The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [142]
Ash observed dampingly that Nicholson's men had failed to follow him, and that he had in fact lingered on in agony for at least three days after being shot.
‘What if he did? That's not the way he'll be remembered. Alexander said it all more than two thousand years ago' – there was a glow in the boy's eyes and his face had flushed like a girl's – ‘ “It is a lovely thing to live with courage, and to die leaving behind an everlasting renown.” I read that when I was ten, and I've never forgotten it. That's exactly –’
He broke off as a sudden shiver made his teeth chatter, and Ash said: ‘Goose walking over your grave – and serve you right. Speaking for myself, I'd rather play safe and live to a ripe and undistinguished old age.’
‘Oh, rats!’ retorted Wally scornfully, firm in the conviction that his friend was a hero. ‘It's getting damned chilly out here. Race you to the road.’
Ash was no stranger to hero-worship. He had received a good deal of it from his juniors in the days when he had been a member of the first eleven at his school, and later when he had played for the Military Academy; and once, long ago, from a little girl; ‘a small sour-looking little thing like an unripe mango’. He had never taken it very seriously and had in general found it either irritating or embarrassing; and on occasions, both. But Wally's admiration was different, and it warmed his heart because it was a tribute from a friend, and not slavish adulation for mere physical prowess and skill at games, regardless of whether the possessor of it was, in himself, an admirable or a despicable character; or a dull one.
The two became known in Rawalpindi as ‘The Inseparables’ and if one were seen without the other there was always someone to call out: ‘Hullo David – what have you done with Jonathan?’ or ‘Blowed if it ain't Wally! I didn't recognize you without Pandy – you look improperly dressed.’ These and other equally foolish pleasantries had at first attracted the disapproving attention of several senior officers, none of whom would have objected very much to their juniors keeping half-caste mistresses or visiting the harlots' quarter of the bazaar (always provided they were discreet about it) but who had a horror of what they termed ‘unnatural vice’.
To these grey-beards any close friendship between young men was suspect, and they feared the worst; but careful inquiry revealed nothing that could be termed ‘unnatural’ about the vices of either young officer. In that respect at least, both were unquestionably ‘normal’ – as Lalun, for one (the most alluring and expensive courtesan in the city), could have testified. Not that their visits to such establishments were very frequent; their tastes lay in other directions, and Lalun and her kind merely represented experience: one of many. Together they rode, raced and played polo, shot partridge on the plains and chikor among the hills, fished or went swimming in the rivers, and spent far more than they could afford on buying horses.
They read voraciously – military history, memoirs, poetry, essays, novels: De Quincey, Dickens, Thackeray and Walter Scott; Shakespeare, Euripides and Marlowe; Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Balzac's La Comédie Humaine and Darwin's Descent of Man… Tacitus and the Koran, and as much of the literature of the country as they could get their hands on – their tastes were catholic and all was grist to their mill. Wally was working for his Lieutenancy and Ash coached him in Pushtu and Hindustani, and talked to him by the hour of India and its peoples; not the British India of cantonments and Clubs, or the artificial world of hill stations and horse shows, but that other India: that mixture of glamour and tawdriness, viciousness