The Black Opal quotes

A string of vehicles moved slowly out of the New Town, taking the road over the long, low slope of the Ridge to the plains.

Nothing was moving on the wide stretch of the plains or under the fine, clear blue sky of early spring, except this train of shabby, dust-covered vehicles.

The road, no more than a track of wheels on shingly earth, wound lazily through paper daisies growing in drifts beside it, and throwing a white coverlet to the dim, circling horizon. The faint, dry fragrance of paper daisies was in the air;

Rouminof’s funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man.

He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady.

Every man, woman, or child on the Ridge knew Michael.

“You’re a regular ’cyclopaedia, Michael,” the men said sometimes when he, had given information on a subject they were discussing.

“Not me,” Michael would reply as often as not. “I just came across that in a book I was reading the other day.”

Ridge folk were proud of Michael’s books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection—mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects—did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk, or …

They would be off down to Sydney, if no buyer was due to visit the fields, eager to make the most of the good time their luck and the opal would bring them. “

Opal only brings you bad luck when you don’t get enough of it,

” Ridge folk say.

… had done, and demand the return of the opals, or let him get away with them, Michael had not decided, when Charley’s hand went to his pocket, and, as it closed over the package of opals, a smile of infantile satisfaction flitted across his face.

That smile, criminal in its treachery, enraged Michael more than the deed itself.

The candle Charley had been reading by guttered out. He stumbled about the room looking for another. After a while, as if he could not find one, he went back to his chair and settled into it.

He knew only a sick fear possessed him that Charley would wake and find him, Michael, barefooted, like a thief in his house. But he was not a thief, he assured himself.

It was not thieving to take from a thief.

Charley stirred uneasily. His arm went out; in the dim light Michael saw it go over the pocket which held the packet of opal; his hand clutch at it unconsciously.

… could not imagine the other considerations which had overshadowed grief and bitterness, the realisation that Sophie’s life had been saved from what looked like early wreckage, and the consciousness that the consequences of what Charley had done, had fallen, not on Charley, but on himself.

Michael had lived like a child, with an open heart at the disposal of his mates always

; and the sense of Charley’s guilt descending on him, had created a subtle ostracism, a remote alienation from them.

In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world.

Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake.

The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its …

but the days go on, for months, one after the other, hot, breathless, of dazzling radiance, or wrapped in the red haze of a dust storm.

Ridge folk take the heat as primitive people do most acts of God, as a matter of course, with stiff-lipped hardihood, which makes complaint the manifestation of a poor spirit.

They meet their difficulties with a native humour which gives zest to flagging energies.

A sober, easygoing crowd, the Ridge miners do not trouble themselves much about law. They have little need of it. They live in accord with certain fundamental instincts, on terms of good fellowship with each other.

“To go back on a mate,” is recognised as the major crime of the Ridge code.

Sometimes, during a rush, the wilder spirits who roam from one mining camp to another in the back-country, drift back, and “hit things up” on the Ridge, as the men say. But they soon drift away again.

There might be more money in it, there would be a steadier means of livelihood; but the Ridge miners will not hear of it.

“No,” they say; “we’ll put up with less money⁠—and be our own masters.”

Most of them worked on Chalk Cliffs’ opal blocks, and they realised in the early days of the new field the difference between the conditions they had lived and worked under on the Cliffs and were living and working under on the Ridge, where every …

But the beauty of the world, the sky, and the stars, spring, summer, the grass, and the birds, were for every man, Michael said.

Any and every man could have immortal happiness by hearing a bird sing, by gazing into the blue-dark depths of the sky on a starry night.

No man could sell his joy of these things. No man could buy them. Love is for all men: no man can buy or sell love.

Any and every man could have immortal happiness by hearing a bird sing, by gazing into the blue-dark depths of the sky on a starry night. No man could sell his joy of these things. No man could buy them.

Love is for all men: no man can buy or sell love.

Pleasure in work, in jolly gatherings with friends, peace at the end of the day, and satisfaction of his natural hungers, a man might have all these things on the Ridge, if he were content with essentials.

A married man gives his wife and children a trip to the seaside or a holiday in town. But all drift back to the Ridge when the taste of city life has begun to cloy, or when all their money is spent.

Once an opal miner, always an opal miner, the Ridge folk say.

Among the men, only the shiftless and more worthless are not in sympathy with Ridge ideas, and talk of money and what money will buy as the things of first value in life.

“They felt,” they said, “that there was something occultly evil about black opal.” They had a curious fear and dread of the stones as talismans of evil. Dawe Armitage scattered the quakers like chaff with his scorn.

They could not, he said, accept the magnificent pessimism of black opal.

They would not rejoice with pagan abandonment in the beauty of those fires in black opal, realising that, like the fires of life, they owed their brilliance, their transcendental glory, to the dark setting. But every day the opals made worshippers of sightseers.

She did not know why she liked being with Arthur Henty so much, or why they were such golden occasions when she met him. They did not talk much when they were together.

Their eyes met; they knew each other through their eyes⁠—a something remote from themselves was always working through their eyes.

It drew them together.

But now, beyond her going, he could see the failure of his own effort to control circumstances. He had failed; Sophie had gone; she had left the Ridge.

“God,” he groaned; “with the best intentions in the world, what an awful mess we make of things!”

Michael wondered whether it would have been worse for Sophie if she had gone away with Paul when her mother died. At least, Sophie was older now and better able to take care of herself.

“Couple of months,” George said.

“Police protect criminals⁠—everybody knows that,” Snowshoes said.

Sitting on the dump just beyond the shade the shelter cast, he had been listening to what the men were saying, the sun full blaze on him, his blue eyes glittering in the shadow of his old felt hat. All eyes turned to him.

“Well, I reck’n we’d ought to have in the police,” Watty remarked obstinately.

“The police!” Snowshoes stood up as if he had no further patience with the controversy. “It’s like letting hornets build in your house to keep down flies⁠—to call in the police. The hornets get worse than the flies.”

He turned on his heel and walked away. His tall, white figure, straighter than any man’s on the Ridge, moved silently, his feet, wrapped in their moccasins of grass and sacking, making no sound on the shingly earth.

Potch’s grey eyes lay on his for the fraction of a second.

“You haven’t got money enough to buy that stone, Mr. Armitage,” he said, quietly.

The old man was crestfallen.

“I’m all right, Michael,” she said, “only a bit crocky and dead tired.” She sat up, and Michael sat on the bed beside her while she drank the tea and ate the bread and butter.

“Tea in a pannikin is much nicer than any other tea in the world,” Sophie said.

“Don’t you think so, Michael? I’ve often wondered whether it’s the tea, or the taste of the tin pannikin, or the people who have tea in pannikins, that makes it so nice.”

“Oh!” Sophie cried, in a bitter wailing; “it’s true, I believe … somebody said once that I’m as unlucky as opal—that I bring people bad luck like opal. …”

“You know what we say on the Ridge?” Potch said; “The only bad luck you get through opal is when you can’t get enough of it⁠—so the only bad luck you’re likely to bring to people is when they can’t get enough of you.”

Sophie’s hands went to him in a flutter of breaking grief. The forgiveness she could not ask, the gratitude for his gentleness, which she could not express any other way, were in the gesture and exclamation.

Potch’s grip on her hand tightened.

“You’re you⁠—and you’re here. That’s enough for us!” he said.

Sophie sighed. “I never dreamt everybody would be so good. You and Michael I knew would—but the others … I thought they’d remember … and disapprove of me, Potch. … Mrs. Watty”—a smile showed faintly in her eyes—“I thought she’d see to that.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Potch said.

“I love you enough for both of us.⁠ ⁠… Just think of me”⁠—he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it gently⁠—“like this⁠—your hand⁠—a sort of third hand.”

When he came back from the mine in the afternoon Potch went to see Sophie, cut wood for her, and do any odd jobs she might need done.

People looking after her wondered why she was not laughing; why suddenly her good spirits had died down. She was tired and wanted to cry. … She hoped she would not cry; but she did not like dancing with Arthur Henty before all these people.

It was like dancing on a grave.

Henty’s grip tightened. Sophie’s face had become childish and pitiful, working with the distress which she could not suppress. His hand on hers comforted her. Their hands loved and clung; they comforted each other, every fibre finding its mate, twined and entwined;

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.

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?

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.

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—”

Potch expected to see his father where he was; he had seen him so often before on Michael’s sofa under the window. Charley glanced up from the newspaper he was reading as Potch came into the room.

“Well, son,” he said, “the prodigal father’s returned, and quite ready for a fatted calf.”

Potch stood staring at him.