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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 châlets, 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.