The Judge

by Rebecca West

III

"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them, laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do; there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic hues.

But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields, set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather, and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under changing skies even as the seas.

Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly, "Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity, and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which, when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country, these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.

"Do you not think it's rather fine?" asked Ellen, in so small and flat a voice that he perceived she was afraid that the climax she had worked up to hadn't come off and that he was sneering at her Pentlands. It seemed a little surprising to him that she didn't know what was in his mind without being told, and he hastened to tell her he thought it was glorious. The anxiety lifted from her face at that, and she gazed at the hills with such an exultant fixity that he was able to stare at her at his ease. She was looking very Scotch, and like a small boy, for her velvet tam-o'-shanter was stuck down on her head and she wore a muffler that nearly touched her rather pink little nose. Her jacket was too big for her and her skirt very short, showing her slender legs rising out of large cobbler-botched nailed boots like plant-stems rising out of flower-pots, and these extreme sartorial disproportions gave her a sort of "father's waistcoat" look. Yet at a change of the wind, at the slightest alteration of the calm content of their relationship, she would disclose herself indubitably romantic as the sickle moon, as music heard at dusk in a garden of red roses. He supposed that to every man of his horse-power there ultimately came a Juliet, but none but him in the whole world had a Juliet of so many merry disguises. He looked at the range and thought that somewhere behind them was the spot where he would tell her that he loved her. It gave him a foolish pleasure to imagine what manner of place it would be—whether there would be grass or heather underfoot and if the hill-birds would cry there also.

"Well, it's no use you and me seeing which of us can gape the longest if we mean to get to Glencorse before the light goes," said Ellen. "We'd best step forward. I'm glad you like the place. I love it. And this bit of the road's bonny. When Rachael Wing and I were stopping up in the ploughman's cottage at Kirktown over by Glencorse Pond we got up one day at sunrise and came over here before the stroke of four. And if you'll believe it, the road was thick with rabbits, running about as bold as brass and behaving as sensibly as Christians. The poor things ran like the wind when they saw us. I wish we could have explained we meant no harm, for I suppose it's the one time in the day when they count on having the world to themselves."

"I've felt like that about a jaguar," he said. "Came on it suddenly, on a clearing by a railway camp on the Leopoldina. It had been tidying up a monkey and was going home a bit stupid and sleepy. Lord, the sick fright in its eyes when it saw me. I'd have given anything to be able to stand it a drink and offer to see it home."

"Och!" she murmured abashed. "Me talking about rabbits, and you accustomed to jaguars. I suppose you never take notice of a rabbit except to look down your nose at it. But we can't rise to jaguars in Scotland. But I once saw a red deer running in the woods at Taynuilt."

"I've seen a red deer too," he said, "when I was motorcycling up to Ross this summer." It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, "The sunset was on it. It looked the colour of your hair."

"Well, if it did," she cried with sudden petulance, "pity me, that has to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast's back. Och, come along! Let's run. I like running. I'm cold. There's a bonny bridge where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir. Let's run." And for a hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath. "I don't like this," she said half laughingly. "I've a poor envious nature. I'm used to running everybody else off their feet, and here you're holding back to keep with me. I feel I'm being an object of condescension. We'll walk, if you please."