Jude the Obscure
them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and jacket. After
carrying them along a little way openly an idea came to her, and,
pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other rank growths from
the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she could in these, so
that what she carried appeared to be an enormous armful of green stuff
gathered by a zealous lover of nature.
“Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!” she
said. But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to wish
she had not bought the figures.
Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus’s arm was not
broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian city
in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main one,
and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to which she
was attached. Her purchases were taken straight up to her own chamber,
and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was her very own
property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped them in large
sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner.
The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in
spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as become
one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St.
Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also had
begun to attend. She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years
before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little
shop of church requisites and developing it to its present creditable
proportions. She wore a cross and beads round her neck as her only
ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.
She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not
respond for a moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily
putting a string round each parcel.
“Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?” she asked, regarding
the enwrapped objects.
“Yes—just something to ornament my room,” said Sue.
“Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already,” said Miss
Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints, the
Church-text scrolls, and other articles which, having become too stale
to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber. “What is it?
How bulky!” She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer, in the
brown paper, and tried to peep in. “Why, statuary? Two figures? Where
did you get them?”
“Oh—I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts—”
“Two saints?”
“Yes.”
“What ones?”
“St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.”
“Well—now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if
there’s light enough afterwards.”
These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest
passing fancy created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects and
looking at them; and at bedtime, when she was sure of being
undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort. Placing the pair of
figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them, she
withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began reading a
book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew nothing of.
It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the chapter dealing with the
reign of Julian the Apostate. Occasionally she looked up at the
statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place, there happening to
be a Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene suggested
the action, she at length jumped up and withdrew another book from her
box—a volume of verse—and turned to the familiar poem—
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:
The world has grown grey from thy breath!
which she read to the end. Presently she put out the candles,
undressed, and finally extinguished her own light.
She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she kept
waking up, and every time she opened her eyes there was enough diffused
light from the street to show her the white plaster figures, standing
on the chest of drawers in odd contrast to their environment of text
and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was only
discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being obscured by
the shades.
On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour. It
fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his books at
a not very distant spot in the same city. Being Saturday night the
morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to call him at
his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as was his custom,
two or three hours later than he could afford to do on any other day of
the week. Just then he was earnestly reading from his Griesbach’s text.
At the very time that Sue was tossing and staring at her figures, the
policeman and belated citizens passing along under his window might
have heard, if they had stood still, strange syllables mumbled with
fervour within—words that had for Jude an indescribable enchantment:
inexplicable sounds something like these:—
“_All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis
auton:_”
Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard to
close:—
“_Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di
autou!_”
IV
He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as artizans in
country-towns are apt to be. In London the man who carves the boss or
knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which merges
in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second half of
one whole. When there was not much Gothic moulding for Jude to run, or
much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out lettering monuments
or tombstones, and take a pleasure in the change of handiwork.
The next time that he saw her was when he was on a ladder executing a
job of this sort inside one of the churches. There was a short morning
service, and when the parson entered Jude came down from his ladder,
and sat with the half-dozen people forming the congregation, till the
prayer should be ended, and he could resume his tapping. He did not
observe till the service was half over that one of the women was Sue,
who had perforce accompanied the elderly Miss Fontover thither.
Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy, curiously nonchalant
risings and sittings, and her perfunctory genuflexions, and thought
what a help such an Anglican would have been to him in happier
circumstances. It was not so much his anxiety to get on with his work
that made him go up to it immediately the worshipers began to take
their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot, confront the
woman who was beginning to influence him in such an indescribable
manner. Those three enormous reasons why he must not attempt intimate
acquaintance with Sue Bridehead, now that his interest in her had shown
itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind, loomed as stubbornly as
ever. But it was also obvious that man could not live by work alone;
that the particular man Jude, at any rate, wanted something to love.
Some men would have rushed incontinently to her, snatched the pleasure
of easy friendship which she could hardly refuse, and have left the
rest to chance. Not so Jude—at first.
But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely evenings,
dragged along, he found himself, to his moral consternation, to be
thinking more of her instead of thinking less of her, and experiencing
a fearful bliss in doing what was erratic, informal, and unexpected.
Surrounded by her influence all day, walking past the spots she
frequented, he was always thinking of her, and was obliged to own to
himself that his conscience was likely to be the loser in this battle.
To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still. Perhaps to know her
would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion. A
voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he did not desire
to be cured.
There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of view
the situation was growing immoral. For Sue to be the loved one of a man
who was licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella and none
other unto his life’s end, was a pretty bad second beginning when the
man was bent on such a course as Jude purposed. This conviction was so
real with him that one day when, as was frequent, he was at work in a
neighbouring village church alone, he felt it to be his duty to pray
against his weakness. But much as he wished to be an exemplar in these
things he could not get on. It was quite impossible, he found, to ask
to be delivered from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be
tempted unto seventy times seven. So he excused himself. “After all,”
he said, “it is not altogether an _erotolepsy_ that is the matter with
me, as at that first time. I can see that she is exceptionally bright;
and it is partly a wish for intellectual sympathy, and a craving for
loving-kindness in my solitude.” Thus he went on adoring her, fearing
to realize that it was human perversity. For whatever Sue’s virtues,
talents, or ecclesiastical saturation, it was certain that those items
were not at all the cause of his affection for her.
On an afternoon at this time a young girl entered the stone-mason’s
yard with some hesitation, and, lifting her skirts to avoid draggling
them in the white dust, crossed towards the office.
“That’s a nice girl,” said one of the men known as Uncle Joe.
“Who is she?” asked another.
“I don’t know—I’ve seen her about here and there. Why, yes, she’s the
daughter of that clever chap Bridehead who did all the wrought ironwork
at St. Silas’ ten years ago, and went away to London afterwards. I
don’t know what he’s doing now—not much I fancy—as she’s come back
here.”
Meanwhile the young woman had knocked at the office door and asked if
Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard. It so happened that Jude had
gone out somewhere or other that afternoon, which information she
received with a look of disappointment, and went away immediately. When
Jude returned they told him, and described her, whereupon he exclaimed,
“Why—that’s my cousin Sue!”
He looked along the street after her, but she was out of sight. He had
no longer any thought of a conscientious avoidance of her, and resolved
to call upon her that very evening. And when he reached his lodging he
found a note from her—a first note—one of those documents which, simple
and commonplace in themselves, are seen retrospectively to have been
pregnant with impassioned consequences. The very unconsciousness of a
looming drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from women
to men, or _vice versa_, makes them, when such a drama follows, and
they are read over by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more
impressive, solemn, and in cases, terrible.
Sue’s was of the most artless and natural kind. She addressed him as
her dear cousin Jude; said she had only just learnt by the merest
accident that he was living in Christminster, and reproached him with
not letting her know. They might have had such nice times together, she
said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had hardly any
congenial friend. But now there was every probability of her soon going
away, so that the chance of companionship would be lost perhaps for
ever.
A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was going away. That
was a contingency he had never thought of, and it spurred him to write
all the more quickly to her. He would meet her that very evening, he
said, one hour from the time of writing, at the cross in the pavement
which marked the spot of the Martyrdoms.
When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted that in his hurry