The Judge Part 9

Yaverland said, "Oh, what nonsense! I was just thinking how rippingly you ran."

"Havers!" she replied. "You were thinking nothing of the sort. You were wondering what for I carried an iron-monger's shop in my pocket. But yon rattling's just a tin with some coconuts I've in it that I made last night and slipped in in case you'd like it, rubbing up against my protractor."

"But why in Heaven's name," Yaverland asked, "do you carry a protractor about with you?"

"Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch, and I just keep a protractor handy."

Yaverland stopped. "Ellen," he said, "I haven't known you very long."

There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, "I may call you Ellen, mayn't I? This modern comradeship between men and women...." "Och, yes," beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her pure enthusiasms for his own purposes. Sometimes he was conscious of a detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but he could not take back the insincerity. "As I say, I haven't known you very long. But may I ask you a favour?"

"Surely," said Ellen.

"Turn out your pockets."

"But why?"

"I want to see what's in 'em."

"Well," said Ellen resignedly, "there are worse vices than inquisitiveness. Both pockets?"

"We'll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor, please."

"It's too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you'll have to take them from me as I get them out. Well, there's the protractor, and there's the coconut ice. Have a bit? Ah, well, I notice that grown-up--that people older than me don't seem to care for sweeties before their dinner. I wonder why. And there's a magnetic compa.s.s I picked up on George the Fourth Bridge. There's a kind of pleasure in finding the north, don't you think? And--fancy this being here! I thought I'd lost it long ago. It's a wee garnet I found on the beach at Elie. I was set up all the afternoon with finding a precious stone. I would like fine to be a miner in the precious stone mines in Mexico. If I was a boy I would go. And the rest's just papers. Here's notes on a Geographical Society lecture on the geology of Yellowstone Park I went to last spring. Very instructive it was. And here's a diagram I did when I was working for the Bible examination on the Second Book of Kings--the lines of the House of Israel and the House of Judah drawn to scale on square paper, five years to a square and set parallel so that you can see which buddy was ruling on the one throne when another buddy was on the other. I came out fifth in all Scotland. And this is a poem I wrote.

It's not a good poem. The subject was excellent--reflections of an absinthe-drinker condemned to death for the murder of his mistress--but I couldn't give it the treatment it desairved. No, you will _nut_ see it. I'll just tear it up. There. It'll do the whaups no harm scattering over the moor, for they've no aesthetic sensibilities. But I shouldn't be surprised if you had, though I've heard that the English don't care much for art. I'm not much good at the poetry, but I have the grace to know it, and so I've just given it up. I make my own blouses, though I know I can't equal the professional product that's sold in the shops, because it comes cheaper. But with the Carnegie library handing out the professional product for nothing, I see no reason why I should write my own poems. That's all in this pocket. But I think there's more in the other. Oh, mercy, there's nothing at all except this pair of woollen gloves I had forgotten. Not another thing. And no wonder. There's a hole in it the size of an egg. Now, if that isn't vexatious. I had some real nice things in that pocket. A wee ammonite, I remember. Och, well, it can't be helped. I'm afraid you've seen nothing very thrilling after all."

"Oh yes, I have," said Yaverland.

"Indeed you've not. Yet certainly you're looking tickled to death. No wonder Scotch comedians have such a success when they go among the English if they're all as easily amused as you."

"Your pockets are like a boy's," he said. "In a way, you're awfully like a boy."

"I wish I was," she answered bitterly. "But I'm a girl, and I've nothing before me. No going to sea for me as there was for you." But they were nearly at the bridge now, and she was changed to a gay child because she loved this spot. She ran forward, crying, "Is it not beautiful?

Look, you didn't think there was this grand loch stretching away there!

And look how the firs stand at the water's edge. The day Rachael and I came there was a clump of bell-heather just on that point of rock. A bonny pinky red it was. And look how Bavelaw Avenue marches up the hill!

Is it not just fine?"

Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.

He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice, and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety, represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.

But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt, some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and said reproachfully, "Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day."

To-day was to be such a lovely holiday. And then she ran round the stone spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.

There was no rat there now. The water was in spate with the autumn floods and the muddy ledge on which he had sat at his toilette was an invisible thing that sent up a smear of weed to tremble on the surface.

But she continued to crouch down and watch the burn. Better than anything in nature she loved running water, and this was grey and icy and seemed to have a cold sweet smell, and she liked the slight squeaking noises her boots made on the quaggy turf when she shifted her balance. It was quiet here, and the gentle colours of the soft grey sky, the stern grey stream, the amber gra.s.ses that shook perpetually in the stream's violence, and the black stripped hawthorns that humped at the water's border made a medicine for her eyes, which had begun to ache.

There was always peace on the Pentlands. And such bonny things happened every minute. A bough of silver birch came floating along, doubtless a windfall from one of those trees that stood where Thriepmuir was but the Bavelaw burn, a furtive trickle among the moss-hags, a brown rushy confusion between two moors. It was as bright as any flower with its yellow leaves, and as fine as filigree; and its preservation of this brightness and fineness through all the angry river's tumbling gave it an air of brave integrity. She watched it benignly, and peered beneath the bridge to see if it would have the clear course it deserved, and a kind of despair fell on her as she saw that it would not. The ill-will that creeps about the world is vigilant; many are the branches that fall from the silver birch in autumn, and not one of them is forgotten by it.

Doubtless the very leaves on the bough are numbered, lest one should sail bravely to the loch and make a good end. So there, where the shadow lay thickest under the arch, was a patch of still black water, confined in stagnancy by a sunk log on which alluvial mud had made a garden of whitish gra.s.ses like the beard of an unclean old man. The impact of the unchecked floods that rushed past made this black patch shake perpetually, and this irregular motion gave it a sort of personality. It suggested a dark man shaking with a suppressed pa.s.sion of malice. It was like Mr. Philip. From some submerged rottenness caught in the log bubbles slowly floated up through the dark water, wavered a little under the gla.s.sy surface, and then popped up and made a dirty trail of spume.

That was like the way Mr. Philip sat in the dark corner beyond the fireplace and showed by the way the whites of his eyes turned about that something bad had come into his mind, and let a s.p.a.ce of silence fall so that one thought he was not going to say it after all, and then it would come out suddenly, cool and as mean as mean could be and somehow unanswerable.

With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of malice. Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed with the gra.s.sy rottenness beside the whitish gra.s.ses. It had had no chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave him the chance to make a fool of her. It was all right to be here on the Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and work under Mr. Philip. She could not go on like this. She would have to kill herself. She would jump over the Dean Bridge. Mother would just have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.

Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you talk about? Aren't you still pals?"

Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on.

She's never written since the first month."

"Probably she's having hard luck."

"Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.

She's not a bit like me."

"But that's just what you look like."

"Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.

When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."

"Why don't you cut yours off then?"

"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun that de Quincey wrote about. She had pa.s.sed herself off as a man all right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.

He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary austerity in his pa.s.sion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was a woman the pa.s.sion between them was so strong that the delight of touching her beloved flesh would have been too great for human nerves to support, and it would have turned to pain. The mutual knowledge that they loved would be enough to work as many miracles on the visible and invisible world as either of their hearts could stand. "I love you," was what he had to say....

It was the strangest thing in the world that he could not say it. He could not even make a kind movement of his body, a protective slackening of his step and overhanging of her spindrift delicacy with his great height, that might have intimated to her that they were dear friends. He found himself walking woodenly a pace away from her, and though his soul shouted something hidden round the corner of his mind, it would not let his lips articulate the desperate cry. He stared at the pa.s.sing moment as a castaway, gagged, and bound to a raft of pirates, might wake from a delirious sleep, stare dumbly up at the steep side of a galleon that rides slowly, and know that with it rides away his chance of life because he cannot speak. Love of this girl meant infinite joy and a relief such as nothing before had ever promised him from the black regiment of moods that had for long beleaguered him, self-hatred, doubt of the value of any work on this d.a.m.ned earth, a recurrent tendency to brood on his mother's wrongs until he was a little mad; and if he did not win her life would be more tormenting in its patent purposelessness than even he, with his immense capacity for abstract rage, had ever known. And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.

And the army of winds pa.s.sed down to the plains and there was stillness, the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.

She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon her lips.

Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you, she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in the face for St. Paul? He made himself forget in laughter the priceless moment that had pa.s.sed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was too young.

There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long way that spread about before them after they pa.s.sed Bavelaw Castle, the whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its d.y.k.es, the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down on the gra.s.s, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young girl.

The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin along to any business, and two gra.s.sy tracks went forward, both marked by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor, her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course he never had. There was no one in the world like her.

"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in the hills where the Logan Burn tumbled down a spiral staircase of dark polished rock. She ran about the pools at its feet, crying that this wee one was red as rust, that this big one was red as a red rose--was it not, if you looked in the very middle? But suddenly she looked up into his face and asked, "You'll have seen grand waterfalls out in Brazil?"

"Yes," he said, "but I like this as well, and I would rather be here than anywhere else in the world."

"Tell me the names of some of the big waterfalls," she insisted, uninterested in the loving things that he had said.

"Well, the falls of Paulo Affonso are pretty good."

"Paulo Affonso!" she repeated, her face avaricious with the desire for adventure, "I will go there some day...."

That she should feel so intensely about something which did not concern himself roused his jealousy, and he set himself to interrupt her train of thought by saying boisterously, "This is a ripping place! What's it like above the fall? Let's climb it." He strolled closer to the waterfall to see if there was an easy way up the rock, but was recalled by a ready, embarra.s.sed murmur from her.

"I can't...."

He imagined she was moved by shame at his greater strength, as she had been when they ran together, and he said encouragingly: