A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

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"The last two days he has been lying, except for a minute here and
there, in a coma. You may see him if you like, but it is a question of
hours."

Luttrell went into the bedroom where the sick man lay, so thin of face
and hand, so bloodless. But it seemed that the Fates wished to deal the
Colonel one last ironic stroke, before they let him die. For, while
Luttrell yet stood in the room, Colonel Oakley's eyes opened. This last
moment of consciousness was his, the very last; and while it still
endured, suddenly, down Portland Place, with its drums beating, its
soldiers singing, marched a battalion. The song and the music swelled,
the tramp of young, active, vigorous soldiers echoed and reached down
the quiet street. Colonel Oakley turned his face to his pillow and burst
into tears; the bitterness of death was given him to drink in
overflowing measure. It seemed as though a jibe was flung at him.

The tramp of the battalion had not yet died away when Oakley sank again
into unconsciousness.

"It was pretty rough that he should just wake up to hear that and to
know that he would never have part in it, eh?" said Luttrell, speaking
in a low voice more to himself than to the nurse. "What he did for us!
Pretty hard treatment, eh?"

Luttrell left the home with one thought filling his mind--the regiment.
It had got to justify all Oakley's devotion; it had got somehow to make
amends to him, even if he never was to know of it, for this last unfair
stroke of destiny. Luttrell walked across London, dwelling upon the
qualities of individual men in the company which was his command--how
this man was quick, and that man stupid, and that other inclined to
swank, and a fourth had a gift for reading maps, and a fifth would make
a real marksman; and so he woke up to find himself before the bookstall
in the station at Waterloo. Then he remembered the visit he had
promised, but there was no longer any time. He took the train to the New
Forest, and three days later went to France.

But of Luttrell's visit to Colonel Oakley, Stella Croyle never knew.
And, again, very likely it would not have mattered if she had. They were
parted too widely for insight and clear vision.

* * * * *

Hillyard carried away with him a picture of Stella's haunted and
despairing face. It was over against him as he dined at his club,
gleaming palely from out of darkness, the lips quivering, the eyes sad
with all the sorrows of women. He could blame neither the one nor the
other--neither Stella Croyle nor Harry Luttrell. One heart called to the
other across too wide a gulf, and this heart on the hither side was
listening to quite other voices and was deaf to her cry for help. But
Hillyard was on the road along which Millicent Splay had already
travelled. More and more he felt the case for compassion. He carried the
picture of Stella's face home with him. It troubled his sleep; by
constant gazing upon it he became afraid....

He waked with a start to hear a question whispered at his ear. "Where is
she? How has she passed this night?" The morning light was glimmering
between the curtains. The room was empty. Yet surely those words had
been spoken, actually spoken by a human voice.... He took his telephone
instrument in his hand and lifted the receiver. In a little while--but a
while too long for his impatience--his call was acknowledged at the
exchange. He gave Stella Croyle's number and waited. Whilst he waited he
looked at his watch. The time was a quarter past seven.

An unfamiliar and sleepy voice answered him from her house.

"Will you put me on to Mrs. Croyle?" he requested, and the reply came
back:

"Mrs. Croyle went away with her maid last night."

"Last night?" cried Hillyard incredulously. "But I did not leave the
house myself until well after six, and she had then no plans for
leaving."

Further details, however, were given to him. Mrs. Croyle had called up a
garage whence cars can be hired. She had packed hurriedly. She had left
at nine by motor.

"Where for?" asked Hillyard.

The name of an hotel in the pine country of Surrey was given.

"Thank you," said Hillyard, and he rang off.

She had run to earth in her usual way, when trouble and grief broke
through her woman's armour and struck her down--that was all! Hillyard
lighted a cigarette and rang for his tea. Yes, that was all! She was
acting true to her type, as the jargon has it. But against his will, her
face took shape before him, as he had seen it in the darkness of her
room and ever since--ever since!

He rang again, and more insistently. He possessed a small, swift
motor-car. Before the clocks of London had struck eight he was
travelling westwards along the King's Road. Hillyard was afraid. He did
not formulate his fears. He was not sure of what he feared. But he was
afraid--terribly afraid; and for the first time anger rose up in his
heart against his friend. Luttrell! Harry Luttrell! At this very moment
he was changing direction in columns of fours upon the drill ground,
happy in the smooth execution of the manoeuvre by his men and
untroubled by any thought of the distress of Stella Croyle. Well, little
things must give way to great--women to the exigencies of drill!

Meanwhile, Hillyard grew more afraid, and yet more afraid. He swept down
the hill to Cobham, passed between the Hut and the lake, and was through
Ripley before the shutters in the shops were down. The dew was heavy in
the air; all the fresh, clean smell of the earth was in that September
morning. And as yet the morning itself was only half awake. At last the
Hog's Back rose, and at a little inn, known for its comfort--and its
_chef_--Hillyard's car was stopped.

"Mrs. Croyle?" Hillyard asked at the office.

"Her maid is here," said the girl clerk, and pointed.

Hillyard turned to a girl, pretty and, by a few years, younger than
Stella Croyle.

"I have orders not to wake Mrs. Croyle until she rings," said the maid.
Jenny Prask, she was called, and she spoke with just a touch of pleasant
Sussex drawl. "Mrs. Croyle has not been sleeping well, and she looked
for a good night's rest in country air."

The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her
argument, that Hillyard's terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose
their vivid colours.

"I understand that," he stammered. "Yet, Jenny----"

Jenny Prask smiled.

"You are Mr. Hillyard, I think?"

"Yes."

"I have heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids
to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it
seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly
Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the
recognition of a mistress.

"If you wish, I will wake her."

Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels. She knocked upon
the door. No answer was returned. She opened it and entered.

Stella Croyle was up and dressed. She was sitting at a table by the
window with some sheets of notepaper and some envelopes in front of her,
and her back was towards Hillyard and the open door. But she was dressed
as she had been dressed the evening before when he had left her; the
curtains in the room were drawn, and the electric lights on the
writing-table and the walls were still burning. The bed had not been
slept in.

Stella Croyle rose and turned towards her visitors. She tottered a
little as she stood up, and her eyes were dazed.

"Why have you come here?" she asked faintly, and she fell rather than
sat again in her chair.

Hillyard sprang forward and tore the curtains aside so that the
sunlight poured into the room, and Stella opened and shut her eyes with
a contraction of pain.

"I had so many letters to write," she explained, "I thought that I would
sit up and get through with them."

Hillyard looked at the table. There were great black dashes on the
notepaper and lines, and here and there a scribbled picture of a face,
and perhaps now and again half a word. She had sat at that table all
night and had not even begun a letter. Hillyard's heart was torn with
pity as he looked from her white, tired face to the sheets of notepaper.
What misery and unhappiness did those broad, black dashes and idle lines
express?

"You must have some breakfast," he said. "I'll order it and have it
ready for you downstairs by the time you are ready. Then I'll take you
back to London."

The blood suddenly mounted into her face.

"You will?" she cried wildly. "In a reserved compartment, so that I may
do nothing rash and foolish? Are you going to be kind too?"

She broke into a peal of shrill and bitter laughter. Then her head went
down upon her hands, and she gave herself up to such a passion of
sobbing and tears as was quite beyond all Hillyard's experience. Yet he
would rather hear those sobs and see her bowed shoulders shaking under
the violence of them than listen again to the dreadful laughter which
had gone before. He had not the knowledge which could enable him to
understand her sudden outburst, nor did he acquire that knowledge until
long afterwards. But he understood that quite unwittingly he had touched
some painful chord in that wayward nature.

"I am going to take you back in my motor-car," he said. "I'll be
downstairs with the breakfast ready."

She had probably eaten nothing, he reckoned, since teatime the day
before. Food was the steadying thing she needed now. He went to the door
which Jenny Prask held open for him.

"Don't leave her!" he breathed in a whisper.

Jenny Prask smiled.

"Not me, sir," she said fervently.

Hillyard remembered with comfort some words which she had spoken in
appreciation of the loving devotion of her maid.

"In three-quarters of an hour," said Jenny; and later on that morning,
with a great fear removed from his heart, Hillyard drove Stella Croyle
back to London.

CHAPTER XII

IN BARCELONA

It was nine o'clock on a night of late August.

The restaurant of the Maison Doree in the Plaza Cataluna at Barcelona
looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the
pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Cafe Continental, the
vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for
sale. Even in this wide space the air was close and stale. Within, a few
people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed
against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of
Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. Across
the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble terrace
overlooking a country-side bathed in orange light; and on the terrace
stood a sedan chair with drawn curtains, and behind the chair stood a
saddled white horse. Hillyard had dined more than once during the last
few months at the Maison Doree; and the problem of that picture had
always baffled him. A lovers' tryst! But where were the lovers? In some
inner room shaded from the outrage of that orange light which never was
on sea or land? Or in the sedan chair? Or were their faces to be
discovered, as in the puzzle pictures, in the dappling of the horse's
flanks, or the convolutions of the pillars which supported the terrace
roof, or the gilded ornamentations of the chair itself? Hillyard was
speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a
vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when
another door opened--the door of the restaurant. A sharp-visaged man
with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller,
looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard's table. He went
quite openly.

The two men shook hands, and the new-comer seated himself in front of
Hillyard.

"You will take coffee and a cigar?" Hillyard asked in Spanish, and gave
the order to the waiter.

The two men talked of the heat, the cinematograph theatres at the side
of the Plaza, the sea-bathing at Caldetas, and then the sharp-faced man
leaned forward.

"Ramon says there is no truth in the story, senor."

Hillyard struck a match and held it to his companion's cigar.

"And you trust Ramon, Senor Baeza?"

Lopez Baeza leaned back with a gesture of unqualified assent.

"As often and often you can trust the peasant of my country," he said.

Hillyard agreed with a nod. He gazed about the room.

"There is no one interesting here to-night," he said idly.

"No," answered Lopez Baeza. "The theatres are closed, the gay people
have gone to St. Sebastian, the families to the seaside. Ouf, but it is
hot."

"Yes."

Hillyard dropped his voice to a whisper and returned to the subject of
his thoughts.

"You see, my friend, it is of so much importance that we should make no
mistake here."

"_Claro!_" returned Lopez Baeza. "But listen to me, senor. You know that
our banks are behind the times and our post offices not greatly trusted.
We have therefore a class of messengers."

Hillyard nodded.

"I know of them."

"Good. They are not educated. Most of them can neither read nor write.
They are simply peasants. Yet they are trusted to carry the most
important letters and great sums of money in gold and silver from place
to place. And never do they betray their trust. It is unknown. Why,
senor, I know myself of cases where rich men have entrusted their
daughters to the care of the messengers, sure that in this way their
daughters will arrive safely at their destination."

"Yes," said Hillyard. "I know of these men."

"Ramon Castillo is as honest as the best of them."

"Yes, but he is not one of them," said Hillyard. "He is a stevedore with
thirty years of the quayside and at the port of Barcelona, where there
are German ships with their officers and crews on board."

Hillyard was troubled. He drew from his pocket creased letters and read
them for the twentieth time with a frowning countenance.

"There is so much at stake. Two hundred feluccas--two hundred
motor-driven feluccas! And eighteen thousand men, on shore and sea? See
what it means! On our side, the complete surveillance of the Western
Mediterranean! On the other side--against us--two hundred travelling
supply bases for submarines, two hundred signal stations. I want to be
sure! I want neither to give the enemy the advantage by putting him upon
his guard, nor to miss the great opportunity myself."

Lopez Baeza nodded.

"Why not talk with Ramon Castillo yourself?" he asked.

"That is what I want to do."

"I will arrange for it. When?"

"To-night," said Hillyard.

Lopez Baeza lifted his hands in deprecation.

"Yes. I can take you to his house--now. But, senor, Ramon is a poor man.
He lives in a little narrow street."

Hillyard looked quietly at Lopez Baeza. He had found men on the
Mediterranean littoral whom he could trust with his life and everything
that was his. But a good working principle was to have not overmuch
faith in any one. A noisome little street in the lower quarters of
Barcelona--who could tell what might happen after one had plunged into
it?

"I will come with you," he said.

"Good," said Lopez. "I will go on ahead." And once more Hillyard's quiet
eyes rested upon Baeza's face. "It is not wise that we should walk out
together. There is no one here, it is true, but in the chairs outside
the cafes--who shall say?"

"Yes. You go on ahead," Hillyard agreed. "That is wise."

Lopez rose.

"Give me five minutes, senor. Then down the Rambla. The second turning
to the right, beyond the Opera House. You will see me at the corner.
When you see me, follow!"

Hillyard rose and shook hands cordially with Lopez Baeza with the air of
a man who might never see his friend again for years. Baeza commended
him to God and went out of the restaurant on to the lighted footway.

Hillyard read through the two creased letters again, though he knew them
by heart. They had reached him from William Lloyd, an English merchant
at Barcelona, at two different dates. The first, written six weeks ago,
related how Pontiana Tabor, a servant of the firm, had come into Lloyd's
private office and informed him that on the night of the 27th June a
German submarine had entered a deep cove at the lonely north-east point
of the island of Mallorca, and had there been provisioned by Jose
Medina's men, with Jose Medina's supplies, and that Jose Medina had
driven out of Palma de Mallorca in his motor-car, and travelling by
little-known tracks, had been present when the operation was in process.
The name of a shoemaker in a street of Palma was given as corroboration.

The second letter, which had brought Hillyard post-haste off the sea
into Barcelona, was only three days old. Once more Pontiana Tabor had
been the bearer of bad news. Jose Medina had been seen entering the
German Consulate in Barcelona, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the
morning of August 22nd.

Hillyard was greatly troubled by these two letters.

"We can put Jose Medina out of business, of course," he reflected. For
Jose Medina's tobacco factories were built at a free port in French
territory. "But I want the man for my friend."

He put the letters back in his pocket and paid his bill. As he went out
of the Maison Doree, he felt in the right-hand pocket of his jacket to
make sure that a little deadly life preserver lay ready to his hand.

He did not distrust Lopez Baeza. All the work which Baeza had done for
him had, indeed, been faithfully and discreetly done. But--but there was
always a certain amount of money for the man who would work the double
cross--not so very much, but still, a certain amount. And Hillyard was
always upon his guard against the intrusion of a contempt for the
German effort. That contempt was easy enough for a man who, having read
year after year of the wonders of the loud-vaunted German system of
espionage, had come fresh from his reading into contact with the actual
agents. Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their
Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and
extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their
estimation of men--these things were apt in the early years of the war
to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the
great idol of German efficiency.

"The German agent works on the assumption that the mind of every
foreigner reasons on German lines, but with inferior intelligence. But
behind the agent is the cunning of Berlin, with its long-deliberated
plans and its concocted ingenuity of method. And though on the whole
they are countered, as with amazement they admit, by the amateurs from
England, still every now and then--not very often--they do bring
something off."

Thus Hillyard reasoned as he turned the corner of the Plaza Cataluna
into the wide Rambla. It might be that the narratives of Pontiana Tabor
and the denials of Ramon Castillo were all just part of one little
subsidiary plan in the German scheme which was to reach its achievement
by putting an inconvenient Englishman out of the way for good in one of
the dark, narrow side streets of Barcelona.

After the hot day the Rambla, with its broad tree-shaded alley in the
middle, its carriage-ways on each side of the alley, and its shops and
footwalks beyond the carriage-ways, was crowded with loiterers. The
Spaniard, to our ideas, is simple in his pleasure. To visit a
cinematograph, to take a cooling temperance drink at the Municipal
Kiosque at the top of the Rambla, and to pace up and down the broad walk
with unending chatter--until daybreak--here were the joys of Barcelona
folk in the days of summer. Further down at the lower end of the Rambla
you would come upon the dancing halls and supper-cafes, with separate
rooms for the national gambling game, "Siete y Media," but they had
their own clientele amongst the bloods and the merchant captains from
the harbour. The populace of Barcelona walked the Rambla under the
great globes of electric light.

Hillyard could only move slowly through the press. Every one dawdled.
Hillyard dawdled too. He passed the Opera House, and a little further
down saw across the carriage-way, Lopez Baeza in front of a lighted
tobacco shop at the corner of a narrow street. Hillyard crossed the
carriage-way and Baeza turned into the street, a narrow thoroughfare
between tall houses and dark as a cavern. Hillyard followed him. The
lights of the Rambla were left behind, the houses became more slatternly
and disreputable, the smells of the quarter were of rancid food and bad
drains. Before a great door Baeza stopped and clapped his hands.

A jingle of keys answered him, and rising from the step of another house
the watchman of the street crossed the road. He put a key into the door,
opened it, and received the usual twopence. Baeza and Hillyard passed
in.

"Ramon is on the top floor. We have to climb," said Baeza.

He lit a match, and the two men mounted a staircase with a carved
balustrade, made for a king. Two stories up, the great staircase ended,
and another of small, steep and narrow steps succeeded it. When Baeza's
match went out there was no light anywhere; from a room somewhere above
came a sound of quarrelling voices--a woman's voice high and shrill, a
man's voice hoarse and drunken, and, as an accompaniment, the wailing of
a child wakened from its sleep.

At the very top of the house Baeza rapped on a door. The door was
opened, and a heavy, elderly man, wearing glasses on his nose, stood in
the entrance with the light of an unshaded lamp behind him.

"Ramon, it is the chief," said Baeza.

Ramon Castello crossed the room and closed an inner door. Then he
invited Hillyard to enter. The room was bare but for a few pieces of
necessary furniture, but all was scrupulously clean. Ramon Castillo set
forward a couple of chairs and asked his visitors to be seated. He was
in his shirt-sleeves, and he wore the rope-soled sandals of the Spanish
peasant, but he was entirely at his ease. He made the customary little
speech of welcome with so simple a dignity and so manifest a sincerity
that Hillyard could hardly doubt him afterwards.

"It is my honour to welcome you not merely as my chief, but as an
Englishman. I am poor, and I take my pay, but Senor Baeza will assure
you that for twenty-five years I have been the friend of England. And
there are thousands and thousands of poor Spaniards like myself, who
love England, because its law-courts are just, because there is a real
freedom there, because political power is not the opportunity of
oppression."

The little speech was spoken with great rapidity and with deep feeling;
and, having delivered it, Ramon seated himself on the side of the table
opposite to Hillyard and Baeza and waited.

"It is about Pontiana Tabor," said Hillyard. "He is making a mistake?"

"No, senor; he is lying," and he used the phrase which has no exact
equivalent in the English. "He is a _sin verguenza_."

"Tell me, my friend," said Hillyard.

"Pontiana Tabor swears that Jose Medina was seen to enter the German
Consulate before noon on August the 22nd. But on August the 21st Medina
was in Palma, Mallorca; he was seen there by a captain of the Islana
Company, and a friend of mine spoke to him on the quay. If, therefore,
he was in the German Consulate here on the 22nd, he must have crossed
that night by the steamer to Barcelona. But he did not. His name was not
on the list of passengers, and although he might have avoided that, he
was not seen on board or to come on board. I have spoken with officers
and crew. Jose Medina did not cross on the 21st. Moreover, Senor Baeza
has seen a letter which shows that he was certainly in Palma on the
23rd."

"That is true," said Baeza. "Medina was in Palma on the 21st, and in
Palma on the 23rd, and he did not cross to Barcelona on the night of the
21st, nor back again to Palma on the night of the 22nd. Therefore he was
not seen to visit the German Consulate on the morning of the 22nd, and,
as Ramon says, Pontiana is lying."

"Why should Pontiana lie?" asked Hillyard.

Ramon took his pince-nez from the bridge of his nose, and, holding them
between his finger and thumb, tapped with them upon his knee.

"Because, senor, there are other contrabandists besides Jose Medina; one
little group at Tarragona and another near Garucha--and they would all
be very glad to see Jose Medina get into trouble with the British and
the French. His feluccas fly the British flag and his factories are on
French soil. There would be an end of Jose Medina."

The letters were put in front of Hillyard. He read them over carefully,
and at the end he said:

"If Pontiana Tabor lied in this case of the Consulate--and that seems
clear--it is very likely that he lied also in the other. Yes."

As a matter of fact, Hillyard had reasons of his own to doubt the truth
of the story which ascribed to Medina the actual provisioning of a
submarine--reasons which had nothing whatever to do with Jose Medina
himself.

The destruction of shipping by German submarines in this western section
of the Mediterranean had an intermittent regularity. There would be ten
successive days--hardly ever more than ten days--during which ships were
sunk. Thereafter for three weeks, steamships and sailing ships would
follow the course upon which they were ordered, without hurt or loss.
After three weeks, the murderous business would begin again. There was
but one explanation in Hillyard's opinion.

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