Jude the Obscure
Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady’s eyebrow,
came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was
obliged to go and attend to him. “We can’t talk here,” she said,
stepping back a moment. “Can’t you wait till nine? Say yes, and don’t
be a fool. I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask. I
am not living in the house at present.”
He reflected and said gloomily, “I’ll come back. I suppose we’d better
arrange something.”
“Oh, bother arranging! I’m not going to arrange anything!”
“But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can’t talk here.
Very well; I’ll call for you.”
Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the
street. Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of his
sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella’s word was absolutely
untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her implication
that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really supposed him
dead. However, there was only one thing now to be done, and that was to
play a straightforward part, the law being the law, and the woman
between whom and himself there was no more unity than between east and
west, being in the eye of the Church one person with him.
Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at
Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of this a pang had gone
through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped. Arabella was
perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his unauthorized
love. Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the
town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall,
because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar
while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell
of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous
irony. The inn was now brilliantly lighted up, and the scene was
altogether more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen in
colour, each having a pink flush on her cheek; their manners were still
more vivacious than before—more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous,
and they expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically,
laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.
The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous
hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but the
customers were fewer at last. He nodded to Arabella, and told her that
she would find him outside the door when she came away.
“But you must have something with me first,” she said with great good
humour. “Just an early night-cap: I always do. Then you can go out and
wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going together.” She
drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had
evidently, from her countenance, already taken in enough alcohol either
by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere she had breathed for
so many hours, she finished hers quickly. He also drank his, and went
outside the house.
In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black
feather. “I live quite near,” she said, taking his arm, “and can let
myself in by a latch-key at any time. What arrangement do you want to
come to?”
“Oh—none in particular,” he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his
thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go by;
the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when she
arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and lonely
climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen. “I ought to have gone
back really! My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear.”
“I’ll go over with you to-morrow morning. I think I could get a day
off.”
There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella,
who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,
coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue. Yet he said,
“Of course, if you’d like to, you can.”
“Well, that we’ll consider… Now, until we have come to some agreement
it is awkward our being together here—where you are known, and I am
getting known, though without any suspicion that I have anything to do
with you. As we are going towards the station, suppose we take the
nine-forty train to Aldbrickham? We shall be there in little more than
half an hour, and nobody will know us for one night, and we shall be
quite free to act as we choose till we have made up our minds whether
we’ll make anything public or not.”
“As you like.”
“Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging.
Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so nobody
will think anything of my staying out.”
She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the
half-hour’s journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate inn
near the station in time for a late supper.
IX
On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back to
Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a third-class
railway-carriage. Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet to
catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very
far from possessing the animation which had characterized it at the bar
the night before. When they came out of the station she found that she
still had half an hour to spare before she was due at the bar. They
walked in silence a little way out of the town in the direction of
Alfredston. Jude looked up the far highway.
“Ah … poor feeble me!” he murmured at last.
“What?” said she.
“This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago
full of plans!”
“Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have to
be in the bar by eleven o’clock. And as I said, I shan’t ask for the
day to go with you to see your aunt. So perhaps we had better part
here. I’d sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we’ve come to
no conclusion at all.”
“Very well. But you said when we were getting up this morning that you
had something you wished to tell me before I left?”
“So I had—two things—one in particular. But you wouldn’t promise to
keep it a secret. I’ll tell you now if you promise? As an honest woman
I wish you to know it… It was what I began telling you in the
night—about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel.” Arabella
spoke somewhat hurriedly for her. “You’ll keep it close?”
“Yes—yes—I promise!” said Jude impatiently. “Of course I don’t want to
reveal your secrets.”
“Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much
taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him. I never
thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in
Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last
agreed, and did.”
“What—marry him?”
“Yes.”
“Regularly—legally—in church?”
“Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left. It was stupid, I
know; but I did! There, now I’ve told you. Don’t round upon me! He
talks of coming back to England, poor old chap. But if he does, he
won’t be likely to find me.”
Jude stood pale and fixed.
“Why the devil didn’t you tell me last, night!” he said.
“Well—I didn’t… Won’t you make it up with me, then?”
“So in talking of ‘your husband’ to the bar gentlemen you meant him, of
course—not me!”
“Of course… Come, don’t fuss about it.”
“I have nothing more to say!” replied Jude. “I have nothing at all to
say about the—crime—you’ve confessed to!”
“Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over there! Lots of
’em do it… Well, if you take it like that I shall go back to him! He
was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable
as any married couple in the colony! How did I know where you were?”
“I won’t go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but perhaps it would
be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?”
“Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy
we’ve seen enough of one another for the present! I shall think over
what you said about your circumstances, and let you know.”
Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the direction of the
hotel, and entered the railway station close by. Finding that it wanted
three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could get a train
back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the city as far as to
the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often stood before, and
surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its college after college,
in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such Continental vistas as the
Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines of the buildings being as
distinct in the morning air as in an architectural drawing. But Jude
was far from seeing or criticizing these things; they were hidden by an
indescribable consciousness of Arabella’s midnight contiguity, a sense
of degradation at his revived experiences with her, of her appearance
as she lay asleep at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as
of one accurst. If he could only have felt resentment towards her he
would have been less unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.
Jude turned and retraced his steps. Drawing again towards the station
he started at hearing his name pronounced—less at the name than at the
voice. To his great surprise no other than Sue stood like a vision
before him—her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth
nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.
“Oh, Jude—I am so glad—to meet you like this!” she said in quick,
uneven accents not far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed his
thought that they had not met since her marriage.
They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each
other’s hand without further speech, and went on together awhile, till
she glanced at him with furtive solicitude. “I arrived at Alfredston
station last night, as you asked me to, and there was nobody to meet
me! But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me Aunt was a trifle
better. I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I was
frightened about you—I thought that perhaps, when you found yourself
back in the old city, you were upset at—at thinking I was—married, and
not there as I used to be; and that you had nobody to speak to; so you
had tried to drown your gloom—as you did at that former time when you
were disappointed about entering as a student, and had forgotten your
promise to me that you never would again. And this, I thought, was why
you hadn’t come to meet me!”
“And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!”
“I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you—in
case—in case—”
“I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall never
break out again as I did, I am sure. I may have been doing nothing
better, but I was not doing that—I loathe the thought of it.”
“I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that. But,” she said,
the faintest pout entering into her tone, “you didn’t come back last
night and meet me, as you engaged to!”
“I didn’t—I am sorry to say. I had an appointment at nine o’clock—too
late for me to catch the train that would have met yours, or to get
home at all.”
Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender
thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever
had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that
her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily
ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in
Arabella’s company. There was something rude and immoral in thrusting
these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so
uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average