The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [588]
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