Jude the Obscure
contradictoriness to which he was not blind. But that much he conceded
to human frailty, and hoped to learn to love her only as a friend and
kinswoman.
He considered that he might so mark out his coming years as to begin
his ministry at the age of thirty—an age which much attracted him as
being that of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee.
This would allow him plenty of time for deliberate study, and for
acquiring capital by his trade to help his aftercourse of keeping the
necessary terms at a theological college.
Christmas had come and passed, and Sue had gone to the Melchester
Normal School. The time was just the worst in the year for Jude to get
into new employment, and he had written suggesting to her that he
should postpone his arrival for a month or so, till the days had
lengthened. She had acquiesced so readily that he wished he had not
proposed it—she evidently did not much care about him, though she had
never once reproached him for his strange conduct in coming to her that
night, and his silent disappearance. Neither had she ever said a word
about her relations with Mr. Phillotson.
Suddenly, however, quite a passionate letter arrived from Sue. She was
quite lonely and miserable, she told him. She hated the place she was
in; it was worse than the ecclesiastical designer’s; worse than
anywhere. She felt utterly friendless; could he come
immediately?—though when he did come she would only be able to see him
at limited times, the rules of the establishment she found herself in
being strict to a degree. It was Mr. Phillotson who had advised her to
come there, and she wished she had never listened to him.
Phillotson’s suit was not exactly prospering, evidently; and Jude felt
unreasonably glad. He packed up his things and went to Melchester with
a lighter heart than he had known for months.
This being the turning over a new leaf he duly looked about for a
temperance hotel, and found a little establishment of that description
in the street leading from the station. When he had had something to
eat he walked out into the dull winter light over the town bridge, and
turned the corner towards the Close. The day was foggy, and standing
under the walls of the most graceful architectural pile in England he
paused and looked up. The lofty building was visible as far as the
roofridge; above, the dwindling spire rose more and more remotely, till
its apex was quite lost in the mist drifting across it.
The lamps now began to be lighted, and turning to the west front he
walked round. He took it as a good omen that numerous blocks of stone
were lying about, which signified that the cathedral was undergoing
restoration or repair to a considerable extent. It seemed to him, full
of the superstitions of his beliefs, that this was an exercise of
forethought on the part of a ruling Power, that he might find plenty to
do in the art he practised while waiting for a call to higher labours.
Then a wave of warmth came over him as he thought how near he now stood
to the bright-eyed vivacious girl with the broad forehead and pile of
dark hair above it; the girl with the kindling glance, daringly soft at
times—something like that of the girls he had seen in engravings from
paintings of the Spanish school. She was here—actually in this Close—in
one of the houses confronting this very west façade.
He went down the broad gravel path towards the building. It was an
ancient edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace, now a
training-school, with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard
in front shut in from the road by a wall. Jude opened the gate and went
up to the door through which, on inquiring for his cousin, he was
gingerly admitted to a waiting-room, and in a few minutes she came.
Though she had been here such a short while, she was not as he had seen
her last. All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had
become subdued lines. The screens and subtleties of convention had
likewise disappeared. Yet neither was she quite the woman who had
written the letter that summoned him. That had plainly been dashed off
in an impulse which second thoughts had somewhat regretted; thoughts
that were possibly of his recent self-disgrace. Jude was quite overcome
with emotion.
“You don’t—think me a demoralized wretch—for coming to you as I was—and
going so shamefully, Sue?”
“Oh, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know what had
caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my
poor Jude! And I am glad you have come!”
She wore a murrey-coloured gown with a little lace collar. It was made
quite plain, and hung about her slight figure with clinging
gracefulness. Her hair, which formerly she had worn according to the
custom of the day was now twisted up tightly, and she had altogether
the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an
under-brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline
had not yet been able to reach.
She had come forward prettily, but Jude felt that she had hardly
expected him to kiss her, as he was burning to do, under other colours
than those of cousinship. He could not perceive the least sign that Sue
regarded him as a lover, or ever would do so, now that she knew the
worst of him, even if he had the right to behave as one; and this
helped on his growing resolve to tell her of his matrimonial
entanglement, which he had put off doing from time to time in sheer
dread of losing the bliss of her company.
Sue came out into the town with him, and they walked and talked with
tongues centred only on the passing moments. Jude said he would like to
buy her a little present of some sort, and then she confessed, with
something of shame, that she was dreadfully hungry. They were kept on
very short allowances in the college, and a dinner, tea, and supper all
in one was the present she most desired in the world. Jude thereupon
took her to an inn and ordered whatever the house afforded, which was
not much. The place, however, gave them a delightful opportunity for a
_tête-à-tête_, nobody else being in the room, and they talked freely.
She told him about the school as it was at that date, and the rough
living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered
together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and
work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of a
young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but it
was not what he wanted especially to know—her relations with
Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and
eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up and
smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one,
dividing his fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the
fingers of a glove she was purchasing.
“Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?” she said.
“Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day.”
“I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man’s hands
subdued to what he works in… Well, I’m rather glad I came to this
training-school, after all. See how independent I shall be after the
two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr.
Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school.”
She had touched the subject at last. “I had a suspicion, a fear,” said
Jude, “that he—cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps wanted to
marry you.”
“Now don’t be such a silly boy!”
“He has said something about it, I expect.”
“If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him!”
“Oh, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw him doing—”
“Not kissing me—that I’m certain!”
“No. But putting his arm round your waist.”
“Ah—I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.”
“You are wriggling out if it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!”
Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at
something this reproof was deciding her to say.
“I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s why I
don’t want to!”
“Very well, then, dear,” he said soothingly. “I have no real right to
ask you, and I don’t wish to know.”
“I shall tell you!” said she, with the perverseness that was part of
her. “This is what I have done: I have promised—I have promised—that I
will marry him when I come out of the training-school two years hence,
and have got my certificate; his plan being that we shall then take a
large double school in a great town—he the boys’ and I the girls’—as
married school-teachers often do, and make a good income between us.”
“Oh, Sue! … But of course it is right—you couldn’t have done better!”
He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his own belying
his words. Then he drew his hand quite away from hers, and turned his
face in estrangement from her to the window. Sue regarded him passively
without moving.
“I knew you would be angry!” she said with an air of no emotion
whatever. “Very well—I am wrong, I suppose! I ought not to have let you
come to see me! We had better not meet again; and we’ll only correspond
at long intervals, on purely business matters!”
This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear, as she
probably knew, and it brought him round at once. “Oh yes, we will,” he
said quickly. “Your being engaged can make no difference to me
whatever. I have a perfect right to see you when I want to; and I
shall!”
“Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling our
evening together. What does it matter about what one is going to do two
years hence!”
She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the subject drift
away. “Shall we go and sit in the cathedral?” he asked, when their meal
was finished.
“Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway station,”
she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. “That’s the
centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!”
“How modern you are!”
“So would you be if you had lived so much in the Middle Ages as I have
done these last few years! The cathedral was a very good place four or
five centuries ago; but it is played out now… I am not modern, either.
I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only knew.”
Jude looked distressed.
“There—I won’t say any more of that!” she cried. “Only you don’t know
how bad I am, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t think so much of
me, or care whether I was engaged or not. Now there’s just time for us
to walk round the Close, then I must go in, or I shall be locked out
for the night.”
He took her to the gate and they parted. Jude had a conviction that his
unhappy visit to her on that sad night had precipitated this marriage
engagement, and it did anything but add to his happiness. Her reproach
had taken that shape, then, and not the shape of words. However, next
day he set about seeking employment, which it was not so easy to get as
at Christminster, there being, as a rule, less stone-cutting in
progress in this quiet city, and hands being mostly permanent. But he
edged himself in by degrees. His first work was some carving at the
cemetery on the hill; and ultimately he became engaged on the labour he
most desired—the cathedral repairs, which were very extensive, the
whole interior stonework having been overhauled, to be largely replaced
by new. It might be a labour of years to get it all done, and he had
confidence enough in his own skill with the mallet and chisel to feel
that it would be a matter of choice with himself how long he would
stay.
The lodgings he took near the Close Gate would not have disgraced a
curate, the rent representing a higher percentage on his wages than
mechanics of any sort usually care to pay. His combined bed and