Jude the Obscure
should go out and search about for another place, and bespeak it for
the morrow, so as not to be so hard-driven then as they had been that
day.
Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just been sent on
from the station by Jude, they sallied out into the damp though not
unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not to disturb her husband with the
news of her notice to quit while he was perhaps worried in obtaining a
lodging for himself. In the company of the boy she wandered into this
street and into that; but though she tried a dozen different houses she
fared far worse alone than she had fared in Jude’s company, and could
get nobody to promise her a room for the following day. Every
householder looked askance at such a woman and child inquiring for
accommodation in the gloom.
“I ought not to be born, ought I?” said the boy with misgiving.
Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where she was not
welcome, but where at least she had temporary shelter. In her absence
Jude had left his address; but knowing how weak he still was she
adhered to her determination not to disturb him till the next day.
II
Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the scene
outside the uncurtained window. At some distance opposite, the outer
walls of Sarcophagus College—silent, black, and windowless—threw their
four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she
occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by day. The
outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond the other, and
the tower of a third farther off still. She thought of the strange
operation of a simple-minded man’s ruling passion, that it should have
led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place them
here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his
dream. Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that
those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house
for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy—a brooding
undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was
broken by his saying: “Mother, _what_ shall we do to-morrow!”
“I don’t know!” said Sue despondently. “I am afraid this will trouble
your father.”
“I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it
wouldn’t matter so much! Poor Father!”
“It wouldn’t!”
“Can I do anything?”
“No! All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!”
“Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?”
“Partly.”
“It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?”
“It would almost, dear.”
“’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t get a good
lodging?”
“Well—people do object to children sometimes.”
“Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?”
“Oh—because it is a law of nature.”
“But we don’t ask to be born?”
“No indeed.”
“And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,
and you needn’t have had me unless you liked. I oughtn’t to have come
to ’ee—that’s the real truth! I troubled ’em in Australia, and I
trouble folk here. I wish I hadn’t been born!”
“You couldn’t help it, my dear.”
“I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should
be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to
grow big and walk about!”
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too
reflective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she
would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties
like an aged friend.
“There is going to be another in our family soon,” she hesitatingly
remarked.
“How?”
“There is going to be another baby.”
“What!” The boy jumped up wildly. “Oh God, Mother, you’ve never a-sent
for another; and such trouble with what you’ve got!”
“Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!” murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.
The boy burst out weeping. “Oh you don’t care, you don’t care!” he
cried in bitter reproach. “How _ever_ could you, Mother, be so wicked
and cruel as this, when you needn’t have done it till we was better
off, and Father well! To bring us all into _more_ trouble! No room for
us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow; and
yet you be going to have another of us soon! … ’Tis done o’
purpose!—’tis—’tis!” He walked up and down sobbing.
“Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!” she pleaded, her bosom heaving
now as much as the boy’s. “I can’t explain—I will when you are older.
It does seem—as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these
difficulties! I can’t explain, dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I
can’t help it!”
“Yes it is—it must be! For nobody would interfere with us, like that,
unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever, ever! I’ll never believe
you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!”
He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which a
bed had been spread on the floor. There she heard him say: “If we
children was gone there’d be no trouble at all!”
“Don’t think that, dear,” she cried, rather peremptorily. “But go to
sleep!”
The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided to
get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had
informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before
he went out. She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children, who,
as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.
She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a
counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him
her homelessness. He had been so anxious about her all night, he said.
Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings did not
seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night before, nor
did even her failure to find another place affect her so deeply as at
first. Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth while to insist
upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate steps for removal.
“You must all come to this inn for a day or two,” he said. “It is a
rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we shall
have more time to look round. There are plenty of lodgings in the
suburbs—in my old quarter of Beersheba. Have breakfast with me now you
are here, my bird. You are sure you are well? There will be plenty of
time to get back and prepare the children’s meal before they wake. In
fact, I’ll go with you.”
She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they
started together, resolving to clear out from Sue’s too respectable
lodging immediately. On reaching the place and going upstairs she found
that all was quiet in the children’s room, and called to the landlady
in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and something for
their breakfast. This was perfunctorily done, and producing a couple of
eggs which she had brought with her she put them into the boiling
kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the youngsters, while she
went to call them, it being now about half-past eight o’clock.
Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand, timing
the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner chamber where
the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round.
He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet—which had seemed to
go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back—was open, and that Sue
had sunk to the floor just within it. Hastening forward to pick her up
he turned his eyes to the little bed spread on the boards; no children
were there. He looked in bewilderment round the room. At the back of
the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the
forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of
box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off
the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned
chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the
room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.
Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene, he
let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three
children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary
handling seemed to say that they were dead. He caught up Sue, who was
in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after which
he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.
When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless women,
bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them, and the
triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew his
self-command. The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had inferred,
his presence was superfluous. The children were past saving, for though
their bodies were still barely cold it was conjectured that they had
been hanging more than an hour. The probability held by the parents
later on, when they were able to reason on the case, was that the elder
boy, on waking, looked into the outer room for Sue, and, finding her
absent, was thrown into a fit of aggravated despondency that the events
and information of the evening before had induced in his morbid
temperament. Moreover a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on
which was written, in the boy’s hand, with the bit of lead pencil that
he carried:
_Done because we are too menny._
At sight of this Sue’s nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy,
throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abatement. They
carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower floor; and
there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her eyes
staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying to soothe
her.
They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and
she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing so
by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might do
harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of herself
lest she should endanger a coming life. Her inquiries were incessant,
and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope. As soon as
she could speak she informed him what she had said to the boy, and how
she thought herself the cause of this.
“No,” said Jude. “It was in his nature to do it. The Doctor says there
are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the
last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all
its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist
them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to
live. He’s an advanced man, the Doctor: but he can give no consolation
to—”
Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke
down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some
degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody
was gone, she was allowed to see the children.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that
little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which
had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes,
fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their
expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had
groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the
misfortunes of these he had died.
When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the