Far Pavilions (167 page)

‘Poor silly bastards,’ observed Rosie dispassionately. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Oh… just a fellow I know.’

‘Well it don't do to believe every blatherumshkite you hear, for it's more than likely that your fine friend merely overheard some disgruntled competitor who'd made a fool of himself by missing the target altogether, excusing his failure by taking a swipe at the Guides and enjoying a good old green-eyed grumble.’

‘To tell you the truth,’ confessed Wally, ‘I was inclined to think along those lines myself at first. But then this business – all the things I learned this evening from our fellows – has made me think differently, because… Well he, this same chap, told me about these other things too, and he was right. And there was something else he said that is quite likely to be true. He said that you ought to give up your idea of opening a free clinic to treat the Kabulis, because it's already being said that it's only a plot to get rid of as many people as possible by giving them poison instead of medicines.’

‘Well of all the –!’began the doctor explosively; and then broke into laughter. ‘Bunkum, my dear boy – bunkum! Faith, I never heard such twaddle in me life, and you can tell your friend I said so and advise him from me to be putting his head in a horse bucket. It's as plain as the nose on your face that the feller was just pulling your leg, or as likely as not trying to put the wind up you. Even the most bigoted infidel-hating barbarian couldn't be so woollen-witted as to imagine that we'd try anything as childishly silly as that. They must have
some
sense, so they must.’

But Wally's brow remained furrowed, and when he spoke again it was in an undertone that was barely audible above the noise of the wind and the rain, and as though he was speaking a thought aloud: ‘But he was right about… other things. And – and they
are
bigoted and barbaric. And they do hate us: they really hate us…’

‘Whisht now! it's making a mountain out of a mole-hill you are.’ Ambrose Kelly wagged an admonitory finger at the youthful Commander of the Escort and by way of showing that the subject was now closed, reached for a battered tin of tobacco and turned his attention to knocking out and re-filling his pipe. Wally laughed a little shamefacedly and leaning back in the creaking cane chair, felt the accumulated tensions of the last few hours seep away as his mind and his muscles relaxed under the peaceful influence of Rosie's optimism and the soothing sight of tobacco smoke weaving back and forth in the draught.

Outside the closed and shuttered windows the lightning flared and thunder rolled among the hills, while the rain and wind shook the fabric of the flimsy lath-and-plaster house, and from the next room came the
plink, plink
of water dripping into a tin basin that one of the doctor's servants had positioned below a leak in the ceiling. The flames of the two oil lamps bent and flickered in the draught that blew in under the ill-fitting doors and window frames, and Wally sat watching them with half-shut eyes as he listened gratefully to the noise of the rain and thought of what William Jenkyns had had to say earlier that evening on the subject of the unpaid troops and the advisability of paying them immediately, or at least promising that the Government of India would see to it that they were paid in full in the near future.

William had agreed that this would probably have to be done, and had told him in strict confidence that the Viceroy had already intimated his willingness to do so. ‘Everything will be all right, laddie. You'll see. There's precious little that goes on in Kabul that the Chief don't know about, and he'll have laid his plans and decided just how he means to deal with this particular problem long ago, I can tell you that.’

But though William's conviction that His Excellency the Envoy was aware of all that went on in Kabul was in the main justified, his confidence in his Chief was less well-founded.

Sir Louis was certainly very well informed, and the diary that he dispatched to Simla at the end of each week would have been an eye-opener for those who thought that his confident bearing indicated ignorance of the unrest in the Amir's capital city. Both he, and via him Lord Lytton, knew what was going on, but both treated the knowledge lightly, Lord Lytton for his part being so little troubled by it that he had allowed a full ten days to drift by before forwarding, without comment, Sir Louis' account of the behaviour of the mutinous Heratis to the Secretary of State, as though it was no more than another trivial piece of information to be filed and forgotten.

As for Sir Louis, despite the fact that he had learned early – and immediately informed the Viceroy – that the Kabulis appeared to expect him, among other things, to pay the arrears owed to the Afghan army, he made no move to deal with this particular problem; not even when he received a telegram from the Viceroy offering to provide financial assistance to the Amir if the money would help His Highness out of his present difficulties.

The offer had not been entirely altruistic (Lord Lytton having pointed out that if it was accepted, it would eventually provide the Government with a useful lever for obtaining certain administrative reforms that the Amir might be reluctant to concede), but at least it had been made. The money that Ash had seen as the only solution to the problem of the mutinous Heratis and the hatred and unrest that they were creating in Kabul was there for the asking. Yet Sir Louis did not take advantage of it – perhaps because he too, like Wally, recoiled in distaste from paying the wages of an army that had so recently been involved in a war against the British Empire.

But not even to William, who decoded all the Envoy's confidential messages, did he give his reasons. An omission that troubled his loyal secretary not a little, since to William the Viceroy's offer had seemed a godsend: a quick and easy way out of an exceedingly tricky situation, and an admirable solution to the most pressing of the problems that were bedevilling the harassed Amir, not to mention his equally harassed capital.

It had never occurred to William that his Chief would not see the offer in this light. But August wore on and Sir Louis made no move to accept it, or even to discuss the possibility of doing so, though every day brought fresh evidence that passions in the city were rapidly building up to flash-point, and that disaffection was now rife among the regiments on duty in the Bala Hissar itself.

This last was no more than a rumour that had only recently reached William at secondhand, via Walter Hamilton; yet he could not help wondering if were true. Was it possible that the regiments at present quartered inside the Bala Hissar were in fact any more reliable than the Heratis, and if so, was the Amir playing a double game? There was no doubt that he had been exceedingly angry over the affair of the sentries who had stoned the Hindu: but not with the sentries. His wrath had been directed against Sir Louis for daring to dismiss them and refusing to allow them to be replaced – and with Lieutenant Hamilton, who had carried out Sir Louis' order.

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 –

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.