The Judge

by Rebecca West

But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes—those black eyes; and there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his bat, the glorious man.

Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard, were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes, standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode, to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent up that hooting wordless cry.

Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her, until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man, Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.

"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his child to this.

Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly. But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.

She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively, Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking the village people what would happen when the squire came home and heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.

She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon: the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.

His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only door that was open to her. She must follow him.

Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes, which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of irritation.

"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching incuriously.