Arthur had given her his arm before the open door; they had moved a little distance from the door. Darkness was about them. There was no hesitancy, no moment of consideration. As two waves meeting in mid-ocean fall to each other, they met, and were lost in the oblivion of a close embrace. The first violence of their movement, failing, brought consciousness of time and place. They were standing in the slight shadow of some trees just beyond the light of the hall. A purring of music came to them in far-away murmurs, and strange, distant ejaculations, and laughter.
Sophie tried to withdraw from the arms which held her.
"No, no," she breathed; but Henty drew her to him again.
He murmured into her hair, and then from her lips again took a full draught of her being, lingeringly, as though he would drain its last essence.
A shadow loomed heavy and shapeless over them. It fell on them. Sophie was thrown back. Dazed, and as if she were falling through space, for a moment she did not realise what had happened. Then, there in the dark, she knew men were grappling silently. The intensity of the struggle paralysed her; she could see nothing but heavy, rolling shapes; hear nothing but stertorous breathing and the snorting grunts as of enraged animals. A cry, as if someone were hurt, broke the fear which had stupefied her.
She called Michael.
Two or three men came running from the hall. The struggling figures were on their feet again; they swung from the shadow. Sophie had an instant's vision of a hideous, distorted face she scarcely recognised as Potch's ... she saw Henty on the ground and Potch crouched over him. Then the surrounding darkness swallowed her. She knew she was dragged away from where she had been standing; she seemed to have been dragged through darkness for hours. When she wakened she could see only those heavy, quiet figures, struggling and grappling through the darkness.
CHAPTER 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 ball-room, 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 window-sill 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,"