Jude the Obscure
mullioned windows at the vast west front of the cathedral opposite, and
the spire rising behind it.
When they awoke the next morning they glanced into Sue’s nook, to find
it still without a tenant. After the early lessons by gas-light, in
half-toilet, and when they had come up to dress for breakfast, the bell
of the entrance gate was heard to ring loudly. The mistress of the
dormitory went away, and presently came back to say that the
principal’s orders were that nobody was to speak to Bridehead without
permission.
When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily tidy herself,
looking flushed and tired, she went to her cubicle in silence, none of
them coming out to greet her or to make inquiry. When they had gone
downstairs they found that she did not follow them into the dining-hall
to breakfast, and they then learnt that she had been severely
reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week, there to be
confined, and take her meals, and do all her reading.
At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they thought, too
severe. A round robin was prepared and sent in to the principal, asking
for a remission of Sue’s punishment. No notice was taken. Towards
evening, when the geography mistress began dictating her subject, the
girls in the class sat with folded arms.
“You mean that you are not going to work?” said the mistress at last.
“I may as well tell you that it has been ascertained that the young man
Bridehead stayed out with was not her cousin, for the very good reason
that she has no such relative. We have written to Christminster to
ascertain.”
“We are willing to take her word,” said the head girl.
“This young man was discharged from his work at Christminster for
drunkenness and blasphemy in public-houses, and he has come here to
live, entirely to be near her.”
However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the mistress left the
room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.
Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard exclamations
from the first-year’s girls in an adjoining classroom, and one rushed
in to say that Sue Bridehead had got out of the back window of the room
in which she had been confined, escaped in the dark across the lawn,
and disappeared. How she had managed to get out of the garden nobody
could tell, as it was bounded by the river at the bottom, and the side
door was locked.
They went and looked at the empty room, the casement between the middle
mullions of which stood open. The lawn was again searched with a
lantern, every bush and shrub being examined, but she was nowhere
hidden. Then the porter of the front gate was interrogated, and on
reflection he said that he remembered hearing a sort of splashing in
the stream at the back, but he had taken no notice, thinking some ducks
had come down the river from above.
“She must have walked through the river!” said a mistress.
“Or drownded herself,” said the porter.
The mind of the matron was horrified—not so much at the possible death
of Sue as at the possible half-column detailing that event in all the
newspapers, which, added to the scandal of the year before, would give
the college an unenviable notoriety for many months to come.
More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and then, at last,
on the opposite shore, which was open to the fields, some little
boot-tracks were discerned in the mud, which left no doubt that the too
excitable girl had waded through a depth of water reaching nearly to
her shoulders—for this was the chief river of the county, and was
mentioned in all the geography books with respect. As Sue had not
brought disgrace upon the school by drowning herself, the matron began
to speak superciliously of her, and to express gladness that she was
gone.
On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the Close Gate.
Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the silent Close, and
stand opposite the house that contained Sue, and watch the shadows of
the girls’ heads passing to and fro upon the blinds, and wish he had
nothing else to do but to sit reading and learning all day what many of
the thoughtless inmates despised. But to-night, having finished tea and
brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of the Twenty-ninth
Volume of Pusey’s Library of the Fathers, a set of books which he had
purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price that seemed to him to be
one of miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work. He fancied he
heard something rattle lightly against his window; then he heard it
again. Certainly somebody had thrown gravel. He rose and gently lifted
the sash.
“Jude!” (from below).
“Sue!”
“Yes—it is! Can I come up without being seen?”
“Oh yes!”
“Then don’t come down. Shut the window.”
Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough, the front door
being opened merely by a knob which anybody could turn, as in most old
country towns. He palpitated at the thought that she had fled to him in
her trouble as he had fled to her in his. What counterparts they were!
He unlatched the door of his room, heard a stealthy rustle on the dark
stairs, and in a moment she appeared in the light of his lamp. He went
up to seize her hand, and found she was clammy as a marine deity, and
that her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the
Parthenon frieze.
“I’m so cold!” she said through her chattering teeth. “Can I come by
your fire, Jude?”
She crossed to his little grate and very little fire, but as the water
dripped from her as she moved, the idea of drying herself was absurd.
“Whatever have you done, darling?” he asked, with alarm, the tender
epithet slipping out unawares.
“Walked through the largest river in the county—that’s what I’ve done!
They locked me up for being out with you; and it seemed so unjust that
I couldn’t bear it, so I got out of the window and escaped across the
stream!” She had begun the explanation in her usual slightly
independent tones, but before she had finished the thin pink lips
trembled, and she could hardly refrain from crying.
“Dear Sue!” he said. “You must take off all your things! And let me
see—you must borrow some from the landlady. I’ll ask her.”
“No, no! Don’t let her know, for God’s sake! We are so near the school
that they’ll come after me!”
“Then you must put on mine. You don’t mind?”
“Oh no.”
“My Sunday suit, you know. It is close here.” In fact, everything was
close and handy in Jude’s single chamber, because there was not room
for it to be otherwise. He opened a drawer, took out his best dark
suit, and giving the garments a shake, said, “Now, how long shall I
give you?”
“Ten minutes.”
Jude left the room and went into the street, where he walked up and
down. A clock struck half-past seven, and he returned. Sitting in his
only arm-chair he saw a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself
on a Sunday, so pathetic in her defencelessness that his heart felt big
with the sense of it. On two other chairs before the fire were her wet
garments. She blushed as he sat down beside her, but only for a moment.
“I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all my
things hanging there? Yet what nonsense! They are only a woman’s
clothes—sexless cloth and linen… I wish I didn’t feel so ill and sick!
Will you dry my clothes now? Please do, Jude, and I’ll get a lodging by
and by. It is not late yet.”
“No, you shan’t, if you are ill. You must stay here. Dear, dear Sue,
what can I get for you?”
“I don’t know! I can’t help shivering. I wish I could get warm.” Jude
put on her his great-coat in addition, and then ran out to the nearest
public-house, whence he returned with a little bottle in his hand.
“Here’s six of best brandy,” he said. “Now you drink it, dear; all of
it.”
“I can’t out of the bottle, can I?” Jude fetched the glass from the
dressing-table, and administered the spirit in some water. She gasped a
little, but gulped it down, and lay back in the armchair.
She then began to relate circumstantially her experiences since they
had parted; but in the middle of her story her voice faltered, her head
nodded, and she ceased. She was in a sound sleep. Jude, dying of
anxiety lest she should have caught a chill which might permanently
injure her, was glad to hear the regular breathing. He softly went
nearer to her, and observed that a warm flush now rosed her hitherto
blue cheeks, and felt that her hanging hand was no longer cold. Then he
stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a
divinity.
IV
Jude’s reverie was interrupted by the creak of footsteps ascending the
stairs.
He whisked Sue’s clothing from the chair where it was drying, thrust it
under the bed, and sat down to his book. Somebody knocked and opened
the door immediately. It was the landlady.
“Oh, I didn’t know whether you was in or not, Mr. Fawley. I wanted to
know if you would require supper. I see you’ve a young gentleman—”
“Yes, ma’am. But I think I won’t come down to-night. Will you bring
supper up on a tray, and I’ll have a cup of tea as well.”
It was Jude’s custom to go downstairs to the kitchen, and eat his meals
with the family, to save trouble. His landlady brought up the supper,
however, on this occasion, and he took it from her at the door.
When she had descended he set the teapot on the hob, and drew out Sue’s
clothes anew; but they were far from dry. A thick woollen gown, he
found, held a deal of water. So he hung them up again, and enlarged his
fire and mused as the steam from the garments went up the chimney.
Suddenly she said, “Jude!”
“Yes. All right. How do you feel now?”
“Better. Quite well. Why, I fell asleep, didn’t I? What time is it? Not
late surely?”
“It is past ten.”
“Is it really? What _shall_ I do!” she said, starting up.
“Stay where you are.”
“Yes; that’s what I want to do. But I don’t know what they would say!
And what will you do?”
“I am going to sit here by the fire all night, and read. To-morrow is
Sunday, and I haven’t to go out anywhere. Perhaps you will be saved a
severe illness by resting there. Don’t be frightened. I’m all right.
Look here, what I have got for you. Some supper.”
When she had sat upright she breathed plaintively and said, “I do feel
rather weak still. I thought I was well; and I ought not to be here,
ought I?” But the supper fortified her somewhat, and when she had had
some tea and had lain back again she was bright and cheerful.
The tea must have been green, or too long drawn, for she seemed
preternaturally wakeful afterwards, though Jude, who had not taken any,
began to feel heavy; till her conversation fixed his attention.
“You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn’t you?”
she said, breaking a silence. “It was very odd you should have done
that.”
“Why?”
“Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.”
“You are very philosophical. ‘A negation’ is profound talking.”
“Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?” she asked, with a touch of
raillery.
“No—not learned. Only you don’t talk quite like a girl—well, a girl who
has had no advantages.”
“I have had advantages. I don’t know Latin and Greek, though I know the
grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin
classics through translations, and other books too. I read Lemprière,
Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio,
Scarron, De Brantôme, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare,
the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the
unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery.”
“You have read more than I,” he said with a sigh. “How came you to read
some of those queerer ones?”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it was by accident. My life has been