Jude the Obscure
for them to live. But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so
little a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between
the Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a
vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep
a pig. But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it was
a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. Arabella, however,
felt that all these make-shifts were temporary; she had gained a
husband; that was the thing—a husband with a lot of earning power in
him for buying her frocks and hats when he should begin to get
frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw aside those stupid
books for practical undertakings.
So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage, giving up
his old room at his aunt’s—where so much of the hard labour at Greek
and Latin had been carried on.
A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long tail of
hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back of
her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon the
looking-glass which he had bought her.
“What—it wasn’t your own?” he said, with a sudden distaste for her.
“Oh no—it never is nowadays with the better class.”
“Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed to
be different. Besides, you’ve enough of your own, surely?”
“Yes, enough as country notions go. But in town the men expect more,
and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—”
“Barmaid at Aldbrickham?”
“Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house
there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to
getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have the
better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town than all your
Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair—the barber’s
assistant told me so.”
Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be true
to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would
and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their
simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct
towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in
counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was
no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no
more of it.
A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few weeks,
even though the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy.
There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her
acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts,
and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.
Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one
market-day with this quality in her carriage when she met Anny her
former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.
As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them
without saying it.
“So it turned out a good plan, you see!” remarked the girl to the wife.
“I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear good fellow, and you
ought to be proud of un.”
“I am,” said Mrs. Fawley quietly.
“And when do you expect?”
“Ssh! Not at all.”
“What!”
“I was mistaken.”
“Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that’s
clever—it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o’,
wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the real
thing—not that one could sham it!”
“Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I didn’t know.”
“My word—won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’ Saturday
nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick—a double one, by the
Lord!”
“I’ll own to the first, but not to the second… Pooh—he won’t care!
He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down, bless
’ee—men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is married.”
Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached
the time when in the natural course of things she would have to reveal
that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. The occasion
was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their chamber in the
lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his work
every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve hours, and had retired
to rest before his wife. When she came into the room he was between
sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her undressing before
the little looking-glass as he lay.
One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her face
being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she was
amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the dimple
before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was mistress,
effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for the first
time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face during his
intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the earlier weeks
of their acquaintance.
“Don’t do that, Arabella!” he said suddenly. “There is no harm in it,
but—I don’t like to see you.”
She turned and laughed. “Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!” she said.
“How countrified you are! That’s nothing.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I
was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was fatter then.”
“I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a
woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you.”
“Most men think otherwise.”
“I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?”
“I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.”
“Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the
adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening.
I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father’s
house.”
“You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more
finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. There was
not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away
for three months.”
“You’ll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won’t you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, of course—little things to make.”
“Oh.”
“When will it be? Can’t you tell me exactly, instead of in such general
terms as you have used?”
“Tell you?”
“Yes—the date.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I made a mistake.”
“What?”
“It was a mistake.”
He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. “How can that be?”
“Women fancy wrong things sometimes.”
“But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of
furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn’t have hurried on our
affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if
it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to
save you, ready or no… Good God!”
“Don’t take on, dear. What’s done can’t be undone.”
“I have no more to say!”
He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between
them.
When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a
different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to accept
her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while
ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes
involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man’s one
opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of
contributing his units of work to the general progress of his
generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory
instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be
only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he
had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught
in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a
lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the
immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But the
marriage remained.
X
The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had
fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering was
timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so that
Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a
day.
The night had seemed strangely silent. Jude looked out of the window
long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with
snow—snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still
falling.
“I’m afraid the pig-killer won’t be able to come,” he said to Arabella.
“Oh, he’ll come. You must get up and make the water hot, if you want
Challow to scald him. Though I like singeing best.”
“I’ll get up,” said Jude. “I like the way of my own county.”
He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding it
with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze flinging a
cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of cheerfulness
was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze—to heat water to
scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as yet lived, and
whose voice could be continually heard from a corner of the garden. At
half-past six, the time of appointment with the butcher, the water
boiled, and Jude’s wife came downstairs.
“Is Challow come?” she asked.
“No.”
They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a snowy
dawn. She went out, gazed along the road, and returning said, “He’s not
coming. Drunk last night, I expect. The snow is not enough to hinder
him, surely!”
“Then we must put it off. It is only the water boiled for nothing. The
snow may be deep in the valley.”
“Can’t be put off. There’s no more victuals for the pig. He ate the
last mixing o’ barleymeal yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning? What has he lived on since?”
“Nothing.”
“What—he has been starving?”
“Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the
innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!”
“That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!”
“Well—you must do the sticking—there’s no help for it. I’ll show you
how. Or I’ll do it myself—I think I could. Though as it is such a big
pig I had rather Challow had done it. However, his basket o’ knives and
things have been already sent on here, and we can use ’em.”
“Of course you shan’t do it,” said Jude. “I’ll do it, since it must be
done.”
He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the space of a
couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in front, with the knives
and ropes at hand. A robin peered down at the preparations from the
nearest tree, and, not liking the sinister look of the scene, flew
away, though hungry. By this time Arabella had joined her husband, and
Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal,
who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of
rage. Arabella opened the sty-door, and together they hoisted the
victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella
bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from
struggling.
The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry
of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.
“Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had
this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”
“Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife—the
one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”