by Peg Kingman
“How astonishing, Sandy, to see you turned farmer!”
“I doubt I should break my back for turnips and barley, but I am exceedingly fond of my tea bushes, my darlings! But come along; there is the manufactory. No need for walls—only a good roof and an oven for the firing. Getting enough dry fuel has been a difficulty in this season. There’s endless wood, but it’s wet. Of course there is cow dung, but we seem to require more of it than the cows can produce; and if we use it all here, the townspeople complain of none left for their kitchen fires. No peat, of course; but there is coal to be had, and plenty of it. It will be a matter of organizing the carrying.”
There was bright-haired Grace, sitting among the women in the factory shed. Three dogs napped under the bench where she sat. She had a big round rattan tray of leaves on her lap, and one of the women was showing her how to bruise them and roll them, working them over and over with long slender fingers. Other women were tending the oven; and sorting, spreading, raking, and tossing the leaves. “This has been our first real plucking season, and our first full-scale season of manufacture,” said Sandy. “Look.” He opened a brass canister and plunged his fingers into the black curled leaves.
Tea.
“Smell,” he said, and held it under her nose. Obediently she sniffed.
“We manufactured lu cha and qing cha at first,” he said. “Green tea and oolong tea, you know. It was quite acceptable—as good as what comes out of Fu-jian. But when we tried manufacturing some in the hong cha style, black tea, the fully fermented tea—ah! Well, let me brew some for you. You shall taste it, and judge for yourself.” He dipped some water out of the brimming rain barrel at the corner of the shed into a blackened tin pot, and set it on the hottest part of the stove, saying something in another language to the Khasi girl, who tossed a couple of patties of dried cow dung onto the fire. His remark made her laugh, quite at her ease. The dung patties quickly caught fire, and the smoke that wafted up smelled like incense.
“How do you pay them?” asked Catherine, nodding toward the women.
“I do not pay them. They do not work for me. They are their own masters, and their husbands’ masters, too. That is how these Khasi women arrange matters. It was the most baffling thing in the world to me when first I came into these hills, Catriona. The women own everything. Houses, lands, goods, livestock—all property, in short—passes from mother to daughter. And not to the eldest daughter but to the youngest! I felt as though I had stumbled into some Amazonia.”
“How very wise of Anibaddh to marry among the Amazons,” said Catherine.
“And into so highly placed a family. Teerut is a nephew of my partner here, you know, who is the brother of the Hima Syiem, the great man of the entire district. She will enjoy great privileges here. Perhaps she will wish to plant some tea gardens of her own. These women are planting dozens of them all through the hills. Tea doesn’t require prime rice land, you see; it does very well in the wasteland—the poor, lean red hill soils.
“Now it is only a question of finding the best market for our tea. It is a pity that Mr Fleming did not come up here with you. I should have so liked to show all this to him, and to offer him the privilege of carrying this first lot to Europe. What a coup that would be for Crawford and Fleming, in the mercantile world! How gratifying to poke the eye of the Honourable Company! And some small amends, too, for my having so abruptly cut off all contact with him when I made up my mind to be ‘drowned.’ He was a kind friend to me.”
“So he has been to us all,” said Catherine, aching to speak of him, yet unable to bear it.
“There—the water is boiling,” said Sandy. “Here is a teapot—no lid, alas. I wonder where it’s got to? But here are two cups, and quite clean enough for MacDonalds from Skye.” He threw a generous pinch of tea leaves into the teapot, and poured the boiling water over them. “Ah! Do smell that, Catriona. Isn’t it lovely?”
It smelled sweet and rich. “Like malt,” said Catherine.
“Like the malt sheds at home, eh? It is most unusual, most distinctive—and yet, not a fault. And the colour as it pours! So rich a red, so coppery. Taste it.”
She did. The hot, malty, full-bodied liquor spread across her tongue. Then the sweetness after the swallow. “It reminds me of the tea you sent me, in that little ivory coffer,” she said. “Very like it, only somehow more so. Maltier.”
“Just so. That tea I had sent you was made from my plants at Ghazipur. I had collected those plants up here in Assam, of course. But growing down there, in that rich lowland soil, that easy lowland climate, they were not so entirely, so distinctively, themselves.”
“Like Scots who go to London, and dwindle by degrees into Englishmen,” said Catherine.
Sandy agreed, laughing. He looked very pleased with himself.
Catherine set down her cup, suddenly angry with him again. “Sandy, why could you not have sent in your resignation to the Company, then gone about your honest business in open daylight, like other people? Why all this subterfuge, this duplicity?”
“Because, my dear, the Honourable Company would have prevented this with all its might, and its might is very mighty. Do you not see? Their sole remaining trade monopoly is tea. They have it all their own way; no one may carry tea to Britain or its possessions but themselves. The trade is profitable only because they may set the price to suit themselves. And if they were to lose their monopoly? It would be the end of the Company. It will be fatal to them to lose control of the commodity. And now—thanks to me—they will lose it.”
“But could you not have set up plantations and manufactories as you have done here on their behalf? Surely they would lose no control thus. It would be like their opium productions.”
“So I proposed, in a lengthy letter to the Company’s Court of Directors. Their reply, when it came, was to reprimand me, and to bid me submit to the superior judgment of my betters, who assert doggedly—and quite wrongly—that this plant is not the true tea.”
She scowled, still.
“Come, my dear, if you have done,” said Sandy. She put her shawl over her head and went out with him into the drizzle. They made their way up to the forested slope at the top of the far terraces.
Suddenly he spoke again: “And then a little later, Catriona, after I had spent some time in Ghazipur superintending the Company’s opium business, I was glad that they had not taken up my proposal. I saw in Ghazipur a great deal to disgust me. The Company have persecuted the small farmers, pressed them far harder than the mogul’s greediest zamindars ever did, harder than the cruelest Highland tacksman at home. The Company would never have allowed any independent production of the sort we are doing here—never. The Company insist upon vast plantations, and all under their own control. No one is allowed to produce any commodity of value—opium or tea—for any independent trade on their own account. The landlords get rich while everyone else starves. I do not like it. It reminds me unpleasantly of—of Scotland.”
They came up to the open ground above the highest terrace; it was the place where she had found him. Across the grassy clearing stood the tall stones, towering twice as high as a man except for one, which lay flat on the ground. It was a very convenient height—like a gigantic garden seat. It was wet, however; and as it had probably been an altar, she did not quite like to sit upon it.
“Well,” she said, frowning, “I still do not see why you must forge your own death.”
“My position as a dead man is so much more secure than if I were alive! It was Mr Fleming who led me to see this. If, after the—ah—the controversies I have had with the Company, if I had then politely resigned their service in order to pursue my own enterprises, sapping their bulwarks, it is exceedingly unlikely that they would have granted me a license of residence or left me in peace. The Company has a history of taking a very high hand with anyone whose activities they dislike. They have issued peremptory summonses to indigo planters to appear here or there to stand trial on the evidence of bought witnesses. They hav
e forbidden planters to return to their estates. And they have not hesitated to deport—in chains, when it suits them—anyone whose conduct or activities they do not approve. And that is only for indigo. There is a great deal more at stake for tea, my dear. You will certainly understand that this has been a job for a dead man, being so much less likely to attract the notice of the authorities—until now, when it is too late for them to stop me.”
Catherine made no reply, only picked at a brilliant chartreuse-coloured lichen growing on the stone nearest at hand.
“It was not a gratuitous deception, Catriona.”
STILL CATHERINE FELT angry and sore at heart. One evening, just before nightfall, when she and Sandy were walking above the riverbank, along the path leading between his house and the town, she said to him, “Sandy, there is a certain matter—and I cannot let it pass, though it is no affair of mine. But how could you have dropped Sharada as you did? How could you have given up and gone away from her so easily?”
He stopped in the path and turned to her. “You mean, how has she brought herself to forgive me for that?”
How indeed? thought Catherine. How at all? But certainly not so promptly, not so freely, not so as to sing improper songs all day while her eyes and limbs drooped heavy from lack of sleep.
“There I did err most grievously,” said Sandy. “Of course I know now that I ought never to have doubted her heart, her resolve, her courage. But give me credit at least, Catriona, for diffidence, for humility. When she did not come that terrible night at the Chalis Satoon, I sorrowed, grieved, raged like a child denied a favorite plaything. But then, unwillingly, miserably, I concluded—reasonably enough, I am sure you will agree—that she did not choose to make a ruin of her life just for love of magnificent me. And if she did not choose of her own free will to come to me, after all we had said and done, I resolved I must learn to live, or die, without her.”
“But Sandy, you ought certainly to have considered that your message might have miscarried, or that she might have been prevented somehow from responding to your summons on such short notice.”
“So I did, Catriona, and that is why I went back for her. Has she not yet mentioned this to you? She did not know it herself, of course, until now. I did go back again, to beg her once more to come away with me. I had proceeded downriver at great speed on the floodwaters of the monsoon, feeling very sorry for myself, and very bitter toward her for her inconstancy. I got so far as a village just below Monghyr, and there I found I could go no further. A fever of the brain came upon me and I was unable to leave my cot. I lay there plagued by dreads and feverish horrors, assaulted by wishes, doubts, imaginings: what if somehow she had not received my message after all? Oh, that is only my pride and wishful thinking, I rebuked myself. Only my weakness. But I could not overcome this weakness. I could not make myself proceed any further without her. My fever abated after ten or twelve days; then, still weak and shaky, I reversed course and made my way back up to Ghazipur again, with great difficulty against the flood current. All in deepest secrecy, of course, for I had taken such vast trouble to be drown’d that it was of utmost importance that I not be seen by anyone who might recognise me, nor even my ghost—and I was a mere ghost of myself just then.
“I had to travel incognito, in mufti, at night whenever possible,” he continued, “not to be seen or guessed at by any European. I arrived in Ghazipur, just five weeks after that terrible night. But her father’s house was shut up and she was gone, gone! I had much ado to find anyone who would speak of her at all, for the Hindus regard such deeds as hers with deepest horror: a failed suttee; and now she had gone away, over the black water, or so it was rumoured: outcaste, anathema, lost forever. No one knew where she had gone—only that she was utterly lost, cast into the abyss, as though she had fallen off the ends of the earth.
“And still, you must remember, I had every reason to suppose that she had spurned me. In deepest despondency I reversed my course yet again, passing down the river once more. On two occasions I came very near to drowning myself, so despondent was I, so sunk by melancholia. Oddly, Catriona, it was the thought that I had assured you that I was not drown’d which prevented me. I felt some obligation to remain alive, because I had assured you that I was! Still, if I had fallen by chance into the river, I would certainly have taken no stroke to save myself. But I did not fall into the river. Eventually I told myself to be a man, to resolve to live without her if she would not have me. And I have had no solace here in these misty mountains but my bagpipe ever since. It is undoubtedly the case, however, that my piping has improved. I am now able to play all those old laments with a far more expressive pathos than formerly. Ha ha!”
His laughter only made Catherine angrier, and lonelier. She said, “How can you laugh?”
“Catriona, may I not laugh now, after our suffering is ended? Have I not been punished? She has suffered for my error, but have I not suffered, too? Perhaps if you have any imagination, you can find some compassion for me as well as for her. But if she can forgive me, Catriona—if she can forgive me—must you bear me a grudge on her behalf?”
“And still, after all that, after all the trials Sharada has undergone, after she has demonstrated her faith and courage and valour as never any woman has been called upon to do, what return is made her? Why, Sandy, only this: You prostitute her; you make her your concubine! She is too good for that, and too good for you. Why do you not marry her in all honour and good faith?”
“Because, Catriona, because—as you, even you, must have learned by now—we cannot always have everything we want.”
“Cannot have everything we want! Is she to be your concubine because you do not want her for a wife?”
“No, Catriona, you have got it backward. It is I who cannot have what I want. She will not marry me because she is a widow. She says she cannot. A Hindu widow does not ever remarry. It is impossible; it cannot be done.”
“Could she not become a Christian, and thus be permitted to remarry?”
“A convert, like Mr Fleming’s Harini?”
Catherine nodded, forbidding herself to wince at the sound of these names conjoined in his mouth. It was getting dark now, and she hoped he could not read her face.
“Alas, it will not do,” said Sandy. “She will not renounce Hinduism and become a Christian, and she will not marry me. Nevertheless I do consider that she is my wife. Upon my honour, I consider that I am married to her and that she is married to me, and any children who may be born to us will be the honest fruits of our true marriage.”
Catherine shook her head, still resisting him.
But Sandy had not finished. “Have you never made any such mistake yourself, my dear?” he continued gently. “Have you never, by error or pride or obstinacy or fear or diffidence—have you never fled from the thing that is best and dearest to you? Your own heart’s true desire? Supposing perhaps that you cannot possibly deserve to have such happiness as that? That you cannot have what you want?”
Catherine scowled at him, her scalp prickling; how could he know?
“Sharada has told me all about it,” he said.
Of course she had.
But Catherine could not bring herself to speak of it. She stood quite silent in the dark, thinking. Sandy had suffered bitterest disappointment and had accepted it, and proceeded on his course despite it. But now, unexpectedly, and against all odds, he had his rich reward. His rich reward had sought him across half the globe, increased now in value a hundredfold.
Still, even Sandy could not have everything he wanted.
But she, Catherine, had all these painful lessons before her still, and no prospect of relief or reward. She, too, had thrown away her happiness, had heedlessly gone away from the good man who might not choose to make a ruin of his life just for the love of her. What becomes of those who flee their own happiness? Have they any right then to sorrow, to grieve, to rage? Here was the lesson in which she had now to school herself: We cannot always have everything we want. Som
etimes we must learn to live, or die, without.
Or reverse course, go back, seek again?
Sandy said, “There is no irregular connection between him and Harini.”
“So Sharada has assured us both, apparently,” said Catherine.
“No, I speak from my own knowledge, my dear. But I do not know quite how I am to speak of this to you. It is so very difficult.” He shuffled one foot on the sandy path before going on: “It must have been a year or so after Harini’s terrible misadventure that I made Mr Fleming’s acquaintance, and went to spend a fortnight at his house as his guest. By then, Harini had recovered her health; she was out of any danger with regard to the snakebite and the gangrene and the loss of the foot. However, it was plain to see that all was not well between her and my host. And one very hot night, as I lay tossing and turning in my bed in the darkness…well, she came in to my bedchamber, creeping along somehow. Ah, Catriona! I do not know how I can tell you this! Well, I—ah—but not quite. I did not quite, because she was…and I had assumed, just as you had, that she was…you understand. And I his guest, and I could not just…and so I told her. And then she told me that I need feel no disloyalty to my friend Mr Fleming, that he never touched her. Indeed he had repeatedly rebuffed her, though he knew very well that nothing in the world but a baby could ever console her for the loss of her own children. But he would not, she said, for the reason that she had still a living husband. And a baby was just what she wanted of me. The only consolation she could hope for in all the world would be another baby to hold in her arms.”
Catherine knew this had to be true. “So,” she said cruelly, “did you oblige her?” She regretted her words, even as she spoke them.
“What do you think?” he retorted. He turned down the path and strode away, leaving her alone in the dark.
ON THAT NIGHT, great festivities were to take place in the town on the bank of the Bor Soree. The Hima Syiem and Prince Teerut, with their entourage, had been staying as the honoured guests of the great man who lived in the best house. But this was the last night of their stay. Tomorrow, they—and Anibaddh, with her lady, Mrs Babcock—were to pack up and proceed higher up into the hills. Tonight was the celebration of the agreements and goodwill that had been reached. There would be gift-giving and speeches as well as food and drink, music, dancing, and farewells.