Jude the Obscure
“Well: that’s one thing in my life as it should be, at any rate.”
“But the other half of him is—_she_! And that’s what I can’t bear! But
I ought to—I’ll try to get used to it; yes, I ought!”
“Jealous little Sue! I withdraw all remarks about your sexlessness.
Never mind! Time may right things… And Sue, darling; I have an idea!
We’ll educate and train him with a view to the university. What I
couldn’t accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out through
him? They are making it easier for poor students now, you know.”
“Oh you dreamer!” said she, and holding his hand returned to the child
with him. The boy looked at her as she had looked at him. “Is it you
who’s my _real_ mother at last?” he inquired.
“Why? Do I look like your father’s wife?”
“Well, yes; ’cept he seems fond of you, and you of him. Can I call you
Mother?”
Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue
thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp
which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to
vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
“You may call me Mother, if you wish to, my poor dear!” she said,
bending her cheek against his to hide her tears.
“What’s this round your neck?” asked Jude with affected calmness.
“The key of my box that’s at the station.”
They bustled about and got him some supper, and made him up a temporary
bed, where he soon fell asleep. Both went and looked at him as he lay.
“He called you Mother two or three times before he dropped off,”
murmured Jude. “Wasn’t it odd that he should have wanted to!”
“Well—it was significant,” said Sue. “There’s more for us to think
about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky…
I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that ceremony over?
It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel myself getting
intertwined with my kind. Oh Jude, you’ll love me dearly, won’t you,
afterwards? I do want to be kind to this child, and to be a mother to
him; and our adding the legal form to our marriage might make it easier
for me.”
IV
Their next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,
though it was begun on the morning following the singular child’s
arrival at their home.
Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and
weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in the
substantial world.
“His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene,” said Sue. “What is
your name, dear? Did you tell us?”
“Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nickname;
because I look so aged, they say.”
“And you talk so, too,” said Sue tenderly. “It is strange, Jude, that
these preternaturally old boys almost always come from new countries.
But what were you christened?”
“I never was.”
“Why was that?”
“Because, if I died in damnation, ’twould save the expense of a
Christian funeral.”
“Oh—your name is not Jude, then?” said his father with some
disappointment.
The boy shook his head. “Never heerd on it.”
“Of course not,” said Sue quickly; “since she was hating you all the
time!”
“We’ll have him christened,” said Jude; and privately to Sue: “The day
we are married.” Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.
Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that a
marriage at a superintendent registrar’s office was more private than
an ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time. Both
Sue and Jude together went to the office of the district to give
notice: they had become such companions that they could hardly do
anything of importance except in each other’s company.
Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his shoulder
and watching his hand as it traced the words. As she read the
four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which her own
and Jude’s names were inserted, and by which that very volatile
essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be made permanent,
her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. “Names and Surnames of
the Parties”—(they were to be parties now, not lovers, she thought).
“Condition”—(a horrid idea)—“Rank or Occupation”—“Age”—“Dwelling
at”—“Length of Residence”—“Church or Building in which the Marriage is
to be solemnized”—“District and County in which the Parties
respectively dwell.”
“It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it!” she said on their way home. “It
seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the
contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church. But we’ll
try to get through with it, dearest, now.”
“We will. ‘For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath not
taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the
battle, and another man take her.’ So said the Jewish law-giver.”
“How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to have been a
parson. I can only quote profane writers!”
During the interval before the issuing of the certificate, Sue, in her
housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the office, and furtively
glancing in saw affixed to the wall the notice of the purposed clinch
to their union. She could not bear its aspect. Coming after her
previous experience of matrimony, all the romance of their attachment
seemed to be starved away by placing her present case in the same
category. She was usually leading little Father Time by the hand, and
fancied that people thought him hers, and regarded the intended
ceremony as the patching up of an old error.
Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in some slight
degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining on earth
who was associated with his early life at Marygreen—the aged widow Mrs.
Edlin, who had been his great-aunt’s friend and nurse in her last
illness. He hardly expected that she would come; but she did, bringing
singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brass snuffers, an
ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enormous bag of goose
feathers towards a bed. She was allotted the spare room in Jude’s
house, whither she retired early, and where they could hear her through
the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord’s Prayer in a loud voice,
as the Rubric directed.
As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and Jude were
still sitting up—it being in fact only ten o’clock—she dressed herself
again and came down, and they all sat by the fire till a late
hour—Father Time included; though, as he never spoke, they were hardly
conscious of him.
“Well, I bain’t set against marrying as your great-aunt was,” said the
widow. “And I hope ’twill be a jocund wedding for ye in all respects
this time. Nobody can hope it more, knowing what I do of your families,
which is more, I suppose, than anybody else now living. For they have
been unlucky that way, God knows.”
Sue breathed uneasily.
“They was always good-hearted people, too—wouldn’t kill a fly if they
knowed it,” continued the wedding guest. “But things happened to thwart
’em, and if everything wasn’t vitty they were upset. No doubt that’s
how he that the tale is told of came to do what ’a did—if he _were_ one
of your family.”
“What was that?” said Jude.
“Well—that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted just on the brow of the
hill by the Brown House—not far from the milestone between Marygreen
and Alfredston, where the other road branches off. But Lord, ’twas in
my grandfather’s time; and it medn’ have been one of your folk at all.”
“I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well,” murmured
Jude. “But I never heard of this. What—did this man—my ancestor and
Sue’s—kill his wife?”
“’Twer not that exactly. She ran away from him, with their child, to
her friends; and while she was there the child died. He wanted the
body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn’t give it up. Her
husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke into the house to
steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and being obstinate,
wouldn’t tell what he broke in for. They brought it in burglary, and
that’s why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill. His wife
went mad after he was dead. But it medn’t be true that he belonged to
ye more than to me.”
A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out of
the earth: “If I was you, Mother, I wouldn’t marry Father!” It came
from little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him.
“Oh, it is only a tale,” said Sue cheeringly.
After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve of the
solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest good-night, retired.
The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified with the hours,
took Jude privately into the sitting-room before starting. “Jude, I
want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally,” she said, tremulously
nestling up to him, with damp lashes. “It won’t be ever like this any
more, will it? I wish we hadn’t begun the business. But I suppose we
must go on. How horrid that story was last night! It spoilt my thoughts
of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as
it did the house of Atreus.”
“Or the house of Jeroboam,” said the quondam theologian.
“Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying! I am going
to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you
to me in the same as you used to your other wife; regardless of the
deterrent lesson we were taught by those experiments!”
“If you are uneasy I am made unhappy,” said he. “I had hoped you would
feel quite joyful. But if you don’t, you don’t. It is no use
pretending. It is a dismal business to you, and that makes it so to
me!”
“It is unpleasantly like that other morning—that’s all,” she murmured.
“Let us go on now.”
They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no witness
accompanying them except the Widow Edlin. The day was chilly and dull,
and a clammy fog blew through the town from “Royal-tower’d Thame.” On
the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marks of people who
had entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas. Within the office
several persons were gathered, and our couple perceived that a marriage
between a soldier and a young woman was just in progress. Sue, Jude,
and the widow stood in the background while this was going on, Sue
reading the notices of marriage on the wall. The room was a dreary
place to two of their temperament, though to its usual frequenters it
doubtless seemed ordinary enough. Law-books in musty calf covered one
wall, and elsewhere were post-office directories, and other books of
reference. Papers in packets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed
around, and some iron safes filled a recess, while the bare wood floor
was, like the door-step, stained by previous visitors.
The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and timid; she was
soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye. Their
little business was soon done, and the twain and their friends
straggled out, one of the witnesses saying casually to Jude and Sue in
passing, as if he had known them before: “See the couple just come in?
Ha, ha! That fellow is just out of gaol this morning. She met him at
the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She’s paying for
everything.”
Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely cropped, with
a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquor and the
satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire. They jocosely
saluted the outgoing couple, and went forward in front of Jude and Sue,
whose diffidence was increasing. The latter drew back and turned to her
lover, her mouth shaping itself like that of a child about to give way
to grief:
“Jude—I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The place gives me