Jude the Obscure (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (33 page)

She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic. He knew that, and said merely, “At an inn,” though it would have been a relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one. But the latter’s final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered him lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.

Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston. That Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled “Phillotson,” paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual. Yet she seemed unaltered—he could not say why. There remained the five-mile extra journey into the country, which it was just as easy to walk as to drive, the greater part of it being uphill. Jude had never before in his life gone that road with Sue, though he had with another. It was now as if he carried a bright light which temporarily banished the shady associations of the earlier time.

Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation from herself. At length he inquired if her husband were well.

“0 yes,” she said. “He is obliged to be in the school all the day, or he would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to accompany me he would have dismissed the school for once, even against his principles—for he is strongly opposed to giving casual holidays—only I wouldn’t let him. I felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being almost a stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.”

Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being expressed. “Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,” he said.

“Of course.”

“You ought to be a happy wife.”

“And of course I am.”

“Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks since I gave you to him, and———”

“Yes, I know! I know!” There was something in her face which be-lied her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in “The Wife’s Guide to Conduct.” Jude knew the quality of every vibration in Sue’s voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition ; and he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing; for Sue naturally did such things as those.

“Well you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.”

She reproached him by a glance.

“No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,” murmured Jude. “You are dear, free Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it! Wifedom has not yet squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality.”

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, “Nor has husbandom you, so far as I can see!”

“But it has!” he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now. He could not help saying to Sue: “That’s the house my wife and I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to that house.”

She looked at it. “That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is to me.”

“Yes; but I was not very happy there, as you are in yours.”

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. “Of course I may have exaggerated your happiness—one never knows,” he continued blandly.

“Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect liberty—which elderly husbands don’t do in general.... If you think I am not happy because he’s too old for me, you are wrong.”

“I don’t think anything against him—to you, dear.”

“And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?”

“I will not.”

He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she ought not to have done.

They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose the village—the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from the farmer many years earlier. On ascending to the village and approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly. “She’s downstairs, if you’ll believe me!” cried the widow. “Out o’ bed she got, and nothing could turn her. What will come o’t I do not know!

On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of Sebastiano’s Lazarus.
¹
They must have looked their amazement, for she said in a hollow voice:

“Ah—sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there no longer, to please nobody! ‘Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be ordered to do this and that by a feller that don’t know half as well as you do yourself! ... Ah—you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!” she added, turning to Sue. “All our family do,—and nearly all everybody else’s. You should have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson the schoolmaster, of all men! What made ’ee marry him?”

“What makes most women marry, aunt?”

“Ah! You mean to say you loved the man!”

“I don’t mean to say anything definite.”

“Do ye love un?”

“Don’t ask me, aunt.”

“I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but Lord!—I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but—there be certain men here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have said he was one. I don’t say so now, since you must ha’ known better than I,—but that’s what I should have said!”

Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the outhouse, crying.

“Don’t cry, dear!” said Jude in distress. “She means well, but is very crusty and queer now, you know.”

“0 no—it isn’t that!” said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. “I don’t mind her roughness one bit.”

“What is it, then?”

“It is that what she says is—is true!”

“God—what—you don’t like him?” asked Jude.

“I don’t mean that!” she said hastily. “That I ought—perhaps I ought not to have married!”

He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first. They went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive her to Alfredston.

“I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?” he said.

She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she looked at him prohibitively.

“I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at Melchester?” he half-crossly observed.

She bent down and said softly: “No, dear—you are not to come yet. I don’t think you are in a good mood.”

“Very well,” said Jude. “Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” She waved her hand and was gone.

“She’s right! I won’t go!” he murmured.

He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline; and hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before he had returned from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter from Arabella. The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of self-condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his attachment to Sue.

The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few days after their parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of the hotel in Sydney. He had come to England on purpose to find her; and had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he wished her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely to be a very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent, densely populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a trade of £200 a month, which could be easily doubled.

As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff, and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had just gone to join him as he urged. She could not help feeling that she belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married him, and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband. In thus wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted he would not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her, and bring her to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her circumstances and leading a genteel life.

JUDE RETURNED TO MELCHESTER, which had the questionable recommendation of being only a dozen and a half miles from his Sue’s now permanent residence. At first he felt that this nearness was a distinct reason for not going southward at all; but Christminster was too sad a place to bear, while the proximity of Shaston to Melchester might afford him the glory of worsting the Enemy in a close engagement,
^cd
such as was deliberately sought by the priests and virgins of the early Church, who, disdaining an ignominious flight from temptation, became even chamber-partners with impunity. Jude did not pause to remember that, in the laconic words of the historian, “insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights”
^ce
in such circumstances.

He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the priesthood—in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his aims, and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable of late. His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till afterwards. He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to liquor—which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of mind. Yet he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might not always be victorious.

As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he developed his slight skill in church-music and thorough-bass, till he could join in part-singing from notation with some accuracy. A mile or two from Melchester there was a restored village church, to which Jude had originally gone to fix the new columns and capitals. By this means he had become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate result was that he joined the choir as a bass voice.

He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and sometimes in the week. One evening about Easter the choir met for practice, and a new hymn which Jude had heard of as being by a Wessex composer was to be tried and prepared for the following week. It turned out to be a strangely emotional composition. As they all sang it over and over again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly.

When they had finished he went round to the organist to make inquiries. The score was in manuscript, the name of the composer being at the head, together with the title of the hymn: “The Foot of the Cross.”

“Yes,” said the organist. “He is a local man. He is a professional musician at Kennetbridge—between here and Christminster. The vicar knows him. He was brought up and educated in Christminster traditions, which accounts for the quality of the piece. I think he plays in the large church there, and has a surpliced choir. He comes to Melchester sometimes, and once tried to get the Cathedral organ when the post was vacant. The hymn is getting about everywhere this Easter.”

As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell to musing on its composer, and the reasons why he composed it. What a man of sympathies he must be! Perplexed and harassed as he himself was about Sue and Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the complication of his position, how he would like to know that man! “He of all men would understand my difficulties,” said the impulsive Jude. If there were any person in the world to choose as a confidant, this composer would be the one, for he must have suffered, and throbbed, and yearned.

In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey, Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge the very next Sunday. He duly started, early in the morning, for it was only by a series of crooked railways that he could get to the town. About mid-day he reached it, and crossing the bridge into the quaint old borough he inquired for the house of the composer.

They told him it was a red brick building some little way further on. Also that the gentleman himself had just passed along the street not five minutes before.

“Which way?” asked Jude with alacrity.

“Straight along homeward from church.”

Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing a man in a black coat and a black slouched felt hat no considerable distance ahead. Stretching out his legs yet more widely he stalked after. “A hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul!” he said. “I must speak to that man!”

He could not, however, overtake the musician before he had entered his own house, and then arose the question if this were an expedient time to call. Whether or not he decided to do so there and then, now that he had got here, the distance home being too great for him to wait till late in the afternoon. This man of soul would understand scant ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in which an earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly obtained entrance into his heart through the opening afforded for religion.