The Judge

by Rebecca West

She had called it Roger after her own father in a desperate effort to bring it into the family, but the name, when she spoke it, seemed infinitely remote, as if she were speaking of the child of some servant in the house whom she had heard of but had never seen. When he was out of her sight, she ejected the thought of him from her mind, so that when her eyes fell on him again it was a shock. He did not become more seemly to look at. Indeed, he was worse when he grew out of frocks, for knickerbockers disclosed that he had very thin legs and large, knotty knees. He had a dull stare, and there seemed always to be a ring of food round his mouth. He had no pride. When she took the children on a railway journey Richard would sit quite still in his seat and would speak in a very low voice, and if any of the other passengers offered him chocolates or sweets he would draw back his chin as an animal does when it is offered food, and would shake his head very gravely. But Roger would move about, falling over people's legs, and would talk perpetually in a voice that was given a whistling sound by air that passed through the gap between his two front teeth, and when he got tired he would whine. He was unexclusive and unadventurous. He liked playing on the sands at Prittlebay in summer when they were covered with trippers' children. He hated Richard's passion for bringing the names of foreign places into the games. When Richard was sitting on his engine and roaring, "I'm the Trans-Andean express, and I don't half go at a pace!" Roger would stand against the wall opposite and cry over and over again in that whistling voice: "Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train! Make it the London, Tilbury and Prittlebay train!" When he felt happy he would repeatedly jump up in the air, bringing both his feet down on the ground at once, but a little distance apart, so that his thin legs looked horrible, and he would make loud, silly noises. At these times Richard would sit with his back to him and would take no notice. Always he was insolent to the other child. He would not share his toys with him, though sometimes he would pick out one of the best toys and give it to his brother as a master might give a present to a servant. He was of the substance of his mother, and he knew all that she knew, and he knew that this child was an intruder.

They clenched themselves against him. They were kind to him, but they would silently scheme to be alone together. If they were all three in the garden, she sitting with her needlework, Richard playing with his engine and Roger making daisy-chains, there would come a time when she would arise and go into the house. She would not look at Richard before she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale, or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him, knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door and stand for a moment, twiddling the handle round and round, as if he had not really been so very keen to come to her, and she would go on indifferently with her occupation. But presently she would feel that she must steal a glance at the face that she knew would be looking so adorable now, peering obliquely round the edge of the door, the lips bright with vitality as with wet paint and the eyes roguish as if he felt she were teasing life by enjoying it so, and the dear square head, browny-gold like the top of a bun, and the little bronze body standing so fresh and straight in the linen suit. So her glance would slide and slide, and their eyes would meet and he would run to her. If he had anything on his conscience he would choose this moment for confession. "Mother, I told a lie yesterday. But it wasn't about anything really important, so we won't talk about it, will we?"

Then he would clamber over her, like a squirrel going up a tree-trunk, until she tumbled into some big chair and rated him for being so boisterous, and drew him close to her so that he revelled in her love for him as in long meadow-grass. Even as she imagined that night before Peacey came, he did not struggle in her arms but gave her kiss for kiss. They would be sphered in joy, until they heard a sniff and saw the other child standing at the open door, resting its flabby cheek on the handle, surveying them with wild eyes. There would be a moment of dislocation. Then she would cry, "Come along, Roger!" and Richard would slip from her knee and the other child would come and very gratefully put its arms round her neck and kiss her. It would go on kissing and kissing her, as if it needed reassurance.

But she had always done her duty by Roger. That had not been so very difficult a matter at first, for Grandmother had made a great fuss of him and taken him off her hands for most of the day. Marion had never felt quite at ease about this, for she knew that he was receiving nothing, since the old woman was only affecting to find him lovable in order that it might seem that something good had come of the marriage which she had engineered. But the problem was settled when he was eighteen months old, for then Grandmother died. Marion did not feel either glad or sorry. God had dreamed her and her grandmother in different dreams. It was well that they should separate. But it had the immediate disadvantage of throwing her into perpetual contact with the other child. She looked after it assiduously, but she always felt when she had been with it for an hour or two that she wanted to go a great distance and breathe air that it had not breathed. Perpetually she marvelled at its contentedness and gentleness and unexigent hunger for love, and planted seeds of affection for it in her heart, but they would never mature.

The relationship became still more galling to her after yet another eighteen months, when Harry came back to live with his family at Torque Hall, who had returned there the year before. No communication passed between them, but sometimes by chance he met her in the lanes when she was out with the children. The first time he tried to speak to her, but she turned away, and Richard said, "Look here, you don't know us," so after that they only looked at one another. They would walk slowly past each other with their heads bent, and as they drew near she would lift her eyes and see him, beautiful and golden as a corn of wheat, and she would know from his eyes that, dark for his fair, she was as beautiful, and they would both look at Richard, who ran at her right side and was as beautiful as the essence of both their beauties. It seemed as if a band of light joined the bodies of these three, as if it were contracting and pulling them together, as if in a moment they would be pressed together and would dissolve in loving cries upon each other's breasts. But before that moment came, Harry's eyes would stray to the other child. Its socks would be coming down round its thin legs; it would be making some silly noises in its squalid, whistling voice; its features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the mud. They would pass on—their hearts sunk deeper into dingy acquiescence in their separation.

Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard. Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when Roger ailed—which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a weak digestion—she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary intensity on the minutiæ of his treatment and diet as if she were attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent, concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.

As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger, but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there had arrived—as there did every six months—parcels of toys, addressed to him and stamped with the Dawlish postmark and containing a piece of paper scrawled "With love from father."

She would be troubled by such moments when they came, for she was growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent that it did not detect that nobody had really given it anything, and went on rejoicing, thus redeeming her from guilt. He would come and stand at the door of any room in which she was sitting, and she would pretend not to know he was there, so that she need caress him or say the forced loving word; but when at length, irritated by his repeated sniffs, she turned towards him, she would find the grey marbles of his eyes bright with happiness, and he would cry out in his dreadful whistling voice, "Ah, you didn't know I was watching you!" and run across undoubtingly to her arms. There would be real gratitude in the embrace she gave him. His trust in her had so changed the moment that she need not feel remorse for it.

It had seemed quite possible that they could go on like this for ever, until the very instant that all was betrayed. She had had a terrible time with Richard, who was now seven years old. After their midday meal he had asked permission to go and spend the afternoon playing with some other boys on the marshes, and she had given it to him with a kiss, under which she had thought he seemed a little sullen. When Roger and she had nearly finished their tea he had appeared at the door, had stood there for a minute, and then, throwing up his head, had said doggedly: "I've had a lovely time at the circus." She had left the bread-knife sticking in midloaf and sat looking at him in silence. This was real drama, for she had refused to take them to the circus and forbidden him to go by himself because there was a measles epidemic in the neighbourhood. It flashed across her that by asking for permission to play with the boys on the marshes when he meant to go to the circus he had told her a lie. The foolish primitive maternal part of her was convulsed with horror at his fault. Because he was more important than anybody else, it seemed the most tremendous fault that anybody had ever committed, and because he was her son it seemed quite unlike any other fault and far more excusable. Her detached wisdom warned her that she must check all such tendencies in him, since what would in other children be judged a shortcoming natural to their age, would in him be ascribed to the evil blood of his lawless begetting, and he would start life under the powerful suggestion of a bad reputation. She resolved to punish him. The core of her that was nothing but love for Richard, that would have loved him utterly if they had not been mother and son, but man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman, cried out with anguish that she should have to hurt him to guard against the destiny which she herself had thrust upon him.

She said in a strained voice: "How dare you tell a lie to me and pretend that you were going to the marshes?" He answered, his eyebrows meeting and lying in straight, sullen bars: "I had to do that so's you wouldn't worry about me not coming home. And I paid for myself with the sixpence that was over from the five shillings Cousin Tom gave me at Christmas. And you know it doesn't really matter about the measles, because I'm strong and don't always go catching things like Roger does."