The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Summons, by A.E.W. Mason

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Summons

Author: A.E.W. Mason

Release Date: July 28, 2005 [EBook #16381]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUMMONS ***




Produced by Ted Garvin and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net











THE
SUMMONS

BY
A.E.W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "THE FOUR FEATHERS," "THE TURNSTILE," ETC.


NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920.
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



            TO THOSE
     WHO SERVED WITH ME ABROAD
      THROUGH THE FOUR YEARS




CONTENTS


CHAPTER


     I THE OLYMPIC GAMES                                  11

    II AN ANTHEM INTERVENES                               18

   III MARIO ESCOBAR                                      28

    IV THE SECRET OF HARRY LUTTRELL                       35

     V HILLYARD'S MESSENGER                               47

    VI THE HONORARY MEMBER                                55

   VII IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN                              65

  VIII HILLYARD HEARS NEWS OF AN OLD FRIEND               70

    IX ENTER THE HEROINE IN ANYTHING BUT WHITE SATIN      80

     X THE SUMMONS                                        91

    XI STELLA RUNS TO EARTH                              100

   XII IN BARCELONA                                      111

  XIII OLD ACQUAINTANCE                                  121

   XIV "TOUCHING THE MATTER OF THOSE SHIPS"              135

    XV IN A SLEEPING-CAR                                 144

   XVI TRICKS OF THE TRADE                               155

  XVII ON A CAPE OF SPAIN                                163

 XVIII THE USES OF SCIENCE                               173

   XIX UNDER GREY SKIES AGAIN                            183

    XX LADY SPLAY'S PREOCCUPATIONS                       193

   XXI THE MAGNOLIA FLOWERS                              208

  XXII JENNY PRASK                                       219

 XXIII PLANS FOR THE EVENING                             227

  XXIV JENNY PRASK IS INTERESTED                         235

   XXV IN A LIBRARY                                      238

  XXVI A FATAL KINDNESS                                  248

 XXVII THE RANK AND FILE                                 257

XXVIII THE LONG SLEEP                                    263

  XXIX JENNY PUTS UP HER FIGHT                           273

   XXX A REVOLUTION IN SIR CHICHESTER                    287

  XXXI JENNY AND MILLIE SPLAY                            298

 XXXII "BUT STILL A RUBY KINDLES IN THE VINE"            306




THE SUMMONS




CHAPTER I

THE OLYMPIC GAMES


"Luttrell! Luttrell!"

Sir Charles Hardiman stood in the corridor of his steam yacht and bawled
the name through a closed door. But no answer was returned from the
other side of the door. He turned the handle and went in. The night was
falling, but the cabin windows looked towards the north and the room was
full of light and of a low and pleasant music. For the tide tinkled and
chattered against the ship's planks and, in the gardens of the town
across the harbour, bands were playing. The town was Stockholm in the
year nineteen hundred and twelve, and on this afternoon, the Olympic
games, that unfortunate effort to promote goodwill amongst the nations,
which did little but increase rancours and disclose hatreds, had ended,
never, it is to be hoped, to be resumed.

"Luttrell," cried Hardiman again, but this time with perplexity in his
voice. For Luttrell was there in the cabin in front of him, but sunk in
so deep a contemplation of memories and prospects that the cabin might
just as well have been empty. Sir Charles Hardiman touched him on the
shoulder.

"Wake up, old man!"

"That's what I am doing--waking up," said Luttrell, turning without any
start. He was seated in front of the writing-desk, a young man, as the
world went before the war, a few months short of twenty-eight.

"The launch is waiting and everybody's on deck," continued Hardiman.
"We shall lose our table at Hasselbacken if we don't get off."

Then he caught sight of a telegram lying upon the writing-table.

"Oh!" and the impatience died out of his voice. "Is anything the
matter?"

Luttrell pushed the telegram towards his host.

"Read it! I have got to make up my mind--and now--before we start."

Hardiman read the telegram. It was addressed to Captain Harry Luttrell,
Yacht _The Dragonfly_, Stockholm, and it was sent from Cairo by the
Adjutant-General of the Egyptian Army.

     "_I can make room for you, but you must apply immediately to
     be transferred._"

Hardiman sat down in a chair by the side of the table against the wall,
with his eyes on Luttrell's face. He was a big, softish, overfed man of
forty-five, and the moment he began to relax from the upright position,
his body went with a run; he collapsed rather than sat. The little veins
were beginning to show like tiny scarlet threads across his nose and on
the fullness of his cheeks; his face was the colour of wine; and the
pupils of his pale eyes were ringed with so pronounced an _arcus
senilis_ that they commanded the attention like a disfigurement. But the
eyes were shrewd and kindly enough as they dwelt upon the troubled face
of his guest.

"You have not answered this?" he asked.

"No. But I must send an answer to-night."

"You are in doubt?"

"Yes. I was quite sure when I cabled to Cairo on the second day of the
games. I was quite sure, whilst I waited for the reply. Now that the
reply has come--I don't know."

"Let me hear," said the older man. "The launch must wait, the table at
the Hasselbacken restaurant must be assigned, if need be, to other
customers." Hardiman had not swamped all his kindliness in good living.
Luttrell was face to face with one of the few grave decisions which
each man has in the course of his life to make; and Hardiman understood
his need better than he understood it himself. His need was to formulate
aloud the case for and against, to another person, not so much that he
might receive advice as, that he might see for himself with truer eyes.

"The one side is clear enough," said Luttrell with a trace of
bitterness. "There was a Major I once heard of at Dover. He trained his
company in night-marches by daylight. The men held a rope to guide them
and were ordered to shut their eyes. The Major, you see, hated stirring
out at night. He liked his bridge and his bottle of port. Well, give me
another year and that's the kind of soldier I shall become--the worst
kind--the slovenly soldier. I mean slovenly in mind, in intention. Even
now I come, already bored, to the barrack square and watch the time to
see if I can't catch an earlier train from Gravesend to London."

"And when you do?" asked Hardiman.

Luttrell nodded.

"When I do," he agreed, "I get no thrill out of my escape, I assure you.
I hate myself a little more--that's all."

"Yes," said Hardiman. He was too wise a man to ask questions. He just
sat and waited, inviting Luttrell to spread out his troubles by his very
quietude.

"Then there are these games," Luttrell cried in a swift exasperation,
"--these damned games! From the first day when the Finns marched out
with their national flag and the Russians threatened to withdraw if they
did it again----" he broke off suddenly. "Of course you know soldiers
have believed that trouble's coming. I used to doubt, but by God I am
sure of it now. Just a froth of fine words at the opening and
afterwards--honest rivalry and let the best man win? Not a bit of it!
Team-running--a vile business--the nations parked together in different
sections of the Stadium like enemies--and ill-will running here and
there like an infection! Oh, there's trouble coming, and if I don't go I
shan't be fit for it. There, that's the truth."

"The whole truth and nothing but the truth?" Hardiman asked with a
smile. He leaned across the table and drew towards him a case of
telegraph forms. But whilst he was drawing them towards him, Luttrell
spoke again.

"Nothing but the truth--_yes_," he said. He was speaking shyly,
uncomfortably, and he stopped abruptly.

"The whole truth--no." Hardiman added slowly, and gently. He wanted the
complete story from preface to conclusion, but he was not to get it. He
received no answer of any kind for a considerable number of moments and
Luttrell only broke the silence in the end, to declare definitely,

"That, at all events, is all I have to say."

Sir Charles nodded and drew the case of forms close to him. There was
something more then. There always is something more, which isn't told,
he reflected, and the worst of it is, the something more which isn't
told is always the real reason. Men go to the confessional with a
reservation; the secret chamber where they keep their sacred vessels,
their real truths and inspirations, as also their most scarlet
sins--that shall be opened to no one after early youth is past unless it
be--rarely--to one woman. There was another reason at work in Harry
Luttrell, but Sir Charles Hardiman was never to know it. With a shrug of
his shoulders he took a pencil from his pocket, filled up one of the
forms and handed it to Luttrell.

"That's what I should reply."

He had written:

     "_I am travelling to London to-morrow to apply for
     transfer._--LUTTRELL."

Luttrell read the telegram with surprise. It was not the answer which he
had expected from the victim of the flesh-pots in front of him.

"You advise that?" he exclaimed.

"Yes. My dear Luttrell, as you know, you are a guest very welcome to me.
But you don't belong. We--Maud Carstairs, Tony Marsh and the rest of
us--even Mario Escobar--we are the Come-to-nothings. We are the people
of the stage door, we grow fat in restaurants. From three to seven, you
may find us in the card-rooms of our clubs--we are jolly fine
fellows--and no good. You don't belong, and should get out while you
can."

Luttrell moved uncomfortably in his chair.

"That's all very well. But there's another side to the question," he
said, and from the deck above a woman's voice called clearly down the
stairway.

"Aren't you two coming?"

Both men looked towards the door.

"That side," said Hardiman.

"Yes."

Hardiman nodded his head.

"Stella Croyle doesn't belong either," he said. "But she kicked over the
traces. She flung out of the rank and file. Oh, I know Croyle was a
selfish, dull beast and her footprints in her flight from him were
littered with excuses. I am not considering the injustice of the world.
I am looking at the cruel facts, right in the face of them, as you have
got to do, my young friend. Here Stella Croyle is--with us--and she
can't get away. You can."

Luttrell was not satisfied. His grey eyes and thin, clean features were
troubled like those of a man in physical pain.

"You don't know the strange, queer tie between Stella Croyle and me," he
said. "And I can't tell you it."

Hardiman grew anxious. Luttrell had the look of a man overtrained, and
it was worry which had overtrained him. His face was a trifle too
delicate, perhaps, to go with those remorseless sharp decisions which
must be made by the men who win careers.

"I know that you can't go through the world without hurting people,"
cried Hardiman. "Neither you nor any one else, except the limpets. And
you won't escape hurting Stella Croyle, by abandoning your chances. Your
love-affair will end--all of that kind do. And yours will end in a
bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and
because you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack--make no
doubt about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation--how
many times on this yacht!--for trumpery, little, unimportant things she
has said and done, which you would never have noticed six months ago;
or only noticed to smile at with a pleased indulgence."

Luttrell's face coloured. "Why, that's true enough," he said. He was
remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed between the
green islands with their bathing stations and chalets, over a tranquil,
sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner towards sunset
she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and the gardens of
Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon. A rush was made
towards it. They were summoned to this first wonderful view of the city
of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella Croyle was in the middle of a
game of Russian patience. She could play that game any day, every day,
all day. This exquisite vision was vouchsafed to her but the once, and
she had neglected it with the others. She had not troubled, even to move
so far as the saloon door. For she had not finished her game.

Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into
indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to
this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating
grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which sprang
to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner or
later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the
king's horses and all the king's men could never bring them again
together; and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view
of Stockholm.

"Youth has many privileges over age," continued Hardiman, "but none
greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider
spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great
emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows
his loss. Stay here, and you'll lose it before your time."

Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of man
he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a laugh.
"Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once."

Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and placed
it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.

"I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it,
I can send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we
return to the yacht."

Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders. He
had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with
Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and
music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her
eyes within his sight--he, Charles Hardiman, might as well have held his
tongue.

So very likely it would have been. But when great matters are ripe for
decisions one way or the other, the little accident as often as not
decides. There was a hurrying of light feet in the corridor outside, a
swift, peremptory knocking upon the door. The same woman's voice called
in rather a shrill note through the panels! "Harry! Why don't you come?
We are waiting for you."

And in the sound of the voice there was not merely impatience, but a
note of ownership--very clear and definite; and hearing it Luttrell
hardened. He stood up straight. He had the aspect of a man in revolt.




CHAPTER II

AN ANTHEM INTERVENES


Upon the entrance of Hardiman's party a wrinkle was smoothed away from
the forehead of a _maitre d'hotel_.

"So! You have come!" he cried. "I began to despair."

"You have kept my table?" Sir Charles insisted.

"Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!"; and the _maitre d'hotel_
led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony. Here the table was
set endwise to the balustrade, commanding the crowded visitors, yet
taking the coolness of the night. Hardiman was contented with his choice
of its position. But when he saw his guests reading the cards which
assigned them their places, he was not so contented with the order of
their seating.

"If I had known an hour before!" he said to himself, and the astounding
idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to
spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering
of food.

However, the harm was done now. There was Luttrell already seated at the
end against the balustrade. He had the noise of a Babel of tongues and
the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the
stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below
the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers
in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness
and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each
of them, sat Stella Croyle.

"I should have separated them," Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised
and drank his cocktail. "But how the deuce could I without making
everybody stare? This party wasn't got up to separate people. All the
same----"

The hushed wonder of a summer night. The gaiety of a bright thronged
restaurant! In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable
antagonist. But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by
nature, the seduction of both!

"Poor devil, he won't have a dog's chance!" the baronet concluded; and
he watched approvingly what appeared to him to be Luttrell's endeavour
to avoid joining battle on this unfavourable field. He could only trust
feebly in that and in the strength of the "something else," the secret
reason he was never to know.

It was about half-way through dinner when Stella Croyle, who had
directed many a furtive, anxious glance to the averted face of her
companion, attacked directly.

"What is the matter with you to-night?" she asked, interrupting him in
the midst of a rattle of futilities. "Why should you recite to me from
the guide-book about the University of Upsala?"

"It appears to be most interesting, and quaint," replied Luttrell
hastily.

"Then we might hire a motor-car and run out there to luncheon.
To-morrow! Just you and I."

"No." Harry Luttrell exclaimed suddenly and Stella Croyle drew back. Her
face clouded. She had won the first round, but victory brought her no
ease. She knew now from the explosion of his "No" and the swift alarm
upon his face that something threatened her.

"You must tell me what has happened," she cried. "You must! Oh, you turn
away from me!"

From the dark steep garden at their feet rose a clamour of cheers--to
Luttrell an intervention of Providence.

"Listen," he said.

Here and there a man or a woman rose at the dinner tables and looked
down. Upwards along a glimmering riband of path, a group of students
bore one of their number shoulder-high. Luttrell leaned over the
balustrade. The group below halted; speeches were made; cheers broke out
anew.

"It is the Swedish javelin-thrower. He won the championship of the world
this afternoon."

"Did he?" asked Stella Croyle in a soft voice at his side. "Does he
throw javelins as well as you? You wound me every time."

Luttrell raised his head. It was not fear of defeat which had kept his
looks averted from Stella's dark and starry eyes. No thought of lists
set and a contest to be fought out had even entered his head. But he did
fear to see those eyes glisten with tears--for she so seldom shed them!
And even more than the evidence of her pain he feared the dreadful
submission with which women in the end receive the stroke of fortune. He
had to meet her gaze now, however.

"I put off telling you," he began lamely.

"So that this evening of mine with you might not be spoilt," she
returned. "But, my dear, my evening was already spoilt before the launch
left the yacht gangway. I am not so blind."

Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was
difficult to picture her any older. Partly because of her vivid
colouring and because she was abrim with life; partly because in her
straightness of limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish.
"What a pretty boy she would make!" was the first thought until you
noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on
the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and
chin. Then it was seen that she was all woman. She was tall and yet
never looked tall. It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger,
but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm. She was a
baffling person. She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of
eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and
face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.

She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of
her hair stormed his senses.

"Tell me!" she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons
cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to
babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen how
they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were coming--battles
behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this too--the phrase
of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.

"Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one
or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of
Staff."

He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the
way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in
the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally
unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult
things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know
surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was
necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her
perplexities and fears grew.

"Of course it can't be _that_," she assured herself again and again, but
with a dreadful catch at her heart. "Oh no, it can't be _that_."

"That," was the separation which some day or another--after a long and
wondrous period--both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself
with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day
on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly
dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony
joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle
invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not
possible!

Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and
listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had
seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two
papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other
Hardiman's reply. He handed her the first of the two.

"This reached me this morning."

Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the
letters would not be still.

"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.

"It offers me service abroad."

Stella's face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the
cablegram.

"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was
not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.

"Further south, in the Sudan--Heaven knows where!"

"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."

"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.

Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her
eyes.

"But you are not going! You can't go!"

Luttrell handed to her the second paper.

"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.

"Yet it is what I would have written."

Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had
recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell's cabin while the
rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the
gangway. If a woman's glance had power, he would have been stricken that
instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman
at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.

"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"

"Yes."

"To a cable of yours?"

"Sent three days ago."

The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a
rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell
bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery. The
appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen it--so she
thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a
sinner on his bed.

She stared at the telegrams--not reading them. His arguments and
prefaces--the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it--what she had
caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the
personal reason.

"You are tired of me."

"No," Luttrell answered hotly. "That's not true--not even a half-truth.
If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy."

"But you are!" Her voice rose shrill in its violence. "You know you are
but you are too much of a coward to say so--oh, like all men!" and as
Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a
remonstrant "Hush!", she continued bitterly, "What do I care if they all
hear? I am impossible! You know that, don't you? I am quite impossible!
I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you hate--one of the
Undisciplined."

Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and
Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass. It passed
with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from
mood to mood.

He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. "Oh, Wub,
what have I done that you should treat me so?"

Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of
her lips what she was saying.

"These nicknames are the very devil," he exclaimed, apparently about
nothing, to his startled neighbour. "The first thing a woman does when
she's fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn't
belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a
tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit,
she uses it--publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents
her. Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and
that she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That's the nickname
I am referring to, my dear, when I say it's the very devil."

The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be
very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which
was to assert that she had never been in love. For the practice seems
invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for
AEneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a woman, it would
be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have
gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter. "Wobbles" had been the
first name which Stella Croyle had invented for Harry Luttrell, though
by what devious process she had lighted upon it, psychology could not
have discovered. "Wub" was the nickname within the nickname, the
cherished sign that the two of them lived apart in a little close-hedged
garden of their own. Luttrell's eyes were upon her as she spoke it. And
she spoke it with a curious little wistful pursing of soft lips so that
it came to him winged with the memory of all her kisses.

"Oh, Wub, must you leave me?" she pleaded in a breaking whisper. "What
will be left to me if you do?"

Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands. All the character which he
had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal.
But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace. He tried to
realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before.
There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel
over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever
afterwards forgive. But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper
at his ear and how could he look forward so far?

"Stella!"

He turned impulsively towards her.

"The game's up," reflected Sir Charles Hardiman at the end of the table.
"Calypso wins--no, by God!"

For before Luttrell could speak another word, the music crashed and all
that assemblage was on its feet. The orchestra was playing the Swedish
National Anthem; and upon that, one after the other, followed the hymns
of the peoples who had taken part in the Games. In turn the
representatives of each people stood and resumed their seat, the music
underlining their individuality and parking them in sections, even as
rivalry had parked them in the Stadium. The majestic anthem of Russia,
the paean of the Marseillaise, the livelier march of Italy, the song of
Germany, the Star-Spangled Banner; and long before the band struck into
the solemn rhythm of "God save the King," Stella Croyle at all events
knew that Calypso had lost. For she saw a flame illumine Luttrell's face
and transfigure him. He had slipped out of her reach. The doubts and
perplexities which had so troubled him during the last months were now
resolved. As he listened to the Hymns, he saw as in a vision the nations
advancing abreast over a vast plain like battalions in line with their
intervals for manoeuvring spaced out between them. In front of each
nation rolled a grey vapour, which gradually took shape before
Luttrell's eyes; and there was made visible to him a shadowy legion of
men marching in the van, the men who had left ease and women and all the
grace of life behind them and had gone out to die in the harness of
service--one in this, one in that corner of the untravelled world, and
now all reunited in a strong fellowship. The vision remained with him
after the last strains of music had died away, and faded slowly. He
waked to the lights and clamour of the restaurant and turned to Stella
Croyle.

"Stella," he began, and----

"I know," she interrupted in a small voice. She was sitting with her
head downcast and her hands clenched upon her lap so tightly that the
skin was white about the points where the tips of her fingers pressed.
"Perhaps I shan't suffer so very much."

She was careful not to lift her head, and when a few moments later their
host gave the signal to move, she rose quickly and turned her back on
Luttrell.

The party motored back through the Dyurgarden, past the glimmering tents
where the Boy-Scouts were encamped to the great hotel by the
landing-stage. There a wait of a few minutes took place whilst Hardiman
settled for the cars, and during that wait Luttrell disappeared. He
rejoined his friends at the harbour steps and when the launch put off
towards the _Dragonfly_, he found himself side by side with Stella
Croyle. In the darkness she relaxed her guard. Luttrell saw the great
tears glisten on her dark eyelashes and fall down her cheeks.

"I am sorry, Stella," he whispered, dropping his hand on hers, and she
clutched it and let it go.

"Perhaps I shan't suffer so very much," she repeated and the next moment
the gangway light shone down upon their faces. Stella dropped her head
and furtively dried her cheeks.

"I want to go up last," she said, "and just behind you, so that no one
shall see what a little fool I am making of myself."

But by some subtle understanding already it was felt amongst that group
of people, quick to perceive troubles of the emotions, that something
was amiss between the pair. They were left alone upon the deck. Stella
by chance looking southwards to the starlit gloom, Luttrell to the
north, where still the daylight played in blue and palest green and the
delicate changing fires of the opal.

"What will you do, Stella?" Luttrell asked gently.

"I think I will go and live in the country," she replied.

"It will be lonely, child."

"There will be ghosts, my dear, to keep me company," she answered with a
wan smile. "People like me always have to be a good deal alone, anyway.
I shall be, of course, lonelier, now that I have no one to play with,"
and the smile vanished from her lips. She flung up her face towards the
skies, letting her grief have its way upon that empty deck.

"So we shall never be together--just you and I--alone again," she said,
forcing herself to realise that unintelligible thing. Her thoughts ran
back over the year--the year of their alliance--and she saw all of its
events flickering vividly before her, as they say drowning people do.
"Oh, Wub, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to
be kind," she cried, with the tears streaming down her face; and
Luttrell winced.

"Yes, that's true," he admitted remorsefully. "I never dreamed what
would come of it."

"You should have left me alone."

Amongst the flickering pictures of the year the first was the clearest.
A great railway station in the West of England, a train drawn up at the
departure platform, herself with a veil drawn close over her face, half
running, half walking in a pitiful anguish towards the train; and then a
man at her elbow. Harry Luttrell.

"I have reserved a compartment. I suspected that things were not going
to turn out well. I thought the long journey to London alone would be
terrible. If things had turned out right, you would not have seen me."

She had let him place her in a carriage, look after her wants as if she
had been a child, hold her in his arms, tend her with the magnificent
sympathy of his silence. That had been the real beginning. Stella had
known him as the merest of friends before. She had met him here and
there at a supper party, at a dancing club, at some Bohemian country
house; and then suddenly he had guessed what others had not, and
foolishly had gone out of his way to be kind.

"She would have died if I hadn't travelled with her," Luttrell argued
silently. "She would have thrown herself out of the carriage, or when
she reached home she would have----" and his argument stopped, and he
glanced at her uneasily.

Undisciplined, was the epithet she had used of herself. You never knew
what crazy thing she might do. There was daintiness but no order in her
life; the only law she knew was given to her by a fastidious taste.

"Of course, Wub, I have always known that you never cared for me as I do
for you. So it was bound to end some time." She caught his hand to her
heart for a second, and then, dropping it, ran from his side.




CHAPTER III

MARIO ESCOBAR


Late in the autumn of the following year a new play, written by Martin
Hillyard and named "The Dark Tower," was produced at the Rubicon Theatre
in Panton Street, London. It was Hillyard's second play. His first,
produced in April of the same year, had just managed to limp into July;
and that small world which concerns itself with the individualities of
playwrights was speculating with its usual divergencies upon Hillyard's
future development.

"The Dark Tower" was a play of modern days, built upon the ancient
passions. The first act was played to a hushed house, and while the
applause which greeted the fall of the curtain was still rattling about
the walls of the theatre, Sir Charles Hardiman hoisted himself heavily
out of his stall and made his way to a box on the first tier, which he
entered without knocking.

There was but one person in the box, a young man hidden behind a side
curtain. Hardiman let himself collapse into a chair by the side of the
young man.

"Seems all right," he said. "You have a story to tell. It's clear in
every word, too, that you know where you are going. That makes people
comfortable and inclined to go along with you."

Hillyard turned with a smile.

"We haven't come to the water jump yet," he said.

Hardiman remained in the box during the second act. He watched the stage
for a while, took note of the laughter which welcomed this or that line,
and of the silence which suddenly enclosed this or that scene from the
rest of the play; and finally, with a certain surprise, and a certain
amusement he fixed his attention upon the play's author. The act ended
in laughter and Hillyard leaned back, and himself laughed, without pose
or affectation, as heartily as any one in the theatre.

"You beat me altogether, my young friend," said Hardiman. "You ought to
be walking up and down the pavement outside in the classical state of
agitation. But you appear to be enjoying the play, as if you never had
seen it before."

"And I haven't," Hillyard returned. "This isn't quite the play which
we have been learning and rehearsing during the last month. Here's
the audience at work, adding a point there, discovering an
interpretation--yes, actually an interpretation--there, bringing into
importance one scene, slipping over the next which we thought more
important--altering it, in fact. Of course," and he returned to his
earlier metaphor, "I know the big fences over which we may come a
cropper. I can see them ahead before we come up to them and know the
danger. We are over two of them, by the way. But on the whole I am more
interested than nervous. It's the first time I have ever been to a first
night, you see."

"Well, upon my word," cried Hardiman, "you are the coolest hand at it I
ever saw." But he could have taken back his words the next moment.

In spite of Hillyard's aloof and disinterested air, the night had
brought its excitement and in a strength of which he himself was
unaware. It lifted now the veils behind which a man will hide his secret
thoughts! He turned swiftly to Hardiman with a boyish light upon his
face.

"Oh, I am not in doubt of what to-night means to me! Not for a moment.
If it's failure, it means that I begin again to-morrow on something
else; and again after that, and again after that, until success does
come. Playwriting is my profession, and failures are a necessary part of
it--just as much a part as the successes. But even if the great success
were to come now, it wouldn't mean quite so much to me perhaps as it
might to other people." He paused, and a smile broke upon his face. "I
live expecting a messenger. There! That's my secret delivered over to
you under the excitement of a first night."

And as he spoke the colour mounted into his face. He turned away in
confusion. His play was nearer at his heart than he had thought; the
enthusiasm which seemed to be greeting it had stirred him unwisely.

"Tell me," he said hurriedly, "who all these people in the stalls are."

He peeped down between the edge of the curtain and the side wall of the
box whilst Hardiman stood up behind him.

"Yes, I will be your man from Cook's," said Hardiman genially.

His heart warmed to the young man both on account of his outburst and of
the shame which had followed upon the heels of it. Few beliefs had
survived in Hardiman after forty years of wandering up and down the
flowery places of the earth; but one--he had lectured Harry Luttrell
upon it on a night at Stockholm--continually gained strength in him.
Youth must beget visions and man must preserve them if great work were
to be done; and so easily the visions lost their splendour and their
inspiration. Of all the ways of tarnishing the vision, perhaps talk was
the most murderous. Hillyard possessed them. Hillyard was ashamed that
he had spoken of them. Therefore he had some chance of retaining them.

"Yes, I will show you the celebrities." He pointed out the leading
critics and the blue stockings of the day. His eyes roamed over the
stalls. "Do you see the man with the broad face and the short whiskers
in the fourth row? The man who looks just a little too like a country
gentleman to be one? That is Sir Chichester Splay. He made a fortune in
a murky town of Lancashire, and, thirsting for colour, came up to London
determined to back a musical comedy. That is the way the craving for
colour takes them in the North. His wish was gratified. He backed 'The
Patchouli Girl,' and in that shining garden he got stung. He is now what
they call an amateur. No first night is complete without him. He is the
half-guinea Mecaenas of our days."

Hillyard looked down at Sir Chichester Splay and smiled at his
companion's description.

"You will meet him to-night at supper, and if your play is a
success--not otherwise--you will stay with him in Sussex."

"No!" cried Hillyard; but Sir Charles was relentless in his insistence.

"You will. His wife will see to that. Who the pretty girl beside him is
I do not know. But the more or less young man on the other side of her,
talking to her with an air of intimacy a little excessive in a public
place, is Mario Escobar. He is a Spaniard, and has the skin-deep
politeness of his race. He is engaged in some sort of business,
frequents some sort of society into which he is invited by the women,
and he is not very popular amongst men. He belongs, however, to some
sort of club. That is all I know about him. One would think he had
guessed we were speaking of him," Hardiman added.

For at that moment Mario Escobar raised his dark, sleek head, and his
big, soft eyes--the eyes of a beautiful woman--looked upwards to the
box. It seemed to Hillyard for a moment that they actually exchanged a
glance, though he himself was out of sight behind the curtain, so direct
was Escobar's gaze. It was, however, merely the emptiness of the box
which had drawn the Spaniard's attention. He was neatly groomed, of a
slight figure, tall, and with his eyes, his thin olive face, his small
black moustache and clean-cut jaw he made without doubt an effective and
arresting figure.

"Now turn your head," said Hardiman, "the other way, and notice the big,
fair man in the back row of the stalls. He is a rival manager, and he is
explaining in a voice loud enough to be heard by the first rows of the
pit, the precise age of your leading lady. Now look down! There is a
young girl flitting about the stalls. She is an actress, not very
successful. But to-night she is as busy as a bee. She is crabbing your
play. Yesterday her opinion on the subject was of no value, and it will
be again of no value to-morrow. But as one of the limited audience on a
first night, she can do just a tiny bit of harm. But don't hold it
against her, Hillyard! She has no feeling against you. This is her
little moment of importance."

Sir Charles rattled on through the interval--all good nature with just a
slice of lemon--and it had happened that he had pointed out one who was
to be the instrument of great trouble for Hillyard and a few others,
with whom this story is concerned.

Hillyard interrupted Hardiman.

"Who is the girl at the end of the sixth row, who seems to have stepped
down from a china group on a mantelpiece?"

"That one?" said Hardiman, and all the raillery faded from his face.
"That is Mrs. Croyle. You will meet her to-night at my supper party." He
hesitated as to what further he should say. "You might do worse than be
a friend to her. She is not, I am afraid, very happy."

Hillyard was surprised at the sudden gentleness of his companion's
voice, and looked quickly towards him. Hardiman answered the look as he
got heavily up from his chair.

"I sometimes fear that I have some responsibility for her unhappiness.
But there are things one cannot help."

The light in the auditorium went down while Hardiman was leaving the
box, and the curtain rose on the third act of "The Dark Tower." Of that
play, however, you may read in the files of the various newspapers, if
you will. This story is concerned with Martin Hillyard, not his work. It
is sufficient to echo the words of Sir Chichester Splay when Hillyard
was introduced to him an hour and a half later in the private
supper-room at the Semiramis Hotel.

"A good play, Mr. Hillyard. Not a great play, of course, but quite a
good play," said Sir Chichester with just the necessary patronage to
tickle Hillyard to an appreciation of Hardiman's phrases--a ten and
six-penny Mecaenas.

"I am grateful that it has earned your good opinion," he replied.

"Oh, not at all!" cried Sir Chichester, and catching a lady who passed
by the arm. "Stella, Mr. Hillyard should know you. This is Mrs. Croyle.
I hope you will meet him some day at Rackham Park."

Sir Chichester trotted away to greet the manager of the _Daily Harpoon_,
who was at that moment shaking hands with Hardiman.

"I congratulate you," said Stella Croyle, as she gave him her hand.

"Thank you. So you know Sir Chichester well?"

"His wife has been a friend of mine for a long time." Her eyes twinkled.
"I wonder you have not been seen at his house."

"Oh, I am only just hatched out," said Hillyard. They both laughed. "I
hardly know a soul here except my leading lady and our host."

They were summoned to the supper table. Hillyard found himself with the
leading lady on one side of him and Stella Croyle opposite, and Mario
Escobar a couple of seats away. Supper was half through when Escobar
leaned suddenly forward.

"Mr. Hillyard, I have seen you before, somewhere and not in England."

"That is possible."

"In Spain?"

"Yes," answered Hillyard.

A certain curiosity in Escobar's voice, a certain reticence in
Hillyard's, arrested the attention of those about.

"Let me see!" continued Escobar. "It was in the Opera House at Barcelona
on the first performance of Manon Lescaut."

"No," replied Hillyard.

"Then--I know--it was under the palm-trees in front of the sea at
Alicante one night."

Hillyard nodded.

"That may well have been. I was up and down the south coast of Spain for
three years. Eighteen months of it were spent at Alicante."

He turned to his neighbour, but Escobar persisted.

"It was for your health?"

Hillyard did not answer directly.

"My lungs have always been my trouble," he said.

Hardiman bent towards Stella Croyle.

"I think our new friend has had a curious life, Stella. He should
interest you."

Stella Croyle replied with a shrewd look towards the Spaniard.

"At present he is interesting Escobar. One would say Escobar was
suspicious lest Mr. Hillyard should know too much of him."

Sir Charles laughed.

"The Mario Escobars are always suspicious. Let us see!" he said in a low
voice, and leaning across the table, he shot a question sharply at the
Spaniard.

"And what were you doing under the palm trees, in front of the sea at
Alicante, Senor Escobar?"

Mario Escobar sat back. The challenge had startled him. He reflected,
and as the recollection came he turned slowly very white.

"I?" he asked.

"Yes," said Hardiman, leaning forward. But it was not at Hardiman that
Escobar was looking. His eyes were fixed warily on Hillyard. He answered
the question warily too, fragment by fragment, ready to stop, ready to
take the words back, if a sign of recollection kindled in Hillyard's
face.

"It is what we should call here the esplanade--the sea and harbour on
one side, the houses on the other. The band plays under the palms in
front of the Casino on summer nights. I----" and he took the last words
at a rush--"I was sitting in a lounge chair in front of the club, when I
saw Mr. Hillyard pass. An Englishman is noticeable in Alicante. There
are so few of them."

"Yes," Hillyard agreed. No recollection was stirred in him by Escobar's
description. Escobar turned away, but he could not quite conceal the
relief he felt.

"Yes, my friend," said Hardiman to himself, "you have taken your
water-jump too. And you're uncommonly glad that you haven't come a
cropper."

After that noticeable moment of tension, the talk swept on into
sprightlier channels.




CHAPTER IV

THE SECRET OF HARRY LUTTRELL


"Shall I take you home?"

"Oh, will you?" cried Stella Croyle, with a little burst of pleasure.
After all, Hillyard was the great man of the evening, and that he should
consider her out of all that company was pleasant. "I will get my
cloak."

Throughout the supper-party Hillyard had been at a loss to discover in
Stella Croyle the woman whom Hardiman had led him to expect. Her spirits
were high, but unforced. She chattered away with more gaiety than wit,
like the rest of Hardiman's guests, but the gaiety was apt to the
occasion. She had the gift of a clear and musical laugh, and her small
delicate face would wrinkle and pout into grimaces which gave to her a
rather attractive air of _gaminerie_--Hillyard could find no word but
the French one to express her on that evening. He drove her to a small
house in the Bayswater Road, overlooking Kensington Gardens.

"Will you come in for a moment?" she asked.

Hillyard followed her up a paved pathway, through a tiny garden enclosed
in a high wall, to her door. She led him into a room bright with flowers
and pictures. Curtains of purple brocade were drawn across the window, a
fire burned on the hearth, and thick soft cushions on broad couches gave
the room a look of comfort.

"You live here alone?" Hillyard asked.

"Yes."

She turned suddenly towards him as he gazed about the room.

"I married a long while ago." She stood in front of him like a slim
child. It seemed impossible. "Yes, before I knew anything--to get away
from home. Our marriage did not go smoothly. After three years I ran
away--oh, not with any one I cared for; he happened to be there, that
was all. After a month he deserted me in Italy. I have fortunately some
money of my own and a few friends who did not turn me down--Lady Splay,
for instance. There!"

She moved to a table and poured out for Hillyard a whisky-and-soda.

"My question was thoughtless," he said. "I did not mean that you should
answer it as you did."

"I preferred you to know."

"I am honoured," Hillyard replied.

Stella Croyle sat down upon a low stool in front of the fire. Hillyard
sank into one of the deep-cushioned chairs. The day of tension was over,
and there was no doubt about the success of "The Dark Tower." Stella
Croyle sat very quietly, with the firelight playing upon her face and
her delicate dress. Her vivacity had dropped from her like the pretty
cloak she had thrown aside. Both became her well, but they were for use
out-of-doors, and Hillyard was grateful that she had discarded them.

"You are tired, no doubt," he said, reluctantly. "I ought to go."

"No," she answered. "It is pleasant before the fire here."

"Thank you. I should like to stay for a little while. I did not know
until I came into this room with how much anxiety I had been looking
forward to this night."

He leaned forward with his hands clenched, and saw pass in the bright
coals glimpses of the long tale of days when endeavour was fruitless and
hopes were disappointed. "Success! Lord, how I wanted it!" he whispered.

Stella Croyle looked at him with a smile.

"It was sure to come to you, since you wanted it enough," she said.

"Yes, but in time?" exclaimed Hillyard.

"In time for what?"

Hillyard broke into a laugh.

"I don't know," he answered. He was silent for a little while, and the
comfort of the room, the quiet of the night, the pleasant sympathy of
Stella Croyle, all wrought upon him. "I don't know," he repeated slowly.
"I am waiting. But out of my queer life something more has got to
come--something more and something different. I have always been sure of
it, but I used to be afraid that the opportunity would come while I was
still chained to the handles of the barrow."

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!

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.

"Yes, I see now," said Hillyard.

"You had an instance to-night," Luttrell added, as they went in at the
door. "It's a serious matter--the order of a Province and a great many
lives, and the cost of troops from Khartum, and the careers of all of us
are at stake. I think that I am right, and it is for me to say. They
disagree. Yes, Sir Chichester Splay saved us to-night, and"--a smile
suddenly broke upon his serious face--"I really should like to meet
him."

"I will arrange it when we are both in London," Hillyard returned.

He did not forget that promise. But he was often afterwards to recall
this moment when he made it--the silent hall, the door open upon the
hot, still night, the moon just beginning to gild the dark sky, and the
two men standing together, neither with a suspicion of the life-long
consequences which were to spring from the casual suggestion and the
careless assent.

"You are over there," said Luttrell, pointing to the other side of the
hall. He turned towards his own quarters, but a question from Hillyard
arrested him.

"What about that message for me?"

"I know nothing about it," Luttrell answered, "beyond what I wrote. The
telegram came from Khartum. No doubt they can tell you more at
Government House. Good night!"




CHAPTER VII

IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN


Just outside Senga to the north, in open country, stands a great walled
zareba, and the space enclosed is the nearest approach to the Garden of
Eden which this wicked world can produce. The Zoological Gardens of
Cairo and Khartum replenish their cages from Senga. But there are no
cages at Senga, and only the honey-badger lives in a tub with a chain
round his neck, like a bull-dog. The buffalo and the elephant, the
wart-hog and the reed-buck, roam and feed and sleep together. Nor do
they trouble, after three days' residence in that pleasant sanctuary,
about man--except that specimen of man who brings them food.

All day long you may see, towering above the wall close to the little
wooden door, the long necks and slim heads of giraffes looking towards
the city and wondering what in the world is the matter with the men
to-day, and why they don't come along with the buns and sugar. Once
within the zareba, once you have pushed your way between the giraffes
and got their noses out of your jacket-pockets, you have really only to
be wary of the ostrich. He, mincing delicately around you with his
little wicked red eye blinking like a camera shutter, may try with an
ill-assumed air of indifference to slip up unnoticed close behind you.
If he succeeds he will land you one. And one is enough.

Into this zareba Harry Luttrell led Martin Hillyard on the next morning.
Luttrell had an hour free, and the zareba was the one spectacle in
Senga. He kicked the honey-badger's tub in his little reed-house and
brought out that angry animal to the length of his strong chain and to
within an inch of his own calves.

"Charming little beast, isn't he? See the buffalo in the middle? The
little elephant came in a week ago from just south of the Khor Galagu.
You had something private to say to me? Now's your time. Mind the
ostrich, that's all. He looks a little ruffled."

They were quite alone in the zareba. The giraffes had fallen in behind
and were following them, and level with them, on Hillyard's side, the
ostrich stepped like a delicate lady in a muddy street. Hillyard found
it a little difficult to concentrate his thoughts on Stella Croyle's
message. But he would have delivered it awkwardly in any case. He had
seen enough of Harry Luttrell last night to understand that an ocean now
rolled between those two.

"On the first night of my play, 'The Dark Tower,'" he began, and
suddenly faced around as the ostrich fell back.

"Yes!" said Luttrell, and he eyed the ostrich indifferently. "That
animal's a brute, isn't he?"

He took a threatening step towards it, and the ostrich sidled away as if
it really didn't matter to him where he took his morning walk.

"Yes?" Luttrell repeated.

"I went to a supper-party given by Sir Charles Hardiman."

"Oh?"

Luttrell's voice was careless enough. But his eyes went watchfully to
Hillyard's face, and he seemed to shut suddenly all expression out of
his own.

"Hardiman introduced me to a friend of yours."

Luttrell nodded.

"Mrs. Croyle?"

"Yes."

"She was well?"

"In health, yes!"

"I am very glad." Unexpectedly some feeling of relief had made itself
audible in Luttrell's voice. "It would have troubled me if you had
brought me any other news of her. Yes, that would have troubled me very
much. I should not have been able to forget it," he said slowly.

"But she is unhappy."

Luttrell walked on in silence. His forehead contracted, a look of
trouble came into his face. Yet he had an eye all the while for the
movements of the animals in the zareba. At last he halted, struck out
at the ostrich with his stick, and turned to Hillyard with a gesture of
helplessness.

"But what can one do--except the single thing one can't do?"

"She gave me a message, if I should chance to meet you," answered
Hillyard.

Luttrell's face hardened perceptibly.

"Let me hear it, Martin."

"She said that she would like you to have news of her, and that from
time to time she would like to have a little line from you."

"That was all?"

"Yes."

Harry Luttrell nodded, but he made no reply. He walked back with
Hillyard to the door of the zareba, and the ostrich bore them company,
now on this side, now on that. The elephant was rolling in the grass
like a dog, the giraffes crowded about the little door like beggars
outside a restaurant. The two friends walked back towards the town in an
air shimmering with heat. The Blue Nile glittered amongst its sand-banks
like so many ribands of molten steel. They were close upon the house
before Luttrell answered Stella Croyle's message.

"All _that_," he cried, with a sharp gesture as of a man sweeping
something behind him, "all that happened in another age when I was
another man."

The gesture was violent, but the words were pitiful. He was not a man
exasperated by a woman's unseasonable importunity, but angry with the
grim, hard, cruel facts of life.

"It's no good, Martin," he added, with a smile. "Not all the king's
horses nor all the king's men----"

Hillyard was sure now that no little line would ever go from Senga to
the house in the Bayswater Road. The traditions of his house and of his
regiment had Harry Luttrell in their keeping. Messages? Martin Hillyard
might expect them, might indeed respond to and obey them, and with
advantage, just because they came out of the blue. But the men of
tradition, no! The messenger had knocked upon the doors of their
fathers' houses before ever they were born.

At the door of the Governor's house Harry Luttrell stopped.

"I expect you'll want to do some marketing, and I shall be busy, and
to-night we shall have the others with us. So I'll say now," and his
face brightened with a smile, as though here at all events were a matter
where the bitter laws of change could work no cruelties, "it has been
really good to see you again."

Certain excellent memories were busy with them both--Nuneham and Sanford
Lasher and the Cherwell under its overhanging branches. Then Luttrell
looked out across to the Blue Nile and those old wondrous days faded
from his vision.

"I should like you to get away bukra, bukra, Martin," he said.
"Half-past one at the latest, to-morrow morning. Can you manage it?"

"Why, of course," answered Hillyard in surprise.

"You see, I postponed that execution, whilst you were here. I think
it'll go off all right, but since it's no concern of yours, I would just
as soon you were out of the way. I have fixed it for eight. If you start
at half-past one you will be a good many miles away by then."

He turned and went into the house and to his own work. Martin Hillyard
walked down the road along the river bank to the town. Harry Luttrell
had said his last word concerning Stella Croyle. Of that he was sure and
was glad, though Stella's tear-stained face would rise up between his
eyes and the water of the Nile. Sooner or later Harry Luttrell would
come home, bearing his sheaves, and then he would marry amongst his own
people; and a new generation of Luttrells would hold their commissions
in the Clayfords. He had said his last word concerning Stella Croyle.

But Hillyard was wrong. For in the dark of the morning, when he had
bestridden his donkey and given the order for his caravan to march, he
was hailed by Luttrell's voice. He stopped, and Luttrell came down in
his pyjamas from the door of the house to him.

"Good luck," he said, and he patted the donkey's neck. "Good luck, old
man. We'll meet in England some time."

"Yes," said Hillyard.

It was not to speak these words that Harry Luttrell had risen, after
wishing him good-bye the night before. So he waited.

Luttrell was still, his hand on the little donkey's neck.

"You'll remember me to our honorary member, won't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't forget."

"I won't."

Nor was it for this reminder, either. So Hillyard still waited, and at
last the words came, jerkily.

"One thing you said yesterday.... I was very glad to hear it. That
Stella was well--quite well. You meant that, didn't you? It's the
truth?"

"Yes, it's the truth."

"Thank you ... I was a little afraid ... thank you!"

He took his hand from the donkey's neck, and Hillyard rode forward on
the long and dreary stage to the one camping ground between Senga and
Senaar.

For a little while he wondered at this insistence of Harry Luttrell upon
the physical health of Stella Croyle, and why he had been afraid. But
when the dawn came his thoughts reverted to his own affairs. The message
delivered to him in the forest of the River Dinder! It might mean
nothing. It was the part of prudence to make light of his hopes and
conjectures. But the hopes would not be stilled, now that he was alone.
This was the Summons, the great Summons for which, without his
knowledge, the experiences of his life, detail by detail, had builded
him.




CHAPTER VIII

HILLYARD HEARS NEWS OF AN OLD FRIEND


At Khartum, however, disappointment awaited him. He was received without
excitement by a young aide-de-camp at the Palace.

"I heard that you had come in last night. A good trip? Dine with me
to-night and you shall show me your heads. The Governor-General's in
England."

"There's a telegram."

"Oh yes. It came up to us from Cairo. Some one wanted to know where you
were. They'll know about it at Cairo. We just pushed it along, you
know," said the aide-de-camp. He dined with Hillyard, admired his heads,
arranged for his sleeping compartment, and assured him that the
execution had gone off "very nicely" at Senga.

"Luttrell made a palaver, and his patent drop worked as well as anything
in Pentonville, and every one went home cheered up and comfortable.
Luttrell's a good man."

Thus Hillyard took the train to Wadi Haifa in a chastened mood.
Obviously the message was of very little, if indeed of any, importance.
A man can hardly swing up to extravagant hopes without dropping to
sarcastic self-reproaches on his flightiness and vanity. He was not
aware that the young aide-de-camp pushed aside some pressing work to
make sure that he did go on the train; or that when the last carriage
disappeared towards the great bridge, the aide-de-camp cried, "Well,
that's that," like a man who has discharged one task at all events of
the many left to his supervision.

One consequence of Hillyard's new humility was that he now loitered on
his journey. He stayed a few days at Assouan and yet another few in
Luxor, in spite of the heat, and reached Cairo in the beginning of June
when the streets were thick with dust-storms and the Government had
moved to Alexandria. Hillyard was in two minds whether to go straight
home, but in the end he wandered down to the summer seat of government.

If Khartum had been chilly to the enthusiast, Alexandria was chillier.
It was civil and polite to Hillyard and made him a member of the Club.
But it was concerned with the government of Egypt, and gently allowed
Hillyard to perceive it. Khartum had at all events stated "There is a
cablegram." At Alexandria the statement became a question: "Is there a
cablegram?" In the end a weary and indifferent gentleman unearthed it.
He did not show it to Hillyard, but held it in his hand and looked over
the top of it and across a roll-top desk at the inquirer.

"Yes, yes. This seems to be what you are asking about. It is for us, you
know"--this with a patient smile as Hillyard's impatient hand reached
out for it. "Do you know a man called Bendish--Paul Bendish?"

"Bendish?" cried Hillyard. "He was my tutor at Oxford."

"Ah! Then it does clearly refer to you. Bendish has a friend who needs
your help in London."

Hillyard stared.

"Do you mean to say that I was sent for from the borders of Abyssinia
because Bendish has a friend in London who wants my help?"

The indifferent gentleman stroked his chin.

"It certainly looks like it, doesn't it? But I do hope that you didn't
cut your expedition short on that account." He looked remorsefully into
Hillyard's face. "In any case, the rainy season was coming on, wasn't
it?"

"Yes, my expedition was really ended when the message reached me,"
Hillyard was forced to admit.

"That's good," said the indifferent gentleman, brightening. "You will
see Bendish, of course, in England. By what ship do you sail? It's not
very pleasant here, is it?"

"I shall sail on the _Himalaya_ in a week's time."

"Right!" said the official, and he nodded farewell and dipped his nose
once more into his papers.

Hillyard walked to the door, conscious that he looked the fool he felt
himself to be. But at the door he turned in a sort of exasperation.

"Can't you tell me at all why Bendish's friend wants my help?" he asked.

It was at this moment that the indifferent gentleman had the inspiration
of his life.

"I haven't an idea, Mr. Hillyard," he replied. "Perhaps he has got into
difficulties in the writing of a revue."

The answer certainly drove Hillyard from the room without another word.
He stood outside the door purple with heat and indignation. Hillyard
neither overrated nor decried his work. But to be dragged away from the
buffalo and the reed-buck of the Dinder River in order to be told that
he was a writer of revues. No! That was carrying a bad joke too far.

Hillyard stalked haughtily along the corridor towards the outer door,
but not so fast but that a youth passed him with a sheet of paper in his
hand. The youth went into the room where Government cablegrams were
coded. The sheet of paper which he held in his hand was inscribed with a
message that Martin Hillyard would leave Alexandria in a week's time on
the s.s. _Himalaya_. And the message strangely enough was not addressed
to Paul Bendish at all. It was headed, "For Commodore Graham.
Admiralty." The great Summons had in fact come, although Hillyard knew
it not.

He travelled in consequence leisurely by sea. He started from Alexandria
after half the month of June had gone, and he was thus in the Bay of
Biscay on that historic morning of June the twenty-eighth, when the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia Duchess of Hohenberg, were
murdered in the streets of Saravejo. London, when he reached it, was a
choir of a million voices not yet tuned to the ringing note of one. It
was incredible that the storm, foreseen so often over the port wine,
should really be bursting at last. Mediation will find a way. Not this
time; the moment has been chosen. And what will England do? Ride safe in
the calm centre of the hurricane? No ship ever did, and England won't.

A few degenerate ones threw up their hands and cried that all was
over--_they knew_.

Of these a gaunt-visaged man, stubborn and stupid and two generations
back a German, held forth in the hall of Hillyard's club.

"German organisation, German thoroughness and German brains--we are no
match for them. The country's thick with spies--wonderful men. Where
shall _we_ find their equals?"

A sailor slipped across the hall and dropped into a chair by Hillyard's
side.

"You take no part in these discussions? The crackling of thorns--what?"

"I have been a long time away."

"Thought so," continued the sailor. "A man was inquiring for you
yesterday--a man of the name of Graham."

Hillyard shook his head.

"I don't know him."

"No, but he is a friend of a friend of yours."

Hillyard sat up in his chair. He had been four days in London, and the
engrossing menace of those days had quite thrust from his recollections
the telegram which had, as he thought, befooled him.

"The friend of mine is possibly Paul Bendish," he said stiffly.

"Think that was the name. Graham's the man I am speaking of," and the
sailor paused. "Commodore Graham," he added.

Hillyard's indignation ebbed away. What if he had not been fooled? The
quenched hopes kindled again in him. There was all this talk of
war--alarums and excursions as the stage-directions had it. Service!
Suddenly he realised that ever since he had left Senga, a vague envy of
Harry Luttrell had been springing up in his heart. The ordered life of
service--authority on the one hand, the due execution of details on the
other! Was it to that glorious end in this crisis that all his life's
experience had slowly been gathering? He looked keenly at his companion.
Was it just by chance that he had crossed the hall in the midst of all
this thistle-down discussion and dropped in the chair by his side?

"But what could I do?"

He spoke aloud, but he was putting the question to himself. The sailor,
however, answered it.

"Ask Graham."

He wrote an address upon a sheet of notepaper and handed it to Hillyard.
Then he looked at the clock which marked ten minutes past three.

"You will find him there now."

The sailor went after his cap and left the club. Hillyard read the
address. It was a number in a little street of the Adelphi, and as he
read it, suspicion again seized upon Hillyard. After all, why should a
Commodore want to see him in a little street of the Adelphi. Perhaps,
after all, the indifferent official of Alexandria was right and the
Commodore had ambitions in the line of revues!

"I had better go and have it out with him," he decided, and, taking his
hat and stick, he walked eastwards to Charing Cross. He turned into a
short street. At the bottom a stone arch showed where once the Thames
had lapped. Now, beyond its grey-white curve, were glimpses of green
lawns and the cries of children at their play. Hillyard stopped at a
house by the side of the arch. A row of brass plates confronted him, but
the name of Commodore Graham was engraved on none of them. Hillyard rang
the housekeeper's bell and inquired.

"On the top floor on the left," he was told.

He climbed many little flights of stairs, and at the top of each his
heart sank a little lower. When the stairs ended he confronted a mean,
brown-varnished door; and he almost turned and fled. After all, the
monstrous thing looked possible. He stood upon the threshold of a set of
chambers. Was he really to be asked to collaborate in a revue? He rang
the bell, and a young woman opened the door and barred the way.

"Whom do you wish to see?" she asked.

"Commodore Graham."

"Commodore Graham?" she repeated with an air of perplexity, as though
this was the first time she had ever heard the name.

Across her shoulder Hillyard looked into a broad room, where three other
girls sat at desks, and against one wall stood a great bureau with many
tiny drawers like pigeon-holes. Several of these drawers stood open and
disclosed cards standing on their edges and packed against each other.
Hillyard's hopes revived. Not for nothing had he sat from seven to ten
in the office of a shipping agent at Alicante. Here was a card-index,
and of an amazing volume. But his interlocutor still barred the way.

"Have you an appointment with Commodore Graham?" she asked, still with
that suggestion that he had lunched too well and had lost his way.

"No. But he sent for me across half the world."

The girl raised a pair of steady grey eyes to his.

"Will you write your name here?"

She allowed him to pass and showed him some slips of paper on a table in
the middle of the room. Hillyard obeyed, and waited, and in a few
moments she returned, and opened a door, crossed a tiny ante-room and
knocked again. Hillyard entered a room which surprised him, so greatly
did its size and the wide outlook from its windows contrast with the
dinginess of its approach. A thin man with the face of a French abbe sat
indolently twiddling his thumbs by the side of a big bureau.

"You wanted to see me?"

"Mr. Hillyard?"

"Yes."

Commodore Graham nodded to the girl, and Hillyard heard the door close
behind him.

"Won't you sit down? There are cigarettes beside you. A match? Here is
one. I hope that I didn't bring you home before your time."

"The season had ended," replied Hillyard, who was in no mood to commit
himself. "In what way can I help you?"

"Bendish tells me that you know something of Spain."

"Spain?" cried Hillyard in surprise. "Spain means Madrid, Bilbao, and a
host of places, and a host of people, politicians, merchants, farmers.
What should I know of them?"

"You were in Spain for some years."

"Three," replied Hillyard, "and for most of the three years picking up a
living along the quays. Oh, it's not so difficult in Spain, especially
in summer time. Looking after a felucca while the crew drank in a cafe,
holding on to a dinghy from a yacht and helping the ladies to step out,
a little fishing here, smuggling a box of cigars past the customs
officer there--oh, it wasn't so difficult. You can sleep out in comfort.
I used to enjoy it. There was a coil of rope on the quay at Tarragona;
it made a fine bed. Lord, I can feel it now, all round me as I curled up
in it, and the stars overhead, seen out of a barrel, so to speak!"

Hillyard's face changed. He had the spark of the true wanderer within
him. Even recollections of days long gone could blow it into clear, red
flame. All the long glowing days on the hot stones of the water-side,
the glitter of the Mediterranean purple-blue under the sun, the coming
of night and the sudden twinkling of lights in the cave-dwellings above
Almeria and across the bay from Aguilas, the plunge into the warm sea at
midnight, the glorious evenings at water-side cafes when he had half a
dozen coppers in his pocket; the good nature of the people! All these
recollections swept back on him in a rush. The actual hardships, the
hunger, the biting winds of January under a steel-cold sky, these things
were all forgotten. He remembered the freedom.

"There weren't any hours to the day," he cried, and spoke the creed of
all the wanderers in the world. "I saw the finest bull-fights in the
world, and made money out of them by selling dulces and membrilla and
almond rock from Alicante. Oh, the life wasn't so bad. But it came to an
end. A shipping agent at Alicante used me as a messenger, and finally,
since I knew English and no one else in his office did, turned me into a
shipping clerk."

Hillyard had quite forgotten Commodore Graham, who sat patiently
twiddling his thumbs throughout the autobiography, and now came with
something of a start to a recognition of where he sat. He sprang up and
reached for his hat.

"So, you see, you might as well ask a Chinaman at Stepney what he knows
of England as ask me what I know of Spain. I am just wasting your time.
But I have to thank you," and he bowed with a winning pleasantness, "for
reviving in me some very happy recollections which were growing dim."

The Commodore, however, did not stir.

"But it is possible," he said quietly, "that you do know the very places
which interest me--the people too."

Hillyard looked at the Commodore. He put down his hat and resumed his
seat.

"For instance?"

"The Columbretes."

Hillyard laughed.

"Islands sixty miles from Valencia."

"With a lighthouse," interrupted Graham.

"And a little tumble-down inn with a vine for an awning."

"Oh! I didn't know there was an inn," said Graham. "Already you have
told me something."

"I fished round the Columbretes all one summer," said Hillyard, with a
laugh.

Graham nodded two or three times quickly.

"And the Balearics?"

"I worked on one of Island Line ships between Barcelona and Palma
through a winter."

"There's a big wireless," said Commodore Graham.

"At Soller. On the other side of Mallorca from Palma. You cross a
wonderful pass by the old monastery where Georges Sand and Chopin stayed
and quarrelled."

The literary reminiscence left Commodore Graham unmoved.

"Did you ever go to Iviza?"

"For a month with a tourist who dug for ancient pottery."

Graham swung round to his bureau and drummed with the tips of his
fingers upon the leather pad. He made no sign which could indicate
whether he was satisfied or no. He lit a cigarette and handed the box to
Hillyard.

"Did you ever come across a man called Jose Medina?"

Eleven years had passed since the strange days in Spain, and those
eleven years not without their sharp contrasts and full hours.
Hillyard's act of memory was the making of a picture. One by one he
called up the chain of coast cities wherein he had wandered. Malaga,
with its brown cathedral; Almeria and its ancient castle and bright
blue-painted houses glowing against the brown and barren hills; Aguilas,
with its islets; Cartagena, Gandia, Alicante of the palms; Valencia--and
under the trees and on the quays, the boatmen and the captains and the
resplendent officials whom he had known! They took shape before him and
assumed their names. He dived amongst them for one Jose Medina.

"Yes," he replied at last, "there was a Jose Medina. He was a young
peasant of Mallorca. He always said jo for yo."

Graham's eyes brightened and his lips twitched to a smile. He glanced
aside to his bureau, whereon lay a letter written by Paul Bendish at
Oxford.

"He probably has a larger acquaintance with the