XI
Sophie went into the shed where her cutting-wheel was soon after eight o’clock next morning. She took up a packet of small stones George Woods had left with her and set to work on them.
The wheel was in a line with the window, and she sat on the wooden chair before it, so that the light fell over her left shoulder. On the bench which ran out from the wheel were a spirit lamp and the trays of rough opal; on the other side of the bench the polishing buffers were arranged one against the other. A hand-basin, the water in it raddled with rouge, stood on the table behind her, and a white china jug of fresh water beside it.
Sophie lighted the spirit lamp, gathered up a handful of the slender sticks about the size of pen-holders which Potch had prepared for her, melted her sealing-wax over the flame of the lamp, drew the saucer of George’s opals to her, and fastened a score of small stones to the heated wax on the ends of the sticks. She blew out the lamp.
She was working in order not to think; she worked for awhile without thinking, details of the opal-cutting following each other in the routine they had made for themselves.
The plague of her thoughts grew as she worked. From being nebulae of a state of mind which she could not allow herself to contemplate, such darkness of despair there was in it, they evolved to tiny pictures which presented themselves singly and in panorama, flitting and flickering incoherently, incongruously.
Sophie could see the hall as she had the night before. She seemed to be able to see everything at once and in detail—its polished floors, flowering boughs, and flags, the people sitting against the iron walls in their best clothes … Mrs. Watty, Watty and George, Ella and Bully … Bully holding the baby … the two little Woods’ girls in their white embroidered muslin dresses, with pink ribbons tied round their heads. … Cash Wilson dancing solemnly in carpet slippers; Mrs. Newton at the piano … the prim way her fat little hands pranced sedately up and down over the keys. … Paul enjoying his own music … getting a little bit wild over it, and working his right leg and knee as though he had an orchestra to keep going somehow. … Mrs. Newton refusing to be coaxed into anything like enthusiasm, but trying to keep up with him, nevertheless. … Mrs. Henty, Polly, Elizabeth … Mrs. Arthur … the Langi-Eumina party … the Moffats … Potch, Michael … John Armitage.
Images of New York flashed across these pictures of the night before. Sophie visualised the city as she had first seen it. A fairy city it had seemed to her with its sky-flung lights, thronged thoroughfares, and jangling bells. She saw a square of tall, flat-faced buildings before a park of leafless trees; shimmering streets on a wet night, near the New Theatre and the Little Opera House; a supper-party after the theatre … gilded walls, Byzantian hangings, women with bare shoulders flashing satin from slight, elegant limbs, or emerging with jewel-strung necks from swathings of mist-like tulle, the men beside them … a haze of cigarette smoke over it all … tinkle of laughter, a sweet, sleepy stirring of music somewhere … light of golden wine in wide, shallow-bowled glasses, with tall, fragile stems … lipping and sway of tides against the hull of a yacht on quiet water … a man’s face, heavy and swinish, peering into her own. …
Then again, Mrs. Watty against the wall of the Ridge ballroom, stiff and disapproving-looking in her high-necked black dress … Michael dancing with Martha … Martha’s pink stockings … and the way she had danced, lightly, delightedly, her feet encased in white canvas shoes. Sophie had worn white canvas shoes at the Warria ball, she remembered. Pictures of that night crowded on her, of Phyllis Chelmsford and Arthur … Arthur. …
Her thought stopped there. Arthur … what did it all mean? She saw again the fixed, flat figures she had seen against the wall when she was dancing with Arthur—the corpse-like faces. … Why had everybody died when she was dancing with Arthur Henty? Sophie remembered that people had looked very much as usual when she went out to dance with Arthur; then when she looked at them again, they all seemed to be dead—drowned—and sitting round the hall in clear, still water, like the figures she had seen in mummy cases in foreign museums. Only she and Arthur were alive in that roomful of dead people. They had come from years before and were going to years beyond. It had been dark before she realised this; then they had been caught up into a light, transcending all consciousness of light; in which they had seemed no more than atoms of light adrift on the tide of the ages. Then the light had gone. …
They were out of doors when she recognised time and place again. Sophie had seen the hall crouched heavy and dark under a starry sky, its windows, yellow eyes. … She was conscious of trees about her … the note of a goat-bell not far away … and Arthur. … They had kissed, and then in the darkness that terror and fear—those struggling shapes … figures of a nightmare … light on Potch’s hair. … She heard her own cry, winging eerie and shrill through the darkness.
With a sudden desperate effort Sophie threw off the plague of these thoughts and small mind-pictures; she turned to the cutting-wheel again. It whirred as she bent over it.
“Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!” the wheel purred. “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!”
Her brain throbbed as she tried not to listen or hear that song of the wheel; “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur!” the blood murmured and droned in her head.
Her hand holding an opal to the wheel trembled, the opal skidded and was scratched.
“Oh, God,” Sophie moaned, “don’t let me think of him any more. Don’t let me. …”
A mirror on the wall opposite reflected her face. Sophie wondered whether that was her face she saw in the mirror: the face in the mirror was strangely old, withered and wan. She closed her eyes on the sight of it. It confronted her again when she opened them. The eyes of the face in the mirror were heavy and dark with a darkness of mind she could not fathom.
Sophie got up from her chair before the cutting-wheel. She went to the window and stood looking through its small open space at the bare earth beyond the hut. A few slight, sketchy trees, and the broken earth and scattered mounds of old dumps were thrown up under a fall of clear, exquisite sky, of a blue so pure, so fine, that there was balm just in looking at it. For a moment she plunged into it, the tragic chaos of her mind obliterated.
With new courage from that moment’s absorption of peaceful beauty, she went back to the wheel, the resolution which had taken her to it twice before that morning urging her. She sat down and began to work, took up the piece of opal she had scratched, examined it closely, wondering how the flaw could be rectified, if it could be rectified.
The wheel, set going, raised its droning whirr. Sophie held her mind to the stone. She was pleased after a while. “That’s all right,” she told herself. “If only you don’t think. … If only you keep working like this and don’t think of Arthur.”
It was Arthur she did not want to think of. “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!” the wheel mocked. “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!”
Her head went into her hands. She was moaning and crying again. “Don’t let me think of him any more … if only I needn’t think of him any more. …”
She began to work again. There was nothing to do but persist in trying to work, she thought. If she kept to it, perhaps in the end the routine would take her; she would become absorbed in the mechanism of what she was doing.
A shadow was thrown before her. In the mirror Sophie saw that John Armitage was standing in the doorway. Her feet ceased to work the treadles of the cutting-wheel; her hands fell to her lap; she waited for him to come into the room. He walked past her to the window, and stood with his back to it, facing her. Her eyes went to him. She let him take what impression he might from her face, her defences were down; vaguely, perhaps, she hoped he would read something of her mind in her face, that he would need no explanation of what she had no words to express.
There had been a smile of faint cynicism in his eyes as he looked towards her; it evaporated as she surrendered to the inquisition of his gaze.
“Well?” he inquired gravely.
“Well?” she replied as gravely.
They studied each other quietly.
John Armitage had changed very little since she had first seen him. His clean-shaven face was harder, a little more firmly set perhaps; the indecision had gone from it; it had lost some of its amiable mobility. He looked much more a man of the world he was living in—a business man, whose intelligence and energies had been trained in its service—but his eyes still had their subtle knowledge and sympathy, his individuality the attraction it had first had for her.
He was wearing the loose, well-cut tweeds he travelled in, and had taken off his hat. It lay on the windowsill beside him, and Sophie saw that there was more silver in his hair where it was brushed back from his ears than there used to be. His eyes surveyed her as if she were written in an argot or dialect which puzzled him; his hands drifted and moved before her as he smoked a cigarette. His hands emphasised the difference between John Lincoln Armitage and men of the Ridge. Sophie thought of Potch’s hands, and of Michael’s, and the smile Michael might have had for Armitage’s hands curved her lips.
Armitage, taking that smile for a lessening of the tension of her mood, said:
“You’d much better put on your bonnet and shawl, and come home with me, Sophie. We can be married en route, or in Sydney if you like. … You know how pleased the old man’ll be. And, as for me—”
Sophie’s gaze swept past him, fretted lines deepening on her forehead.
Armitage threw away his cigarette, abandoning his assumption of familiar friendliness with the action, and went to her side. Sophie rose to meet him.
“Look here, Sophie,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes, “let’s have done with all this neurotic rot. … You’re the only woman in the world for me. I don’t know why you left me. I don’t care. … Come home … let’s get married … and see whether we can’t make a better thing of it. …”
Sophie had turned her eyes from his.
“When I’ve said that before, you wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he continued. “You had a notion I was saying it because I ought—thought I had to, or the old man had talked me into it. … It wasn’t true even then. I came here to say it … so that you would believe I—want it, and I want you—more than anything on earth, Sophie.”
There was no response, only an overshadowing of troubled thought in Sophie’s face.
“Is there anything love or money can give you, girl, that I’m not eager to give you?” Armitage demanded. “What is it you want? … Do you know what you want?”
Sophie did not reply, and her silence exasperated him.
Taking her face in his hands, Armitage scrutinised it as though he must read there what her silence held from him.
He realised how wan and weary-looking it was. Shadows beneath her eyes fell far down her cheeks, her lips lay together with a new, strange sternness. But he could not think of that yet. His male egoism could only consider its own situation, fight imperiously in its own defence.
“You want something I can’t give you?”
His eyes held her for the fraction of a second; then, the pain of knowledge gripping him, his hands fell from her face. He turned away.
“Which is it … Potch or—the other?” He spoke with cruel bitterness. “It’s always a case of ‘which’ with you—isn’t it?”
“That’s just it,” Sophie said.
He glanced at her, surprised to hear a note of the same bitterness in her voice.
“I didn’t mean that, Sophie,” he said. “You know I didn’t.”
She smiled.
“It’s true all the same.”
“Tell me”—he turned to her—“I wish you would. You never have—why you left New York … and gave up singing … everything there, and came here.”
Sophie dropped into her chair again.
“But you know.”
“Who could know anything of you, Sophie?”
She moved the stones on the bench absentmindedly. At length she said:
“You remember our big row about Adler, when I was going to the supper on his yacht?”
Armitage exclaimed with a gesture of protest.
“I know,” Sophie said, “you were angry … you didn’t mean what you said. But you were right all the same. You said I had let the life I was leading go to my head—that I was utterly demoralised by it. … I was angry; but it was true. You know the people I was going about with. …”
“I did my best to get you away from them,” Armitage said.
Sophie nodded. “But I hadn’t had enough then … of the beautiful places and things I found myself in the midst of … and of all the admiration that came my way. What a queer crowd they were—Kalin, that Greek boy who was singing with me in Eurydice, Ina Barres, the Countess, Mrs. Youille-Bailey, Adler, and the rest of them. … They seemed to have run the gamut of all natural experiences and to be interested only in what was unnatural, bizarre, macabre. … Adler in that crowd was almost a relief. I liked his—honest Rabelaisianism, if you like. … I hadn’t the slightest intention of more than amusing myself with him … but he, evidently, did not intend to be merely a source of amusement to me. The supper on the yacht. … I kept my head for a while, not long, and then—”
“Then?” Armitage queried.
“That’s why I came home,” Sophie said. “I was so sick with the shock and shame of it all … so sick and ashamed I couldn’t sing any more. I wouldn’t. My voice died. … I deserved what happened. I’d been playing for it … taking the wine, the music, Adler’s lovemaking … and expecting to escape the taint of it all. … Afterwards I saw where I was going … what that life was making of me. …”
“I don’t know how you came to have anything to do with such a rotten lot,” Armitage cried, sweating under a white heat of rage.
“Oh, they’re just people of means and leisure who like to patronise successful young dancers and singers for their own amusement,” Sophie said.
“Because you fell in with a set of ultra-aesthetics and degenerates, is no reason to suppose all our people of means and leisure are like them,” Armitage declared hotly.
“I don’t,” Sophie said; “what I felt, when I began to think about it, was that they were just the natural consequences of all the easy, luxurious living I’d seen—the extreme of the pole if you like. I saw the other when I went to live in a slum settlement in Chicago.”
“You did?” Armitage exclaimed incredulously.
“When I got over the shock of—my awakening,” she went on slowly, “I began to remember things Michael had said. That’s why I went to Chicago … and worked in a clothing factory for a while. … I saw there why Adler’s a millionaire, and heard from girls in a Youille-Bailey-M’Gill factory why Connie Youille-Bailey has money to burn. …”
“Old Youille-Bailey had fingers in a dozen pies, and he left her all he’d got,” Armitage said.
“But people down in the district where most of their money is made are living like bugs under a rotten log,” Sophie exclaimed wearily. “They’re made to live like that … in order that people like William P. Adler and Mrs. Youille-Bailey … may live as they do.”
Armitage’s expression of mild cynicism yielded to one of concerned attentiveness. But he was concerned with the bearing on Sophie of what she had to say, and not at all with its relation to conditions of existence.
“After all, life only goes on by its interests,” she went on musingly; “and Mrs. Youille-Bailey’s not altogether to blame for what she is. When people are bored, they’ve got to get interest or die; and if faculties which ought to be spent in useful or creative work aren’t spent in that work, they find outlet in the silly energies a selfish and artificial life breeds. …”
“I admit,” Armitage said, trying to veer her thoughts from the abstract to the personal issue, “that you went the pace. I couldn’t keep up with it—not with Adler and his mob! But there’s no need to go back to that sort of life. We could live as quietly as you like.”
Sophie shook her head. “I want to live here,” she said. “I want to work with my hands … feel myself in the swim of the world’s life … going with the great stream; and I want to help Michael here.”
Armitage sat back against the windowsill regarding her steadily.
“If I could help you to do a great deal for the Ridge,” he said; “if I were to settle here and spend all the money I’ve got in developing this place.—There’s nothing innately immoral about a water-supply or electric power, I suppose, or in giving people decent houses to live in. And it would mean that for Fallen Star, if the scheme I have in mind is put into action. And if it is … and I build a house here and were to live here most of my time … would you marry me then, Sophie?”
Sophie gazed at him, her eyes widening to a scarcely believable vision.
“Do you mean you’d give up all your money to do that for the Ridge?” she asked.
“Not quite that,” he replied. “But the scheme would work out like that. I mean, it would provide more comfort and convenience for everybody on the Ridge—a more assured means of livelihood.”
“You don’t mean to buy up the mines?”
“Just that,” he said.
“But the men wouldn’t agree. …”
“I don’t know so much about that. It would depend on a few—”
“Michael would never consent.”
“As a matter of fact”—John Armitage returned Sophie’s gaze tranquilly—“I know something about Michael—some information came into my hands recently, although I’ve always vaguely suspected it—which will make his consent much more likely than you would have imagined. … If it does not, giving the information I hold to men of the Ridge will so destroy their faith and confidence in Michael that what he may say or do will not matter.”
Sophie’s bewilderment and dismay constrained him. Then he continued:
“You see, quite apart from you, my dear, it has always been a sort of dream of mine—ambition, if you like—to make a going concern of this place—to do for Fallen Star what other men I know have done for no-count, out-of-the-way towns and countries where natural resources or possibilities of investment warranted it. … I’ve talked the thing over with the old man, and with Andy M’Intosh, an old friend of mine, who is one of the ablest engineers in the States. … He’s willing to throw in his lot with me. … Roughly, we’ve drawn up plans for conservation of flood waters and winter rains, which will alter the whole character of this country. … The old man at first was opposed—said the miners would never stand it; but since we’ve been out with the Ridge men, he’s changed his mind rather. I mean, that when he knew some of the men would be willing to stand by us—and I have means of knowing they would—he was ready to agree. And when I told him Michael might be reckoned a traitor to his own creed—”
“It’s not true,” Sophie cried, her faith afire. “It couldn’t be! … If everybody in the world told me, I wouldn’t believe it!”
Armitage took a cigarette-case from his vest pocket, opened it, and selected a cigarette.
“I’m not asking you to believe me,” he said. “I’m only explaining the position to you because you’re concerned in it. And for God’s sake don’t let us be melodramatic about it, Sophie. I’m not a villain. I don’t feel in the least like one. This is entirely a business affair. … I see my way to a profitable investment—incidentally fulfilment of a scheme I’ve been working out for a good many years.
“Michael would oppose the syndicate for all he’s worth if it weren’t for this trump card of mine,” Armitage went on. “He’s got a Utopian dream about the place. … I see it as an up-to-date mining town, with all the advantages which science and money can bring to the development of its resources. His dream against mine—that’s what it amounts to. … Well, it’s a fair thing, isn’t it, if I know that Michael is false to the things he says he stands for—and he stands in the way of my scheme—to let the men know he’s false? … They will fall away from the ideas he stands for as they will from Michael; two or three may take the ideas sans Michael … but they will be in the minority. … The way will be clear for reorganisation then.”
Not for an instant did Sophie believe that Michael had been a traitor to his own creed—false to the things he stood for, as John Armitage said—although she thought he may have done something to give Armitage reason for thinking so.
“I’ll see Michael tomorrow, and have it out with him,” John Armitage said. “I shall tell him what I know … and also my plans. If he will work with me—”
Sophie looked up, her smile glimmering.
“If he will work with me,” Armitage repeated, knowing she realised all that would mean in the way of surrender for Michael, “nothing need be said which will undermine Michael’s influence with men of the Ridge. I know he can make things a great deal easier by using his influence with them—by bending their thoughts in the direction of my proposition, suggesting that, after all, they have given their system a trial and it has not worked out as satisfactorily as might have been expected. … I’ll make all the concessions possible, you may be sure—give it a profit-sharing basis even, so that the transaction won’t look like the thing they are prejudiced against. But if Michael refuses. …”
“He will. …”
“I am going to ask the men to meet me in the hall, at the end of the month, to lay before them a proposition for the more effective working of the mines. I shall put my proposition before them, and if Michael refuses to work with me, I shall be forced to give them proofs of his unworthiness of their respect. …”
“They won’t believe you.”
“There will be the proofs, and Michael will not—he cannot—deny them.”
“You’ll tell him what you are going to do?”
“Certainly.”
Sophie realised how far Armitage was from understanding the religious intensity and simplicity with which Ridge folk worked for the way of life they believed to be the right one, and what the breakup of that belief would mean to those who had served it in the unpretentious, unprotesting fashion of honest, downright people. To him the Ridge stood for messy sentimentalism, Utopian idealism. And there was money in the place: there was money to be made by putting money into it—by working the mines and prospecting the country as the men without capital could not.
John Armitage was ready to admit—Sophie had heard him admitting in controversy—that the Fallen Star mines which the miners themselves controlled were as well worked and as well managed within their means as any he had ever come across; that the miners themselves were a sober and industrious crowd. What capital could do for them and for the Fallen Star community by way of increasing its output and furthering its activities was what he saw. And the only security he could have for putting his capital into working the mines was ownership of them. Ownership would give him the right to organise the workers, and to claim interest for his investment from their toil, or the product of their toil.
The Ridge declaration of independence had made it clear that people of Fallen Star did not want increased output, the comforts and conveniences which capital could give them, unless they were provided from the common fund of the community. Ultimately, it was hoped the common fund would provide them, but until it did Ridge men had announced their willingness to do without improvements for the sake of being masters of their own mines. If it was a question of barter, they were for the pride and dignity of being free men and doing without the comforts and conveniences of modern life. Sophie felt sure Armitage underestimated the feeling of the majority of men of the Ridge toward the Ridge idea, and that most of them would stand by it, even if for some mysterious reason Michael lost status with them. But she was dismayed at the test the strength of that feeling was to be put to, and at the mysterious shame which threatened Michael. She could not believe Michael had ever done anything to merit it. Michael could never be less than Michael to her—the soul of honour, the knight without fear, against whom no reproach could be levelled.
Armitage spoke again.
“You see,” he said, “you could still have all those things you spoke of, under my scheme—the long, quiet days; life that is broad and simple; the hearth; home, children—all that sort of thing … and even time for any of the little social reform schemes you fancied. …”
Sophie found herself confronted with the fundamental difference of their outlook again. He talked as if the ideas which meant so much to her and to people of the Ridge were the notions of headstrong children—whimsical and interesting notions, perhaps, but mistaken, of course. He was inclined to make every allowance for them.
“The only little social reform I’d have any time for,” she murmured, “would be the overthrowing of your scheme for ownership of the mines.”
John Armitage was frankly surprised to find that she held so firmly to the core of the Ridge idea, and amused by the uncompromising hostility of her attitude. Sophie herself had not thought she was so attached to the Ridge life and its purposes, until there was this suggestion of destroying them.
“Then”—he stood up suddenly—“whether I succeed or whether I don’t—whether the scheme goes my way or not—won’t make any difference to you—to us.”
“It will make this difference,” Sophie said. “I’m heart and soul in the life here, I’ve told you. And if you do as you say you’re going to … instead of thinking of you in the old, good, friendly way, I’ll have to think of you as the enemy of all that is of most value to me.”
“You mean,” John Armitage cried, his voice broken by the anger and chagrin which rushed over him, “you mean you’re going to take on Henty—that’s what’s at the back of all this.”
“I mean,” Sophie said steadily, her eyes clear green and cool in his, “that I’m going to marry Potch, and if Michael and all the rest of the men of the Ridge go over to you and your scheme, we’ll fight it.”