Jude the Obscure
“Well, it is satisfactory,” said Sue complacently. “Though, after this,
it seems rather low to do likewise, and I am glad. However, she is
provided for now in a way, I suppose, whatever her faults, poor thing.
It is nicer that we are able to think that, than to be uneasy about
her. I ought, too, to write to Richard and ask him how he is getting
on, perhaps?”
But Jude’s attention was still absorbed. Having merely glanced at the
announcement he said in a disturbed voice: “Listen to this letter. What
shall I say or do?”
THE THREE HORNS, LAMBETH.
DEAR JUDE (I won’t be so distant as to call you Mr. Fawley),—I send
to-day a newspaper, from which useful document you will learn that I
was married over again to Cartlett last Tuesday. So that business is
settled right and tight at last. But what I write about more particular
is that private affair I wanted to speak to you on when I came down to
Aldbrickham. I couldn’t very well tell it to your lady friend, and
should much have liked to let you know it by word of mouth, as I could
have explained better than by letter. The fact is, Jude, that, though I
have never informed you before, there was a boy born of our marriage,
eight months after I left you, when I was at Sydney, living with my
father and mother. All that is easily provable. As I had separated from
you before I thought such a thing was going to happen, and I was over
there, and our quarrel had been sharp, I did not think it convenient to
write about the birth. I was then looking out for a good situation, so
my parents took the child, and he has been with them ever since. That
was why I did not mention it when I met you in Christminster, nor at
the law proceedings. He is now of an intelligent age, of course, and my
mother and father have lately written to say that, as they have rather
a hard struggle over there, and I am settled comfortably here, they
don’t see why they should be encumbered with the child any longer, his
parents being alive. I would have him with me here in a moment, but he
is not old enough to be of any use in the bar nor will be for years and
years, and naturally Cartlett might think him in the way. They have,
however, packed him off to me in charge of some friends who happened to
be coming home, and I must ask you to take him when he arrives, for I
don’t know what to do with him. He is lawfully yours, that I solemnly
swear. If anybody says he isn’t, call them brimstone liars, for my
sake. Whatever I may have done before or afterwards, I was honest to
you from the time we were married till I went away, and I remain,
yours, &c.,
ARABELLA CARTLETT.
Sue’s look was one of dismay. “What will you do, dear?” she asked
faintly.
Jude did not reply, and Sue watched him anxiously, with heavy breaths.
“It hits me hard!” said he in an under-voice. “It _may_ be true! I
can’t make it out. Certainly, if his birth was exactly when she says,
he’s mine. I cannot think why she didn’t tell me when I met her at
Christminster, and came on here that evening with her! … Ah—I do
remember now that she said something about having a thing on her mind
that she would like me to know, if ever we lived together again.”
“The poor child seems to be wanted by nobody!” Sue replied, and her
eyes filled.
Jude had by this time come to himself. “What a view of life he must
have, mine or not mine!” he said. “I must say that, if I were better
off, I should not stop for a moment to think whose he might be. I would
take him and bring him up. The beggarly question of parentage—what is
it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it,
whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our
time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and
entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for
their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like
class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a
mean exclusiveness at bottom.”
Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion. “Yes—so it is,
dearest! And we’ll have him here! And if he isn’t yours it makes it all
the better. I do hope he isn’t—though perhaps I ought not to feel quite
that! If he isn’t, I should like so much for us to have him as an
adopted child!”
“Well, you must assume about him what is most pleasing to you, my
curious little comrade!” he said. “I feel that, anyhow, I don’t like to
leave the unfortunate little fellow to neglect. Just think of his life
in a Lambeth pothouse, and all its evil influences, with a parent who
doesn’t want him, and has, indeed, hardly seen him, and a stepfather
who doesn’t know him. ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the
night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived!’ That’s
what the boy—_my_ boy, perhaps, will find himself saying before long!”
“Oh no!”
“As I was the petitioner, I am really entitled to his custody, I
suppose.”
“Whether or no, we must have him. I see that. I’ll do the best I can to
be a mother to him, and we can afford to keep him somehow. I’ll work
harder. I wonder when he’ll arrive?”
“In the course of a few weeks, I suppose.”
“I wish—When shall we have courage to marry, Jude?”
“Whenever you have it, I think I shall. It remains with you entirely,
dear. Only say the word, and it’s done.”
“Before the boy comes?”
“Certainly.”
“It would make a more natural home for him, perhaps,” she murmured.
Jude thereupon wrote in purely formal terms to request that the boy
should be sent on to them as soon as he arrived, making no remark
whatever on the surprising nature of Arabella’s information, nor
vouchsafing a single word of opinion on the boy’s paternity, nor on
whether, had he known all this, his conduct towards her would have been
quite the same.
In the down train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham station about ten
o’clock the next evening, a small, pale child’s face could be seen in
the gloom of a third-class carriage. He had large, frightened eyes, and
wore a white woollen cravat, over which a key was suspended round his
neck by a piece of common string: the key attracting attention by its
occasional shine in the lamplight. In the band of his hat his
half-ticket was stuck. His eyes remained mostly fixed on the back of
the seat opposite, and never turned to the window even when a station
was reached and called. On the other seat were two or three passengers,
one of them a working woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was
a tabby kitten. The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the
kitten would put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these
the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key
and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed
mutely to say: “All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked
at, there is no laughable thing under the sun.”
Occasionally, at a stoppage, the guard would look into the compartment
and say to the boy, “All right, my man. Your box is safe in the van.”
The boy would say, “Yes,” without animation, would try to smile, and
fail.
He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his
real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of
night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life,
when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and
appeared not to care about what it saw.
When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did one by
one—even the kitten curling itself up in the basket, weary of its too
circumscribed play—the boy remained just as before. He then seemed to
be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed divinity, sitting passive
and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole rounded lives
rather than their immediate figures.
This was Arabella’s boy. With her usual carelessness, she had postponed
writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing, when she could
absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known for weeks of his
approaching arrival, and had, as she truly said, visited Aldbrickham
mainly to reveal the boy’s existence and his near home-coming to Jude.
This very day on which she had received her former husband’s answer at
some time in the afternoon, the child reached the London Docks, and the
family in whose charge he had come, having put him into a cab for
Lambeth and directed the cabman to his mother’s house, bade him
good-bye, and went their way.
On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him over with an
expression that was as good as saying, “You are very much what I
expected you to be,” had given him a good meal, a little money, and,
late as it was getting, dispatched him to Jude by the next train,
wishing her husband Cartlett, who was out, not to see him.
The train reached Aldbrickham, and the boy was deposited on the lonely
platform beside his box. The collector took his ticket, and, with a
meditative sense of the unfitness of things, asked him where he was
going by himself at that time of night.
“Going to Spring Street,” said the little one impassively.
“Why, that’s a long way from here; a’most out in the country; and the
folks will be gone to bed.”
“I’ve got to go there.”
“You must have a fly for your box.”
“No. I must walk.”
“Oh well: you’d better leave your box here and send for it. There’s a
‘bus goes half-way, but you’ll have to walk the rest.”
“I am not afraid.”
“Why didn’t your friends come to meet ’ee?”
“I suppose they didn’t know I was coming.”
“Who is your friends?”
“Mother didn’t wish me to say.”
“All I can do, then, is to take charge of this. Now walk as fast as you
can.”
Saying nothing further the boy came out into the street, looking round
to see that nobody followed or observed him. When he had walked some
little distance he asked for the street of his destination. He was told
to go straight on quite into the outskirts of the place.
The child fell into a steady mechanical creep which had in it an
impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or of
the cloud. He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring
gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy’s ideas of life
were different from those of the local boys. Children begin with
detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous,
and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun
with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the
particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond,
were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows;
but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark
world.
He found the way to the little lane, and knocked at the door of Jude’s
house. Jude had just retired to bed, and Sue was about to enter her
chamber adjoining when she heard the knock and came down.
“Is this where Father lives?” asked the child.
“Who?”
“Mr. Fawley, that’s his name.”
Sue ran up to Jude’s room and told him, and he hurried down as soon as
he could, though to her impatience he seemed long.
“What—is it he—so soon?” she asked as Jude came.
She scrutinized the child’s features, and suddenly went away into the
little sitting-room adjoining. Jude lifted the boy to a level with
himself, keenly regarded him with gloomy tenderness, and telling him he
would have been met if they had known of his coming so soon, set him
provisionally in a chair whilst he went to look for Sue, whose
supersensitiveness was disturbed, as he knew. He found her in the dark,
bending over an arm-chair. He enclosed her with his arm, and putting
his face by hers, whispered, “What’s the matter?”
“What Arabella says is true—true! I see you in him!”