The Judge

by Rebecca West

She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation, which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors, were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body, taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.

"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward. And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate Broadway—"

The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at Margate."

"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got, Poppy!"

Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be very comfortable when one's tired."

Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was, perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking just like this; but it was gone immediately.

"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to pass it by—think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!—when the band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy. Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you know, mother, Poppy is Spanish—half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."

After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."

The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.

"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"