Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  “Is he here still? I do not know. We shall find him perhaps after crossing the river. Soon we will come to the Bor Soree River, and crossing it we come into our Hima, our own district.”

  “But what is his name, sir, this man from Scotland?”

  “It is a strange name; I cannot say it. But we call him Sur Bylla.”

  “Sur Bylla?”

  “Aye, it means…a borrowed tune from another district, a borrowed tune which we adopt and then we sing it or play it, too, because we like it. The Scot-land man, he is like that—a borrowed tune.”

  After this, Catherine felt no doubts about finding Sandy. But each day as they proceeded—mounted upon elephants, ascending into these beautiful misty highlands graced with pine forests and waterfalls, orchids and butterflies—she felt that the ordinary world of mortals was falling away behind her; that she was passing into another distinct world; and who could ever follow her here? Who would?

  Catherine felt perfectly safe on an elephant, so much more reliable than a horse. She and Grace and Sharada rode on one; another carried Anibaddh and Mrs Babcock and the infant Constantia.

  The mists came and went around them as their party made their way—on elephants, on bullocks, on foot—up the sloping, grassy tablelands toward the high wooded escarpments rising to the south, visible now and then between curtains of mist.

  “What are those stones?” Catherine asked Sharada, “those great stones standing up on end? We have passed several groups of them now.”

  “Oh, in honour of the ancestors perhaps,” said Sharada. “I don’t know—they are very old. Some of them are altars, for offerings. I am thinking they are everywhere in these hills.”

  “In Scotland there are great circles of stones like that from the ancient times,” said Catherine. “No one knows who put them there, or why.”

  “It is just a thing that men are liking to do everywhere in the world—setting stones up on end. Oh, men!”

  The sun was low, and a brilliant rainbow filled the east, at their left, by the time they arrived at last at the fording place on the bank of the Bor Soree River. Across the river stood a considerable town of thatched houses and stone terraces set well back from the river’s edge and comfortably settled in a wide lap of open grassland below the forested hills. The water was running high, but not too high for crossing. One by one, the bullocks and the elephants and the men on foot made their way across the slippery stones.

  The elephant carrying Catherine, Grace, and Sharada had tender feet, and she picked her way unwillingly across the sharp rocks at the water’s edge, her mahout prodding her behind her ears with his toes and with reproachful words: ah geet! ah geet! The elephant proceeded through water that came up above her knees at the middle of the river, but suddenly she missed her footing and pitched hard to her left, nearly unseating Catherine, who grabbed thin air—and then the howdah and Grace—and just managed to save herself.

  My lay! cried the mahout. But a brass-bound chest containing Sharada’s belongings came loose and tumbled down the elephant’s side into the streaming water. It was still attached by a loose binding, but it was pulling the howdah sideways. The chest was made of wood, and it floated for a moment. But it was not made to be watertight, and in any case the current caught it and pulled hard.

  The mahout turned the elephant downriver and told her eh dur! oota! in no uncertain terms, prodding now with his ankush. Chastened, the elephant reached with her trunk for the chest, but as she moved forward the current carried the chest forward, too, to the end of its tether. Oopa dur! cried the mahout, and this time the elephant managed to reach the chest, and with a groan she lowered herself a little, just enough to wrap her trunk around it and drag it from the water. Then, forgetting her tender feet, she made quickly for the shallows and burst up onto the far bank as water streamed off her gray flanks. She gently set down the chest, upside down, on a tussock of grass upon command. Water drained from its brass-bound corners.

  “Oh, Sharada! All your things! Your musical instruments!” cried Grace.

  “The instruments will take no harm. But there are other things. I must dry them if I can.” They dismounted, and Sharada went to attend to her precious things while the rest of the party spread out to dry themselves upon the riverbank.

  Another fainter rainbow had appeared above, outside the first one, its colours reversed. Catherine walked up a little rise to see it better. She wanted to be alone for a few minutes, before the party pulled itself together again and proceeded to the night’s camping place just below the town. Voices floated up to her, voices speaking languages she did not understand. Would she ever understand them? Had she been in these misty hills forever? Would she remain in these misty hills forever? Among strangers?

  The mist blew down again and blotted out the rainbows. Even the voices below her suddenly became muted.

  For no more reason than that, Catherine wept. Such an indulgence, such a relief, these tears in private. She recalled a tune, a ceol mhor tune that Sandy used to play for her on the pipes sometimes called “Cumha Catriona,” “Catherine’s Lament.” It always filled her with so sublime a sorrow, so fierce and acute a sorrow that it resembled joy. It felt like this.

  The hot tears cooled on her face.

  Off to the east, where the wet hills rose up, there was something to hear.

  She listened.

  How could it be a piper? How could it be the sound of bagpipes?

  There was no path, no trail across the open grassland, the rolling rising ground, dotted by trees looming here and there out of the mist. Catherine’s shoes and stockings were soon drenched—heavy and squishing; she was hurrying, breaking into a run where she could, panting, climbing.

  The music stopped, and so did she. Waiting.

  It began again. The piper tuned, adjusting the drones. He played a particular little spring, a phrase to tune against. Surely not everyone tuned in just that way, using just that phrase?

  She breasted a knoll and suddenly found herself in a garden, a plantation of knee-high shrubs set in an orderly grid across the gently sloping red clay hill. She knew very well what they were, these glossy, compact dark green plants. She waded between two rows of them, still making her way upward. Their stiff branches grabbed at the fragile fabric of her wet skirt.

  Very near now.

  She left the tea plantation behind and ascended into a misty woodland. Then the trees fell behind her as she crested the slope, emerging onto a grassy place dotted with rocks and walled in by mist. She could see only a blank whiteness on all sides.

  But he was here. She stood still, and the sound of the pipes rang all about her. And he was playing his own tune, “Not Yet Drown’d.”

  He finished the urlar and began the first variation, the thumb variation with the highest notes. As she stood, the tricky breeze came up again and the mist thinned, then blew away.

  There he was, with his back to her, facing an enormous upright gray stone, standing up close to it and playing his pipes to its rough glistening surface—just as he used to do at home. It was so he could really hear the pipes, he used to say, really hear the sound breaking back onto him, off the stone surface three feet away.

  The mist had settled in droplets in his raging hair like a faint halo. She reached up and felt her own—just the same. He played the taorluath singling, then surged ahead into the doubling, forward, moving strongly now. Then settled back again for the crunluath, so abstractly, baroquely ornamented that the original tune was almost submerged. Yet a purer, more essential version of the underlying notes still shone, like the largest rocks in the river still above water—wet and glistening—when the river runs high. Then the little rocks are submerged and only the big important ones remain, standing up in their swirling liquid collet settings, big cabochon gemstones set in smooth gold; never mind now the little ones set in busy figured enamels. Then the plunging urgency of the crunluath doubling, like a river approaching a fall. Over the edge, then, into the air: the crunluath a mach.
Catherine lost her place in it, the phrases closing over her head. Which way is up?

  Then, at last, the still, deep black pool at the bottom once more: the majestic return to the opening phrase of all, the first line of the urlar.

  It was ended. He stopped. Silence came rushing back in to fill the tear that the sound of the pipes had made. Removing the mouthpiece, he stepped forward and licked the wet stone in front of him.

  “Thirsty work, my darling,” said Catherine. “I have a wee bit of whisky still, but not with me just at the moment.”

  He turned.

  Like looking into a mirror.

  25

  a gracefull Conclusion to the whole

  “Disgraceful, I call it,” said Grace.

  “What is disgraceful, my dear?” asked Catherine, distracted, for she was searching through her workbag, a messy tangle by now of various vivid silks and worsteds.

  “Sharada’s songs, of course! Can you not understand them? Still, after all this time? Indeed, you have no taste for language, Catriona. And she goes about all the day long singing under one’s very ear. All about preparing beds and strewing them with flowers for lovers to disport themselves upon; and limbs aching with longing, heavy and dark as monsoon clouds. And so on. I don’t think I ought to be permitted to hear this sort of thing.”

  “Oh, dear! I daresay it is exceedingly indecent. So many of these Hindu songs are. It is a thousand pities that you pick up these languages so quickly. Pray, try not to listen, or at least not to understand.”

  It was true that Sharada sang all day; and to judge from her languor, her heavy-lidded eyes, she did not sleep much at night. Grace continued, “And while of course I am very glad that Uncle Sandy is not dead after all, still I don’t quite see—”

  “That is a relief. You are much too young yet to ‘quite see,’” said Catherine briskly. It was quite obvious that Sandy did not spend his nights in sleep either. Catherine could not fail to notice the blue shadows under his eyes, like bruises against his pale skin. She changed the subject: “Where do you suppose all my copper-coloured silk floss has got to?”

  “Well, do you?” said Grace.

  “Do I what?”

  “See—understand—what all the fuss is about,” said Grace. “It’s only Uncle Sandy; he’s not the king of Burma. He’s given us all a great deal of trouble as a matter of fact, slipping off like that. Tricky, I call it, at the very least. But to hear Sharada carry on, you’d think he was the young Lord Krishna himself. I am losing respect for her, and after all this time, too. She’s changed.”

  “You have a point,” admitted Catherine.

  Here at Sandy’s airy house, days and nights were joyous—to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual. Catherine was ashamed to acknowledge that she felt disappointed and sore at heart. Surely she ought to take delight from the success of her long hard quest? From the fact that Sandy was not dead? And from his joy and Sharada’s?

  But joy was not what she felt.

  And as to the disappearance of the copper-coloured silk floss, she felt inexplicably annoyed. Surely she had not used all of it on the lady’s hair in her canvaswork.

  Sandy’s house stood on the breast of a slope overlooking the tea gardens, outside the town above the Bor Soree River. The house was of the local type, set on a raised platform of packed earth. Walls of woven bamboo screens were affixed to a stout frame of bamboo timbers, then plastered thickly with smoothed mud inside and out, and generously whitewashed with lime. There were several large rooms, and screens and curtains were moved about for privacy where needed. The roof was grass thatch, and the eaves were deep, making a wide veranda all the way around. An airy room at one end had a platform for the cooking fire. The hole in the thatch overhead for a chimney was just like that of a Highland croft.

  Catherine rose early these mornings; she was too troubled to sleep well. And Sandy, who had always been an early riser, generally joined her on the veranda with steaming tea in the misty half-light before the dawn, before the rest of the household was stirring. They would drink tea and quietly talk over all the many astonishing things that had happened to them since they had parted five years before.

  He was now half a head taller than Catherine, taller and sturdier than when he had left Scotland. They had been only eighteen years old the last time they had seen each other. Catherine often caught herself gazing at him, drinking up the sight of him, so thirsty was she for the sight of his face, his limbs—so familiar, yet rather different now, too, after all this time. There was a great deal of catching up to be done.

  But she was surprised, after the first joyful transports of their reunion had receded, at how furiously angry she felt toward him. And one morning, without quite intending it, she burst out bitterly: “Did you never give a thought for us? How could you have done this to us? How could you have let us all grieve so for you?”

  He was taken aback: “But I sent you those messages!”

  “That parcel? Do you call that a message?”

  “But you did understand what it meant—my little tune retitled just for you. You have said so! And I knew, Catriona, that you—you!—would understand it.”

  “Well, and so I did,” she admitted grudgingly, “obscure though it was. But Hector always refused to believe in it, and he persecuted me about it most unjustly.”

  “Hector! So deficient in imagination! He lacks the conspirator’s temperament. But it did occur to me that my parcel might not reach you, or you might not study it closely, or you might not succeed in convincing Hector of its meaning. So then I sent him that other message, which even he could not fail to understand. It had to be nonsense, of course, or anyone who knew Gaelic could have deciphered it. But I knew he would recognise my handwriting—right across the front sheet of the Calcutta Gazette, printed just exactly a month after my ‘drowning.’ Ha ha! Whatever did he make of that, our Hector? I have often amused myself in thinking of his puzzling over it! But I knew that you would be able to tell him what it meant.”

  “Whatever do you mean? We never received anything of that kind.”

  “But I saw it sent off to Calcutta by dak, by the mail carrier, you know, from Dacca, with my own eyes. I had a native scribe in the bazaar there send it under cover to the captain of the Regent, down at Calcutta.”

  “Ah! The Regent, the East Indiaman Regent?”

  “Aye; in Dacca I had a glimpse of the shipping digest and saw that she was due shortly to embark for home. That must have been, oh, late August, I daresay, of ’twenty-one.”

  “But the Regent was lost off the coast of Mauritius that October, my dear.”

  “Lost?”

  “Foundered, sunk. Only six survivors were picked up afterward by a French ship. Without their mail pouch, of course. The ship’s master had disembarked at Ceylon, refusing to go any further, for he declared that the ship was not seaworthy. But the captain would not hear of it. Then so soon, so tragically, the master was proven right. It was a great scandal; people were talking of it, and Parliament took up the matter of fraudulent surveys and repairs.”

  “Is it so? My message for Hector was lost then at sea…I did not know that. Somehow that news did not penetrate here, to these misty mountains. But I did my best, Catriona. I did not wish you to grieve for me. I wanted you to know that I was alive, though I could not yet tell you plainly where I was and what I was doing.”

  “Were we ever to hear of you again?”

  “Certainly, my dear. It is not so easy to send letters from here, you will understand; there is no post. But now that the secret of my great enterprise must come out within a very short time, I had been preparing to send word again to Scotland, to you and Hector there. Aye, we are just about to burst upon the world in a blaze of glory with our first chests of tea. What a sensation we will make! With this first tea in the world that is not from China!”

  Someone stirred inside; then Grace wandered out and joined them on the veranda. She was rubbing her eyes, and the hair on
one side of her head was squashed flat. “I had such an odd dream,” she said, “about butterflies and elephants, I think.”

  “Catriona, my dear, will you care to walk out with me?” said Sandy, coming onto the wide veranda one day after their midday meal. “I must go up to the firing sheds to see about a new batch of coal. Do come with me. You can give me your opinion of it.”

  “Coal is the one subject on which I have no opinions, but I will walk out with you,” said Catherine. She put away her canvaswork and rose to join him. “Where is Sharada? Won’t she come with us?” she asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Sandy. “She is…oh, I don’t know, asleep, perhaps.” Catherine knew very well that his offhand tone was assumed. He always knew just where Sharada was.

  They walked out to the rows of dark green plants that covered some eight or ten terraced acres of gently sloping hillside. The soil was a rough red clay, with ditches dug through it here and there for drainage. Most of the plants were scarcely knee-high. But in two of the terraces, the plants were noticeably larger and older. Although pruned severely, they were pushing out copious new growth of the tenderest green from every scape. Half a dozen Khasi girls—up from the town, Catherine supposed—were wading among the plants with baskets slung from their necks. Into these, they were tossing the tiny shoots of green which they pinched off the burgeoning plants.

  “These larger plants were found growing wild in the hills, and we dug them up and moved them here—filthy, heavy work!—to be the parents,” explained Sandy. “From these we are plucking already, once every fortnight or three weeks. The others, the wee plants, are mostly seedlings, and too young yet for plucking—not until next year. We are trying to root some cuttings, too, with encouraging results—cuttings from exceptionally good wild plants which were unfortunately too large or too distant to be dug up and moved. They do strike roots amazingly, in this climate, if set out in a bed of river sand and manure for a season.”