The Judge

by Rebecca West

But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly conscientious woman would have gone on selling Votes for Women for at least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the Scotsman's report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.

The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea, though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill. The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually turned on the rest of the world....

But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less. "But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."

He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers, and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention, which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.

But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift. They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic ("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a magical power to give each other the things they wanted.

But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.

"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."

"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"

She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr. Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her, things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."

"Ju—?"