Jude the Obscure
the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love! I wish it
had been at church, if it had to be at all. It is not so vulgar there!”
“Dear little girl,” said Jude. “How troubled and pale you look!”
“It must be performed here now, I suppose?”
“No—perhaps not necessarily.”
He spoke to the clerk, and came back. “No—we need not marry here or
anywhere, unless we like, even now,” he said. “We can be married in a
church, if not with the same certificate with another he’ll give us, I
think. Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear, and I too, and
talk it over.”
They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed a
misdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the widow,
who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them; that they
would call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary. When in
the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley where they
walked up and down as they had done long ago in the market-house at
Melchester.
“Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of it, it strikes
me. Still, _anything_ that pleases you will please me.”
“But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there,
didn’t you?”
“Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn’t care
much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did you—it
was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this morning as to
whether we ought.”
They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began
anew: “It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much
better than to act rashly a second time… How terrible that scene was to
me! The expression in that flabby woman’s face, leading her on to give
herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a
lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a nominal
shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading
herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her—a man
whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of salvation… This is our
parish church, isn’t it? This is where it would have to be, if we did
it in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going on.”
Jude went up and looked in at the door. “Why—it is a wedding here too,”
he said. “Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.”
Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there was
always a crowd of marriages. “Let us listen,” she said, “and find how
it feels to us when performed in a church.”
They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings
at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to the
well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary
prettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in the
bride’s hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical
murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all
under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude listened,
and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same form
of self-committal.
“It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it
over again with my present knowledge,” Sue whispered. “You see, they
are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course. But
having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at least as
I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings perhaps
sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and undertake the
same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and seeing this has
frightened me from a church wedding as much as the other did from a
registry one… We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may
feel confident in I feel doubts of—my being proof against the sordid
conditions of a business contract again!”
Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were both
too thin-skinned—that they ought never to have been born—much less have
come together for the most preposterous of all joint ventures for
_them_—matrimony.
His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed felt that
they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that life-undertaking
again? “It is awful if you think we have found ourselves not strong
enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing to perjure ourselves,”
she said.
“I fancy I do think it—since you ask me,” said Jude. “Remember I’ll do
it if you wish, own darling.” While she hesitated he went on to confess
that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked
by the dread of incompetency just as she did—from their peculiarities,
perhaps, because they were unlike other people. “We are horribly
sensitive; that’s really what’s the matter with us, Sue!” he declared.
“I fancy more are like us than we think!”
“Well, I don’t know. The intention of the contract is good, and right
for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends because
we are the queer sort of people we are—folk in whom domestic ties of a
forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness.”
Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:
that all were so. “Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a
little beforehand, that’s all. In fifty, a hundred, years the
descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will see
weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as
Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,
and will be afraid to reproduce them.”
“What a terrible line of poetry! … though I have felt it myself about
my fellow-creatures, at morbid times.”
Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:
“Well—the general question is not our business, and why should we
plague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are, we come
to the same conclusion: that for us particular two, an irrevocable oath
is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream! Yes?
How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!”
“They accord very much with my own.”
He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of
everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession
entering the vestry; and then they came outside the building. By the
door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for a
while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open
daylight. Sue sighed.
“The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland which
decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!”
“Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That’s what
some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the
conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a
woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is
only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him.”
“Yes—some are like that, instead of uniting with the man against the
common enemy, coercion.” The bride and bridegroom had by this time
driven off, and the two moved away with the rest of the idlers.
“No—don’t let’s do it,” she continued. “At least, just now.”
They reached home, and passing the window arm in arm saw the widow
looking out at them. “Well,” cried their guest when they entered, “I
said to myself when I zeed ye coming so loving up to the door, ‘They
made up their minds at last, then!’”
They briefly hinted that they had not.
“What—and ha’n’t ye really done it? Chok’ it all, that I should have
lived to see a good old saying like ‘marry in haste and repent at
leisure’ spoiled like this by you two! ’Tis time I got back again to
Marygreen—sakes if tidden—if this is what the new notions be leading us
to! Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much
else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor man
were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!”
“Don’t tell the child when he comes in,” whispered Sue nervously.
“He’ll think it has all gone on right, and it will be better that he
should not be surprised and puzzled. Of course it is only put off for
reconsideration. If we are happy as we are, what does it matter to
anybody?”
V
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to
express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. That
the twain were happy—between their times of sadness—was indubitable.
And when the unexpected apparition of Jude’s child in the house had
shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it had looked, but one
that brought into their lives a new and tender interest of an ennobling
and unselfish kind, it rather helped than injured their happiness.
To be sure, with such pleasing anxious beings as they were, the boy’s
coming also brought with it much thought for the future, particularly
as he seemed at present to be singularly deficient in all the usual
hopes of childhood. But the pair tried to dismiss, for a while at
least, a too strenuously forward view.
There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand souls; the
town may be called Stoke-Barehills. It stands with its gaunt,
unattractive, ancient church, and its new red brick suburb, amid the
open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary triangle
which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham and
Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot. The
great western highway from London passes through it, near a point where
the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty miles
further westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there used to
arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days, endless questions
of choice between the respective ways. But the question is now as dead
as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner, and the mail
coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single inhabitant of
Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads which part in his
town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and down the great
western highway daily.
The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,
standing among some picturesque mediæval ruins beside the railway; the
modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs having a look of
intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient
walls.
On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now been
reached by this narrative—the month being early June—the features of
the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive by the
trains; some down-trains, in especial, nearly emptying themselves here.
It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose vast
encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town like the tents
of an investing army. Rows of marquees, huts, booths, pavilions,
arcades, porticoes—every kind of structure short of a permanent
one—cover the green field for the space of a square half-mile, and the
crowds of arrivals walk through the town in a mass, and make straight
for the exhibition ground. The way thereto is lined with shows, stalls,
and hawkers on foot, who make a market-place of the whole roadway to
the show proper, and lead some of the improvident to lighten their
pockets appreciably before they reach the gates of the exhibition they
came expressly to see.
It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast arriving
excursion trains two from different directions enter the two contiguous
railway stations at almost the same minute. One, like several which
have preceded it, comes from London: the other by a cross-line from
Aldbrickham; and from the London train alights a couple; a short,
rather bloated man, with a globular stomach and small legs, resembling