Book: The Judge

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THE JUDGE

by

REBECCA WEST

Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"

New York
George H. Doran Company

1922,







TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER




BOOK ONE




"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
the father."




CHAPTER I

I


It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those
decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of Edinburgh
New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that opened just
opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock
and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the
southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that
strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it
keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the
cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy
with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and
remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms
beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the Cowgate
and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly
night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of
dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a
past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army.... She stopped and
said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the institution of
monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is possible to be a
Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and she spent much
of her time composing speeches which she knew she would always be too
shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about palaces. Always they
appear like the camp of an invading army that is uneasy and keeps a good
look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they are always ready to
shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of annoyance. "I see
myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold the crowd with
the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll never
make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist that I
am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to watching the
succession of little black figures that huddled in their topcoats as
they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist as they came
to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and then pulled
themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces. The
spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were just
part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price one
had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed gave it
its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one good rough
stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it evoked
desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was
nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months
since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by
this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in
Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult
people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known
as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these.
Less than that would do: just to see people's faces doing something else
than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
beginning.

"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
feet," and Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.

She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose
thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea. Rachael had raised
it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching
vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a
Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord
Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed
out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish
swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and
the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the
aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she
was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had
worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather
pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer
than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing
in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had
two elder sisters. It had always seemed so strange that such a clever
girl couldn't make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen
had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again. She
was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin
brown paper out of _Weldon's Fashions_ on to stuff that must not on any
account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with
the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her
shoulder, "I doubt you've read the instructions right...." What was the
good? She was decaying. That was proven by the present current of her
thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had
always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy,
as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now
dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in
Hume Park Square. She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been
hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a
wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge
among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she
cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to
wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher's among a crowd that hawked and
spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of
hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used
to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the
housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered
it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At
the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these
accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....

The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly
on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles
against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their
persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the
representative of another firm: an interview in which he had disguised
his sense of his client's moral instability by preserving the most
impressive physical immobility. The air of the room struck cold on him,
and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a
high stool where he could feel the warmth. He gloomed over it, pressing
his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the wrong over this right
of way, and Menzies & Lawson knew it. He looked dotingly across at
Ellen, breathed "Well, well!"--that greeting by which Scot links himself
to Scot in a mutual consciousness of a prudent despondency about life.
Age permitted him, in spite of his type, to delight in her. In his youth
he had turned his back on romance, lest it should dictate conduct that
led away from prosperity, or should alter him in some manner that would
prevent him from attaining that ungymnastic dignity which makes the
respected townsman. He had meant from the first to end with a paunch.
But now wealth was inalienably his and Beauty could beckon him on no
strange pilgrimages, his soul retraced its steps and contemplated this
bright thing as an earth creature might creep to the mouth of its lair
and blink at the sun. And there was more than that to it. He loved her.
He had never had enough to do with pitiful things (his wife Elizabeth
had been a banker's daughter), and this, child had come to him, that day
in June, so white, so weak, so chilled to the bone, for all the summer
heat, by her monstrous ill-usage....

He said, "Nelly, will your mother be feared if you stop and take a few
notes for Mr. Philip till eight? There is a chemist body coming through
from the cordite works at Aberfay who can't come in the day but Saturday
mornings, and you ken Mr. Philip's away to London for the week-end by
the 8.30, so he's seeing him the night. Mr. Philip would be thankful if
you'd stop."

"I will so, Mr. James," said Ellen.

"You're sure your mother'll not be feared?"

"What way would my mother be feared," said Ellen, "and me seventeen
past?"

"There's many a lassie who's found being seventeen no protection from a
wicked world." He emitted some great Burns-night chuckles, and kicked
the fire to a blaze.

She said sternly, "Take note, Mr. James, that I haven't done a hand's
turn this hour or more, and that not for want of asking for work. Dear
knows I have my hand on Mr. Morrison's door-knob half the day."

Mr. James got up to go. "You're a fierce hussy, and mean to be a partner
in the firm before you've done with us."

"If I were a man I would be that."

"Better than that for you, lassie, better than that. Wait till a good
man comes by."

She snorted at the closing door, but felt that he had come near to
defining what she wanted. It was not a good man she needed, of course,
but nice men, nice women. She had often thought that of late. Sometimes
she would sit up in bed and stare through the darkness at an imaginary
group of people whom she desired to be with--well-found people who would
disclose themselves to one another with vivacity and beautiful results;
who in large lighted rooms would display a splendid social life that had
been previously nurtured by separate tender intimacies at hearths that
were more than grates and fenders, in private picture-galleries with
wide spaces between the pictures, and libraries adorned with big-nosed
marble busts. She knew that that environment existed for she had seen
it. Once she had gone to a Primrose League picnic in the grounds of an
Edinburgh M.P.'s country home and the secretary had taken her up to the
house. They had waited in a high, long room with crossed swords on the
walls wherever there were not bookshelves or the portraits of men and
women so proud that they had not minded being painted plain, and there
were French windows opening to a flagged terrace where one could lean on
an ornate balustrade and look over a declivity made sweet with many
flowering trees to a wooded cliff laced by a waterfall that seemed, so
broad the intervening valley, to spring silently to the bouldered
river-bed below. On a white bearskin, in front of one of the few
unnecessary fires she had ever seen, slept a boar-hound. It was a pity
that the books lying on the great round table were mostly the drawings
of Dana Gibson and that when the lady of the house came in to speak to
them she proved to be a lisping Jewess, but that could not dull the
pearl of the spectacle. She insisted on using the memory as a guarantee
that there must exist, to occupy this environment, that imagined society
of thin men without an Edinburgh accent, of women who were neither thin
like her schoolmistresses nor fat like her schoolfellows' mothers and
whose hair had no short ends round the neck.

But sometimes it seemed likely, and in this sad twilight it seemed
specially likely, that though such people certainly existed they had
chosen some other scene than Edinburgh, whose society was as poor and
restricted as its Zoo, perhaps for the same climatic reason. It was the
plain fact of the matter that the most prominent citizen of Edinburgh
to-day was Mary Queen of Scots. Every time one walked in the Old Town
she had just gone by, beautiful and pale as though in her veins there
flowed exquisite blood that diffused radiance instead of ruddiness, clad
in the black and white that must have been a more solemn challenge, a
more comprehensive announcement of free dealings with good and evil,
than the mere extravagance of scarlet could have been; and wearing a
string of pearls to salve the wound she doubtless always felt about her
neck. Ellen glowed at the picture as girls do at womanly beauty. Nobody
of a like intensity had lived here since. The Covenanters, the
Jacobites, Sir Walter Scott and his fellows, had dropped nothing in the
pool that could break the ripples started by that stone, that precious
stone, flung there from France so long ago. The town had settled down
into something that the tonic magic of the place prevented being decay,
but it was though time still turned the hour-glass, but did it
dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
nothing better than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.'s by
the Wee Frees. It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the
town's life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the
English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade
unions. And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir
Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a
facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on
the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested
that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and
dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of
which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as
inadequately represented by AEneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at
the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the
corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace
ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked
G.R.... She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as
noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the
Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like. She wept
undisguisedly.


II

"What ails you, Miss Melville?" asked Mr. Philip James. He had lit the
gas and seen that she was crying.

At first she said, "Nothing." But there grew out of her gratitude to
this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that
she should always answer them with the cleanest candour. As one rewards
the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in
it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her
motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved. So
she added, "It's just that I'm bored. Nothing ever happens to me!"

Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that "Nothing," and
bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way
she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy. Indeed, he always
felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at
the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman
whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the
expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has
forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist,
but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through
an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall,
dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed
by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his
train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel a little tired
himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on
her tam-o'-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would
presently prick her smooth skin. Yet these apprehensions were quite
uncoloured by any emotional tone. It was simply that she was essentially
conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man
going through a crowd. Even now, instead of registering disapproval at
her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it
radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the
sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk. That was
characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion. He
had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a
great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a
tree. And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day
when there was an easterly ha'ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped
towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily. It
was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked
her very much.

He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire. "Well, what
should happen? No news is good news, I've heard!"

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