The Judge

by Rebecca West

Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her, and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops, trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love: indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of love.

She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago? Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow, repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ... and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke, too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece of female imbecility.

Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands with a fierce, jubilant pressure.

How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool. That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish, but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than most professed romantics do.

Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house. He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella." At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are such a wee darling!"

And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things? It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good—even divinely good. Life had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child, and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!" she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles? Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her. It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman was being allowed to die without having been happy.

"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen, whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.

Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.

"Richard, she's going!"