The Black Opal - Katharine Susannah Prichard (open ebook .TXT) 📗

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