of the suspended wedding onwards, to be observed and discussed by other
persons than Arabella. The society of Spring Street and the
neighbourhood generally did not understand, and probably could not have
been made to understand, Sue and Jude’s private minds, emotions,
positions, and fears. The curious facts of a child coming to them
unexpectedly, who called Jude “Father,” and Sue “Mother,” and a hitch
in a marriage ceremony intended for quietness to be performed at a
registrar’s office, together with rumours of the undefended cases in
the law-courts, bore only one translation to plain minds.
Little Time—for though he was formally turned into “Jude,” the apt
nickname stuck to him—would come home from school in the evening, and
repeat inquiries and remarks that had been made to him by the other
boys; and cause Sue, and Jude when he heard them, a great deal of pain
and sadness.
The result was that shortly after the attempt at the registrar’s the
pair went off—to London it was believed—for several days, hiring
somebody to look to the boy. When they came back they let it be
understood indirectly, and with total indifference and weariness of
mien, that they were legally married at last. Sue, who had previously
been called Mrs. Bridehead now openly adopted the name of Mrs. Fawley.
Her dull, cowed, and listless manner for days seemed to substantiate
all this.
But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so secretly to
do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and they
found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as they
had expected to do thereby. A living mystery was not much less
interesting than a dead scandal.
The baker’s lad and the grocer’s boy, who at first had used to lift
their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands, in
these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage, and
the neighbouring artizans’ wives looked straight along the pavement
when they encountered her.
Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive atmosphere began to
encircle their souls, particularly after their excursion to the show,
as if that visit had brought some evil influence to bear on them. And
their temperaments were precisely of a kind to suffer from this
atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous and open
statements. Their apparent attempt at reparation had come too late to
be effective.
The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months
later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return to
journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now, in that
he had not as yet cleared off the debt he had unavoidably incurred in
the payment of the law-costs of the previous year.
One evening he sat down to share the common meal with Sue and the child
as usual. “I am thinking,” he said to her, “that I’ll hold on here no
longer. The life suits us, certainly; but if we could get away to a
place where we are unknown, we should be lighter hearted, and have a
better chance. And so I am afraid we must break it up here, however
awkward for you, poor dear!”
Sue was always much affected at a picture of herself as an object of
pity, and she saddened.
“Well—I am not sorry,” said she presently. “I am much depressed by the
way they look at me here. And you have been keeping on this house and
furniture entirely for me and the boy! You don’t want it yourself, and
the expense is unnecessary. But whatever we do, wherever we go, you
won’t take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not let him go now! The
cloud upon his young mind makes him so pathetic to me; I do hope to
lift it some day! And he loves me so. You won’t take him away from me?”
“Certainly I won’t, dear little girl! We’ll get nice lodgings, wherever
we go. I shall be moving about probably—getting a job here and a job
there.”
“I shall do something too, of course, till—till— Well, now I can’t be
useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my hand to something
else.”
“Don’t hurry about getting employment,” he said regretfully. “I don’t
want you to do that. I wish you wouldn’t, Sue. The boy and yourself are
enough for you to attend to.”
There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it. Sue could hear the
conversation:
“Is Mr. Fawley at home? … Biles and Willis, the building contractors,
sent me to know if you’ll undertake the relettering of the ten
commandments in a little church they’ve been restoring lately in the
country near here.”
Jude reflected, and said he could undertake it.
“It is not a very artistic job,” continued the messenger. “The
clergyman is a very old-fashioned chap, and he has refused to let
anything more be done to the church than cleaning and repairing.”
“Excellent old man!” said Sue to herself, who was sentimentally opposed
to the horrors of over-restoration.
“The Ten Commandments are fixed to the east end,” the messenger went
on, “and they want doing up with the rest of the wall there, since he
won’t have them carted off as old materials belonging to the contractor
in the usual way of the trade.”
A bargain as to terms was struck, and Jude came indoors. “There, you
see,” he said cheerfully. “One more job yet, at any rate, and you can
help in it—at least you can try. We shall have all the church to
ourselves, as the rest of the work is finished.”
Next day Jude went out to the church, which was only two miles off. He
found that what the contractor’s clerk had said was true. The tables of
the Jewish law towered sternly over the utensils of Christian grace, as
the chief ornament of the chancel end, in the fine dry style of the
last century. And as their framework was constructed of ornamental
plaster they could not be taken down for repair. A portion, crumbled by
damp, required renewal; and when this had been done, and the whole
cleansed, he began to renew the lettering. On the second morning Sue
came to see what assistance she could render, and also because they
liked to be together.
The silence and emptiness of the building gave her confidence, and,
standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which she was
nevertheless timid at mounting, she began painting in the letters of
the first Table while he set about mending a portion of the second. She
was quite pleased at her powers; she had acquired them in the days she
painted illumined texts for the church-fitting shop at Christminster.
Nobody seemed likely to disturb them; and the pleasant twitter of
birds, and rustle of October leafage, came in through an open window,
and mingled with their talk.
They were not, however, to be left thus snug and peaceful for long.
About half-past twelve there came footsteps on the gravel without. The
old vicar and his churchwarden entered, and, coming up to see what was
being done, seemed surprised to discover that a young woman was
assisting. They passed on into an aisle, at which time the door again
opened, and another figure entered—a small one, that of little Time,
who was crying. Sue had told him where he might find her between
school-hours, if he wished. She came down from her perch, and said,
“What’s the matter, my dear?”
“I couldn’t stay to eat my dinner in school, because they said—” He
described how some boys had taunted him about his nominal mother, and
Sue, grieved, expressed her indignation to Jude aloft. The child went
into the churchyard, and Sue returned to her work. Meanwhile the door
had opened again, and there shuffled in with a businesslike air the
white-aproned woman who cleaned the church. Sue recognized her as one
who had friends in Spring Street, whom she visited. The church-cleaner
looked at Sue, gaped, and lifted her hands; she had evidently
recognized Jude’s companion as the latter had recognized her. Next came
two ladies, and after talking to the charwoman they also moved forward,
and as Sue stood reaching upward, watched her hand tracing the letters,
and critically regarded her person in relief against the white wall,
till she grew so nervous that she trembled visibly.
They went back to where the others were standing, talking in
undertones: and one said—Sue could not hear which—“She’s his wife, I
suppose?”
“Some say Yes: some say No,” was the reply from the charwoman.
“Not? Then she ought to be, or somebody’s—that’s very clear!”
“They’ve only been married a very few weeks, whether or no.”
“A strange pair to be painting the Two Tables! I wonder Biles and
Willis could think of such a thing as hiring those!”
The churchwarden supposed that Biles and Willis knew of nothing wrong,
and then the other, who had been talking to the old woman, explained
what she meant by calling them strange people.
The probable drift of the subdued conversation which followed was made
plain by the churchwarden breaking into an anecdote, in a voice that
everybody in the church could hear, though obviously suggested by the
present situation:
“Well, now, it is a curious thing, but my grandfather told me a strange
tale of a most immoral case that happened at the painting of the
Commandments in a church out by Gaymead—which is quite within a walk of
this one. In them days Commandments were mostly done in gilt letters on
a black ground, and that’s how they were out where I say, before the
owld church was rebuilded. It must have been somewhere about a hundred
years ago that them Commandments wanted doing up just as ours do here,
and they had to get men from Aldbrickham to do ’em. Now they wished to
get the job finished by a particular Sunday, so the men had to work
late Saturday night, against their will, for overtime was not paid then
as ’tis now. There was no true religion in the country at that date,
neither among pa’sons, clerks, nor people, and to keep the men up to
their work the vicar had to let ’em have plenty of drink during the
afternoon. As evening drawed on they sent for some more themselves;
rum, by all account. It got later and later, and they got more and more
fuddled, till at last they went a-putting their rum-bottle and rummers
upon the communion table, and drawed up a trestle or two, and sate
round comfortable and poured out again right hearty bumpers. No sooner
had they tossed off their glasses than, so the story goes, they fell
down senseless, one and all. How long they bode so they didn’t know,
but when they came to themselves there was a terrible thunder-storm
a-raging, and they seemed to see in the gloom a dark figure with very
thin legs and a curious voot, a-standing on the ladder, and finishing
their work. When it got daylight they could see that the work was
really finished, and couldn’t at all mind finishing it themselves. They
went home, and the next thing they heard was that a great scandal had
been caused in the church that Sunday morning, for when the people came
and service began, all saw that the Ten Commandments wez painted with
the ‘nots’ left out. Decent people wouldn’t attend service there for a
long time, and the Bishop had to be sent for to reconsecrate the
church. That’s the tradition as I used to hear it as a child. You must
take it for what it is wo’th, but this case to-day has reminded me o’t,
as I say.”
The visitors gave one more glance, as if to see whether Jude and Sue
had left the “nots” out likewise, and then severally left the church,
even the old woman at last. Sue and Jude, who had not stopped working,
sent back the child to school, and remained without speaking; till,
looking at her narrowly, he found she had been crying silently.
“Never mind, comrade!” he said. “I know what it is!”
“I can’t _bear_ that they, and everybody, should think people wicked
because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these
opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually
become immoral!”
“Never be cast down! It was only a funny story.”
“Ah, but we suggested it! I am afraid I have done you mischief, Jude,
instead of helping you by coming!”
To have suggested such a story was certainly not very exhilarating, in
a serious view of their position. However, in a few minutes Sue seemed
to see that their position this morning had a ludicrous side, and
wiping her eyes she laughed.
“It is droll, after all,” she said, “that we two, of all people, with
our queer history, should happen to be here painting the Ten
Commandments! You a reprobate, and I—in my condition… O dear!” … And
with her hand over her eyes she laughed again silently and
intermittently, till she was quite weak.
“That’s better,” said Jude gaily. “Now we are right again, aren’t we,
little girl!”
“Oh but it is serious, all the same!” she sighed as she took up the
brush and righted herself. “But do you see they don’t think we are
married? They _won’t_ believe it! It is extraordinary!”
“I don’t care whether they think so or not,” said Jude. “I shan’t take
any more trouble to make them.”
They sat down to lunch—which they had brought with them not to hinder
time—and having eaten it, were about to set to work anew when a man
entered the church, and Jude recognized in him the contractor Willis.
He beckoned to Jude, and spoke to him apart.
“Here—I’ve just had a complaint about this,” he said, with rather
breathless awkwardness. “I don’t wish to go into the matter—as of
course I didn’t know what was going on—but I am afraid I must ask you
and her to leave off, and let somebody else finish this! It is best, to
avoid all unpleasantness. I’ll pay you for the week, all the same.”
Jude was too independent to make any fuss; and the contractor paid him,
and left. Jude picked up his tools, and Sue cleansed her brush. Then
their eyes met.
“How could we be so simple as to suppose we might do this!” said she,
dropping to her tragic note. “Of course we ought not—I ought not—to
have come!”
“I had no idea that anybody was going to intrude into such a lonely
place and see us!” Jude returned. “Well, it can’t be helped, dear; and
of course I wouldn’t wish to injure Willis’s trade-connection by
staying.” They sat down passively for a few minutes, proceeded out of
the church, and overtaking the boy pursued their thoughtful way to
Aldbrickham.
Fawley had still a pretty zeal in the cause of education, and, as was
natural with his experiences, he was active in furthering “equality of
opportunity” by any humble means open to him. He had joined an
Artizans’ Mutual Improvement Society established in the town about the
time of his arrival there; its members being young men of all creeds
and denominations, including Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists,
Unitarians, Positivists, and others—Agnostics had scarcely been heard
of at this time—their one common wish to enlarge their minds forming a
sufficiently close bond of union. The subscription was small, and the
room homely; and Jude’s activity, uncustomary acquirements, and, above
all, singular intuition on what to read and how to set about
it—begotten of his years of struggle against malignant stars—had led to
his being placed on the committee.
A few evenings after his dismissal from the church repairs, and before
he had obtained any more work to do, he went to attend a meeting of the
aforesaid committee. It was late when he arrived: all the others had
come, and as he entered they looked dubiously at him, and hardly
uttered a word of greeting. He guessed that something bearing on
himself had been either discussed or mooted. Some ordinary business was
transacted, and it was disclosed that the number of subscriptions had
shown a sudden falling off for that quarter. One member—a really
well-meaning and upright man—began speaking in enigmas about certain
possible causes: that it behoved them to look well into their
constitution; for if the committee were not respected, and had not at
least, in their differences, a common standard of _conduct_, they would
bring the institution to the ground. Nothing further was said in Jude’s
presence, but he knew what this meant; and turning to the table wrote a
note resigning his office there and then.
Thus the supersensitive couple were more and more impelled to go away.
And then bills were sent in, and the question arose, what could Jude do
with his great-aunt’s heavy old furniture, if he left the town to
travel he knew not whither? This, and the necessity of ready money,
compelled him to decide on an auction, much as he would have preferred
to keep the venerable goods.
The day of the sale came on; and Sue for the last time cooked her own,
the child’s, and Jude’s breakfast in the little house he had furnished.
It chanced to be a wet day; moreover Sue was unwell, and not wishing to
desert her poor Jude in such gloomy circumstances, for he was compelled
to stay awhile, she acted on the suggestion of the auctioneer’s man,
and ensconced herself in an upper room, which could be emptied of its
effects, and so kept closed to the bidders. Here Jude discovered her;
and with the child, and their few trunks, baskets, and bundles, and two
chairs and a table that were not in the sale, the two sat in meditative
talk.
Footsteps began stamping up and down the bare stairs, the comers
inspecting the goods, some of which were of so quaint and ancient a
make as to acquire an adventitious value as art. Their door was tried
once or twice, and to guard themselves against intrusion Jude wrote
“Private” on a scrap of paper, and stuck it upon the panel.
They soon found that, instead of the furniture, their own personal
histories and past conduct began to be discussed to an unexpected and
intolerable extent by the intending bidders. It was not till now that
they really discovered what a fools’ paradise of supposed unrecognition
they had been living in of late. Sue silently took her companion’s
hand, and with eyes on each other they heard these passing remarks—the
quaint and mysterious personality of Father Time being a subject which
formed a large ingredient in the hints and innuendoes. At length the
auction began in the room below, whence they could hear each familiar
article knocked down, the highly prized ones cheaply, the unconsidered
at an unexpected price.
“People don’t understand us,” he sighed heavily. “I am glad we have
decided to go.”
“The question is, where to?”
“It ought to be to London. There one can live as one chooses.”
“No—not London, dear! I know it well. We should be unhappy there.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you think?”
“Because Arabella is there?”
“That’s the chief reason.”
“But in the country I shall always be uneasy lest there should be some
more of our late experience. And I don’t care to lessen it by
explaining, for one thing, all about the boy’s history. To cut him off
from his past I have determined to keep silence. I am sickened of
ecclesiastical work now; and I shouldn’t like to accept it, if offered
me!”
“You ought to have learnt classic. Gothic is barbaric art, after all.
Pugin was wrong, and Wren was right. Remember the interior of
Christminster Cathedral—almost the first place in which we looked in
each other’s faces. Under the picturesqueness of those Norman details
one can see the grotesque childishness of uncouth people trying to
imitate the vanished Roman forms, remembered by dim tradition only.”
“Yes—you have half-converted me to that view by what you have said
before. But one can work, and despise what one does. I must do
something, if not church-gothic.”
“I wish we could both follow an occupation in which personal
circumstances don’t count,” she said, smiling up wistfully. “I am as
disqualified for teaching as you are for ecclesiastical art. You must
fall back upon railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls,
hotels—everything that has no connection with conduct.”
“I am not skilled in those… I ought to take to bread-baking. I grew up
in the baking business with aunt, you know. But even a baker must be
conventional, to get customers.”
“Unless he keeps a cake and gingerbread stall at markets and fairs,
where people are gloriously indifferent to everything except the
quality of the goods.”
Their thoughts were diverted by the voice of the auctioneer: “Now this
antique oak settle—a unique example of old English furniture, worthy
the attention of all collectors!”
“That was my great-grandfather’s,” said Jude. “I wish we could have
kept the poor old thing!”
One by one the articles went, and the afternoon passed away. Jude and
the other two were getting tired and hungry, but after the conversation
they had heard they were shy of going out while the purchasers were in
their line of retreat. However, the later lots drew on, and it became
necessary to emerge into the rain soon, to take on Sue’s things to
their temporary lodging.
“Now the next lot: two pairs of pigeons, all alive and plump—a nice pie
for somebody for next Sunday’s dinner!”
The impending sale of these birds had been the most trying suspense of
the whole afternoon. They were Sue’s pets, and when it was found that
they could not possibly be kept, more sadness was caused than by
parting from all the furniture. Sue tried to think away her tears as
she heard the trifling sum that her dears were deemed to be worth
advanced by small stages to the price at which they were finally
knocked down. The purchaser was a neighbouring poulterer, and they were
unquestionably doomed to die before the next market day.
Noting her dissembled distress Jude kissed her, and said it was time to
go and see if the lodgings were ready. He would go on with the boy, and
fetch her soon.
When she was left alone she waited patiently, but Jude did not come
back. At last she started, the coast being clear, and on passing the
poulterer’s shop, not far off, she saw her pigeons in a hamper by the
door. An emotion at sight of them, assisted by the growing dusk of
evening, caused her to act on impulse, and first looking around her
quickly, she pulled out the peg which fastened down the cover, and went
on. The cover was lifted from within, and the pigeons flew away with a
clatter that brought the chagrined poulterer cursing and swearing to
the door.
Sue reached the lodging trembling, and found Jude and the boy making it
comfortable for her. “Do the buyers pay before they bring away the
things?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yes, I think. Why?”
“Because, then, I’ve done such a wicked thing!” And she explained, in
bitter contrition.
“I shall have to pay the poulterer for them, if he doesn’t catch them,”
said Jude. “But never mind. Don’t fret about it, dear.”
“It was so foolish of me! Oh why should Nature’s law be mutual
butchery!”
“Is it so, Mother?” asked the boy intently.
“Yes!” said Sue vehemently.
“Well, they must take their chance, now, poor things,” said Jude. “As
soon as the sale-account is wound up, and our bills paid, we go.”
“Where do we go to?” asked Time, in suspense.
“We must sail under sealed orders, that nobody may trace us… We mustn’t
go to Alfredston, or to Melchester, or to Shaston, or to Christminster.
Apart from those we may go anywhere.”
“Why mustn’t we go there, Father?”
“Because of a cloud that has gathered over us; though ‘we have wronged
no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!’ Though perhaps we have
‘done that which was right in our own eyes.’”
VII
From that week Jude Fawley and Sue walked no more in the town of
Aldbrickham.
Whither they had gone nobody knew, chiefly because nobody cared to
know. Any one sufficiently curious to trace the steps of such an
obscure pair might have discovered without great trouble that they had
taken advantage of his adaptive craftsmanship to enter on a shifting,
almost nomadic, life, which was not without its pleasantness for a
time.
Wherever Jude heard of free-stone work to be done, thither he went,
choosing by preference places remote from his old haunts and Sue’s. He
laboured at a job, long or briefly, till it was finished; and then
moved on.
Two whole years and a half passed thus. Sometimes he might have been
found shaping the mullions of a country mansion, sometimes setting the
parapet of a town-hall, sometimes ashlaring an hotel at Sandbourne,
sometimes a museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down as Exonbury,
sometimes at Stoke-Barehills. Later still he was at Kennetbridge, a
thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of Marygreen, this
being his nearest approach to the village where he was known; for he
had a sensitive dread of being questioned as to his life and fortunes
by those who had been acquainted with him during his ardent young
manhood of study and promise, and his brief and unhappy married life at
that time.
At some of these places he would be detained for months, at others only
a few weeks. His curious and sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical work,
both episcopal and noncomformist, which had risen in him when suffering
under a smarting sense of misconception, remained with him in cold
blood, less from any fear of renewed censure than from an
ultra-conscientiousness which would not allow him to seek a living out
of those who would disapprove of his ways; also, too, from a sense of
inconsistency between his former dogmas and his present practice,
hardly a shred of the beliefs with which he had first gone up to
Christminster now remaining with him. He was mentally approaching the
position which Sue had occupied when he first met her.
On a Saturday evening in May, nearly three years after Arabella’s
recognition of Sue and himself at the agricultural show, some of those
who there encountered each other met again.
It was the spring fair at Kennetbridge, and, though this ancient
trade-meeting had much dwindled from its dimensions of former times,
the long straight street of the borough presented a lively scene about
midday. At this hour a light trap, among other vehicles, was driven
into the town by the north road, and up to the door of a temperance
inn. There alighted two women, one the driver, an ordinary country
person, the other a finely built figure in the deep mourning of a
widow. Her sombre suit, of pronounced cut, caused her to appear a
little out of place in the medley and bustle of a provincial fair.
“I will just find out where it is, Anny,” said the widow-lady to her
companion, when the horse and cart had been taken by a man who came
forward: “and then I’ll come back, and meet you here; and we’ll go in
and have something to eat and drink. I begin to feel quite a sinking.”
“With all my heart,” said the other. “Though I would sooner have put up
at the Chequers or The Jack. You can’t get much at these temperance
houses.”
“Now, don’t you give way to gluttonous desires, my child,” said the
woman in weeds reprovingly. “This is the proper place. Very well: we’ll
meet in half an hour, unless you come with me to find out where the
site of the new chapel is?”
“I don’t care to. You can tell me.”
The companions then went their several ways, the one in crape walking
firmly along with a mien of disconnection from her miscellaneous
surroundings. Making inquiries she came to a hoarding, within which
were excavations denoting the foundations of a building; and on the
boards without one or two large posters announcing that the
foundation-stone of the chapel about to be erected would be laid that
afternoon at three o’clock by a London preacher of great popularity
among his body.
Having ascertained thus much the immensely weeded widow retraced her
steps, and gave herself leisure to observe the movements of the fair.
By and by her attention was arrested by a little stall of cakes and
ginger-breads, standing between the more pretentious erections of
trestles and canvas. It was covered with an immaculate cloth, and
tended by a young woman apparently unused to the business, she being
accompanied by a boy with an octogenarian face, who assisted her.
“Upon my—senses!” murmured the widow to herself. “His wife Sue—if she
is so!” She drew nearer to the stall. “How do you do, Mrs. Fawley?” she
said blandly.
Sue changed colour and recognized Arabella through the crape veil.
“How are you, Mrs. Cartlett?” she said stiffly. And then perceiving
Arabella’s garb her voice grew sympathetic in spite of herself.
“What?—you have lost—”
“My poor husband. Yes. He died suddenly, six weeks ago, leaving me none
too well off, though he was a kind husband to me. But whatever profit
there is in public-house keeping goes to them that brew the liquors,
and not to them that retail ’em… And you, my little old man! You don’t
know me, I expect?”
“Yes, I do. You be the woman I thought wer my mother for a bit, till I
found you wasn’t,” replied Father Time, who had learned to use the
Wessex tongue quite naturally by now.
“All right. Never mind. I am a friend.”
“Juey,” said Sue suddenly, “go down to the station platform with this
tray—there’s another train coming in, I think.”
When he was gone Arabella continued: “He’ll never be a beauty, will he,
poor chap! Does he know I am his mother really?”
“No. He thinks there is some mystery about his parentage—that’s all.
Jude is going to tell him when he is a little older.”
“But how do you come to be doing this? I am surprised.”
“It is only a temporary occupation—a fancy of ours while we are in a
difficulty.”
“Then you are living with him still?”
“Yes.”
“Married?”
“Of course.”
“Any children?”
“Two.”
“And another coming soon, I see.”
Sue writhed under the hard and direct questioning, and her tender
little mouth began to quiver.
“Lord—I mean goodness gracious—what is there to cry about? Some folks
would be proud enough!”
“It is not that I am ashamed—not as you think! But it seems such a
terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world—so
presumptuous—that I question my right to do it sometimes!”
“Take it easy, my dear… But you don’t tell me why you do such a thing
as this? Jude used to be a proud sort of chap—above any business
almost, leave alone keeping a standing.”
“Perhaps my husband has altered a little since then. I am sure he is
not proud now!” And Sue’s lips quivered again. “I am doing this because
he caught a chill early in the year while putting up some stonework of
a music-hall, at Quartershot, which he had to do in the rain, the work
having to be executed by a fixed day. He is better than he was; but it
has been a long, weary time! We have had an old widow friend with us to
help us through it; but she’s leaving soon.”
“Well, I am respectable too, thank God, and of a serious way of
thinking since my loss. Why did you choose to sell gingerbreads?”
“That’s a pure accident. He was brought up to the baking business, and
it occurred to him to try his hand at these, which he can make without
coming out of doors. We call them Christminster cakes. They are a great
success.”
“I never saw any like ’em. Why, they are windows and towers, and
pinnacles! And upon my word they are very nice.” She had helped
herself, and was unceremoniously munching one of the cakes.
“Yes. They are reminiscences of the Christminster Colleges. Traceried
windows, and cloisters, you see. It was a whim of his to do them in
pastry.”
“Still harping on Christminster—even in his cakes!” laughed Arabella.
“Just like Jude. A ruling passion. What a queer fellow he is, and
always will be!”
Sue sighed, and she looked her distress at hearing him criticized.
“Don’t you think he is? Come now; you do, though you are so fond of
him!”
“Of course Christminster is a sort of fixed vision with him, which I
suppose he’ll never be cured of believing in. He still thinks it a
great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a
nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid
obsequiousness to tradition.”
Arabella was quizzing Sue with more regard of how she was speaking than
of what she was saying. “How odd to hear a woman selling cakes talk
like that!” she said. “Why don’t you go back to school-keeping?”
She shook her head. “They won’t have me.”
“Because of the divorce, I suppose?”
“That and other things. And there is no reason to wish it. We gave up
all ambition, and were never so happy in our lives till his illness
came.”
“Where are you living?”
“I don’t care to say.”
“Here in Kennetbridge?”
Sue’s manner showed Arabella that her random guess was right.
“Here comes the boy back again,” continued Arabella. “My boy and
Jude’s!”
Sue’s eyes darted a spark. “You needn’t throw that in my face!” she
cried.
“Very well—though I half-feel as if I should like to have him with me!
… But Lord, I don’t want to take him from ’ee—ever I should sin to
speak so profane—though I should think you must have enough of your
own! He’s in very good hands, that I know; and I am not the woman to
find fault with what the Lord has ordained. I’ve reached a more
resigned frame of mind.”
“Indeed! I wish I had been able to do so.”
“You should try,” replied the widow, from the serene heights of a soul
conscious not only of spiritual but of social superiority. “I make no
boast of my awakening, but I’m not what I was. After Cartlett’s death I
was passing the chapel in the street next ours, and went into it for
shelter from a shower of rain. I felt a need of some sort of support
under my loss, and, as ’twas righter than gin, I took to going there
regular, and found it a great comfort. But I’ve left London now, you
know, and at present I am living at Alfredston, with my friend Anny, to
be near my own old country. I’m not come here to the fair to-day.
There’s to be the foundation-stone of a new chapel laid this afternoon
by a popular London preacher, and I drove over with Anny. Now I must go
back to meet her.”
Then Arabella wished Sue good-bye, and went on.
VIII
In the afternoon Sue and the other people bustling about Kennetbridge
fair could hear singing inside the placarded hoarding farther down the
street. Those who peeped through the opening saw a crowd of persons in
broadcloth, with hymn-books in their hands, standing round the
excavations for the new chapel-walls. Arabella Cartlett and her weeds
stood among them. She had a clear, powerful voice, which could be
distinctly heard with the rest, rising and falling to the tune, her
inflated bosom being also seen doing likewise.
It was two hours later on the same day that Anny and Mrs. Cartlett,
having had tea at the Temperance Hotel, started on their return journey
across the high and open country which stretches between Kennetbridge
and Alfredston. Arabella was in a thoughtful mood; but her thoughts
were not of the new chapel, as Anny at first surmised.
“No—it is something else,” at last said Arabella sullenly. “I came here
to-day never thinking of anybody but poor Cartlett, or of anything but
spreading the Gospel by means of this new tabernacle they’ve begun this
afternoon. But something has happened to turn my mind another way
quite. Anny, I’ve heard of un again, and I’ve seen _her_!”
“Who?”
“I’ve heard of Jude, and I’ve seen his wife. And ever since, do what I
will, and though I sung the hymns wi’ all my strength, I have not been
able to help thinking about ’n; which I’ve no right to do as a chapel
member.”
“Can’t ye fix your mind upon what was said by the London preacher
to-day, and try to get rid of your wandering fancies that way?”
“I do. But my wicked heart will ramble off in spite of myself!”
“Well—I know what it is to have a wanton mind o’ my own, too! If you
on’y knew what I do dream sometimes o’ nights quite against my wishes,
you’d say I had my struggles!” (Anny, too, had grown rather serious of
late, her lover having jilted her.)
“What shall I do about it?” urged Arabella morbidly.
“You could take a lock of your late-lost husband’s hair, and have it
made into a mourning brooch, and look at it every hour of the day.”
“I haven’t a morsel!—and if I had ’twould be no good… After all that’s
said about the comforts of this religion, I wish I had Jude back
again!”
“You must fight valiant against the feeling, since he’s another’s. And
I’ve heard that another good thing for it, when it afflicts volupshious
widows, is to go to your husband’s grave in the dusk of evening, and
stand a long while a-bowed down.”
“Pooh! I know as well as you what I should do; only I don’t do it!”
They drove in silence along the straight road till they were within the
horizon of Marygreen, which lay not far to the left of their route.
They came to the junction of the highway and the cross-lane leading to
that village, whose church-tower could be seen athwart the hollow. When
they got yet farther on, and were passing the lonely house in which
Arabella and Jude had lived during the first months of their marriage,
and where the pig-killing had taken place, she could control herself no
longer.
“He’s more mine than hers!” she burst out. “What right has she to him,
I should like to know! I’d take him from her if I could!”
“Fie, Abby! And your husband only six weeks gone! Pray against it!”
“Be damned if I do! Feelings are feelings! I won’t be a creeping
hypocrite any longer—so there!”
Arabella had hastily drawn from her pocket a bundle of tracts which she
had brought with her to distribute at the fair, and of which she had
given away several. As she spoke she flung the whole remainder of the
packet into the hedge. “I’ve tried that sort o’ physic and have failed
wi’ it. I must be as I was born!”
“Hush! You be excited, dear! Now you come along home quiet, and have a
cup of tea, and don’t let us talk about un no more. We won’t come out
this road again, as it leads to where he is, because it inflames ’ee
so. You’ll be all right again soon.”
Arabella did calm herself down by degrees; and they crossed the
ridge-way. When they began to descend the long, straight hill, they saw
plodding along in front of them an elderly man of spare stature and
thoughtful gait. In his hand he carried a basket; and there was a touch
of slovenliness in his attire, together with that indefinable something
in his whole appearance which suggested one who was his own
housekeeper, purveyor, confidant, and friend, through possessing nobody
else at all in the world to act in those capacities for him. The
remainder of the journey was down-hill, and guessing him to be going to
Alfredston they offered him a lift, which he accepted.
Arabella looked at him, and looked again, till at length she spoke. “If
I don’t mistake I am talking to Mr. Phillotson?”
The wayfarer faced round and regarded her in turn. “Yes; my name is
Phillotson,” he said. “But I don’t recognize you, ma’am.”
“I remember you well enough when you used to be schoolmaster out at
Marygreen, and I one of your scholars. I used to walk up there from
Cresscombe every day, because we had only a mistress down at our place,
and you taught better. But you wouldn’t remember me as I should
you?—Arabella Donn.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said politely, “I don’t recall the name.
And I should hardly recognize in your present portly self the slim
school child no doubt you were then.”
“Well, I always had plenty of flesh on my bones. However, I am staying
down here with some friends at present. You know, I suppose, who I
married?”
“No.”
“Jude Fawley—also a scholar of yours—at least a night scholar—for some
little time, I think? And known to you afterwards, if I am not
mistaken.”
“Dear me, dear me,” said Phillotson, starting out of his stiffness.
“_You_ Fawley’s wife? To be sure—he had a wife! And he—I understood—”
“Divorced her—as you did yours—perhaps for better reasons.”
“Indeed?”
“Well—he med have been right in doing it—right for both; for I soon
married again, and all went pretty straight till my husband died
lately. But you—you were decidedly wrong!”
“No,” said Phillotson, with sudden testiness. “I would rather not talk
of this, but—I am convinced I did only what was right, and just, and
moral. I have suffered for my act and opinions, but I hold to them;
though her loss was a loss to me in more ways than one!”
“You lost your school and good income through her, did you not?”
“I don’t care to talk of it. I have recently come back here—to
Marygreen. I mean.”
“You are keeping the school there again, just as formerly?”
The pressure of a sadness that would out unsealed him. “I am there,” he
replied. “Just as formerly, no. Merely on sufferance. It was a last
resource—a small thing to return to after my move upwards, and my long
indulged hopes—a returning to zero, with all its humiliations. But it
is a refuge. I like the seclusion of the place, and the vicar having
known me before my so-called eccentric conduct towards my wife had
ruined my reputation as a schoolmaster, he accepted my services when
all other schools were closed against me. However, although I take
fifty pounds a year here after taking above two hundred elsewhere, I
prefer it to running the risk of having my old domestic experiences
raked up against me, as I should do if I tried to make a move.”
“Right you are. A contented mind is a continual feast. She has done no
better.”
“She is not doing well, you mean?”
“I met her by accident at Kennetbridge this very day, and she is
anything but thriving. Her husband is ill, and she anxious. You made a
fool of a mistake about her, I tell ’ee again, and the harm you did
yourself by dirting your own nest serves you right, excusing the
liberty.”
“How?”
“She was innocent.”
“But nonsense! They did not even defend the case!”
“That was because they didn’t care to. She was quite innocent of what
obtained you your freedom, at the time you obtained it. I saw her just
afterwards, and proved it to myself completely by talking to her.”
Phillotson grasped the edge of the spring-cart, and appeared to be much
stressed and worried by the information. “Still—she wanted to go,” he
said.
“Yes. But you shouldn’t have let her. That’s the only way with these
fanciful women that chaw high—innocent or guilty. She’d have come round
in time. We all do! Custom does it! It’s all the same in the end!
However, I think she’s fond of her man still—whatever he med be of her.
You were too quick about her. _I_ shouldn’t have let her go! I should
have kept her chained on—her spirit for kicking would have been broke
soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster
for taming us women. Besides, you’ve got the laws on your side. Moses
knew. Don’t you call to mind what he says?”
“Not for the moment, ma’am, I regret to say.”
“Call yourself a schoolmaster! I used to think o’t when they read it in
church, and I was carrying on a bit. ‘Then shall the man be guiltless;
but the woman shall bear her iniquity.’ Damn rough on us women; but we
must grin and put up wi’ it! Haw haw! Well; she’s got her deserts now.”
“Yes,” said Phillotson, with biting sadness. “Cruelty is the law
pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we
would!”
“Well—don’t you forget to try it next time, old man.”
“I cannot answer you, madam. I have never known much of womankind.”
They had now reached the low levels bordering Alfredston, and passing
through the outskirts approached a mill, to which Phillotson said his
errand led him; whereupon they drew up, and he alighted, bidding them
good-night in a preoccupied mood.
In the meantime Sue, though remarkably successful in her cake-selling
experiment at Kennetbridge fair, had lost the temporary brightness
which had begun to sit upon her sadness on account of that success.
When all her “Christminster” cakes had been disposed of she took upon
her arm the empty basket, and the cloth which had covered the standing
she had hired, and giving the other things to the boy left the street
with him. They followed a lane to a distance of half a mile, till they
met an old woman carrying a child in short clothes, and leading a
toddler in the other hand.
Sue kissed the children, and said, “How is he now?”
“Still better!” returned Mrs. Edlin cheerfully. “Before you are
upstairs again your husband will be well enough—don’t ’ee trouble.”
They turned, and came to some old, dun-tiled cottages with gardens and
fruit-trees. Into one of these they entered by lifting the latch
without knocking, and were at once in the general living-room. Here
they greeted Jude, who was sitting in an arm-chair, the increased
delicacy of his normally delicate features, and the childishly
expectant look in his eyes, being alone sufficient to show that he had
been passing through a severe illness.
“What—you have sold them all?” he said, a gleam of interest lighting up
his face.
“Yes. Arcades, gables, east windows and all.” She told him the
pecuniary results, and then hesitated. At last, when they were left
alone, she informed him of the unexpected meeting with Arabella, and
the latter’s widowhood.
Jude was discomposed. “What—is she living here?” he said.
“No; at Alfredston,” said Sue.
Jude’s countenance remained clouded. “I thought I had better tell you?”
she continued, kissing him anxiously.
“Yes… Dear me! Arabella not in the depths of London, but down here! It
is only a little over a dozen miles across the country to Alfredston.
What is she doing there?”
She told him all she knew. “She has taken to chapel-going,” Sue added;
“and talks accordingly.”
“Well,” said Jude, “perhaps it is for the best that we have almost
decided to move on. I feel much better to-day, and shall be well enough
to leave in a week or two. Then Mrs. Edlin can go home again—dear
faithful old soul—the only friend we have in the world!”
“Where do you think to go to?” Sue asked, a troublousness in her tones.
Then Jude confessed what was in his mind. He said it would surprise
her, perhaps, after his having resolutely avoided all the old places
for so long. But one thing and another had made him think a great deal
of Christminster lately, and, if she didn’t mind, he would like to go
back there. Why should they care if they were known? It was
oversensitive of them to mind so much. They could go on selling cakes
there, for that matter, if he couldn’t work. He had no sense of shame
at mere poverty; and perhaps he would be as strong as ever soon, and
able to set up stone-cutting for himself there.
“Why should you care so much for Christminster?” she said pensively.
“Christminster cares nothing for you, poor dear!”
“Well, I do, I can’t help it. I love the place—although I know how it
hates all men like me—the so-called self-taught—how it scorns our
laboured acquisitions, when it should be the first to respect them; how
it sneers at our false quantities and mispronunciations, when it should
say, I see you want help, my poor friend! … Nevertheless, it is the
centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream: and nothing
can alter it. Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous. I pray so!
… I should like to go back to live there—perhaps to die there! In two
or three weeks I might, I think. It will then be June, and I should
like to be there by a particular day.”
His hope that he was recovering proved so far well grounded that in
three weeks they had arrived in the city of many memories; were
actually treading its pavements, receiving the reflection of the
sunshine from its wasting walls.
Part Sixth AT CHRISTMINSTER AGAIN
_“… And she humbled her body greatly, and all the places of her joy she
filled with her torn hair.”_—ESTHER (Apoc.).
_“There are two who decline, a woman and I,_
_And enjoy our death in the darkness here.”_
—R. BROWNING.
I
On their arrival the station was lively with straw-hatted young men,
welcoming young girls who bore a remarkable family likeness to their
welcomers, and who were dressed up in the brightest and lightest of
raiment.
“The place seems gay,” said Sue. “Why—it is Remembrance Day!—Jude—how
sly of you—you came to-day on purpose!”
“Yes,” said Jude quietly, as he took charge of the small child, and
told Arabella’s boy to keep close to them, Sue attending to their own
eldest. “I thought we might as well come to-day as on any other.”
“But I am afraid it will depress you!” she said, looking anxiously at
him up and down.
“Oh, I mustn’t let it interfere with our business; and we have a good
deal to do before we shall be settled here. The first thing is
lodgings.”
Having left their luggage and his tools at the station they proceeded
on foot up the familiar street, the holiday people all drifting in the
same direction. Reaching the Fourways they were about to turn off to
where accommodation was likely to be found when, looking at the clock
and the hurrying crowd, Jude said: “Let us go and see the procession,
and never mind the lodgings just now. We can get them afterwards.”
“Oughtn’t we to get a house over our heads first?” she asked.
But his soul seemed full of the anniversary, and together they went
down Chief Street, their smallest child in Jude’s arms, Sue leading her
little girl, and Arabella’s boy walking thoughtfully and silently
beside them. Crowds of pretty sisters in airy costumes, and meekly
ignorant parents who had known no college in their youth, were under
convoy in the same direction by brothers and sons bearing the opinion
written large on them that no properly qualified human beings had lived
on earth till they came to grace it here and now.
“My failure is reflected on me by every one of those young fellows,”
said Jude. “A lesson on presumption is awaiting me to-day!—Humiliation
Day for me! … If you, my dear darling, hadn’t come to my rescue, I
should have gone to the dogs with despair!”
She saw from his face that he was getting into one of his tempestuous,
self-harrowing moods. “It would have been better if we had gone at once
about our own affairs, dear,” she answered. “I am sure this sight will
awaken old sorrows in you, and do no good!”
“Well—we are near; we will see it now,” said he.
They turned in on the left by the church with the Italian porch, whose
helical columns were heavily draped with creepers, and pursued the lane
till there arose on Jude’s sight the circular theatre with that
well-known lantern above it, which stood in his mind as the sad symbol
of his abandoned hopes, for it was from that outlook that he had
finally surveyed the City of Colleges on the afternoon of his great
meditation, which convinced him at last of the futility of his attempt
to be a son of the university.
To-day, in the open space stretching between this building and the
nearest college, stood a crowd of expectant people. A passage was kept
clear through their midst by two barriers of timber, extending from the
door of the college to the door of the large building between it and
the theatre.
“Here is the place—they are just going to pass!” cried Jude in sudden
excitement. And pushing his way to the front he took up a position
close to the barrier, still hugging the youngest child in his arms,
while Sue and the others kept immediately behind him. The crowd filled
in at their back, and fell to talking, joking, and laughing as carriage
after carriage drew up at the lower door of the college, and solemn
stately figures in blood-red robes began to alight. The sky had grown
overcast and livid, and thunder rumbled now and then.
Father Time shuddered. “It do seem like the Judgment Day!” he
whispered.
“They are only learned Doctors,” said Sue.
While they waited big drops of rain fell on their heads and shoulders,
and the delay grew tedious. Sue again wished not to stay.
“They won’t be long now,” said Jude, without turning his head.
But the procession did not come forth, and somebody in the crowd, to
pass the time, looked at the façade of the nearest college, and said he
wondered what was meant by the Latin inscription in its midst. Jude,
who stood near the inquirer, explained it, and finding that the people
all round him were listening with interest, went on to describe the
carving of the frieze (which he had studied years before), and to
criticize some details of masonry in other college fronts about the
city.
The idle crowd, including the two policemen at the doors, stared like
the Lycaonians at Paul, for Jude was apt to get too enthusiastic over
any subject in hand, and they seemed to wonder how the stranger should
know more about the buildings of their town than they themselves did;
till one of them said: “Why, I know that man; he used to work here
years ago—Jude Fawley, that’s his name! Don’t you mind he used to be
nicknamed Tutor of St. Slums, d’ye mind?—because he aimed at that line
o’ business? He’s married, I suppose, then, and that’s his child he’s
carrying. Taylor would know him, as he knows everybody.”
The speaker was a man named Jack Stagg, with whom Jude had formerly
worked in repairing the college masonries; Tinker Taylor was seen to be
standing near. Having his attention called the latter cried across the
barriers to Jude: “You’ve honoured us by coming back again, my friend!”
Jude nodded.
“An’ you don’t seem to have done any great things for yourself by going
away?”
Jude assented to this also.
“Except found more mouths to fill!” This came in a new voice, and Jude
recognized its owner to be Uncle Joe, another mason whom he had known.
Jude replied good-humouredly that he could not dispute it; and from
remark to remark something like a general conversation arose between
him and the crowd of idlers, during which Tinker Taylor asked Jude if
he remembered the Apostles’ Creed in Latin still, and the night of the
challenge in the public house.
“But Fortune didn’t lie that way?” threw in Joe. “Yer powers wasn’t
enough to carry ’ee through?”
“Don’t answer them any more!” entreated Sue.
“I don’t think I like Christminster!” murmured little Time mournfully,
as he stood submerged and invisible in the crowd.
But finding himself the centre of curiosity, quizzing, and comment,
Jude was not inclined to shrink from open declarations of what he had
no great reason to be ashamed of; and in a little while was stimulated
to say in a loud voice to the listening throng generally:
“It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man—that
question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the
present moment in these uprising times—whether to follow uncritically
the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it,
or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course
accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don’t admit
that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success
would have made it a right one; though that’s how we appraise such
attempts nowadays—I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by
their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these
gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now,
everybody would have said: ‘See how wise that young man was, to follow
the bent of his nature!’ But having ended no better than I began they
say: ‘See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his
fancy!’
“However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten.
It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and
my impulses—affections—vices perhaps they should be called—were too
strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as
cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good
chance of being one of his country’s worthies. You may ridicule me—I am
quite willing that you should—I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think
if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would
rather pity me. And if they knew”—he nodded towards the college at
which the dons were severally arriving—“it is just possible they would
do the same.”
“He do look ill and worn-out, it is true!” said a woman.
Sue’s face grew more emotional; but though she stood close to Jude she
was screened.
“I may do some good before I am dead—be a sort of success as a
frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story,”
continued Jude, beginning to grow bitter, though he had opened serenely
enough. “I was, perhaps, after all, a paltry victim to the spirit of
mental and social restlessness that makes so many unhappy in these
days!”
“Don’t tell them that!” whispered Sue with tears, at perceiving Jude’s
state of mind. “You weren’t that. You struggled nobly to acquire
knowledge, and only the meanest souls in the world would blame you!”
Jude shifted the child into a more easy position on his arm, and
concluded: “And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of
me. I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by
instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came
here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away
one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have
anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations
which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to
those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was
getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain
further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our
social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with
greater insight than mine—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least in
our time. ‘For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?—and who
can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?’”
“Hear, hear,” said the populace.
“Well preached!” said Tinker Taylor. And privately to his neighbours:
“Why, one of them jobbing pa’sons swarming about here, that takes the
services when our head reverends want a holiday, wouldn’t ha’
discoursed such doctrine for less than a guinea down. Hey? I’ll take my
oath not one o’ ’em would! And then he must have had it wrote down for
’n. And this only a working-man!”
As a sort of objective commentary on Jude’s remarks there drove up at
this moment with a belated Doctor, robed and panting, a cab whose horse
failed to stop at the exact point required for setting down the hirer,
who jumped out and entered the door. The driver, alighting, began to
kick the animal in the belly.
“If that can be done,” said Jude, “at college gates in the most
religious and educational city in the world, what shall we say as to
how far we’ve got?”
“Order!” said one of the policemen, who had been engaged with a comrade
in opening the large doors opposite the college. “Keep yer tongue
quiet, my man, while the procession passes.” The rain came on more
heavily, and all who had umbrellas opened them. Jude was not one of
these, and Sue only possessed a small one, half sunshade. She had grown
pale, though Jude did not notice it then.
“Let us go on, dear,” she whispered, endeavouring to shelter him. “We
haven’t any lodgings yet, remember, and all our things are at the
station; and you are by no means well yet. I am afraid this wet will
hurt you!”
“They are coming now. Just a moment, and I’ll go!” said he.
A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd the windows
around, and the procession of heads of houses and new Doctors emerged,
their red and black gowned forms passing across the field of Jude’s
vision like inaccessible planets across an object-glass.
As they went their names were called by knowing informants, and when
they reached the old round theatre of Wren a cheer rose high.
“Let’s go that way!” cried Jude, and though it now rained steadily he
seemed not to know it, and took them round to the theatre. Here they
stood upon the straw that was laid to drown the discordant noise of
wheels, where the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the
building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in
particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at
ludicrous persons who had no business there.
“I wish I could get in!” he said to her fervidly. “Listen—I may catch a
few words of the Latin speech by staying here; the windows are open.”
However, beyond the peals of the organ, and the shouts and hurrahs
between each piece of oratory, Jude’s standing in the wet did not bring
much Latin to his intelligence more than, now and then, a sonorous word
in _um_ or _ibus_.
“Well—I’m an outsider to the end of my days!” he sighed after a while.
“Now I’ll go, my patient Sue. How good of you to wait in the rain all
this time—to gratify my infatuation! I’ll never care any more about the
infernal cursed place, upon my soul I won’t! But what made you tremble
so when we were at the barrier? And how pale you are, Sue!”
“I saw Richard amongst the people on the other side.”
“Ah—did you!”
“He is evidently come up to Jerusalem to see the festival like the rest
of us: and on that account is probably living not so very far away. He
had the same hankering for the university that you had, in a milder
form. I don’t think he saw me, though he must have heard you speaking
to the crowd. But he seemed not to notice.”
“Well—suppose he did. Your mind is free from worries about him now, my
Sue?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But I am weak. Although I know it is all right with
our plans, I felt a curious dread of him; an awe, or terror, of
conventions I don’t believe in. It comes over me at times like a sort
of creeping paralysis, and makes me so sad!”
“You are getting tired, Sue. Oh—I forgot, darling! Yes, we’ll go on at
once.”
They started in quest of the lodging, and at last found something that
seemed to promise well, in Mildew Lane—a spot which to Jude was
irresistible—though to Sue it was not so fascinating—a narrow lane
close to the back of a college, but having no communication with it.
The little houses were darkened to gloom by the high collegiate
buildings, within which life was so far removed from that of the people
in the lane as if it had been on opposite sides of the globe; yet only
a thickness of wall divided them. Two or three of the houses had
notices of rooms to let, and the newcomers knocked at the door of one,
which a woman opened.
“Ah—listen!” said Jude suddenly, instead of addressing her.
“What?”
“Why the bells—what church can that be? The tones are familiar.”
Another peal of bells had begun to sound out at some distance off.
“I don’t know!” said the landlady tartly. “Did you knock to ask that?”
“No; for lodgings,” said Jude, coming to himself.
The householder scrutinized Sue’s figure a moment. “We haven’t any to
let,” said she, shutting the door.
Jude looked discomfited, and the boy distressed. “Now, Jude,” said Sue,
“let me try. You don’t know the way.”
They found a second place hard by; but here the occupier, observing not
only Sue, but the boy and the small children, said civilly, “I am sorry
to say we don’t let where there are children”; and also closed the
door.
The small child squared its mouth and cried silently, with an instinct
that trouble loomed. The boy sighed. “I don’t like Christminster!” he
said. “Are the great old houses gaols?”
“No; colleges,” said Jude; “which perhaps you’ll study in some day.”
“I’d rather not!” the boy rejoined.
“Now we’ll try again,” said Sue. “I’ll pull my cloak more round me…
Leaving Kennetbridge for this place is like coming from Caiaphas to
Pilate! … How do I look now, dear?”
“Nobody would notice it now,” said Jude.
There was one other house, and they tried a third time. The woman here
was more amiable; but she had little room to spare, and could only
agree to take in Sue and the children if her husband could go
elsewhere. This arrangement they perforce adopted, in the stress from
delaying their search till so late. They came to terms with her, though
her price was rather high for their pockets. But they could not afford
to be critical till Jude had time to get a more permanent abode; and in
this house Sue took possession of a back room on the second floor with
an inner closet-room for the children. Jude stayed and had a cup of
tea; and was pleased to find that the window commanded the back of
another of the colleges. Kissing all four he went to get a few
necessaries and look for lodgings for himself.
When he was gone the landlady came up to talk a little with Sue, and
gather something of the circumstances of the family she had taken in.
Sue had not the art of prevarication, and, after admitting several
facts as to their late difficulties and wanderings, she was startled by
the landlady saying suddenly:
“Are you really a married woman?”
Sue hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that her husband and
herself had each been unhappy in their first marriages, after which,
terrified at the thought of a second irrevocable union, and lest the
conditions of the contract should kill their love, yet wishing to be
together, they had literally not found the courage to repeat it, though
they had attempted it two or three times. Therefore, though in her own
sense of the words she was a married woman, in the landlady’s sense she
was not.
The housewife looked embarrassed, and went downstairs. Sue sat by the
window in a reverie, watching the rain. Her quiet was broken by the
noise of someone entering the house, and then the voices of a man and
woman in conversation in the passage below. The landlady’s husband had
arrived, and she was explaining to him the incoming of the lodgers
during his absence.
His voice rose in sudden anger. “Now who wants such a woman here? and
perhaps a confinement! … Besides, didn’t I say I wouldn’t have
children? The hall and stairs fresh painted, to be kicked about by
them! You must have known all was not straight with ’em—coming like
that. Taking in a family when I said a single man.”
The wife expostulated, but, as it seemed, the husband insisted on his
point; for presently a tap came to Sue’s door, and the woman appeared.
“I am sorry to tell you, ma’am,” she said, “that I can’t let you have
the room for the week after all. My husband objects; and therefore I
must ask you to go. I don’t mind your staying over to-night, as it is
getting late in the afternoon; but I shall be glad if you can leave
early in the morning.”
Though she knew that she was entitled to the lodging for a week, Sue
did not wish to create a disturbance between the wife and husband, and
she said she would leave as requested. When the landlady had gone Sue
looked out of the window again. Finding that the rain had ceased she
proposed to the boy that, after putting the little ones to bed, they
should go out and search about for another place, and bespeak it for
the morrow, so as not to be so hard-driven then as they had been that
day.
Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just been sent on
from the station by Jude, they sallied out into the damp though not
unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not to disturb her husband with the
news of her notice to quit while he was perhaps worried in obtaining a
lodging for himself. In the company of the boy she wandered into this
street and into that; but though she tried a dozen different houses she
fared far worse alone than she had fared in Jude’s company, and could
get nobody to promise her a room for the following day. Every
householder looked askance at such a woman and child inquiring for
accommodation in the gloom.
“I ought not to be born, ought I?” said the boy with misgiving.
Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where she was not
welcome, but where at least she had temporary shelter. In her absence
Jude had left his address; but knowing how weak he still was she
adhered to her determination not to disturb him till the next day.
II
Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the scene
outside the uncurtained window. At some distance opposite, the outer
walls of Sarcophagus College—silent, black, and windowless—threw their
four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she
occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by day. The
outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond the other, and
the tower of a third farther off still. She thought of the strange
operation of a simple-minded man’s ruling passion, that it should have
led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly, to place them
here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still haunted by his
dream. Even now he did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that
those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house
for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy—a brooding
undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was
broken by his saying: “Mother, _what_ shall we do to-morrow!”
“I don’t know!” said Sue despondently. “I am afraid this will trouble
your father.”
“I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it
wouldn’t matter so much! Poor Father!”
“It wouldn’t!”
“Can I do anything?”
“No! All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!”
“Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?”
“Partly.”
“It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?”
“It would almost, dear.”
“’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t get a good
lodging?”
“Well—people do object to children sometimes.”
“Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?”
“Oh—because it is a law of nature.”
“But we don’t ask to be born?”
“No indeed.”
“And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,
and you needn’t have had me unless you liked. I oughtn’t to have come
to ’ee—that’s the real truth! I troubled ’em in Australia, and I
trouble folk here. I wish I hadn’t been born!”
“You couldn’t help it, my dear.”
“I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should
be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to
grow big and walk about!”
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too
reflective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she
would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties
like an aged friend.
“There is going to be another in our family soon,” she hesitatingly
remarked.
“How?”
“There is going to be another baby.”
“What!” The boy jumped up wildly. “Oh God, Mother, you’ve never a-sent
for another; and such trouble with what you’ve got!”
“Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!” murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.
The boy burst out weeping. “Oh you don’t care, you don’t care!” he
cried in bitter reproach. “How _ever_ could you, Mother, be so wicked
and cruel as this, when you needn’t have done it till we was better
off, and Father well! To bring us all into _more_ trouble! No room for
us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow; and
yet you be going to have another of us soon! … ’Tis done o’
purpose!—’tis—’tis!” He walked up and down sobbing.
“Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!” she pleaded, her bosom heaving
now as much as the boy’s. “I can’t explain—I will when you are older.
It does seem—as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in these
difficulties! I can’t explain, dear! But it—is not quite on purpose—I
can’t help it!”
“Yes it is—it must be! For nobody would interfere with us, like that,
unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever, ever! I’ll never believe
you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!”
He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which a
bed had been spread on the floor. There she heard him say: “If we
children was gone there’d be no trouble at all!”
“Don’t think that, dear,” she cried, rather peremptorily. “But go to
sleep!”
The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided to
get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had
informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before
he went out. She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children, who,
as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.
She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a
counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him
her homelessness. He had been so anxious about her all night, he said.
Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings did not
seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night before, nor
did even her failure to find another place affect her so deeply as at
first. Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth while to insist
upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate steps for removal.
“You must all come to this inn for a day or two,” he said. “It is a
rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we shall
have more time to look round. There are plenty of lodgings in the
suburbs—in my old quarter of Beersheba. Have breakfast with me now you
are here, my bird. You are sure you are well? There will be plenty of
time to get back and prepare the children’s meal before they wake. In
fact, I’ll go with you.”
She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they
started together, resolving to clear out from Sue’s too respectable
lodging immediately. On reaching the place and going upstairs she found
that all was quiet in the children’s room, and called to the landlady
in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and something for
their breakfast. This was perfunctorily done, and producing a couple of
eggs which she had brought with her she put them into the boiling
kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the youngsters, while she
went to call them, it being now about half-past eight o’clock.
Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand, timing
the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner chamber where
the children lay. A shriek from Sue suddenly caused him to start round.
He saw that the door of the room, or rather closet—which had seemed to
go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed it back—was open, and that Sue
had sunk to the floor just within it. Hastening forward to pick her up
he turned his eyes to the little bed spread on the boards; no children
were there. He looked in bewilderment round the room. At the back of
the door were fixed two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the
forms of the two youngest children were suspended, by a piece of
box-cord round each of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off
the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An overturned
chair was near the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the
room; but those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.
Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene, he
let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three
children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary
handling seemed to say that they were dead. He caught up Sue, who was
in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after which
he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.
When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless women,
bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them, and the
triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew his
self-command. The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had inferred,
his presence was superfluous. The children were past saving, for though
their bodies were still barely cold it was conjectured that they had
been hanging more than an hour. The probability held by the parents
later on, when they were able to reason on the case, was that the elder
boy, on waking, looked into the outer room for Sue, and, finding her
absent, was thrown into a fit of aggravated despondency that the events
and information of the evening before had induced in his morbid
temperament. Moreover a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on
which was written, in the boy’s hand, with the bit of lead pencil that
he carried:
_Done because we are too menny._
At sight of this Sue’s nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy,
throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abatement. They
carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower floor; and
there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and her eyes
staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying to soothe
her.
They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and
she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing so
by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might do
harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of herself
lest she should endanger a coming life. Her inquiries were incessant,
and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope. As soon as
she could speak she informed him what she had said to the boy, and how
she thought herself the cause of this.
“No,” said Jude. “It was in his nature to do it. The Doctor says there
are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the
last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all
its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist
them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to
live. He’s an advanced man, the Doctor: but he can give no consolation
to—”
Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke
down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some
degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When everybody
was gone, she was allowed to see the children.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that
little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which
had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes,
fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their
expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had
groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the
misfortunes of these he had died.
When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the
coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of
the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.
“What is it?” said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.
“The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose.
It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; ‘Truly God is loving unto
Israel.’”
She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should
they have been taken away, and not I!”
There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.
“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”
Jude listened—“No—they are not talking of us,” he said. “They are two
clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good
God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!”
Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable
fit of grief. “There is something external to us which says, ‘You
shan’t!’ First it said, ‘You shan’t learn!’ Then it said, ‘You shan’t
labour!’ Now it says, ‘You shan’t love!’”
He tried to soothe her by saying, “That’s bitter of you, darling.”
“But it’s true!”
Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The baby’s
frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time of
his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain have
got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched them she implored
him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the
house when she also attempted to put them away.
Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms. “Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?” she cried out, after one
of these. “Don’t turn away from me! I can’t _bear_ the loneliness of
being out of your looks!”
“There, dear; here I am,” he said, putting his face close to hers.
“Yes… Oh, my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now
stained with blood!”
“Shadowed by death—that’s all.”
“Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t know I was
doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be
out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I
told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh how
bitterly he upbraided me!”
“Why did you do it, Sue?”
“I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t bear
deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for
with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—Why was I half-wiser
than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him
pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of
self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”
“Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only
in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must have
known sooner or later.”
“And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall
never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! … My eyes are so
swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I
called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much—indulging
ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you
remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature’s
intention, Nature’s law and _raison d’être_ that we should be joyful in
what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilization had taken
upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has
given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature
at her word!”
She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, “It is best,
perhaps, that they should be gone.—Yes—I see it is! Better that they
should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!”
“Yes,” replied Jude. “Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy.”
“But they don’t know! … Oh my babies, my babies, could you be alive
now! You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he wouldn’t have
done it. It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was part of his
incurably sad nature, poor little fellow! But then the others—my _own_
children and yours!”
Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and
shoes; and her figure quivered like a string. “I am a pitiable
creature,” she said, “good neither for earth nor heaven any more! I am
driven out of my mind by things! What ought to be done?” She stared at
Jude, and tightly held his hand.
“Nothing can be done,” he replied. “Things are as they are, and will be
brought to their destined issue.”
She paused. “Yes! Who said that?” she asked heavily.
“It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_. It has been in my mind
continually since this happened.”
“My poor Jude—how you’ve missed everything!—you more than I, for I did
get you! To think you should know that by your unassisted reading, and
yet be in poverty and despair!”
After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.
The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and
next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral. Accounts in the
newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood apparently
counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls. Doubt of the
real relations of the couple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had
declared that she would follow the two little ones to the grave, but at
the last moment she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out
of the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehicle, and
it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue
and her luggage remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear
of later on in the day, and so to have freed his house from the
exasperating notoriety it had acquired during the week through his
wife’s unlucky admission of these strangers. In the afternoon he
privately consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that
if any objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there
they would try to get its number changed.
When Jude had seen the two little boxes—one containing little Jude, and
the other the two smallest—deposited in the earth he hastened back to
Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not disturb her
just then. Feeling anxious, however, he went again about four o’clock.
The woman thought she was still lying down, but returned to him to say
that she was not in her bedroom after all. Her hat and jacket, too,
were missing: she had gone out. Jude hurried off to the public house
where he was sleeping. She had not been there. Then bethinking himself
of possibilities he went along the road to the cemetery, which he
entered, and crossed to where the interments had recently taken place.
The idlers who had followed to the spot by reason of the tragedy were
all gone now. A man with a shovel in his hands was attempting to earth
in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held back by
an expostulating woman who stood in the half-filled hole. It was Sue,
whose coloured clothing, which she had never thought of changing for
the mourning he had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than
the conventional garb of bereavement could express.
“He’s filling them in, and he shan’t till I’ve seen my little ones
again!” she cried wildly when she saw Jude. “I want to see them once
more. Oh Jude—please Jude—I want to see them! I didn’t know you would
let them be taken away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should
see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you didn’t,
but took them away! Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!”
“She’s been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get to
the coffins,” said the man with the spade. “She ought to be took home,
by the look o’ her. She is hardly responsible, poor thing, seemingly.
Can’t dig ’em up again now, ma’am. Do ye go home with your husband, and
take it quiet, and thank God that there’ll be another soon to swage yer
grief.”
But Sue kept asking piteously: “Can’t I see them once more—just once!
Can’t I? Only just one little minute, Jude? It would not take long! And
I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey you ever
any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards,
and not want to see them any more! Can’t I? Why can’t I?”
Thus she went on. Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he almost
felt he would try to get the man to accede. But it could do no good,
and might make her still worse; and he saw that it was imperative to
get her home at once. So he coaxed her, and whispered tenderly, and put
his arm round her to support her; till she helplessly gave in, and was
induced to leave the cemetery.
He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so
imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly,
Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing. They were to have
gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was not
practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated house.
Sue was at once got to bed, and the Doctor sent for.
Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the
intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely born,
and that it, like the others, was a corpse.
III
Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had
again obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings now,
in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of
Ceremonies—Saint Silas.
They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of things
than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness. Vague and quaint
imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect scintillated
like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a
dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence,
but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the First Cause worked
automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;
that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to
have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness
among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by
thinking and educated humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces
loom anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense
of Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.
“We must conform!” she said mournfully. “All the ancient wrath of the
Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and we must
submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use fighting against
God!”
“It is only against man and senseless circumstance,” said Jude.
“True!” she murmured. “What have I been thinking of! I am getting as
superstitious as a savage! … But whoever or whatever our foe may be, I
am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no
more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten! … ‘We are made a spectacle unto
the world, and to angels, and to men!’ I am always saying that now.”
“I feel the same!”
“What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may only be
because our history and relations are not absolutely known… Possibly,
if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they would turn you
out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!”
“I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think
that we ought to make it legal now—as soon as you are able to go out.”
“You think we ought?”
“Certainly.”
And Jude fell into thought. “I have seemed to myself lately,” he said,
“to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous—the men
called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it! I have not been
conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you, whom I love more
than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them
are the same purblind, simple creatures as I? … Yes, Sue—that’s what I
am. I seduced you… You were a distinct type—a refined creature,
intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone!”
“No, no, Jude!” she said quickly. “Don’t reproach yourself with being
what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I.”
“I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me
perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you go.”
“I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not
having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our
union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity of
our first marriages.”
“Solemnity?” Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew conscious
that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.
“Yes,” she said, with a little quiver in her words, “I have had
dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have
thought—that I am still his wife!”
“Whose?”
“Richard’s.”
“Good God, dearest!—why?”
“Oh I can’t explain! Only the thought comes to me.”
“It is your weakness—a sick fancy, without reason or meaning! Don’t let
it trouble you.”
Sue sighed uneasily.
As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come an
improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in their
experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite unexpectedly
found good employment at his old trade almost directly he arrived, the
summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and outwardly his days
went on with that monotonous uniformity which is in itself so grateful
after vicissitude. People seemed to have forgotten that he had ever
shown any awkward aberrancies, and he daily mounted to the parapets and
copings of colleges he could never enter, and renewed the crumbling
freestones of mullioned windows he would never look from, as if he had
known no wish to do otherwise.
There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service
at the churches now. One thing troubled him more than any other; that
Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the
tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws,
customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue’s. She
was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect
played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he
at that time respected, though he did not now.
On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late. She was not at
home, but she soon returned, when he found her silent and meditative.
“What are you thinking of, little woman?” he asked curiously.
“Oh I can’t tell clearly! I have thought that we have been selfish,
careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a
vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road.
We should mortify the flesh—the terrible flesh—the curse of Adam!”
“Sue!” he murmured. “What has come over you?”
“We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of duty!
But I have always striven to do what has pleased me. I well deserved
the scourging I have got! I wish something would take the evil right
out of me, and all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful ways!”
“Sue—my own too suffering dear!—there’s no evil woman in you. Your
natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite so impassioned,
perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and dear, and pure. And as I have
often said, you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I
ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness. Why do you talk in such
a changed way? We have not been selfish, except when no one could
profit by our being otherwise. You used to say that human nature was
noble and long-suffering, not vile and corrupt, and at last I thought
you spoke truly. And now you seem to take such a much lower view!”
“I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had them
yet!”
“You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you
deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too full of narrow dogmas
at that time to see it.”
“Don’t say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and thought could
be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I
cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all
over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!”
“Hush!” he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she
were an infant. “It is bereavement that has brought you to this! Such
remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones of
the earth—who never feel it!”
“I ought not to stay like this,” she murmured, when she had remained in
the position a long while.
“Why not?”
“It is indulgence.”
“Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on earth than
that we should love one another?”
“Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours—ours—is the wrong.”
“I won’t have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our marriage to be signed
in a vestry?”
She paused, and looked up uneasily. “Never,” she whispered.
Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the objection serenely,
and said nothing. Several minutes elapsed, and he thought she had
fallen asleep; but he spoke softly, and found that she was wide awake
all the time. She sat upright and sighed.
“There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere about you
to-night, Sue,” he said. “I mean not only mentally, but about your
clothes, also. A sort of vegetable scent, which I seem to know, yet
cannot remember.”
“It is incense.”
“Incense?”
“I have been to the service at St. Silas’, and I was in the fumes of
it.”
“Oh—St. Silas.”
“Yes. I go there sometimes.”
“Indeed. You go there!”
“You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the weekday mornings, when you are
at work, and I think and think of—of my—” She stopped till she could
control the lumpiness of her throat. “And I have taken to go in there,
as it is so near.”
“Oh well—of course, I say nothing against it. Only it is odd, for you.
They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!”
“What do you mean, Jude?”
“Well—a sceptic, to be plain.”
“How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble! Yet I know you
didn’t mean it. But you ought not to say that.”
“I won’t. But I am much surprised!”
“Well—I want to tell you something else, Jude. You won’t be angry, will
you? I have thought of it a good deal since my babies died. I don’t
think I ought to be your wife—or as your wife—any longer.”
“What? … But you _are_!”
“From your point of view; but—”
“Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good many others would
have been in our places, with such strong reasons for fears. But
experience has proved how we misjudged ourselves, and overrated our
infirmities; and if you are beginning to respect rites and ceremonies,
as you seem to be, I wonder you don’t say it shall be carried out
instantly? You certainly _are_ my wife, Sue, in all but law. What do
you mean by what you said?”
“I don’t think I am!”
“Not? But suppose we _had_ gone through the ceremony? Would you feel
that you were then?”
“No. I should not feel even then that I was. I should feel worse than I
do now.”
“Why so—in the name of all that’s perverse, my dear?”
“Because I am Richard’s.”
“Ah—you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!”
“It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more convinced
as time goes on that—I belong to him, or to nobody.”
“My good heavens—how we are changing places!”
“Yes. Perhaps so.”
Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening, they were
sitting in the same small room downstairs, when a knock came to the
front door of the carpenter’s house where they were lodging, and in a
few moments there was a tap at the door of their room. Before they
could open it the comer did so, and a woman’s form appeared.
“Is Mr. Fawley here?”
Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the affirmative, for
the voice was Arabella’s.
He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down in the window
bench, where they could distinctly see her outline against the light;
but no characteristic that enabled them to estimate her general aspect
and air. Yet something seemed to denote that she was not quite so
comfortably circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she had been
during Cartlett’s lifetime.
The three attempted an awkward conversation about the tragedy, of which
Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her immediately, though she
had never replied to his letter.
“I have just come from the cemetery,” she said. “I inquired and found
the child’s grave. I couldn’t come to the funeral—thank you for
inviting me all the same. I read all about it in the papers, and I felt
I wasn’t wanted… No—I couldn’t come to the funeral,” repeated Arabella,
who, seeming utterly unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic
manner, fumbled with iterations. “But I am glad I found the grave. As
’tis your trade, Jude, you’ll be able to put up a handsome stone to
’em.”
“I shall put up a headstone,” said Jude drearily.
“He was my child, and naturally I feel for him.”
“I hope so. We all did.”
“The others that weren’t mine I didn’t feel so much for, as was
natural.”
“Of course.”
A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.
“I had often wished I had mine with me,” continued Mrs. Cartlett.
“Perhaps ’twouldn’t have happened then! But of course I didn’t wish to
take him away from your wife.”
“I am not his wife,” came from Sue.
The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said Arabella. “I thought you were!”
Jude had known from the quality of Sue’s tone that her new and
transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except their obvious
meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing
that she was struck by Sue’s avowal, recovered herself, and went on to
talk with placid bluntness about “her” boy, for whom, though in his
lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial
mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience. She
alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed again to Sue.
There was no answer: Sue had invisibly left the room.
“She said she was not your wife?” resumed Arabella in another voice.
“Why should she do that?”
“I cannot inform you,” said Jude shortly.
“She is, isn’t she? She once told me so.”
“I don’t criticize what she says.”
“Ah—I see! Well, my time is up. I am staying here to-night, and thought
I could do no less than call, after our mutual affliction. I am
sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow I go
back to Alfredston. Father is come home again, and I am living with
him.”
“He has returned from Australia?” said Jude with languid curiosity.
“Yes. Couldn’t get on there. Had a rough time of it. Mother died of
dys—what do you call it—in the hot weather, and Father and two of the
young ones have just got back. He has got a cottage near the old place,
and for the present I am keeping house for him.”
Jude’s former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict good
breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a number
of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability. When she
had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the stairs and called
Sue—feeling anxious as to what had become of her.
There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings said she
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
to you!” she brokenly murmured. “Dislike to you! But I can’t say any
more—it breaks my heart—it will be undoing all I have begun!
Jude—good-night!”
“Good-night,” he said, and turned to go.
“Oh but you shall kiss me!” said she, starting up. “I can’t—bear—!”
He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely ever
done before, and they remained in silence till she said, “Good-bye,
good-bye!” And then gently pressing him away she got free, trying to
mitigate the sadness by saying: “We’ll be dear friends just the same,
Jude, won’t we? And we’ll see each other sometimes—yes!—and forget all
this, and try to be as we were long ago?”
Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the
stairs.