The Judge | Page 8

hands, that for all her present fierceness and the inkstains of her daily industry lay little things on her lap, and thought of Rachael Wing, who had so splendidly departed to London to go on the stage. "But it's hard to be punished just for what you are."
He wondered whether, although she was the typist, there was not something rare about her. He could not compare her in this moment with his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible that they could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. Suddenly he wanted to enter into this world; not indeed with the intention of naturalising himself as its inhabitant nor with the intention of staying there for ever, but as a navvy might stop on his way to work and refresh his horny sweating body by a swim in a sunny pool. He felt a thirst, a thing that stopped the breath for her pity. And although his desire was but for participation in kindness, his instinct for conformity was so suspicious of her vividness that he felt furtive and red-eared while he searched in the purse of his experiences to find the coin that would admit him to her world. The search at first was vain, for most of them that he cared to remember were mere manifestations of the kind of qualities that are mentioned in testimonials. But presently he gripped the disappointment that would buy him her pity.
He said, "I'm right sorry for you, Miss Melville. But you know ... We all have our troubles."
She raised her eyebrows.
"I wanted to go into the Navy."
"You did? Would your father not let you?" She said it in her red-headed "My-word-if-I'd-been-there" way.
"Aye, he would have liked it fine."
"What was it then?" She leaned forward and almost crooned at him. "What was it then?"
His speech became more clipped. "My eyes."
"Your eyes!" she breathed. He suddenly became a person to her. "I never thought."
"I'm as short-sighted as a bat."
"They look all right." She frowned at them as though they were traitors.
He basked in her pity. "They're not. I never could play football at the University."
She rose and stood beside him at the table, so that he would feel how sorry she was, and set one finger to her lips and murmured, "Well, well!" and at the end of a warm, drowsy moment, after which they seemed to know each other much better, she said softly and irrelevantly, "I saw you capped."
"Did you so? How did you notice me? It was one of the big graduations."
"I went with my mother to see my cousin Jeanie capped M.A., and we saw your name on the list. Philip Mactavish James. And mother said, 'Yon'll be the son of Mactavish James. Many's the time I've danced with him when I was Ellen Forbes.' Funny to think of them dancing!"
"Oh, father was a great man for the ladies." They both laughed. He vacillated from the emotional business of the moment. "Do you dance?" he asked.
"I did at school--"
"Don't you go to dances?"
She shook her head. It was a shame, thought Mr. Philip.
With that long slender waist she should have danced so beautifully; he could imagine how her head would droop back and show her throat, how her brows would become grave with great pleasure. He wished she could come to his mother's dances, but he knew so well the rigid standards of his own bourgeoisie that he felt displeased by his wish. It was impossible to ask a Miss Melville to a dance unless one could say, 'She's the daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville, the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he wished he could dance with her.
Ellen recalled him to