Soul

The men laughed.

‘Campbell, you do me a disservice,’ the painter complained in a booming baritone that almost had the others looking around for a more corpulent figure. ‘Trust me, my friends, I can make any wife ravishing under my brush.’

‘And not just under his brush,’ Campbell added, invoking more laughter and a coughing fit from Henry Smith. ‘I swear he’s well worth the investment,’ Campbell finished, grinning broadly, ‘but we didn’t come over to sell you Valery’s services.’

He pulled over a vacant chair and sat himself down. The Colonel, amused by his audacity, put it down to youth. On closer examination, Hamish Campbell looked far younger than he remembered.

‘I have read several of your articles since that dinner, sir,’ Campbell declared loudly, ‘and I must say I am impressed.’

The Colonel, not believing the student actually followed his work, stayed silent.

Undeterred, Campbell went on. ‘The article in The Gentleman magazine on the Amazon tribes’ rite of initiation into manhood was wickedly intriguing, and I particularly enjoyed your treatise in The Spectator on the moral responsibility of the colonial powers.’

The Colonel glanced at Henry, who smiled wryly.

‘You are ambitious indeed, sir. At your age I was soldiering and chasing skirt,’ Huntington condescended, but the young scholar was not to be deterred.

In truth, he found the youth’s praise a little intoxicating.

Sensing some influence, Campbell leaned forward, his eyes glinting. ‘I have aspirations myself, sir. It would be a great honour if you cared to show me your collection of artefacts. I am going up to Oxford next year and I would like to include reference to them in my studies.’

There is no greater flattery than the informed admiration of one’s achievements, and certainly the Colonel was aware of this as he noted the charms of the young man before him: the faint hue that coloured his cheeks, and the depth of intelligence in his eyes. Eyes that were curiously almond in shape and sat beneath a dark brow that only served to heighten the illusion of light dancing around the youth’s uncovered head. If he were to take on an acolyte, he could have not asked for a fairer one, the Colonel observed.

Before replying, he ordered another bottle of the fine port they were drinking. Hamish Campbell settled into the lounge chair, assuming that this was a signal that he and his associate had permission to linger at the table. But the Colonel had other ideas; the old sensation of sexual play had begun to rap at his veins and he did not care for the implications. Charles, recognising the conflict behind the slight smile that now played across his oldest friend’s lips, broke the uncomfortable pause.

‘We were just discussing the idea of marrying for love. Such a modern concept.’

Campbell tipped back his head and laughed, displaying a manly jaw—an agreeable counterbalance to the Byronic curls he affected. ‘I utterly agree. Marriage should be a coldblooded economic exchange. For example, Valery here, who owns a small estate in Buckinghamshire, has been trying to hook a rich Jewess whose grandfather was a furrier, but she’s decided not to have him! Why, the world is topsy-turvy and refuses to be righted. As for myself, I am young enough to relish the guidance of a mature, and preferably wealthy, woman.’

‘And Lady Morgan is the doyenne of such guidance. Trust me, you are in the hands of an expert,’ the Colonel parried.

Campbell blushed, momentarily losing his composure for the first time in the conversation, which lead the Colonel to wonder whether he was in fact the aristocrat’s lover.

‘So you will allow me to view your collection, sir?’ Campbell returned to his original quest, now more confident of his host’s approval.

‘The artefacts are of a suggestive and primitive nature. A man must have a full comprehension of the culture from whence they spring, otherwise the viewing of them is a wasted exercise.’

‘As I mentioned before, I have a burgeoning interest and am well-informed. But to learn from a man who has been there himself, who has surrendered all civilisation in order to see through the eyes of another…’

Campbell’s flattery threatened to become excessive. Glancing at his companions’ wry expressions, the Colonel decided to save the boy from potential ridicule.

‘Give me your card and I may send for you.’ And with that, Hamish Campbell was forced to be content.

The moonlight glittered in the puddles, broken only by the sweep of the coach wheels. The night tribe of the homeless and itinerant workers had emerged, loitering around railway stations and the gin shops with their smoky crowded windows, hoping to beg a penny from the emerging carousers. The carriage swung into Regent Street and the Colonel watched a chestnut seller pushing his barrel wearily home. Nearby, a family of gypsies huddled around a fire; their distant expressions, those of a lost people, illuminated by the dancing flames.

If Colonel Huntington felt any empathy for the dispossessed it was this; that no one should suffer the chill of an English winter’s night. Like many members of his class, he saw no inherent nobility in the impoverished. He had been educated to believe such disparity was inherent. He did not regard the poor as his equals in intellect or humanity, witnessing, as he had often described, the great wash of human degradation pouring daily into London: the country fieldworkers; the swathes of Eastern European Jews that arrived, swarthy and exotic, at the docks; the thousands trying their luck at the new industries with only a lucky few pushing their way up through the rigid social strata.

It would have never occurred to the anthropologist to apply his studies to his own race and the inequalities it perpetuated. Instead, he chose to believe that those who ruled were born to rule. Yet, paradoxically, the Colonel was tolerant of the mercantile class whose ingenuity had begun to erode centuries of order, even as he was aware that individuals like himself—the landed gentry whose own work ethic had been destroyed—were slowly but inevitably heading towards extinction. This was the decay of the natural order, of this he was certain.

As a representative of this brave new order, young Hamish Campbell held a fascination for Colonel Huntington. The son of an industrialist, who surely had not foreseen his son would aspire to the loft

y ambitions of science, Hamish Campbell was energy, he was the future. Unlike himself, the Colonel observed, with his own decadent breeding.

Perhaps this was the real natural order, he pondered, an evolution that favoured adaptation, that favoured the creature who dared, fought and schemed successfully. He had observed this phenomenon in the Crimea, in the Amazon and in the Guildhall, and nothing he had seen in his travels and in the lives around him had encouraged him to question his growing conviction.

The coach passed an infamous molly house, one the Colonel had visited before his marriage. Through the mist he made out two young men loitering outside. One glanced over at the passing brougham, seeming to sense its occupant’s interest across the square.

How did he know? Do I give out some invisible signal? the Colonel wondered as he moved away from the carriage window, frightened the youth might be some past furtive conquest. Perhaps I am denying my own sensibility, he thought bleakly. The uniqueness of individuals and their desires was an issue that had occupied him much of late. It wasn’t just his studies of other cultures that had led him to such musings, but also the manner in which many of his peers lived and loved, often exploiting others. And what was morality other than the order of the day when set against a broader canvas? Why, he had even read of tribes that defined sexuality in terms of three groupings.