The Judge

by Rebecca West

"We've talked it over," said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear. "We think we'll wait. Six months. Out of respect for mother."

"But, my dear, your mother won't get any pleasure out of Richard being kept waiting. She'd like you to settle down and be happy."

Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church. "I feel I'd like to wait," she murmured.

The older woman understood. In such fear of life had she once dallied, one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale clotted starshine. With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a lover, and she murmured, "He is there, he is waiting for me. But I will not go. Another night...." She had been so glad that there was no moon, so that he would not see her from his window. She had forgotten that her white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost! So he had stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across the clearing. It was strange that though she wanted to run away she could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely, "No ... no...." Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son. Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves that would make their living a tremendous thing. She was exhilarated by the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate's climate caused her to desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she exclaimed urgently, "Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!"

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would not leave her alone with her delightful fears. "After all, this is my life," she seemed to be saying, "and you have had yours to do what you willed with. Let me have mine."

But there had come on Marion the tribulation that falls on unhappy people when they see before them a gleam of happiness. She had to lay hold of it. Although she knew that she was irritating the girl, she said: "But, Ellen, really you ought to marry Richard soon!" She forced herself to speak glibly and without reserve, though it seemed to her that in doing so she was somehow participating in the glittering vulgarity of the place where they sat. "I want Richard's happiness to be assured. I want to see him certainly, finally happy. I may die soon. I'm fifty, and my heart is bad. I want him to be so happy that when I die he won't grieve too much. For, you see, he is far too fond of me—quite unreasonably fond. And even if I live for quite a long time I still will be miserable if he doesn't find happiness with someone else. You see, I've had various troubles in my life. Some day I will tell you what they are. I can't now. I don't mean in the least that I'm trying to shut you out from our lives. But if I started talking about them my throat would close. I suppose I've been quiet about it for so many years that I've lost the way of speaking out everything but small talk. But the point is that Richard frets about these troubles far too much. He lives them all over again every time he sees they are worrying me. I want you to give him a fresh, unspoiled life to look after, which will give him pleasure to share as my life has given him pain. Do this for him. Please do it. Forgive me if I'm being a nuisance to you. But, you see, I feel so responsible for Richard." She looked across the restaurant, as if on the great wall at its other end there hung a vast mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips, to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are for their sons."

She would have left it cryptically at that if she had not seen that Ellen would have disliked her as a mystificator. She drew her hand across her brow, and immediately perceived that the gesture had so evidently expressed dislike of this obligation to confide that the girl was again alienated, and in desperation she cried out all she meant. "I'm responsible for him in the usual way. By loving his father. Much more than the usual way, most people would tell me, because of course I knew it wasn't lawful. But there's something more than that. I was so very ill before he was born that the doctor wanted to operate and take him away from me long before there was any chance of his living. I knew he would be illegitimate and that there would be much trouble for us both, but I wanted him so much that I couldn't bear them to kill him. So I risked it, and struggled through till he was born. So you see it's twice instead of once that I have willed him into the world. I must see to it that now he is here he is happy."

Ellen said in a little voice, "That was very brave of you," and soared into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some practical consideration that she must settle at once. Her eyes hovered about Marion's and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, "Does having a baby hurt very much?" She did not feel at all disturbed when Marion answered, "Yes," though that was the word she had been dreading, for the speech she added, "If the child is going to be worth while it always hurts, but one does not care," seemed to her one of those sombre and heartening things like "King Lear," or the black line of the Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life, since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever beautiful. It settled her practical consideration: she had known that she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret. Now she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman who had given her Richard.

Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth. But in her mind's eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard. If she had relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have rolled through few and inferior phases. When she stood at the windows of Grand-Aunt's house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother's death she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by anonymous travellers. She would have wept: not waited, as she did, for the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest recklessness and would bring joy with it. She would never have had occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life. Her sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief. It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with his long first kiss.

She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles's bazaar, instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, "Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at Prestonpans. He was just your height and he had the verra look of you," and to allow Grand-Aunt to declare, "Elspeth, I wonder at you. There was never a McGinnis stood more than five feet five, and I do not remember that Hendry escaped the family misfortune—mind you, I know it's no a fault—of a squint." There would not have been those hours in the dining-room when life was lifted to a strange and interesting plane where the flesh became as thoughtful as the spirit, and each meeting of lips was as individual as an idea and as much a comment on life, and the pressing of a finger across the skin could be watched like the unfolding of a theory.