Jude the Obscure
not to be angry! Jude, please still keep me as your friend and
associate, with all my faults. I’ll try not to be like it again.
I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things away from
the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half an hour, if you would
like?—Your repentant
SUE.
Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the
cathedral works when she came.
VI
Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty
concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard Phillotson,
who had recently removed from the mixed village school at Lumsdon near
Christminster, to undertake a large boys’ school in his native town of
Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the south-west as the
crow flies.
A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal
that the schoolmaster’s plans and dreams so long indulged in had been
abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor
literature had much in common. Essentially an unpractical man, he was
now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose—that of
keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls’
schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go
into training, since she would not marry him offhand.
About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester, and
entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the schoolmaster
was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston. All the furniture
being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails driven, he had begun to
sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of
his old studies—one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic
antiquities—an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a
subject, that, after his abandonment of the university scheme, had
interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine; practicable to
those who, like himself, had lived in lonely spots where these remains
were abundant, and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast
to accepted views on the civilization of that time.
A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby
of Phillotson at present—his ostensible reason for going alone into
fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself
up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected,
instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part
had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him. But it
was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all. Thus on a particular
evening in the month, when it had grown quite late—to near midnight,
indeed—and the light of his lamp, shining from his window at a salient
angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward,
announced as by words a place and person given over to study, he was
not exactly studying.
The interior of the room—the books, the furniture, the schoolmaster’s
loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the flickering of the fire,
bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research—more than
creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own
making. And yet the tale, true enough till latterly, was not true now.
What he was regarding was not history. They were historic notes,
written in a bold womanly hand at his dictation some months before, and
it was the clerical rendering of word after word that absorbed him.
He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,
few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays. Each was in its
envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same
womanly character as the historic notes. He unfolded them one by one
and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these small
documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over. They were
straightforward, frank letters, signed “Sue B—”; just such ones as
would be written during short absences, with no other thought than
their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading and
other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by the
writer with the passing of the day of their inditing. In one of
them—quite a recent note—the young woman said that she had received his
considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of him to
say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the school
being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her strong wish
that her engagement to him should not be known, which it would
infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the
school-master pored. What precise shade of satisfaction was to be
gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man who loved her had not
been often to see her? The problem occupied him, distracted him.
He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from which he
drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had known her,
standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand. There was
another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a very
distinct and attractive picture of her, which just disclosed, too, the
thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods. It was a duplicate of
the one she had given Jude, and would have given to any man. Phillotson
brought it half-way to his lips, but withdrew it in doubt at her
perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing the dead pasteboard with all the
passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young man of
eighteen.
The schoolmaster’s was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,
rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving. A certain
gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by nature, suggesting an
inherent wish to do rightly by all. His speech was a little slow, but
his tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect. His
greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle of his
crown. There were four lines across his forehead, and he only wore
spectacles when reading at night. It was almost certainly a
renunciation forced upon him by his academic purpose, rather than a
distaste for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one
of the sex in matrimony.
Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated many and
oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick and
penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to the
self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making him,
in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet glances,
lest they should read what the dream within him was.
He had honourably acquiesced in Sue’s announced wish that he was not
often to visit her at the training school; but at length, his patience
being sorely tried, he set out one Saturday afternoon to pay her an
unexpected call. There the news of her departure—expulsion as it might
almost have been considered—was flashed upon him without warning or
mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few minutes to behold
her face; and when he turned away he could hardly see the road before
him.
Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,
although it was fourteen days old. A short reflection told him that
this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for
silence as any degree of blameworthiness.
They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having no
immediate anxiety about her comfort, his thoughts took the direction of
a burning indignation against the training school committee. In his
bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent cathedral, just now in a
direly dismantled state by reason of the repairs. He sat down on a
block of freestone, regardless of the dusty imprint it made on his
breeches; and his listless eyes following the movements of the workmen
he presently became aware that the reputed culprit, Sue’s lover Jude,
was one amongst them.
Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the model
of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson’s tentative
courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man’s
mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to
communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson’s success in
obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude, he had frankly
recognized that he did not wish to see or hear of his senior any more,
learn anything of his pursuits, or even imagine again what excellencies
might appertain to his character. On this very day of the
schoolmaster’s visit Jude was expecting Sue, as she had promised; and
when therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the nave of the building,
saw, moreover, that he was coming to speak to him, he felt no little
embarrassment; which Phillotson’s own embarrassment prevented his
observing.
Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other workmen to the
spot where Phillotson had been sitting. Jude offered him a piece of
sackcloth for a cushion, and told him it was dangerous to sit on the
bare block.
“Yes; yes,” said Phillotson abstractedly, as he reseated himself, his
eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying to remember where he
was. “I won’t keep you long. It was merely that I have heard that you
have seen my little friend Sue recently. It occurred to me to speak to
you on that account. I merely want to ask—about her.”
“I think I know what!” Jude hurriedly said. “About her escaping from
the training school, and her coming to me?”
“Yes.”
“Well”—Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to
annihilate his rival at all cost. By the exercise of that treachery
which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most
honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off
Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true, and
that Sue had irretrievably committed herself with him. But his action
did not respond for a moment to his animal instinct; and what he said
was, “I am glad of your kindness in coming to talk plainly to me about
it. You know what they say?—that I ought to marry her.”
“What!”
“And I wish with all my soul I could!”
Phillotson trembled, and his naturally pale face acquired a corpselike
sharpness in its lines. “I had no idea that it was of this nature! God
forbid!”
“No, no!” said Jude aghast. “I thought you understood? I mean that were
I in a position to marry her, or someone, and settle down, instead of
living in lodgings here and there, I should be glad!”
What he had really meant was simply that he loved her.
“But—since this painful matter has been opened up—what really
happened?” asked Phillotson, with the firmness of a man who felt that a
sharp smart now was better than a long agony of suspense hereafter.
“Cases arise, and this is one, when even ungenerous questions must be
put to make false assumptions impossible, and to kill scandal.”
Jude explained readily; giving the whole series of adventures,
including the night at the shepherd’s, her wet arrival at his lodging,
her indisposition from her immersion, their vigil of discussion, and
his seeing her off next morning.
“Well now,” said Phillotson at the conclusion, “I take it as your final
word, and I know I can believe you, that the suspicion which led to her
rustication is an absolutely baseless one?”
“It is,” said Jude solemnly. “Absolutely. So help me God!”
The schoolmaster rose. Each of the twain felt that the interview could
not comfortably merge in a friendly discussion of their recent
experiences, after the manner of friends; and when Jude had taken him
round, and shown him some features of the renovation which the old
cathedral was undergoing, Phillotson bade the young man good-day and
went away.