The Complete McAuslan (63 page)

There seemed to be more casual activity than usual in the vicinity that morning: several platoons were drilling on the square, various Jocks had found an excuse for moving to and from the nearer buildings, and others were being unobtrusive in the middle distance; nothing like a crowd, just a modest gathering, not large enough to excite the displeasure of R.S.M. Macintosh as he made his magisterial way across the parade, pausing to survey the platoons who presently stopped drilling and stood easy, but did not dismiss. It was all very orderly, but in no way official; they were waiting to see Suleiman ibn Aziz go, without being too obvious about it. The windows and verandahs of the farther barrack-blocks had their share of spectators, and the Padre and M.O. were coming through the main gate and mounting the guardroom steps, returning the magnificent salute of the
sous-officier —
he was a slightly puzzled
sous-officier,
judging by the way he was studying the square: why so many Ecossaises about, he might well have been wondering. Was this how les Dames d’Enfer kept discipline, by example? What would Milor’ Wellington have said? He shook his head and resumed pacing, and the Ecossaises regarded him bleakly from under their bonnet-brims.

‘Now’s the time for the English to attack,’ observed the M.O.

‘Right enough, Lachlan,’agreed the Padre. ‘The Auld Alliance is looking gey fragile.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Band practice shortly, I think – there, what did I say?’

From behind the band office came the warm-up notes of a piper, and then the slow measured strains of ‘Lovat’s Lament’, the loveliest and most stately of slow marches. The Padre nodded approval.

‘Aye, that’s pipey. Not bad, for a man that never set foot on Skye.’

‘Who’s idea’s this?’ I asked. ‘The Colonel’s?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ said the M.O. ′Here he is, wi’ the Comédie Francaise.’

The Colonel and Adjutant were emerging from the tamarisk grove that screened the mess, with the French officers and the P.M. The R.S.M. let out a splendid Guards-trained scream of ‘Attain-shah!’ and there was an echoing crash of heels on the square. The Padre chuckled.

‘Canny Macintosh! You notice he didn’t say “Parade-shun!” Because there is no parade, of course. A nice distinction.’

I followed the Colonel’s party into the guardroom, the
sous-officier
and the Moorish interpreter bringing up the rear. Suleiman, with McGarry standing by, was sitting beside the table, very composed, the lean brown face impassive under the silver-edged
kafilyeh
— it was hard to believe that this frail, quiet little man had twice tried to break out, fighting like a wild beast and trying to stab a sentry with his own bayonet. He didn’t get up, and the French Major smiled and turned to the Colonel.

‘I am pleased he has caused you no inconvenience, sir.’ He spoke English with barely a trace of accent.

‘None whatever,’ said the Colonel. ‘All ready, Sarn′t McGarry? Very well, sir.’

The Major nodded to the
sous-officier,
who strode across and snapped an order. Suleiman didn’t stir, and the
sous-officier
repeated it in an explosive bark that was startling in its unexpected violence. But not as startling as what followed. McGarry stiffened to his full height and rasped:

‘You don’t talk tae the man like that, son!’

The
sous-officier
didn’t speak the language, but he knew cold menace when he heard it, and gave back as though he’d been hit – which, in my opinion, he nearly had been. The others stared, all except the Colonel, who had tactfully turned aside to listen to something that the Adjutant wasn’t saying. There was an embarrassed pause, and then Suleiman glanced up at McGarry and, with the smallest of deprecating gestures, rose to his feet. He turned his back on the
sous-officier,
looked McGarry full in the face, and made the quick graceful heart-lips-brow salutation of the
salaam.

For once McGarry was taken flat aback, and then he did the only thing he could do – stamped his heel and nodded. Suleiman turned away and calmly surveyed the waiting officers; he looked for a moment at the Colonel and then said something in Arabic to the interpreter, who passed it on in French to the Major, indicating the bundle of coarse cloth on the table which contained Suleiman’s belongings. The Major looked surprised, shrugged, and turned to the Colonel.

‘It seems there is something he wishes to leave with you.’

He gave an order to the
sous-officier,
and we waited expectantly while the bundle was unwrapped. Outside the pipey could still be heard running through his repertoire; he was on to the marches now, with a kettle-drum rattling accompaniment, but you couldn’t tell whether Suleiman was hearing it or not. He was standing absolutely still, his hands clasped before him, looking straight ahead at the Colonel, but he must have been watching out of the corner of his eye, for as the
sous-officier
began to take out the bundle’s contents – a packet of papers, a bunch of keys, a couple of enamelled boxes, a few rather fine-looking ornaments which were probably gold and silver, one or two strands of jewellery – he gave another grunt in Arabic and thrust out his hand, palm up. The
sous-officier
was holding a packet about a foot long, wrapped in red muslin; he passed it to the interpreter, who handed it nervously to Suleiman.

You could have heard a pin drop while the little man flicked a hand to indicate that the rest of his goods should be parcelled up again, and then stood looking down at the red packet, turning it in his hands, clasping it as though reluctant to let it go. Then his head came up and he walked across to the Colonel and held it out to him with both hands. The Colonel took it, and as he did so Suleiman suddenly clasped both his hands over the Colonel’s on the package, holding the grip hard and staring fiercely into the Colonel’s face. Then he let go, inclined his head gravely, and stepped back. The Colonel said ‘Thank you’, and Suleiman ibn Aziz walked out of the guardroom.

On the verandah he paused for a moment, looking at the Jocks in the square who were waiting to see him go. The unseen Pipe-Sergeant and the kettle-drums were waking the echoes, and I heard the Padre murmur to the M.O.:

‘That’ll be “The Music of Suleiman ibn Aziz”, I daresay – it sounds just like “The Black Bear” to me, but then I haven’t the pipey’s imagination.’

Suleiman ibn Aziz went down the steps and into the waiting car, the French officers exchanged salutes with the Colonel and climbed in, the legionnaires piled into the jeep, the
sous-officier
exchanged a last stare with McGarry, the sentry on the gate presented arms as the vehicles drove through, and the Jocks on the square began to drift away.

The Colonel was holding the red muslin package. ‘Right, let’s have a look at it,’ he said, and led the way back into the guardroom, for he knew McGarry would be as curious as the rest of us. We all stood round as he unwrapped the cloth, and when the contents lay on the table nobody spoke for quite some time. We just looked at it and let the thought sink in.

It was an Arab dagger, and not a rich or ornamental one. The sheath was cracked and discoloured, and while the blade was classically curved and shone like silver, it was pitted with age, the brass cross-hilt was scarred, the pommel had lost its inlay, and the haft was bound with wire in two places. You wouldn’t have given two ackers for it on a bazaar stall – unless you had laid it across your finger and noted the perfect balance, or lowered its edge on to a piece of paper and watched it slice through of its own weight.

The Colonel fingered his moustache, gave a little cough, said ‘Well,’ and was silent. He picked the dagger up again, weighed it in his hand, and said at last: ‘Not the most valuable of his possessions, I daresay. But certainly the most precious.’

‘He must have had it a long time,’ said the Adjutant. In a wondering tone he added: ‘He gave it to us.’

The Colonel pushed the blade home. ‘Right. Get it cleaned up and sterilised – God knows who it’s been in. It can go with the mess silver.’ He caught the Adjutant’s doubtful frown. ‘Well, why shouldn’t it? If some cavalry regiment can use Napoleon’s brother’s chamber-pot as a punchbowl, I see no reason why you shouldn’t cut your cheese with a knife that’s been through the Riff Rebellion.’

‘Absolutely, sir!’ agreed the Adjutant hastily. ‘I’ll see the mess sergeant looks after it right away.’ Then he looked worried. ‘I say, though – we ought to have given old Suleiman some cash for it – you know, bad luck not to pay for a knife. Cuts friendship, my aunt used to say.’

The Colonel paused in the doorway. ‘I’m afraid his luck can’t get much worse, Michael.’ He frowned, considering. ‘And I’m not sure that we were ever friends, exactly. Put it with the silver anyway.’

McAuslan, Lance-Corporal

To hear him talk, usually at the top of his raucous voice, you might have thought that Private McAuslan was a violent man, but he wasn’t, really, except under extreme provocation. Being unclean, dim, handless, illiterate, and ugly, he attracted a good deal of abuse from comrades as well as superiors, but while he didn’t take it gladly his response seldom went beyond verbal truculence. Any day you might hear his warning roar of ‘Watch it, china!’ floating from the windows of 12 Platoon barrack-room, followed by furious threats to melt, claim, sort out, or banjo his critic, but there it would end, as a rule; his associates knew just how far it was safe to rib him, and that there were some subjects best left alone. His intelligence, for example: he was used to being called dumb, dozy, clueless, and not the full hod of bricks, and that was all right, being the small change of military conversation; only if the ridicule went too far, or became too penetrating, was physical eruption liable to follow, as young Corporal Crawford learned to his cost.

He was a weapons instructor who, during a lecture, was unwise enough to make fun of McAuslan’s inability to see through a well-known optical illusion. Bren gun magazines are kidney-shaped; lay them side by side and one looks larger than the other because its convex edge is longer than the concave edge of the magazine beside it; change them over, and the one which looked smaller now appears to be the bigger . . . a simple trick which causes much hilarity among five-year-olds.

Whether McAuslan had reached that stage, intellectually, was debatable, but he wasn’t amused. I wasn’t present, but according to my informant, Private Forbes, Crawford had been squatting over the magazines on the floor, switching them round and jeering at McAuslan’s failure to see that they were identical, and McAuslan, having glowered at them in genuine baffled fury, had suddenly kicked Crawford full in the solar plexus, lifting him several feet and laying him out cold. Which had earned McAuslan fourteen days in the cooler, as well as demonstrating that there are few things more dangerous than presenting a primitive mind with an insoluble problem, never mind mocking it. Good teachers know this; bad ones, like Crawford, are appalled when they learn it the hard way.

The only other time I knew McAuslan moved to calculated assault (occasional canteen disturbances don’t count, in Scottish regiments) was when he attacked an Arab vendor who had been threatening Ellen Ramsey on a shopping expedition, but that had been simple gallantry. Any normal – or in McAuslan’s case, sub-normal – man would have been glad to play knight-errant to the fair Ellen, although in justice to the lad I believe he would have been just as forward in the defence of Gagool the Crone. For there was a champion inside McAuslan’s ill-made frame, and a strong sense of fair play – his concept of what was, in his own words, ‘no’ fair’, got him court-martialled once. But, as I say, he wasn’t normally given to hitting people, and when I heard that he and Private Chisholm were in cells for fighting in (and incidentally wrecking) the battalion’s modest library, I was moved to do some preliminary investigating before their inevitable appearance in front of the Colonel.

For one thing, the locale was unusual, and for another, Chisholm was a civil, sober, and well-bred lad, the product of an Edinburgh public school, and a most unlikely antagonist for McAuslan, if only because each probably had difficulty understanding what the other was saying, a common prerequisite to disagreement. I visited them in the guardroom, starting with Chisholm as the more likely to provide a coherent explanation.

He didn’t, as it turned out. Indeed, he was reticent to the point of embarrassment, and would say only that there had been a private difference of opinion, which since he was sporting a splendid black eye was an obvious understatement. I warned him that the Colonel would require rather more detail, and passed on to intrude on Private Grief in person; he was sitting on his cell floor, bruised and foul, moodily pulling threads from a blanket and looking like a disgruntled cave-dweller.

‘Chisholm made a pretty good job of you,’ I observed, breaking the ice tactfully.

‘Chisholm’s a ——’, he said, with unusual venom, and then rose and crouched apologetically to attention. ‘Ah beg yer pardon, sur; Ah shouldnae hiv said that. Awfy sorry. Aye, but he should’ve knowed better, so he should. Ah mean, he’s no’ a yahoo, is he? Chisholm, he’s meant tae be eddimacated, fella that’s been tae a posh school, an’ that —’

‘All right, McAuslan,’ I said patiently. ‘What happened?’

He scowled, with an indignant snuffle. ‘He insultit me.’

‘Insulted you?’ It seemed unlikely, if not impossible. ‘How?’

‘Aye, weel, ye see. It wis because o’ because. That’s whit startit it.’

Not for the first time with him, I found myself doubting my senses. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to say that again. It was because of what?’

‘Because. Whit he said aboot because.’

‘I’m not with you, McAuslan. Why do you keep saying because?’

‘Because that’s whit it wis aboot. Because.’

I felt that if I asked ‘Who’s on first?’ he would reply ‘No, he’s on third,’ like Abbot and Costello, so I tried a new line.

‘Shut up, McAuslan. Now, we’ll start again. Why were you in the battalion library?’