‘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 getting 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 Sirdar 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.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the Major-General. He was reluctant to continue, because it was not safe to pester his chief with a request for further instructions once a decision had been reached, but in this case the Service regulations left him no option. ‘He’s junior to Webb as brigadier, of course.’
‘Then you’ll have to promote him major-general. Get the orders out to-day.’
A wave of the Field-Marshal’s massive hand told the General and the Major-General that their presence was no longer required, and they left the Field-Marshal to plunge once more into the mass of work piled before him – into the business of constructing a modern army out of the few antiquated remains left over after the departure of the Expeditionary Force.
That was how Curzon obtained his appointment to the command of the Ninety-first Division and his promotion to the temporary rank of Major-General. There were not wanting unkind people who hinted that he owed his new rank to his prospective father-in-law, but the Duke had not raised a finger in the matter. There had been no scheming or bargaining, not even by the little scheming group which centred round the Duke and Lady Constance. He had been selected out of a hundred possible officers who could have filled the vacancy because, while their capacities were all equally unexplored, an adventitious circumstance had singled him out for particular notice. Without that the Major-General would never have had the opportunity of putting in the single sentence which ultimately turned the scale. And it must be specially noticed that the Major-General had not the slightest hint that he might receive favours in return; neither Curzon nor his new relations had been parties to anything underhand of that sort.