Jude the Obscure
coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of
the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.
“What is it?” said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.
“The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose.
It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; ‘Truly God is loving unto
Israel.’”
She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should
they have been taken away, and not I!”
There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.
“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”
Jude listened—“No—they are not talking of us,” he said. “They are two
clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good
God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!”
Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable
fit of grief. “There is something external to us which says, ‘You
shan’t!’ First it said, ‘You shan’t learn!’ Then it said, ‘You shan’t
labour!’ Now it says, ‘You shan’t love!’”
He tried to soothe her by saying, “That’s bitter of you, darling.”
“But it’s true!”
Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The baby’s
frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time of
his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain have
got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched them she implored
him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the
house when she also attempted to put them away.
Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms. “Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?” she cried out, after one
of these. “Don’t turn away from me! I can’t _bear_ the loneliness of
being out of your looks!”
“There, dear; here I am,” he said, putting his face close to hers.
“Yes… Oh, my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now
stained with blood!”
“Shadowed by death—that’s all.”
“Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t know I was
doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be
out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I
told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh how
bitterly he upbraided me!”
“Why did you do it, Sue?”
“I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t bear
deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for
with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—Why was I half-wiser
than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him
pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of
self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”
“Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only
in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must have
known sooner or later.”
“And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall
never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! … My eyes are so
swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I
called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much—indulging
ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you
remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature’s
intention, Nature’s law and _raison d’être_ that we should be joyful in
what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilization had taken
upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has
given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature
at her word!”
She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, “It is best,
perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is! Better that they
should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!”
“Yes,” replied Jude. “Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy.”
“But they don’t know! … Oh my babies, my babies, could you be alive
now! You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he wouldn’t have
done it. It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was part of his
incurably sad nature, poor little fellow! But then the others—my _own_
children and yours!”
Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and
shoes; and her figure quivered like a string. “I am a pitiable
creature,” she said, “good neither for earth nor heaven any more! I am
driven out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?” She stared at
Jude, and tightly held his hand.
“Nothing can be done,” he replied. “Things are as they are, and will be
brought to their destined issue.”
She paused. “Yes! Who said that?” she asked heavily.
“It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_. It has been in my mind
continually since this happened.”
“My poor Jude—how you’ve missed everything!—you more than I, for I did
get you! To think you should know that by your unassisted reading, and
yet be in poverty and despair!”
After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.
The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and
next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral. Accounts in the
newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood apparently
counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls. Doubt of the
real relations of the couple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had
declared that she would follow the two little ones to the grave, but at
the last moment she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out
of the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehicle, and
it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue
and her luggage remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear
of later on in the day, and so to have freed his house from the
exasperating notoriety it had acquired during the week through his
wife’s unlucky admission of these strangers. In the afternoon he
privately consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that
if any objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there
they would try to get its number changed.
When Jude had seen the two little boxes—one containing little Jude, and
the other the two smallest—deposited in the earth he hastened back to
Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not disturb her
just then. Feeling anxious, however, he went again about four o’clock.
The woman thought she was still lying down, but returned to him to say
that she was not in her bedroom after all. Her hat and jacket, too,
were missing: she had gone out. Jude hurried off to the public house
where he was sleeping. She had not been there. Then bethinking himself
of possibilities he went along the road to the cemetery, which he
entered, and crossed to where the interments had recently taken place.
The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the tragedy were
all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands was attempting to earth
in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held back by
an expostulating woman who stood in the half-filled hole. It was Sue,
whose coloured clothing, which she had never thought of changing for
the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than
the conventional garb of bereavement could express.
“He’s filling them in, and he shan’t till I’ve seen my little ones
again!” she cried wildly when she saw Jude. “I want to see them once
more. Oh Jude—please Jude—I want to see them! I didn’t know you would
let them be taken away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should
see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you didn’t,
but took them away! Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!”
“She’s been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get to
the coffins,” said the man with the spade. “She ought to be took home,
by the look o’ her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly.
Can’t dig ’em up again now, ma’am. Do ye go home with your husband, and
take it quiet, and thank God that there’ll be another soon to swage yer
grief.”
But Sue kept asking piteously: “Can’t I see them once more—just once!
Can’t I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It would not take long! And
I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey you ever
any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards,
and not want to see them any more! Can’t I? Why can’t I?”
Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he almost
felt he would try to get the man to accede. But it could do no good,
and might make her still worse; and he saw that it was imperative to
get her home at once. So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put
his arm round her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and was
induced to leave the cemetery.
He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so
imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly,
Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing. They were to have
gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was not
practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated house.
Sue was at once got to bed, and the Doctor sent for.
Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the
intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely born,
and that it, like the others, was a corpse.
III
Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had
again obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings now,
in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of
Ceremonies—Saint Silas.
They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of things
than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness. Vague and quaint
imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect scintillated
like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a
dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence,
but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the First Cause worked
automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;
that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to
have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness
among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by
thinking and educated humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces
loom anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense
of Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.
“We must conform!” she said mournfully. “All the ancient wrath of the
Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and we must
submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use fighting against
God!”
“It is only against man and senseless circumstance,” said Jude.
“True!” she murmured. “What have I been thinking of! I am getting as
superstitious as a savage! … But whoever or whatever our foe may be, I
am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no
more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten! … ‘We are made a spectacle unto
the world, and to angels, and to men!’ I am always saying that now.”
“I feel the same!”
“What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may only be
because our history and relations are not absolutely known… Possibly,
if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they would turn you
out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!”
“I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think
that we ought to make it legal now—as soon as you are able to go out.”
“You think we ought?”
“Certainly.”
And Jude fell into thought. “I have seemed to myself lately,” he said,