The Far Pavilions (34 page)

‘Insufferable young puppy,’ fumed the Major, justifiably incensed; and he retired to his study to compose a forceful letter to the Commandant of the Corps of Guides, while Ash rode back to Mardan with his mind in a turmoil of anger and disgust and sheer, concentrated bitterness.

It was not Belinda's engagement that stuck in his throat. He could have found excuses for that: the Victorian age approved the marriage of young girls to much older men, and it was no uncommon thing for a girl of sixteen or seventeen to marry a man of forty. Mr Podmore-Smyth, whatever his physical disadvantages, was rich, respected and successful, and Belinda had probably been flattered by his attentions and ended by mistaking her admiration for his qualities as something much warmer, and persuading herself that it was love. She was, after all, young and impressionable, and she had always been impulsive. Ash might have forgiven her engagement, but he could neither excuse nor condone her behaviour in the matter of George.

George had undoubtedly told a lot of silly lies, but the revenge Belinda was taking on him was cruelly unjust, for it was not as though he had intended to marry her under false pretences. He knew very well that neither she nor her parents would ever have seriously considered him as a possible husband, and the most he had hoped to do was to make himself more interesting in her eyes and be accepted as an equal by the narrow, insular society of the cantonment. Yet now she was planning to expose him as a liar and a half-caste to that same society, knowing full well that although they might forgive the first, they would neither forgive nor forget the second. George would be ruined socially, for Anglo-India was intensely parochial and the story would follow him up and down the country. Wherever he went there would always be someone who knew it, or had heard it from someone else, and the virtuous middle-class matrons would whisper behind their fans while their daughters snubbed him and their menfolk laughed – and blackballed him at their Clubs.

‘It's not fair!’ thought Ash passionately. What did it matter who a man's grandmother was? Or his father or mother, if it came to that? He wished now that he had swallowed his pride and his bile and put in a plea for George to Belinda's father. He ought to have spoken up and told that old puffing-billy what his daughter was up to, and that she must be stopped. Except that it was already too late for that, as according to her she had already told several people, and for all he knew, her father might agree with her. Her mother and that tattling woman Mrs Gidney obviously did, and so, presumably, would their friends and acquaintances, all of whom would sympathize with that conceited little bitch, Belinda, and turn on poor George like a pack of wolves. The ugliness and injustice of it stuck in Ash's throat and choked him, and he felt physically ill with disgust.

He had arrived back in Mardan in a black rage and blacker disillusionment. And a few day later Dilasah had absconded with the carbines, and five sowars of his clan, including Malik Shah and Lal Mast, had been stripped of their uniforms and expelled from the Regiment with orders to bring back the stolen carbines or never again show their faces in Mardan…

Ash had intended to demand an interview with the Commandant in order to protest against the action that had been taken. But he had been forestalled by the belated arrival of a letter from Major Harlowe, and had been sent for instead to explain himself. The dressing-down he had received from Belinda's father had been nothing to the one he received from his C.O., though most of it went over his head, for once again he was obsessed with an injustice. It was not
fair
that five men of Dilasah Khan's tribe, with impeccable records -men who had never even liked Dilasah, let alone helped him! – should be driven out of the Guides like criminals. He could barely wait for the Commandant to finish speaking before making his own protest; and the fact that he had obviously paid little attention to anything that had been said to him did nothing to improve his case, or the Commandant's temper.

‘If anyone is responsible, it's me,’ declared Ash with a fine disregard for grammar. ‘
I'm
the one who ought to be sacked or sent after Dilasah, because I knew there was something wrong somewhere, and I ought to have seen that he didn't get a chance to do anything like this. But Malik and the others had nothing whatever to do with it, and it's not fair that their faces should be blackened in this way. It's not their fault that he belongs to their tribe, and it's downright unjust that -’

He got no further. The Commandant told him in one brief, blistering sentence what others had previously told him at greater length but with less clarity, and dismissed him from the Presence. Ash took his troubles to Zarin, but once again received no encouragement from that quarter, for Zarin considered the Commandant's action to be a wise one. So too did Risaldar Awal Shah.

‘How else will he get our rifles back?’ demanded Awal Shah. ‘We of the whole Guide Corps have scoured the countryside and have not caught so much as a glimpse of Dilasah. But it may be that his own kin will be able to read his mind and follow his trail, and in two days, or three, they will return with the rifles. Thus their honour and ours will be saved.’

Zarin grunted in agreement, and Koda Dad, who happened to be paying a rare visit to his sons, not only sided with them but took Ash to task.

‘You talk like a Sahib,’ said Koda Dad crossly. ‘To prate of injustice in such a matter is foolishness. The Commandant-Sahib is wiser, for he is thinking not as an
Angrezi
but as a Pathan, while you – you who were once Ashok – are looking at this as though you had never been anything but Pelham-Sahib.
Chut
! how many times have I not told you that it is only children who cry “it is not fair” – children and Sahib-log? Now at last,’ added Koda Dad acidly, ‘I see that you are indeed a Sahib.’

Ash returned to his quarters sore and discomforted, and as angry as before. Yet even then he might have saved himself from folly if it had not been for George – for George and Belinda…

Walking into the mess that night, Ash met one of his fellow subalterns, newly returned from a visit to Headquarters in Peshawar.

‘Heard the news about that fellow Garforth?’ inquired Cooke-Collis.

‘No. And I don't want to, thanks all the same,’ retorted Ash rudely. He had not expected the story to spread quite so quickly, and the thought of having to listen to some second-hand or third-hand version of it sickened him.

‘Why, didn't you like him?’

Ash ignored the question, and turning his back, hailed a
khidmatgar
and ordered himself a double brandy. But Cooke-Collis was not so easily put off: ‘Think I'll have one too.
Hamare waste bhi
,
*
Iman Din. I need it, by jove. Nasty business at any time, but when it's someone you know, it's a bit of a shock, even if you didn't know them very well, and I didn't really; though I'd met him at several dinner-parties and dances and all that sort of thing, because he got asked all over the place. Very popular with the ladies, even though he was only a junior boxwallah. Not that I've anything against boxwallahs, you know; daresay they're a very pleasant lot. But Garforth was the only one you seemed to meet almost everywhere, and I won't deny that it was a nasty shock to hear that he -’

‘Was a half-caste,’ finished Ash impatiently. ‘Yes, I know. And I don't see that it is any concern of yours or anyone else's, so you needn't go on about it.’

‘Was he a half-caste? I didn't know that. Are you sure? He didn't look it.’

‘Then what on earth are you talking about?’ demanded Ash, angry with himself for betraying George's secret to someone who obviously did not know it and would now inevitably hand it on.

‘Garforth, of course. He shot himself this afternoon.’

‘
What?
’ Ash's voice cracked. ‘I don't believe it.’

‘Perfectly true, I'm afraid. I don't know what he'd been up to, but it seems that several people cut him at the Club last night. Then this morning he got a couple of letters cancelling invitations that he had already accepted, so at lunch time he took two bottles of brandy from the shop, drank 'em both and then shot himself, poor devil. I got it from Billy Carddock who'd just met the doctor coming away from the firm's bungalow. He said they'd no idea what was behind it.’

‘I was,’ whispered Ash, his face grey and drawn with shock: ‘He asked me what I'd do if I were in his place, and I told him… I told him –’ He shuddered, and pushing the unbearable thought away, said aloud: ‘Belinda was behind it. Belinda and all those narrow-minded, bigoted, bourgeois snobs who purred over him while they thought his grandmother was a countess and cut him when they found out that she was only a bazaar woman from Agra. The —,—!’ The end of the softly spoken sentence was in the vernacular and happily unintelligible to young Mr Cooke-Collis, but its virulent obscenity startled the
khidmatgar
into dropping a box of cigars, and drew a shocked protest from a senior Major who happened to be standing within earshot.

‘Here, I say,’ objected the Major. ‘You can't talk like that in mess, Ashton. If you must spout filth, go and do it somewhere else, will you.’

‘Don't worry,’ said Ash, his voice deceptively gentle. ‘I'm going.’

He lifted his glass as though drinking a toast, and having drained it, tossed it over his shoulder in the manner of an earlier day when it had been the custom in some regiments to drink a young queen's health in broken glass. The crash brought conversation to a stop, and in the brief lull that followed, Ash turned on his heel and walked out of the mess.

‘Silly young ass,’ observed the Major without heat. ‘I shall have to give him a talking-to in the morning.’

But Ash was not there in the morning.

His room was empty and his bed had not been slept in, and the sentry who had come on duty at midnight reported that Pelham-Sahib had left the fort shortly after that hour, saying that he could not sleep and would walk for a while. He had been wearing a poshteen and a pair of Pathan trousers, and as far as the sentry could remember had not been carrying anything. His horses were still in the stables, and Ala Yar, questioned by the Adjutant, said that apart from the poshteen and a pair of
chupplis
and some money, the only thing missing from his room was a set of Pathan clothing and an Afghan knife that his Sahib always kept in a locked box on top of the
almirah
(cupboard). The box had not been in its accustomed place when he, Ala Yar, had brought in his Sahib's
chota hazri
(small breakfast) that morning; it had been on the floor, open and empty. As for the money it was a matter of a few rupees only, and it was certain that no thief had taken it, for his Sahib's gold cuff-links and silver-backed brushes lay on the dressing table where no one could have failed to see them. It was Ala Yar's opinion that his Sahib, being troubled in his mind, had taken leave and followed after the father of Risaldar Awal Shah and Jemadar Zarin Khan, who had been visiting his sons and had left in the late afternoon of the previous day to return to his village.

‘Koda Dad Khan is as a father to my Sahib, who has a great affection for him,’ said Ala Yar. ‘But yesterday there was some small disagreement between them, and it may be my Sahib desires to mend matters and make his peace with the old man, and when he has done so he will return swiftly. No harm will befall him beyond the Border.’

‘That's all very well, but he's got no damned business to be beyond the Border – now or at any other time,’ retorted the Adjutant, forgetting for a moment whom he was addressing. ‘Just you wait until I get my hands on that young –’ He recollected himself and dismissed Ala Yar, who returned to the Sahib's quarters to remove the
chota hazri
tray that he had ‘placed on the bedside table in the dawn, and in the agitation of the morning omitted to remove. It was only then that he saw the letter underneath it, for in the dim light of the early morning the envelope had not shown up against the clean cloth that he himself changed daily on the Sahib's table.

Ala Yar had learned to read a little English during his years in
Belait
, and ten minutes later, having deciphered the address, he was in the Commandant's office.

Ash had indeed gone over the Border. But not to visit Koda Dad. He had gone to join Malik Shah and Lal Mast and their fellow clansmen, who had been sent to track down Dilasah and bring back the two stolen rifles. And though search parties were sent out to bring him in, they could find no trace of him. He had vanished as completely as Dilasah had done, and nothing more was heard of him for almost two years.

That afternoon Zarin had gone to the Commandant and asked for special leave so that he might go in search of Pelham-Sahib. But this had been refused, and a few hours later, after a long talk with Mahdoo and a shorter and slightly acrimonious one with Zarin, Ala Yar had gone instead.

‘I am the Sahib's servant, and he has not yet dismissed me from his service,’ said Ala Yar. ‘There is also the promise that I made to Anderson-Sahib that I would see to it that the boy came to no harm, and as you cannot go after him, I must do so. That is all.’

‘I would go if I could,’ growled Zarin. ‘But I too am a servant. I serve the Sirkar and I cannot do as I please.’

‘I know. Therefore I go in your stead.’

‘You are an old fool,’ said Zarin angrily.

‘Maybe,’ agreed Ala Yar without rancour.

He left Mardan an hour before sunset, and Mahdoo accompanied him for a mile along the track that leads towards Afghanistan and stood to watch him grow smaller and smaller against the vast, desolate background of the plain and the Border hills, until at last the sun went down and the dusty purple twilight hid him from sight.

Book Three

World out of Time

13

‘There are men out there. Beyond the nullah, to the left,’ said one of the sentries, peering out at the moonlit plain. ‘Look – they are moving this way.’

His companion turned to stare in the direction of the pointing finger, and after a moment or two laughed and shook his head. ‘Gazelle. This drought has made the
chinkara
so bold that they do not fear to approach within a stone's throw. But if those clouds yonder do not fail us, there should soon be grass in plenty.’

The summer of 1874 had been a particularly trying one. The monsoon had been late and scanty and the plains around Mardan were burned to a dry golden-brown in which no trace of green showed. Dust-devils danced all day among the mirages and the parched thorn bushes, and the rivers ran low and sluggishly between banks of blinding white sand.

There was no grass on the hills either, and most of the game had moved up the far valleys in search of food. Only a few wild pig and
chinkara
had remained, and these plundered the fields of the villagers by night, and would occasionally even venture into the cantonment to eat the shrubs in Hodson's garden, or nibble the leaves of the mulberry tree that marked the place where Colonel Spottiswood had killed himself over seventeen years ago. The sentries had become so accustomed to the sight of them that a dark shape skirting the parade ground or moving among the shadows no longer brought a challenge followed by the crack of a carbine; and in any case, the section of Frontier adjacent to Mardan had been quiet for so long that men were becoming used to peace.

There had been no ‘Border incidents’ for over five years, and the Guides had had no active soldiering to occupy them. They had provided an escort under Jemadar Siffat Khan to accompany a new Envoy on a mission to Kashgar, and a year later two of the escort had carried the completed treaty from Kashgar to Calcutta in sixty days. A sepoy of the Guides Infantry had been detailed to accompany a messenger across the Oxus and from there, by way of Badakshan and Kabul, to India, and a sowar of the Cavalry, who had been sent to Persia with a British officer bound on a special mission, had been killed on the road to Teheran while defending the baggage from a gang of robbers. The Corps itself had taken part in a year-long ‘camp of exercise’ at Hasan Abdal, from where it had returned to Mardan in February of that year, to occupy itself with the normal routine of cantonment life, and pray throughout that hot weather for rain to temper the remorseless heat.

September had been as scorching as July, but now October was almost out, and the mercury in the thermometer that hung in the mess verandah retreated daily. Men went abroad again at midday, and the wind that blew off the mountains at sunset carried a refreshing edge of coolness. But apart from a few brief and isolated showers there had been no sign of the autumn rains – until tonight, when for the first time in many months there were clouds in the sky…

‘This time –
Shukr Allah
*
– they will not fail us,’ said the sentry devoutly. ‘The wind is behind them and I can smell rain.’

‘I too,’ said his companion. The two men sniffed appreciatively, and as a sudden gust whirled up the dust and obscured any further movement on the plain, they turned together and continued on their rounds.

The wind had been blowing only fitfully since moonrise, but now it steadied and blew strongly, driving the banked clouds before it until presently they reached the moon and blotted it out. A quarter of an hour later the first swollen drops of rain splashed down out of the darkness: forerunners of a lashing torrent that within seconds turned the dust of the long, scorching summer into a sea of mud, and transformed every dry nullah and ditch into a fully fledged river.

Under cover of darkness and that raging bedlam of noise and water, the handful of men that one of the sentries had mistaken for
chinkara
passed the outposts unseen. But head-down against the wind-driven rain, they missed their way and were challenged by the guard on the gate of the fort.

It had been no part of their plan to be dragged before Authority that night. They had hoped to reach the cavalry lines without being detected, and to lie up there until morning; but as it was, the havildar in charge of the guard had sent for the Indian officer on duty, who in turn sent for the Duty Officer; and presently the Adjutant was fetched from the mess where he had been playing whist, and the Second-in-Command, who had retired early, aroused from his bed.

The Commandant had also retired early, but not to sleep. He had been writing his weekly letters home when he was interrupted by the entrance of two of his officers, accompanied by as sorry an object as had ever been seen in that room. A gaunt, bearded tribesman with a bandaged head, from whose tattered blanket, worn cloak-wise in the manner of the Frontier, a dozen little rivulets poured onto the Commandant's cherished Shiraz carpet. The bandage too leaked a steady red-stained trickle down one hollow and unshaven cheek, and the blanket that clung wetly to the man's scare-crow body failed to conceal that he held something long and bulky under its sodden folds. He let his arms drop, and the carbines that he had been carrying slid down and fell with a clatter into the circle of light shed by the oil lamp on the writing table.

‘There they are, sir,’ said Ash. ‘I'm sorry… we took so long… about it, but… it wasn't as easy as… we'd thought.’

The Commandant stared at him and did not speak. He found it difficult to believe that this was the boy who had stormed into his office nearly two years ago. This was a man. A tall one, for he had come late to his full height, and lean with the leanness of hard muscle and harder living. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and he was ragged, unkempt and wounded, and dazed with fatigue. But he held himself erect and forced his tongue to the English that it had not spoken for so long:

‘I must… apologize, sir,’ said Ash haltingly, the words blurred by exhaustion, ‘for… letting you see us like – like this. We didn't mean… We meant to spend the night with Zarin and – make ourselves presentable, and in the morning… But the storm –’ His voice failed and he made a vague and entirely oriental gesture with one hand.

The Commandant turned to the Adjutant and said curtly: ‘Are the others out there?’

‘Yes, sir. All except Malik Shah.’

‘He's dead,’ said Ash tiredly.

‘And Dilasah Khan?’

‘He too. We got back most of the ammunition. He hadn't used much of it. Lal Mast has it…’ Ash stared down at the carbines for a long moment, and said with sudden bitterness: ‘I hope they're worth it. They cost three lives. That is a high price to pay for anything.’

‘For honour?’ suggested the Commandant in the same curt voice.

‘Oh –
honour
!’ said Ash; and laughed mirthlessly. ‘Malik and Ala Yar… Ala Yar… His voice broke and his eyes were suddenly full of tears. He said harshly: ‘May I go now, sir?’ And almost as he spoke he fell forward, as a tree falls, and lay sprawled and unconscious across the cavalry carbines that had been stolen two years ago and recovered at the cost of three lives. One of them Ala Yar's…

‘He'll have to be cashiered, of course,’ said the Second-in-Command.

His tone made the remark less an assertion than a query, and his Commanding Officer, who had been drawing complicated patterns on the blotting paper, looked up sharply.

‘Well, I mean – it seems a pity,’ said the Major defensively. ‘After all, when you come to think of it, it was a damned fine show. I've been talking to Lal Mast and the others and they –’

‘So, oddly enough, have I,’ interrupted the Commandant with some asperity. ‘And if you intend to play Devil's Advocate, you're wasting your time. I don't need one.’

Two days had passed since Ash and his four companions had stumbled into Mardan, but the rain was still falling and the little fort was loud with the sound of water drumming upon the flat roofs, cascading from pipes and gutters, and splashing into the inch-deep lake that had replaced the dusty paths and parched lawns of the previous week. Malik Shah's family were to be awarded a pension, and his four fellow-tribesmen had been congratulated and reinstated, their uniforms returned and two years' back-pay handed over to them. But Lieutenant Pelham-Martyn, who faced a charge of Absent Without Leave for the space of twenty-three months and two days, was technically under close arrest – though in actual fact confined to bed in the quarters of the Medical Officer, Ambrose Kelly, with a high fever due to a head wound that had become septic. His fate and his future were still under discussion.

‘You mean you agree with me?’ demanded the Major, startled.

‘Of course I do. Why else should I have bothered to go over to Peshawar yesterday? You don't suppose I spent over an hour jawing with the Commissioner, and two more arguing with an assortment of brass-hats, just for the fun of it, do you? Ashton's an insurbordinate young bastard, but he's too valuable to throw away. Look – what's the most useful thing to any military commander who is planning a campaign or trying to keep order in a country like this? Information! Early and accurate information is worth more than all the guns and ammunition one could ask for, and that's why I'm going to fight like a steer to keep that young idiot. I don't imagine any other Corps could get away with it; but then we're not like any other Corps. We've always been pretty unorthodox, and if one of our officers can spend a couple of years on the other side of the Border without being spotted as an Englishman or shot as a spy, he's too bloody useful to lose and that's all there is to it. Though mark you, what he really deserves is a Court Martial.
And
they'd cashier him.’

‘But what the hell are we going to do with him?’ demanded the Major. ‘We can't just let him stay on here as though nothing had happened, can we?’

‘No, of course not. The sooner he leaves Mardan the better. I propose to see if I can't get him transferred to another unit for a couple of years. Preferably a British one, where he can cool his heels and mix with his own people for a change. He needs to get right away from his friends and the Frontier for a while; and it won't do him any harm to go somewhere down south.’

‘He'll probably get into even more trouble there,’ observed the Major pessimistically. ‘After all, he was brought up as a Hindu, wasn't he?’

‘What of it? The point is, he can't stay here just now. It would have a bad effect on discipline.’

Which is why Ashton Pelham-Martyn came to be stationed in Rawalpindi that winter.

If his Commanding Officer had had his way, Ash would have been sent somewhere a good deal further off. For although Rawalpindi is hardly true Frontier country (which in the north-west is held to start at Hasan Abdal, once a posting-stage of the Mogul Emperors on their journeys to Kashmir) it lies only one hundred and thirteen miles to the south-east of Mardan. But as the main object of those in authority had been to remove the offender from his regiment as soon as possible, and as the ‘Pindi Brigade had been able to provide an immediate vacancy (Ash would have been surprised to learn how many strings had been pulled to engineer that unorthodox posting), it would have to do for the present. Meanwhile the Commandant of the Guides had been promised that at the first opportunity Mr Pelham-Martyn would be moved further down south, and that on no account whatever would he be permitted to put so much as a foot inside the North-West Frontier Province, or go back across the Indus.

In the unlikely event of there being anyone there who could recall having seen him when he stopped at the 'Pindi dâk-bungalow on his way from Bombay to Mardan, over three years ago, they would certainly not have known him now, for he had changed beyond recognition – and not only outwardly. As a child in the Gulkote days he would, by European standards, have been considered old for his age; the city and the Hawa Mahal made few concessions to youth, and he had made an early acquaintance with the facts of life and death and evil. Yet later on, as a boy among boys of his own blood, he had seemed curiously young, for he had retained a child's way of looking at a problem and seeing it in the simplest possible terms, without realizing – or perhaps merely ignoring – the fact that every question is likely to have more than two sides to it.

Arriving back in Rawalpindi that winter he was still only twenty-two. But he had grown up at last – though he was always to retain a trace of the child and the boy and the young man he had once been, and despite the strictures of Koda Dad, to continue to see things as ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’. But he had learned many things in the land beyond the Border, not least among them to ride his temper on a tight rein, to think more carefully before he spoke, to curb his impatience and (surprisingly enough) to laugh.

Superficially, the change in him was more noticeable. For though he had removed both beard and moustache, the boyish look had gone for ever and his face bore deep, unyouthful lines that had been etched there by hunger and grief and hard living. It also bore a long, angry-looking scar that ran up into his hair above his left temple, pulling up one eyebrow and giving him a quizzical look which oddly enough was far from unattractive, and looking at him now one would have said he was a remarkably handsome man – and also, in some indefinable way, a dangerous one: someone to be reckoned with…