In the intimacy of his hotel bedroom he had felt thrilled and pleased with himself in his Lancer full dress, with his plastron and his schapska, his gold lace and glittering boots and sword, and he had even found a sneaking pleasure in the stir among the people on the pavement as he walked out to get into the waiting cab, but his knees knocked and his throat dried up in Buckingham Palace.
On the same leave Curzon had in duty-bound to go and visit Aunt Kate, who lived in Brixton. The late Mr Curzon, Captain Herbert Curzon’s father, had married a trifle beneath him, and his wife’s sister had married a trifle beneath her, and the Mr Cole whom she had married had not met with much success in life, and after marriage Mr Curzon had met with much, so that the gap between Curzon and his only surviving relatives – between the Captain in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own and the hard-up city clerk with his swarm of shrieking children – was wide and far too deep to plumb. Curzon drove to Brixton in a cab, and the appearance of the cab caused as much excitement in that street as did his full-dress uniform in the West End. Aunt Kate opened the door to him – a paint-blistered door at the end of a tile path three yards long, leading from a gate in the iron railings past a few depressed laurels in the tiny ‘front garden’. Aunt Kate was momentarily disconcerted at the sight of the well-dressed gentleman who had rat-tat-tatted on her door, but she recovered herself.
‘Why, it’s Bertie,’ she said. ‘Come in, dear. Uncle Stanley ought to be home soon. Come in here and sit down. Maud! Dick! Gertie! Here’s your cousin Bertie home from South Africa!’
The shabby children came clustering into the shabby parlour; at first they were shy and constrained, and when the constraint wore off they grew riotous, making conversation difficult and hindering Aunt Kate in her effort to extract from her nephew details of his visit to Buckingham Palace.
‘What’s it like in there?’ she asked. ‘Is it all gold? I suppose there’s cut-glass chandeliers?’
Curzon had not the least idea. And –
‘Did the king really speak to you? What was he wearing?’
‘Field-Marshal’s uniform,’ said Curzon briefly.
‘Of course, you’ve been presented to him before, when you went into the Army,’ said Aunt Kate enviously. ‘That was in the dear queen’s time.’
‘Yes,’ said Curzon.
‘It must be lovely to know all these people,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Are there any lords in your regiment now?’
‘Yes,’ said Curzon. ‘One or two.’
It was irritating, because he himself found secret pleasure in serving in the same regiments as lords, and in addressing them without their titles, but the pleasure was all spoilt now at finding that Aunt Kate was of the same mind.
More irritating still was the arrival of Stanley Cole, Aunt Kate’s husband, whom Curzon felt he could not possibly address now as ‘Uncle Stanley’, although he had done so as a boy. Mr Cole was an uncompromising Radical, and no respecter of persons, as he was ready to inform anyone.
‘I didn’t ’old with your doings in South Africa,’ he announced, almost before he was seated. ‘I didn’t ’old with them at all, and I said so all along. We didn’t ought to ’ave fought with the Boers in the first place. And burning farms, and those concentration camps. Sheer wickedness, that was. You shouldn’t have done it, you know, Bertie.’
Curzon, with an effort, maintained an appearance of mild good manners, and pointed out that all he had done was to obey orders.
‘Orders! Yes! It’s all a system. That’s what it is.’
Mr Cole seemed to think that in this case the word ‘system’ was deeply condemnatory – to Curzon, of course, the word was, if anything, of the opposite implication. He was roused far enough to suggest to his uncle that if he had undergone the discomforts of two years of guerrilla warfare he might not be so particular as to the methods employed to suppress it.
‘I wouldn’t have gone,’ said Mr Cole. ‘Not if they had tried to make me. Lord Roberts, now. ’E’s trying to introduce conscription. Ought to ’ave more sense. And now there’s all this talk about a big Navy. Big fiddlestick!’
There was clearly no ground at all which was common to Mr Cole and his nephew by marriage.
‘Look at the rise in the income tax!’ said Mr Cole. ‘Two shillings in the pound! Peace, retrenchment, and reform. That’s what we want. And a sane Government, and no protection.’
Curzon might have replied that Mr Cole had nothing to complain about in the matter of income tax, seeing that his income was clearly below the taxable limit, but his good manners would not permit him to say so while he was conscious of his own seven hundred a year from his private means. Instead, he rose to go, apologizing for the briefness of his visit and pleading further urgent matters demanding his attention. He declined the tea which Aunt Kate belatedly remembered to offer him; he said truthfully enough, that he never had tea, and the children goggled up in surprise at a man who could so lightly decline tea, and Aunt Kate said, ‘You’ll be going to have late dinner, I suppose.’
She accompanied him to the door.
‘Good-bye, then, Bertie,’ she said. ‘It was nice of you to come. We’ll be seeing you again soon, I suppose?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Curzon, and he knew it was a lie as he said it, that he would never be able to bring himself again to penetrate into Brixton. He thought the lie had succeeded, if he thought about it at all, but Aunt Kate dabbed furtively at her eyes before she went back into the parlour to talk over the visitor with her family. She knew perfectly well that she would never see ‘Lily’s boy’ again.
Meanwhile Curzon, out in the cabless suburban street, had to make his way on foot to the main road to some means of conveyance to take him back to his hotel. Before he took a cab he was constrained to go into a saloon bar and order himself a large whisky-and-soda, and while he drank it he had to mop his forehead and run his fingers round underneath his collar as recollections of his visit surged up within him. He thanked God fervently that he was an orphan, that he was an only child, and that his father was an only child, and that his mother had had only one sister. He thanked God that his father’s speculations in Mincing Lane had been early successful, so that preparatory school and Haileybury and Sandhurst had come naturally to his son.
In a moment of shuddering self-revelation he realized that in other circumstances it might have been just possible that he should have breathed naturally in the air of Brixton. Worse still he felt for a nauseating moment that in that environment he too might have been uncertain with his aitches and spoken about late dinner in a respectful tone of voice. It was bad enough to remember that as a child he had lived in Bayswater – although he could only just remember it, as they had early moved to Lancaster Gate. He had ridden in the Park then, and his father had already decided that he should go into the Army and, if possible, into the cavalry among the real swells.
He could remember his father using that very expression, and he could remember his father’s innocent pride in him at Sandhurst and when he had received his commission in the Duke of Suffolk’s Own. Curzon struggled for a moment – so black was his mood – with the realization that the Twenty-second Lancers was not really a crack regiment. He could condescend to infantrymen and native Indian army – poor devils – of course, but he knew perfectly well when he came to admit it to himself, as on this black occasion, that the Households and Horse Gunners and people like the Second Dragoons could condescend to him in their turn.
His
