Jude the Obscure
never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely
regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from
her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked
arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble.
“What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words had
not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.
“Ah, you should see me Sundays!” she said piquantly.
“I don’t suppose I could?” he answered
“That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just now, though
there med be in a week or two.” She had spoken this without a smile,
and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. “Will you
let me?”
“I don’t mind.”
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning her face
aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation
before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than a general
impression of her appearance. “Next Sunday?” he hazarded. “To-morrow,
that is?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I call?”
“Yes.”
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost tenderly
with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the brookside
grass rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,
filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had just
inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been
hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had
somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.
The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so
precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a
curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.
“Well, it’s only a bit of fun,” he said to himself, faintly conscious
that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more
obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had drawn
him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere
sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her
quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with
literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no
vestal who chose _that_ missile for opening her attack on him. He saw
this with his intellectual eye, just for a short fleeting while, as by
the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on
a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then this passing
discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to all conditions
of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that of having
found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto unsuspected, though
it had lain close beside him. He was to meet this enkindling one of the
other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently resumed
her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid stream.
“Catched un, my dear?” laconically asked the girl called Anny.
“I don’t know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!”
regretfully murmured Arabella.
“Lord! he’s nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old
Drusilla Fawley’s bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he ’prenticed
himself at Alfredston. Since then he’s been very stuck up, and always
reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say.”
“Oh, I don’t care what he is, or anything about ’n. Don’t you think it,
my child!”
“Oh, don’t ye! You needn’t try to deceive us! What did you stay talking
to him for, if you didn’t want un? Whether you do or whether you don’t,
he’s as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted on the bridge,
when he looked at ’ee as if he had never seen a woman before in his
born days. Well, he’s to be had by any woman who can get him to care
for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch him the right way.”
VII
The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping
ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black mark
on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past
months.
It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with
Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to
set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,—the re-reading of his
Greek Testament—his new one, with better type than his old copy,
following Griesbach’s text as amended by numerous correctors, and with
variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the book, having
obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing he had
never done before.
He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading, under the
quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he now slept
only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened
yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt
as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot
understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.
He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened the
book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands to
his temples, began at the beginning:
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ.
Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait indoors,
poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him. There was a
something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from promises. He
ought not to break faith with her. Even though he had only Sundays and
week-day evenings for reading he could afford one afternoon, seeing
that other young men afforded so many. After to-day he would never
probably see her again. Indeed, it would be impossible, considering
what his plans were.
In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular
power seized hold of him—something which had nothing in common with the
spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care
little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated
intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy
he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the
embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had
nothing in common with his own except locality.
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude sprang up
and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed
himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house
and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground
which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the
dip beyond the upland.
As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours,
easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading
after tea.
Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path joined
the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left, descending
the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown House. Here at
the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it,
and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of
piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the originators of
that smell. He entered the garden, and knocked at the door with the
knob of his stick.
Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on the
inside said:
“Arabella! Here’s your young man come coorting! Mizzle, my girl!”
Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a businesslike aspect as it
evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking of. He
was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her; but “courting” was too
coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas. The door
was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs in radiant
walking attire.
“Take a chair, Mr. What’s-your-name?” said her father, an energetic,
black-whiskered man, in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard from
outside.
“I’d rather go out at once, wouldn’t you?” she whispered to Jude.
“Yes,” said he. “We’ll walk up to the Brown House and back, we can do
it in half an hour.”
Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt
glad he had come, and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto
haunted him.
First they clambered to the top of the great down, during which ascent
he had occasionally to take her hand to assist her. Then they bore off
to the left along the crest into the ridgeway, which they followed till
it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of
his former fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them
now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella with greater
zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies with
all the Dons in the recently adored university, and passed the spot
where he had knelt to Diana and Phœbus without remembering that there
were any such people in the mythology, or that the sun was anything
else than a useful lamp for illuminating Arabella’s face. An
indescribable lightness of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the
incipient scholar, prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not,
felt himself honoured and glorified by the condescension of this
handsome country wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her
Sunday frock and ribbons.
They reached the Brown House barn—the point at which he had planned to
turn back. While looking over the vast northern landscape from this
spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke from the
neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a distance
of a couple of miles.
“It is a fire,” said Arabella. “Let’s run and see it—do! It is not
far!”
The tenderness which had grown up in Jude’s bosom left him no will to
thwart her inclination now—which pleased him in affording him excuse
for a longer time with her. They started off down the hill almost at a
trot; but on gaining level ground at the bottom, and walking a mile,
they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than it had
seemed.
Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on; but it was not
till five o’clock that they found themselves on the scene,—the distance
being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen, and three
from Arabella’s. The conflagration had been got under by the time they
reached it, and after a short inspection of the melancholy ruins they
retraced their steps—their course lying through the town of Alfredston.
Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered an inn of an
inferior class, and gave their order. As it was not for beer they had a
long time to wait. The maid-servant recognized Jude, and whispered her
surprise to her mistress in the background, that he, the student “who
kept hisself up so particular,” should have suddenly descended so low
as to keep company with Arabella. The latter guessed what was being
said, and laughed as she met the serious and tender gaze of her
lover—the low and triumphant laugh of a careless woman who sees she is
winning her game.
They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and
Delilah which hung on the wall, and at the circular beer-stains on the
table, and at the spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust. The whole
aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which few places
can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when the setting sun is
slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the unfortunate wayfarer finds
himself with no other haven of rest.
It began to grow dusk. They could not wait longer, really, for the tea,
they said. “Yet what else can we do?” asked Jude. “It is a three-mile
walk for you.”