Jude the Obscure
“As I choose.”
Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: “She, or he, ‘who lets the world, or his own portion of
it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty
than the apelike one of imitation.’ J. S. Mill’s words, those are. I
have been reading it up. Why can’t you act upon them? I wish to,
always.”
“What do I care about J. S. Mill!” moaned he. “I only want to lead a
quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never once
occurred to me before our marriage—that you were in love, and are in
love, with Jude Fawley!”
“You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun. But do you
suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and
live with him?”
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of
replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being such
a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_ as she, in her loss of courage
at the last moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to be so
puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her other
little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering the
class-room, where he could see the back of her head through the glass
partition whenever he turned his eyes that way. As he went on giving
and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched from
concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore a scrap from
a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:
Your request prevents my attending to work at all. I don’t know what I
am doing! Was it seriously made?
He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little boy to
take to Sue. The child toddled off into the class-room. Phillotson saw
his wife turn and take the note, and the bend of her pretty head as she
read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent undue expression under
fire of so many young eyes. He could not see her hands, but she changed
her position, and soon the child returned, bringing nothing in reply.
In a few minutes, however, one of Sue’s class appeared, with a little
note similar to his own. These words only were pencilled therein:
I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously made.
Phillotson looked more disturbed than before, and the meeting-place of
his brows twitched again. In ten minutes he called up the child he had
just sent to her, and dispatched another missive:
God knows I don’t want to thwart you in any reasonable way. My whole
thought is to make you comfortable and happy. But I cannot agree to
such a preposterous notion as your going to live with your lover. You
would lose everybody’s respect and regard; and so should I!
After an interval a similar part was enacted in the class-room, and an
answer came:
I know you mean my good. But I don’t want to be respectable! To produce
“Human development in its richest diversity” (to quote your Humboldt)
is to my mind far above respectability. No doubt my tastes are low—in
your view—hopelessly low! If you won’t let me go to him, will you grant
me this one request—allow me to live in your house in a separate way?
To this he returned no answer.
She wrote again:
I know what you think. But cannot you have pity on me? I beg you to; I
implore you to be merciful! I would not ask if I were not almost
compelled by what I can’t bear! No poor woman has ever wished more than
I that Eve had not fallen, so that (as the primitive Christians
believed) some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled Paradise.
But I won’t trifle! Be kind to me—even though I have not been kind to
you! I will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.
Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:
I do not wish to pain you. How well you _know_ I don’t! Give me a
little time. I am disposed to agree to your last request.
One line from her:
Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve your kindness.
All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.
But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart in
the house. At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed more
composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of their
position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her nature seemed
strained like harp-strings. She talked vaguely and indiscriminately to
prevent his talking pertinently.
IV
Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to get
together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities. For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it. He forgot time and place, and when he
remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o’clock.
His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other side
of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his wife had
occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place, which since
his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively. He entered, and
unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement. Before the
schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up
half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the
side away from him, which was towards the window. This was somewhat
hidden by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her
flinging up the sash. Before he had thought that she meant to do more
than get air she had mounted upon the sill and leapt out. She
disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.
Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply against
the newel in his haste. Opening the heavy door he ascended the two or
three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the gravel before
him lay a white heap. Phillotson seized it in his arms, and bringing
Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he gazed at her by the
flapping light of the candle which he had set down in the draught on
the bottom stair.
She had certainly not broken her neck. She looked at him with eyes that
seemed not to take him in; and though not particularly large in general
they appeared so now. She pressed her side and rubbed her arm, as if
conscious of pain; then stood up, averting her face, in evident
distress at his gaze.
“Thank God—you are not killed! Though it’s not for want of trying—not
much hurt I hope?”
Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the
lowness of the old rooms and to the high level of the ground without.
Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow in the side she had apparently
incurred little harm.
“I was asleep, I think!” she began, her pale face still turned away
from him. “And something frightened me—a terrible dream—I thought I saw
you—” The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her, and she was
silent.
Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched
Phillotson flung it round her. “Shall I help you upstairs?” he asked
drearily; for the significance of all this sickened him of himself and
of everything.
“No thank you, Richard. I am very little hurt. I can walk.”
“You ought to lock your door,” he mechanically said, as if lecturing in
school. “Then no one could intrude even by accident.”
“I have tried—it won’t lock. All the doors are out of order.”
The aspect of things was not improved by her admission. She ascended
the staircase slowly, the waving light of the candle shining on her.
Phillotson did not approach her, or attempt to ascend himself till he
heard her enter her room. Then he fastened up the front door, and
returning, sat down on the lower stairs, holding the newel with one
hand, and bowing his face into the other. Thus he remained for a long
long time—a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him; till,
raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that the
business of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or no,
he took the candle and went upstairs to his lonely room on the other
side of the landing.
No further incident touching the matter between them occurred till the
following evening, when, immediately school was over, Phillotson walked
out of Shaston, saying he required no tea, and not informing Sue where
he was going. He descended from the town level by a steep road in a
north-westerly direction, and continued to move downwards till the soil
changed from its white dryness to a tough brown clay. He was now on the
low alluvial beds
Where Duncliffe is the traveller’s mark,
And cloty Stour’s a-rolling dark.
More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity of evening.
Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible
On the grey-topp’d height
Of Paladore, as pale day wore
Away…[1]
[1] William Barnes.
The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine as if
watching him, one of which windows was his own. Above it he could just
discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity Church. The air down here,
tempered by the thick damp bed of tenacious clay, was not as it had
been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when he had walked a mile or
two he was obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.
Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without hesitation
through the shade, as a man goes on, night or day, in a district over
which he has played as a boy. He had walked altogether about four and a
half miles
Where Stour receives her strength,
From six cleere fountains fed,[2]
[2] Drayton.
when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton—a
little town of three or four thousand inhabitants—where he went on to
the boys’ school, and knocked at the door of the master’s residence.
A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson’s inquiry if Mr.
Gillingham was at home, replied that he was, going at once off to his
own house, and leaving Phillotson to find his way in as he could. He
discovered his friend putting away some books from which he had been
giving evening lessons. The light of the paraffin lamp fell on
Phillotson’s face—pale and wretched by contrast with his friend’s, who
had a cool, practical look. They had been schoolmates in boyhood, and
fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many years before
this time.
“Glad to see you, Dick! But you don’t look well! Nothing the matter?”
Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed the
cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.
“Why you haven’t been here—let me see—since you were married? I called,
you know, but you were out; and upon my word it is such a climb after
dark that I have been waiting till the days are longer before lumpering
up again. I am glad you didn’t wait, however.”
Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally used
a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.
“I’ve come, George, to explain to you my reasons for taking a step that
I am about to take, so that you, at least, will understand my motives
if other people question them anywhen—as they may, indeed certainly
will… But anything is better than the present condition of things. God
forbid that you should ever have such an experience as mine!”
“Sit down. You don’t mean—anything wrong between you and Mrs.
Phillotson?”
“I do… My wretched state is that I’ve a wife I love who not only does
not love me, but—but— Well, I won’t say. I know her feeling! I should
prefer hatred from her!”
“Ssh!”
“And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame as I. She
was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I took advantage of her
inexperience, and toled her out for walks, and got her to agree to a
long engagement before she well knew her own mind. Afterwards she saw