The Judge

by Rebecca West

"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a necessary and noble journey towards economic and spiritual independence it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh, which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight. What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried about the town.

Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in the glass which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened to her in it.

She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping, but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who died God's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one of them.

She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of glass which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and wept and wept, until she fell asleep.

It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more—they were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"

But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.

"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute—oh, such a brute. Do, do forgive me."

"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."

"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.

"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly, and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"