Jude the Obscure
poured your own love-philtre into it, that you sold me at the
agricultural show, don’t you re-member?”
“I do, I do! Clever woman! But you must be prepared for the
consequences.” Putting his arm round her shoulders he kissed her there
and then.
“Don’t don’t,” she whispered, laughing good-humouredly. “My man will
hear.”
She let him out of the house, and as she went back she said to herself:
“Well! Weak women must provide for a rainy day. And if my poor fellow
upstairs do go off—as I suppose he will soon—it’s well to keep chances
open. And I can’t pick and choose now as I could when I was younger.
And one must take the old if one can’t get the young.”
XI
The last pages to which the chronicler of these lives would ask the
reader’s attention are concerned with the scene in and out of Jude’s
bedroom when leafy summer came round again.
His face was now so thin that his old friends would hardly have known
him. It was afternoon, and Arabella was at the looking-glass curling
her hair, which operation she performed by heating an umbrella-stay in
the flame of a candle she had lighted, and using it upon the flowing
lock. When she had finished this, practised a dimple, and put on her
things, she cast her eyes round upon Jude. He seemed to be sleeping,
though his position was an elevated one, his malady preventing him
lying down.
Arabella, hatted, gloved, and ready, sat down and waited, as if
expecting some one to come and take her place as nurse.
Certain sounds from without revealed that the town was in festivity,
though little of the festival, whatever it might have been, could be
seen here. Bells began to ring, and the notes came into the room
through the open window, and travelled round Jude’s head in a hum. They
made her restless, and at last she said to herself: “Why ever doesn’t
Father come?”
She looked again at Jude, critically gauged his ebbing life, as she had
done so many times during the late months, and glancing at his watch,
which was hung up by way of timepiece, rose impatiently. Still he
slept, and coming to a resolution she slipped from the room, closed the
door noiselessly, and descended the stairs. The house was empty. The
attraction which moved Arabella to go abroad had evidently drawn away
the other inmates long before.
It was a warm, cloudless, enticing day. She shut the front door, and
hastened round into Chief Street, and when near the theatre could hear
the notes of the organ, a rehearsal for a coming concert being in
progress. She entered under the archway of Oldgate College, where men
were putting up awnings round the quadrangle for a ball in the hall
that evening. People who had come up from the country for the day were
picnicking on the grass, and Arabella walked along the gravel paths and
under the aged limes. But finding this place rather dull she returned
to the streets, and watched the carriages drawing up for the concert,
numerous Dons and their wives, and undergraduates with gay female
companions, crowding up likewise. When the doors were closed, and the
concert began, she moved on.
The powerful notes of that concert rolled forth through the swinging
yellow blinds of the open windows, over the housetops, and into the
still air of the lanes. They reached so far as to the room in which
Jude lay; and it was about this time that his cough began again and
awakened him.
As soon as he could speak he murmured, his eyes still closed: “A little
water, please.”
Nothing but the deserted room received his appeal, and he coughed to
exhaustion again—saying still more feebly: “Water—some
water—Sue—Arabella!”
The room remained still as before. Presently he gasped again:
“Throat—water—Sue—darling—drop of water—please—oh please!”
No water came, and the organ notes, faint as a bee’s hum, rolled in as
before.
While he remained, his face changing, shouts and hurrahs came from
somewhere in the direction of the river.
“Ah—yes! The Remembrance games,” he murmured. “And I here. And Sue
defiled!”
The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ notes. Jude’s face
changed more: he whispered slowly, his parched lips scarcely moving:
_“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was
said, There is a man-child conceived.”_
(“Hurrah!”)
_“Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither
let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no
joyful voice come therein.”_
(“Hurrah!”)
_“Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I
came out of the belly? … For now should I have lain still and been
quiet. I should have slept: then had I been at rest!”_
(“Hurrah!”)
_“There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the
oppressor… The small and the great are there; and the servant is free
from his master. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and
life unto the bitter in soul?”_
Meanwhile Arabella, in her journey to discover what was going on, took
a short cut down a narrow street and through an obscure nook into the
quad of Cardinal. It was full of bustle, and brilliant in the sunlight
with flowers and other preparations for a ball here also. A carpenter
nodded to her, one who had formerly been a fellow-workman of Jude’s. A
corridor was in course of erection from the entrance to the hall
staircase, of gay red and buff bunting. Waggon-loads of boxes
containing bright plants in full bloom were being placed about, and the
great staircase was covered with red cloth. She nodded to one workman
and another, and ascended to the hall on the strength of their
acquaintance, where they were putting down a new floor and decorating
for the dance.
The cathedral bell close at hand was sounding for five o’clock service.
“I should not mind having a spin there with a fellow’s arm round my
waist,” she said to one of the men. “But Lord, I must be getting home
again—there’s a lot to do. No dancing for me!”
When she reached home she was met at the door by Stagg, and one or two
other of Jude’s fellow stoneworkers. “We are just going down to the
river,” said the former, “to see the boat-bumping. But we’ve called
round on our way to ask how your husband is.”
“He’s sleeping nicely, thank you,” said Arabella.
“That’s right. Well now, can’t you give yourself half an hour’s
relaxation, Mrs. Fawley, and come along with us? ’Twould do you good.”
“I should like to go,” said she. “I’ve never seen the boat-racing, and
I hear it is good fun.”
“Come along!”
“How I _wish_ I could!” She looked longingly down the street. “Wait a
minute, then. I’ll just run up and see how he is now. Father is with
him, I believe; so I can most likely come.”
They waited, and she entered. Downstairs the inmates were absent as
before, having, in fact, gone in a body to the river where the
procession of boats was to pass. When she reached the bedroom she found
that her father had not even now come.
“Why couldn’t he have been here!” she said impatiently. “He wants to
see the boats himself—that’s what it is!”
However, on looking round to the bed she brightened, for she saw that
Jude was apparently sleeping, though he was not in the usual
half-elevated posture necessitated by his cough. He had slipped down,
and lay flat. A second glance caused her to start, and she went to the
bed. His face was quite white, and gradually becoming rigid. She
touched his fingers; they were cold, though his body was still warm.
She listened at his chest. All was still within. The bumping of near
thirty years had ceased.
After her first appalled sense of what had happened, the faint notes of
a military or other brass band from the river reached her ears; and in
a provoked tone she exclaimed, “To think he should die just now! Why
did he die just now!” Then meditating another moment or two she went to
the door, softly closed it as before, and again descended the stairs.
“Here she is!” said one of the workmen. “We wondered if you were coming
after all. Come along; we must be quick to get a good place… Well, how
is he? Sleeping well still? Of course, we don’t want to drag ’ee away
if—”
“Oh yes—sleeping quite sound. He won’t wake yet,” she said hurriedly.
They went with the crowd down Cardinal Street, where they presently
reached the bridge, and the gay barges burst upon their view. Thence
they passed by a narrow slit down to the riverside path—now dusty, hot,
and thronged. Almost as soon as they had arrived the grand procession
of boats began; the oars smacking with a loud kiss on the face of the
stream, as they were lowered from the perpendicular.
“Oh, I say—how jolly! I’m glad I’ve come,” said Arabella. “And—it can’t
hurt my husband—my being away.”
On the opposite side of the river, on the crowded barges, were gorgeous
nosegays of feminine beauty, fashionably arrayed in green, pink, blue,
and white. The blue flag of the boat club denoted the centre of
interest, beneath which a band in red uniform gave out the notes she
had already heard in the death-chamber. Collegians of all sorts, in
canoes with ladies, watching keenly for “our” boat, darted up and down.
While she regarded the lively scene somebody touched Arabella in the
ribs, and looking round she saw Vilbert.
“That philtre is operating, you know!” he said with a leer. “Shame on
’ee to wreck a heart so!”
“I shan’t talk of love to-day.”
“Why not? It is a general holiday.”
She did not reply. Vilbert’s arm stole round her waist, which act could
be performed unobserved in the crowd. An arch expression overspread
Arabella’s face at the feel of the arm, but she kept her eyes on the
river as if she did not know of the embrace.
The crowd surged, pushing Arabella and her friends sometimes nearly
into the river, and she would have laughed heartily at the horse-play
that succeeded, if the imprint on her mind’s eye of a pale, statuesque
countenance she had lately gazed upon had not sobered her a little.
The fun on the water reached the acme of excitement; there were
immersions, there were shouts: the race was lost and won, the pink and
blue and yellow ladies retired from the barges, and the people who had
watched began to move.
“Well—it’s been awfully good,” cried Arabella. “But I think I must get
back to my poor man. Father is there, so far as I know; but I had
better get back.”
“What’s your hurry?”
“Well, I must go… Dear, dear, this is awkward!”
At the narrow gangway where the people ascended from the riverside path
to the bridge the crowd was literally jammed into one hot mass—Arabella
and Vilbert with the rest; and here they remained motionless, Arabella
exclaiming, “Dear, dear!” more and more impatiently; for it had just
occurred to her mind that if Jude were discovered to have died alone an
inquest might be deemed necessary.
“What a fidget you are, my love,” said the physician, who, being
pressed close against her by the throng, had no need of personal effort
for contact. “Just as well have patience: there’s no getting away yet!”
It was nearly ten minutes before the wedged multitude moved
sufficiently to let them pass through. As soon as she got up into the
street Arabella hastened on, forbidding the physician to accompany her
further that day. She did not go straight to her house; but to the
abode of a woman who performed the last necessary offices for the
poorer dead; where she knocked.
“My husband has just gone, poor soul,” she said. “Can you come and lay
him out?”
Arabella waited a few minutes; and the two women went along, elbowing
their way through the stream of fashionable people pouring out of
Cardinal meadow, and being nearly knocked down by the carriages.
“I must call at the sexton’s about the bell, too,” said Arabella. “It
is just round here, isn’t it? I’ll meet you at my door.”