Jude the Obscure
man. And yet she was Phillotson’s. How she had become such, how she
lived as such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her to-day.
“You’ll go back with me?” he said. “There’s a train just now. I wonder
how my aunt is by this time… And so, Sue, you really came on my account
all this way! At what an early time you must have started, poor thing!”
“Yes. Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and instead
of going to bed when it got light I started. And now you won’t frighten
me like this again about your morals for nothing?”
He was not so sure that she had been frightened about his morals for
nothing. He released her hand till they had entered the train,—it
seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another—where
they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window. He regarded
the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight, applelike
convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella’s amplitudes.
Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn to him, but kept
her eyes forward, as if afraid that by meeting his own some troublous
discussion would be initiated.
“Sue—you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in
such a hurry that we have not said a word about it!”
“There’s no necessity,” she quickly returned.
“Oh well—perhaps not… But I wish”
“Jude—don’t talk about _me_—I wish you wouldn’t!” she entreated. “It
distresses me, rather. Forgive my saying it! … Where did you stay last
night?”
She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic.
He knew that, and said merely, “At an inn,” though it would have been a
relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one. But the
latter’s final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered him
lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.
Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston. That
Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled “Phillotson,” paralyzed
Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual. Yet she
seemed unaltered—he could not say why. There remained the five-mile
extra journey into the country, which it was just as easy to walk as to
drive, the greater part of it being uphill. Jude had never before in
his life gone that road with Sue, though he had with another. It was
now as if he carried a bright light which temporarily banished the
shady associations of the earlier time.
Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation from
herself. At length he inquired if her husband were well.
“O yes,” she said. “He is obliged to be in the school all the day, or
he would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to accompany me
he would have dismissed the school for once, even against his
principles—for he is strongly opposed to giving casual holidays—only I
wouldn’t let him. I felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt
Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being almost a
stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns
out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.”
Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed. “Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,” he
said.
“Of course.”
“You ought to be a happy wife.”
“And of course I am.”
“Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks since
I gave you to him, and—”
“Yes, I know! I know!” There was something in her face which belied her
late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken that
they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in “The Wife’s
Guide to Conduct.” Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue’s
voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and he was
convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month
married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a
relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue
naturally did such things as those.
“Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.”
She reproached him by a glance.
“No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,” murmured Jude. “You are dear, free
Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up
and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further
individuality.”
Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, “Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!”
“But it has!” he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown
House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and
quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now.
He could not help saying to Sue: “That’s the house my wife and I
occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to
that house.”
She looked at it. “That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is
to me.”
“Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours.”
She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till
she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. “Of course I may have
exaggerated your happiness—one never knows,” he continued blandly.
“Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it
to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect
liberty—which elderly husbands don’t do in general… If you think I am
not happy because he’s too old for me, you are wrong.”
“I don’t think anything against him—to you dear.”
“And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?”
“I will not.”
He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking
Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not
to have done.
They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the
village—the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer
many years earlier. On ascending to the village and approaching the
house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them
lifted her hands deprecatingly. “She’s downstairs, if you’ll believe
me!” cried the widow. “Out o’ bed she got, and nothing could turn her.
What will come o’t I do not know!”
On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped
in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of
Sebastiano’s Lazarus. They must have looked their amazement, for she
said in a hollow voice:
“Ah—sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there no longer, to
please nobody! ’Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be ordered
to do this and that by a feller that don’t know half as well as you do
yourself! … Ah—you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!” she added,
turning to Sue. “All our family do—and nearly all everybody else’s. You
should have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson the
schoolmaster, of all men! What made ’ee marry him?”
“What makes most women marry, Aunt?”
“Ah! You mean to say you loved the man!”
“I don’t meant to say anything definite.”
“Do ye love un?”
“Don’t ask me, Aunt.”
“I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!—I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but—there be certain men
here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have
said he was one. I don’t say so _now_, since you must ha’ known better
than I—but that’s what I _should_ have said!”
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the
outhouse, crying.
“Don’t cry, dear!” said Jude in distress. “She means well, but is very
crusty and queer now, you know.”
“Oh no—it isn’t that!” said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. “I don’t mind
her roughness one bit.”
“What is it, then?”
“It is that what she says is—is true!”
“God—what—you don’t like him?” asked Jude.
“I don’t mean that!” she said hastily. “That I ought—perhaps I ought
not to have married!”
He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first. They
went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took rather
kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly married
would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the
afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive her
to Alfredston.
“I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?” he said.
She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude
helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she looked
at him prohibitively.
“I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at
Melchester?” he half-crossly observed.
She bent down and said softly: “No, dear—you are not to come yet. I
don’t think you are in a good mood.”
“Very well,” said Jude. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” She waved her hand and was gone.
“She’s right! I won’t go!” he murmured.
He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts
to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read
sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history that
treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before he had returned
from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter from Arabella. The
sight of it revived a stronger feeling of self-condemnation for his
brief return to her society than for his attachment to Sue.
The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the
Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few days after their
parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an
affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of
the hotel in Sydney. He had come to England on purpose to find her; and
had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he wished
her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely to be a
very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent, densely
populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a trade of
£200 a month, which could be easily doubled.
As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to
tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff,
and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had just
gone to join him as he urged. She could not help feeling that she
belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married him,
and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband. In thus
wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted he would
not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her, and bring her
to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her circumstances and
leading a genteel life.
X
Jude returned to Melchester, which had the questionable recommendation
of being only a dozen and a half miles from his Sue’s now permanent
residence. At first he felt that this nearness was a distinct reason
for not going southward at all; but Christminster was too sad a place
to bear, while the proximity of Shaston to Melchester might afford him
the glory of worsting the Enemy in a close engagement, such as was
deliberately sought by the priests and virgins of the early Church,
who, disdaining an ignominious flight from temptation, became even
chamber-partners with impunity. Jude did not pause to remember that, in
the laconic words of the historian, “insulted Nature sometimes
vindicated her rights” in such circumstances.
He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the
priesthood—in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his aims,
and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable of late.
His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to
the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse