Jude the Obscure
“Oh well—I don’t mind, if you wish. Nothing will happen to my four old
walls, whether I be there or no.”
She then fastened up the doors, and they ascended the stairs together.
“Wait here, Mrs. Edlin,” said Sue. “I’ll go into my old room a moment
by myself.”
Leaving the widow on the landing Sue turned to the chamber which had
been hers exclusively since her arrival at Marygreen, and pushing to
the door knelt down by the bed for a minute or two. She then arose, and
taking her night-gown from the pillow undressed and came out to Mrs.
Edlin. A man could be heard snoring in the room opposite. She wished
Mrs. Edlin good-night, and the widow entered the room that Sue had just
vacated.
Sue unlatched the other chamber door, and, as if seized with faintness,
sank down outside it. Getting up again she half opened the door, and
said “Richard.” As the word came out of her mouth she visibly
shuddered.
The snoring had quite ceased for some time, but he did not reply. Sue
seemed relieved, and hurried back to Mrs. Edlin’s chamber. “Are you in
bed, Mrs. Edlin?” she asked.
“No, dear,” said the widow, opening the door. “I be old and slow, and
it takes me a long while to un-ray. I han’t unlaced my jumps yet.”
“I—don’t hear him! And perhaps—perhaps—”
“What, child?”
“Perhaps he’s dead!” she gasped. “And then—I should be _free_, and I
could go to Jude! … Ah—no—I forgot _her_—and God!”
“Let’s go and hearken. No—he’s snoring again. But the rain and the wind
is so loud that you can hardly hear anything but between whiles.”
Sue had dragged herself back. “Mrs. Edlin, good-night again! I am sorry
I called you out.” The widow retreated a second time.
The strained, resigned look returned to Sue’s face when she was alone.
“I must do it—I must! I must drink to the dregs!” she whispered.
“Richard!” she said again.
“Hey—what? Is that you, Susanna?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want? Anything the matter? Wait a moment.” He pulled on
some articles of clothing, and came to the door. “Yes?”
“When we were at Shaston I jumped out of the window rather than that
you should come near me. I have never reversed that treatment till
now—when I have come to beg your pardon for it, and ask you to let me
in.”
“Perhaps you only think you ought to do this? I don’t wish you to come
against your impulses, as I have said.”
“But I beg to be admitted.” She waited a moment, and repeated, “I beg
to be admitted! I have been in error—even to-day. I have exceeded my
rights. I did not mean to tell you, but perhaps I ought. I sinned
against you this afternoon.”
“How?”
“I met Jude! I didn’t know he was coming. And—”
“Well?”
“I kissed him, and let him kiss me.”
“Oh—the old story!”
“Richard, I didn’t know we were going to kiss each other till we did!”
“How many times?”
“A good many. I don’t know. I am horrified to look back on it, and the
least I can do after it is to come to you like this.”
“Come—this is pretty bad, after what I’ve done! Anything else to
confess?”
“No.” She had been intending to say: “I called him my darling Love.”
But, as a contrite woman always keeps back a little, that portion of
the scene remained untold. She went on: “I am never going to see him
any more. He spoke of some things of the past, and it overcame me. He
spoke of—the children. But, as I have said, I am glad—almost glad I
mean—that they are dead, Richard. It blots out all that life of mine!”
“Well—about not seeing him again any more. Come—you really mean this?”
There was something in Phillotson’s tone now which seemed to show that
his three months of remarriage with Sue had somehow not been so
satisfactory as his magnanimity or amative patience had anticipated.
“Yes, yes!”
“Perhaps you’ll swear it on the New Testament?”
“I will.”
He went back to the room and brought out a little brown Testament. “Now
then: So help you God!”
She swore.
“Very good!”
“Now I supplicate you, Richard, to whom I belong, and whom I wish to
honour and obey, as I vowed, to let me in.”
“Think it over well. You know what it means. Having you back in the
house was one thing—this another. So think again.”
“I have thought—I wish this!”
“That’s a complaisant spirit—and perhaps you are right. With a lover
hanging about, a half-marriage should be completed. But I repeat my
reminder this third and last time.”
“It is my wish! … O God!”
“What did you say ‘O God’ for?”
“I don’t know!”
“Yes you do! But …” He gloomily considered her thin and fragile form a
moment longer as she crouched before him in her night-clothes. “Well, I
thought it might end like this,” he said presently. “I owe you nothing,
after these signs; but I’ll take you in at your word, and forgive you.”
He put his arm round her to lift her up. Sue started back.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, speaking for the first time sternly.
“You shrink from me again?—just as formerly!”
“No, Richard—I—I—was not thinking—”
“You wish to come in here?”
“Yes.”
“You still bear in mind what it means?”
“Yes. It is my duty!”
Placing the candlestick on the chest of drawers he led her through the
doorway, and lifting her bodily, kissed her. A quick look of aversion
passed over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry.
Mrs. Edlin had by this time undressed, and was about to get into bed
when she said to herself: “Ah—perhaps I’d better go and see if the
little thing is all right. How it do blow and rain!”
The widow went out on the landing, and saw that Sue had disappeared.
“Ah! Poor soul! Weddings be funerals ’a b’lieve nowadays. Fifty-five
years ago, come Fall, since my man and I married! Times have changed
since then!”
X
Despite himself Jude recovered somewhat, and worked at his trade for
several weeks. After Christmas, however, he broke down again.
With the money he had earned he shifted his lodgings to a yet more
central part of the town. But Arabella saw that he was not likely to do
much work for a long while, and was cross enough at the turn affairs
had taken since her remarriage to him. “I’m hanged if you haven’t been
clever in this last stroke!” she would say, “to get a nurse for nothing
by marrying me!”
Jude was absolutely indifferent to what she said, and indeed, often
regarded her abuse in a humorous light. Sometimes his mood was more
earnest, and as he lay he often rambled on upon the defeat of his early
aims.
“Every man has some little power in some one direction,” he would say.
“I was never really stout enough for the stone trade, particularly the
fixing. Moving the blocks always used to strain me, and standing the
trying draughts in buildings before the windows are in always gave me
colds, and I think that began the mischief inside. But I felt I could
do one thing if I had the opportunity. I could accumulate ideas, and
impart them to others. I wonder if the founders had such as I in their
minds—a fellow good for nothing else but that particular thing? … I
hear that soon there is going to be a better chance for such helpless
students as I was. There are schemes afoot for making the university
less exclusive, and extending its influence. I don’t know much about
it. And it is too late, too late for me! Ah—and for how many worthier
ones before me!”
“How you keep a-mumbling!” said Arabella. “I should have thought you’d
have got over all that craze about books by this time. And so you
would, if you’d had any sense to begin with. You are as bad now as when
we were first married.”
On one occasion while soliloquizing thus he called her “Sue”
unconsciously.
“I wish you’d mind who you are talking to!” said Arabella indignantly.
“Calling a respectable married woman by the name of that—” She
remembered herself and he did not catch the word.
But in the course of time, when she saw how things were going, and how
very little she had to fear from Sue’s rivalry, she had a fit of
generosity. “I suppose you want to see your—Sue?” she said. “Well, I
don’t mind her coming. You can have her here if you like.”
“I don’t wish to see her again.”
“Oh—that’s a change!”
“And don’t tell her anything about me—that I’m ill, or anything. She
has chosen her course. Let her go!”
One day he received a surprise. Mrs. Edlin came to see him, quite on
her own account. Jude’s wife, whose feelings as to where his affections
were centred had reached absolute indifference by this time, went out,
leaving the old woman alone with Jude. He impulsively asked how Sue
was, and then said bluntly, remembering what Sue had told him: “I
suppose they are still only husband and wife in name?”
Mrs. Edlin hesitated. “Well, no—it’s different now. She’s begun it
quite lately—all of her own free will.”
“When did she begin?” he asked quickly.
“The night after you came. But as a punishment to her poor self. He
didn’t wish it, but she insisted.”
“Sue, my Sue—you darling fool—this is almost more than I can endure! …
Mrs. Edlin—don’t be frightened at my rambling—I’ve got to talk to
myself lying here so many hours alone—she was once a woman whose
intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp: who saw all _my_
superstitions as cobwebs that she could brush away with a word. Then
bitter affliction came to us, and her intellect broke, and she veered
round to darkness. Strange difference of sex, that time and
circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of
women almost invariably. And now the ultimate horror has come—her
giving herself like this to what she loathes, in her enslavement to
forms! She, so sensitive, so shrinking, that the very wind seemed to
blow on her with a touch of deference… As for Sue and me when we were
at our own best, long ago—when our minds were clear, and our love of
truth fearless—the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years
too soon to be any good to us. And so the resistance they met with
brought reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me! … There—this,
Mrs. Edlin, is how I go on to myself continually, as I lie here. I must
be boring you awfully.”
“Not at all, my dear boy. I could hearken to ’ee all day.”
As Jude reflected more and more on her news, and grew more restless, he
began in his mental agony to use terribly profane language about social
conventions, which started a fit of coughing. Presently there came a
knock at the door downstairs. As nobody answered it Mrs. Edlin herself
went down.
The visitor said blandly: “The Doctor.” The lanky form was that of
Physician Vilbert, who had been called in by Arabella.
“How is my patient at present?” asked the physician.
“Oh bad—very bad! Poor chap, he got excited, and do blaspeam terribly,
since I let out some gossip by accident—the more to my blame. But
there—you must excuse a man in suffering for what he says, and I hope
God will forgive him.”
“Ah. I’ll go up and see him. Mrs. Fawley at home?”
“She’s not in at present, but she’ll be here soon.”
Vilbert went; but though Jude had hitherto taken the medicines of that
skilful practitioner with the greatest indifference whenever poured
down his throat by Arabella, he was now so brought to bay by events
that he vented his opinion of Vilbert in the physician’s face, and so
forcibly, and with such striking epithets, that Vilbert soon scurried
downstairs again. At the door he met Arabella, Mrs. Edlin having left.
Arabella inquired how he thought her husband was now, and seeing that
the Doctor looked ruffled, asked him to take something. He assented.
“I’ll bring it to you here in the passage,” she said. “There’s nobody
but me about the house to-day.”
She brought him a bottle and a glass, and he drank.
Arabella began shaking with suppressed laughter. “What is this, my
dear?” he asked, smacking his lips.
“Oh—a drop of wine—and something in it.” Laughing again she said: “I