Jude the Obscure
had not come in. Jude was puzzled, and became quite alarmed at her
absence, for the hour was growing late. The carpenter called his wife,
who conjectured that Sue might have gone to St. Silas’ church, as she
often went there.
“Surely not at this time o’ night?” said Jude. “It is shut.”
“She knows somebody who keeps the key, and she has it whenever she
wants it.”
“How long has she been going on with this?”
“Oh, some few weeks, I think.”
Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he had never
once approached since he lived out that way years before, when his
young opinions were more mystical than they were now. The spot was
deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch
without noise, and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely
still inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint sound,
explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came from the other end
of the building. The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he moved in
that direction through the obscurity, which was broken only by the
faintest reflected night-light from without.
High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge,
solidly constructed Latin cross—as large, probably, as the original it
was designed to commemorate. It seemed to be suspended in the air by
invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly glimmered
in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed to and fro in
a silent and scarcely perceptible motion. Underneath, upon the floor,
lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and from this was
repeated the sobbing that he had heard before. It was his Sue’s form,
prostrate on the paving.
“Sue!” he whispered.
Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.
“What—do you want with me here, Jude?” she said almost sharply. “You
shouldn’t come! I wanted to be alone! Why did you intrude here?”
“How can you ask!” he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart
was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him. “Why do
I come? Who has a right to come, I should like to know, if I have not!
I, who love you better than my own self—better—far better—than you have
loved me! What made you leave me to come here alone?”
“Don’t criticize me, Jude—I can’t bear it!—I have often told you so.
You must take me as I am. I am a wretch—broken by my distractions! I
couldn’t _bear_ it when Arabella came—I felt so utterly miserable I had
to come away. She seems to be your wife still, and Richard to be my
husband!”
“But they are nothing to us!”
“Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage differently now. My babies
have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella’s child killing mine
was a judgement—the right slaying the wrong. What, __ shall I do! I am
such a vile creature—too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings!”
“This is terrible!” said Jude, verging on tears. “It is monstrous and
unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no wrong!”
“Ah—you don’t know my badness!”
He returned vehemently: “I do! Every atom and dreg of it! You make me
hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may
be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration in you.
That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a
diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if
they could have known you—should degrade herself like this! I am glad I
had nothing to do with Divinity—damn glad—if it’s going to ruin you in
this way!”
“You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don’t see how things are.”
“Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall. I am
overburdened—and you, too, are unhinged just now.” He put his arm round
her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk without
his support.
“I don’t dislike you, Jude,” she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
“I love you as much as ever! Only—I ought not to love you—any more. Oh
I must not any more!”
“I can’t own it.”
“But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to him—I
sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter it!”
“But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this world?
Nature’s own marriage it is, unquestionably!”
“But not Heaven’s. Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester.”
“Sue, Sue—affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state! After
converting me to your views on so many things, to find you suddenly
turn to the right-about like this—for no reason whatever, confounding
all you have formerly said through sentiment merely! You root out of me
what little affection and reverence I had left in me for the Church as
an old acquaintance… What I can’t understand in you is your
extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you,
or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a
fraction always wanting its integer? How you argued that marriage was
only a clumsy contract—which it is—how you showed all the objections to
it—all the absurdities! If two and two made four when we were happy
together, surely they make four now? I can’t understand it, I repeat!”
“Ah, dear Jude; that’s because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music. You say ‘What are they regarding?
Nothing is there.’ But something is.”
“That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel! You threw off
old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go back
upon yourself. I confess I am utterly stultified in my estimate of
you.”
“Dear friend, my only friend, don’t be hard with me! I can’t help being
as I am, I am convinced I am right—that I see the light at last. But
oh, how to profit by it!”
They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the building
and she had returned the key. “Can this be the girl,” said Jude when
she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now that he was
in the open street; “can this be the girl who brought the pagan deities
into this most Christian city?—who mimicked Miss Fontover when she
crushed them with her heel?—quoted Gibbon, and Shelley, and Mill? Where
are dear Apollo, and dear Venus now!”
“Oh don’t, don’t be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!” she
sobbed. “I can’t bear it! I was in error—I cannot reason with you. I
was wrong—proud in my own conceit! Arabella’s coming was the finish.
Don’t satirize me: it cuts like a knife!”
He flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately there in the
silent street, before she could hinder him. They went on till they came
to a little coffee-house. “Jude,” she said with suppressed tears,
“would you mind getting a lodging here?”
“I will—if, if you really wish? But do you? Let me go to our door and
understand you.”
He went and conducted her in. She said she wanted no supper, and went
in the dark upstairs and struck a light. Turning she found that Jude
had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door. She went to
him, put her hand in his, and said “Good-night.”
“But Sue! Don’t we live here?”
“You said you would do as I wished!”
“Yes. Very well! … Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue distastefully as
I have done! Perhaps as we couldn’t conscientiously marry at first in
the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted. Perhaps the world is
not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to
think we could act as pioneers!”
“I am so glad you see that much, at any rate. I never deliberately
meant to do as I did. I slipped into my false position through jealousy
and agitation!”
“But surely through love—you loved me?”
“Yes. But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere
lovers; until—”
“But people in love couldn’t live for ever like that!”
“Women could: men can’t, because they—won’t. An average woman is in
this superior to an average man—that she never instigates, only
responds. We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”
“I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said before! … Well,
as you will! … But human nature can’t help being itself.”
“Oh yes—that’s just what it has to learn—self-mastery.”
“I repeat—if either were to blame it was not you but I.”
“No—it was I. Your wickedness was only the natural man’s desire to
possess the woman. Mine was not the reciprocal wish till envy
stimulated me to oust Arabella. I had thought I ought in charity to let
you approach me—that it was damnably selfish to torture you as I did my
other friend. But I shouldn’t have given way if you hadn’t broken me
down by making me fear you would go back to her… But don’t let us say
any more about it! Jude, will you leave me to myself now?”
“Yes… But Sue—my wife, as you are!” he burst out; “my old reproach to
you was, after all, a true one. You have never loved me as I love
you—never—never! Yours is not a passionate heart—your heart does not
burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite—not
a woman!”
“At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I
merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but
that inborn craving which undermines some women’s morals almost more
than unbridled passion—the craving to attract and captivate, regardless
of the injury it may do the man—was in me; and when I found I had
caught you, I was frightened. And then—I don’t know how it was—I
couldn’t bear to let you go—possibly to Arabella again—and so I got to
love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the
selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting
mine ache for you.”
“And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!”
“Ah—yes! The further I flounder, the more harm I do!”
“O Sue!” said he with a sudden sense of his own danger. “Do not do an
immoral thing for moral reasons! You have been my social salvation.
Stay with me for humanity’s sake! You know what a weak fellow I am. My
two arch-enemies you know—my weakness for womankind and my impulse to
strong liquor. Don’t abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul
only! They have been kept entirely at a distance since you became my
guardian-angel! Since I have had you I have been able to go into any
temptations of the sort, without risk. Isn’t my safety worth a little
sacrifice of dogmatic principle? I am in terror lest, if you leave me,
it will be with me another case of the pig that was washed turning back
to his wallowing in the mire!”
Sue burst out weeping. “Oh, but you must not, Jude! You won’t! I’ll
pray for you night and day!”
“Well—never mind; don’t grieve,” said Jude generously. “I did suffer,
God knows, about you at that time; and now I suffer again. But perhaps
not so much as you. The woman mostly gets the worst of it in the long
run!”
“She does.”
“Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible. And this one is
not that, anyhow!”
Sue drew a nervous breath or two. “She is—I fear! … Now
Jude—good-night,—please!”
“I mustn’t stay?—Not just once more? As it has been so many times—O
Sue, my wife, why not?”
“No—no—not wife! … I am in your hands, Jude—don’t tempt me back now I
have advanced so far!”
“Very well. I do your bidding. I owe that to you, darling, in penance
for how I overruled it at the first time. My God, how selfish I was!
Perhaps—perhaps I spoilt one of the highest and purest loves that ever
existed between man and woman! … Then let the veil of our temple be
rent in two from this hour!”
He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and
flung it to the floor.
Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept silently. “You
don’t see that it is a matter of conscience with me, and not of dislike