The Far Pavilions (142 page)

Did the Amir, mused William, really intend to go on an autumn tour of his northern borders with Sir Louis, leaving his capital to the mercy of a mutinous gaggle of unpaid regiments and scheming ministers? Sir Louis certainly seemed to think so, and spoke of it as though it was an accepted fact.

No one could possibly have wished for a more loyal or admiring supporter than William Jenkyns. But as the summer drew to a close there were times, particularly if he happened to lie awake too long in the small hours of the night, when small pin-pricks of doubt nagged at William's mind and he caught himself wondering uneasily if Louis Cavagnari's sudden elevation in rank had not impaired his judgement and made him blind to much that would never have escaped his attention in the old days.

Wild horses could not have dragged the verbal expression of such a suspicion from the Envoy's loyal Secretary, but he was increasingly baffled by his Chief's determination to ignore what was becoming clear to others in the Mission (and glaringly obvious to many outside it, if the warning words of such visitors as the Sirdar Nakshband Khan were anything to go by). Yet as day succeeded day without any sign that the tension in the city was decreasing, Sir Louis still continued to occupy himself with ideas for reforming the administration, plans for the forthcoming tour and the prospects of partridge shooting on the
charman
– the uncultivated grazing grounds in the valley – and, despite the Amir's warnings, to ride out daily with a guard of Afghans to see and be seen by the citizens of Kabul.

William could not understand it. He was well aware that his Chief was a man who did not suffer fools gladly and was inclined to be a little too scornful of lesser men. It was part of his character, and William had once heard someone at a dinner-party in Simla saying of Cavagnari that one could easily visualize him behaving as the Comte d'Auteroches had done at the Battle of Fontenoy, when he called out to the opposing British line that the ‘French Guards never fired first’.

At the time, William had laughed and agreed – and thought the more of Pierre Louis Napoleon in consequence. But now he recalled how that famous incident had ended, and no longer felt like laughing; for in response to those flamboyant words the British had fired first, and their murderous volley had mown down the immobile French guards, decimating their ranks and killing or wounding every one of their officers, so that the survivors, left without leaders, had broken and run.

That fellow in Simla had been right, thought William… Louis Cavagnari was perfectly capable of making a similar gesture… he was that sort of man. Brave, proud and fanatical; supremely self-confident, and contemptuous of lesser men…

Only last week there had been an ugly incident in the city that had arisen out of a quarrel involving a woman and four sowars of the Guides. The sowars had been attacked and only rescued with difficulty, and afterwards Sir Louis had told young Hamilton to see that his men kept clear of the city until tempers had cooled. But a few days later his own orderly, an Afridi, Amal Din, who had been with him for many years, had also been involved in a brawl, this time with a group of Afghan soldiers. Amal Din feared no one, and having taken exception to some derogatory remarks about his Sahib, he had attacked the speakers and done a good deal of damage before the fight was broken up. A formal complaint on behalf of the injured soldiers had been made to Sir Louis, who, having expressed regret in the coldest possible terms, had followed this up by rewarding Amal Din – and letting it be known that he had done so.

‘That can't have done anything towards making him popular with the Afghans,’ brooded William in the intervals of dealing with official correspondence in the Envoy's office on the evening following this affair, ‘but does he care? Not him!’ William gazed at the opposite wall with unseeing eyes and thought about the local women whom the men kept smuggling into the compound, though they had been warned often enough against doing so. That too was bound to lead to trouble one day, but it was difficult to know how to stop it. He began to write again, found that the ink had dried on his nib and, dipping it in the standish again, went on with his work…

In the Mess House on the opposite side of the courtyard, Wally too was busy writing, for the dâk-rider was due to leave at dawn for Ali Khel with the Residency post-bag, and anyone anxious to catch the next Home mail knew that their letters must be handed to the head chupprassi tonight.

Wally finished the last of his letters and reached for the fair copy of his poem on ‘The Village of Bemaru’, which he intended to enclose in the letter to his parents. It was, he considered, one of his best, and though he had spent half the afternoon polishing it, he could not resist reading the final copy again before sending it off. Yes, not a bad effort at all, he decided with some complacency:…
‘Yet to die Game to the last as they did, well upheld Their English name… E'en now their former foe Frankly avers…’

Ash was going to be rude about that ‘E'en’… But then Ash was no poet and did not realize how impossible it was to make one's lines scan without resorting to such perfectly legitimate short-cuts as ‘e'en’ and ‘t'were’ and ‘were’… ‘
Regret were uppermost, were't not for pride
’. Wally frowned over the line, chewing the end of his pen, but could think of no other way of putting it. Anyway, even Ash must agree that the ending was not half bad. He read it aloud, pleased with the sound of his own lines –

‘How England's fame shone brighter as she fought

And wrenched lost laurels from their funeral pile

And rose at last from out misfortunes tide

Supreme – for God and Right were on her side.’

That was the stuff to give them! He repeated the last few lines again, beating time with his pen in the manner of a conductor, and had got as far as ‘supreme’ when his baton wavered and he stopped in mid-flight, it having suddenly occurred to him that Ash would certainly not approve of that final sentiment.

Ash had never made any secret of his views on the subject of England's dealings with Afghanistan, and had expressed them pretty freely to Wally, denouncing them as unjust and indefensible. He was therefore the last person to agree that ‘God and Right were on her side’. In Ash's opinion, England had never had any right to interfere with Afghanistan, let alone attack her, and he would undoubtedly say that God – or Allah – ought by rights to be on the side of the Afghans. Ash would say…

‘Ah, to hell with Ash,’ thought Wally irritably. He stuffed the poem in with the letter, and having sealed and addressed the envelope, added it to the pile in the ‘out’ tray and went off to dress for dinner.

Sir Louis Cavagnari was another who had spent the latter part of the afternoon and most of the evening at his desk, bringing his diary up-to-date and writing letters and telegrams for dispatch to Ali Khel. He had been feeling considerably easier of late, for the sudden death from cholera in the course of a single night of a hundred and fifty of the Herati soldiers in the city, though a shocking piece of news, had proved to be a blessing in disguise.

The regiments concerned, panic-stricken by the sudden loss of so great a number of their comrades, had settled for part of the pay they were owed plus forty days furlough to return to their homes, and rushing to the Bala Hissar to hand in their arms, had not even waited to obtain their certificates of leave before marching away from the city, hurling threats and abuse as they went at the Commander-in-Chief, General Daud Shah, who had come to see them leave.

From Sir Louis's point of view, this could not have been better. They had caused a great deal of trouble, and the effort of preserving a bold front, and keeping up the pretence that the undisciplined behaviour of a rabble of mutinous troops was a matter of complete indifference to him instead of a constant source of anxiety, was becoming increasingly tedious. Not that he had at any time been in the least afraid of the disgruntled troops from Herat, whom he regarded as no more than hooligans.

All the same, it was a relief to know that a considerable number of them had at last been paid off (he had always known that the money would be forthcoming as soon as the Amir and his ministers realized that there was no other way of ridding themselves of a dangerous nuisance), and had handed in their arms and left the city. He fully realized that fear of the cholera had probably played a greater part than money in bringing about that welcome exodus; and also that not all the Herati regiments had left – some were still encamped in cantonments outside the city, and a number of men drawn from these were actually helping to guard the Arsenal, which on the face of it seemed a little unwise. But then the Amir had assured him that they had been carefully selected and were well disposed towards him, which Sir Louis took to mean that they had probably been paid something on account.

There remained the Ardal Regiment from Turkestan and three Orderly Regiments, whose pay was also many months in arrears. They too were pressing for their money, but had shown no signs of emulating the deplorable behaviour of the Heratis. And as General Daud Shah had apparently promised them that if they would only have a little patience they would all be paid at the beginning of September, Sir Louis felt justified in taking a more rosy view of the future.

It was unfortunate that this year the start of Ramadan, the Mohammedan Month of Fasting, should have fallen in mid-August, since during Ramadan the Faithful may not eat or drink except between sunset and the first streak of dawn, and men who have fasted all day and gone without water in the heat and dust of August are apt to be short-tempered. But then August would soon be over, and with it that long, eventful summer that had seen the metamorphosis of plain Major Cavagnari into His Excellency Sir Louis Cavagnari, K.C.S.I., Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary. Only another week, and then it would be September.

Sir Louis looked forward to the autumn. He had heard that it was almost the best time of year in Kabul: not as beautiful as spring, when the almond trees were in bloom and the valley was white with fruit blossom, but with a spectacular beauty of its own as the leaves of poplars and fruit trees, vines, walnuts and willows flamed gold and orange and scarlet, the snow-line crept down the mountain-sides, and thousands of wild fowl on their way south flew in from the tundras beyond the great ranges of the Hindu Kush. The stalls in the bazaars of Kabul would be piled high with apples, grapes, corncobs, walnuts and chillies, and there would be snipe and quail and chikor in the uncultivated grasslands and on the lower slopes of the hills. And tempers would cool with the coming of the cooler days.

The Envoy smiled as he contemplated the day's entry in his diary, and putting down his pen he rose and went to stand by one of the windows that faced south across the darkening plain, gazing out at the far snow peaks that a short while ago had glowed bright pink in the last of the sunset, and now showed silver in the light of a sky that blazed with stars.

The storm of the previous week had been followed by several days of hot sunshine and a blustery wind that had dried up the puddles and filled the valley with a haze of dust. But yesterday rain had fallen again, not in a deluge as before but gently – the last dying tears of the monsoon – and now the new-washed air was fresh and cool.

The night was full of sounds, for after the abstinence of the day all Kabul, released from fasting by the setting of the sun, was relaxing over the
Iftari
, the evening meal of Ramadan, and the darkness hummed like a hive. A contented hive, thought Cavagnari, listening to the cheerful medley of noises that came from the Residency compound, and sniffing the scent of wood-smoke and cooked food and the pungent smell of horses. He could hear someone in the King's Garden that lay near by, behind the Residency, playing a flute; and from further up the hill came the faint sound of drums and sitars and a woman's voice singing a song of Barbur's day –
‘Drink wine in this hold of Kabul – send the cup around…’

Beneath his window-sill the wall of the citadel fell away into darkness, its shadow blotting out the road below. Yet here too there were sounds – the clip-clop of unseen hoof-beats on the hard earth and the sound of footsteps and voices as a party of travellers hurried towards the Shah Shahie Gate. Only the shadowy plain and the vast wall of mountains lay still and silent.

Cavagnari sniffed the night breeze, and presently, hearing feet on the stair, said without turning: ‘Come in, William. I've finished the letters for the dâk, so you can put the code book away; we shall not need it tonight. No point in sending another telegram to Simla when there is nothing new to report. They'll find anything they need to know when they get the next diary. What day does that go off?’

‘Morning of the 29th, sir.’

‘Well, if anything of interest comes up before then we can always send a
tar
. But with a bit of luck, the worst is over and things should settle down a bit now that mosfof those pestilential nuisances from Herat have dispersed to their homes. You can take the letters. I must change for dinner.’

Half-a-mile away, on the rooftop of Nakshband Khan's house, Ash too had been looking at the mountains and thinking, as Cavagnari had been, that the worst was over. After last week's downpour and the rain of yesterday there was more snow on the high hills, and tonight there was a distinct hint of autumn in the cool air, so it was more than likely that the worst of the cholera was over – or soon would be. And like' Sir Louis, Ash had been encouraged by the departure of the mutinous regiments.