XII
“Are you there, Potch?” Sophie stood in the doorway of Michael’s hut, a wavering shadow against the moonlight behind her.
Michael looked up. He was lying on the sofa under the window, a book in his hands.
“He’s not here,” he said.
His voice was as distant as though he were talking to a stranger. He had been trying to read, but his mind refused to concern itself with anything except the night before, and the consequences of it. His eyes had followed a trail of words; but he had been unable to take any meaning from them. Sophie! His mind hung aghast at the exclamation of her. She was the storm-centre. His thoughts moved in a whirlwind about her. He did not understand how she could have worn that dress showing her shoulders and so much of her bared breast. It had surprised, confused, and alarmed him to see Sophie looking as she did in that photograph Dawe Armitage had brought to the Ridge. The innocence and sheer joyousness of her laughter had reassured him, but, as the evening wore on, she seemed to become intoxicated with her own gaiety.
Michael had watched her dancing with vague disquiet. To him, dancing was rather a matter of concern to keep step and to avoid knocking against anyone—a serious business. He did not get any particular pleasure out of it; and Sophie’s delight in rhythmic movement and giving of her whole being to a waltz, amazed him. When Armitage came, her manner had changed. It had lost some of its abstract joyousness. It was as if she were playing up to him. … She had been much more of his world than of the world of the Ridge; had displayed a thousand little airs and superficial graces, all the gay, light manner of that other world. When she was dancing with Arthur Henty, Michael had seen the sudden drooping and overcasting of her gaiety. He thought she was tired, and that Potch should take her home. The old gossip about Arthur Henty had faded from his memory; not the faintest recollection of it occurred to him as he had seen Sophie and Arthur Henty dancing together.
Then Sophie’s cry, eerie and shrill in the night air, had reached him. He had seen Potch and Arthur Henty at grips. He had not imagined that such fury could exist in Potch. Other men had come. They dragged Potch away from Henty. … Henty had fallen. … Potch would have killed him if they had not dragged him away. … Henty was carried in an unconscious condition to Newton’s. Armitage had taken Sophie home. Michael went with Potch.
Michael did not know exactly what had occurred. He could only imagine. … Sophie had been behaving in that gay, light manner of the other world: he had seen her at it all the evening. Potch had not understood, he believed; it had goaded him to a state of mind in which he was not responsible for what he did.
Sophie was conscious of Michael’s aloofness from her as she stood in the doorway; it wavered as his eyes held and communed with hers. The night before he had not been able to realise that the girl in the black dress, which had seemed to him almost indecent, was Sophie. He kept seeing her in her everyday white cotton frock—as she sat at work at her cutting-wheel, or went about the hut—and now that she stood before him in white again, he could scarcely believe that the black dress and happenings of the ball were not an hallucination. But there was a prayer in her eyes which came of the night before. She would not have looked at him so if there had been no night before; her lips would not have quivered in that way, as if she were sorry and would like to explain, but could not.
Potch had staggered home beside Michael, swaying and muttering as though he were drunk. But he was not drunk, except with rage and grief, Michael knew. He had lain on his bunk like a log all night, muttering and groaning. Michael had sat in a chair in the next room, trying to understand the madness which had overwhelmed Potch.
In the morning, he realised that work and the normal order of their working days were the only things to restore Potch’s mental balance. He roused him earlier than usual.
“We’d better get down and clear out some of the mullock,” he said. “The gouges are fair choked up. There’ll be no doing anything if we don’t get a move on with it.”
Potch had stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he got up, changed his clothes, and they had gone down to the mine together. His face was swollen and discoloured, his lip broken, one eye almost hidden beneath a purple and blue swelling which had risen on the upper part of his left cheek. He had dragged his hat over his face, and walked with his head down; they had not spoken all the morning. Potch had swung his pick stolidly. All day his eyes had not met Michael’s as they usually did, in that glance of love and comradeship which united them whenever their eyes met.
In the afternoon, when they stopped work and went to the top of the mine, Potch had said:
“Think I’ll clear out—go away somewhere for awhile, Michael.”
From his attitude, averted head and drooping shoulders, Michael got the unendurable agony of his mind, his pain and shame. He did not reply, and Potch had walked away from him striking out in a southeasterly direction across the Ridge. Michael had not seen him since then. And now it was early evening, the moon up and silvering the plains with the light of her young crescent.
“He says—Potch says … he’s going away,” Michael said to Sophie.
Her eyes widened. Her thought would not utter itself, but Michael knew it. Potch leaving the Ridge! The Ridge without Potch! It was impossible. Their minds would not accept the idea.
Sophie turned away from the door. Her white dress fluttered in the moonlight. Michael could see it moving across the bare, shingly ground at the back of the hut. He thought that Sophie was going to look for Potch. He had not told her the direction in which Potch had gone. He wondered whether she would find him. She might know where to look for him. Michael wondered whether Potch haunted particular places as he himself did, when his soul was out of its depths in misery.
Instinctively Sophie went to the old playground she and Potch had made on the slope of the Ridge behind the Old Town.
She found him lying there, stretched across the shingly earth. He lay so still that she thought he might be asleep. Then she went to him and knelt beside him.
“Potch!” she said.
He moved as if to escape her touch. The desolation of spirit which had brought him to the earth like that overwhelmed Sophie. She crouched beside him.
“Potch,” she cried. “Potch!”
Potch did not move or reply.
“I can’t live … if you won’t forgive me, Potch,” Sophie said.
He stirred. “Don’t talk like that,” he muttered.
After a little time he sat up and turned his face to her. The dim light of the young moon showed it swollen and discoloured, a hideous and comic mask of the tragedy which consumed him.
“That’s the sort of man I am,” Potch said, his voice harsh and unsteady. “I didn’t know … I didn’t know I was like that. It came over me all of a sudden, when I saw you and—him. I didn’t know any more until Michael was talking to me. I wouldn’t’ve done it if I’d known, Sophie. … But I didn’t know. … I just saw him—and you, and I had to put out the sight of it … I had to get it out of my eyes … what I saw. … That’s all I know. Michael says I didn’t kill him … but I meant to … that’s what I started to do.”
Sophie’s face withered under her distress.
“Don’t say that, Potch,” she begged.
“But I do,” he said. “I must. … I can’t make out … how it was … I felt like that. I thought I’d see things like you saw them always, stand by you. Now I don’t know. … I’m not to be trusted—”
“I’d trust you always, and in anything, Potch,” Sophie said.
“You can’t say that—now.”
“It’s now … I want to say it more than ever,” she continued. “I can’t explain … what I did … any more than you can what you did, Potch. But I’m to blame for what you did … and yet … I can’t see that I’m altogether to blame. I didn’t want what happened—to happen … any more than you.”
She wanted to explain to Potch—to herself also. But she could not see clearly, or understand how the threads of her intentions and deeds had become so crossed and tangled. It was not easy to explain.
“You remember that ball at Warria I went to with father,” she said at last. “I thought a lot of Arthur Henty then. … I thought I was in love with him. People teased me about him. They thought he was in love with me, too. … And then over there at the ball something happened that changed everything. I thought he was ashamed of me … he didn’t ask me to dance with him like he did at the Ridge balls. … He danced with other girls … and nobody asked me to dance except Mr. Armitage, I wanted to go away from the Ridge and learn to look like those girls Arthur had danced with … so that he would not be ashamed of me. … Afterwards I thought I’d forgotten and didn’t care for him any more. … Last night he was not ashamed of me. … It was funny. I felt that the Warria people were envying me last night, and I had envied them at the other ball. … I didn’t want to dance with Arthur … but I did … and, somehow, then—it was as if we had gone back to the time before the ball at Warria. …”
A heavy, brooding silence hung between them. Sophie broke it.
“Michael says you’re going away?”
“Yes,” Potch replied.
Sophie shifted the pebbles on the earth about her abstractedly.
“Don’t leave me, Potch,” she cried, scattering the pebbles suddenly. “I don’t know what will become of me if you go away. … I wanted us to get married and settle down.”
Potch turned to her.
“You don’t mean that?”
“I do,” Sophie said, all her strength of will and spirit in the words. “I’m afraid of myself, Potch … afraid of drifting.”
Potch’s arms went round her. “Sophie!” he sobbed. But even as he held her he was conscious of something in her which did not fuse with him.
“But you love him!” he said.
Sophie’s eyes did not fail from his.
“I do,” she said, “but I don’t want to. I wish I didn’t.”
His hands fell from her. “Why,” he asked, “why do you say you’ll marry me, if you … if—”
Despair and desperation were in the restive movement of Sophie’s hands.
“I’m afraid of him,” she said, “of the power of my love for him … and there’s no future that way. With you there is a future. I can work with you and Michael for the Ridge. … You know I do care for you too, Potch dear, and I want to have the sort of life that keeps a woman faithful … to mend your clothes, cook your meals, and—”
Potch quivered to the suggestions she had evoked. He saw Sophie in a thousand tender associations—their home, the quiet course their lives might have together. He loved her enough for both, he told himself.
His conscience was not clear that he should take this happiness the gods offered him, even for the moment. And yet—he could not turn from it. Sophie had said she needed him; she wanted the home they would have together; all that their life in common would mean. And by and by—he stirred to the afterthought of her “and”—she wanted the children who might come to them. … Potch knew what Sophie meant when she said that she cared for him. Whatever else happened he knew he had her tenderest affection. She kissed him familiarly and with tenderness. It was not as Maud had kissed him, with passion, a soul-dying yearning. He drove the thought off. Maud was Maud, and Sophie Sophie; Maud’s most passionate kisses had never distilled the magic for him that the slightest brush of Sophie’s dress or fingers had.
Sophie took his hand.
“Potch,” she said, “if you love me—if you want me to marry you, let us settle the thing this way. … I want to marry you. … I want to be your loving and faithful wife. … I’ll try to be. … I don’t want to think of anyone but you. … You may make me forget—if we are married, and get on well together. I hope you will—”
Potch took her into his arms, an inarticulate murmur breaking his voice.