The Judge

by Rebecca West

"Tell me," she asked. "How did you get rid of Peacey? Was it money?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Not altogether. You see, I found out something about him...."

She walked home slowly, with her head bent, wondering what blood she had perpetuated.

So, a week later, Susan Rodney came. Her visit was a great humiliation. She was a woman of thirty-five, strangely and reassuringly unlike her brother, having a fair, sun-burned skin with a golden down on her upper lip, and slow-moving eyes, the colour of a blue sky reflected in shallow floods. She was as clean and useful as a scrubbed deal table. And because she was wholesome in her soul, she abhorred this woman who was sending away her own child. During the twenty-four hours she was at Yaverland's End she ate sparingly, plainly because she felt reluctance at accepting hospitality from Marion, and rose very early, as if she found sleeping difficult in the air of this house. This might have been in part due to the affection she evidently felt for her brother, which was shown in the proud and grudging responses to Marion's enquiries as to how he was getting on at Dawlish.

"He's doing ever so well, and he's made the place a picture," she would begin volubly, and then would toss her head slowly like a teased heifer, and decide that Marion did not deserve to hear tidings of the glorious man she had slighted. But the greater part of her loathing was that which a woman with a simple heart of nature must feel for one who hated her child, which the sound must feel for the leprous.

Marion could have mitigated that feeling in a great part, not by explaining, for that was impossible, but by simply showing that she had suffered, for Susan was a kind woman. Instead she did everything she could to encourage it. She told no lies, although by now her efforts to win over the neighbourhood, so that she could get a servant easily and be able to give her whole time to the children, had made her coldly sly in her dealings with humanity. She liked Susan too much for that. Merely she made no attempt to disguise her personality. After the children had gone to bed she sat by the hearth and held her head high under the other's ruminant stare, knowing that because of the times she had been subject to love and to lust her beauty was lip-marked as a well-read book is thumb-marked, and that that would seem a mark of abomination to this woman in the salty climate of whose character passion could not bloom. She knew, too, that to Susan, who every Sunday since her babyhood had gone to church and prayed very hard, with her thick fair brows brought close together, to be helped to be good, the pride of her bearing would seem terribly wicked to a sinner who had broken one of the Ten Commandments.

Marion kept down her eyes so that the other should not see that the eyeballs were strained with agony, and should think that she was a loose and conscienceless woman. She hated doing this. She liked Susan so much, and she was terribly lonely. She would like to have thrown her arms round Susan's neck and cried and cried, and told her how terribly difficult she found life, and how she hated people being nasty to her, and asked her if sometimes she did not long for a man to look after her. But instead she sat there rigidly alienating her. For she had seen that because Susan disliked her she was precipitating herself much more impulsively than she would otherwise have done into affection for the child whom she suspected was being maltreated by this queer woman in this queer house. In any case she would have admitted Roger to her heart, for it was plainly very empty since the loss of her son, whom she had loved so dearly that she did not speak of him to Marion, but being slow of movement she might have taken her time over it; and it was necessary that these two should love each other at once. At any moment Roger might understand his mummie hated him, and that would break his poor little heart, which she knew was golden, unless he had some other love to which to run. She was so glad when she found herself seeing them off at Paddington, although it was a horrible scene. Susan had primly, and with an air of refusing to participate in the spoils of vice, declined to let Marion buy her a firstclass ticket, so the parting had to take place in a crowded thirdclass compartment. Roger shrieked and kicked at leaving her, and leaned howling from the window, while Marion said over and over again, "Mummy's so sorry ... it's only that just now she isn't well enough to look after you both ... and Richard's the eldest, so he must stay ... and you'll be back ever so soon.... And there's such lovely sands at Dawlish...."

All the people in the corner-seats had looked with distaste at this plain, ill-behaved child and had cast commending glances on Richard, who stood by her side on the platform, absorbedly watching the porters wheeling their trucks along, but always keeping on the alert so that he never got in anyone's way. She couldn't bear that. She wanted to scream out: "How dare you look like that at this poor little soul who has been sinned against from the moment of his begetting? Think of it, his mother hates him!"

She looked wildly at Susan for some comfort, but found her pink with grave anger. Well, it was better for Roger that Susan should feel thus about her. So she went on with these murmurs, which she felt the child might detect as insincere at any moment, until the green flag waved. She watched the diminishing train with a criminally light heart. Richard began to jump up and down. "Mummie! Won't it be lovely—just us two!"

It was lovely. It was iniquitously lovely. In the morning Richard ran into her room and flung himself, all dewy after the night's long sleep, into her bed and nuzzled into her and gave her endless love which did not have to be interrupted because the other child was standing at the head of the bed, its pale eyes asking for its share of kisses. When he went to school, she stood at the door and watched him run along the garden to the gate, flinging out his arms and legs quite straight as a foal does, and was exultingly proud of being a mother as she had not been when there ran behind him Roger on weak, ambling limbs. When he returned, they had their meal together to the tune of happy laughter, for there was now no third to spill its food or say it was feeling sick suddenly or babble silly things. In the afternoon she had to drive him out to go and play games with the other boys. Much rather would he have stayed with her, and when she called him back for a last hug he did not struggle in her arms but gave her back kiss for kiss. She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they left corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before he came in, and sit waiting in a drowse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man, for this was much better than anything she could have had from Harry. When Richard came in he would hold his breath because it was so nice and forget to tell her about the game from which he was still flushed; and after tea they would settle down to a lovely warm, close evening by the fire, when they would tell each other all the animal stories that Roger had not liked.