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 nebulæ 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....