The Judge

by Rebecca West

It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift, automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. It was evidently a habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose, for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it, although the brows were still sleek. She did it, Ellen told herself with a tightening of her lips, as a person who would like to spend the afternoon playing the piano but is obliged to receive a visitor instead and strums on her knee. It was the only expression the occasion allowed for that passionate care for her own person which accounted for the inordinate beauty of her clothes. They were, she said to herself, using a phrase which she had always previously disliked, fair ridiculous for a woman of that age. They were, almost sinisterly, not accidental. The very dark brown hat on her head was just sufficiently like in shape to the crowns that Russian empresses wear in pictures to heighten the effect of majesty, which, Ellen supposed without approval, was what she was aiming at by her manner, and yet plain enough to heighten that effect in another way by suggesting that the wearer was a woman so conscious of advantage other than physical that she could afford to accept her middle age. And its colour was cunningly chosen to change her colour from mere swarthiness to something brown that holds the light like amber. Ellen felt pleased at her own acumen in discovering the various fraudulent designs of this hat, and at the back of her mind she wondered not unhopefully if this meant that she too would be clever about clothes. They must, moreover, have cost what, again using a phrase that had always before seemed quite horrid, she called to herself a pretty penny, for the materials had been made to satisfy some last refinement of exigence which demanded textures which should keep their own qualities yet ape their opposites, and the dark fur on her coat seemed a weightless softness like tulle, and the chestnut-coloured stuff of the coat and the dress beneath it was thick and rough like fur and yet as supple as the yellow silk of her fichu, which itself was sensually heavy with its own richness.

And as Ellen looked, the forefinger swept again the sleek eyebrows. Really, it was terrible that Richard's mother should be so deep in crime as to be guilty of offences that are denounced at two separate sorts of public meetings. She was a squaw who was all that men bitterly say women are, not loving life and the way of serving it, undesirous of power, content against all reason with her corruptible body and the clothing and adorning of it. She was an economic parasite, setting wage-slaves to produce luxuries for her to enjoy in idleness while millions of honest, hard-working people have to exist without the bare necessities of life. And now she was leaning forward, insolently untroubled by guilt, and saying in that voice that was too lazy to articulate:

"You won't like anchovies; those things they're helping you to now."

Ellen made a confused noise as if she were committing an indiscretion, and was furious at having made it, and then furious that she had betrayed the fact that she did not know an anchovy when she saw it; and then furious when the next moment Marion let the waiter put the limp bronze things on her own plate. Why shouldn't she like them if Marion did? Did Marion think she was a child who liked nothing but sugar-cakes? When another waiter came and Marion murmured tentatively, "Wine?" she answered with passionate assumption of self-possession, "Yes, please." She almost wavered when Marion, not raising her eyes, asked, "Red or white?" It brought her back to that night in the office when Mr. Philip had made her drink that Burgundy and then had come towards her, looking almost hump-back with strangeness, while all the shadows in the corners had seemed to leap a little and then stand still in expectation. Fear travelled through all her veins, weakening the blood; she pressed her lips together and braced her shoulders, living the occasion over again till all the evil things dissolved at Richard's knock upon the door. Because of him, how immune from fear she had become! She lifted her eyes to Marion and said confidently, "Red, please."

The blankness of the gaze that met her had, she felt sure, been substituted but the second before for a gaze richly complicated with observation and speculation. She scowled and remembered that she was disliking this woman on the highest grounds, and as she ate she sent her eyes round the restaurant, knowing quite well the line of the thought she expected it to arouse in her. She was not, in fact, seeing things with any acuteness. There was a woman at a table close by wearing a dress of a very beautiful blue, the colour of the lower flowers of the darkest delphiniums, but the sight of it gave her none of the pleasant physical sensations, the pricking of the skin, the desire to rub the palms of the hands together quickly that she usually experienced when she saw an intense, clear colour. But she saw, though all the images seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to the nerves, many people in bright clothes, the women showing their arms and shoulders as she had always heard rich women do, the men with glossy faces which reminded her in their brilliance and their blankness of the nails on Marion's hands; pretty food, like the things to eat in Keat's St. Agnes' Eve, being carried about on gleaming dishes by waiters whose bodies seemed deformed with obsequiousness; jewel-coloured wines hanging suspended over the white cloths in glasses invisible save where they glittered; bottles with gold necks lolling in pails among lumps of ice like tipsy gnomes overcome by sleep on some Alpine pass; innumerable fairy frocks and vessels of alabaster patterned like a cloud invested strong lights with the colour of romance. It would have roused her fatigued imagination had she not remembered that she had other business in hand. She organised her face to look on the spectacle with innocent pleasure, and then to darken at some serious reflection, and finally to assume the expression which she had always thought Socialist leaders ought to wear, though at public meetings she had noticed they do not.

She coughed to attract attention, and then sighed. "It's terrible," she declared, taking good care that her voice should travel across the table, "to see all these people being happy like this when there are millions in want."

Marion set down her wine-glass with a movement that, though her hands were clever, seemed clumsy, so indifferent was she to the thing she handled and the place she put it in, and looked round the restaurant with eyes that were very like Richard's, though they shone from bloodshot whites and were not so bright as his, nor so kind; nor so capable, Ellen felt sure, of losing all brilliance and becoming contemplative, passionate darkness. She said in her rapid, inarticulate murmur, "They don't strike me as being particularly happy."

Ellen was taken aback, and said in the tones of a popular preacher, "Then what are they doing here—feasting?"

"I suppose they're here because it's on the map and so are they," she answered almost querulously. "They'd go anywhere else if one told them it was where they ought to be. Good children, most people. Anxious to do the right thing. Don't you think?"

Ellen was unprepared for anything but agreement or reactionary argument from the old, and this was neither, but a subtlety that she left matched in degree her own though it was probably unsound; and to cover her emotions she lifted her glass to her lips. But really wine was very horrid. Her young mouth was convulsed. And then she reminded herself that it could not be horrid, for all grown-up people like it, and that there had never been any occasion when it was more necessary for her to be grown-up, so she continued to drink. Even after several mouthfuls she did not like it, but she was then interrupted by a soft exclamation from Mrs. Yaverland.