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The Summons (Mason novel)

The Summons AuthorA. E. W. MasonLanguageEnglishPublisherHodder & StoughtonOctober 1920Media typePrintPages320
The Summons is a 1920 novel of adventure and romance by A. E. W. Mason, published by Hodder & Stoughton. Set just before and during the Great War, the novel recounts the adventures of Martin Hillyard, a secret service agent, and his army officer friend Harry Luttrell who aims to restore the battered reputation of his regiment.

Hillyard has been called the nearest approach to a self-portrait that Mason ever drew, and his childhood and secret service wartime experiences are based on those of the author himself.

Plot
After a good early education, Martin Hillyard left home at 16 to scrape a living in the ports of the Southern Spanish coast. When he was 19, his parents died and he took up a place at Oxford, becoming friends with Harry Luttrell, a young man steeped in tradition. After University Hillyard worked as a playwright while Luttrell felt it his duty to take a commission in his family's regiment, the Clayfords, to redeem its reputation after disgrace in the South African Wars.

Fearful of becoming an "undisciplined soldier", and wanting to escape from a relationship with Stella Croyle, a divorc�e he finds excessively proprietorial, Luttrell volunteers in 1912 to be posted to the Sudan. Stella, however, will not accept that the relationship is over, and when Hillyard decides to take a shooting holiday there, gets him to promise that he will ask Luttrell to write. When the friends meet, Luttrell makes it clear that he has no intention of doing so.

Hillyard is summoned to the Admiralty in London, and learns that his wide network of working class Spanish contacts makes him well suited for secret service work.

In August 1914 Hillyard attends a house party at the home of Sir Chichester and Lady Splay. Most of the house guests attend the racing at Goodwood, but Lady Splay's orphaned niece, the 18 year old Joan Whitworth, affects to reject conventional society and declines to go. The guests notice as the afternoon draws on that gaps have appeared in the crowds and that "the officers had gone". Great Britain has entered the Great War.

Largely due to the bravery of Luttrell, the Clayfords redeem their reputation at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. With assistance from an influential Spanish tobacco smuggler, Jos� Medina, Hillyard obtains details of German submarine movements and discovers how enemy messages are being passed between Berlin and Madrid. Medina confirms the involvement of a prominent Spaniard called Mario Escobar.

Returning to England after twenty months abroad, Hillyard is again invited to Lady Splay's, along with Luttrell. Joan, who in the interim has been in a public relationship with Escobar, instantly falls in love with Luttrell and he with her. There is a difficult scene when Luttrell discovers that a disturbed Stella Croyle is also a guest, and that she is still expecting him to return to her. Joan writes to Escobar to call their relationship off, and they meet alone in the house late at night. He threatens her, but leaves precipitately when he realises that their meeting has been overheard by Stella.

At breakfast the next morning, the party are astonished by a London newspaper report of an incident said to have taken place in the house the night before: the tragic death by chloroform of Mrs Stella Croyle. Stella's maid, Jenny, is sent to check her room, and finds that Stella has indeed died. Hillyard learns that during the night � but well before the death actually occurred � a chauffeur had arrived at the newspaper's offices bearing a letter under the signature of Sir Chichester, but (unknown to the editor) in Stella's handwriting. Questioned about it, Jenny tries to implicate Joan, but at last confesses that the bearer was Stella's own chauffeur, Jenny's fianc�. She had not known what the letter contained. On discovering her mistress's suicide in the morning, she had tried to ensure that Joan, whom she hated as her mistress's rival, would have to attend the inquest and give public evidence of her secret meeting with Escobar. Such a disclosure would destroy her reputation and prevent her marriage to Luttrell.

Escobar is arrested and interned as a spy, and Jenny belatedly realises that she may herself be suspected of murder. Joan avoids having to give evidence, and the coroner brings in a verdict of suicide.

Joan and Luttrell marry before he is recalled to France ten days later. He loses his life at the Battle of Messines in 1917, and Joan bears his child six months afterwards. She tells Hillyard of her pride in her young son, rejoicing that there will be no stigma on the Clayfords when he gets his commission.

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