Drums Along the Khyber

by Philip McCutchan

  She gave a small, formal bob of her head. “Oh, but of course, Lord Dornoch, you really mustn’t mind about me—”

  “But I do,” he cut in gallantly. “I leave you with regret—but in good hands, I’m glad to say.” Then he was gone. Again Ogilvie had had a surprise. This was no longer the correct Colonel of the 114th Highlanders; there had been a light in his eye that was never there in the Mess or the battalion office or when Lady Dornoch, that rather formidable and important woman in subalterns’ lives, was with him—which currently she was not, having been confined to quarters with a touch of lumbago. Ogilvie swallowed, found his hands sweating lightly in the palms, and asked nervously, “Will you dance, Mrs. Archdale?”

  Her eyes seemed to mock him. “Colonel’s orders, Mr. Ogilvie? I heard what Lord Dornoch said, you know! Or do you really want to?”

  As a matter of fact he didn’t; he felt an obscure sense of danger because this girl was highly attractive and already he was feeling a response to her in his body. That would never do. He took a grip on himself, realizing he was being callow and foolish. What was a dance, after all? Very likely he would have the one dance and she would be off, looking for a more proficient partner. He said with a stiff reserve, “Yes, I really want to. May I have the honour?”

  Gaily she said, “Yes, Mr. Ogilvie, you may indeed,” and in fact it was she who took him and swept him into the whirl. Once there he took over, his masculinity vaguely affronted. He liked the touch of her bare flesh through his thin glove, wondered what it would be like without that absurd formal covering on his fingers. He found nothing to talk about, was as hopelessly tongue-tied as on that far-off day with his father at Balmoral, and the old Queen’s frosty stares. But this girl was vital and alive and not at all regal, not at all frosty, and she held her body close to his own; more closely, a quick glance around told him, than most of the others were doing. She seemed to know a great many people, which was rather off-putting, because she kept meeting eyes over his shoulder, and smiling, and now and again lifting her hand in a somehow appealing gesture. He felt her basic disinterest in himself despite their physical closeness, and this further inhibited his ability to muster any small talk, but after a while a thaw set in and he found himself answering her questions, which were mainly concerned with army matters, until the music stopped and the dancers moved off the floor to be replaced by others. Ogilvie guided Mrs. Archdale towards a door leading on to a dimly-lit terrace that ran right along one side of the ballroom and where there were tables and chairs. He said diffidently, “It should be cooler out there, don’t you think?”

  She giggled. “That’s what they all say!”

  “Oh—do they?” He flushed uncomfortably, as though he had made an advance and had been rebuffed.

  “Yes,” she said, “but never mind, I’d quite like to sit for a while.”

  On the terrace they went first to a marble balustrade and looked down a long drop to bare earth below where there was a moon-splashed cluster of mean-looking huts. Ogilvie remarked, “I wonder who lives down there.”

  “The sweepers, and creatures like that,” she said with the same lack of interest and feeling as MacKinlay had displayed when talking about the beggars. She changed the subject. “I think I’d like a drink.”

  “Of course.” Ogilvie turned away and signalled to a servant, who came up with a tray. Mrs: Archdale swept the native with a glance, turned her back and made for a table. The man followed. She sat, then disdainfully took a glass from the proffered tray—a glass of brandy. Ogilvie, scarcely aware of what he was choosing, took a glass that turned out to contain an excellent, full-bodied French wine. He raised the glass. “Your good health,” he murmured.

  “I have a feeling,” she said, smiling, “you should be saying ‘Her Majesty the Queen-Empress.’ Shouldn’t you?”

  He felt she was laughing at him. “I doubt if that would be appropriate,” he said, realizing how stiff he sounded.

  She was still smiling. “You’re awfully regimental,” she said surprisingly. “If you’re not careful you’ll end up like Tom.”

  “Tom?”

  “My husband. Major Archdale to you.” She did something to her hair, and the movement of her arm did something to the arrangement of her dress. Ogilvie found himself staring down into the valley between her breasts; he looked away. “The army can get too deeply into a man’s life,” she said with a hint of pensiveness. “It can be lonely for a woman. I gather you’re not married, Mr. Ogilvie.”

  He laughed. “Married subalterns are a rarity, Mrs. Archdale!”

  “I know that, but you won’t always be a subaltern, one hopes. Something tells me, in fact, you’re going to get on well. Is there a lucky girl, waiting somewhere in those remote Scottish hillsides?”

  All at once he felt a wave of nostalgia, a homesickness for Scotland, for its clean honesty and its glens and lochs and the crispness of a Highland morning. He said seriously, answering her question, “No one in particular at all events. Why do you ask, Mrs. Archdale?”

  She shrugged and said, “Oh, just put it down to the curiosity of army wives on remote stations. Your father’s the Divisional Commander, isn’t he?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” he said in surprise at the sudden shift—it was his night for surprises and again asked, “Why?”

  “Because he’s just come on to the terrace with His ghastly little Highness our host.”

  “The devil he has!”

  “My dear Mr. Ogilvie, he’s not going to eat you, surely?”

  He had got quickly to his feet, almost knocking over the table and glasses. His father, attended by an aide-de-camp, was coming along towards him, an important-looking figure in the Mess uniform of the General Staff, all scarlet and gold and garnished with tassels and medals and orders. Half a pace behind him, His Highness Feroz Khan grinned and shuffled and darted sharp glances to left and right. The native prince was accompanied now by three young eunuchs, his hand running up and down the satin-skinned arm of one of them. Ogilvie stood at attention as the procession moved past. His Highness gave him a sly sideways look and a slack-mouthed, suggestively approving grin. His father nodded distantly. “Evening, Ogilvie,” he said.

  “Good evening, sir.” The men moved on past; his father kept edging distastefully away from the eunuchs. As Ogilvie sat down once again Mrs. Archdale said, “Well, well! A regimental father, too. Very!”

  ”Yes.”

  “Has he always been like that?”

  “Yes.” Ogilvie was about to say something more, to excuse his father, when he saw the A.D.C. coming back towards him, a man of captain’s rank whom he didn’t know.

  The A.D.C. bowed to Mrs. Archdale then turned to Ogilvie. He said, “Mr. Ogilvie, the General suggests you make a point of attending His Highness’s special entertainment. It’s being held in the Throne Room, which leads off the terrace at the end.” He bowed again to Mrs. Archdale, then hurried away in Sir Iain’s wake.

  “Off you go as bidden,” Mrs. Archdale said brightly.

  “Won’t you come?”

  She gave a peal of laughter and tapped him with her fan. “My dear Mr. Ogilvie, no, I will not! I wouldn’t be admitted in any case—and when you get in there you’ll see for yourself why.”

  “Oh—I think I see. Well, I certainly don’t want to go.”

  “Oh, yes, you do,” she said good-humouredly, “and anyhow, you’ve been ordered to. And it may be good for your education—which is no doubt what was in your father’s mind. It’ll teach you a little more about India, and you’re going to be here a long time, so you mustn’t let any chivalrous thoughts of me detain you.”

  “Shall I see you again...after the entertainment?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “Ladies usually stay well away from unattached males after the kind of show Feroz Khan’s going to put on!”

  But he did in fact see her again after the special entertainment, and in the meantime he had certainly had his eyes opened. Fairly inexperienced with wome
n even in a purely social sense, James Ogilvie was still totally inexperienced when it came to the bedroom, was still as virginal as he’d been when staying with Jackie Harrington. What he saw that night stirred up the latent urges that had been stimulated back in Half Moon Street when the girl Freddie something-or-other had spent the night there. But this time nothing at all had been left to the imagination. It was an orgy, nothing less. The women—he was not sure if they were His Highness’s wives—disported themselves fantastically and entirely naked except for large jewels whose facets glittered from navels and nipples and elsewhere. They threw themselves frenziedly into the most extreme, and occasionally absurd, postures. The music was erotic, the action, in part of which the eunuchs were engaged, was more so. During the entertainment, more drink was served. Ogilvie sweated, became the victim of an urge so strong that he felt his body must explode. Now and again he stole a glance at his father; that irascible gentleman was staring as if transfixed, his eyes bulging, his mouth slightly open. Ogilvie—again—was intensely surprised; for perhaps the first time in his life he saw his father as a human being with all a man’s emotions. Never had he seen him like this; neither, he was willing to bet from the basis of a sudden flash of insight, had his mother, in front of whom his father behaved publicly as did Lord Dornoch in the company, or rather the presence, of Lady Dornoch. He looked at the other officers, singling out the Royal Strathspeys. Black had an intent, hungry look. He was at one and the same time eager and disapproving. Major Hay was looking appalled, though presumably, having served in India before, he was no stranger to this kind of entertainment. The Colonel was smiling slightly, had adopted a bored, patrician look of tolerance. MacKinlay and the other company commanders and Ogilvie’s brother subalterns seemed to be enjoying it well enough and were in no way embarrassed as Ogilvie himself was. Ogilvie’s attention went back to the performing women. He was surprised at the lack of beauty in them; always he had imagined that Eastern women, the women in the harems, were good-looking and seductive. These were not, in the main. One or two were reasonably so, but the majority were skinny, haggard even, with dirty, tousled hair and sagging breasts and lined faces, and there was a smell of uncleanness as though the palace was short on soap and water, which it probably was. But that didn’t matter to Ogilvie; he found, to his shame, that he was seeing Mrs. Archdale in those unlovely bodies, that he was mentally projecting her in their places, that he was seeing her as he was seeing them, her nudity displayed with eager abandon before him; and this was the more shame-making because—regimental thought! —he didn’t even know her christian name...

  Soon after the officers had rejoined the ladies, Ogilvie, sweating still from drink and excitement and with his pulse racing, saw Mrs. Archdale in the centre of a group of young officers, none of them as it happened from the 114th. Laughing, she excused herself and left the group to join. Ogilvie. “Well?” she asked challengingly.

  He stared at her, blood pounding through his head, visualizing again all that he couldn’t see. Licking his lips he said, “I do understand...why you couldn’t come.”

  She nodded, then said with sudden compassion and understanding, laying her fan against his chest, “Don’t let it all disturb your dreams too much. There are plenty of unattached girls in India. You’ll see. When you have leave to visit Simla, or Poona...they’ll come running. I promise you that, James.”

  “James?” he repeated.

  She said, “It’s your name, isn’t it? I made enquiries. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Mine’s Mary. Why don’t you come and sit down for a minute, you look unwell.”

  “Yes,” he said stupidly, and almost staggered across the floor towards the terrace, pushing into people and getting a number of eyebrows raised at him. He was really more than a little drunk. As they sat down at one of the tables in a dark corner he said in a thickish voice, “I’ve had a damn sight too much to drink.”

  “You’ve had a damn sight too much of other things too,” she said crisply. “They ought to give people a course on Indian social life before sending them out here!”

  “Yes,” he said again; then, speaking as thickly as before, he said, “Mary, d’you know something?”

  She looked at him curiously. “Well, go on.”

  He said, “I’ve never even kissed a girl.”

  She laughed. “Oh dear, don’t let your friends hear you confess that!” Then she saw his terrible seriousness and her voice softened and she said, “Well, then, you may as well begin now as later,” and very gently she moved into his arms and she lifted her face towards him and their lips met. He kissed her clumsily but hungrily and with a strange, consuming passion, and he was reluctant for it to end. It was she who drew away, as gently as she had begun. She said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Well, James, that’s that. I don’t know what’s been started but it mustn’t go on...and I know I’m to blame.”

  He said, “Tell me about yourself.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Oh, all right, I will. Better if I do, rather than have someone tell you what isn’t true, which is sure to happen sooner or later in a place like Peshawar. I’m told I look like twenty, but in fact I’m twenty-seven, which is far too old for you even if I wasn’t married to Tom. So don’t get ideas of—of falling in love with me, which I see is at least half of the cards—and don’t tell me I’m too frank, I know I am. Just remember you’re a little drunk and you’ve had an emotional evening, and this is India. It can be terribly, dangerously romantic—all those hills, and the silence of the plains, and the glamour, which is horribly false really, of serving the Queen and being treated as God because of it. And the fighting, and the coming back as heroes because you’ve killed some poor starving tribesmen who didn’t want to change their way of life and who were defending their own just as much as the English tried to do way back in 1066—and the Scots at Flodden Field and Culloden. Which are sentiments dear Tom would simply hate to hear expressed,” she added in a voice that had gone very hard. “Which leads me to the next thing I have to tell you before someone else does. I do not love Tom, I loathe him. He’s an old man, James—fifty-three. He’s the stupidest man I’ve ever, ever met and he’s the Brigade Major of the Mahratta Brigade, and I don’t know if there’s any connection or not. And he’s a killer. He adores India because it lets him be a high-level killer and gives him medals for being one. It’s his outlet. He has no time for sex, he hasn’t even the ability, poor Tom!” He felt a sense of shock at such forthrightness from an officer’s wife. “But I’ll tell you something you’re going to be sorry to hear in your present state of mind and it’s this: I’ve never been in any man’s bed but Tom’s and though I may fall one of these days, it’s not going to be tonight or with a boy of your age. So go back to cantonments with your Colonel and the regiment, James dear, and tomorrow go off to fight. And if you happen to run into Tom when you’re through the Khyber, and I pray God you do get through safely, you’ll feel much better because you’ll be able to look him in the eye. All right?”

  He nodded, his head reeling, his body still on fire. “All right,” he said in a low voice and, looking up, saw Captain Black coming towards them.

  Black had merely come to round up the officers for a return to cantonments, Dornoch having sought His Highness’s leave to extract his battalion early so that they could the better march next morning. Normally, these affairs went on into the small hours or even right through the night, it seemed. Black said nothing at the time about Mary Archdale but Ogilvie guessed from the disapproving look in his eye that he was only storing it up. He was right. Next morning at dawn the skid of the pipes aroused the battalion and, soon after, the bugles sent the men running on to the parade where, with their baggage train, native bearers and mountain artillery, they formed up before Lord Dornoch. As the sun went up the sky in many-coloured splendour, striking fire off the hills, the 114th Highlanders marched away from the cantonments in column of route, behind the pipes and drums and
the Colonel on his charger, with Sir Iain Ogilvie on his right, marched away on action bent, all of them with high spirits but all of them wondering who would be the ones who would not return. And later as James Ogilvie marched ahead of his half-company, the adjutant, mounted and wearing trews, wheeled his horse out of the line and waited beside the dusty track until Ogilvie drew level with him.

  “A word in your ear, James,” he said. “You’ll kindly fall out.”

  Ogilvie did so. “Yes?” he asked.

  “You were in a compromising situation last night. I refer, of course, to Mrs. Archdale, as I understand the woman’s name to be.”

  “There was nothing compromising about that,” Ogilvie snapped back, his colour—and his temper—rising. “We were simply talking, that’s all.”

  “Aye—alone, on a darkened terrace!” the adjutant said furiously.

  “What’s wrong with that?”