The Judge | Page 3

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