Jude the Obscure
produce that small bottle full.”
“How do you get pigeons enough?”
“To tell a secret, I get a piece of rock-salt, of which pigeons are
inordinately fond, and place it in a dovecot on my roof. In a few hours
the birds come to it from all points of the compass—east, west, north,
and south—and thus I secure as many as I require. You use the liquid by
contriving that the desired man shall take about ten drops of it in his
drink. But remember, all this is told you because I gather from your
questions that you mean to be a purchaser. You must keep faith with
me?”
“Very well—I don’t mind a bottle—to give some friend or other to try it
on her young man.” She produced five shillings, the price asked, and
slipped the phial in her capacious bosom. Saying presently that she was
due at an appointment with her husband, she sauntered away towards the
refreshment bar, Jude, his companion, and the child having gone on to
the horticultural tent, where Arabella caught a glimpse of them
standing before a group of roses in bloom.
She waited a few minutes observing them, and then proceeded to join her
spouse with no very amiable sentiments. She found him seated on a stool
by the bar, talking to one of the gaily dressed maids who had served
him with spirits.
“I should think you had enough of this business at home!” Arabella
remarked gloomily. “Surely you didn’t come fifty miles from your own
bar to stick in another? Come, take me round the show, as other men do
their wives! Dammy, one would think you were a young bachelor, with
nobody to look after but yourself!”
“But we agreed to meet here; and what could I do but wait?”
“Well, now we have met, come along,” she returned, ready to quarrel
with the sun for shining on her. And they left the tent together, this
pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the antipathetic, recriminatory
mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom.
In the meantime the more exceptional couple and the boy still lingered
in the pavilion of flowers—an enchanted palace to their appreciative
taste—Sue’s usually pale cheeks reflecting the pink of the tinted roses
at which she gazed; for the gay sights, the air, the music, and the
excitement of a day’s outing with Jude had quickened her blood and made
her eyes sparkle with vivacity. She adored roses, and what Arabella had
witnessed was Sue detaining Jude almost against his will while she
learnt the names of this variety and that, and put her face within an
inch of their blooms to smell them.
“I should like to push my face quite into them—the dears!” she had
said. “But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them—isn’t it,
Jude?”
“Yes, you baby,” said he: and then playfully gave her a little push, so
that her nose went among the petals.
“The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was my husband’s
fault!”
Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told so much to
Arabella.
“Happy?” he murmured.
She nodded.
“Why? Because you have come to the great Wessex Agricultural Show—or
because _we_ have come?”
“You are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of absurdities.
Because I am improving my mind, of course, by seeing all these
steam-ploughs, and threshing-machines, and chaff-cutters, and cows, and
pigs, and sheep.”
Jude was quite content with a baffle from his ever evasive companion.
But when he had forgotten that he had put the question, and because he
no longer wished for an answer, she went on: “I feel that we have
returned to Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness
and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-five centuries have taught
the race since their time, as one of your Christminster luminaries
says… There is one immediate shadow, however—only one.” And she looked
at the aged child, whom, though they had taken him to everything likely
to attract a young intelligence, they had utterly failed to interest.
He knew what they were saying and thinking. “I am very, very sorry,
Father and Mother,” he said. “But please don’t mind!—I can’t help it. I
should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking
they’d be all withered in a few days!”
VI
The unnoticed lives that the pair had hitherto led began, from the day
of the suspended wedding onwards, to be observed and discussed by other
persons than Arabella. The society of Spring Street and the
neighbourhood generally did not understand, and probably could not have
been made to understand, Sue and Jude’s private minds, emotions,
positions, and fears. The curious facts of a child coming to them
unexpectedly, who called Jude “Father,” and Sue “Mother,” and a hitch
in a marriage ceremony intended for quietness to be performed at a
registrar’s office, together with rumours of the undefended cases in
the law-courts, bore only one translation to plain minds.
Little Time—for though he was formally turned into “Jude,” the apt
nickname stuck to him—would come home from school in the evening, and
repeat inquiries and remarks that had been made to him by the other
boys; and cause Sue, and Jude when he heard them, a great deal of pain
and sadness.
The result was that shortly after the attempt at the registrar’s the
pair went off—to London it was believed—for several days, hiring
somebody to look to the boy. When they came back they let it be
understood indirectly, and with total indifference and weariness of
mien, that they were legally married at last. Sue, who had previously
been called Mrs. Bridehead now openly adopted the name of Mrs. Fawley.
Her dull, cowed, and listless manner for days seemed to substantiate
all this.
But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so secretly to
do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and they
found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as they
had expected to do thereby. A living mystery was not much less
interesting than a dead scandal.
The baker’s lad and the grocer’s boy, who at first had used to lift
their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands, in
these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage, and
the neighbouring artizans’ wives looked straight along the pavement
when they encountered her.
Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive atmosphere began to
encircle their souls, particularly after their excursion to the show,
as if that visit had brought some evil influence to bear on them. And
their temperaments were precisely of a kind to suffer from this
atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous and open
statements. Their apparent attempt at reparation had come too late to
be effective.
The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months
later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return to
journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now, in that
he had not as yet cleared off the debt he had unavoidably incurred in
the payment of the law-costs of the previous year.
One evening he sat down to share the common meal with Sue and the child
as usual. “I am thinking,” he said to her, “that I’ll hold on here no
longer. The life suits us, certainly; but if we could get away to a
place where we are unknown, we should be lighter hearted, and have a
better chance. And so I am afraid we must break it up here, however
awkward for you, poor dear!”
Sue was always much affected at a picture of herself as an object of
pity, and she saddened.
“Well—I am not sorry,” said she presently. “I am much depressed by the
way they look at me here. And you have been keeping on this house and
furniture entirely for me and the boy! You don’t want it yourself, and
the expense is unnecessary. But whatever we do, wherever we go, you
won’t take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not let him go now! The
cloud upon his young mind makes him so pathetic to me; I do hope to
lift it some day! And he loves me so. You won’t take him away from me?”
“Certainly I won’t, dear little girl! We’ll get nice lodgings, wherever
we go. I shall be moving about probably—getting a job here and a job
there.”
“I shall do something too, of course, till—till— Well, now I can’t be
useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my hand to something
else.”
“Don’t hurry about getting employment,” he said regretfully. “I don’t
want you to do that. I wish you wouldn’t, Sue. The boy and yourself are
enough for you to attend to.”
There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it. Sue could hear the
conversation:
“Is Mr. Fawley at home? … Biles and Willis, the building contractors,
sent me to know if you’ll undertake the relettering of the ten
commandments in a little church they’ve been restoring lately in the
country near here.”
Jude reflected, and said he could undertake it.
“It is not a very artistic job,” continued the messenger. “The
clergyman is a very old-fashioned chap, and he has refused to let
anything more be done to the church than cleaning and repairing.”
“Excellent old man!” said Sue to herself, who was sentimentally opposed
to the horrors of over-restoration.
“The Ten Commandments are fixed to the east end,” the messenger went
on, “and they want doing up with the rest of the wall there, since he
won’t have them carted off as old materials belonging to the contractor
in the usual way of the trade.”
A bargain as to terms was struck, and Jude came indoors. “There, you
see,” he said cheerfully. “One more job yet, at any rate, and you can
help in it—at least you can try. We shall have all the church to
ourselves, as the rest of the work is finished.”
Next day Jude went out to the church, which was only two miles off. He
found that what the contractor’s clerk had said was true. The tables of
the Jewish law towered sternly over the utensils of Christian grace, as
the chief ornament of the chancel end, in the fine dry style of the
last century. And as their framework was constructed of ornamental
plaster they could not be taken down for repair. A portion, crumbled by
damp, required renewal; and when this had been done, and the whole
cleansed, he began to renew the lettering. On the second morning Sue
came to see what assistance she could render, and also because they
liked to be together.
The silence and emptiness of the building gave her confidence, and,
standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which she was
nevertheless timid at mounting, she began painting in the letters of
the first Table while he set about mending a portion of the second. She
was quite pleased at her powers; she had acquired them in the days she
painted illumined texts for the church-fitting shop at Christminster.
Nobody seemed likely to disturb them; and the pleasant twitter of
birds, and rustle of October leafage, came in through an open window,
and mingled with their talk.
They were not, however, to be left thus snug and peaceful for long.
About half-past twelve there came footsteps on the gravel without. The
old vicar and his churchwarden entered, and, coming up to see what was
being done, seemed surprised to discover that a young woman was
assisting. They passed on into an aisle, at which time the door again
opened, and another figure entered—a small one, that of little Time,
who was crying. Sue had told him where he might find her between
school-hours, if he wished. She came down from her perch, and said,
“What’s the matter, my dear?”
“I couldn’t stay to eat my dinner in school, because they said—” He
described how some boys had taunted him about his nominal mother, and
Sue, grieved, expressed her indignation to Jude aloft. The child went
into the churchyard, and Sue returned to her work. Meanwhile the door
had opened again, and there shuffled in with a businesslike air the