Jude the Obscure
“to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous—the men
called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it! I have not been
conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you, whom I love more
than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them
are the same purblind, simple creatures as I? … Yes, Sue—that’s what I
am. I seduced you… You were a distinct type—a refined creature,
intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone!”
“No, no, Jude!” she said quickly. “Don’t reproach yourself with being
what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I.”
“I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me
perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you go.”
“I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not
having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our
union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity of
our first marriages.”
“Solemnity?” Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew conscious
that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.
“Yes,” she said, with a little quiver in her words, “I have had
dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have
thought—that I am still his wife!”
“Whose?”
“Richard’s.”
“Good God, dearest!—why?”
“Oh I can’t explain! Only the thought comes to me.”
“It is your weakness—a sick fancy, without reason or meaning! Don’t let
it trouble you.”
Sue sighed uneasily.
As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come an
improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in their
experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite unexpectedly
found good employment at his old trade almost directly he arrived, the
summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and outwardly his days
went on with that monotonous uniformity which is in itself so grateful
after vicissitude. People seemed to have forgotten that he had ever
shown any awkward aberrancies, and he daily mounted to the parapets and
copings of colleges he could never enter, and renewed the crumbling
freestones of mullioned windows he would never look from, as if he had
known no wish to do otherwise.
There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service
at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that
Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the
tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws,
customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue’s. She
was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect
played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he
at that time respected, though he did not now.
On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late. She was not at
home, but she soon returned, when he found her silent and meditative.
“What are you thinking of, little woman?” he asked curiously.
“Oh I can’t tell clearly! I have thought that we have been selfish,
careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a
vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road.
We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!”
“Sue!” he murmured. “What has come over you?”
“We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty!
But I have always striven to do what has pleased me. I well deserved
the scourging I have got! I wish something would take the evil right
out of me, and all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!”
“Sue—my own too suffering dear!—there’s no evil woman in you. Your
natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite so impassioned,
perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and dear, and pure. And as I have
often said, you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I
ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness. Why do you talk in such
a changed way? We have not been selfish, except when no one could
profit by our being otherwise. You used to say that human nature was
noble and long-suffering, not vile and corrupt, and at last I thought
you spoke truly. And now you seem to take such a much lower view!”
“I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had them
yet!”
“You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you
deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too full of narrow dogmas
at that time to see it.”
“Don’t say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and thought could
be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I
cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all
over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!”
“Hush!” he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she
were an infant. “It is bereavement that has brought you to this! Such
remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones of
the earth—who never feel it!”
“I ought not to stay like this,” she murmured, when she had remained in
the position a long while.
“Why not?”
“It is indulgence.”
“Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on earth than
that we should love one another?”
“Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours—ours—is the wrong.”
“I won’t have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our marriage to be signed
in a vestry?”
She paused, and looked up uneasily. “Never,” she whispered.
Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the objection serenely,
and said nothing. Several minutes elapsed, and he thought she had
fallen asleep; but he spoke softly, and found that she was wide awake
all the time. She sat upright and sighed.
“There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere about you
to-night, Sue,” he said. “I mean not only mentally, but about your
clothes, also. A sort of vegetable scent, which I seem to know, yet
cannot remember.”
“It is incense.”
“Incense?”
“I have been to the service at St. Silas’, and I was in the fumes of
it.”
“Oh—St. Silas.”
“Yes. I go there sometimes.”
“Indeed. You go there!”
“You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the weekday mornings, when you are
at work, and I think and think of—of my—” She stopped till she could
control the lumpiness of her throat. “And I have taken to go in there,
as it is so near.”
“Oh well—of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd, for you.
They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!”
“What do you mean, Jude?”
“Well—a sceptic, to be plain.”
“How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I know you
didn’t mean it. But you ought not to say that.”
“I won’t. But I am much surprised!”
“Well—I want to tell you something else, Jude. You won’t be angry, will
you? I have thought of it a good deal since my babies died. I don’t
think I ought to be your wife—or as your wife—any longer.”
“What? … But you _are_!”
“From your point of view; but—”
“Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good many others would
have been in our places, with such strong reasons for fears. But
experience has proved how we misjudged ourselves, and overrated our
infirmities; and if you are beginning to respect rites and ceremonies,
as you seem to be, I wonder you don’t say it shall be carried out
instantly? You certainly _are_ my wife, Sue, in all but law. What do
you mean by what you said?”
“I don’t think I am!”
“Not? But suppose we _had_ gone through the ceremony? Would you feel
that you were then?”
“No. I should not feel even then that I was. I should feel worse than I
do now.”
“Why so—in the name of all that’s perverse, my dear?”
“Because I am Richard’s.”
“Ah—you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!”
“It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more convinced
as time goes on that—I belong to him, or to nobody.”
“My good heavens—how we are changing places!”
“Yes. Perhaps so.”
Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening, they were
sitting in the same small room downstairs, when a knock came to the
front door of the carpenter’s house where they were lodging, and in a
few moments there was a tap at the door of their room. Before they
could open it the comer did so, and a woman’s form appeared.
“Is Mr. Fawley here?”
Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the affirmative, for
the voice was Arabella’s.
He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down in the window
bench, where they could distinctly see her outline against the light;
but no characteristic that enabled them to estimate her general aspect
and air. Yet something seemed to denote that she was not quite so
comfortably circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she had been
during Cartlett’s lifetime.
The three attempted an awkward conversation about the tragedy, of which
Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her immediately, though she
had never replied to his letter.
“I have just come from the cemetery,” she said. “I inquired and found
the child’s grave. I couldn’t come to the funeral—thank you for
inviting me all the same. I read all about it in the papers, and I felt
I wasn’t wanted… No—I couldn’t come to the funeral,” repeated Arabella,
who, seeming utterly unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic
manner, fumbled with iterations. “But I am glad I found the grave. As
’tis your trade, Jude, you’ll be able to put up a handsome stone to
’em.”
“I shall put up a headstone,” said Jude drearily.
“He was my child, and naturally I feel for him.”
“I hope so. We all did.”
“The others that weren’t mine I didn’t feel so much for, as was
natural.”
“Of course.”
A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.
“I had often wished I had mine with me,” continued Mrs. Cartlett.
“Perhaps ’twouldn’t have happened then! But of course I didn’t wish to
take him away from your wife.”
“I am not his wife,” came from Sue.
The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said Arabella. “I thought you were!”
Jude had known from the quality of Sue’s tone that her new and
transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except their obvious
meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing
that she was struck by Sue’s avowal, recovered herself, and went on to
talk with placid bluntness about “her” boy, for whom, though in his
lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial
mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience. She
alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed again to Sue.
There was no answer: Sue had invisibly left the room.
“She said she was not your wife?” resumed Arabella in another voice.
“Why should she do that?”
“I cannot inform you,” said Jude shortly.
“She is, isn’t she? She once told me so.”
“I don’t criticize what she says.”
“Ah—I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night, and thought
I could do no less than call, after our mutual affliction. I am
sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow I go
back to Alfredston. Father is come home again, and I am living with
him.”
“He has returned from Australia?” said Jude with languid curiosity.
“Yes. Couldn’t get on there. Had a rough time of it. Mother died of
dys—what do you call it—in the hot weather, and Father and two of the
young ones have just got back. He has got a cottage near the old place,
and for the present I am keeping house for him.”
Jude’s former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict good
breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a number
of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability. When she
had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the stairs and called
Sue—feeling anxious as to what had become of her.
There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings said she