Far Pavilions (32 page)

Mrs Harlowe, who had feared that the presence of Belinda's discarded lover would cast a gloom over her party, was relieved to find that his behaviour could not be faulted, and that he had actually contributed a great deal to the evening's success, being pronounced a delightful young man and an asset to any party. While as for Belinda herself, the impression that Ash had made on the other young women present had not been lost upon her. Being confident of his devotion it pleased her to know that she possessed something that others found desirable, and on parting with him she returned the pressure of his hand with so much warmth and such a speaking look from her blue eyes that he went back to the dâk-bungalow walking on air.

Her mother too had been unexpectedly kind and had actually said that she hoped he would call on them when next he was in Peshawar, though she was sorry that prior engagements would prevent them from seeing him on the following day. But this had not depressed him, for as their carriage drove away down the dark cantonment road, Ash looked down at the thing that Belinda had pressed into his palm under cover of the conventional farewell, and was comforted and uplifted to find that he held a much crushed and faded yellow rose-bud.

11

Mardan looked friendly and familiar in the evening light, and Ash was surprised to find himself glad to get back to it. The sounds and smells of the cavalry lines, the little star-shaped fort and the long line of the Yusafzai hills, rose-red in the sunset, already seemed like home to him; and though he had not expected to be back until late, Ala Yar was waiting on the verandah, ready to talk or be silent as the mood took him.

In the months that followed there had been little time in which to brood over Belinda and the unsatisfactory state of their love-affair, and there were even days sometimes several in succession when he did not think of her at all; and if he dreamed of her at night he did not remember it by morning. For Ash was discovering, as others had done before him, that the ways of the Indian Army (and in particular the ways of the Corps of Guides) differed a great deal from the pattern laid down by the Military Academy at Sandhurst. That difference was very much to his taste, and had it not been for Belinda, he would have had nothing to complain of and much to commend.

As a junior officer of the Guides he was expected to devote a part of each day to the study of Pushtu and Hindustani, the former being the language of the Border and the latter the lingua-franca of India and the Indian Army. But though he needed no instruction in either, he had still not learned to read or write them with the same facility with which he used the spoken word, and now he studied hard under an elderly munshi (teacher) and being Hilary's son made rapid progress. Which, it may here be noted, availed him little, for when he subsequently sat for the written examination in the Higher Standard, he failed to pass, to his own bewilderment and the fury of his munshi who took the matter up with the Commandant, asserting angrily that it was impossible for Pelham-Sahib to have failed; never before had he taught such a pupil and there must be some fault on the part of the examiners – a misprint perhaps? The papers were not returnable, but the Commandant had a friend in Calcutta who on the promise that no action would be taken, borrowed them from the files, only to discover, scrawled across them in red ink, the terse comment:
Flawless
.
This officer has obviously used a crib
.

‘Tell the boy to make a few errors next time,’ advised the Commandant's friend. But Ash never sat for an examination again.

November saw the beginning of squadron training, and he exchanged his hot, high room in the fort for a tent on the plains beyond the river. Camp life, with its long hours in the saddle and frosty nights under canvas or the open sky, was far more to his taste than the routine of the cantonment; and after sundown when the tired squadron had finished their evening meal and his fellow officers, sated with, fresh air and hard exercise, had fallen asleep, Ash would join a group around one of the fires and listen to the talk.

This to him was almost the best part of the day, and during it he learned a great deal more about his men than he would ever have learned in the normal course of his duties, not only about their families and personal problems, but the dissimilarities in their characters. For men who are relaxed and at ease show a different side of themselves from that which appears when they are on duty; and as the firelight faded and the ring of faces became shadowy and unrecognizable, they would discuss many things that would not normally have been raised in the presence of a
feringhi
. The talk would range widely, from tribal matters to theology; and once a Pathan sowar who had recently met and conversed with a missionary (to the mystification and deep misunderstanding of them both) had demanded of Ash an explanation of the Trinity: ‘For the Missionary-Sahib,’ said the sowar, ‘says that he too believes that there is only the One God, but that his god is three gods in one person. Now, how can that be?’

Ash hesitated for a moment, and then, picking up the lid of a biscuit-tin that someone had been using as a plate, poured a drop of water into three of the corners and said: ‘Look here are three things, are there not? Each separate to itself.’ The assembly having looked and agreed, he tilted the tin so that the three drops ran together and formed a single and larger one: ‘Now tell me, which is which of the three? There is now only one, yet all three are in that one.’ His audience had applauded and the tin was handed round to be peered at and argued over, and Ash achieved an overnight reputation for great wisdom.

He was sorry when the camp broke up and they returned to the cantonment, but apart from the blow to his hopes of an early marriage, he thoroughly enjoyed his first cold weather in Mardan. He got on well with his fellow officers and was on excellent terms with his men – all of whom, by the mysterious grapevines of India (for neither Zarin nor Awal Shah had talked), knew something of his story and took a keen and faintly proprietary interest in his progress. Because of this his troop soon acquired the reputation of being the smartest and best disciplined in its squadron, for which Ash received more credit than he deserved, as it was his background rather than any special talent for leadership or force of character that was responsible for this state of affairs. The men knew that ‘Pelham-Sahib’ not only spoke but thought as they did, and therefore could not be fooled by lies or tricks such as might serve occasionally with other Sahibs. They knew too that it was safe to bring him their private disputes, because he could be counted upon to make allowances for certain factors that would for ever be beyond the comprehension of those born and bred in the West. It was Ash, for example, who while out on detachment with his troop gave a judgement that was remembered and appreciated for many years on the Border…

His men had been told to keep a look out for a grey polo pony stolen from an officer stationed at Risalpur, and on the following night a missionary doctor, riding a grey horse, had jogged past in the moonlight and been challenged by a sentry. The horse had taken fright and bolted, and the sentry, supposing this to be the action of a thief putting spurs to his steed, fired at the doctor and fortunately missed. But the shot had gone uncomfortably close and the doctor, an elderly and choleric gentleman, had been exceedingly angry and lodged a complaint against the sentry. The man had come up for judgement the next morning and Ash, using the judiciary powers of a detachment commander, had sentenced him to fifteen days' detention with loss of pay: two days for firing at a Sahib, and the remainder for having missed him when he did. The sentence had been received with considerable acclamation, and the fact that the Commandant had later put it aside on the grounds that the sowar in question had acted in good faith did nothing to affect the popularity of the verdict; the men being well aware that Ash could not have enforced it and had merely taken this way of showing his disapproval of poor marksmanship. His seniors, however, had not been amused.

‘We shall have to watch that young man,’ said his Squadron Commander. ‘Good stuff in him, but he lacks balance.’

‘
Too rash, too unadvised, too sudden
,’ quoted Lieutenant Battye. ‘I agree. But he'll learn.’

‘I suppose so; though there are times when I have my doubts about it. If only he had a cooler head and a bit more steadiness, he'd be first-class material for a Corps like this. But he's too apt to go off at half-cock. Frankly, he worries me, Wigram.’

‘Why? The men think the world of him. He can do anything with them.’

‘I know. They treat him as though he were some sort of minor deity, and I believe they'd follow him anywhere.’

‘Well, what's wrong with that?’ demanded the Lieutenant, puzzled by his senior's tone of voice.

The Squadron Commander frowned and tugged unhappily at his moustache, looking baffled and irritated: ‘On the face of it, nothing. All the same, and just between the two of us, I'm not at all sure that in a crisis he wouldn't leap before he looked and lead them into something he couldn't get them out of. He's got plenty of courage, I'll grant you that. Possibly too much. But he seems to me to be guided too often by his emotions and not enough by… And there's another thing: in a pinch, and supposing he had to make a decision, which way would his loyalties lie? With England or India?’

‘Good God,’ gasped the Lieutenant, genuinely shocked. ‘You aren't suggesting he'd turn traitor, are you?’

‘No, no, of course not. Well… not exactly. But with a fellow like that – with that background I mean – there's no knowing how it might look to him. It's a deal simpler for you and me, Wigram, for we are always going to assume that our side of any question is the right one; because it's ours. But which is his side? See what I mean?’

‘Can't say that I do,’ admitted the Lieutenant uneasily. ‘After all, it's not as though he had any Indian blood in him, is it? Both his parents were as British as – as beer. And just because he was born out here – Well, I mean, dozens of fellows were. You were, for one.’

‘Yes, but I never once thought of myself as an Indian! Well he did, and that's the difference. Oh well, time will show. But I'm not at all sure that we didn't make a hell of a mistake in fetching him back to this country.’

‘Couldn't have stopped him,’ said the Lieutenant with conviction. ‘He'd have got back even if he'd had to walk – or swim. Seems to look upon it as his home.’

‘Exactly what I've been saying – but it isn't: not really. And one day he's going to find that out, and when he does, he'll realize that he doesn't belong anywhere – unless it's in Limbo, which as far as I remember is somewhere on the fringes of Hell. I tell you, Wigs, I wouldn't be in that boy's shoes for all the tea in China; and I probably wouldn't have cared a damn about it if he'd managed to get back here off his own bat, because that would have been his own affair. As it is, we – the Corps – saddled ourselves with the responsibility for it, so it's ours too, and that's what worries me. Though mark you, I like the boy.’

‘Oh, he's all right,’ said the Lieutenant easily. ‘A bit difficult to get to know, if you know what I mean. You get just so far and no further. But there's no denying that he's the best all-rounder on the sports side that we've had in years, and we ought to knock spots off the rest of the Brigade at next month's gymkhana.’

Neither Awal Shah nor Zarin were in Ash's squadron, and he saw comparatively little of them in Mardan, though whenever possible one or other of them would accompany him out shooting. When neither of them could do so, he would either go alone or take one of his sowars Malik Shah or Lal Mast, tribesmen from the country beyond the Panjkora, whose company he enjoyed and from whom he had learned much.

Malik Shah was an excellent
shikari
who could stalk a herd of gurral so cunningly that not one would see him until he was well within range; and in this his cousin, Lal Mast (the relationship was so remote that it was impossible to work out the degree), was almost his equal. But though Ash spent many hours in the hills with one or other of them when Zarin was otherwise occupied, he never learned to move as skilfully or as silently as they did, or mastered completely their trick of melting into the landscape and becoming so much a part of it that one would have sworn that there was no human being within miles.

‘It has to be learned when young,’ said Malik Shah consolingly, as the buck they had been stalking threw up its head and bounded away across the plain. ‘In my country, to move unseen, taking advantage of every stick and stone or blade of grass, may often mean the difference between living and dying; for we are all good shots and we make many enemies. But with you, Sahib, it is different; you have never had to lie as still as a stone, or slither from rock to rock as silently as a snake because an enemy waits for you on the far slope – or you yourself stalk one for his life. Had I a gun such as this one' (he had been shooting with his army-issue carbine) ‘I should make myself master of our valley and a score of villages among the hills. Wait here, Sahib, and I will drive the buck this way again – between that nullah and those thorn bushes yonder. That should give you a good shot.’