The Judge

by Rebecca West

"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily, making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"

She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me? Whoever's been complaining—and no doubt if your clients once began at that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock gun—it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm practically infallible."

"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing. "Perhaps we might call it your play."

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville, a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving away. I won't tell you"—he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before he speaks of evil—"what the client made of it all." And then he bent again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously, "The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now, if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing. For of course it could not be so.

Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery, which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve, the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently. "Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out, though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her? They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string was snapping separately.

"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise. "There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine, which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way, and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived. It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly. But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on, masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.