The Judge | Page 2

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