Jude the Obscure
women do about these things; and don’t actually believe what you
pretend to, and only are indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised
by an affected belief?”
“Luxury! How can you be so cruel!”
“You dear, sad, soft, most melancholy wreck of a promising human
intellect that it has ever been my lot to behold! Where is your scorn
of convention gone? I _would_ have died game!”
“You crush, almost insult me, Jude! Go away from me!” She turned off
quickly.
“I will. I would never come to see you again, even if I had the
strength to come, which I shall not have any more. Sue, Sue, you are
not worth a man’s love!”
Her bosom began to go up and down. “I can’t endure you to say that!”
she burst out, and her eye resting on him a moment, she turned back
impulsively. “Don’t, don’t scorn me! Kiss me, oh kiss me lots of times,
and say I am not a coward and a contemptible humbug—I can’t bear it!”
She rushed up to him and, with her mouth on his, continued: “I must
tell you—oh I must—my darling Love! It has been—only a church
marriage—an apparent marriage I mean! He suggested it at the very
first!”
“How?”
“I mean it is a nominal marriage only. It hasn’t been more than that at
all since I came back to him!”
“Sue!” he said. Pressing her to him in his arms, he bruised her lips
with kisses. “If misery can know happiness, I have a moment’s happiness
now! Now, in the name of all you hold holy, tell me the truth, and no
lie. You do love me still?”
“I do! You know it too well! … But I _mustn’t_ do this! I mustn’t kiss
you back as I would!”
“But do!”
“And yet you are so dear!—and you look so ill—”
“And so do you! There’s one more, in memory of our dead little
children—yours and mine!”
The words struck her like a blow, and she bent her head. “I _mustn’t_—I
_can’t_ go on with this!” she gasped presently. “But there, there,
darling; I give you back your kisses; I do, I do! … And now I’ll _hate_
myself for ever for my sin!”
“No—let me make my last appeal. Listen to this! We’ve both remarried
out of our senses. I was made drunk to do it. You were the same. I was
gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk. Either form of intoxication takes away
the nobler vision… Let us then shake off our mistakes, and run away
together!”
“No; again no! … Why do you tempt me so far, Jude! It is too merciless!
… But I’ve got over myself now. Don’t follow me—don’t look at me. Leave
me, for pity’s sake!”
She ran up the church to the east end, and Jude did as she requested.
He did not turn his head, but took up his blanket, which she had not
seen, and went straight out. As he passed the end of the church she
heard his coughs mingling with the rain on the windows, and in a last
instinct of human affection, even now unsubdued by her fetters, she
sprang up as if to go and succour him. But she knelt down again, and
stopped her ears with her hands till all possible sound of him had
passed away.
He was by this time at the corner of the green, from which the path ran
across the fields in which he had scared rooks as a boy. He turned and
looked back, once, at the building which still contained Sue; and then
went on, knowing that his eyes would light on that scene no more.
There are cold spots up and down Wessex in autumn and winter weather;
but the coldest of all when a north or east wind is blowing is the
crest of the down by the Brown House, where the road to Alfredston
crosses the old Ridgeway. Here the first winter sleets and snows fall
and lie, and here the spring frost lingers last unthawed. Here in the
teeth of the north-east wind and rain Jude now pursued his way, wet
through, the necessary slowness of his walk from lack of his former
strength being insufficent to maintain his heat. He came to the
milestone, and, raining as it was, spread his blanket and lay down
there to rest. Before moving on he went and felt at the back of the
stone for his own carving. It was still there; but nearly obliterated
by moss. He passed the spot where the gibbet of his ancestor and Sue’s
had stood, and descended the hill.
It was dark when he reached Alfredston, where he had a cup of tea, the
deadly chill that began to creep into his bones being too much for him
to endure fasting. To get home he had to travel by a steam tram-car,
and two branches of railway, with much waiting at a junction. He did
not reach Christminster till ten o’clock.
IX
On the platform stood Arabella. She looked him up and down.
“You’ve been to see her?” she asked.
“I have,” said Jude, literally tottering with cold and lassitude.
“Well, now you’d best march along home.”
The water ran out of him as he went, and he was compelled to lean
against the wall to support himself while coughing.
“You’ve done for yourself by this, young man,” said she. “I don’t know
whether you know it.”
“Of course I do. I meant to do for myself.”
“What—to commit suicide?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, I’m blest! Kill yourself for a woman.”
“Listen to me, Arabella. You think you are the stronger; and so you
are, in a physical sense, now. You could push me over like a nine-pin.
You did not send that letter the other day, and I could not resent your
conduct. But I am not so weak in another way as you think. I made up my
mind that a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a
fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular
woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one
stroke by taking this journey in the rain. That I’ve done. I have seen
her for the last time, and I’ve finished myself—put an end to a
feverish life which ought never to have been begun!”
“Lord—you do talk lofty! Won’t you have something warm to drink?”
“No thank you. Let’s get home.”
They went along by the silent colleges, and Jude kept stopping.
“What are you looking at?”
“Stupid fancies. I see, in a way, those spirits of the dead again, on
this my last walk, that I saw when I first walked here!”
“What a curious chap you are!”
“I seem to see them, and almost hear them rustling. But I don’t revere
all of them as I did then. I don’t believe in half of them. The
theologians, the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the
high-handed statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has
been spoilt for me by the grind of stern reality!”
The expression of Jude’s corpselike face in the watery lamplight was
indeed as if he saw people where there was nobody. At moments he stood
still by an archway, like one watching a figure walk out; then he would
look at a window like one discerning a familiar face behind it. He
seemed to hear voices, whose words he repeated as if to gather their
meaning.
“They seem laughing at me!”
“Who?”
“Oh—I was talking to myself! The phantoms all about here, in the
college archways, and windows. They used to look friendly in the old
days, particularly Addison, and Gibbon, and Johnson, and Dr. Browne,
and Bishop Ken—”
“Come along do! Phantoms! There’s neither living nor dead hereabouts
except a damn policeman! I never saw the streets emptier.”
“Fancy! The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the great Dissector
of Melancholy there!”
“I don’t want to hear about ’em! They bore me.”
“Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that
lane—Wycliffe—Harvey—Hooker—Arnold—and a whole crowd of Tractarian
Shades—”
“I _don’t want_ to know their names, I tell you! What do I care about
folk dead and gone? Upon my soul you are more sober when you’ve been
drinking than when you have not!”
“I must rest a moment,” he said; and as he paused, holding to the
railings, he measured with his eye the height of a college front. “This
is old Rubric. And that Sarcophagus; and up that lane Crozier and
Tudor: and all down there is Cardinal with its long front, and its
windows with lifted eyebrows, representing the polite surprise of the
university at the efforts of such as I.”
“Come along, and I’ll treat you!”
“Very well. It will help me home, for I feel the chilly fog from the
meadows of Cardinal as if death-claws were grabbing me through and
through. As Antigone said, I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts.
But, Arabella, when I am dead, you’ll see my spirit flitting up and
down here among these!”
“Pooh! You mayn’t die after all. You are tough enough yet, old man.”
It was night at Marygreen, and the rain of the afternoon showed no sign
of abatement. About the time at which Jude and Arabella were walking
the streets of Christminster homeward, the Widow Edlin crossed the
green, and opened the back door of the schoolmaster’s dwelling, which
she often did now before bedtime, to assist Sue in putting things away.
Sue was muddling helplessly in the kitchen, for she was not a good
housewife, though she tried to be, and grew impatient of domestic
details.
“Lord love ’ee, what do ye do that yourself for, when I’ve come o’
purpose! You knew I should come.”
“Oh—I don’t know—I forgot! No, I didn’t forget. I did it to discipline
myself. I have scrubbed the stairs since eight o’clock. I _must_
practise myself in my household duties. I’ve shamefully neglected
them!”
“Why should ye? He’ll get a better school, perhaps be a parson, in
time, and you’ll keep two servants. ’Tis a pity to spoil them pretty
hands.”
“Don’t talk of my pretty hands, Mrs. Edlin. This pretty body of mine
has been the ruin of me already!”
“Pshoo—you’ve got no body to speak of! You put me more in mind of a
sperrit. But there seems something wrong to-night, my dear. Husband
cross?”
“No. He never is. He’s gone to bed early.”
“Then what is it?”
“I cannot tell you. I have done wrong to-day. And I want to eradicate
it… Well—I will tell you this—Jude has been here this afternoon, and I
find I still love him—oh, grossly! I cannot tell you more.”
“Ah!” said the widow. “I told ’ee how ’twould be!”
“But it shan’t be! I have not told my husband of his visit; it is not
necessary to trouble him about it, as I never mean to see Jude any
more. But I am going to make my conscience right on my duty to
Richard—by doing a penance—the ultimate thing. I must!”
“I wouldn’t—since he agrees to it being otherwise, and it has gone on
three months very well as it is.”
“Yes—he agrees to my living as I choose; but I feel it is an indulgence
I ought not to exact from him. It ought not to have been accepted by
me. To reverse it will be terrible—but I must be more just to him. O
why was I so unheroic!”
“What is it you don’t like in him?” asked Mrs. Edlin curiously.
“I cannot tell you. It is something… I cannot say. The mournful thing
is, that nobody would admit it as a reason for feeling as I do; so that
no excuse is left me.”
“Did you ever tell Jude what it was?”
“Never.”
“I’ve heard strange tales o’ husbands in my time,” observed the widow
in a lowered voice. “They say that when the saints were upon the earth
devils used to take husbands’ forms o’ nights, and get poor women into
all sorts of trouble. But I don’t know why that should come into my
head, for it is only a tale… What a wind and rain it is to-night!
Well—don’t be in a hurry to alter things, my dear. Think it over.”
“No, no! I’ve screwed my weak soul up to treating him more
courteously—and it must be now—at once—before I break down!”
“I don’t think you ought to force your nature. No woman ought to be
expected to.”
“It is my duty. I will drink my cup to the dregs!”
Half an hour later when Mrs. Edlin put on her bonnet and shawl to
leave, Sue seemed to be seized with vague terror.
“No—no—don’t go, Mrs. Edlin,” she implored, her eyes enlarged, and with
a quick nervous look over her shoulder.
“But it is bedtime, child.”
“Yes, but—there’s the little spare room—my room that was. It is quite
ready. Please stay, Mrs. Edlin!—I shall want you in the morning.”