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 abbé 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 café, 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 cafés 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 José 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 José Medina.
“Yes,” he replied at last, “there was a José 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 queer birds of the Mediterranean ports than any one else in England. But he does not seem to be aware of it. But if you persist in sitting quiet his knowledge will trickle out.”
Commodore Graham persisted, and facts concerning José Medina began to trickle out. José’s father had left him, the result of a Spanish peasant’s thrift, a couple of thousand pesetas. With this José Medina had gone to Gibraltar, where he bought a felucca, with a native of Gibraltar as its nominal owner; so that José Medina might fly the flag of Britain and sleep more surely for its protection. At Gibraltar, with what was left of his two thousand pesetas and the credit which his manner gained him, he secured a cargo of tobacco.
“Gibraltar’s a free port, you see,” said Hillyard. “José ran the cargo along the coast to Benicassim, a little watering-place with a good beach about thirty kilometres east of Valencia. He ran the felucca ashore one dark night.” Suddenly he stopped and smiled to himself. “I expect José Medina’s in prison now.”
“On the contrary,” said Graham, “he’s a millionaire.”
Hillyard stared. Then he laughed.
“Well, those were the two alternatives for José Medina. But I am judging by one night’s experience. I never saw him again.”
Commodore Graham touched with his heel a bell by the leg of his bureau. The bell did not ring, but displaced a tiny shutter in front of the desk of his secretary in the ante-room; and Hillyard had hardly ended when the girl was in the room and announced:
“Admiral Carstairs.”
Commodore Graham looked annoyed.
“What a nuisance! I am afraid that I must see him, Mr. Hillyard.”
“Of course,” said Hillyard. “Admirals are admirals.”
“And they know it!” said Commodore Graham with a sigh.
Hillyard rose and took his hat.
“Well, I am very grateful to you, Mr. Hillyard,” said Graham. “I can’t say anything more to you now. Things, as you know, are altogether very doubtful. We may slip over into smooth water. On the other hand,” and he twiddled his thumbs serenely, “we may be at war in a month. If that were to be the case, I might want to talk with you again. Will you leave your address with Miss Chayne?”
Hillyard was led out by another door, no doubt so that he might not meet the impatient admiral. He might have gone away disheartened from that interview with its vague promises. But there are other and often surer indications than words. When Miss Chayne took down his address, her manner had quite changed towards him. She had now a frank and pleasant comradeship. The official had gone. Her smile said as plainly as print could do: “You are with us now.”
Meanwhile Commodore Graham read through once more the letter of Paul Bendish. He turned from that to a cabled report from Khartum of the opinion which various governors of districts had formed concerning the ways and the discretion of Martin Hillyard. Then once more he rang his bell.
“There was a list of suitable private yachts to be made out,” he said.
“It is ready,” replied Miss Chayne, and she brought it to him.
Over that list Commodore Graham spent a great deal of time. In the end his finger rested on the name of the steam-yacht Dragonfly, owned by Sir Charles Hardiman, Baronet.
CHAPTER IX
Enter the Heroine in anything but White Satin
GOODWOOD IN THE year nineteen hundred and fourteen! There were some, throwers of stones, searchers after a new thing on which to build a reputation, who have been preaching these many years past that the temper of England had changed, its solidity all dissolved into froth, and that a new race of neurotics was born on Mafeking night. Just ninety-nine years before this Goodwood meeting, when Napoleon and the veterans of the Imperial Guard were knocking at the gates of Brussels, a famous ball was given. Goodwood of the year nineteen-fourteen, mutatis mutandis, did but repeat that scene, the same phlegmatic enjoyment of the festival, the same light-heartedness and sure confidence under the great shadow, and the same ending.
The whispered word went round so that there should be no panic or alarm, and of a sudden every officer was gone. Goodwood of nineteen fourteen and a July so perfect with sunlight and summer that it seemed some bird at last must break the silence of the famed beech-grove! All the world went to it. The motor-cars and the coaches streamed up over Duncton Hill and wound down the Midhurst Road to pleasant Charlton, with its cottages and gardens of flowers. Martin Hillyard went too.
As he walked away from Captain Graham’s eyrie he met Sir Chichester Splay in Pall Mall.
“Where have you been these eight months?” inquired Sir Chichester. “‘The Dark Tower’ is still running, I see. A good play, Mr. Hillyard.”
“But not a great play, of course,” said Martin, his lips twitching to a smile.
“I have been looking for you everywhere,” remarked Sir Chichester. “You must stay with us for Goodwood. My wife will never forgive me if I don’t secure you.”
Hillyard gladly consented. It would be his first visit to the high racecourse on the downs — and — and he might find Stella Croyle among the company. It would be a little easier for him and for her too, if they met this second time in a house of many visitors. He had no comfortable news to give to her, and he had shrunk from seeking her out in the Bayswater Road. Wrap the truth in words however careful, he could not but wound her. Yet sooner or later she must hear of his return, and avoidance of her would but tell the story more cruelly than his lips.
“Yes, I will gladly come,” he said, “if I may come down on the first day.”
He was delayed in London until midday, and so motored after luncheon through Guildford and Chiddingfold and Petworth to Rackham Park. The park ran down to the Midhurst Road, and when Hillyard was shown into the drawing-room he walked across to the window and looked out over a valley of fields and hedges and low, dark ridges to the downs lying blue in the sunlight and the black forests on their slopes.
From an embrasure a girl rose with a book in her hand.
“Let me introduce myself, Mr. Hillyard. I am Joan Whitworth, and make my home here with my aunt. They are all at Goodwood, of course, but they should be back at any moment.”
She rang the bell and ordered tea. Somewhere Hillyard realised he had seen the girl before. She was about eighteen years old, he guessed, very pretty, with a wealth of fair hair deepening into brown, dark blue eyes shaded with long dark lashes and a colour of health abloom in her cheeks.
“You have been in Egypt, uncle tells me.”
“In the Sudan,” Hillyard corrected. “I have been shooting for eight months.”
“Shooting!”
Joan Whitworth’s eyes were turned on him in frank disappointment. “The
author of ‘The Dark Tower’ — shooting!”
There was more than disappointment in her voice. There was a hint of disdain.
Hillyard did not pursue the argument.
“I knew that I had seen you before. I remember where now. You were with Sir Chichester at the first performance of ‘The Dark Tower.’ I peeped out behind the curtain of my box and saw you.”
Joan’s face relaxed.
“Oh, yes, I was there.”
“But — —” Hillyard began, and caught himself up. He had been on the point of saying that she had a very different aspect in the stalls of the Rubicon Theatre. But he looked her up and down and held his peace. Yet what he did substitute left him in no better case.
“So you have not gone to the races,” he said, and once more her lip curled in disdain. She drew herself up to her full height — she was not naturally small, but a good honest piece of English maidenhood.
“Do I look as if I were likely to go to the races?” she asked superbly.
She was dressed in a sort of shapeless flowing gown, saffron in colour, and of a material which, to Hillyard’s inexperienced eye, seemed canvas. It spread about her on the ground, and it was high at the throat. A broad starched white collar, like an Eton boy’s, surmounted it, and a little black tie was fastened in a bow, and scarves floated untidily around her.
“No, upon my word you do not,” cried Hillyard, nettled at last by her haughtiness, and with such a fervour of agreement, that suddenly all her youth rose into Joan Whitworth’s face and got the better of her pose. She laughed aloud, frankly, deliciously. And her laugh was still rippling about the room when motor-horns hooted upon the drive.
At once the laughter vanished.
“We shall be amongst horses in a minute,” she observed with a sigh. “I can smell the stables already,” and she retired to her book in the embrasure of the window.
A joyous and noisy company burst into the room. Sir Chichester, with larger mother-of-pearl buttons on his fawn-coloured overcoat than ever decorated even a welshing bookmaker on Brighton Downs, led Hillyard up to Lady Splay.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 539