Jude the Obscure
engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in some chancel to assist
devotion.
He came out. It would have been easy to speak to her there and then,
but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to disregard her
request so incontinently. She had used him roughly, but she had brought
him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control him lent a
pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative as an
argument.
So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet. He had other
reasons against doing so when he had walked away. She seemed so dainty
beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty trousers that he
felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he had felt about Mr.
Phillotson. And how possible it was that she had inherited the
antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as far as a Christian
could, particularly when he had told her that unpleasant part of his
history which had resulted in his becoming enchained to one of her own
sex whom she would certainly not admire.
Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there. The
consciousness of her living presence stimulated him. But she remained
more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave
curious and fantastic day-dreams.
Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with some more
men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting a block of
worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, before hoisting it
to the parapet which they were repairing. Standing in position the head
man said, “Spaik when he heave! He-ho!” And they heaved.
All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow,
pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object
should have been removed. She looked right into his face with liquid,
untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to combine,
keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as
well as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just spoken
to a companion, and being carried on into his face quite unconsciously.
She no more observed his presence than that of the dust-motes which his
manipulations raised into the sunbeams.
His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turned his
face away with a shy instinct to prevent her recognizing him, though as
she had never once seen him she could not possibly do so; and might
very well never have heard even his name. He could perceive that though
she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter girlhood of some years in
London, and a womanhood here, had taken all rawness out of her.
When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her. He had been
so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her general
mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure,
that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was
about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was
nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have
called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised
him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his.
How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock,
have contrived to reach this pitch of niceness? London had done it, he
supposed.
From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in his breast
as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized locality he dwelt
in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this half-visionary form;
and he perceived that, whatever his obedient wish in a contrary
direction, he would soon be unable to resist the desire to make himself
known to her.
He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there were
crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any
other.
The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong. The
second was that they were cousins. It was not well for cousins to fall
in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion. The
third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage
usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would
duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be
intensified to a tragic horror.
Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only a relation’s
mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her in a practical way
as some one to be proud of; to talk and nod to; later on, to be invited
to tea by, the emotion spent on her being rigorously that of a kinsman
and well-wisher. So would she be to him a kindly star, an elevating
power, a companion in Anglican worship, a tender friend.
III
But under the various deterrent influences Jude’s instinct was to
approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went to the morning
service in the Cathedral church of Cardinal College to gain a further
view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended there.
She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was finer.
He knew that if she came at all she would approach the building along
the eastern side of the great green quadrangle from which it was
accessible, and he stood in a corner while the bell was going. A few
minutes before the hour for service she appeared as one of the figures
walking along under the college walls, and at sight of her he advanced
up the side opposite, and followed her into the building, more than
ever glad that he had not as yet revealed himself. To see her, and to
be himself unseen and unknown, was enough for him at present.
He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way
advanced when he was put into a seat. It was a louring, mournful, still
afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to ordinary
practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional and leisured
classes. In the dim light and the baffling glare of the clerestory
windows he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only,
but he saw that Sue was among them. He had not long discovered the
exact seat that she occupied when the chanting of the 119th Psalm in
which the choir was engaged reached its second part, _In quo corriget_,
the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian tune as the singers gave
forth:
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?
It was the very question that was engaging Jude’s attention at this
moment. What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as he
had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such
disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself;
then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music
tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had
been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm
was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of
his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary
psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.
The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary
tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those
which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him. She
was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in
church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt,
much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man the
consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which
promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like
the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a
sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.
Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him
that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.
Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen
before he himself moved. She did not look towards him, and by the time
he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path. Being dressed
up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her and reveal himself.
But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with the kind
of feeling that was awakening in him?
For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the
service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he could
not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism. She was
such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he said, “It
can’t be! I, a man with a wife, must not know her!” Still Sue _was_ his
own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though she was not in
evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one sense. It would put
all thought of a tender wish on his part out of Sue’s mind, and make
her intercourse with him free and fearless. It was with some heartache
that he saw how little he cared for the freedom and fearlessness that
would result in her from such knowledge.
Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the
pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman, Sue Bridehead, had an
afternoon’s holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in
which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country
with a book in her hand. It was one of those cloudless days which
sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,
as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god. She went along for a
mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the city
she had left behind her. The road passed between green fields, and
coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was reading,
and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles new and old.
On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a foreigner
with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass beside a large
square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they could stand, a
number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed, which he was
re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way. They were in the
main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a
very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see
portrayed, among them being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and,
of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. Though the figures were
many yards away from her the south-west sun brought them out so
brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern their
contours with luminous distinctness; and being almost in a line between
herself and the church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly
foreign and contrasting set of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and,
seeing her, politely took off his cap, and cried, “I-i-i-mages!” in an
accent that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he dexterously
lifted upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities
divine and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them
on to her and resting the board on the stile. First he offered her his
smaller wares—the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then a
winged Cupid. She shook her head.
“How much are these two?” she said, touching with her finger the Venus
and the Apollo—the largest figures on the tray.
He said she should have them for ten shillings.
“I cannot afford that,” said Sue. She offered considerably less, and to
her surprise the image-man drew them from their wire stay and handed
them over the stile. She clasped them as treasures.
When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be
concerned as to what she should do with them. They seemed so very large
now that they were in her possession, and so very naked. Being of a
nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise. When she handled