The Summons (novel)/X
It is curious to recollect how smoothly the surface water ran during that last week of peace. Debates there were, of course, and much argument across the table. It was recognised that great changes, social, economic, military, would come and great adaptations have to be made. But, meanwhile, to use the phrase which was soon to be familiar in half a million mouths, people carried on. The Brown couple, for instance. Each morning they set out gaily, certain of three or four nice wins; each evening they returned after a day which was "simply awful." Harold Jupp was at hand with his unfailing remedy.
"We'll go jumping in the winter and get it all back easily. Flat racing's no good for the poor. The Lords don't come jumping."
Joan Whitworth carried on too, in her sackcloth and sashes. She was moved by the enthusiastic explosions of Miranda Brown to reveal some details of the great novel which was then in the process of incubation.
"She insists on being married in a violet dress," said Joan, "with the organ playing the 'Funeral March of a Marionette.'"
"Oh, isn't that thrilling!" cried Miranda.
"But why does she insist upon these unusual arrangements?" asked Harold Jupp.
Joan brushed his question aside.
"It was symbolical of her."
"Yes. Linda would have done that," said Miranda. "I suppose her marriage turns out very unhappily?"
"It had to," said Joan, quite despondent over this unalterable necessity.
"Now, why?" asked Jupp in a perplexity.
"Her husband never understood her."
"What ho!" cried Dennis Brown, looking up from his scientific researches into "Form at a Glance."
"I expect that he talked racing all day," said Miranda.
Dennis Brown treated the rejoinder with contempt. His eyes were fixed sympathetically on the young writer-to-be.
"I hate crabbing any serious effort to elevate us, Joan, but, honestly, doesn't it all sound a little conventional?"
He could have used no epithet more deplorable. Joan shot at him one annihilating glance. Miranda bubbled with indignation.
"Don't notice them, Joan dear! They don't know the meaning of words. They are ribald, uneducated people. You call your heroine Linda? Linda—what?"
Mr. Jupp supplied a name.
"Linda Spavinsky," said he. "She comes of the ancient Scottish family of that name."
"Pig! O pig!" cried Joan, routed at last from her superior serenity; and a second afterwards her eyes danced and with a flash of sound white teeth she broke into honest laughter. She did her best to suppress her sense of fun, but it would get the better of her from time to time.
This onslaught upon Joan Whitworth took place on the Wednesday evening. Sir Chichester came into the room as it ended, with a telegram in his hand.
"Mario Escobar wires, Millie, that he is held up in London by press of work and will only be able to run down here on Friday for the night."
Hillyard looked up.
"Mario Escobar?"
"Do you know him?" asked Millie Splay.
"Slightly," answered Hillyard. "Press of work! What does he do?"
"Runs about with the girls," said Dennis Brown.
Sir Chichester Splay would not have the explanation.
"Nonsense, my dear Dennis, nonsense, nonsense! He has a great many social engagements of the most desirable kind. He is, I believe, interested in some shipping firms."
"I like him," said Millie Splay.
"And so do I," added Joan, "very much indeed." The statement was defiantly thrown at Harold Jupp.
"I think he is charming," said Miranda.
Harold Jupp looked from one to the other.
"That seems to settle it, doesn't it? But——"
"But what?" asked Sir Chichester.
"Need we listen to the ridiculous exhibitions of male jealousy?" Miranda asked plaintively.
"But," Harold Jupp repeated firmly, "I do like a man to have another address besides his club. Now, I will lay a nice five to one that no one in this room knows where Mario Escobar goes when he goes home."
A moment's silence followed upon Harold Jupp's challenge. To the men, the point had its importance. The women did not appreciate the importance, but they recognised that their own menfolk did, and they did not interrupt.
"It's true," said Sir Chichester, "I always hear from him with his club as his address. But it simply means that he lives at an hotel and is not sure that he will remain on."
Thus the little things of every day occupied the foreground of Rackham Park. Millicent Splay had her worries of which Joan Whitworth was the cause. She loved Joan; she was annoyed with Joan; she admired Joan; she was amused at Joan; and she herself could never have told you which of these four emotions had the upper hand. So inextricably were they intermingled.
She poured them out to Martin Hillyard, as they drove through the Park at Midhurst on the Thursday morning.
"What do you think of Joan?" she asked. "She is beautiful, isn't she, with that mass of golden hair and her eyes?"
"Yes, she is," answered Hillyard.
"And what a fright she is making of herself! She isn't dressed at all, is she? She is just—protected by her clothes."
Hillyard laughed and Millicent Splay sighed. "And I did hope she would have got over it all by Goodwood. But no! Really I could slap her. But I might have known! Joan never does things by halves."
"She seems thorough," said Hillyard, although he remembered, with some doubts as to the truth of his comment, moments now and again when more primitive impulses had bubbled up in Joan Whitworth.
"Thorough! Yes, that's the word. Oh, Mr. Hillyard, there was a time when she really dressed—dressed, you understand. My word, she was thorough then, too. I remember coming out of the Albert Hall on a Melba afternoon, when we could get nothing but a hansom cab, and a policeman actually had to lift her up into it like a big baby because her skirt was so tight. And look at her now!"
Millicent Splay thumped the side of the car in her vexation.
"But you mustn't think she's a fool." Lady Splay turned menacingly on the silent Hillyard.
"But I don't," he protested.
"That's the last thing to say about her."
"I never said it," declared Martin Hillyard.
"I should have lost my faith in you, if you had," rejoined Millicent Splay, even now hardly mollified.
But she could not avoid the subject. Here was a new-comer to Rackham Park. She could not bear that he should carry away a wrong impression of her darling.
"I'll tell you the truth about Joan. She has lived her sheltered life with us, and no real things have yet come near her. No real troubles, no deep joys. Her parents even died when she was too young to know them. But she is eighteen and alive to her finger-tips. Therefore she's—expectant."
"Yes," Hillyard agreed.
"She is searching for the meaning, for the secrets of life, sure that there is a meaning, sure that there are secrets, if only she could get hold of them. But she hasn't got hold of them. She runs here. She runs there. She explores, she experiments. That's why she's dressed like a tramp and thinking out a book where the heroine gets married to the Funeral March of a Marionette. Oh, my dear person, it just means, as it always means with us poor creatures, that the right man hasn't come along."
Millie Splay leaned back in her seat.
"When he does!" she cried. "When he does! Did you see the magnolia this morning? It burst into flower during the night. Joan! I thought once that it might be Harold Jupp. But it isn't."
Lady Splay spoke with discouragement. She had the matchmaking fever in her blood. Martin Hillyard remembered her glance when he had casually spoken of Harry Luttrell. Then she startled him with words which he was never to forget, and in which he chose to find a real profundity.
"The right man has not come along. So Joan mistakes anything odd for something great, and thinks that to be unusual is to be strong. It's a mood of young people who have not yet waked up."
They drove to the private stand and walked through into the paddock. Millie Splay looked round at the gay and brilliant throng. She sighed.
"There she is, moping in the drawing-room over Prince Hohenstiel—whatever his name is. She won't come to Goodwood. No, she just won't."
Yet Joan Whitworth did come to Goodwood that year, though not upon this day.
No one in that household had read the newspapers so carefully each day as Martin Hillyard. As the prospect darkened each morning, he was in a distress lest a letter should not have been forwarded from his flat in London, or should have been lost in the post. Each evening when the party returned from the races his first question asked whether there was no telegram awaiting him. So regular and urgent were his inquiries that the house-party could not be ignorant of his preoccupation. And on the afternoon of the Thursday a telegram in its orange envelope was lying upon the hall-table.
"It's for you, Mr. Hillyard," said Lady Splay.
Hillyard held it in his hands. So the summons had come, the summons hoped for, despaired of, made so often into a whip wherewith he lashed his arrogance, the summons to serve.
"I shall have to go up to town this evening," he said.
Anxious faces gathered about him.
"Oh, don't do that!" said Harold Jupp. "We have just got to like you."
"Yes, wait until to-morrow, my dear boy," Sir Chichester suggested. Even Joan Whitworth descended to earth and requested that he should stay.
"It's awfully kind of you," stammered Martin. "But I am afraid that this is very important."
Lady Splay was practical.
"Hadn't you better see first?" she asked.
Hillyard, with his thoughts playing swiftly in the future like a rapier, was still standing stock-still with the unopened telegram in his hand.
"Of course," he said. "But I know already what it is."
The anxious little circle closed nearer as he tore open the envelope. He read:
- "I have refused the Duke. Money is cash—I mean trash. Little one I am yours.—Linda Spavinsky."
The telegram had been sent that afternoon from Chichester.
Hillyard gazed around at the serious faces which hemmed him in. It became a contest as to whose face should hold firm longest. Joan herself was the first to flee, and she was found rocking to and fro in silent laughter in a corner of the library. Then Hillyard himself burst into a roar.
"I bought that fairly," he admitted, and he went up several points in the estimation of them all.
The last day of the races came—all sunshine and hot summer; lights and shadows chasing across the downs, the black slopes of Charlton forest on the one side, parks and green fields and old brown houses, sloping to the silver Solent, upon the other; and in the centre of the plain, by Bosham water, the spire of Chichester Cathedral piercing the golden air. Paddock and lawn and the stands were filled until about two in the afternoon. Then the gaps began to show to those who were concerned to watch. Especially about the oval railings in the paddock, within which, dainty as cats and with sleek shining skins, the racehorses stepped, the crowd grew thin. And in a few moments, the word had run round like fire, "The officers had gone."
Hillyard stood reflecting upon the stupendous fact. Never had he so bitterly regretted that physical disqualification which banned him from their company. Never had he so envied Luttrell. He was in the uttermost depression when a small, brown-gloved hand touched his arm. He turned and saw Joan Whitworth at his side, her lovely face alive with excitement, her eyes most friendly. It was hardly at all the Joan he knew. Joan had courage, but to face Goodwood in the clothes she affected at Rackham Park was beyond it. From her grey silk stockings and suede shoes to the little smart blue hat which sat so prettily on her hair, she was, as Millicent Splay would have admitted, really dressed.
"There is a real telegram for you," she said. She held it out to him enclosed in an envelope which had been already opened.
"Please come to see me—Graham," he read, and the actual receipt of the message stirred within him such a whirl of emotion that, for a moment or two, Joan Whitworth spoke and he was not aware of it. Suddenly, however, he understood that she was speaking words of importance.
"I hope I did right to open it," she said. "Colonel Brockley rode over this morning to tell us that his son had been recalled to his battalion by a telegram. I knew you were expecting one. When this one came, I thought that it might be important and that you ought to have it at once. On the other hand it might be another telegram," and her face dimpled into smiles, "from Linda Spavinsky. I didn't know what to do about it. But Mario Escobar was quite certain that I ought to open it."
"Mario Escobar?" cried Hillyard.
"Yes. He had just arrived. He was quite certain that we ought to open it, so we did."
"We?" A note of regret in his voice made her ask anxiously:
"Was I wrong?"
Hillyard hastened to reassure her.
"Not a bit. Of course you were quite right, and I am very grateful."
Joan's face cleared again.
"You see, I thought that if it was important I could bring it over and drive you back again."
"Will you?" Hillyard asked eagerly. "But now you are here you ought to stay."
Joan would not hear of the proposal, and Hillyard himself was in a fever to be off. They found Sir Chichester and his wife in the paddock, and Hillyard wished his hosts good-bye. Mario Escobar, who had driven over with Joan Whitworth, was talking to them. Escobar turned to Martin Hillyard.
"We met at Sir Charles Hardiman's supper party. You have not forgotten? You are off? A new play, I hope, to go into rehearsal."
He smiled and bowed, and waved his hands. Hillyard went away with Joan Whitworth and mounted beside her into a little two-seated car which she had been accustomed to drive in her unregenerate days. She had not forgotten her skill, and she sent the little car spinning up and down the road into the hills. It was an afternoon of blue and gold, with the larks singing out of sight in the sky. The road wound up and down, dark hedges on one side, fields yellow with young wheat upon the other, and the scent of the briar-rose in the air. Joan said very little, and Hillyard was content to watch her as she drove, the curls blowing about her ears and her hands steady and sure upon the wheel as she swung the car round the corners and folds of the hills. Once she asked of him:
"Are you glad to go?"
He made no pretence of misunderstanding her.
"Very," he answered. "If the great trial is coming, I want to fall back into the rank and file. Pushing and splashing is for peace times."
"Oh, I understand that!" she cried.
These were the young days. The jealousies of Departments, the intrigues to pull this man down and put that man up, not because of his capacity or failure, but because he fitted or did not fit the inner politics of the Office, the capture of honours by the stay-at-homes—all the little miseries and horrors that from time immemorial have disfigured the management of wars—they lay in the future. With millions of people, as with this couple speeding among the uplands, the one thought was—the great test is at hand.
"You go up to London to-night, and it may be a long while before we see you," said Joan. She brought the car to a halt on the edge of Duncton Hill. "Look for luck and for memory at the Weald of Sussex," she cried with a little catch in her throat.
Fields and great trees, and here and there the white smoke of a passing train and beyond the Blackdown and the misty slopes of Leith Hill—Hillyard was never to forget it, neither that scene nor the eager face and shining eyes of Joan Whitworth against the blue and gold of the summer afternoon.
"You will remember that you have friends here, who will be glad to hear news of you," she said, and she threw in the clutch and started the car down the hill.