Outwardly the London to which Curzon returned was not very different from the London he had always known. The streets were darker and there were more uniforms to be seen, but that was all. After the first paralysing blow of the declaration of war the city had made haste to recover its balance to the cry of ‘Business as Usual.’ The theatres were as gay as ever – gayer, if anything; the restaurants more crowded. Most of the people in the streets were so convinced of England’s approaching victory in the war that now that the front was stabilized the war had ceased to be a matter of more interest to them than their own personal concerns.
But here and there were cases of interest. The Club, for instance. When Curzon went in there he found the place crowded with men he did not recognize. In addition to many men in the khaki which had scarcely ever been seen in the Club in the old days, all the retired officers who hardly set foot in the Club from year’s end to year’s end had now crowded up to London to besiege the War Office for employment, and were spending their time of waiting listening all agog for rumours. Curzon had not realized the efficiency of the censorship until he found men crowding round him all intent on acquiring first-hand information. Birtles started it – Birtles had been a major in the regiment when Curzon was only a subaltern.
‘’Morning, Curzon,’ said Birtles when they encountered each other on the stairs, and would have passed him by if he had not suddenly remembered that Curzon must have come back from France on leave from the regiment; he halted abruptly. ‘On leave, eh?’
‘Yes,’ said Curzon.
‘What – er,’ said Birtles, checking himself in the midst of a question as he suddenly had a spasm of doubt lest Curzon had been ‘sent home’. But he reassured himself quickly on that point, because no man who had been sent home would show his face in the Club – at least, not for years. So he was able to continue. ‘What’s the regiment doing?’
Curzon said what he could about the regiment’s achievements.
‘Dismounted action, eh?’ said Birtles. ‘That’s bad. Very bad. And what about you? Short leave, or something?’
Curzon was in civilian clothes, so that Birtles had nothing to go on. Yet he was obviously painfully anxious to ask questions. His old eyes were watering with anxiety. Curzon said he was home to take up a fresh command.
‘Yeomanry or something?’
‘No, an infantry brigade,’ said Curzon.
‘A brigade? A brigade!’ gasped Birtles, who, naturally, having once known Curzon as a subaltern, could not think of him as anything else. ‘Here, come and have a drink. I mean – have you time for a drink?’
Curzon was in need of a drink after his busy morning. He had called at the War Office and had had a very satisfactory interview, because a note about him from G.H.Q. in France had already arrived; and he had been told that his promotion to the temporary rank of brigadier-general would appear in the next Gazette. Not merely that, either. There would undoubtedly be a brigade for him at the end of his fortnight’s leave. More still; besides his inevitable mention in dispatches there would be a decoration for him – most likely a commandership of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Three eminent soldiers had cross-examined him in turn about the state of affairs in Flanders – there was a general anxiety to try and supplement the information doled out by telegram from G.H.Q. – and he had answered questions as well as he knew how.
And from the War Office he had gone to his military tailor’s. They did not seem to remember him at first, which had annoyed him, and they had expressed doubt about their ability in face of a torrent of orders, to supply his demands in the next week. Their attitude had changed a little when he told them who he was, and still more when he gave his order for a general’s uniform with the red tabs and crossed sword and baton of his rank. There had been more excitement than he had expected in giving that order – Curzon was still conscious of a little thrill when he remembered it, and he really badly needed his drink.
Yet by the time the drink had come to him he had precious little opportunity of drinking it, because Birtles hastened to spread the news that he was entertaining a brigadier-general home from the Front, and from every corner of the Club men came crowding to hear his news and to ask him questions, or merely to look at the man newly returned from a European war. They were grey-headed old men, most of them, and they eyed him with envy. With anxiety, too; they had been gathering their information from the all-too-meagre communiqués and from the all-too-extensive casualty lists. They feared to know the worst at the same time as they asked, and they raised their voices in quavering questions about this unit and that, and to every question Curzon could only give a painful answer. There was not a unit in the Expeditionary Force which had not poured out its best blood at Mons or at Le Cateau or at Ypres.
For a long time Curzon dealt out death and despair among those old men; it was fortunate that he did not feel the awkwardness which a more sensitive man might have felt. After all, casualties were a perfectly natural subject for a military man to discuss. It was need for his lunch which caused him in the end to break off the conversation, and even at lunch he was not free from interruption. Someone came up and spoke to him as he began on his soup – a tall, heavily-built bald old man in the uniform of a captain of a very notable regiment of infantry. He displayed all the embarrassment of an English gentleman addressing a stranger with an unconventional request.
‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you,’ he began. Curzon tried to be polite, although it was a strain when he had hardly begun his lunch.
‘The fact is’ – went on the captain – ‘of course, I must apologize for being unconventional – I was wondering if you had made any arrangements for dinner to-night?’
Curzon stared at him. But his arrangements were of the vague sort an officer home on leave without a relation in the world might be expected to have.
‘Well –’ began Curzon. It was the fact that this stranger belonged to that very crack regiment which caused him to temporize.
‘You see,’ went on the captain hastily. ‘I was hoping – I know all this sounds most impertinent – I was hoping that I could induce you to dine at my brother’s to-night.’
He had fumbled out his card case by now, and proffered a card with embarrassed fingers. Curzon read upon it the simple words: ‘Lord George Winter-Willoughby’. He only half heard what Lord George, voluble at last, went on to say, while he co-ordinated in his mind what the name meant to him. The Winter-Willoughbys were the Bude family, whose head was the Duke of Bude with a score of other titles, who had held office in the last Conservative Government. The courtesy title of Lord implied that the present speaker was a son of a duke – more, it meant that he was brother of the present Duke – in fact, it meant that the invitation now being given was to dine with the Duke of Bude. Confirmation trickled through into Curzon’s consciousness from the bits of Lord George’s speech which Curzon heard – ‘Bude House’ – ‘Eight o’clock’ – ‘Quite informal – war-time, you know’ – ‘Telephone’ – ‘The Duke and Duchess will be delighted if you can come.’
The self-control which had enabled Curzon for fifteen years to conceal the part which chance had played in the battle of Volkslaagte made it possible for him to accept an invitation to dine at one of the greatest London houses as though he were thoroughly accustomed to such invitations and Lord George displayed immense relief at not being snubbed, apologized once more for the informality of his behaviour, pleaded the present national crisis as his excuse, and withdrew gracefully.
It was fortunate that Curzon was not a man given to analysis of sociological conditions; if he had been he would certainly have wasted the rest of that day in thinking about how extensive must be the present upheaval if it resulted in hasty invitations to Bude House addressed to men of no family at all – he was fully aware that six months ago there would have been no perceptible difference between such an invitation and a Royal Command. As it was, he merely savoured pleasantly of his success and went out and bought a new set of buttons for his white waistcoat.
In December 1914 ‘war-time informality’ at Bude House implied something quite different from what those words meant in, say, Bloomsbury in 1918. There was a footman as well as a butler to open the door to Curzon, but they were both over military age and the footman’s livery was inconspicuous. For the first time in his life Curzon described himself as ‘General Curzon’ for the butler to announce him.
‘It’s very good of you to come, General,’ said a tall woman with dyed hair, offering her hand as he approached her across the deep carpet of the not-too-large drawing-room.
‘It’s very good of you to ask me,’ Curzon managed to say. The bulky figure of Lord George showed itself at the Duchess’s side, and beside it a bulkier counterpart of itself, as if the law of primogeniture ensured that the holder of the title should be a size larger than the young son. There were introductions effected. The Duke was as bald as his brother – only a wisp of grey hair remaining round his ears. Lady Constance Winter-Willoughby was apparently Lord George’s wife, and was as lovely and as dignified as was to be expected of a daughter of an earldom six generations older than the Dukedom of Bude.
Lady Emily Winter-Willoughby was the Duke’s daughter; she was nearly as tall as her father, but she was not conspicuous for beauty of feature or of dress. For a fleeting moment Curzon, as his eyes wandered over her face, was conscious of a likeness between her features and those of Bingo, the best polo pony he ever had, but the thought vanished as quickly as it came when he met her kindly grey eyes. Lady Emily, especially now that she had left thirty behind, had always been a woman who preferred the country to London, and felt more at home with horses and dogs and flowers than with the politicians whom she was likely to encounter at Bude House. A few more years might see her an embittered spinster; but at the moment she only felt slightly the tediousness of this life – just enough to sense the slight awkwardness Curzon was careful not to display. When their eyes met they were both suddenly conscious of a fellow feeling, and they smiled at each other almost as if they were members of some secret society.
It was with an odd reluctance that Curzon left the warm glow of Lady Emily’s proximity to meet the other two guests, a Sir Henry Somebody (Curzon did not catch the name) and his wife. They were a sharp-featured pair, both of them. Curzon formed the impression that Sir Henry must be some sort of lawyer, and that his wife had wits just as keen. There was a depressing moment of impersonal conversation with them before dinner was announced.
The advent of the war had accelerated the already noticeable decline from the great days of the Edwardians; dinners were very different now from the huge meals and elaborate service of ten years before; twelve courses had diminished to six; there was some attempt to please by simplicity instead of to impress by elaboration. The dining-room was lit by candles so that it was hard to see the painted arched ceiling; there was not a great deal of silver displayed upon the circular table. But the food was perfection, and the wine marvellous – Bude House had not seen fit to follow the example of Buckingham Palace and eschew all alcoholic liquor for the duration of the war.
As the Vouvray was being served Lady Constance on Curzon’s right recounted how, a short time before, at another dinner-party, where the hostess had tried to do like Queen Mary and confine her guests to lemonade and barley water, the guests had one and all produced pocket flasks to make up for the absence of liquor. With eight people at a circular table general conversation was easy, and the Duchess on Curzon’s left announced incisively that if she had been the hostess in question she would never receive one of those guests again, but she went on to agree only the dear Queen could expect people to dine without drinking.
‘It’s bad enough having to do without German wines,’ she said. ‘We had some Hock that the Duke was very proud of, but of course we can’t drink it now, can we?’
Curzon agreed with her, and not out of deference, either. He was quite as convinced as she was that there was no virtue left in Hock or in Wagner or in Goethe or in Dürer. From the innate badness of German art to the recent deeds of the German Government was but a step in the conversation – a step easily taken as at least seven of the eight people present were anxious to take it. Before very long Curzon found himself talking about his recent experiences, and he was listened to with rapt attention. It was generally a question either from Sir Henry (on the other side of the Duchess) or from Sir Henry’s wife (on the other side of the Duke) which moved him steadily on from one point to the next – at one moment Curzon noted to himself that Sir Henry simply must be a lawyer of some sort, as he had already surmised, because the tone of his questions had a ring of the law courts about it.
The conversation had a different trend from that at the Club in the morning. There was not so much anxiety displayed as to the fates of regiments and battalions. The party seemed to be far more interested in the general conduct of the war – Sir Henry, in particular, seemed to know a good deal more already about Mons and Le Cateau than Curzon did. Curzon almost began to form the idea that they would have relished criticism of the Higher Command, but he put the notion away before it crystallized. That was inconceivable; moreover, there was no chance of his disparaging his superiors to anyone – to say nothing of the fact that he had only the haziest ideas about the conduct of a great deal of the war. The British Army had been pitted against superior numbers over and over again, and had emerged each time from the ordeal with honour. Of crisis at headquarters he knew no more than any subaltern, and he denied their existence with all his soldier’s pride. Besides, no soldier who had served under Kitchener could lightly give away anything approaching a military secret.
If the company, as it appeared reasonable to suppose, had been expecting any juicy bits of scandal, they were doomed to disappointment. In fact, the disappointment on the faces of the Duchess, Lady Constance, and Sir Henry’s wife was almost noticeable even to Curzon, who got as far as feeling that his conversation was not as brilliant as it should have been – a feeling which did not surprise him in the least. It only made him take more notice of Lady Emily, who showed no disappointment at all.
When the conversation moved from the general to the particular, Curzon was still rather at sea. All his life he had been a regimental officer; these people were far more familiar with individuals on the General Staff than he was – to him they were only surnames, while at this table they were spoken of as ‘Bertie’ and ‘Harry’ and ‘Arthur’. There was only one moment of tense reality, and that was when young Carruthers was mentioned. For a tiny interval Curzon forgot where he was; he forgot the polished table, and the glittering silver, and the exquisite food within him, and the butler brooding over his shoulder like a benevolent deity. It seemed as if he was back at brigade headquarters again, with the tortured screams of Carruthers sounding in his ears. A flood of memories followed – of Major Browning combating the deadly fear which was shaking him like a leaf, of the four headless troopers lying in a huddled heap in one bay of the trench, of the mud and the stench and the sleeplessness.
It was only for a moment. The extraordinary feeling that these men and women here should be forced somehow to realize that these things were part of the same framework as Arthur’s appointment to the Adjutant-General’s department passed away, killed by its own absurdity, before the others had finished their kind words about Carruthers’ fate and had passed on to the discussion of someone still alive. After all, it would be as bad taste to force these inevitable details of war upon the notice of these women and civilians as it would be to do the same with the details of digestive processes or any other natural occurrence.
Then the women rose to leave the table and gave Curzon a further opportunity to come back to normal again, as the men closed up round the Duke. The war tended to disappear from the conversation from that moment, while later in the drawing-room where they rejoined the ladies, Lady Constance played the piano very brilliantly indeed so that conversation was not necessary. The music was a little over Curzon’s head, but he had a very good dinner inside him and some excellent port, and he was quite content to sit beside Lady Emily and listen vaguely. It was with a shock that he found himself nodding in his chair – it was typical of Curzon not to realize what enormous demands those eleven days of furious action and eleven nights of little sleep at Ypres had made upon his strength.
So that it was with relief that he saw Lord George and Lady Constance rise to take their leave, making it possible for him to go immediately afterwards. And Sir Henry’s wife said to him as he said good-bye to her: ‘Perhaps you’ll come and dine with us if you can spare another evening of your leave?’ so that he felt he had not been quite a failure in society.