The Far Pavilions (119 page)

Ash added that in his opinion, it was perhaps not so strange that a city reputedly founded by the world's first murderer should have a reputation for treachery and violence; or that its rulers should have been faithful to the tradition of Cain, and indulged in murder and fratricide. The past history of the Amirs being one long tale of bloodshed: fathers killing their sons, sons plotting against their fathers and each other, and uncles disposing of their nephews. ‘It's a grisly tale, and if it's true that ghosts are the unquiet spirits of people who died terrible deaths – and that there are such things as ghosts – then Kabul must be full of them. It's a haunted place, and I hope I never see it again.’

‘Well, you will if there's war,’ observed Wally, ‘because the Guides will be in it so they will.’

‘True –
if
there is a war. But speaking for myself…’ the sentence ended in a yawn, and Ash settled himself back in a crotch among the tree roots and closed his eyes against the glaring day, and presently, feeling relaxed and peaceful because he and Wally were together again, he fell asleep.

Wally sat watching him for a long time, seeing the changes that he had missed to begin with, and other things that he had never bothered to notice before: the vulnerability of that thin, reckless face, the sensitive mouth that accorded so ill with the firm obstinate chin, and the purposeful line of the black eyebrows that were at odds with a brow and temples that would have better befitted a poet or a dreamer than a soldier. It was a face at war with itself, beautifully modelled and yet somehow lacking cohesion. And it seemed to Wally that, in spite of the deep unyouthful lines that scored it and the faint scar of that old wound, the sleeper, in some ways, had not really grown up. He still saw things as wrong or right, good or bad, and fair or unfair – as children did, before they learned better. He still thought that he could do something to alter them…

All at once Wally felt deeply sorry for his friend, who thought that because a thing was ‘unfair’ it was wrong and ought to be changed, and who, being unable to look at any problem either from a strictly European or a wholly Asiatic standpoint, was deprived of the comforting armour of national prejudice and left with no defence against the regional bigotries of East and West.

Ash, like his father Hilary, was a civilized and liberal-minded man with an interested and inquiring mind. But unlike Hilary, he had never grasped that the average mind is neither liberal or inquiring, but is in the main intolerant of any attitudes except its own firmly entrenched ones. He had his own gods, but they were neither Christian nor pagan. And he was not and never had been the dashing, romantic and wholly admirable hero of Wally's early imaginings, but was as fallible as the next man – and because of his unorthodox beginnings, possibly more prone to error than most. But he was still Ash, and no one, not even Wigram, could ever take his place in Wally's affections. A hoopoe flew down and began to probe for insects in the hard-packed earth, and Wally watched it idly for a moment or two before following Ash's example and drifting off into sleep.

By the time they awoke the sun was well down and the countryside around them full of shadows. Ash fetched water from the stream, and with this and the food that Gul Baz had left them they made a frugal meal, deciding as they ate that Wally should spend the night at Attock dâk-bungalow after visiting Fatima Begum's house to meet Anjuli, and return to Mardan in the morning.

They had arrived at the house in the dusty amethyst twilight, where the gatekeeper received them incuriously and in answer to Ash's question said no, Koda Dad Khan had not come – oubtless his son, the Risaldar-Sahib, had been able to prevent his father from setting out. He took charge of the horses while Ash sent a message to the Begum, asking her permission to allow his friend, Hamilton-Sahib, to enter her house and meet his wife.

Had Anjuli been a Muslim the suggestion might well have drawn a shocked refusal from the Begum, who by now regarded herself as standing
in loco parentis
to the girl. But as Anjuli was neither a Muslim nor a maiden, and her so-called husband not only a Christian but a foreigner, the proper rules could not be expected to apply, and if Pelham-Sahib was prepared to let his men friends hob-nob with his bride, it was no concern of the Begum's. She therefore sent a servant to conduct the two men to Anjuli's room and to tell Ash that if they desired to eat together, the evening meal would be served in a few minutes' time.

The lamps had not yet been lit, but the
kus-kus
tatties had been rolled up and the high, white-washed room was palely luminous with the last of the daylight and the first glimmer of a full moon that was rising above the low, dun-coloured hills beyond Attock.

Anjuli had been standing by an open window, looking down onto the garden where birds were flocking home to roost among the fruit trees while bats flitted out from a score of dark hidden crannies to greet the night. She had not heard the footsteps on the stairs, for the sound had been lost in the chatter of quarrelling birds, and only when the door opened did she turn.

Seeing Ash, but not the man who stood in the shadows behind him, she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. And that was how Wally had first seen her. A tall, slender girl running towards him with outstretched arms, and with such a blaze of love in her face that for a moment it seemed to him that a light shone on it. She had taken his breath away – and his heart with it.

Afterwards, sitting alone in the moonlight on the verandah of the dâk-bungalow, he found that he had no clear recollection of what she looked like. Only that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen – a princess out of a fairy-tale, fashioned from ivory and gold and jet. But then he had never before seen a well-born Indian woman, and knew nothing of the wealth of grace and loveliness that is hidden away behind the purdah screens and jealously guarded from the gaze of all strangers.

Few foreigners were privileged to see or know these women; and those few tended to be the wives of senior British officials, whose views on the charms of ‘native women’ were apt to be lukewarm, or at best, tinged with condescension. So that when Ash had tried to describe his wife, Wally had made due allowance for a man in love and supposed, indulgently, that the bride might be tolerably good looking – as were one or two of the more expensive courtesans of Ash's acquaintance, whom Wally had met in those early, carefree days in Rawalpindi: brown-skinned women who painted their eyes with
kohl,
chewed
pan
and stained the palms of their slender hands with henna; and whose supple, small-boned bodies smelled of musk and sandalwood and exuded an almost visible aura of sexuality.

Nothing that he had so far seen of India had prepared him for the sight of Anjuli. He had expected a little, dark-complexioned woman, not a long-limbed goddess – Venus Aphrodite – whose skin was paler than ripe wheat, and whose beautiful black-lashed eyes were the colour of peat-water on the moors of Kerry.

Strangely, she did not suggest the East to him, but rather the North, and gazing at her, he had been reminded of snow and pine trees and the cool fresh wind that blows in the high mountains… and of a line in a new book of poems recently sent to him by a doting Aunt – ‘
And dark and true and tender is the North
…’ Dark and true and tender; – yes, that was Anjuli. All the heroines of fiction had come true in her – she was Eve, she was Juliet, she was Helen…! “
She walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies. And all that's best of dark and light meet in her aspect and her eyes,
” ’ declaimed Wally, drunk with unreasoning happiness.

He no longer blamed Ash for marrying in haste, for he could imagine himself doing exactly the same thing if he had had the luck to be in Ash's place. There could not be many women in the world like Anjuli, and having found one it would have been madness to lose her for the sake of a career. And yet… Wally sighed, and some of the euphoria of the last few hours left him. No, he would probably not have done it – not if he had been given enough time to realize what it might mean in terms of the future, because the Guides had come to count so much to him. Besides, he had cherished dreams of military glory for as long as he could remember; it was something he had grown up with and by now it was too much a part of him to be rooted out and replaced by love for a woman – even such a one as he had seen that night and lost his heart to.

All at once he was filled with gratitude towards Ash and Anjuli: and to God, Who had been good enough to allow him to meet the one woman in the world, and yet put her beyond his reach; so that by losing his heart to her he was saved for ever (or at least, for a long time to come) from falling in love with some lesser star and getting married and domesticated and losing his taste for adventure and with it, inevitably, some part of his enthusiasm for his profession and devotion to the men of his own Regiment.

Now that Ash was about to rejoin the Guides, life would be perfect, and the only cloud in Wally's sky was the fact that there were still three weeks to run before Ash returned to duty. The thought of having to wait another twenty-one days after waiting so long was suddenly unendurable – yet it would have to be endured; and at least there was work and Wigram (who was now Adjutant and a Captain) to help him through it and make the time pass quickly. He had asked Ash if he could tell Wigram about Anjuli, and been pleased though not surprised when Ash had agreed. Everyone liked Wigram, and there was no denying that it would be a relief to be able to tell him about Ash's adventures and his romantic, secret marriage, particularly now that he himself had met the bride and so felt qualified to speak in the couple's defence and persuade Wigram to take a lenient view of the whole affair…

Wally rose from the verandah chair, and having searched for something to throw at a pi-dog that sat yelping monotonously by the compound gate, discharged a well-aimed flower-pot and went in to bed humming ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’. Which, in the circumstances, was a healthy sign, for it showed that he was returning to normal after the stresses and strains of that emotional day.

The sun was still well below the horizon when Wally crossed the Indus and took the Peshawar road on the following morning, leaving his bearer Pir Baksh to follow in a tonga with the luggage, and an hour later he breakfasted at the Nowshera dâk-bungalow while his horse rested, before crossing the Kabul River and pressing on towards Risalpur. Mardan was an oasis of shade in a parched land. The fort and the parade-ground, the lines and the familiar back-drop of the Yusafzai hills quivered and swayed in the dancing heat, and far out on the plain towards Jamalgarhi an occasional dust-devil arose to whirl like a spinning-top and die again. But in the cantonment not a leaf stirred, and the dust of the hot weather lay like hoar frost on every stick and stone and blade of grass, reducing greens and browns to a single tint – the colour that Sir Henry Lawrence had chosen for the uniforms of his newly raised Corps of Guides in the days before the Great Mutiny, and that had come to be known as
khaki
.

Wally had gone straight to Wigram's quarters, but Wigram was not there; he had been attending some minor conference in Peshawar, and was not expected back until after sundown. He had, however, returned in time to dine in mess, and later walked back with Wally to the latter's rooms, where he had remained until long after midnight, listening to the saga of Ash and Anjuli-Bai.

The tale had obviously interested him deeply, though the marriage ceremony on board the
Morala
had drawn an angry exclamation and a black frown, and after that he had listened to the rest tight-lipped and with a furrowed brow. But he had made no comments, and at the end of it remarked thoughtfully that he remembered the Commandant saying, at the time when the question of a Court Martial was being discussed following the return of the carbines, that Ashton Pelham-Martyn was not only an insubordinate young hot-head, but an adult enfant-terrible whose penchant for acting on the spur of the moment made him capable of doing any damned silly thing without pausing to think what it could lead to in the long run; yet it had to be remembered that these were the very defects that often proved invaluable in time of war, particularly when accompanied, as in Ashton's case, with considerable courage.

‘I think he was right,’ said Wigram slowly. ‘And if there should be a war, which I pray God there will not be, we may need those defects – and the courage that goes with them.’

He lay back in his chair and was silent for a long time, chewing on the butt of a cheroot that had gone out long ago, and staring abstractedly at the ceiling; and when he spoke again it was to ask a question: ‘Do I understand that Ashton intends to spend the remainder of his leave at Attock?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Wally. ‘He and his wife have been invited to stay with Risaldar Zarin Khan's aunt – she owns that big house in a walled garden that stands back from the 'Pindi road on the far side of the town.’

‘
Hmm.
I should like to go over one day and meet the bride. It would –’ his gaze fell on the clock and he came hurriedly to his feet: ‘Good gracious, is that the right time? I'd no idea it was so late. High time I got my beauty sleep. Good-night, Wally.’

He left to walk back to his own quarters, but not, as it happened, to sleep. Instead, having exchanged his mess dress for the loose cotton trousers that were the customary night-wear at that time of year, he came out onto the verandah, and subsiding into a long-sleeve chair, gave himself up to thought.

50

Captain Battye gazed out unseeingly at the hot moonlight and the black shadows, and thought of his youngest brother, Fred… of Fred and Wally and Ashton Pelham-Martyn, Hammond and Hughes and Campbell, Colonel Jenkins the Commandant, Risaldars Prem Singh and Mahmud Khan, Wordi-Major Duni Chand and Sowar Dowlat Ram and a hundred others… officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Guides; their faces passing before him as though on review. If there should be another Afghan war, how many of them would be alive by the time it was over?

He knew that even now, after all these years, the bleached bones of General Elphinstone's demoralized army still littered the defiles where they had been trapped during the retreat from Kabul, and slaughtered like sheep by the vengeful tribesmen. This time it might be Fred's bones that were left there; or Wally's skull that would go trundling before the blast when the wind howled through those haunted passes. Fred and Wally, the forgotten debris of another useless, pointless Afghan war…

The first had been fought well before either of those two were born, and though the Afghans had not forgotten it, the British seldom mentioned it those who remembered it preferring to pretend they did not; which was hardly surprising, as it was an unedifying tale.

In the early years of the century, when ‘John Company’ ruled half India, a mediocre youth named Shah Shuja had fallen heir to the throne of Afghanistan. Having lost it after a reign that was brief even by the violent standards of that country, he fled to India where he was granted asylum by the Government and settled down to a peaceful existence as a private citizen, while following his departure, his erstwhile subjects indulged in a period of riot and anarchy that came to an abrupt end when a strong and able man, one Dost Mohammed of the Barakzi clan, brought order out of chaos and eventually made himself Amir.

Unfortunately, the Government of India distrusted men of ability. They suspected that the Dost would be difficult to manipulate and might even, if they were not careful, decide to ally himself with Russia; and discussing this possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of Simla, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, and his favoured advisers came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to get rid of the Dost (who had done them no harm and his country much good) and replace him with the now elderly ex-Amir Shah Shuja; their argument being that this aged nonentity, if bound to his British champions by ties of gratitude and self-interest, could not fail to become a biddable tool who would willingly sign any treaty they cared to dictate.

But though the war that Lord Auckland forced upon Afghanistan had ended in total disaster for the British, the majority of those who had helped to launch it did very well for themselves, since to mark the initial victory, medals, titles and honours had been showered upon them – none of which could be taken away. But the dead who rotted in the passes received no decorations: and within two years Dost Mohammed Khan was once again Amir of Afghanistan.

The
waste
, thought Wigram, the injustice and stupidity and the cruel, senseless waste. And all to no purpose, because now once again, after a lapse of almost forty years, it seemed that a handful of men in Simla were planning to force another Amir – the youngest son of that same Dost Mohammed – to accept a permanent British Mission in Kabul. Worse still, there had actually been a time when the Amir would have been only too willing to accommodate them. Five years ago, dismayed by threats of rebellion and the growing power of Russia, Shere Ali had made overtures to the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, and asked for an assurance of protection against any aggressor; but his request has been refused. Embittered by this rejection, he had decided to turn instead to Russia (who had shown a flattering eagerness to discuss treaties of friendship and alliance with him); yet now these same
Angrezis
, who had rebuffed him when he asked for help, were actually demanding, as a right, that he should welcome a British Envoy to his capital and cease ‘intriguing’ with the Tsar.

‘If I were in his shoes, I'd see 'em damned first,’ thought Wigram, and realized that there was no profit in thinking like that. This was how wars came about.

All those years ago Lord Auckland and his friends had sent thousands of people to their deaths on the mere supposition that Shere Ali's father might consider an alliance with Russia. Was Lord Lytton now about to do the same, and with no more proof than before, basing his decisions on suspicion, gossip and rumour, and the garbled accounts of paid spies?

In the course of the past few years Wigram had seen a good deal of Wally's kinsman the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, Major Louis Cavagnari; and until recently his opinion of the D.C. had been almost as high as Wally's. Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari was a curious person to be found occupying such a position, for as Wally had related, his father had been a French count who had served under the great Napoleon, become Military Secretary to Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, and married an Irish lady, Elizabeth, daughter of Dean Stewart Blacker of Carrickblacker (though despite his Gallic names the Deputy Commissioner, having been brought up in Ireland, had always regarded himself as British, and preferred his friends to call him ‘Louis’ because it seemed to him the least foreign of his three given names).

For twenty years he had served with distinction in India's Border lands, seeing service in no less than seven Frontier campaigns, and acquiring an enviable reputation for being able to manage the turbulent tribesmen, whose various dialects he spoke with idiomatic fluency. And though as far as appearance went, the tall, bearded figure might easily have been taken for a professor rather than a man of action, those who knew him declared him to be courageous to a fault. No one had ever accused him of lack of spirit, and he combined a dynamic personality with many excellent qualities; though in common with the majority of his fellow men, these last were offset by some that were less admirable: in his case egotism and personal ambition, a quick temper and a fatal tendency to see things as he wished them to be rather than as they actually were.

Wigram Battye had only recently become aware of these failings. But then he had also had the advantage of seeing Cavagnari in action. The success of the affair at Sipri with its swift night march and surprise attack had been entirely due to the D.C.'s imaginative planning and attention to detail, and that, with several other similar incidents, had given Wigram the greatest possible respect for the man's qualities. Nevertheless, of late he had come to feel less admiring and more critical; and, it must be owned, more than a little apprehensive, for the Deputy Commissioner was a professed supporter of the ‘Forward Policy’, whose advocates considered that the only way to protect the Indian Empire from the ‘Russian menace’ was to turn Afghanistan into a British protectorate and plant the Union Jack on the far side of the Hindu Kush.

As this was also the Viceroy's view (and Lord Lytton was known to have a great regard for Major Cavagnari and to take his advice on Frontier matters in preference to that of older and more cautious men), it was not surprising that Wigram Battye should feel uneasy at hearing the D.C. declare – as he had recently heard him do at a dinner party in Peshawar – ‘If Russia gets a foothold in Afghanistan she will take over that country as she has taken over almost all the old, proud kingdoms of Central Asia; and once she has done that the road through the Khyber will be open and there will be nothing to prevent her marching her armies down to attack and take Peshawar and the Punjab, as Barbur the Tiger did three hundred years ago. I have no quarrel with the Afghan people: my quarrel is solely with their Amir, who, by intriguing with the Tsar, is playing with a fire that unless we can prevent it will destroy his own country, and from there burn its way southward until it has consumed all India…’

Cavagnari's use of the first person singular was characteristic of the man and in a different context Wigram would probably have thought nothing of it: but used in this one it dismayed him. His own interest in the dispute between the Government of India and the Amir was entirely non-political, his concern being mainly with the military consequences of a possible war with Afghanistan and the part that his own Corps would be called upon to play in it. He was, after all, a professional soldier. But he also possessed a conscience, and his fear was that the Forward Policy clique intended to embroil the Raj in a second Afghan war without any real justification for doing so – and without fully realizing the enormous difficulties that would face an invading army.

Of the two, it was the former that worried him most, for having always held the view that the Afghan war of '39 had been morally indefensible as well as totally unnecessary, it horrified him to discover that once again History seemed about to repeat itself, and in his opinion it was the plain duty of all honourable men to try to prevent it doing so; the crying need, as Wigram saw it, being for accurate and unedited information as to the true intentions of the Amir Shere Ali and his people.

If it could be proved that Shere Ali was intriguing with the Tsar and about to sign a treaty that would grant Russia military posts and a firm footing in his country, then the Forward Policy men were right and the sooner Britain stepped in to prevent it the better – the prospect of a Russian-controlled Afghanistan with Russian armies stationed along the north-west frontiers of India being unthinkable. But then
was
it true? Wigram had an uneasy feeling that men like Cavagnari and Lord Lytton and other Forward Policy fire-eaters were being deluded by information supplied by Afghan spies who, knowing full well what these particular Sahibs hoped to hear, repeated only what would please, and suppressed anything else – a quirk probably due to a respect for good manners and a desire to please, rather than any deliberate intent to mislead.

Cavagnari of all people would know this, and – or so Wigram hoped – make allowances for it. But would the Viceroy and his councillors realize that the reports of such spies, faithfully forwarded to Simla by the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, might be one-sided and fail to give the full picture? that spies, after all, were paid, and might consider themselves to be earning their pay by telling only such news as they had reason to believe would be welcome? It was this thought that had been preying on Wigram's mind of late, and Wally's talk of Ashton had given him an idea…

Ashton had spent almost two years in Afghanistan and probably made a number of friends there, certainly in the village of his adoptive father Koda Dad Khan, while it was well known in Mardan that Risaldar Zarin Khan was by no means the only Pathan in the Guides who regarded him almost as a blood-brother. Now supposing Ashton could persuade his friends to organize some form of intelligence service aimed at collecting reliable information which they would pass on to him, and which he in turn could pass on to the Commandant or to Wigram himself, to give to Cavagnari – who whatever his personal views could be counted upon to report it to Simla. Ashton's friends could surely be counted on to tell ‘Pelham-Dulkhan’ the truth (because they knew that he did not think as the ‘Sahib-log’ thought) and Ashton himself trusted to repeat what they told him verbatim, without editing it to fit any theories of his own or anyone else's. It was at least an idea, and it might work: and at this juncture, thought Wigram,
anything
was worth trying.

Impelled by a driving sense of urgency and of time running out, he had tried it at the first opportunity, riding over to Attock with Wally at the weekend, and for reasons of secrecy arriving after dark and putting up at the dâk-bungalow with a story that they intended to do some shooting on the following day. Though as things turned out, his idea had produced a result that Wigram had certainly not expected.

Wally's syce had been sent off to the Begum's house with a note for Ash, and the reply had been handed to them as they sat at supper. An hour later the two had left the dâk-bungalow to walk in the hot starlight along the 'Pindi road, and presently, turning off it down a dusty side path, they came to a gate in a high wall where they found an Afridi waiting for them with a lantern; and Wigram – who had not previously seen Ash dressed in this fashion – did not immediately realize who it was.

Captain Battye had given a good deal of thought to the arguments he intended to use and the points he meant to make, and was confident that he had thought of everything. But he had given no thought at all to Juli Pelham-Martyn, born Anjuli-Bai, Princess of Gulkote, for he considered the marriage both ill-judged and distasteful, and had no desire to meet the ex-widow. Ash however had led his guests through the shadowy garden to a small two-storied pavilion, a
barra durri
that stood in a clearing among the fruit trees, and taking them up a short flight of stairs to the screened upper room, said: ‘Juli, this is another friend of mine from the Regiment. My wife, Wigram -’ and Wigram had found himself shaking hands in the English fashion with a girl in white, and thinking as Wally had done – though without any of Wally's emotion – that she was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.