‘Thank you, yes,’ said the frail old gentleman. ‘I shall be glad of some tea. My work at the Palace is unusually tiring nowadays in consequence of the war.’
The Duchess made the introductions:
‘General Curzon – Mr Anstey.’
‘Curzon?’ repeated Mr Anstey with mild animation. ‘Brigadier-General Herbert Curzon?’
‘Yes,’ said Curzon.
‘Then you are one of the people responsible for my present fatigue.’
‘I’m sorry to hear you say that, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘Oh, there’s no need to be sorry, I assure you. I am only too delighted to have the honour of doing the work I do. It is only to-day that I made out two warrants for you.’
‘Indeed, sir?’ said Curzon vaguely.
‘Yes. There is, of course, no harm in my telling you about them, seeing that they are already in the post and will be delivered to you to-morrow. One of them deals with the Companionship of the Bath and the other with the Belgian Order of Leopold – I must explain that I combine in my humble person official positions both in the department of the Lord-Chamberlain and in the registry of the Order of the Bath. You will find you have been commanded to be present at an investiture to be held next week.’
‘Thank you,’ said Curzon. He remembered vaguely having heard of the Ansteys as one of the ‘Court families’ who occupied positions at the Palace from one generation to the next.
‘The Order of Leopold,’ went on Mr Anstey, ‘is a very distinguished order indeed. It is the Second Class which is being awarded to you, General – the First Class is generally reserved for reigning monarchs and people in corresponding positions. Of course, it is not an order with a very lengthy history – it can hardly be that, can it? – but I think an order presented by a crowned head far more distinguished than any decoration a republic can award. I hope you agree with me, General?’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Curzon, perfectly sincerely.
The Duchess merely nodded. The orders her husband wore were such as no mere general could ever hope to attain, and possessed the further recommendation (as has frequently been pointed out) that there was no ‘damned nonsense about merit’ attached to them. The Duke’s ribbons and stars were given him, if a reason must be assigned, because his great-great-great-great grandfather had come over in the train of William of Orange – certainly not because ten years ago he had been chivvied by his wife into accepting minor office under a tottering Conservative Government. Her Grace was sublimely confident in her share of the universal opinion that it was far better to receive distinctions for being someone than for doing something.
‘You are one of the Derbyshire Curzons, I suppose, General?’ said Mr Anstey.
Curzon was ready for that. He had been an officer in India during Lord Curzon’s vice-royalty and had grown accustomed to having the relationship suggested – in the course of years even his unimaginative mind had been able to hammer out a suitable answer.
‘Yes, but a long way back,’ he said. ‘My branch has been settled in Staffordshire for some time, and I am the only representative now.’
Curzon always remembered that his father had a vague notion that his father had come to London from the Potteries as a boy; moreover, he thought it quite unnecessary to add that these mystic Staffordshire Curzons had progressed from Staffordshire to the Twenty-second Lancers via Mincing Lane.
‘That is extremely interesting,’ said Mr Anstey. ‘Even though the Scarsdale peerage is of comparatively recent creation the Curzons are one of the few English families of undoubtedly Norman descent.’
Mr Anstey checked himself with a jerk. Despite his Court tact, he had allowed himself to mention Norman descent from a follower of William the Conqueror in the presence of a representative of a family of Dutch descent from a follower of William of Orange. To his mind the difference was abysmal and the gaffe he had committed inexcusable. He glanced with apprehension at the Duchess, but he need not have worried. Coronets meant far more to her than did Norman blood.
‘How very interesting,’ said the Duchess coldly.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Lady Emily eagerly, and attracted every eye by the warmth with which she said it.
The Duchess ran a cold glance over every inch of her thirty-year-old daughter’s shrinking form.
‘There are a great number of fresh letters arrived,’ she said, ‘about the Belgian Relief Clothing Association. You will find them in the library, Emily. I think they had better be answered at once.’
Curzon saw Lady Emily’s face fall a little, and it was that which made him take the plunge. He cut in with what he had to say just as Lady Emily, with the obedience resulting from years of subjection, was rising from her arm-chair.
‘I was wondering, Lady Emily,’ he said, ‘if I might have the pleasure of your company at the theatre this evening?’
Lady Emily looked at her mother, as ingrained instinct directed. Mr Anstey sensed an awkwardness, and hastened to try and smooth it over with his well-known tact.
‘We all of us need a little relaxation in these strenuous days,’ he said.
‘Thank you, I should very much like to come,’ said Lady Emily – perhaps she, too, was infected by the surge of revolt against convention and parental control which the newspapers had noted as a concomitant of war-time. The Duchess could hardly countermand a decision publicly reached by a daughter of full age and more.
‘What is the play to which you are proposing so kindly to take my daughter?’ she asked icily, which was all she could do.
‘I was going to leave the choice to Lady Emily,’ said Curzon – a reply, made from sheer ignorance, which left the Duchess with no objection to raise, and that emboldened Curzon still farther.
‘Shall we dine together first?’ he asked.
‘That would be very nice,’ said Lady Emily, her bonnet soaring clean over the windmill in this, her first flourish of emancipation.
‘Seven o’clock?’ said Curzon. ‘It’s a pity having to dine so early, but it’s hard to avoid it. Shall I call for you?’
‘Yes,’ said Lady Emily.
Chapter Nine
‘Damn it all, Maud,’ said the Duke of Bude to the Duchess a week after Curzon had gone to the theatre with Lady Emily. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t want the girl to get married.’
That was so true that the Duchess had to deny it.
‘I don’t want Emily to marry a man of no family at all – a mere adventurer,’ said she, and the Duke chuckled as he made one of his irritating silly jokes.
‘As long as he’s got no family it doesn’t matter. We won’t have to invite his Kensington cousins to the Hall then. The man assured us only yesterday that he hasn’t a relation in the world. And as for being an adventurer – well, a man can’t help having adventures in time of war, can he?’
‘Tcha!’ said the Duchess. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’
‘He’s a perfectly presentable man. He’s Haileybury, after all – everyone can’t be an Etonian. Colonel of a good regiment –’
‘The Twenty-second Lancers,’ sneered the Duchess.
‘It might have been black infantry,’ said the Duke. ‘He’s got a C.B. and a D.S.O., and Borthwick at the Lords was telling me that his boy wrote reams about him from the Front. He’s a man with a future.’
‘But they hardly know each other,’ said the Duchess.
‘Well, they’re old enough to be able to make up their minds. Emily’s thirty-two, isn’t she, or is it thirty-three? And he’s turned forty. I think it’s very suitable. I can’t imagine why you’re objecting so much.’
That, of course, was a lie. The Duke knew perfectly well why the Duchess was objecting, and in his heart of hearts he objected too. But he could bow gracefully to the inevitable, in a way his stiff-necked wife found more difficult.
‘Marrying’s in the air these war-time days,’ went on the Duke. ‘There’ll be no stopping ’em if they set their minds on it. Much better start g
etting used to the idea now. Besides, we may as well be in the fashion.’
‘Fashion, indeed!’ said the Duchess. Her disregard for fashion was one of the things about her which no one who saw her even once could possibly avoid remarking.
‘Besides,’ said the Duchess, unanswerably, ‘he’s got no money.’
‘M’yes,’ said the Duke, undoubtedly shaken. ‘That’s a point I shall have to go into very carefully when the time comes.’
The time came no later than the day after to-morrow. The courtship had blossomed with extraordinary rapidity in the hot-house air of war-time London. So high above the windmill had Lady Emily’s bonnet soared that she had actually accompanied Curzon to a night-club so as to dance. They had shuffled and stumbled through the ultra-modern one-steps and two-steps until the pampered orchestra had at last consented to play a waltz. Curzon certainly could waltz; he had learned the art in the great days of waltzing. And it might have been the extra glass of rather poor champagne which she had drunk at dinner which made Lady Emily’s feet so light and her eyes so bright. As the last heart-broken wail of the violins died away and they stopped and looked at each other the thing was as good as settled. No sooner had they sat down than Curzon was able to stumble through a proposal of marriage with less difficulty than he had found in the one-step; and to his delighted surprise he found himself accepted.
Lady Emily’s eyes were like stars. They made Curzon’s head swim a little. His heart had plunged so madly after his inclinations that never again, not once, did it occur to him that her face was not unlike a horse’s. To Curzon Lady Emily’s gaunt figure, stiffly corseted – almost an old maid’s figure – was a miracle of willowy grace, and her capable ugly hands, when he kissed them in the taxicab on the way home, were more beautiful than the white hands of Lancelot’s Yseult.
The interview with the Duke in the morning was not too terrible. It was a relief to the Duke to discover that the General actually had seven hundred pounds a year – especially as under the stimulus of war-time demands some of the dividends which contributed to make up this sum showed an undoubted tendency to expand. It might have been a much smaller income and still not have been incompatible with Curzon’s position in life. Besides, the General offered, in the most handsome fashion, to settle every penny of his means upon his future wife. No one could make a fairer offer than that, after all. And when one came to total up his general’s pay, and his allowances, under the new scale just published, and his forage allowances and so forth, it did not fall far short of twelve hundred a year, without reckoning on the possibility of promotion or command pay or the less likely sources of income. A general’s widow’s pension (after all, every contingency must be considered) was only a small amount, of course, but it was as good as any investment in the Funds.
And two thousand a year (for so the Duke, in an expansive moment, generously estimated Curzon’s income) really could not be called poverty, not even by a Duke with thirty thousand a year, especially when the Duke belonged to a generation whose young men about town had often contrived to make a passable appearance on eight hundred. The Duke proposed to supplement the newly married couple’s income with two thousand a year from his private purse, and they ought to be able to manage very well, especially while the General was on active service.
‘I think you’ve been weak, Gilbert,’ said the Duchess later.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Maud!’ said the Duke. ‘I don’t see that at all. We owe our national existence at present to the Army. And we can spare the money all right. You know that. It’ll only go to George and his boys if Emily doesn’t get it. That is, if these blasted death duties leave anything over at all.’
‘I don’t think,’ said the Duchess, ‘that there is any need for you to use disgusting language to me even though your daughter is marrying beneath her.’
The Duchess grew more reconciled to her daughter’s marriage when she came to realize that at least while Curzon was on active service she would still be able to tyrannize over her daughter, and the public interest in the wedding reconciled her still more. The formal announcement was very formal, of course. ‘A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Lady Emily Gertrude Maud Winter-Willoughby, only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Bude, and Brigadier-General Herbert Curzon, C.B., D.S.O., Twenty-second Lancers.’
The newspapers built a marvellous edifice upon this bare foundation. ‘Duke’s Daughter to Wed War Hero’, they said, ‘Lightning Wooing’. It was not every day of the week, by any manner of means, that a duke’s daughter married; and war news, now that the campaign in Flanders had dwindled away into a stalemate in the mud and rain, was not likely to stimulate sales. There was something piquant about the union of a Winter of the bluest blood with a Curzon whose relationship to Lord Curzon of Kedleston was at best only ill-defined. All the same, the Press played up nobly. The daily Press had a great deal to say about the future bridegroom’s military achievements – although the exigencies of the censorship compelled them to say more about Volkslaagte than about Ypres – and the snobbish weekly papers laid stress upon the splendours of Bude Hall in Somersetshire, and the interest the Royal Family was taking in the wedding; there were dozens of photographs taken showing the happy pair walking in the Park or at some party in aid of something. A war-time bride had more popular appeal, undoubtedly, than a war-time widow, or than those other ladies underneath whose photograph the papers could only publish the already hackneyed caption, ‘Takes great interest in war work’ – Lady Emily and her mother, the Duchess, were always represented as the hardest workers in the Belgian Relief Clothing Association, and perhaps they were. And because a duke’s daughter at the time of her betrothal could not possibly be other than young and beautiful, all the Press loyally forbore to mention the fact that Emily was thirty-two years old, and no one dreamed of mentioning that her features were large and irregular, nor that her clothes always had a look of the second-hand about them.
Meanwhile a Field-Marshal and a General and a Major-General were in conference at the War Office.
‘The man’s on the verge of senile decay,’ said the General. ‘Over the verge, I should say. He’s no more fit to be trusted with a division than to darn the Alhambra chorus’s tights.’
‘Who are his brigadiers?’ asked the Field-Marshal.
‘Watson and Webb,’ said the Major-General apologetically. ‘Yes, sir, I know they’re no good, but where am I to get three hundred good brigadiers from?’
‘That’s your pigeon,’ said the Field-Marshal.
‘I’m sending Curzon down there to-morrow,’ said the Major-General. ‘The third brigade of the division has never had a general yet. I think he’ll stiffen them up all right.’
‘He’ll have his work cut out, from what I’ve seen of that lot,’ said the General.
‘Curzon?’ said the Field-Marshal. ‘That’s the Volkslaagte fellow, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the Major-General. ‘You read the letter a fortnight ago which G.H.Q. wrote about him.’
‘I remember,’ said the Field-Marshal. He raised his big heavy face to the window, and stared out contemplatively with squinting blue eyes, while he called up isolated recollections out of a packed memory. Volkslaagte had been fought before he went to South Africa, but he remembered reading the dispatches about it very plainly indeed – it was in this very room in the War Office. There was that race meeting in India, and the mob of horses all coming over the last hurdle together, and a Lancer officer doing a brilliant bit of riding in shouldering off a riderless horse which got in the way and might have caused a nasty accident. That was Curzon. That was not the first time he had been pointed out to him, though. Where was that? Oh yes, at the Aldershot review in the old days before India. That was the chap. A big-nosed fellow with the centre squadron.
‘How old is he now?’ asked the Field-Marshal.
‘Forty-one, sir,’ said the Major-General.
At forty-one the Field-Marshal had been S
irdar of the Egyptian Army. He would like to be forty-one again instead of sixty-five with a game leg – but that was nothing to do with the business under discussion. It was this Curzon fellow he was thinking about. He had never put in any time holding a regimental command, apparently, except for a few weeks in France. But that was nothing against him, except that it made it a bit harder to judge him by ordinary standards. The Field-Marshal had done no regimental duty in his life, and it hadn’t hurt him.
But there was something else he had heard, or read, about Curzon, somewhere, quite recently. He could not remember what it was, and was vaguely puzzled.
‘Is there anything against this Curzon fellow?’ he asked tentatively. It was a little pathetic to see him labouring under the burden of all the work he had been doing during these months of war.
‘No, sir,’ said the Major-General, and because Curzon was obviously allied by now to the Bude House set, and would be a valuable friend in the approaching Government reshuffle, he added, ‘He’s a man of very decided character.’
That turned the scale. What the Field-Marshal had seen, of course, had been the flaming headlines that very morning announcing Curzon’s betrothal. He had put the triviality aside, and yet the memory lingered in his subconscious mind. It was because of that that he had pricked up his ears at the first mention of Curzon’s name. Neither the General nor the Major-General saw fit to waste the Field-Marshal’s time by a mention of to-day’s newspaper gossip, and the vague memory remained to tease him into action. His mind was not fully made up when he began to speak, but he was positive in his decision by the time the sentence was completed.
‘You must unstick Coppinger-Brown,’ he said. ‘Shunt him off gracefully, though. There’s no need to be too hard on him. He’s done good work in his time. And Watson’ll have to go too. He’s no good. I never thought he was. Give Webb another chance. He can still turn out all right if he’s properly looked after. You’ll have to give the division to Curzon, though. He ought to make a good job of it.’