The Judge

by Rebecca West

As always, the suspicion that she was in the presence of somebody who had the singular bad luck to be unhappy changed Ellen on the instant to something soft as a kitten, incapable of resentment as an angel. "Well, I've got a habit of saying the things that will be found unpleasant," she said hopefully, in tones tremulous with kindness. "I'm just as likely to say something that'll rouse a person's dander as you are to say something that'll quiet it down. We ought to be awful good for one another."

Mrs. Yaverland turned on Ellen a glance which recognised her quality as queer and precious, yet was not endearing and helped her nothing in the girl's heart. For she was considering Ellen for what she would give Richard, what she would bring to satisfy that craving for living beauty which was so avid in him and because of his fastidiousness and his unwilling loyalty to the soul so unsatisfied. She wondered too whether Ellen could lighten those of his days which were sunless with doubt. And for that reason her appreciation brought her no nearer the girl than a courtier comes to the jewel he thinks fair enough to purchase as a present to his king. She became aware of the obstinate duration of their distance, and, trying to buy intimacy with honesty, because that was for her the highest price that could be paid, she said in the same forced voice, "You know, you're ever so much better than I thought you'd be."

"Am I now? What way?" Like all young people, she loved to talk about herself. "My looks, do you mean? Now, I was sure Richard was funning me when he told me I was nice. He talks so much of my hair that I was afraid he thought little of the rest of me. I'm sure he told you that I'm plain. And I am. Am I not?"

"No, you're beautiful. I expected you to be beautiful." There was a hint of coldness in her voice, as if she disliked the implication that her son might be lacking in taste. "It's the other things I'm surprised at: that you're clever, that you're reflective, that you feel deeply."

"As a matter of fact," said Ellen, confidentially, leaning across the table, "since we're being honest, I don't mind saying that I think you're not over-stating it. But how do you know all that? I'm sure I've been most petty and disagreeable ever since I arrived. I've just been hoping it's not the climate that's doing it, for that'd be hard on Richard and you."

The other woman became almost confused. "Oh, that was me! That was me!" she said earnestly. "I told you I was evasive. One form it takes is that when I meet people I'm very much interested in, I can't show my interest directly; I take cover behind a pretence of abstraction. I polish my nails and do silly things like that, and people think I'm cold, and stupid about the particular point they want me to see, and they try to attract my attention by behaving wildly, and that usually means behaving badly. It was my fault, it was my fault!"

"Indeed, it was my own ill nature," said Ellen stoutly. "But let us cease this moral babble, as Milton says. I wish you'd tell me why you're surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?"

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid women."

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her, and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy. "Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"

There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect, the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you. Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So she said none of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, "Oh, there's a reason.... I'll tell you some time...."