The Judge

by Rebecca West

She lingered over him for long, peering at him through the dusk to miss nothing of his bloomy brownness. He curled up when he slept like a little animal, and his breath drove through him deeply and more serenely than any adult's. At last she felt compelled to kiss him, and, without waking up, he shook his head about and said disgustedly, "Wugh!" as she rose and left him.

Twilight was flooding the house, and peace also, and she moved happily through the dear place where she lived with her dear son, her heart wounded and yet light, because though she had had to hurt him, she knew that henceforward he would obey whatever laws she laid upon him. He had been subject to her when he was a baby; it was plain that he was going to be subject to her now that he was a boy; she might almost hope that she would never lose him. "I must make myself good enough to deserve this," she said prayingly. As she went downstairs she looked through the open front door into the crystalline young night, tinged with purple by some invisible red moon and diluted by the daylight that had not yet all poured down the sluice of the west, and resolved to go out and meditate for a little on how she must live to be worthy of this happy motherhood.

She walked quickly and skimmingly about the dark lawns, exalted and humble. In a gesture of joy she threw out her arms and struck a clump of nightstock, and the scent rushed up at her. A nightingale sang in the woods across the lane. These things seemed to her to be in some way touchingly relevant to the beautiful destiny of her and her son, and her eyes were filled with tears of gratitude for nature's sympathy. She went round the house, walking softly, keeping close to the wall, to eavesdrop on the lovely, drowsy, kindly world. The silence of the farmyard was pulsed with the breath of many sleeping beasts. The dark doors and windows of the cattle-sheds looked out under the thick brows of their thatched eaves at the strange fluctuating wine-like light as if they were consciously preserving their occupants from the night's magic. As she walked to the garden's edge, the crickets chirped in the long grass and the ballet of the bats drove back and forwards in long streaks. The round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were hidden in an amethystine haze that covered the marshes and the sea, and changed the lit liners going from Tilbury to floating opals; and within the house was Richard. All was beauty.

Surely it would be given to her to deserve to be his mother? She stood there in an ecstasy that was hardly at all excitement, until it blew cold and she remembered that she had left the fire unmended, and went back to the house.

She went in by the kitchen, and was amazed to see that the larder door was open and giving out a faint ray of light. She pulled it open and saw the other child standing on a chair and spooning cherry jam out of the jar into his mouth. A candle, which it had put on the shelf below it, threw on the ceiling an enormous shadow of its large, jerry-built skull. It turned on her a pale and filthy face and dropped the jar, so that gobs of jam fell on its pinafore, the paper-covered shelf, the chair, the floor. She lifted the child down and struck it. It gave her the most extraordinary pleasure to strike it. She struck it three times, and each time it was as good as drinking wine. Then she fell forward on her knees and covered her face with her hands. The child ceased to howl and put its jammy arms forgivingly about her while she wept, but its touch only reminded her how delicious it had been to beat it. Still, she submitted to its embrace, and muttered in abasement: "Oh, lovey, mummy shouldn't have done that!"

The child was puzzled, for it knew it ought not to have stolen the jam, and as always, it was so full of love that it could not believe that anybody had behaved badly to it. There was nothing to do but to give it a kiss and take it off to bed. When she saw its horrid little body stripped for the bath, heat ran through her throat, and she remembered again how exquisite it had been to hurt him, and she speculated whether very much force would be needed to kill it. All the time it knelt at her knee saying its prayers she was wondering whether, when he was a little older, he would not get caught by the tide out on the flats. "You vile woman!" she exclaimed in amazement. "You murderess!" But that was merely conversation which did not alter the established fact that her profounder self still hated the child it had brought forth, as it had done before he was born, and now, as then, was plotting to kill it, and that some check which her consciousness had always exerted on that hatred had for some reason been damaged, and that he was in active danger from her.

All night she lay awake, and in the morning she went up to the bailiff's office at Torque Hall and asked them to send for Harry. She waited in an inner room, her heart quite calm with misery, and when Harry appeared in the doorway she did not care one way or another that he was white and shaken. Without delaying to greet him, she told him that she loathed Peacey's child so much that it must be taken away from her, at least for some time, and that she had wondered if she ought to give him a chance of finding affection with his father, who had, after all, never stopped sending him presents.

There was a silence, and she turned her eyes on him and found him looking disapproving. Plainly he thought it very unnatural of her to dislike her own child, and was daring to doubt if his own son was safe with her. He—he of all men—who by his disloyalty had brought on her this monstrous birth that had deformed her fate! She clenched her fists and drew in a sharp breath and her eyes blazed. He moved forward suddenly in his chair, and she saw that this display of her quality had drawn him to her, as always the moon of her being had drawn the fluid tides of his, and that he wanted to touch her. Nearly he desired her. That also was insolence. Her acute hating glance recorded that whereas desire had used to make his face hard and splendid like a diamond, like a flashing sword, it now made it lax, and she realised with agony, though, of course, without surprise, that he had been unfaithful to their love times without number. But she looked into his eyes and found them bereaved as her heart was. She turned aside and sobbed once, drily. After that, they spoke softly, as if one they had both loved lay dead somewhere close at hand. He told her that Peacey had set up for himself in an inn, and that a widowed sister of his, named Susan Rodney, who also had been in the Torques' service, was keeping house for him. She was a really good sort, he declared, although she was Peacey's sister, and very motherly; indeed, she had been terribly upset by the loss of her only child, a little boy of nine, so she would doubtless welcome the charge of Roger. At any rate, there would be no harm in letting the child go to her for a three months' visit.

"I'll settle the whole thing," he said. "You'd better not write; he may want to meet you."

With distaste she perceived that although he had never done anything useful for her, he was still capable of being jealous of her, and she abruptly rose to go. But she delayed for a moment to satisfy a curiosity that had vexed her for years.