XIV
The sky was like a great shallow basin turned over the plains. No tree or rising ground broke the perfect circle of its fall over the earth; only in the distance, on the edge of the bowl, a fringe of trees drew a blurred line between earth and sky.
Potch and Sophie lay out on the plains, on their backs in the dried herbage, watching the sunset—the play of light on the wide sweep of the sky—silently, as if they were listening to great music.
They had been married some days before in Budda township, and were living in Potch’s hut.
Sophie and Potch had often wandered over the plains in the evening and watched the sunset; but never before had they come to the sense of understanding and completeness they attained this evening. The days had been long and peaceful since they were living together, an anodyne to Sophie, soothing all the restless turmoil of her soul and body. She had ceased to desire happiness; she was grateful for this lull of all her powers of sense and thought, and eager to love and to serve Potch as he did her. She believed her life had found its haven; that if she kept in tune with the fundamentals of love and service, she could maintain a consciousness of peace and rightness with the world which would make living something more than a weary longing for death.
All the days were holy days to Potch since Sophie and he had been married. He looked at her as if she were Undine making toast and tea, cooking, washing dishes, or sweeping and tidying up his hut. He followed her every movement with a worshipful, reverent gaze.
Soon after Sophie’s return, Potch had gone to live in the hut which he and his father had occupied in the old days. He had put a veranda of boughs to the front of it, and had washed the roof and walls with carbide to lessen the heat in summer. He had turned out the rooms and put up shelves, trying to furnish the place a little for Sophie; but she had not wanted it altered at all. She had cleared the cupboard, put clean paper on the shelves, and had arranged Potch’s books on them herself.
Sophie loved the austerity of her home when she went to live in it—its earthen floor, bare walls, unvarnished furniture, the couch under the window, the curtains of unbleached linen she had hemstitched herself, the row of shining syrup-tins in which she kept tea, sugar, and coffee on shelves near the fireplace, the big earthenware jar for flowers, and a couple of jugs which Snowshoes had made for her and baked in an oven of his own contrivance. She had a quiet satisfaction in doing all the cleaning up and tidying to keep her house in the order she liked, so that her eyes could rest on any part of it and take pleasure from the sense of beauty in ordinary and commonplace things.
But the hut was small and its arrangements so simple that an hour or two after Potch had gone to the mines Sophie went to the shed into which he had moved her cutting-wheel, and busied herself facing and polishing the stones which some of the men brought her as usual. She knew her work pleased them. She was as skilful at showing a stone to all its advantage as any cutter on the Ridge, and nothing delighted her more than when Watty or George or one of the Crosses exclaimed with satisfaction at a piece of work she had done.
In the afternoon sometimes she went down to the New Town to talk with Maggie Grant, Mrs. Woods, or Martha. She was understudying Martha, too, when anyone was sick in the town, and needed nursing or a helping hand. Martha had her hands full when Mrs. Ted Cross’s fourth baby was born. There were five babies in the township at the time, and Sophie went to Crosses’ every morning to fix up the house and look after the children and Mrs. Ted before Martha arrived. When Martha found the Crosses’ washing gaily flapping on the line one morning towards midday, she protested in her own vigorous fashion.
“I ain’t going to have you blackleggin’ on me, Mrs. Heathfield,” she said. “And what’s more, if I find you doin’ it again, I’ll tell Potch. It’s all right for me to be goin’ round doing other people’s odd jobs; but I don’t hold with you doin’ ’em—so there! If folks wants babies, well, it’s their lookout—and mine. But I don’t see what you’ve got to do with it, coming round makin’ your hands look anyhow.”
“You just sit down, and I’ll make you a cup of tea, Mother M’Cready,” Sophie said by way of reply, and gently pushed Martha into the most comfortable chair in the room. “You look done up … and you’re going on to see Ella and Mrs. Inglewood, I suppose.”
Martha nodded. She watched Sophie with troubled, loving eyes. She was really very tired, and glad to be able to sit and rest for a moment. It gave her a welling tenderness and gratitude to have Sophie concerned for her tiredness, and fuss about her like this. Martha was so accustomed to caring for everybody on the Ridge, and she was so strong, good-natured, and vigorous, very few people thought of her ever being weary or dispirited. But as she bustled into the kitchen, blocking out the light, Sophie saw that Martha’s fat, jolly face under the shadow of her sunhat, was not as happy-looking as usual. Sophie guessed the weariness which had overtaken her, and that she was “poorly” or “out-of-sorts,” as Martha would have said herself, if she could have been made to admit such a thing.
“It’s all very well to give folks a helping hand,” Martha continued, “but I’m not going to have you doin’ their washin’ while I’m about.”
Sophie put a cup of tea and slice of bread and syrup down beside her.
“There! You drink that cup of tea, and tell me what you think of it,” she said.
“But, Sophie,” Martha protested. “It’s stone silly for you to be doing things like Cross’s washing. You’re not strong enough, and I won’t have it.”
“Won’t you?”
Sophie put her arms around Martha’s neck from behind her chair. She pressed her face against the creases of Martha’s sunburnt neck and kissed it.
Martha gurgled happily under the pressure of Sophie’s young arms, the childish impulse of that hugging. She turned her face back and kissed Sophie.
“Oh, my lamb! My dearie lamb!” she murmured.
She recognised Sophie’s need for common and kindly service to the people of the Ridge. She knew what that service had meant to her at one time, and was willing to let Sophie share her ministry so long as her health was equal to it.
Mrs. Watty, and the women who took their views from her, thought that Sophie was giving herself a great deal of unnecessary and laborious work as a sort of penance. They had withdrawn all countenance from her after the disaster of the ball, although they regarded her marriage to Potch as an endeavour to reinstate herself in their good graces. Mrs. Watty had been scandalised by the dress she had worn at the ball, by the way she had danced, and her behaviour generally. But Sophie was quite unconcerned as to what Mrs. Watty and her friends thought: she did not go out of her way either to avoid or placate them.
When she went to the Crosses’ to take charge of the children and look after the house while Mrs. Cross was ill, the gossips had exclaimed together. And when it was known that Sophie had taken on herself odds and ends of sewing for other women of the township who had large families and rather more to do than they knew how to get through, they declared that they did not know what to make of it, or of Sophie and her moods and misdemeanours.
Potch heard of what Sophie was doing from the people she helped. When he came home in the evening she was nearly always in the kitchen getting tea for him; but if she was not, she came in soon after he got home, and he knew that one of these little tasks she had undertaken for people in the town had kept her longer than she expected. Usually he hung in the doorway, waiting for her to come and meet him, to hold up her face to be kissed, eyes sweet with affection and the tender familiarity of their association. Those offered kisses of hers were the treasure of these dreamlike days to Potch.
He had always loved Sophie. He had thought that his love had reached the limit of loving a long time before, but since they had been married and were living, day after day, together, he had become no more than a loving of her. He went about his work as usual, performed all the other functions of his life mechanically, scrupulously, but it was always with a subconscious knowledge of Sophie and of their life together.
“You’re tired,” he said one night when Sophie lifted her face to his, his eyes strained on her with infinite concern.
“Dear Potch,” she said; and she had put back the hair from his forehead with a gesture tender and pitiful.
Her glance and gesture were always tender and pitiful. Potch realised it. He knew that he worshipped and she accepted his worship. He was content—not quite content, perhaps—but he assured himself it was enough for him that it should be so.
He had never taken Sophie in his arms without an overwhelming sense of reverence and worship. There was no passionate need, no spontaneity, no leaping flame in the caresses she had given him, in that kiss of the evening, and the slight, girlish gestures of affection and tenderness she gave as she passed him at meals, or when they were reading or walking together.
As they lay on the plains this evening they had been thinking of their life together. They had talked of it in low, brooding murmurs. The immensity of the silence soaked into them. They had taken into themselves the faint, musky fragrance of the withered herbage and the paper daisies. They had gazed among the stars for hours. When it was time to go home, Sophie sat up.
“I love to lie against the earth like this,” she said.
“We seem to get back to the beginning of things. You and I are no more than specks of dust on the plains … under the skies, Potch … and yet the whole world is within us. …”
“Yes,” Potch said, and the silence streamed between them again.
“I’ll never forget,” Sophie continued dreamily, “hearing a negro talk once about what they call ‘the negro problem’ in America. He was an ordinary thickset, curly-haired, coarse-featured negro to look at—Booker Washington—but he talked some of the clearest, straightest stuff I’ve ever heard.
“One thing he said has always stayed in my mind: ‘Keep close to the earth.’ It was not good, he said, to walk on asphalted paths too long. … He was describing what Western civilisation had done for the negroes—a primitive people. … Anyone could see how they had degenerated under it. And it’s always seemed to me that what was true for the negroes … is true for us, too. … It’s good to keep close to the earth.”
“Keep close to the earth?” Potch mused.
“In tune with the fundamentals, all the great things of loving and working—our eyes on the stars.”
“The stars?”
“The objects of our faith and service.”
They were silent again for a while. Then Sophie said:
“You …” she hesitated, remembering what she had told John Armitage—“you and I would fight for the Ridge principle, even if all the others accepted Mr. Armitage’s offer, wouldn’t we, Potch?”
“Of course,” Potch said.
“And Michael?”
“Michael?” His eyes questioned her in the dim light because of the hesitation in her question. “Why do you say that? Michael would be the last man on earth to have anything to do with Armitage’s scheme.”
“He comes back to put the proposition to the men definitely in a few days, doesn’t he?” Sophie asked.
“Yes,” Potch said.
“Have you talked to Michael about it?”
“To tell you the truth, Sophie,” Potch replied slowly, conscience-stricken that he had given the subject so little consideration, “I took it for granted there could only be one answer to the whole thing. … I haven’t thought of it. I’ve only thought of you the last week or so. I haven’t talked to Michael; I haven’t even heard what the men were saying at midday. … But, of course, there’s only one answer.”
“I’ve tried to talk to Michael, but he won’t discuss it with me,” Sophie said.
Potch stared at her.
“You don’t mean,” he said—“you can’t think—”
“Oh,” she cried, with a gesture of desperation, “I know John Armitage is holding something over Michael … and if it’s true what he says, it’ll break Michael, and it’ll go very badly against the Ridge.”
“You can’t tell me what it is?”
Sophie shook her head.
Potch got up; his face settled into grave and fighting lines. Sophie, too, rose from the ground. They went towards the track where the three huts stood facing the scattered dumps of the old Flash-in-the-Pan rush.
“I want to see Michael,” Potch said, when they approached the huts. “I’ll be in, in a couple of minutes.”
Sophie went on to their own home, and Potch, swerving from her, walked across to the back door of Michael’s hut.