Jude the Obscure
in remissionem peccatorum. Et exspecto Resurrectionem mortuorum. Et
vitam venturi saeculi. Amen._”
“Well done!” said several, enjoying the last word, as being the first
and only one they had recognized.
Then Jude seemed to shake the fumes from his brain, as he stared round
upon them.
“You pack of fools!” he cried. “Which one of you knows whether I have
said it or no? It might have been the Ratcatcher’s Daughter in double
Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell! See what I have
brought myself to—the crew I have come among!”
The landlord, who had already had his license endorsed for harbouring
queer characters, feared a riot, and came outside the counter; but
Jude, in his sudden flash of reason, had turned in disgust and left the
scene, the door slamming with a dull thud behind him.
He hastened down the lane and round into the straight broad street,
which he followed till it merged in the highway, and all sound of his
late companions had been left behind. Onward he still went, under the
influence of a childlike yearning for the one being in the world to
whom it seemed possible to fly—an unreasoning desire, whose ill
judgement was not apparent to him now. In the course of an hour, when
it was between ten and eleven o’clock, he entered the village of
Lumsdon, and reaching the cottage, saw that a light was burning in a
downstairs room, which he assumed, rightly as it happened, to be hers.
Jude stepped close to the wall, and tapped with his finger on the pane,
saying impatiently, “Sue, Sue!”
She must have recognized his voice, for the light disappeared from the
apartment, and in a second or two the door was unlocked and opened, and
Sue appeared with a candle in her hand.
“Is it Jude? Yes, it is! My dear, dear cousin, what’s the matter?”
“Oh, I am—I couldn’t help coming, Sue!” said he, sinking down upon the
doorstep. “I am so wicked, Sue—my heart is nearly broken, and I could
not bear my life as it was! So I have been drinking, and blaspheming,
or next door to it, and saying holy things in disreputable
quarters—repeating in idle bravado words which ought never to be
uttered but reverently! Oh, do anything with me, Sue—kill me—I don’t
care! Only don’t hate me and despise me like all the rest of the
world!”
“You are ill, poor dear! No, I won’t despise you; of course I won’t!
Come in and rest, and let me see what I can do for you. Now lean on me,
and don’t mind.” With one hand holding the candle and the other
supporting him, she led him indoors, and placed him in the only easy
chair the meagrely furnished house afforded, stretching his feet upon
another, and pulling off his boots. Jude, now getting towards his sober
senses, could only say, “Dear, dear Sue!” in a voice broken by grief
and contrition.
She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook his head. Then
telling him to go to sleep, and that she would come down early in the
morning and get him some breakfast, she bade him good-night and
ascended the stairs.
Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did not wake till
dawn. At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his
situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness of a
right mind. She knew the worst of him—the very worst. How could he face
her now? She would soon be coming down to see about breakfast, as she
had said, and there would he be in all his shame confronting her. He
could not bear the thought, and softly drawing on his boots, and taking
his hat from the nail on which she had hung it, he slipped noiselessly
out of the house.
His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and hide, and
perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Marygreen. He
called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found awaiting him a
note of dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he turned his
back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his side, and struck
southward into Wessex. He had no money left in his pocket, his small
savings, deposited at one of the banks in Christminster, having
fortunately been left untouched. To get to Marygreen, therefore, his
only course was walking; and the distance being nearly twenty miles, he
had ample time to complete on the way the sobering process begun in
him.
At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston. Here he pawned his
waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two, slept under a
rick that night. At dawn he rose, shook off the hayseeds and stems from
his clothes, and started again, breasting the long white road up the
hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a long way off, and
passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had carved his hopes years
ago.
He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast. Weary
and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary clearness of
brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so what a poor
Christ he made. Seeing a trough of water near he bathed his face, and
went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found breakfasting in
bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.
“What—out o’ work?” asked his relative, regarding him through eyes
sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for his
tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had been a
struggle with material things.
“Yes,” said Jude heavily. “I think I must have a little rest.”
Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay down in
his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan. He fell asleep for
a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell.
It _was_ hell—“the hell of conscious failure,” both in ambition and in
love. He thought of that previous abyss into which he had fallen before
leaving this part of the country; the deepest deep he had supposed it
then; but it was not so deep as this. That had been the breaking in of
the outer bulwarks of his hope: this was of his second line.
If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension
which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his
virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his
mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows.
A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney like
the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall of the
churchless church-yard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its neighbour
smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-Gothic church in the new
spot had already begun to creak. Yet apparently it was not always the
outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice. He guessed its
origin in a moment or two; the curate was praying with his aunt in the
adjoining room. He remembered her speaking of him. Presently the sounds
ceased, and a step seemed to cross the landing. Jude sat up, and
shouted “Hoi!”
The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in. It was
a young clergyman.
“I think you are Mr. Highridge,” said Jude. “My aunt has mentioned you
more than once. Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the
bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I
am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.”
Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements, by an
unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambitious side
of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this had, up till
now, been merely a portion of the general plan of advancement.
“Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me,” added Jude
in conclusion. “And I don’t regret the collapse of my university hopes
one jot. I wouldn’t begin again if I were sure to succeed. I don’t care
for social success any more at all. But I do feel I should like to do
some good thing; and I bitterly regret the Church, and the loss of my
chance of being her ordained minister.”
The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply
interested, and at last he said: “If you feel a real call to the
ministry, and I won’t say from your conversation that you do not, for
it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the Church
as a licentiate. Only you must make up your mind to avoid strong
drink.”
“I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to support
me!”
Part Third AT MELCHESTER
_“For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her!”_
—SAPPHO (H. T. Wharton).
I
It was a new idea—the ecclesiastical and altruistic life as distinct
from the intellectual and emulative life. A man could preach and do
good to his fellow-creatures without taking double-firsts in the
schools of Christminster, or having anything but ordinary knowledge.
The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the
bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but
a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He feared that his whole
scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in,
a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which
was purely an artificial product of civilization. There were thousands
of young men on the same self-seeking track at the present moment. The
sensual hind who ate, drank, and lived carelessly with his wife through
the days of his vanity was a more likable being than he.
But to enter the Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in
any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that
of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city
slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that
might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being
followed by a remorseful man.
The favourable light in which this new thought showed itself by
contrast with his foregone intentions cheered Jude, as he sat there,
shabby and lonely; and it may be said to have given, during the next
few days, the _coup de grâce_ to his intellectual career—a career which
had extended over the greater part of a dozen years. He did nothing,
however, for some long stagnant time to advance his new desire,
occupying himself with little local jobs in putting up and lettering
headstones about the neighbouring villages, and submitting to be
regarded as a social failure, a returned purchase, by the half-dozen or
so of farmers and other country-people who condescended to nod to him.
The human interest of the new intention—and a human interest is
indispensable to the most spiritual and self-sacrificing—was created by
a letter from Sue, bearing a fresh postmark. She evidently wrote with
anxiety, and told very little about her own doings, more than that she
had passed some sort of examination for a Queen’s Scholarship, and was
going to enter a training college at Melchester to complete herself for
the vocation she had chosen, partly by his influence. There was a
theological college at Melchester; Melchester was a quiet and soothing
place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone; a spot where worldly
learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment; where the
altruistic feeling that he did possess would perhaps be more highly
estimated than a brilliancy which he did not.
As it would be necessary that he should continue for a time to work at
his trade while reading up Divinity, which he had neglected at
Christminster for the ordinary classical grind, what better course for
him than to get employment at the further city, and pursue this plan of
reading? That his excessive human interest in the new place was
entirely of Sue’s making, while at the same time Sue was to be regarded
even less than formerly as proper to create it, had an ethical