“It’s not true,” Sophie cried, her faith afire. “It couldn’t be! … If everybody in the world told me, I wouldn’t believe it!”
Armitage took a cigarette-case from his vest pocket, opened it, and selected a cigarette.
“I’m not asking you to believe me,” he said. “I’m only explaining the position to you because you’re concerned in it. And for God’s sake don’t let us be melodramatic about it, Sophie. I’m not a villain. I don’t feel in the least like one. This is entirely a business affair. … I see my way to a profitable investment—incidentally fulfilment of a scheme I’ve been working out for a good many years.
“Michael would oppose the syndicate for all he’s worth if it weren’t for this trump card of mine,” Armitage went on. “He’s got a Utopian dream about the place. … I see it as an up-to-date mining town, with all the advantages which science and money can bring to the development of its resources. His dream against mine—that’s what it amounts to. … Well, it’s a fair thing, isn’t it, if I know that Michael is false to the things he says he stands for—and he stands in the way of my scheme—to let the men know he’s false? … They will fall away from the ideas he stands for as they will from Michael; two or three may take the ideas sans Michael … but they will be in the minority. … The way will be clear for reorganisation then.”
Not for an instant did Sophie believe that Michael had been a traitor to his own creed—false to the things he stood for, as John Armitage said—although she thought he may have done something to give Armitage reason for thinking so.
“I’ll see Michael tomorrow, and have it out with him,” John Armitage said. “I shall tell him what I know … and also my plans. If he will work with me—”
Sophie looked up, her smile glimmering.
“If he will work with me,” Armitage repeated, knowing she realised all that would mean in the way of surrender for Michael, “nothing need be said which will undermine Michael’s influence with men of the Ridge. I know he can make things a great deal easier by using his influence with them—by bending their thoughts in the direction of my proposition, suggesting that, after all, they have given their system a trial and it has not worked out as satisfactorily as might have been expected. … I’ll make all the concessions possible, you may be sure—give it a profit-sharing basis even, so that the transaction won’t look like the thing they are prejudiced against. But if Michael refuses. …”
“He will. …”
“I am going to ask the men to meet me in the hall, at the end of the month, to lay before them a proposition for the more effective working of the mines. I shall put my proposition before them, and if Michael refuses to work with me, I shall be forced to give them proofs of his unworthiness of their respect. …”
“They won’t believe you.”
“There will be the proofs, and Michael will not—he cannot—deny them.”
“You’ll tell him what you are going to do?”
“Certainly.”
Sophie realised how far Armitage was from understanding the religious intensity and simplicity with which Ridge folk worked for the way of life they believed to be the right one, and what the breakup of that belief would mean to those who had served it in the unpretentious, unprotesting fashion of honest, downright people. To him the Ridge stood for messy sentimentalism, Utopian idealism. And there was money in the place: there was money to be made by putting money into it—by working the mines and prospecting the country as the men without capital could not.
John Armitage was ready to admit—Sophie had heard him admitting in controversy—that the Fallen Star mines which the miners themselves controlled were as well worked and as well managed within their means as any he had ever come across; that the miners themselves were a sober and industrious crowd. What capital could do for them and for the Fallen Star community by way of increasing its output and furthering its activities was what he saw. And the only security he could have for putting his capital into working the mines was ownership of them. Ownership would give him the right to organise the workers, and to claim interest for his investment from their toil, or the product of their toil.
The Ridge declaration of independence had made it clear that people of Fallen Star did not want increased output, the comforts and conveniences which capital could give them, unless they were provided from the common fund of the community. Ultimately, it was hoped the common fund would provide them, but until it did Ridge men had announced their willingness to do without improvements for the sake of being masters of their own mines. If it was a question of barter, they were for the pride and dignity of being free men and doing without the comforts and conveniences of modern life. Sophie felt sure Armitage underestimated the feeling of the majority of men of the Ridge toward the Ridge idea, and that most of them would stand by it, even if for some mysterious reason Michael lost status with them. But she was dismayed at the test the strength of that feeling was to be put to, and at the mysterious shame which threatened Michael. She could not believe Michael had ever done anything to
