Jude the Obscure
“I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the
chief thing.”
“You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that
he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red
and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it,
and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be
eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”
“He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may
look,” said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s
upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then
plunged in the knife with all his might.
“’Od damn it all!” she cried, “that ever I should say it! You’ve
over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time—”
“Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!”
“Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don’t talk!”
However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood
flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had
desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the
shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with
the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the
treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.
“Make un stop that!” said Arabella. “Such a noise will bring somebody
or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it
ourselves.” Picking up the knife from the ground whereon Jude had flung
it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was
instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole.
“That’s better,” she said.
“It is a hateful business!” said he.
“Pigs must be killed.”
The animal heaved in a final convulsion, and, despite the rope, kicked
out with all his last strength. A tablespoonful of black clot came
forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some seconds.
“That’s it; now he’ll go,” said she. “Artful creatures—they always keep
back a drop like that as long as they can!”
The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude stagger, and
in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which the blood had
been caught.
“There!” she cried, thoroughly in a passion. “Now I can’t make any
blackpot. There’s a waste, all through you!”
Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole steaming
liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the snow, and
forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other
than an ordinary obtaining of meat. The lips and nostrils of the animal
turned livid, then white, and the muscles of his limbs relaxed.
“Thank God!” Jude said. “He’s dead.”
“What’s God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I should
like to know!” she said scornfully. “Poor folks must live.”
“I know, I know,” said he. “I don’t scold you.”
Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand.
“Well done, young married volk! I couldn’t have carried it out much
better myself, cuss me if I could!” The voice, which was husky, came
from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaughter they
saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate, critically
surveying their performance.
“’Tis well for ’ee to stand there and glane!” said Arabella. “Owing to
your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! ’Twon’t fetch so
much by a shilling a score!”
Challow expressed his contrition. “You should have waited a bit” he
said, shaking his head, “and not have done this—in the delicate state,
too, that you be in at present, ma’am. ’Tis risking yourself too much.”
“You needn’t be concerned about that,” said Arabella, laughing. Jude
too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in his
amusement.
Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the scalding
and scraping. Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he
had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and that the deed
would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by deputy. The
white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal, wore an
illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian;
but he could not see how the matter was to be mended. No doubt he was,
as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.
He did not like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically in
the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his courtship of
his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he read whenever he could
as he walked to and from his work. Yet he sometimes felt that by caring
for books he was not escaping common-place nor gaining rare ideas,
every working-man being of that taste now. When passing near the spot
by the stream on which he had first made her acquaintance he one day
heard voices just as he had done at that earlier time. One of the girls
who had been Arabella’s companions was talking to a friend in a shed,
himself being the subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen
him in the distance. They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were
so thin that he could hear their words as he passed.
“Howsomever, ’twas I put her up to it! ‘Nothing venture nothing have,’
I said. If I hadn’t she’d no more have been his mis’ess than I.”
“’Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told him
she was…”
What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should make
her his “mis’ess,” otherwise wife? The suggestion was horridly
unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of entering
his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket inside the
garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his old aunt and
get some supper there.
This made his arrival home rather late. Arabella however, was busy
melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out on
a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work. Dreading lest what he had
heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he spoke
little. But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other things
that she wanted some money. Seeing the book sticking out of his pocket
she added that he ought to earn more.
“An apprentice’s wages are not meant to be enough to keep a wife on, as
a rule, my dear.”
“Then you shouldn’t have had one.”
“Come, Arabella! That’s too bad, when you know how it came about.”
“I’ll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you was true.
Doctor Vilbert thought so. It was a good job for you that it wasn’t
so!”
“I don’t mean that,” he said hastily. “I mean before that time. I know
it was not your fault; but those women friends of yours gave you bad
advice. If they hadn’t, or you hadn’t taken it, we should at this
moment have been free from a bond which, not to mince matters, galls
both of us devilishly. It may be very sad, but it is true.”
“Who’s been telling you about my friends? What advice? I insist upon
you telling me.”
“Pooh—I’d rather not.”
“But you shall—you ought to. It is mean of ’ee not to!”
“Very well.” And he hinted gently what had been revealed to him. “But I
don’t wish to dwell upon it. Let us say no more about it.”
Her defensive manner collapsed. “That was nothing,” she said, laughing
coldly. “Every woman has a right to do such as that. The risk is hers.”
“I quite deny it, Bella. She might if no lifelong penalty attached to
it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if the weakness of the
moment could end with the moment, or even with the year. But when
effects stretch so far she should not go and do that which entraps a
man if he is honest, or herself if he is otherwise.”
“What ought I to have done?”
“Given me time… Why do you fuss yourself about melting down that pig’s
fat to-night? Please put it away!”
“Then I must do it to-morrow morning. It won’t keep.”
“Very well—do.”
XI
Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten
o’clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had
accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same
intractable temper.
“That’s the story about me in Marygreen, is it—that I entrapped ’ee?
Much of a catch you were, Lord send!” As she warmed she saw some of
Jude’s dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have
been laid. “I won’t have them books here in the way!” she cried
petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon
the floor.
“Leave my books alone!” he said. “You might have thrown them aside if
you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!” In
the operation of making lard Arabella’s hands had become smeared with
the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible
imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the
books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing,
caught her by the arms to make her leave off. Somehow, in going so, he
loosened the fastening of her hair, and it rolled about her ears.
“Let me go!” she said.
“Promise to leave the books alone.”
She hesitated. “Let me go!” she repeated.
“Promise!”
After a pause: “I do.”
Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to the door, out
of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began
to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse
disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her
gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the
bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north.
People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday clothes;
they were mainly lovers—such pairs as Jude and Arabella had been when
they sported along the same track some months earlier. These
pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now
presented, bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind, her
bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work, and her
hands reeking with melted fat. One of the passers said in mock terror:
“Good Lord deliver us!”
“See how he’s served me!” she cried. “Making me work Sunday mornings
when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my head,
and my gown off my back!”
Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force. Then
he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with the sense that all was over
between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he, her husband
stood still, regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined
by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having
based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no
necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong
comradeship tolerable.
“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother,
and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you be
a queer lot as husbands and wives!”
Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her. But she said no more,
and continued her saunter till she was tired. He left the spot, and,
after wandering vaguely a little while, walked in the direction of
Marygreen. Here he called upon his great-aunt, whose infirmities daily
increased.
“Aunt—did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?” said
Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.
She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that
she always wore. “Who’s been telling you that?” she said.
“I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all.”
“You med so well, I s’pose; though your wife—I reckon ’twas she—must
have been a fool to open up that! There isn’t much to know after all.
Your father and mother couldn’t get on together, and they parted. It
was coming home from Alfredston market, when you were a baby—on the