The Judge

by Rebecca West

"Over yonder," she quavered, "but I'm not wanting any tea."

But just then a gig drew up beside them, driven by an old man and laden with a couple of tin trunks and a cornucopia of a woman, who had snatched the reins out of the old man's hands. "What's this? A roup at Little Vantage! Feyther, what's happened?" The old man shook his head. "Feyther, ye niver ken onything." She raised a megaphonic voice. "Moggie! Moggie Gumley!" A fat young woman with a soap-shining face ran out of the farmhouse. "Wha's calling me? Och, it's you, Mistress Cairns!" "Ay, it's me. What's ta'en ye all here? I've been awa' for two months keepin' hoose for ma brither Jock while his wife's been in the Infirmary wi' her chumer. I didn't think I'd come back to find a roup at Little Vantage." "So ye've not haird?" gasped the fat young woman delightedly. "Feyther's deid o' his dropsy, and Alec and me's awa' to Canady this day fortnight." She panted it out with so honest a joy in the commotion, so innocent a disregard of the tragedy of death and emigration, that Yaverland and Ellen had to turn away and laugh; and he drew her across the road to the cottage.

The door was opened before they got there. "It's me, Mrs. Lawson!" said Ellen. "Indeed, I kenned that!" replied the housewife. "I was keeking out of the window when you came up the road, and I said to masel', 'There's Miss Melville, and she'll be wanting her tea,' so I awa' and popped the kettle on. Bring your gentleman in. He's a new face, but he's welcome. Ye'll pardon the parlour being a' of a reek wi' tobaccy, but Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Borthwick cam' in and had a cup o' tea and a bit of a crack. They were both bidding at the roup and some business thegither. I think Mr. Laidlaw means to buy Cornhaven off Mr. Borthwick and give it to his son John, wha's married on a Glasca girl, a shelpit wee thing wi' a Glesca accent like skirling pipes played by a drunken piper." They watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip, their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires. All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; and farmers hawked out their last jests at one another, mounted their gigs and drove home; and the flocks of sheep and droves of cattle pattered by, bleating and lowing not so heartrendingly.

Ellen rose, went over to the mantelpiece and stroked the china dogs, and sat down in an armchair by the fire. "This has been a lovely day," she murmured. She joined her hands behind her head and crossed her knees and smiled blindishly into the shadow; and his heart turned over in him. All his life he would remember her just as she was then: the lovely attitude of body that was at once angular and softly sensuous, like a blossom-laden branch; the pure pearl colour of her skin, the pure bright colours of her hair and eyes and mouth; the passionate and funny, shrewd and credulous pattern of her features; and that dozing smile, that looked as if her soul had ceased to run up and down enquiringly and was resting awhile to enjoy the sweetness that was its own climate. He would never forget her as she was looking then. She might turn away from him, she might get old, she might die, but the memory of her as she was at that moment would endure for ever in his heart, an eternally living thing. He was aware, reluctantly enough, for he hated such mystical knowledge, and would have given the world to see life as a plain round of dicing and drinking and wenching, that real love was somehow a cruel thing for women; that the hour when she became his wife would be as illimitably tragic as it would be illimitably glorious. But love was also very kind to women, since it enabled them to live always at their loveliest in their lover's memories, there perpetually exempt from the age and ugliness that even the bravest of them seemed pitifully to fear.

Yet, of course love was not so kind to every woman. No one remembered his mother as he would remember Ellen. He began to ponder what his mother must have been like when she was that age, and it marked a certain difference between him and other men, that he was grudgingly surprised that the girl he meant to marry was as beautiful as his mother. Certainly, he reflected, with a bitter, gloating grief, Marion Yaverland must have been beautiful enough to deserve a lodging in some man's memory. She must have been brilliantly attractive in the obvious physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark, silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.

There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull, and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands over her face.

Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."

Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her red hair. But when they got into the lane outside she hurried towards the high road as if she fled from something, catching her breath sobbingly when the darkness was so thick that she could not run, although he told her many times that there was no need for haste. "See," he said, as they took their stand at the cross-roads, "the bus isn't anywhere in sight yet." But she did not answer him, and he became aware that she was trembling. "Are you cold? Would you like my coat?" he asked, but she murmured a little broken mouseish refusal. Could it possibly be that she was frightened of being alone with him in the dark? He had to own to himself that she would have been afraid of him if she had known some of the things that he had done, although he did not admit that her fear would be anything more than a child's harsh judgment of matters it did not understand. But no rumours could have reached her ears, for he had always lived very secretly, even beyond the needs of discretion, since he knew that the passive sort of women with whom, for the most part, he had had dealings have an enormous power of self-deception, and could, as the years went on, if there were no witnesses to dispute it, pretend to themselves that what had happened with him was no reality but only a naughty dream that had come to them between sleeping and waking.

It came to him like a feeling of sickness that it was not absolutely impossible that those Christians, in spite of that personal ridiculousness which he had noticed in nearly all of them, were right. It might be that sin was sin and left a stain, and that those things which had appeared to him as innocently sweet as a bathe in a summer sea, and which he had believed to end utterly with dawn and the stealthy shutting of a door, had somehow left him loathsome to this girl. He perceived that there might have been a meaning adverse to him in the way she had delayed, in despite of her own wish to hurry, and pinned up her hair. Perhaps she had seen something in his face which made her shiver with apprehension that his hands might touch it; not because it was her hair, but because they were his hands and had acquired a habit of fingering women's beauties. But indeed he was not like that. He sweated with panic, and raged silently against this streak of materialism in women that makes them so grossly dwell on the physical events in a man's life. This agony of tenderness he felt for her now, this passion of worship that kept half his mind inactive yet tense, like a devotee contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt for those other women.

The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats, who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen. "And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed. Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the Gondomar had been scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half asleep."