only smiled and said:

"Well, old man, since I disagree, the only course is to refer the whole
problem to our honorary member."

And at once every countenance lightened, and merriment began to flick
and dance from one to other of that company like the beads on the
surface of champagne. Only Hillyard was mystified.

"Your honorary member!" he inquired.

Luttrell nodded solemnly, and raised his glass.

"Gentlemen, the Honorary Member of the Senga Mess--Sir Chichester
Splay."

The toast was drunk with enthusiasm by all but Hillyard, who sat staring
about him and wondering what in the world the Mecaenas of the First
Nights had in common with these youthful administrators far-flung to the
Equator.

"You don't drink, Martin," cried Luttrell. A Socialist at a Public
Dinner who refused to honour the Royal Toast could only have scandalised
the chairman by a few degrees more than Hillyard's indifference did now.

"I beg your pardon," said Hillyard with humility. "I repair my error
now. It was due to amazement."

"Amazement!" Colin Rayne repeated, as Hillyard drained his glass.

"Yes. For I know the man."

There was the silence that follows some stupendous happening; eyes were
riveted upon Hillyard in admiration; and then the silence burst.

"He knows him!"

"It's incredible!"

"Actually knows him!"

And suddenly above the din Blacker's voice rose warningly.

"Don't let's lose our heads! That's the great thing! Let us keep as calm
as we can and think out our questions very carefully lest the
Heaven-sent Bearer of Great Tidings should depart without revealing all
he knows."

Chairs were hitched a little closer about Hillyard. The care which had
brooded in that room was quite dispelled.

"Have some more port, sir," said the youngest of that gathering, eagerly
pushing across the bottle. Hillyard filled his glass. Port was his, and
prestige too. He might write a successful play. That was all very well.
He might go shooting for eight months along by the two Niles and the
Dinder. That was all very well too. He was welcome at the Senga Mess.
But he knew Sir Chichester Splay! He acquired in an instant the
importance of a prodigy.

"But, since he is an honorary member of your mess, you must know him
too," cried Hillyard. "He must have come this way."

"My dear Martin!" Luttrell expostulated, as one upbraiding a child. "Sir
Chichester Splay out of London! The thing's inconceivable!"

"Inconceivable! Why, he lives in the country."

A moment of consternation stilled all voices. Then the Doctor spoke in a
whisper.

"Is it possible that we are all wrong?"

"He lives at Rackham Park, in Sussex."

Mr. Blacker fell back in relief.

"I know the house. He is a new resident. It is near to Chichester. He
went there on the Homoeopathic principle."

The conjecture was actually true. Sir Chichester Splay, spurred by his
ambition to be a country gentleman with a foot in town, had chosen the
neighbourhood on account of his name, so that it might come to be
believed that he had a territorial connection.

"Describe him to us," they all cried, and, when Hillyard had finished:

"Well, he might be like that," Luttrell conceded. "It was not our idea."

"No," said Colin Rayne. "You will remember I always differed from all of
you, but it seems that I am wrong too. I pictured him as a tall,
melancholy man, with a conical bald head and with a habit of plucking at
a black straggling beard--something like the portraits of Tennyson."

"To me," said Luttrell, "he was always fat and fussy, with white spats."

"But why are you interested in him at all?" cried Hillyard.

"We will explain the affair to you on the balcony," answered Luttrell,
as he rose.

They moved into the dark and coolness of this spacious place, and,
stretching themselves in comfort on the long cane chairs, they explained
to Hillyard this great mystery. Rayne began the tale.

"You see, we don't get a mail here so very often. Consequently we pay
attention when it comes. We read the _Searchlight_, for instance, with
care."

Mr. Blacker snatched the narrative away at this point.

"And Sir Chichester Splay occurs in most issues and in many columns. At
first we merely noticed him. Some one would say, 'Oh, here's old Splay
again,' as if--it seems incredible now--the matter was of no importance.
It needed Luttrell to discover the real significance of Sir Chichester,
the man's unique and astounding quality."

Harry Luttrell interrupted now.

"Yes, it was I," he said with pride. "Sir Chichester one day was seen at
a Flower Show in Chelsea. On another he attended the first performance
of a play. On a third day he honoured the Private View of an Exhibition
of Pictures. On a fourth he sat amongst the Distinguished Strangers in
the Gallery of the House of Commons. But that was all! This is what I
alone perceived. Always that was all!"

Luttrell leaned back and relit his cigar.

"When other people come to be mentioned in the newspapers day after day,
sooner or later some information about them slips out, some
characteristic thing. If you don't get to know their appearance, you
learn at all events their professions, their opinions. But of Sir
Chichester Splay--never anything at all. Yet he is there always, nothing
can happen without his presence, a man without a shadow, a being without
a history. To me, a simple soldier, he is admirable beyond words. For he
has achieved the inconceivable. He combines absolute privacy of life
with a world-wide notoriety. He may be a stamp-collector. Do I know
that? No. All I know is that if there were an Exhibition of Stamp
Collections, he would be the first to pass the door." Luttrell rose from
his chair.

"Therefore," he added in conclusion, "Sir Chichester is of great value
to us at Senga. We elected him to the mess with every formality, and
some day, when we have leisure, we shall send a deputation up the Nile
to shoot a Mrs. Grey's Antelope to decorate Rackham Park." He turned to
Hillyard. "We have a few yards to walk, and it is time."

The two friends walked down the stairs and turned along the road,
Hillyard still debating what was, after all, the value of Sir Chichester
Splay to the Senga mess. It had seemed to him that Luttrell had not
wished for further questions on the balcony, but, now that the two were
alone, he asked:

"I don't see it," he said; and Luttrell stopped abruptly and turned to
him.

"Don't you, Martin?" he asked gently. All the merriment had gone from
his face and voice. "If you were with us for a week you would. It's just
the value of a little familiar joke always on tap. Here are a handful of
us. We eat together, morning, noon, and night; we work together; we play
polo together--we can never get away from each other. And in consequence
we get on each other's nerves, especially in the months of hot weather.
Ill-temper comes to the top. We quarrel. Irreparable things might be
said. That's where Sir Chichester Splay comes in. When the quarrel's
getting bitter, we refer it to his arbitration. And, since he has no
opinions, we laugh and are saved." Luttrell resumed his walk to the
Governor's house.

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