The Far Pavilions (120 page)

He saw her exchange a brief glance with Ash, and though he had never been a particularly imaginative man, it seemed to him, as it had once seemed to Kaka-ji, that an invisible current leapt between them, linking them together so that they did not need to touch each other or speak or even smile in order to prove that two people can at times be truly one. He could see too what Walter had meant when he said that she was ‘restful’. But somehow he had not expected her to be so young – or to look so vulnerable. This slender young thing in the white
shulwa
appeared to him to be little more than a child, and he thought confusedly that it was the term ‘widow’ that had misled him: no widow should be as young as this, and he felt as though the ground had been abruptly cut from beneath his feet; though he would have been at a loss to explain why this should be so. But the fact remained that the sight of her had been enough to upset a number of preconceived notions, and all at once he was unsure of himself, and, as a result, of the suggestion he had come here to make.

Was he perhaps being foolishly naïve in expecting Cavagnari, or anyone else for that matter, to abandon their policies and opinions merely on the basis of information from unofficial sources, supposing that information did not agree with their own? Was he, Wigram, taking too much on himself, being conceited enough to imagine that men like Cavagnari and the Viceroy, not to mention a host of big-wigs in Simla, did not know what they were about and needed help and advice from interfering know-nothing amateurs? Yet… He became aware that Ash had asked him a question, and replying at random saw by the quizzical lift of a black eyebrow that his answer had betrayed his inattention.

Wigram flushed and apologized in some confusion, and turning to his hostess said: ‘I'm sorry, Mrs Pelham; I'm afraid I have not been attending. It was rude of me, and I hope you will forgive my bad manners. You see… I came here to put a – a proposition to your husband, and I have been thinking of that instead of listening.’

Anjuli studied him gravely, then she gave a little nod and said politely: ‘I understand. You mean you would like to speak to my husband alone.’

‘Only if you permit.’

She gave him a brief enchanting smile, and rising, placed her palms together, and then remembering that Ashok had told her that this was not the
Angrezi
way, laughed and held out her hand and said in her careful English: ‘Good-night… Captain Battye.’

Wigram took her hand in his and unexpectedly bowed over it in a gesture that was as foreign to him as a handshake was to her, and that surprised him almost more than it surprised Ash and Wally. But it had been an instinctive tribute – and also in some way an unspoken apology for the things he had thought about her. Straightening up and looking into the eyes that were almost on a level with his own, he saw that Wally had been right when he said that there were gold flecks in them – unless it was only the reflections from the pierced bronze lamp that hung from the ceiling and sprinkled the little pavilion with stars. But he did not have time to find out, for Anjuli drew her hand away and offered it to Wally before she turned and left them, and watching her retreat into the shadows he had the odd fancy that she was taking the light with her.

All the same, he was relieved to see her go, because her presence would have precluded straight talking, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to defer to feminine sensibilities. As the sound of her footsteps receded on the stair he heard Wally give a little sigh, and presently Ash said: ‘Well?’

‘She is very beautiful,’ said Wigram slowly. ‘And very… young.’

‘Twenty-one,’ supplied Ash laconically. ‘But I didn't mean “What do you think of her?’ I meant what is this proposition you mentioned?’

‘Yes, come on now, out with it,’ urged Wally. ‘It's dying of curiosity I've been. What have you got up your sleeve?’

Wigram grinned but said a shade defensively that now it came to the point he was not so sure that he wanted to say anything: ‘The fact is, I'm afraid you may laugh.’

But Ash had not laughed. He knew a good deal about the late Afghan war, and while in Gujerat had re-read Sir John Kaye's book on the subject and been as infuriated by the futility, injustice and tragedy of that bungled attempt at extending the power of the East India Company as his father, Hilary, had been over thirty years earlier.

That such a thing could happen again had seemed so impossible that even after Koda Dad had warned him of it he could not believe that anyone with any sense could consider it, largely because, like most Frontier Force soldiers, he was under no illusions as to the fighting capabilities of the Border tribesmen or the ruggedness of the country in which they lived; and knew only too well the appalling problems posed by supply and transport (quite apart from the actual fighting) that must confront any modern army attempting to advance through a hostile land where every hill-top and ravine, each rock and stone and fold in the ground, could hide an enemy marksman. A land moreover where the soil was so unproductive that at the best of times there was barely enough food for the local inhabitants, and therefore no hope of being able to feed large numbers of invading troops and an even larger number of camp-followers off the country; or of grazing the host of horses, mules and other transport animals that must accompany them. Besides, surely the Generals, if not the civilians in Simla, must have learned the lesson of the previous Afghan war?

Yet listening to Wigram he realized that the lesson, if learned, had been forgotten, and that those who were planning a repeat performance of that sorry tragedy would be at pains to see that it remained so – directing the limelight instead onto the fur-hatted figure of the Russian villain lurking in the wings. ‘Yet if it's true that Shere Ali is planning to let in the Russians,’ thought Ash, as Wigram had done, ‘England will have to step in, because once the Russians get their hands on anything they never let go, and it would be India next.’

The thought of India added to the ever-increasing territories of the Tsar – its towns and villages under the control of Ispravniks and Starostas, Russian Governors in every Province and Russian regiments quartered in every cantonment from Peshawar to Cape Comorin, their guns commanding the great sea ports of Karachi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta – was enough to make him shudder. But then he knew Afghanistan even better than men like Cavagnari did, and that knowledge inclined him to be sceptical of the fears expressed by the Deputy Commissioner and his fellow war-mongers.

‘I remember reading somewhere,’ observed Ash meditatively, ‘that Henry I of France said of Spain that if you invaded it with a large force you would be destroyed by starvation, while if you invaded it with a small one you would be overwhelmed by a hostile people. Well, you could say the same of Afghanistan. It's an appalling country to invade, and unless the Russians think that they can walk in unchallenged, with the consent of the population as well as the Amir, I can't believe they'd try it – any more than I am prepared to believe that Cavagnari knows much about the Afghans if he thinks for one moment that the Amir's so-called “subjects” will ever tamely submit to having Russian garrisons quartered all over their country. They may be a murderous lot of ruffians with an unenviable reputation for treachery and ruthlessness, but no one has ever denied their courage; or been able to make them do anything they don't like doing. And they don't like being dictated to or ruled by foreigners – any foreigners! Which is why, in my opinion, this whole Russian scare is probably nothing but a turnip lantern.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Wigram. ‘That's precisely what I'm afraid of. But though I hope I'm wrong, I can't help wondering if – if the Forward Policy fanatics know quite well that it's more than likely that Russia is merely putting out a feeler – testing the temperature of the water so to speak – but are so dead set on this scheme of turning Afghanistan into a buffer-state in order to protect India that they are using this Russian business as a stalking horse to cover their real objective. Though of course if it's true that the Amir is really thinking of signing a treaty with the Tsar –’ the sentence remained unfinished, because at this point he had been interrupted by Wally, who refused to believe that his latest hero could possibly be mistaken on a matter of such vital importance, or wrong about anything that concerned the tribal territories of Afghanistan as a whole. Cavagnari, insisted Wally, knew more about that country and its peoples than anyone else in India – any European at all events. Everyone knew that!

Wigram remarked dryly that he expected a great many people had said as much of Macnaghten in '38, though that hadn't prevented him from being murdered by the Afghans three years later, after being largely responsible for attempting to foist Shah Shuja on the throne, and almost wholly responsible for allowing large numbers of British women and children and their down-country servants to join the Occupation Forces in Kabul and be massacred in the Kurd Kabul passes together with the retreating army. As Wally had-also studied that disastrous campaign, he was temporarily silenced, and confined himself to listening to Ash and Wigram discussing the possibility of being able to discover what was actually going on in Kabul and whether the Russian threat was real or only a turnip lantern being used by the Forward Policy bloc to frighten the electorate into supporting another war of aggression.

‘But supposing we could get the information?’ said Ash some ten minutes later. ‘We'd have no guarantee that it would be accepted if it turned out to contradict what they want to believe.’

‘None,’ confirmed Wigram; ‘except that if by “they” you mean Cavagnari, he would never suppress it. That's one thing I
am
sure about. He has his own spies of course, as we have always had ours – after all, it was in our original charter that we should employ “men capable of collecting trustworthy intelligence beyond as well as within our borders”, and as Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, Cavagnari probably employs a good many of the same. But I'll go bail that anything of a political nature that they send him – anything to do with Shere Ali's relations with Russia for instance – is sent on at once to Simla, as anything we ourselves could tell him in that line would be too, regardless of whether it contradicted his own theories or not. In any case, one has to try. One can't sit back with folded hands and watch a shipload of passengers heading towards a hidden reef without making any attempt to light a flare or send up a rocket or do anything at all to try and warn them, even if it's only to yell or blow a whistle!’

‘No,’ agreed Ash slowly. ‘One has to do something – even when the chances are that it will prove useless.’

‘Yes, that's it. That's how I feel,’ sighed Wigram, enormously relieved. He leaned back in his chair, and grinning at Ash said: ‘I remember when you first joined us we used to rib you over a habit you had of saying that this or that was “unfair” – it was a favourite word of yours in those days. Well, speaking for myself, I've no objection to fighting a war: it's my trade. But I'd prefer to think that I was fighting in a just one; or at the very least, one that could not have been avoided. And I believe that this one can be. It's not too late.’

Ash remained silent, and Wigram saw that although his gaze appeared to be fixed on the dark oblong of the doorway through which his wife had left, his eyes had the blind unfocused look of one whose thoughts have travelled many miles, or perhaps years away. And indeed Ash was remembering the past and hearing once again as he had in Lalji's audience chamber in Gulkote and in the
chattri
at Bhithor, a long-dead voice exhorting a four-year-old boy not to forget that injustice was the worst sin in the world and must be fought wherever it was found… ‘even when you know that you cannot win’.

Wigram, who did not know Ash nearly as well as Wally did, noticed only the abstraction. But Wally saw something in the still face that frightened him: an underlying suggestion of desolation and the bleak look of a man who is being forced to make an unpalatable decision. And as he watched, the prescience that is so often a part of the Irish heritage stirred in him, bringing a premonition of disaster that was so strong that instinctively he flung up a hand as though to ward it off… and in the same moment heard Ash say quietly: ‘I shall have to go myself.’

Wigram had argued with him: they had both argued with him. But in the end they had agreed that he was right. An officer of the Guides would be more likely to be believed than any Afghan who, apart from being paid for services rendered, might well have a personal or tribal antipathy towards the central government in Kabul and so be tempted to twist or be selective with information collected on the far side of the Border. Besides, what was needed now was no longer a matter of which disaffected tribe or local mullah was planning a raid into British India or inciting the Faithful to murder a few infidels, but whether an Amir of Afghanistan was engaged in plotting with the Russians, and if so, how far had he committed himself? Was he indeed preparing to welcome a Russian Mission to Kabul and sign a treaty of alliance with the Tsar, and were his people prepared to support him in this?

Reliable information on these points would be of the greatest possible value to the negotiators in Simla and Peshawar and to Her Majesty's Ministers in London, because such knowledge could mean all the difference between peace and war – which is to say life and death for thousands of human beings. And as Ash pointed out, there was nothing in the Guides' charter to bar an officer from ‘collecting trustworthy intelligence beyond as well as within our borders’. ‘Anyway, I've lived in the country and I know my way around there, so it isn't as if I shall be in any real danger,’ said Ash.

‘Gammon!’ retorted Wally angrily. ‘Don't talk as though we were a pair of sap-heads. You weren't alone last time, but this time you will be; which means that if ever you're tired or ill or wounded and make a slip, there'll be no one to cover it up for you. You'll be a lone stranger, and as such, an object of suspicion. Faith, it's sick you make me – both of you. But I wish to God I could be going with you and that's the truth. When do you mean to leave?’