A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

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"We'll go jumping in the winter and get it all back easily. Flat
racing's no good for the poor. The Lords don't come jumping."

Joan Whitworth carried on too, in her sackcloth and sashes. She was
moved by the enthusiastic explosions of Miranda Brown to reveal some
details of the great novel which was then in the process of incubation.

"_She_ insists on being married in a violet dress," said Joan, "with the
organ playing the 'Funeral March of a Marionette.'"

"Oh, isn't that thrilling!" cried Miranda.

"But why does she insist upon these unusual arrangements?" asked Harold
Jupp.

Joan brushed his question aside.

"It was symbolical of her."

"Yes. Linda would have done that," said Miranda. "I suppose her marriage
turns out very unhappily?"

"It had to," said Joan, quite despondent over this unalterable
necessity.

"Now, why?" asked Jupp in a perplexity.

"Her husband never understood her."

"What ho!" cried Dennis Brown, looking up from his scientific researches
into "Form at a Glance."

"I expect that he talked racing all day," said Miranda.

Dennis Brown treated the rejoinder with contempt. His eyes were fixed
sympathetically on the young writer-to-be.

"I hate crabbing any serious effort to elevate us, Joan, but, honestly,
doesn't it all sound a little conventional?"

He could have used no epithet more deplorable. Joan shot at him one
annihilating glance. Miranda bubbled with indignation.

"Don't notice them, Joan dear! They don't know the meaning of words.
They are ribald, uneducated people. You call your heroine Linda?
Linda--what?"

Mr. Jupp supplied a name.

"Linda Spavinsky," said he. "She comes of the ancient Scottish family of
that name."

"Pig! O pig!" cried Joan, routed at last from her superior serenity; and
a second afterwards her eyes danced and with a flash of sound white
teeth she broke into honest laughter. She did her best to suppress her
sense of fun, but it would get the better of her from time to time.

This onslaught upon Joan Whitworth took place on the Wednesday evening.
Sir Chichester came into the room as it ended, with a telegram in his
hand.

"Mario Escobar wires, Millie, that he is held up in London by press of
work and will only be able to run down here on Friday for the night."

Hillyard looked up.

"Mario Escobar?"

"Do you know him?" asked Millie Splay.

"Slightly," answered Hillyard. "Press of work! What does he do?"

"Runs about with the girls," said Dennis Brown.

Sir Chichester Splay would not have the explanation.

"Nonsense, my dear Dennis, nonsense, nonsense! He has a great many
social engagements of the most desirable kind. He is, I believe,
interested in some shipping firms."

"I like him," said Millie Splay.

"And so do I," added Joan, "very much indeed." The statement was
defiantly thrown at Harold Jupp.

"I think he is charming," said Miranda.

Harold Jupp looked from one to the other.

"That seems to settle it, doesn't it? But----"

"But what?" asked Sir Chichester.

"Need we listen to the ridiculous exhibitions of male jealousy?" Miranda
asked plaintively.

"But," Harold Jupp repeated firmly, "I do like a man to have another
address besides his club. Now, I will lay a nice five to one that no one
in this room knows where Mario Escobar goes when he goes home."

A moment's silence followed upon Harold Jupp's challenge. To the men,
the point had its importance. The women did not appreciate the
importance, but they recognised that their own menfolk did, and they did
not interrupt.

"It's true," said Sir Chichester, "I always hear from him with his club
as his address. But it simply means that he lives at an hotel and is not
sure that he will remain on."

Thus the little things of every day occupied the foreground of Rackham
Park. Millicent Splay had her worries of which Joan Whitworth was the
cause. She loved Joan; she was annoyed with Joan; she admired Joan; she
was amused at Joan; and she herself could never have told you which of
these four emotions had the upper hand. So inextricably were they
intermingled.

She poured them out to Martin Hillyard, as they drove through the Park
at Midhurst on the Thursday morning.

"What do you think of Joan?" she asked. "She is beautiful, isn't she,
with that mass of golden hair and her eyes?"

"Yes, she is," answered Hillyard.

"And what a fright she is making of herself! She isn't _dressed_ at all,
is she? She is just--protected by her clothes."

Hillyard laughed and Millicent Splay sighed. "And I did hope she would
have got over it all by Goodwood. But no! Really I could slap her. But I
might have known! Joan never does things by halves."

"She seems thorough," said Hillyard, although he remembered, with some
doubts as to the truth of his comment, moments now and again when more
primitive impulses had bubbled up in Joan Whitworth.

"Thorough! Yes, that's the word. Oh, Mr. Hillyard, there was a time when
she really dressed--_dressed_, you understand. My word, she was thorough
then, too. I remember coming out of the Albert Hall on a Melba
afternoon, when we could get nothing but a hansom cab, and a policeman
actually had to lift her up into it like a big baby because her skirt
was so tight. And look at her now!"

Millicent Splay thumped the side of the car in her vexation.

"But you mustn't think she's a fool." Lady Splay turned menacingly on
the silent Hillyard.

"But I don't," he protested.

"That's the last thing to say about her."

"I never said it," declared Martin Hillyard.

"I should have lost my faith in you, if you had," rejoined Millicent
Splay, even now hardly mollified.

But she could not avoid the subject. Here was a new-comer to Rackham
Park. She could not bear that he should carry away a wrong impression of
her darling.

"I'll tell you the truth about Joan. She has lived her sheltered life
with us, and no real things have yet come near her. No real troubles, no
deep joys. Her parents even died when she was too young to know them.
But she is eighteen and alive to her finger-tips. Therefore
she's--expectant."

"Yes," Hillyard agreed.

"She is searching for the meaning, for the secrets of life, sure that
there is a meaning, sure that there are secrets, if only she could get
hold of them. But she hasn't got hold of them. She runs here. She runs
there. She explores, she experiments. That's why she's dressed like a
tramp and thinking out a book where the heroine gets married to the
Funeral March of a Marionette. Oh, my dear person, it just means, as it
always means with us poor creatures, that the right man hasn't come
along."

Millie Splay leaned back in her seat.

"When he does!" she cried. "When he does! Did you see the magnolia this
morning? It burst into flower during the night. Joan! I thought once
that it might be Harold Jupp. But it isn't."

Lady Splay spoke with discouragement. She had the matchmaking fever in
her blood. Martin Hillyard remembered her glance when he had casually
spoken of Harry Luttrell. Then she startled him with words which he was
never to forget, and in which he chose to find a real profundity.

"The right man has not come along. So Joan mistakes anything odd for
something great, and thinks that to be unusual is to be strong. It's a
mood of young people who have not yet waked up."

They drove to the private stand and walked through into the paddock.
Millie Splay looked round at the gay and brilliant throng. She sighed.

"There she is, moping in the drawing-room over Prince
Hohenstiel--whatever his name is. She _won't_ come to Goodwood. No, she
just won't."

Yet Joan Whitworth did come to Goodwood that year, though not upon this
day.

No one in that household had read the newspapers so carefully each day
as Martin Hillyard. As the prospect darkened each morning, he was in a
distress lest a letter should not have been forwarded from his flat in
London, or should have been lost in the post. Each evening when the
party returned from the races his first question asked whether there was
no telegram awaiting him. So regular and urgent were his inquiries that
the house-party could not be ignorant of his preoccupation. And on the
afternoon of the Thursday a telegram in its orange envelope was lying
upon the hall-table.

"It's for you, Mr. Hillyard," said Lady Splay.

Hillyard held it in his hands. So the summons had come, the summons
hoped for, despaired of, made so often into a whip wherewith he lashed
his arrogance, the summons to serve.

"I shall have to go up to town this evening," he said.

Anxious faces gathered about him.

"Oh, don't do that!" said Harold Jupp. "We have just got to like you."

"Yes, wait until to-morrow, my dear boy," Sir Chichester suggested.
Even Joan Whitworth descended to earth and requested that he should
stay.

"It's awfully kind of you," stammered Martin. "But I am afraid that this
is very important."

Lady Splay was practical.

"Hadn't you better see first?" she asked.

Hillyard, with his thoughts playing swiftly in the future like a rapier,
was still standing stock-still with the unopened telegram in his hand.

"Of course," he said. "But I know already what it is."

The anxious little circle closed nearer as he tore open the envelope. He
read:

"_I have refused the Duke. Money is cash--I mean trash.
Little one I am yours._--LINDA SPAVINSKY."

The telegram had been sent that afternoon from Chichester.

Hillyard gazed around at the serious faces which hemmed him in. It
became a contest as to whose face should hold firm longest. Joan herself
was the first to flee, and she was found rocking to and fro in silent
laughter in a corner of the library. Then Hillyard himself burst into a
roar.

"I bought that fairly," he admitted, and he went up several points in
the estimation of them all.

The last day of the races came--all sunshine and hot summer; lights and
shadows chasing across the downs, the black slopes of Charlton forest on
the one side, parks and green fields and old brown houses, sloping to
the silver Solent, upon the other; and in the centre of the plain, by
Bosham water, the spire of Chichester Cathedral piercing the golden air.
Paddock and lawn and the stands were filled until about two in the
afternoon. Then the gaps began to show to those who were concerned to
watch. Especially about the oval railings in the paddock, within which,
dainty as cats and with sleek shining skins, the racehorses stepped, the
crowd grew thin. And in a few moments, the word had run round like fire,
"The officers had gone."

Hillyard stood reflecting upon the stupendous fact. Never had he so
bitterly regretted that physical disqualification which banned him from
their company. Never had he so envied Luttrell. He was in the uttermost
depression when a small, brown-gloved hand touched his arm. He turned
and saw Joan Whitworth at his side, her lovely face alive with
excitement, her eyes most friendly. It was hardly at all the Joan he
knew. Joan had courage, but to face Goodwood in the clothes she affected
at Rackham Park was beyond it. From her grey silk stockings and suede
shoes to the little smart blue hat which sat so prettily on her hair,
she was, as Millicent Splay would have admitted, really dressed.

"There is a real telegram for you," she said. She held it out to him
enclosed in an envelope which had been already opened.

"_Please come to see me--Graham_," he read, and the actual receipt of
the message stirred within him such a whirl of emotion that, for a
moment or two, Joan Whitworth spoke and he was not aware of it.
Suddenly, however, he understood that she was speaking words of
importance.

"I hope I did right to open it," she said. "Colonel Brockley rode over
this morning to tell us that his son had been recalled to his battalion
by a telegram. I knew you were expecting one. When this one came, I
thought that it might be important and that you ought to have it at
once. On the other hand it might be another telegram," and her face
dimpled into smiles, "from Linda Spavinsky. I didn't know what to do
about it. But Mario Escobar was quite certain that I ought to open it."

"Mario Escobar?" cried Hillyard.

"Yes. He had just arrived. He was quite certain that we ought to open
it, so we did."

"We?" A note of regret in his voice made her ask anxiously:

"Was I wrong?"

Hillyard hastened to reassure her.

"Not a bit. Of course you were quite right, and I am very grateful."

Joan's face cleared again.

"You see, I thought that if it was important I could bring it over and
drive you back again."

"Will you?" Hillyard asked eagerly. "But now you are here you ought to
stay."

Joan would not hear of the proposal, and Hillyard himself was in a fever
to be off. They found Sir Chichester and his wife in the paddock, and
Hillyard wished his hosts good-bye. Mario Escobar, who had driven over
with Joan Whitworth, was talking to them. Escobar turned to Martin
Hillyard.

"We met at Sir Charles Hardiman's supper party. You have not forgotten?
You are off? A new play, I hope, to go into rehearsal."

He smiled and bowed, and waved his hands. Hillyard went away with Joan
Whitworth and mounted beside her into a little two-seated car which she
had been accustomed to drive in her unregenerate days. She had not
forgotten her skill, and she sent the little car spinning up and down
the road into the hills. It was an afternoon of blue and gold, with the
larks singing out of sight in the sky. The road wound up and down, dark
hedges on one side, fields yellow with young wheat upon the other, and
the scent of the briar-rose in the air. Joan said very little, and
Hillyard was content to watch her as she drove, the curls blowing about
her ears and her hands steady and sure upon the wheel as she swung the
car round the corners and folds of the hills. Once she asked of him:

"Are you glad to go?"

He made no pretence of misunderstanding her.

"Very," he answered. "If the great trial is coming, I want to fall back
into the rank and file. Pushing and splashing is for peace times."

"Oh, I understand that!" she cried.

These were the young days. The jealousies of Departments, the intrigues
to pull this man down and put that man up, not because of his capacity
or failure, but because he fitted or did not fit the inner politics of
the Office, the capture of honours by the stay-at-homes--all the little
miseries and horrors that from time immemorial have disfigured the
management of wars--they lay in the future. With millions of people, as
with this couple speeding among the uplands, the one thought was--the
great test is at hand.

"You go up to London to-night, and it may be a long while before we see
you," said Joan. She brought the car to a halt on the edge of Duncton
Hill. "Look for luck and for memory at the Weald of Sussex," she cried
with a little catch in her throat.

Fields and great trees, and here and there the white smoke of a passing
train and beyond the Blackdown and the misty slopes of Leith
Hill--Hillyard was never to forget it, neither that scene nor the eager
face and shining eyes of Joan Whitworth against the blue and gold of the
summer afternoon.

"You will remember that you have friends here, who will be glad to hear
news of you," she said, and she threw in the clutch and started the car
down the hill.

CHAPTER XI

STELLA RUNS TO EARTH

"You have been back in England long?" asked Stella Croyle.

"A little while," said Hillyard evasively.

It was the first week of September. But since his return from Rackham
Park to London his days had been passed in the examination of files of
documents; and what little time he had enjoyed free from that labour had
been given to quiet preparations for his departure.

"You might have come to see me," Stella Croyle suggested. "You knew that
I wished to see you."

"Yes, but I have been very busy," he answered. "I am going away."

Stella Croyle looked at him curiously.

"You too! You have joined up?"

Hillyard shook his head.

"No good," he answered. "I told you my lungs were my weak point. I am
turned down--and I am going abroad. It's not very pleasant to find
oneself staying on in London, going to a little dinner party here and
there where all the men are oldish, when all of one's friends have
gone."

Stella Croyle's face and voice softened.

"Yes. I can understand that," she said.

Hillyard watched her narrowly, but there was no doubt that she was
sincere. She had received him with an air of grievance, and a hard
accent in her voice. But she was entering now into a comprehension of
the regrets which must be troubling him.

"I am sorry," she continued. "I never cared very much for women. I have
very few friends amongst them. And so I am losing--every one." She held
out her hand to him in sympathy. "But if I were a man and had been
turned down by the doctors, I don't think that I could stay. I should
go like you and hide."

She smiled and poured out two cups of tea.

"That is a habit of yours, even though you are not a man," Hillyard
replied.

"What do you mean?"

"You run away and hide."

Stella looked at her visitor in surprise.

"Who told you that?"

"Sir Charles Hardiman."

Stella Croyle was silent for a few moments.

"Yes, that's true," and she laughed suddenly. "When things go wrong, I
become rather impossible. I have often made up my mind to live entirely
in the country, but I never carry the plan out."

She let Hillyard drink his tea and light a cigarette before she
approached the question which was torturing her.

"You had a good time in the Sudan!" she began. "Lots of heads?"

"Yes. I had a perfect time."

"And your friend? Captain Luttrell. Did you meet him?"

Hillyard had pondered on the answer which he would give to her when she
asked that question. If he answered, "Yes,"--why, then he must go on, he
must tell her something of what passed between Luttrell and himself, how
he delivered his message and what answer he received. Let him wrap that
answer up in words, however delicate and vague, she would see straight
to the answer. Her heart would lead her there. To plead forgetfulness
would be merely to acknowledge that he slighted her; and she would not
believe him. So he lied.

"No. I never met Luttrell. He was away down in Khordofan when I was on
the White Nile."

Stella Croyle had turned a little away from Hillyard when she put the
question; and she sat now with her face averted for a long while.
Nothing broke the silence but the ticking of the clock.

"I am sorry," said Hillyard.

No doubt her disappointment was bitter. She had counted very much, no
doubt, on this chance of the two men meeting; on her message reaching
her lover, and a "little word" now and again from him coming to her
hands. Some morning she would wake up and find an envelope in the
familiar writing waiting upon the tray beside her tea--that, no doubt,
had been the hope which she had lived on this many a day. Hillyard was
not fool enough to hold that he understood either the conclusions at
which women arrived, or the emotions by which they jumped to them. But
he attributed these hopes and thoughts with some confidence to Stella
Croyle--until she turned and showed him her face. The sympathy and
gentleness had gone from it. She was white with passion and her eyes
blazed.

"Why do you lie to me?" she cried. "I met Harry this morning."

Hillyard was more startled by the news of Luttrell's presence in London
than confused by the detection of his lie.

"Harry Luttrell!" he exclaimed. "You are sure? He is in England?"

"Yes. I met him in Piccadilly outside Jerningham's"--she mentioned the
great outfitters and provision merchants--"he told me that he had run
across you in the Sudan. What made you say that you hadn't?"

Hillyard was taken at a loss.

"Well?" she insisted.

Hillyard could see no escape except by the way of absolute frankness.

"Because I gave him your message, Mrs. Croyle," he replied slowly, "and
I judged that he was not going to answer it."

Stella Croyle was inclined to think that the world was banded against
her, to deceive her and to do her harm. They had all been engaged,
Hardiman and the rest of them, in keeping Harry Luttrell away from her:
in defending him, whether he wished it or not, from the wiles of the
enchantress. Stella Croyle was quick enough in the up-take where her
wounded heart was not concerned, but she was never very clear in any
judgment which affected Harry Luttrell. Passion and disappointment and
hope drew veils between the truth and her, and she dived below the plain
reason to this or that far-fetched notion for the springs of his
conduct. Almost she had persuaded herself that Harry Luttrell, by the
powerful influence of friends, was being kept against his will from her
side. Her anger against Hillyard had sprung, not from the mere fact that
he had lied to her, but from her fancy that he had joined the imaginary
band of her enemies. She understood now that in this she had been wrong.

"I see," she said gently. "It was to spare me pain?"

"Yes."

Suddenly Stella Croyle laughed--and with triumph. She showed to Hillyard
a face from which all the anger had gone.

"You need not have been so anxious to spare me. Harry is coming here
this afternoon."

She saw the incredulity flicker in Hillyard's eyes, but she did not
mind.

"Yes," she asserted. "He goes down this evening to a camp in the New
Forest where his battalion is waiting to go to France. He starts at six
from Waterloo. He promised to run in here first."

Hillyard looked at the clock. It was already half-past four. He had not
the faintest hope that Luttrell would come. Stella had no doubt pressed
him to come. She had probably been a little importunate. Luttrell's
promise was an excuse, just an excuse to be rid of her--nothing more.

"Luttrell has probably a great deal to do on this last afternoon," he
suggested.

"Of course, he won't be able to stay long," Stella Croyle agreed.
"Still, five minutes are worth a good deal, aren't they, if you have
waited for them two years?"

She was impenetrable in her confidence. It clothed her about like
armour. Not for a moment would she doubt--she dared not! Harry was
coming back to the house that afternoon. Would he break something--some
little china ornament upon the mantel-shelf? He generally knocked over
something. What would it be to-day, the mandarin with the nodding head,
or the funny little pot-bellied dwarf which she had picked up at
Christie's the day before? Stella smiled delightedly as she selected
this and that of her little treasures for destruction. Oh, to-day Harry
Luttrell could sweep every glass or porcelain trinket she possessed
into the grate--when once he had passed through the doorway--when once
again he stood within her room. She sat with folded hands, hope like a
rose in her heart, sure of him, so sure of him that she did not even
watch the hands of her clock.

But the hands moved on.

"I will stay, if I may," said Hillyard uncomfortably. "I will go, of
course, when----" and he could not bring himself to complete the
sentence.

Stella, however, added the words, though in a quieter voice and with
less triumph than she had used before.

"When he comes. Yes, do stay. I shall be glad."

Slowly the day drew in. The sunlight died away from the trees in the
park. In the tiny garden great shadows fell. The dusk gathered and
Hillyard and Stella Croyle sat without a word in the darkening room. But
Stella had lost her pride of carriage. On the mantelpiece the clock
struck the hour--six little tinkling silvery strokes. At that moment a
guard was blowing his whistle on a platform of Waterloo and a train
beginning slowly to move.

"He will have missed his train," said Stella in an unhappy whisper. "He
will be here later."

"My dear," replied Hillyard, and leaning forward he took and gently
shook her hand. "Soldiers don't miss their trains."

Stella did not answer. She sat on until the lamps were lit in the
streets outside and in this room the dusk had changed to black night.

"No, he will not come," she said at last, in a low wail of anguish. She
rose and turned to Hillyard. Her face glimmered against the darkness
deathly white and her eyes shone with sorrow.

"It was kind and wise of you to wish to spare me," she said. "Oh, I can
picture to myself how coldly he heard you. He never meant to come here
this afternoon."

Stella Croyle was wrong, just as Hillyard had been. Harry Luttrell had
meant to pay his farewell visit to Stella Croyle, knowing well that he
was unlikely ever to come back, and understanding that he owed her it.
But an incident drove the whole matter from his thoughts, and the
incident was just one instance to show how wide a gulf now separated
these two.

He had called at a nursing home close to Portland Place where a Colonel
Oakley lay dying of a malignant disease. Oakley had been the chief
spirit of reviving the moral and the confidence of the disgraced
Clayfords. He had laboured unflinchingly to restore its discipline, to
weld it into one mind, with dishonour to redeem, and a single arm to
redeem it. He had lived for nothing else--until the internal trouble
laid him aside. Luttrell called at half-past three to tell him that all
was well with his old battalion, and was met by a nurse who shook her
head.

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