Jude the Obscure
although I have been—pretending I am happy.—Now you’ll have a contempt
for me for ever, I suppose!” She bent down her face upon her hands as
they lay upon the cloth, and silently sobbed in little jerks that made
the fragile three-legged table quiver.
“I have only been married a month or two!” she went on, still remaining
bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands. “And it is said that
what a woman shrinks from—in the early days of her marriage—she shakes
down to with comfortable indifference in half a dozen years. But that
is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction,
since a person gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg
or arm in the course of time!”
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, “I thought there was something
wrong, Sue! Oh, I thought there was!”
“But it is not as you think!—there is nothing wrong except my own
wickedness, I suppose you’d call it—a repugnance on my part, for a
reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by the
world in general! … What tortures me so much is the necessity of being
responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the
dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence
is its voluntariness! … I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me,
or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for
feeling as I do! But he does nothing, except that he has grown a little
cold since he has found out how I feel. That’s why he didn’t come to
the funeral… Oh, I am very miserable—I don’t know what to do! … Don’t
come near me, Jude, because you mustn’t. Don’t—don’t!”
But he had jumped up and put his face against hers—or rather against
her ear, her face being inaccessible.
“I told you not to, Jude!”
“I know you did—I only wish to—console you! It all arose through my
being married before we met, didn’t it? You would have been my wife,
Sue, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t been for that?”
Instead of replying she rose quickly, and saying she was going to walk
to her aunt’s grave in the churchyard to recover herself, went out of
the house. Jude did not follow her. Twenty minutes later he saw her
cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin’s, and soon she sent a
little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired to see him
again that night.
In the lonely room of his aunt’s house, Jude sat watching the cottage
of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade. He knew
that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and disheartened;
and again questioned his devotional motto that all was for the best.
He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the sense that
Sue was so near at hand. At some time near two o’clock, when he was
beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak that
had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly at Marygreen.
It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin. As was the little
creature’s habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would
not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture
till the morrow when the trapper would come and knock it on the head.
He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now began
to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg. If it were
a “bad catch” by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing
six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of
its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it to escape,
it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it
were a “good catch,” namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken
and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.
Almost half an hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry. Jude could
rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing himself
quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went across the
green in the direction of the sound. He reached the hedge bordering the
widow’s garden, when he stood still. The faint click of the trap as
dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the
spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his
palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open
casement at a window on the ground floor of the adjacent cottage.
“Jude!” said a voice timidly—Sue’s voice. “It is you—is it not?”
“Yes, dear!”
“I haven’t been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit, and
couldn’t help thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must come
down and kill it! But I am so glad you got there first… They ought not
to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!”
Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that she was
visible down to her waist. She let go the casement-stay and put her
hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.
“Did it keep you awake?” he said.
“No—I was awake.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, you know—now! I know you, with your religious doctrines, think
that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a mortal
sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you. I wish I hadn’t,
now!”
“Don’t wish it, dear,” he said. “That may have _been_ my view; but my
doctrines and I begin to part company.”
“I knew it—I knew it! And that’s why I vowed I wouldn’t disturb your
belief. But—I am _so glad_ to see you!—and, oh, I didn’t mean to see
you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!”
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. “There is a stronger one left!” he
said. “I’ll never care about my doctrines or my religion any more! Let
them go! Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even if you…”
“Don’t say it!—I know what you mean; but I can’t admit so much as that.
There! Guess what you like, but don’t press me to answer questions!”
“I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!”
“I _can’t_ be! So few could enter into my feeling—they would say ’twas
my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and condemn me…
It is none of the natural tragedies of love that’s love’s usual tragedy
in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people
who in a natural state would find relief in parting! … It would have
been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I had been
able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody. And I _must_ tell
somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought out fully what
marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no
excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I
rushed on, when I had got into that training school scrape, with all
the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! … I am certain one ought to
be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly! I daresay it
happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick… When people of
a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of
the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what _will_ they
say!”
“You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish—I wish—”
“You must go in now!”
In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon
his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little
kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could
not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have
done. She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.
III
Sue’s distressful confession recurred to Jude’s mind all the night as
being a sorrow indeed.
The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours saw
her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill path which
led into the lonely road to Alfredston. An hour passed before he
returned along the same route, and in his face there was a look of
exaltation not unmixed with recklessness. An incident had occurred.
They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and
passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how
far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and
she said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in
embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell as he
now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss would
be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it. If given in the
spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in the spirit
of a lover she could not permit it. “Will you swear that it will not be
in that spirit?” she had said.
No: he would not. And then they had turned from each other in
estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a distance of twenty
or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously. That look behind
was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained. They had
quickly run back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly, kissed
close and long. When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on
her side, and a beating heart on his.
The kiss was a turning-point in Jude’s career. Back again in the
cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though his kiss
of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life,
as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly
inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and
servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best
a frailty, and at its worst damnation. What Sue had said in warmth was
really the cold truth. When to defend his affection tooth and nail, to
persist with headlong force in impassioned attentions to her, was all
he thought of, he was condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the
accepted school of morals. He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he
had been by social position, to fill the part of a propounder of
accredited dogma.
Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—had
been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards
apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. “Is it,” he said, “that
the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under
which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins
and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?”
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble, to
his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal gain.
Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and himself
in love erratically, the loved one’s revolt against her state being
possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable according
to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the
obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a
law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole, to
which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that he
possessed, and had stored here. He knew that, in this country of true
believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price than
waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way,
even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus
destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with, he cut
the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a three-pronged
fork shook them over the flames. They kindled, and lighted up the back
of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till they were more or less
consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to
him over the garden hedge.
“Burning up your awld aunt’s rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a lot gets heaped