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Part the Third, Chapter VII Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed
across Jude like a withering blast. Before reading the letter he was led to suspect
that its contents were of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight of the signature—which
was in her full name, never used in her correspondence with him since her first note:
MY DEAR JUDE,—I have something to tell you which perhaps you will not be surprised to
hear, though certainly it may strike you as being accelerated (as the railway companies
say of their trains). Mr. Phillotson and I are to be married quite soon—in three or
four weeks. We had intended, as you know, to wait till
I had gone through my course of training and obtained my certificate, so as to assist him,
if necessary, in the teaching. But he generously says he does not see any
object in waiting, now I am not at the training school.
It is so good of him, because the awkwardness of my situation has really come about by my
fault in getting expelled. Wish me joy.
Remember I say you are to, and you mustn't refuse!—Your affectionate cousin,
SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD. Jude staggered under the news; could eat no
breakfast; and kept on drinking tea because his mouth was so dry.
Then presently he went back to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so
confronted. Everything seemed turning to satire.
And yet, what could the poor girl do? he asked himself: and felt worse than shedding tears.
"O Susanna Florence Mary!" he said as he worked. "You don't know what marriage means!"
Could it be possible that his announcement of his own marriage had pricked her on to
this, just as his visit to her when in liquor may have pricked her on to her engagement?
To be sure, there seemed to exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical and social,
for her decision; but Sue was not a very practical or calculating person; and he was compelled
to think that a pique at having his secret sprung upon her had moved her to give way
to Phillotson's probable representations, that the best course to prove how unfounded
were the suspicions of the school authorities would be to marry him off-hand, as in fulfilment
of an ordinary engagement. Sue had, in fact, been placed in an awkward
corner. Poor Sue!
He determined to play the Spartan; to make the best of it, and support her; but he could
not write the requested good wishes for a day or two.
Meanwhile there came another note from his impatient little dear:
Jude, will you give me away? I have nobody else who could do it so conveniently
as you, being the only married relation I have here on the spot, even if my father were
friendly enough to be willing, which he isn't. I hope you won't think it a trouble?
I have been looking at the marriage service in the prayer-book, and it seems to me very
humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all.
According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and
pleasure; but I don't choose him. Somebody GIVES me to him, like a she-*** or
she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted views of woman, O churchman!
But I forget: I am no longer privileged to tease you.—Ever,
SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD. Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and
replied: MY DEAR SUE,—Of course I wish you joy!
And also of course I will give you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house
of your own, you do not marry from your school friend's, but from mine.
It would be more proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related
to you in this part of the world. I don't see why you sign your letter in such
a new and terribly formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still!—Ever
your affectionate, JUDE.
What had jarred on him even more than the signature was a little sting he had been silent
on—the phrase "married relation"—What an idiot it made him seem as her lover!
If Sue had written that in satire, he could hardly forgive her; if in suffering—ah,
that was another thing! His offer of his lodging must have commended
itself to Phillotson at any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line of warm thanks,
accepting the convenience. Sue also thanked him.
Jude immediately moved into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage
of the suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue's unpleasant experience as for
the sake of room. Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for
the wedding; and Jude decided, after inquiry, that she should come into residence on the
following Saturday, which would allow of a ten days' stay in the city prior to the ceremony,
sufficiently representing a nominal residence of fifteen.
She arrived by the ten o'clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not going to meet her
at the station, by her special request, that he should not lose a morning's work and pay,
she said (if this were her true reason). But so well by this time did he know Sue that
the remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might, he thought, have
weighed with her in this. When he came home to dinner she had taken
possession of her apartment. She lived in the same house with him, but
on a different floor, and they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only
meal they took together, when Sue's manner was something like that of a scared child.
What she felt he did not know; their conversation was mechanical, though she did not look pale
or ill. Phillotson came frequently, but mostly when
Jude was absent. On the morning of the wedding, when Jude had
given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin had breakfast together for the first and last
time during this curious interval; in his room—the parlour—which he had hired for
the period of Sue's residence. Seeing, as women do, how helpless he was in
making the place comfortable, she bustled about.
"What's the matter, Jude?" she said suddenly. He was leaning with his elbows on the table
and his chin on his hands, looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on
the tablecloth. "Oh—nothing!"
"You are 'father', you know. That's what they call the man who gives you
away." Jude could have said "Phillotson's age entitles
him to be called that!" But he would not annoy her by such a cheap
retort. She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded
his indulgence in reflection, and before the meal was over both he and she wished they
had not put such confidence in their new view of things, and had taken breakfast apart.
What oppressed Jude was the thought that, having done a wrong thing of this sort himself,
he was aiding and abetting the woman he loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of imploring
and warning her against it. It was on his tongue to say, "You have quite
made up your mind?" After breakfast they went out on an errand
together moved by a mutual thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of
indulging in unceremonious companionship. By the irony of fate, and the curious trick
in Sue's nature of tempting Providence at critical times, she took his arm as they walked
through the muddy street—a thing she had never done before in her life—and on turning
the corner they found themselves close to a grey perpendicular church with a low-pitched
roof—the church of St. Thomas. "That's the church," said Jude.
"Where I am going to be married?" "Yes."
"Indeed!" she exclaimed with curiosity. "How I should like to go in and see what the
spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it."
Again he said to himself, "She does not realize what marriage means!"
He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by the western door.
The only person inside the gloomy building was a charwoman cleaning.
Sue still held Jude's arm, almost as if she loved him.
Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his thoughts of a penance
in store for her were tempered by an ache: ... I can find no way How a blow should fall,
such as falls on men, Nor prove too much for your womanhood!
They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar railing, which they stood
against in silence, turning then and walking down the nave again, her hand still on his
arm, precisely like a couple just married. The too suggestive incident, entirely of her
making, nearly broke down Jude. "I like to do things like this," she said
in the delicate voice of an epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.
"I know you do!" said Jude. "They are interesting, because they have probably
never been done before. I shall walk down the church like this with
my husband in about two hours, shan't I!" "No doubt you will!"
"Was it like this when you were married?" "Good God, Sue—don't be so awfully merciless!
... There, dear one, I didn't mean it!"
"Ah—you are vexed!" she said regretfully, as she blinked away an access of eye moisture.
"And I promised never to vex you! ... I suppose I ought not to have asked you to
bring me in here. Oh, I oughtn't!
I see it now. My curiosity to hunt up a new sensation always
leads me into these scrapes. Forgive me! ...
You will, won't you, Jude?" The appeal was so remorseful that Jude's eyes
were even wetter than hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.
"Now we'll hurry away, and I won't do it any more!" she continued humbly; and they came
out of the building, Sue intending to go on to the station to meet Phillotson.
But the first person they encountered on entering the main street was the schoolmaster himself,
whose train had arrived sooner than Sue expected. There was nothing really to demur to in her
leaning on Jude's arm; but she withdrew her hand, and Jude thought that Phillotson had
looked surprised. "We have been doing such a funny thing!" said
she, smiling candidly. "We've been to the church, rehearsing as it were.
Haven't we, Jude?" "How?" said Phillotson curiously.
Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be unnecessary frankness; but she had gone
too far not to explain all, which she accordingly did, telling him how they had marched up to
the altar. Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude
said as cheerfully as he could, "I am going to buy her another little present.
Will you both come to the shop with me?" "No," said Sue, "I'll go on to the house with
him"; and requesting her lover not to be a long time she departed with the schoolmaster.
Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they prepared for the ceremony.
Phillotson's hair was brushed to a painful extent, and his shirt collar appeared stiffer
than it had been for the previous twenty years. Beyond this he looked dignified and thoughtful,
and altogether a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict that he would make a kind and considerate
husband. That he adored Sue was obvious; and she could
almost be seen to feel that she was undeserving his adoration.
Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly from the Red Lion, and six or
seven women and children had gathered by the door when they came out.
The schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though Jude was getting to be recognized as a citizen;
and the couple were judged to be some relations of his from a distance, nobody supposing Sue
to have been a recent pupil at the training school.
In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little wedding-present, which turned
out to be two or three yards of white tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as
a veil. "It looks so odd over a bonnet," she said.
"I'll take the bonnet off." "Oh no—let it stay," said Phillotson.
And she obeyed. When they had passed up the church and were
standing in their places Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the
edge of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the service he
wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the business of giving her away.
How could Sue have had the temerity to ask him to do it—a cruelty possibly to herself
as well as to him? Women were different from men in such matters.
Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic;
or were they more heroic? Or was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully
gave herself and him pain for the odd and mournful luxury of practising long-suffering
in her own person, and of being touched with tender pity for him at having made him practise
it? He could perceive that her face was nervously
set, and when they reached the trying ordeal of Jude giving her to Phillotson she could
hardly command herself; rather, however, as it seemed, from her knowledge of what her
cousin must feel, whom she need not have had there at all, than from self-consideration.
Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer
again and again, in all her colossal inconsistency. Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded
by a mist which prevented his seeing the emotions of others.
As soon as they had signed their names and come away, and the suspense was over, Jude
felt relieved. The meal at his lodging was a very simple
affair, and at two o'clock they went off. In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked
back; and there was a frightened light in her eyes.
Could it be that Sue had acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew not
what for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of retaliating on him for his secrecy?
Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because she was childishly ignorant of that
side of their natures which wore out women's hearts and lives.
When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying that she had forgotten
something. Jude and the landlady offered to get it.
"No," she said, running back. "It is my handkerchief.
I know where I left it." Jude followed her back.
She had found it, and came holding it in her hand.
She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her lips suddenly parted as if she
were going to avow something. But she went on; and whatever she had meant
to say remained unspoken.
VIII Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief
behind; or whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love that at the last
moment she could not bring herself to express. He could not stay in his silent lodging when
they were gone, and fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol
he went upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots for his thick,
and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.
But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to be possessed with an idea
that she would come back. She could not possibly go home with Phillotson,
he fancied. The feeling grew and stirred.
The moment that the clock struck the last of his working hours he threw down his tools
and rushed homeward. "Has anybody been for me?" he asked.
Nobody had been there. As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room
till twelve o'clock that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had
struck eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off the feeling that she
would come back and sleep in the little room adjoining his own in which she had slept so
many previous days. Her actions were always unpredictable: why
should she not come? Gladly would he have compounded for the denial
of her as a sweetheart and wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend,
even on the most distant terms. His supper still remained spread, and going
to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the room and sat as watchers
sit on Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the phantom of the Beloved.
But she did not come. Having indulged in this wild hope he went
upstairs, and looked out of the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to
London, whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling along through
the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through
which the moon showed its position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger
stars made themselves visible as faint nebulae only.
It was a new beginning of Sue's history. He projected his mind into the future, and
saw her with children more or less in her own likeness around her.
But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her identity was denied to
him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent
alone. Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy. "If at the
estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see her child—hers solely—there
would be comfort in it!" said Jude. And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly
seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man's finer emotions, and her
lack of interest in his aspirations. The oppressive strength of his affection for
Sue showed itself on the morrow and following days yet more clearly.
He could no longer endure the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab
paint, and the blue sky as zinc. Then he received news that his old aunt was
dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost coincided with a letter from his former
employer at Christminster, who offered him permanent work of a good class if he would
come back. The letters were almost a relief to him.
He started to visit Aunt Drusilla, and resolved to go onward to Christminster to see what
worth there might be in the builder's offer. Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication
from the Widow Edlin had led him to expect. There was every possibility of her lingering
on for weeks or months, though little likelihood. He wrote to Sue informing her of the state
of her aunt, and suggesting that she might like to see her aged relative alive.
He would meet her at Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back
from Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed his down-train at that
station. Next morning, according, he went on to Christminster,
intending to return to Alfredston soon enough to keep the suggested appointment with Sue.
The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all feeling for its associations.
Yet as the sun made vivid lights and shades of the mullioned architecture of the façades,
and drew patterns of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the quadrangles, Jude
thought he had never seen the place look more beautiful.
He came to the street in which he had first beheld Sue. The chair she had occupied when,
leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her hand, her girlish figure
had arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its former spot, empty.
It was as if she were dead, and nobody had been found capable of succeeding her in that
artistic pursuit. Hers was now the city phantom, while those
of the intellectual and devotional worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no
longer able to assert their presence there. However, here he was; and in fulfilment of
his intention he went on to his former lodging in "Beersheba," near the ritualistic church
of St. Silas. The old landlady who opened the door seemed
glad to see him again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder who had employed
him had called to inquire his address. Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had
worked. But the old sheds and bankers were distasteful
to him; he felt it impossible to engage himself to return and stay in this place of vanished
dreams. He longed for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where he might probably
meet Sue. Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression
caused by these scenes, there returned upon him that feeling which had been his undoing
more than once—that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of either by himself
or others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical
ironmonger, at Fourways, who proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink together.
They walked along the street till they stood before one of the great palpitating centres
of Christminster life, the inn wherein he formerly had responded to the challenge to
rehearse the Creed in Latin—now a popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance,
which gave admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern
style since Jude's residence here. Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed,
saying it was too stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker
than he had money to be just then. Jude was longer finishing his, and stood abstractedly
silent in the, for the minute, almost empty place.
The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany fixtures having taken
the place of the old painted ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were
stuffed sofa-benches. The room was divided into compartments in
the approved manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent
topers in one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in the
next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids
leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside,
dripping into a pewter trough. Feeling tired, and having nothing more to
do till the train left, Jude sat down on one of the sofas.
At the back of the barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along
their front, on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in bottles
of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst. The moment was enlivened by the entrance of
some customers into the next compartment, and the starting of the mechanical tell-tale
of monies received, which emitted a ting-ting every time a coin was put in.
The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude's direct glance, though
a reflection of her back in the glass behind her was occasionally caught by his eyes.
He had only observed this listlessly, when she turned her face for a moment to the glass
to set her hair tidy. Then he was amazed to discover that the face
was Arabella's. If she had come on to his compartment she
would have seen him. But she did not, this being presided over by the maiden on the other
side. Abby was in a black gown, with white linen
cuffs and a broad white collar, and her figure, more developed than formerly, was accentuated
by a bunch of daffodils that she wore on her left ***. In the compartment she served
stood an electro-plated fountain of water over a spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent
a steam from the top, all this being visible to him only in the mirror behind her; which
also reflected the faces of the men she was attending to—one of them a handsome, dissipated
young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who had been relating to her an experience of
some humorous sort. "Oh, Mr. Cockman, now!
How can you tell such a tale to me in my innocence!" she cried gaily.
"Mr. Cockman, what do you use to make your moustache curl so beautiful?"
As the young man was clean shaven the retort provoked a laugh at his expense.
"Come!" said he, "I'll have a curaçao; and a light, please."
She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles and striking a match held it to his
cigarette with ministering archness while he whiffed.
"Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my dear?" he asked.
"Not a sound," said she. "Where is he?"
"I left him in Australia; and I suppose he's there still."
Jude's eyes grew rounder. "What made you part from him?"
"Don't you ask questions, and you won't hear lies."
"Come then, give me my change, which you've been keeping from me for the last quarter
of an hour; and I'll romantically vanish up the street of this picturesque city."
She handed the change over the counter, in taking which he caught her fingers and held
them. There was a slight struggle and titter, and
he bade her good-bye and left. Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed
philosopher. It was extraordinary how far removed from
his life Arabella now seemed to be. He could not realize their nominal closeness.
And, this being the case, in his present frame of mind he was indifferent to the fact that
Arabella was his wife indeed. The compartment that she served emptied itself
of visitors, and after a brief thought he entered it, and went forward to the counter.
Arabella did not recognize him for a moment. Then their glances met. She started; till
a humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she spoke.
"Well, I'm blest! I thought you were underground years ago!"
"Oh!" "I never heard anything of you, or I don't
know that I should have come here. But never mind!
What shall I treat you to this afternoon? A Scotch and soda?
Come, anything that the house will afford, for old acquaintance' sake!"
"Thanks, Arabella," said Jude without a smile. "But I don't want anything more than I've
had." The fact was that her unexpected presence
there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for strong liquor as completely as if
it had whisked him back to his milk-fed infancy. "That's a pity, now you could get it for nothing."
"How long have you been here?" "About six weeks.
I returned from Sydney three months ago. I always liked this business, you know."
"I wonder you came to this place!" "Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to
glory, and being in London I saw the situation in an advertisement.
Nobody was likely to know me here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster
in my growing up." "Why did you return from Australia?"
"Oh, I had my reasons... Then you are not a don yet?"
"No." "Not even a reverend?"
"No." "Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting
gentleman?" "I am as I was."
"True—you look so." She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the
pull of the beer-engine as she inspected him critically.
He observed that her hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with her, and
that on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an ornamental ring set with what seemed
to be real sapphires—which they were, indeed, and were much admired as such by the young
men who frequented the bar. "So you pass as having a living husband,"
he continued. "Yes.
I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I should have liked."
"True. I am known here a little."
"I didn't mean on that account—for as I said I didn't expect you. It was for other
reasons." "What were they?"
"I don't care to go into them," she replied evasively.
"I make a very good living, and I don't know that I want your company."
Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady's eyebrow, came and asked for
a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was obliged to go and attend to him.
"We can't talk here," she said, stepping back a moment.
"Can't you wait till nine? Say yes, and don't be a fool.
I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if I ask.
I am not living in the house at present." He reflected and said gloomily, "I'll come
back. I suppose we'd better arrange something."
"Oh, bother arranging! I'm not going to arrange anything!"
"But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can't talk here. Very well; I'll call
for you." Depositing his unemptied glass he went out
and walked up and down the street. Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid
sentimentality of his sad attachment to Sue. Though Arabella's word was absolutely untrustworthy,
he thought there might be some truth in her implication that she had not wished to disturb
him, and had really supposed him dead. However, there was only one thing now to be
done, and that was to play a straightforward part, the law being the law, and the woman
between whom and himself there was no more unity than between east and west being in
the eye of the Church one person with him. Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible
to meet Sue at Alfredston as he had promised. At every thought of this a pang had gone through
him; but the conjuncture could not be helped. Arabella was perhaps an intended intervention
to punish him for his unauthorized love. Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory
waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall,
because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred
and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence which
seemed to him gratuitous irony. The inn was now brilliantly lighted up, and
the scene was altogether more brisk and gay. The faces of the barmaidens had risen in colour,
each having a pink flush on her cheek; their manners were still more vivacious than before—more
abandoned, more excited, more sensuous, and they expressed their sentiments and desires
less euphemistically, laughing in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.
The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous hour, and he had heard
from without the hubbub of their voices; but the customers were fewer at last.
He nodded to Arabella, and told her that she would find him outside the door when she came
away. "But you must have something with me first,"
she said with great good humour. "Just an early night-cap: I always do.
Then you can go out and wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going together."
She drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and though she had evidently, from her countenance,
already taken in enough alcohol either by drinking or, more probably, from the atmosphere
she had breathed for so many hours, she finished hers quickly.
He also drank his, and went outside the house. In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket
and a hat with a black feather. "I live quite near," she said, taking his
arm, "and can let myself in by a latch-key at any time.
What arrangement do you want to come to?" "Oh—none in particular," he answered, thoroughly
sick and tired, his thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go
by; the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when she arrived, and the
missed pleasure of her company on the long and lonely climb by starlight up the hills
to Marygreen. "I ought to have gone back really!
My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear." "I'll go over with you to-morrow morning.
I think I could get a day off." There was something particularly uncongenial
in the idea of Arabella, who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,
coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue.
Yet he said, "Of course, if you'd like to, you can."
"Well, that we'll consider... Now, until we have come to some agreement
it is awkward our being together here—where you are known, and I am getting known, though
without any suspicion that I have anything to do with you.
As we are going towards the station, suppose we take the nine-forty train to Aldbrickham?
We shall be there in little more than half an hour, and nobody will know us for one night,
and we shall be quite free to act as we choose till we have made up our minds whether we'll
make anything public or not." "As you like."
"Then wait till I get two or three things. This is my lodging. Sometimes when late I
sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so nobody will think anything of my staying out."
She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the half-hour's journey
to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate inn near the station in time for a late supper.
IX On the morrow between nine and half-past they
were journeying back to Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a third-class
railway-carriage. Having, like Jude, made rather a hasty toilet
to catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy, and her face was very far from possessing
the animation which had characterized it at the bar the night before.
When they came out of the station she found that she still had half an hour to spare before
she was due at the bar. They walked in silence a little way out of
the town in the direction of Alfredston. Jude looked up the far highway.
"Ah ... poor feeble me!" he murmured at last. "What?" said she.
"This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago full of plans!"
"Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have to be in the bar by
eleven o'clock. And as I said, I shan't ask for the day to
go with you to see your aunt. So perhaps we had better part here.
I'd sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we've come to no conclusion at all."
"Very well. But you said when we were getting up this
morning that you had something you wished to tell me before I left?"
"So I had—two things—one in particular. But you wouldn't promise to keep it a secret.
I'll tell you now if you promise? As an honest woman I wish you to know it...
It was what I began telling you in the night—about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel."
Arabella spoke somewhat hurriedly for her. "You'll keep it close?"
"Yes—yes—I promise!" said Jude impatiently. "Of course I don't want to reveal your secrets."
"Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much taken with my looks,
and he kept pressing me to marry him. I never thought of coming back to England
again; and being out there in Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father,
I at last agreed, and did." "What—marry him?"
"Yes." "Regularly—legally—in church?"
"Yes. And lived with him till shortly before I left.
It was stupid, I know; but I did! There, now I've told you.
Don't round upon me! He talks of coming back to England, poor old chap.
But if he does, he won't be likely to find me."
Jude stood pale and fixed. "Why the devil didn't you tell me last, night!"
he said. "Well—I didn't...
Won't you make it up with me, then?" "So in talking of 'your husband' to the bar
gentlemen you meant him, of course—not me!" "Of course...
Come, don't fuss about it." "I have nothing more to say!" replied Jude.
"I have nothing at all to say about the—crime—you've confessed to!"
"Crime! Pooh.
They don't think much of such as that over there! Lots of 'em do it...
Well, if you take it like that I shall go back to him!
He was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable as any married
couple in the colony! How did I know where you were?"
"I won't go blaming you. I could say a good deal; but perhaps it would
be misplaced. What do you wish me to do?"
"Nothing. There was one thing more I wanted to tell
you; but I fancy we've seen enough of one another for the present!
I shall think over what you said about your circumstances, and let you know."
Thus they parted. Jude watched her disappear in the direction
of the hotel, and entered the railway station close by.
Finding that it wanted three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could get a train
back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the city as far as to the Fourways, where
he stood as he had so often stood before, and surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead,
with its college after college, in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such Continental vistas
as the Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines of the buildings being as distinct in the
morning air as in an architectural drawing. But Jude was far from seeing or criticizing
these things; they were hidden by an indescribable consciousness of Arabella's midnight contiguity,
a sense of degradation at his revived experiences with her, of her appearance as she lay asleep
at dawn, which set upon his motionless face a look as of one accurst.
If he could only have felt resentment towards her he would have been less unhappy; but he
pitied while he contemned her. Jude turned and retraced his steps.
Drawing again towards the station he started at hearing his name pronounced—less at the
name than at the voice. To his great surprise no other than Sue stood
like a vision before him—her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth
nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry.
"Oh, Jude—I am so glad—to meet you like this!" she said in quick, uneven accents not
far from a sob. Then she flushed as she observed his thought
that they had not met since her marriage. They looked away from each other to hide their
emotion, took each other's hand without further speech, and went on together awhile, till
she glanced at him with furtive solicitude. "I arrived at Alfredston station last night,
as you asked me to, and there was nobody to meet me!
But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me Aunt was a trifle better.
I sat up with her, and as you did not come all night I was frightened about you—I thought
that perhaps, when you found yourself back in the old city, you were upset at—at thinking
I was—married, and not there as I used to be; and that you had nobody to speak to; so
you had tried to drown your gloom—as you did at that former time when you were disappointed
about entering as a student, and had forgotten your promise to me that you never would again.
And this, I thought, was why you hadn't come to meet me!"
"And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!"
"I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you—in case—in case—"
"I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually! I shall never break out again as I did, I
am sure. I may have been doing nothing better, but
I was not doing that—I loathe the thought of it."
"I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that.
But," she said, the faintest pout entering into her tone, "you didn't come back last
night and meet me, as you engaged to!" "I didn't—I am sorry to say.
I had an appointment at nine o'clock—too late for me to catch the train that would
have met yours, or to get home at all." Looking at his loved one as she appeared to
him now, in his tender thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had
ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could
be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending
the hours he had spent in Arabella's company. There was something rude and immoral in thrusting
these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so uncarnate as to
seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average man.
And yet she was Phillotson's. How she had become such, how she lived as
such, passed his comprehension as he regarded her to-day.
"You'll go back with me?" he said. "There's a train just now.
I wonder how my aunt is by this time... And so, Sue, you really came on my account
all this way! At what an early time you must have started,
poor thing!" "Yes.
Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and instead of going to bed when
it got light I started. And now you won't frighten me like this again
about your morals for nothing?" He was not so sure that she had been frightened
about his morals for nothing. He released her hand till they had entered
the train,—it seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another—where
they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window.
He regarded the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight, applelike convexities
of her bodice, so different from Arabella's amplitudes.
Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn to him, but kept her eyes forward,
as if afraid that by meeting his own some troublous discussion would be initiated.
"Sue—you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in such a hurry that
we have not said a word about it!" "There's no necessity," she quickly returned.
"Oh well—perhaps not... But I wish"
"Jude—don't talk about ME—I wish you wouldn't!" she entreated. "It distresses me, rather.
Forgive my saying it! ... Where did you stay last night?"
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.
"O 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 belied 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.
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 meant 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 ***
now, you know." "Oh 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.
X 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, 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" 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. Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.
The musician came to him in a moment, and being respectably dressed, good-looking, and
frank in manner, Jude obtained a favourable reception.
He was nevertheless conscious that there would be a certain awkwardness in explaining his
errand. "I have been singing in the choir of a little
church near Melchester," he said. "And we have this week practised 'The Foot
of the Cross,' which I understand, sir, that you composed?"
"I did—a year or so ago." "I—like it.
I think it supremely beautiful!" "Ah well—other people have said so too.
Yes, there's money in it, if I could only see about getting it published.
I have other compositions to go with it, too; I wish I could bring them out; for I haven't
made a five-pound note out of any of them yet.
These publishing people—they want the copyright of an obscure composer's work, such as mine
is, for almost less than I should have to pay a person for making a fair manuscript
copy of the score. The one you speak of I have lent to various
friends about here and Melchester, and so it has got to be sung a little.
But music is a poor staff to lean on—I am giving it up entirely.
You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays.
The wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my forthcoming list—it is not issued
yet—but you can take one." He handed Jude an advertisement list of several
pages in booklet shape, ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth the
various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines with which he purposed to
initiate his new venture. It took Jude more than by surprise that the
man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt that he could not open up his confidences.
They talked a little longer, but constrainedly, for when the musician found that Jude was
a poor man his manner changed from what it had been while Jude's appearance and address
deceived him as to his position and pursuits. Jude stammered out something about his feelings
in wishing to congratulate the author on such an exalted composition, and took an embarrassed
leave. All the way home by the slow Sunday train,
sitting in the fireless waiting-rooms on this cold spring day, he was depressed enough at
his simplicity in taking such a journey. But no sooner did he reach his Melchester
lodging than he found awaiting him a letter which had arrived that morning a few minutes
after he had left the house. It was a contrite little note from Sue, in
which she said, with sweet humility, that she felt she had been horrid in telling him
he was not to come to see her, that she despised herself for having been so conventional; and
that he was to be sure to come by the eleven-forty-five train that very Sunday, and have dinner with
them at half-past one. Jude almost tore his hair at having missed
this letter till it was too late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself
considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition to Kennetbridge really did seem
to have been another special intervention of Providence to keep him away from temptation.
But a growing impatience of faith, which he had noticed in himself more than once of late,
made him pass over in ridicule the idea that God sent people on fools' errands.
He longed to see her; he was angry at having missed her: and he wrote instantly, telling
her what had happened, and saying he had not enough patience to wait till the following
Sunday, but would come any day in the week that she liked to name.
Since he wrote a little over-ardently, Sue, as her manner was, delayed her reply till
Thursday before Good Friday, when she said he might come that afternoon if he wished,
this being the earliest day on which she could welcome him, for she was now assistant-teacher
in her husband's school. Jude therefore got leave from the cathedral
works at the trifling expense of a stoppage of pay, and went.
Part Fourth AT SHASTON
"Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence
of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee."—J.
MILTON. I
Shaston, the ancient British Palladour, From whose foundation first such strange reports
arise, (as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself
the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal
abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals,
its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against
his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape
around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and
a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires.
The bones of King Edward "the Martyr," carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought
Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and
enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores.
To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was, as historians tell us,
the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in
a general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them,
and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but strange to say
these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said
to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest
spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp, rising on the
north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor,
the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid,
and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's eyes as the
medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to a railway, it can best be reached
on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a
sort of isthmus on the north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that
side. Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten
Shaston or Palladour. Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within
living memory, horses, donkeys and men may have been seen toiling up the winding ways
to the top of the height, laden with tubs and barrels filled from the wells beneath
the mountain, and hawkers retailing their contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.
This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd facts, namely, that the
chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof behind the church, and that in former
times the town passed through a curious period of corruption, conventual and domestic, gave
rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man, such as the
world afforded not elsewhere. It was a place where the churchyard lay nearer
heaven than the church steeple, where beer was more plentiful than water, and where there
were more wanton women than honest wives and maids.
It is also said that after the Middle Ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their
priests, and hence were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain altogether
from the public worship of God; a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the
settles of their inns on Sunday afternoons. In those days the Shastonians were apparently
not without a sense of humour. There was another peculiarity—this a modern
one—which Shaston appeared to owe to its site.
It was the resting-place and headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows,
shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business lay largely at fairs and markets.
As strange wild birds are seen assembled on some lofty promontory, meditatively pausing
for longer flights, or to return by the course they followed thither, so here, in this cliff-town,
stood in stultified silence the yellow and green caravans bearing names not local, as
if surprised by a change in the landscape so violent as to hinder their further progress;
and here they usually remained all the winter till they turned to seek again their old tracks
in the following spring. It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that
Jude ascended from the nearest station for the first time in his life about four o'clock
one afternoon, and entering on the summit of the peak after a toilsome climb, passed
the first houses of the aerial town; and drew towards the school-house.
The hour was too early; the pupils were still in school, humming small, like a swarm of
gnats; and he withdrew a few steps along Abbey Walk, whence he regarded the spot which fate
had made the home of all he loved best in the world.
In front of the schools, which were extensive and stone-built, grew two enormous beeches
with smooth mouse-coloured trunks, as such trees will only grow on chalk uplands.
Within the mullioned and transomed windows he could see the black, brown, and flaxen
crowns of the scholars over the sills, and to pass the time away he walked down to the
level terrace where the abbey gardens once had spread, his heart throbbing in spite of
him. Unwilling to enter till the children were
dismissed he remained here till young voices could be heard in the open air, and girls
in white pinafores over red and blue frocks appeared dancing along the paths which the
abbess, prioress, subprioress, and fifty nuns had demurely paced three centuries earlier.
Retracing his steps he found that he had waited too long, and that Sue had gone out into the
town at the heels of the last scholar, Mr. Phillotson having been absent all the afternoon
at a teachers' meeting at Shottsford. Jude went into the empty schoolroom and sat
down, the girl who was sweeping the floor having informed him that Mrs. Phillotson would
be back again in a few minutes. A piano stood near—actually the old piano
that Phillotson had possessed at Marygreen—and though the dark afternoon almost prevented
him seeing the notes Jude touched them in his humble way, and could not help modulating
into the hymn which had so affected him in the previous week.
A figure moved behind him, and thinking it was still the girl with the broom Jude took
no notice, till the person came close and laid her fingers lightly upon his bass hand.
The imposed hand was a little one he seemed to know, and he turned.
"Don't stop," said Sue. "I like it.
I learnt it before I left Melchester. They used to play it in the training school."
"I can't strum before you! Play it for me."
"Oh well—I don't mind." Sue sat down, and her rendering of the piece,
though not remarkable, seemed divine as compared with his own.
She, like him, was evidently touched—to her own surprise—by the recalled air; and
when she had finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own half-way. Jude
grasped it—just as he had done before her marriage.
"It is odd," she said, in a voice quite changed, "that I should care about that air; because—"
"Because what?" "I am not that sort—quite."
"Not easily moved?" "I didn't quite mean that."
"Oh, but you ARE one of that sort, for you are just like me at heart!"
"But not at head." She played on and suddenly turned round; and
by an unpremeditated instinct each clasped the other's hand again.
She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly. "How funny!" she said.
"I wonder what we both did that for?" "I suppose because we are both alike, as I
said before." "Not in our thoughts!
Perhaps a little in our feelings." "And they rule thoughts...
Isn't it enough to make one blaspheme that the composer of that hymn is one of the most
commonplace men I ever met!" "What—you know him?"
"I went to see him." "Oh, you goose—to do just what I should
have done! Why did you?"
"Because we are not alike," he said drily. "Now we'll have some tea," said Sue.
"Shall we have it here instead of in my house? It is no trouble to get the kettle and things
brought in. We don't live at the school you know, but
in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old-Grove Place.
It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully.
Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live in—I feel crushed into the earth
by the weight of so many previous lives there spent.
In a new place like these schools there is only your own life to support.
Sit down, and I'll tell Ada to bring the tea-things across."
He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she flung open before going out,
and when she returned, followed by the maiden with tea, they sat down by the same light,
assisted by the blue rays of a spirit-lamp under the brass kettle on the stand.
"This is one of your wedding-presents to me," she said, signifying the latter.
"Yes," said Jude. The kettle of his gift sang with some satire
in its note, to his mind; and to change the subject he said, "Do you know of any good
readable edition of the uncanonical books of the New Testament?
You don't read them in the school I suppose?" "Oh dear no!—'twould alarm the neighbourhood...
Yes, there is one. I am not familiar with it now, though I was interested in it when
my former friend was alive. Cowper's _Apocryphal Gospels_."
"That sounds like what I want." His thoughts, however reverted with a twinge
to the "former friend"—by whom she meant, as he knew, the university comrade of her
earlier days. He wondered if she talked of him to Phillotson.
"The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice," she went on to keep him from his jealous thoughts,
which she read clearly, as she always did. Indeed when they talked on an indifferent
subject, as now, there was ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions,
so perfect was the reciprocity between them. "It is quite like the genuine article.
All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like one of the other evangelists read in
a dream, when things are the same, yet not the same.
But, Jude, do you take an interest in those questions still?
Are you getting up _Apologetica_?" "Yes.
I am reading Divinity harder than ever." She regarded him curiously.
"Why do you look at me like that?" said Jude. "Oh—why do you want to know?"
"I am sure you can tell me anything I may be ignorant of in that subject.
You must have learnt a lot of everything from your dear dead friend!"
"We won't get on to that now!" she coaxed. "Will you be carving out at that church again
next week, where you learnt the pretty hymn?" "Yes, perhaps."
"That will be very nice. Shall I come and see you there?
It is in this direction, and I could come any afternoon by train for half an hour?"
"No. Don't come!" "What—aren't we going to be friends, then,
any longer, as we used to be?" "No."
"I didn't know that. I thought you were always going to be kind
to me!" "No, I am not."
"What have I done, then? I am sure I thought we two—"
The _tremolo_ in her voice caused her to break off.
"Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt," said he abruptly.
There was a momentary pause, till she suddenly jumped up; and to his surprise he saw by the
kettle-flame that her face was flushed. "I can't talk to you any longer, Jude!" she
said, the tragic contralto note having come back as of old.
"It is getting too dark to stay together like this, after playing morbid Good Friday tunes
that make one feel what one shouldn't! ... We mustn't sit and talk in this way any more.
Yes—you must go away, for you mistake me! I am very much the reverse of what you say
so cruelly—Oh, Jude, it WAS cruel to say that!
Yet I can't tell you the truth—I should shock you by letting you know how I give way
to my impulses, and how much I feel that I shouldn't have been provided with attractiveness
unless it were meant to be exercised! Some women's love of being loved is insatiable;
and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't
give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's licence to receive
it. But you are so straightforward, Jude, that you can't understand me! ...
Now you must go. I am sorry my husband is not at home."
"Are you?" "I perceive I have said that in mere convention!
Honestly I don't think I am sorry. It does not matter, either way, sad to say!"
As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched his fingers but lightly
when he went out now. He had hardly gone from the door when, with
a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form and opened the iron casement of a window beneath
which he was passing in the path without. "When do you leave here to catch your train,
Jude?" she asked. He looked up in some surprise.
"The coach that runs to meet it goes in three-quarters of an hour or so."
"What will you do with yourself for the time?" "Oh—wander about, I suppose.
Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old church." "It does seem hard of me to pack you off so!
You have thought enough of churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark.
Stay there." "Where?"
"Where you are. I can talk to you better like this than when
you were inside... It was so kind and tender of you to give up
half a day's work to come to see me! ... You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear
Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote.
And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened.
Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!"
Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not get at her, she
seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had feared at close quarters.
"I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, "that
the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes
than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.
I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of
that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson,
but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...
Now you mustn't wait longer, or you will lose the coach.
Come and see me again. You must come to the house then."
"Yes!" said Jude. "When shall it be?"
"To-morrow week. Good-bye—good-bye!"
She stretched out her hand and stroked his forehead pitifully—just once.
Jude said good-bye, and went away into the darkness.
Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the wheels of the coach departing, and,
truly enough, when he reached the Duke's Arms in the Market Place the coach had gone.
It was impossible for him to get to the station on foot in time for this train, and he settled
himself perforce to wait for the next—the last to Melchester that night.
He wandered about awhile, obtained something to eat; and then, having another half-hour
on his hands, his feet involuntarily took him through the venerable graveyard of Trinity
Church, with its avenues of limes, in the direction of the schools again.
They were entirely in darkness. She had said she lived over the way at Old-Grove
Place, a house which he soon discovered from her description of its antiquity.
A glimmering candlelight shone from a front window, the shutters being yet unclosed.
He could see the interior clearly—the floor sinking a couple of steps below the road without,
which had become raised during the centuries since the house was built.
Sue, evidently just come in, was standing with her hat on in this front parlour or sitting-room,
whose walls were lined with wainscoting of panelled oak reaching from floor to ceiling,
the latter being crossed by huge moulded beams only a little way above her head.
The mantelpiece was of the same heavy description, carved with Jacobean pilasters and scroll-work.
The centuries did, indeed, ponderously overhang a young wife who passed her time here.
She had opened a rosewood work-box, and was looking at a photograph. Having contemplated
it a little while she pressed it against her ***, and put it again in its place.
Then becoming aware that she had not obscured the windows she came forward to do so, candle
in hand. It was too dark for her to see Jude without,
but he could see her face distinctly, and there was an unmistakable tearfulness about
the dark, long-lashed eyes. She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away
to pursue his solitary journey home. "Whose photograph was she looking at?" he
said. He had once given her his; but she had others,
he knew. Yet it was his, surely?
He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation. Those earnest men he read
of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such
encounters if they doubted their own strength. But he could not.
He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than
the Divine.
II However, if God disposed not, woman did.
The next morning but one brought him this note from her:
Don't come next week. On your own account don't!
We were too free, under the influence of that morbid hymn and the twilight.
Think no more than you can help of SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY.
The disappointment was keen. He knew her mood, the look of her face, when
she subscribed herself at length thus. But whatever her mood he could not say she
was wrong in her view. He replied: I acquiesce.
You are right. It is a lesson in renunciation which I suppose
I ought to learn at this season. JUDE.
He despatched the note on Easter Eve, and there seemed a finality in their decisions.
But other forces and laws than theirs were in operation.
On Easter Monday morning he received a message from the Widow Edlin, whom he had directed
to telegraph if anything serious happened: Your aunt is sinking.
Come at once. He threw down his tools and went.
Three and a half hours later he was crossing the downs about Marygreen, and presently plunged
into the concave field across which the short cut was made to the village. As he ascended
on the other side a labouring man, who had been watching his approach from a gate across
the path, moved uneasily, and prepared to speak.
"I can see in his face that she is dead," said Jude.
"Poor Aunt Drusilla!" It was as he had supposed, and Mrs. Edlin
had sent out the man to break the news to him.
"She wouldn't have knowed 'ee. She lay like a doll wi' glass eyes; so it
didn't matter that you wasn't here," said he.
Jude went on to the house, and in the afternoon, when everything was done, and the layers-out
had finished their beer, and gone, he sat down alone in the silent place.
It was absolutely necessary to communicate with Sue, though two or three days earlier
they had agreed to mutual severance. He wrote in the briefest terms:
Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost suddenly. The funeral is on Friday afternoon.
He remained in and about Marygreen through the intervening days, went out on Friday morning
to see that the grave was finished, and wondered if Sue would come.
She had not written, and that seemed to signify rather that she would come than that she would
not. Having timed her by her only possible train,
he locked the door about mid-day, and crossed the hollow field to the verge of the upland
by the Brown House, where he stood and looked over the vast prospect northwards, and over
the nearer landscape in which Alfredston stood. Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was
travelling from the left to the right of the picture.
There was a long time to wait, even now, till he would know if she had arrived.
He did wait, however, and at last a small hired vehicle pulled up at the bottom of the
hill, and a person alighted, the conveyance going back, while the passenger began ascending
the hill. He knew her; and she looked so slender to-day
that it seemed as if she might be crushed in the intensity of a too passionate embrace—such
as it was not for him to give. Two-thirds of the way up her head suddenly
took a solicitous poise, and he knew that she had at that moment recognized him.
Her face soon began a pensive smile, which lasted till, having descended a little way,
he met her. "I thought," she began with nervous quickness,
"that it would be so sad to let you attend the funeral alone!
And so—at the last moment—I came." "Dear faithful Sue!" murmured Jude.
With the elusiveness of her curious double nature, however, Sue did not stand still for
any further greeting, though it wanted some time to the burial.
A pathos so unusually compounded as that which attached to this hour was unlikely to repeat
itself for years, if ever, and Jude would have paused, and meditated, and conversed.
But Sue either saw it not at all, or, seeing it more than he, would not allow herself to
feel it. The sad and simple ceremony was soon over,
their progress to the church being almost at a trot, the bustling undertaker having
a more important funeral an hour later, three miles off.
Drusilla was put into the new ground, quite away from her ancestors.
Sue and Jude had gone side by side to the grave, and now sat down to tea in the familiar
house; their lives united at least in this last attention to the dead.
"She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?" murmured Sue.
"Yes. Particularly for members of our family."
Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile. "We are rather a sad family, don't you think,
Jude?" "She said we made bad husbands and wives.
Certainly we make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!"
Sue was silent. "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative
tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage?
If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a
sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the
inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should
be known—which it seems to be—why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops,
that it hurts and grieves him or her?" "I have said so, anyhow, to you."
Presently she went on: "Are there many couples, do you think, where one dislikes the other
for no definite fault?" "Yes, I suppose.
If either cares for another person, for instance." "But even apart from that?
Wouldn't the woman, for example, be very bad-natured if she didn't like to live with her husband;
merely"—her voice undulated, and he guessed things—"merely because she had a personal
feeling against it—a physical objection—a fastidiousness, or whatever it may be called—although
she might respect and be grateful to him? I am merely putting a case.
Ought she to try to overcome her pruderies?" Jude threw a troubled look at her.
He said, looking away: "It would be just one of those cases in which my experiences go
contrary to my dogmas. Speaking as an order-loving man—which I
hope I am, though I fear I am not—I should say, yes.
Speaking from experience and unbiased nature, I should say, no....
Sue, I believe you are not happy!" "Of course I am!" she contradicted.
"How can a woman be unhappy who has only been married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?"
"'Chose freely!'" "Why do you repeat it? ...
But I have to go back by the six o'clock train. You will be staying on here, I suppose?"
"For a few days to wind up Aunt's affairs. This house is gone now. Shall I go to the
train with you?" A little laugh of objection came from Sue.
"I think not. You may come part of the way."
"But stop—you can't go to-night! That train won't take you to Shaston.
You must stay and go back to-morrow. Mrs. Edlin has plenty of room, if you don't
like to stay here?" "Very well," she said dubiously.
"I didn't tell him I would come for certain." Jude went to the widow's house adjoining,
to let her know; and returning in a few minutes sat down again.
"It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue—horrible!" he said abruptly, with his
eyes bent to the floor. "No!
Why?" "I can't tell you all my part of the gloom.
Your part is that you ought not to have married him.
I saw it before you had done it, but I thought I mustn't interfere.
I was wrong. I ought to have!"
"But what makes you assume all this, dear?" "Because—I can see you through your feathers,
my poor little bird!" Her hand lay on the table, and Jude put his
upon it. Sue drew hers away.
"That's absurd, Sue," cried he, "after what we've been talking about! I am more strict
and formal than you, if it comes to that; and that you should object to such an innocent
action shows that you are ridiculously inconsistent!" "Perhaps it was too prudish," she said repentantly.
"Only I have fancied it was a sort of trick of ours—too frequent perhaps.
There, you may hold it as much as you like. Is that good of me?"
"Yes; very." "But I must tell him."
"Who?" "Richard."
"Oh—of course, if you think it necessary. But as it means nothing it may be bothering
him needlessly." "Well—are you sure you mean it only as my
cousin?" "Absolutely sure.
I have no feelings of love left in me." "That's news.
How has it come to be?" "I've seen Arabella."
She winced at the hit; then said curiously, "When did you see her?"
"When I was at Christminster." "So she's come back; and you never told me!
I suppose you will live with her now?" "Of course—just as you live with your husband."
She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and cactuses, withered for want of attention,
and through them at the outer distance, till her eyes began to grow moist.
"What is it?" said Jude, in a softened tone. "Why should you be so glad to go back to her
if—if what you used to say to me is still true—I mean if it were true then!
Of course it is not now! How could your heart go back to Arabella so
soon?" "A special Providence, I suppose, helped it
on its way." "Ah—it isn't true!" she said with gentle
resentment. "You are teasing me—that's all—because
you think I am not happy!" "I don't know.
I don't wish to know." "If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my
wickedness; not that I should have a right to dislike him!
He is considerate to me in everything; and he is very interesting, from the amount of
general knowledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his way....
Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his own age, or one younger than himself—eighteen
years—as I am than he?" "It depends upon what they feel for each other."
He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on unaided, which she did
in a vanquished tone, verging on tears: "I—I think I must be equally honest with
you as you have been with me. Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to
say?—that though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don't like him—it is a torture
to me to—live with him as a husband!—There, now I have let it out—I couldn't help it,
although I have been—pretending I am happy.—Now you'll have a contempt for me for ever, I
suppose!" She bent down her face upon her hands as they
lay upon the cloth, and silently sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged
table quiver. "I have only been married a month or two!"
she went on, still remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands.
"And it is said that what a woman shrinks from—in the early days of her marriage—she
shakes down to with comfortable indifference in half a dozen years.
But that is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction, since a person
gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time!"
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, "I thought there was something wrong, Sue!
Oh, I thought there was!" "But it is not as you think!—there is nothing
wrong except my own wickedness, I suppose you'd call it—a repugnance on my part, for
a reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by the world in general!
... What tortures me so much is the necessity
of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful
contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!
... I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to
me, or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for feeling as I
do! But he does nothing, except that he has grown
a little cold since he has found out how I feel.
That's why he didn't come to the funeral... Oh, I am very miserable—I don't know what
to do! ... Don't come near me, Jude, because you mustn't.
Don't—don't!" But he had jumped up and put his face against
hers—or rather against her ear, her face being inaccessible.
"I told you not to, Jude!" "I know you did—I only wish to—console
you! It all arose through my being married before
we met, didn't it? You would have been my wife, Sue, wouldn't
you, if it hadn't been for that?" Instead of replying she rose quickly, and
saying she was going to walk to her aunt's grave in the churchyard to recover herself,
went out of the house. Jude did not follow her.
Twenty minutes later he saw her cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin's, and soon
she sent a little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired to see him again
that night. In the lonely room of his aunt's house, Jude
sat watching the cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade.
He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and disheartened; and again
questioned his devotional motto that all was for the best.
He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the sense that Sue was so near
at hand. At some time near two o'clock, when he was
beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak that had been familiar
enough to him when he lived regularly at Marygreen. It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin.
As was the little creature's habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would
not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture till the morrow
when the trapper would come and knock it on the head.
He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now began to picture the
agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg. If it were a "bad catch" by the hind-leg,
the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had
stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed instrument enable it
to escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb.
If it were a "good catch," namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken and the
limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.
Almost half an hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry.
Jude could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing himself quickly
he descended, and by the light of the moon went across the green in the direction of
the sound. He reached the hedge bordering the widow's
garden, when he stood still. The faint click of the trap as dragged about
by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on
the back of the neck with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open casement at a window on the
ground floor of the adjacent cottage. "Jude!" said a voice timidly—Sue's voice.
"It is you—is it not?" "Yes, dear!"
"I haven't been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit, and couldn't help
thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must come down and kill it!
But I am so glad you got there first... They ought not to be allowed to set these
steel traps, ought they!" Jude had reached the window, which was quite
a low one, so that she was visible down to her waist.
She let go the casement-stay and put her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.
"Did it keep you awake?" he said. "No—I was awake."
"How was that?" "Oh, you know—now!
I know you, with your religious doctrines, think that a married woman in trouble of a
kind like mine commits a mortal sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you.
I wish I hadn't, now!" "Don't wish it, dear," he said.
"That may have BEEN my view; but my doctrines and I begin to part company."
"I knew it—I knew it! And that's why I vowed I wouldn't disturb
your belief. But—I am SO GLAD to see you!—and, oh,
I didn't mean to see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!"
Jude seized her hand and kissed it. "There is a stronger one left!" he said.
"I'll never care about my doctrines or my religion any more!
Let them go! Let me help you, even if I do love you, and
even if you..." "Don't say it!—I know what you mean; but
I can't admit so much as that. There!
Guess what you like, but don't press me to answer questions!"
"I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!" "I CAN'T be!
So few could enter into my feeling—they would say 'twas my fanciful fastidiousness,
or something of that sort, and condemn me... It is none of the natural tragedies of love
that's love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for
people who in a natural state would find relief in parting! ...
It would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I had been
able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody.
And I MUST tell somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought
out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew.
It was idiotic of me—there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very
experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that training
school scrape, with all the ***-sureness of the fool that I was! ...
I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly!
I daresay it happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick...
When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of
the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what WILL they say!"
"You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish—I wish—"
"You must go in now!" In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill,
and laid her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible
little kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could not put his arms
round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have done.
She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.
III Sue's distressful confession recurred to Jude's
mind all the night as being a sorrow indeed. The morning after, when it was time for her
to go, the neighbours saw her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill
path which led into the lonely road to Alfredston. An hour passed before he returned along the
same route, and in his face there was a look of exaltation not unmixed with recklessness.
An incident had occurred. They had stood parting in the silent highway,
and their tense and passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how
far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and she said tearfully
that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in embryo to think of such a thing as kissing
her even in farewell as he now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the
kiss would be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it.
If given in the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in the spirit of
a lover she could not permit it. "Will you swear that it will not be in that
spirit?" she had said. No: he would not.
And then they had turned from each other in estrangement, and gone their several ways,
till at a distance of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously. That
look behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained.
They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly, kissed close and long.
When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on
his. The kiss was a turning-point in Jude's career.
Back again in the cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though his kiss of
that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life, as long as he nourished
this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of
becoming the soldier and servant of a religion in which *** love was regarded as at its
best a frailty, and at its worst damnation. What Sue had said in warmth was really the
cold truth. When to defend his affection tooth and nail,
to persist with headlong force in impassioned attentions to her, was all he thought of,
he was condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the accepted school of morals.
He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by social position, to fill the
part of a propounder of accredited dogma. Strange that his first aspiration—towards
academical proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards
apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame;
or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned
into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?"
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble, to his struggling
fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal gain.
Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and himself in love erratically,
the loved one's revolt against her state being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be
barely respectable according to regulation views.
It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the obvious, which was
that he had made himself quite an impostor as a law-abiding religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole, to which he brought
out all the theological and ethical works that he possessed, and had stored here.
He knew that, in this country of true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher
price than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own way, even if
he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of thus destroying them.
Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with, he cut the volumes into pieces as well as
he could, and with a three-pronged fork shook them over the flames.
They kindled, and lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till
they were more or less consumed. Though he was almost a stranger here now,
passing cottagers talked to him over the garden hedge.
"Burning up your awld aunt's rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a lot gets heaped up in nooks and corners
when you've lived eighty years in one house." It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before
the leaves, covers, and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman
and the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he turned and turned the
paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being no longer a hypocrite to himself afforded
his mind a relief which gave him calm. He might go on believing as before, but he
professed nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which, as their
proprietor, he might naturally be supposed to exercise on himself first of all.
In his passion for Sue he could not stand as an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited
sepulchre. Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier
in the day, had gone along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back
and let him kiss her. Jude ought not to have pretended that he was
not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly.
She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue's logic was extraordinarily compounded,
and seemed to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that
being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were
wrong in practice. "I have been too weak, I think!" she ***
out as she pranced on, shaking down tear-drops now and then.
"It was burning, like a lover's—oh, it was! And I won't write to him any more, or at least
for a long time, to impress him with my dignity! And I hope it will hurt him very much—expecting
a letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and the next, and no letter coming.
He'll suffer then with suspense—won't he, that's all!—and I am very glad of it!"—Tears
of pity for Jude's approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those which had
surged up in pity for herself. Then the slim little wife of a husband whose
person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted
by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with
Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and panted, and brought
weariness into her eyes by gazing and worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was troubled, thought
it must be owing to the depressing effect of her aunt's death and funeral.
He began telling her of his day's doings, and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring
schoolmaster whom he had not seen for years, had called upon him.
While ascending to the town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly
and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and its bordering bushes of
hazel: "Richard—I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a
long while. I don't know whether you think it wrong?"
He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said vaguely, "Oh, did you?
What did you do that for?" "I don't know.
He wanted to, and I let him." "I hope it pleased him.
I should think it was hardly a novelty." They lapsed into silence.
Had this been a case in the court of an omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes
the curious fact that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not said
a word about the kiss. After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing
the school registers. She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition, and
at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early.
When Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the attendance-numbers, it
was a quarter to twelve o'clock. Entering their chamber, which by day commanded
a view of some thirty or forty miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer
Wessex, he went to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with hard-breathing
fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered the far-reaching scene.
He was musing, "I think," he said at last, without turning his head, "that I must get
the committee to change the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:
"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the class-room.
The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives me the ear-ache."
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot,
which extended over the walls upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place,"
and the massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast to the
new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch furniture that he had bought
for her, the two styles seeming to nod to each other across three centuries upon the
shaking floor. "Soo!" he said (this being the way in which
he pronounced her name). She was not in the bed, though she had apparently
been there—the clothes on her side being flung back.
Thinking she might have forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to
see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a few minutes, when, finding
she did not come, he went out upon the landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"
"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen quarter.
"What are you doing down there at midnight—tiring yourself out for nothing!"
"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke.
She was not there, even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon
the landing, and again called her name. She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones
were small and confined, and whence they came he could not at first understand.
Under the staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed to come from
it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or
other fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering
if she had suddenly become deranged. "What are you doing in there?" he asked.
"Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late."
"But there's no bed, is there? And no ventilation!
Why, you'll be suffocated if you stay all night!"
"Oh no, I think not. Don't trouble about me."
"But—" Phillotson seized the *** and pulled at the
door. She had fastened it inside with a piece of
string, which broke at his pull. There being no bedstead she had flung down some rugs and
made a little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet afforded.
When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and trembling.
"You ought not to have pulled open the door!" she cried excitedly. "It is not becoming in
you! Oh, will you go away; please will you!"
She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white nightgown against the shadowy lumber-hole
that he was quite worried. She continued to beseech him not to disturb
her. He said: "I've been kind to you, and given
you every liberty; and it is monstrous that you should feel in this way!"
"Yes," said she, weeping. "I know that!
It is wrong and wicked of me, I suppose! I am very sorry.
But it is not I altogether that am to blame!" "Who is then?
Am I?" "No—I don't know!
The universe, I suppose—things in general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"
"Well, it is no use talking like that. Making a man's house so unseemly at this time
o' night! Eliza will hear if we don't mind." (He meant
the servant.) "Just think if either of the parsons in this
town was to see us now! I hate such eccentricities, Sue.
There's no order or regularity in your sentiments! ...
But I won't intrude on you further; only I would advise you not to shut the door too
tight, or I shall find you stifled to-morrow." On rising the next morning he immediately
looked into the closet, but Sue had already gone downstairs.
There was a little nest where she had lain, and spiders' webs hung overhead.
"What must a woman's aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!" he said
bitterly. He found her sitting at the breakfast-table,
and the meal began almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement—or
rather roadway, pavements being scarce here—which was two or three feet above the level of the
parlour floor. They nodded down to the happy couple their
morning greetings, as they went on. "Richard," she said all at once; "would you
mind my living away from you?" "Away from me?
Why, that's what you were doing when I married you. What then was the meaning of marrying
at all?" "You wouldn't like me any the better for telling
you." "I don't object to know."
"Because I thought I could do nothing else. You had got my promise a long time before
that, remember. Then, as time went on, I regretted I had promised
you, and was trying to see an honourable way to break it off.
But as I couldn't I became rather reckless and careless about the conventions.
Then you know what scandals were spread, and how I was turned out of the training school
you had taken such time and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and this frightened
me and it seemed then that the one thing I could do would be to let the engagement stand.
Of course I, of all people, ought not to have cared what was said, for it was just what
I fancied I never did care for. But I was a coward—as so many women are—and
my theoretic unconventionality broke down. If that had not entered into the case it would
have been better to have hurt your feelings once for all then, than to marry you and hurt
them all my life after... And you were so generous in never giving credit
for a moment to the rumour." "I am bound in honesty to tell you that I
weighed its probability and inquired of your cousin about it."
"Ah!" she said with pained surprise. "I didn't doubt you."
"But you inquired!" "I took his word."
Her eyes had filled. "HE wouldn't have inquired!" she said. "But
you haven't answered me. Will you let me go away?
I know how irregular it is of me to ask it—" "It is irregular."
"But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classified. If people are at all peculiar in character
they have to suffer from the very rules that produce comfort in others! ...
Will you let me?" "But we married—"
"What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances," she burst out, "if they make you miserable
when you know you are committing no sin?" "But you are committing a sin in not liking
me." "I DO like you!
But I didn't reflect it would be—that it would be so much more than that...
For a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any
circumstances, however legal. There—I've said it! ...
Will you let me, Richard?" "You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"
"Why can't we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and surely we can cancel
it—not legally of course; but we can morally, especially as no new interests, in the shape
of children, have arisen to be looked after. Then we might be friends, and meet without
pain to either. Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity!
We shall both be dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you
relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think me eccentric, or super-sensitive,
or something absurd. Well—why should I suffer for what I was
born to be, if it doesn't hurt other people?" "But it does—it hurts ME!
And you vowed to love me." "Yes—that's it!
I am in the wrong. I always am!
It is as culpable to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as
silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"
"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"
"Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude."
"As his wife?" "As I choose."
Phillotson writhed. Sue continued: "She, or he, 'who lets the
world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the apelike one of imitation.' J. S. Mill's words, those are.
I have been reading it up. Why can't you act upon them? I wish to, always."
"What do I care about J. S. Mill!" moaned he.
"I only want to lead a quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed
what never once occurred to me before our marriage—that you were in love, and are
in love, with Jude Fawley!" "You may go on guessing that I am, since you
have begun. But do you suppose that if I had been I should
have asked you to let me go and live with him?"
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of replying at present
to what apparently did not strike him as being such a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_
as she, in her loss of courage at the last moment, meant it to appear.
She was beginning to be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her other
little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering the class-room, where
he could see the back of her head through the glass partition whenever he turned his
eyes that way. As he went on giving and hearing lessons his
forehead and eyebrows twitched from concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore
a scrap from a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:
Your request prevents my attending to work at all.
I don't know what I am doing! Was it seriously made?
He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little boy to take to Sue.
The child toddled off into the class-room. Phillotson saw his wife turn and take the
note, and the bend of her pretty head as she read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent
undue expression under fire of so many young eyes.
He could not see her hands, but she changed her position, and soon the child returned,
bringing nothing in reply. In a few minutes, however, one of Sue's class
appeared, with a little note similar to his own.
These words only were pencilled therein: I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously
made. Phillotson looked more disturbed than before,
and the meeting-place of his brows twitched again.
In ten minutes he called up the child he had just sent to her, and dispatched another missive:
God knows I don't want to thwart you in any reasonable way. My whole thought is to make
you comfortable and happy. But I cannot agree to such a preposterous
notion as your going to live with your lover. You would lose everybody's respect and regard;
and so should I! After an interval a similar part was enacted
in the class-room, and an answer came: I know you mean my good.
But I don't want to be respectable! To produce "Human development in its richest diversity"
(to quote your Humboldt) is to my mind far above respectability. No doubt my tastes are
low—in your view—hopelessly low! If you won t let me go to him, will you grant me
this one request—allow me to live in your house in a separate way?
To this he returned no answer. She wrote again:
I know what you think. But cannot you have pity on me?
I beg you to; I implore you to be merciful! I would not ask if I were not almost compelled
by what I can't bear! No poor woman has ever wished more than I
that Eve had not fallen, so that (as the primitive Christians believed) some harmless mode of
vegetation might have peopled Paradise. But I won't trifle! Be kind to me—even though
I have not been kind to you! I will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never
trouble you. Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned
an answer: I do not wish to pain you.
How well you KNOW I don't! Give me a little time.
I am disposed to agree to your last request. One line from her:
Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve your kindness.
All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed partition; and he felt
as lonely as when he had not known her. But he was as good as his word, and consented
to her living apart in the house. At first, when they met at meals, she had
seemed more composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of their position worked
on her temperament, and the fibres of her nature seemed strained like harp-strings.
She talked vaguely and indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.
IV Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often
his custom, trying to get together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman antiquities.
For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a return of his old interest in it.
He forgot time and place, and when he remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly
two o'clock. His preoccupation was such that, though he
now slept on the other side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and
his wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place, which since his
differences with Sue had been hers exclusively. He entered, and unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement.
Before the schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up half-awake,
staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the side away from him, which was
towards the window. This was somewhat hidden by the canopy of
the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her flinging up the sash.
Before he had thought that she meant to do more than get air she had mounted upon the
sill and leapt out. She disappeared in the darkness, and he heard
her fall below. Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking
himself sharply against the newel in his haste. Opening the heavy door he ascended the two
or three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the gravel before him lay a white
heap. Phillotson seized it in his arms, and bringing
Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he gazed at her by the flapping light of the
candle which he had set down in the draught on the bottom stair.
She had certainly not broken her neck. She looked at him with eyes that seemed not
to take him in; and though not particularly large in general they appeared so now.
She pressed her side and rubbed her arm, as if conscious of pain; then stood up, averting
her face, in evident distress at his gaze. "Thank God—you are not killed!
Though it's not for want of trying—not much hurt I hope?"
Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the lowness of the
old rooms and to the high level of the ground without. Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow
in the side she had apparently incurred little harm.
"I was asleep, I think!" she began, her pale face still turned away from him.
"And something frightened me—a terrible dream—I thought I saw you—"
The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her, and she was silent.
Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched Phillotson flung it round
her. "Shall I help you upstairs?" he asked drearily;
for the significance of all this sickened him of himself and of everything.
"No thank you, Richard. I am very little hurt.
I can walk." "You ought to lock your door," he mechanically
said, as if lecturing in school. "Then no one could intrude even by accident."
"I have tried—it won't lock. All the doors are out of order."
The aspect of things was not improved by her admission.
She ascended the staircase slowly, the waving light of the candle shining on her. Phillotson
did not approach her, or attempt to ascend himself till he heard her enter her room.
Then he fastened up the front door, and returning, sat down on the lower stairs, holding the
newel with one hand, and bowing his face into the other.
Thus he remained for a long long time—a pitiable object enough to one who had seen
him; till, raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that the business
of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or no, he took the candle and went
upstairs to his lonely room on the other side of the landing.
No further incident touching the matter between them occurred till the following evening,
when, immediately school was over, Phillotson walked out of Shaston, saying he required
no tea, and not informing Sue where he was going.
He descended from the town level by a steep road in a north-westerly direction, and continued
to move downwards till the soil changed from its white dryness to a tough brown clay. He
was now on the low alluvial beds Where Duncliffe is the traveller's mark, And
cloty Stour's a-rolling dark. More than once he looked back in the increasing
obscurity of evening. Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible
On the grey-topp'd height Of Paladore, as pale day wore Away... [William Barnes.]
The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine as if watching him, one
of which windows was his own. Above it he could just discern the pinnacled
tower of Trinity Church. The air down here, tempered by the thick damp
bed of tenacious clay, was not as it had been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when
he had walked a mile or two he was obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.
Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without hesitation through the shade, as a
man goes on, night or day, in a district over which he has played as a boy.
He had walked altogether about four and a half miles
Where Stour receives her strength, From six cleere fountains fed, [Drayton.]
when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton—a little town of three
or four thousand inhabitants—where he went on to the boys' school, and knocked at the
door of the master's residence. A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson's
inquiry if Mr. Gillingham was at home replied that he was, going at once off to his own
house, and leaving Phillotson to find his way in as he could.
He discovered his friend putting away some books from which he had been giving evening
lessons. The light of the paraffin lamp fell on Phillotson's
face—pale and wretched by contrast with his friend's, who had a cool, practical look.
They had been schoolmates in boyhood, and fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College,
many years before this time. "Glad to see you, ***!
But you don't look well? Nothing the matter?"
Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed the cupboard and pulled
up beside his visitor. "Why you haven't been here—let me see—since
you were married? I called, you know, but you were out; and upon my word it is such
a climb after dark that I have been waiting till the days are longer before lumpering
up again. I am glad you didn't wait, however."
Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally used a dialect-word of their
boyhood to each other in private. "I've come, George, to explain to you my reasons
for taking a step that I am about to take, so that you, at least, will understand my
motives if other people question them anywhen—as they may, indeed certainly will...
But anything is better than the present condition of things.
God forbid that you should ever have such an experience as mine!"
"Sit down. You don't mean—anything wrong between you
and Mrs. Phillotson?" "I do...
My wretched state is that I've a wife I love who not only does not love me, but—but—
Well, I won't say. I know her feeling!
I should prefer hatred from her!" "Ssh!"
"And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame as I. She was a pupil-teacher
under me, as you know, and I took advantage of her inexperience, and toled her out for
walks, and got her to agree to a long engagement before she well knew her own mind.
Afterwards she saw somebody else, but she blindly fulfilled her engagement."
"Loving the other?" "Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly;
though her exact feeling for him is a riddle to me—and to him too, I think—possibly
to herself. She is one of the oddest creatures I ever
met. However, I have been struck with these two
facts; the extraordinary sympathy, or similarity, between the pair.
He is her cousin, which perhaps accounts for some of it.
They seem to be one person split in two! And with her unconquerable aversion to myself
as a husband, even though she may like me as a friend, 'tis too much to bear longer.
She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to no purpose. I cannot bear it—I
cannot! I can't answer her arguments—she has read
ten times as much as I. Her intellect sparkles like diamonds, while
mine smoulders like brown paper... She's one too many for me!"
"She'll get over it, good-now?" "Never!
It is—but I won't go into it—there are reasons why she never will.
At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave me and go to him.
The climax came last night, when, owing to my entering her room by accident, she jumped
out of window—so strong was her dread of me!
She pretended it was a dream, but that was to soothe me.
Now when a woman jumps out of window without caring whether she breaks her neck or no,
she's not to be mistaken; and this being the case I have come to a conclusion: that it
is wrong to so torture a fellow-creature any longer; and I won't be the inhuman wretch
to do it, cost what it may!" "What—you'll let her go?
And with her lover?" "Whom with is her matter.
I shall let her go; with him certainly, if she wishes.
I know I may be wrong—I know I can't logically, or religiously, defend my concession to such
a wish of hers, or harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in.
Only I know one thing: something within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing her.
I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such a so-called preposterous
request from his wife, the only course that can possibly be regarded as right and proper
and honourable in him is to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and
*** her lover perhaps. But is that essentially right, and proper,
and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish?
I don't profess to decide. I simply am going to act by instinct, and
let principles take care of themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a
quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible."
"But—you see, there's the question of neighbours and society—what will happen if everybody—"
"Oh, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer!
I only see what's under my eyes." "Well—I don't agree with your instinct,
***!" said Gillingham gravely. "I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that
such a sedate, plodding fellow as you should have entertained such a craze for a moment.
You said when I called that she was puzzling and peculiar: I think you are!"
"Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to be intrinsically a good woman, while
she has pleaded for release—been the man she has knelt to and implored indulgence of?"
"I am thankful to say I haven't." "Then I don't think you are in a position
to give an opinion. I have been that man, and it makes all the
difference in the world, if one has any manliness or chivalry in him.
I had not the remotest idea—living apart from women as I have done for so many years—that
merely taking a woman to church and putting a ring upon her finger could by any possibility
involve one in such a daily, continuous tragedy as that now shared by her and me!"
"Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you, provided she kept to herself.
But to go attended by a cavalier—that makes a difference."
"Not a bit. Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure
her present misery than be made to promise to keep apart from him? All that is a question
for herself. It is not the same thing at all as the treachery
of living on with a husband and playing him false...
However, she has not distinctly implied living with him as wife, though I think she means
to... And to the best of my understanding it is
not an ignoble, merely animal, feeling between the two: that is the worst of it; because
it makes me think their affection will be enduring.
I did not mean to confess to you that in the first jealous weeks of my marriage, before
I had come to my right mind, I hid myself in the school one evening when they were together
there, and I heard what they said. I am ashamed of it now, though I suppose I
was only exercising a legal right. I found from their manner that an extraordinary
affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour
of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together—to share each other's emotions,
and fancies, and dreams." "Platonic!"
"Well no. Shelleyan would be nearer to it.
They remind me of—what are their names—Laon and Cythna.
Also of Paul and Virginia a little. The more I reflect, the more ENTIRELY I am
on their side!" "But if people did as you want to do, there'd
be a general domestic disintegration. The family would no longer be the social unit."
"Yes—I am all abroad, I suppose!" said Phillotson sadly.
"I was never a very bright reasoner, you remember.... And yet, I don't see why the woman and the
children should not be the unit without the man."
"By the Lord Harry!—Matriarchy! ... Does SHE say all this too?"
"Oh no. She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this—all
in the last twelve hours!" "It will upset all received opinion hereabout.
Good God—what will Shaston say!" "I don't say that it won't.
I don't know—I don't know! ... As I say, I am only a feeler, not a reasoner."
"Now," said Gillingham, "let us take it quietly, and have something to drink over it."
He went under the stairs, and produced a bottle of cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer
each. "I think you are rafted, and not yourself,"
he continued. "Do go back and make up your mind to put up
with a few whims. But keep her.
I hear on all sides that she's a charming young thing."
"Ah yes! That's the bitterness of it!
Well, I won't stay. I have a long walk before me."
Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting expressed his hope
that this consultation, singular as its subject was, would be the renewal of their old comradeship.
"Stick to her!" were his last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson; from which
his friend answered "Aye, aye!" But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds
of night, and no sound was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour, he
said, "So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments against it than those!"
"I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses—that's what I think!" murmured
Gillingham, as he walked back alone. The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson
told Sue: "You may go—with whom you will.
I absolutely and unconditionally agree." Having once come to this conclusion it seemed
to Phillotson more and more indubitably the true one.
His mild serenity at the sense that he was doing his duty by a woman who was at his mercy
almost overpowered his grief at relinquishing her.
Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had come—a cloudy evening
with wind—which indeed was very seldom absent in this elevated place.
How permanently it was imprinted upon his vision; that look of her as she glided into
the parlour to tea; a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and marked
by the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic possibilities quite at variance
with her times of buoyancy; a trying of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either.
Her nervous manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be injured by her course, might
have been interpreted by a stranger as displeasure that Phillotson intruded his presence on her
for the few brief minutes that remained. "You had better have a slice of ham or an
egg, or something with your tea? You can't travel on a mouthful of bread and
butter." She took the slice he helped her to; and they
discussed as they sat trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he would find
the key of this or that cupboard, what little bills were paid, and what not.
"I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue," he said, in a heroic attempt to put her at
her ease. "So that being without a wife will not really
be irksome to me, as it might be to other men who have had one a little while.
I have, too, this grand hobby in my head of writing 'The Roman Antiquities of Wessex,'
which will occupy all my spare hours." "If you will send me some of the manuscript
to copy at any time, as you used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!" she said with
amenable gentleness. "I should much like to be some help to you
still—as a—friend." Phillotson mused, and said: "No, I think we
ought to be really separate, if we are to be at all.
And for this reason, that I don't wish to ask you any questions, and particularly wish
you not to give me information as to your movements, or even your address...
Now, what money do you want? You must have some, you know."
"Oh, of course, Richard, I couldn't think of having any of your money to go away from
you with! I don't want any either.
I have enough of my own to last me for a long while, and Jude will let me have—"
"I would rather not know anything about him, if you don't mind. You are free, absolutely;
and your course is your own." "Very well.
But I'll just say that I have packed only a change or two of my own personal clothing,
and one or two little things besides that are my very own.
I wish you would look into my trunk before it is closed.
Besides that I have only a small parcel that will go into Jude's portmanteau."
"Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your luggage!
I wish you would take three-quarters of the household furniture.
I don't want to be bothered with it. I have a sort of affection for a little of
it that belonged to my poor mother and father. But the rest you are welcome to whenever you
like to send for it." "That I shall never do."
"You go by the six-thirty train, don't you? It is now a quarter to six."
"You... You don't seem very sorry I am going, Richard!"
"Oh no—perhaps not." "I like you much for how you have behaved.
It is a curious thing that directly I have begun to regard you as not my husband, but
as my old teacher, I like you. I won't be so affected as to say I love you,
because you know I don't, except as a friend. But you do seem that to me!"
Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these reflections, and then the station
omnibus came round to take her up. Phillotson saw her things put on the top,
handed her in, and was obliged to make an appearance of kissing her as he wished her
good-bye, which she quite understood and imitated. From the cheerful manner in which they parted
the omnibus-man had no other idea than that she was going for a short visit.
When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs and opened the window in the
direction the omnibus had taken. Soon the noise of its wheels died away.
He came down then, his face compressed like that of one bearing pain; he put on his hat
and went out, following by the same route for nearly a mile.
Suddenly turning round he came home. He had no sooner entered than the voice of
his friend Gillingham greeted him from the front room.
"I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I walked in, and made myself comfortable.
I said I would call, you remember." "Yes.
I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly for coming to-night."
"How is Mrs.—" "She is quite well.
She is gone—just gone. That's her tea-cup, that she drank out of
only an hour ago. And that's the plate she—"
Phillotson's throat got choked up, and he could not go on. He turned and pushed the
tea-things aside. "Have you had any tea, by the by?" he asked
presently in a renewed voice. "No—yes—never mind," said Gillingham,
preoccupied. "Gone, you say she is?"
"Yes... I would have died for her; but I wouldn't
be cruel to her in the name of the law. She is, as I understand, gone to join her
lover. What they are going to do I cannot say.
Whatever it may be she has my full consent to."
There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson's pronouncement which restrained his friend's
comment. "Shall I—leave you?" he asked.
"No, no. It is a mercy to me that you have come.
I have some articles to arrange and clear away.
Would you help me?" Gillingham assented; and having gone to the
upper rooms the schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all Sue's things that
she had left behind, and laying them in a large box.
"She wouldn't take all I wanted her to," he continued.
"But when I made up my mind to her going to live in her own way I did make up my mind."
"Some men would have stopped at an agreement to separate."
"I've gone into all that, and don't wish to argue it.
I was, and am, the most old-fashioned man in the world on the question of marriage—in
fact I had never thought critically about its ethics at all.
But certain facts stared me in the face, and I couldn't go against them."
They went on with the packing silently. When it was done Phillotson closed the box
and turned the key. "There," he said.
"To adorn her in somebody's eyes; never again in mine!"
V Four-and-twenty hours before this time Sue
had written the following note to Jude: It is as I told you; and I am leaving to-morrow
evening. Richard and I thought it could be done with less obtrusiveness after dark.
I feel rather frightened, and therefore ask you to be sure you are on the Melchester platform
to meet me. I arrive at a little to seven.
I know you will, of course, dear Jude; but I feel so timid that I can't help begging
you to be punctual. He has been so VERY kind to me through it
all! Now to our meeting!
S. As she was carried by the omnibus farther
and farther down from the mountain town—the single passenger that evening—she regarded
the receding road with a sad face. But no hesitation was apparent therein.
The up-train by which she was departing stopped by signal only.
To Sue it seemed strange that such a powerful organization as a railway train should be
brought to a stand-still on purpose for her—a fugitive from her lawful home.
The twenty minutes' journey drew towards its close, and Sue began gathering her things
together to alight. At the moment that the train came to a stand-still
by the Melchester platform a hand was laid on the door and she beheld Jude.
He entered the compartment promptly. He had a black bag in his hand, and was dressed
in the dark suit he wore on Sundays and in the evening after work. Altogether he looked
a very handsome young fellow, his ardent affection for her burning in his eyes.
"Oh Jude!" She clasped his hand with both hers, and her
tense state caused her to simmer over in a little succession of dry sobs.
"I—I am so glad! I get out here?"
"No. I get in, dear one! I've packed.
Besides this bag I've only a big box which is labelled."
"But don't I get out? Aren't we going to stay here?"
"We couldn't possibly, don't you see. We are known here—I, at any rate, am well
known. I've booked for Aldbrickham; and here's your
ticket for the same place, as you have only one to here."
"I thought we should have stayed here," she repeated.
"It wouldn't have done at all." "Ah!
Perhaps not." "There wasn't time for me to write and say
the place I had decided on. Aldbrickham is a much bigger town—sixty
or seventy thousand inhabitants—and nobody knows anything about us there."
"And you have given up your cathedral work here?"
"Yes. It was rather sudden—your message coming
unexpectedly. Strictly, I might have been made to finish out the week.
But I pleaded urgency and I was let off. I would have deserted any day at your command,
dear Sue. I have deserted more than that for you!"
"I fear I am doing you a lot of harm. Ruining your prospects of the Church; ruining
your progress in your trade; everything!" "The Church is no more to me.
Let it lie! _I_ am not to be one of
The soldier-saints who, row on row, Burn upward each to his point of bliss,
if any such there be! My point of bliss is not upward, but here."
"Oh I seem so bad—upsetting men's courses like this!" said she, taking up in her voice
the emotion that had begun in his. But she recovered her equanimity by the time
they had travelled a dozen miles. "He has been so good in letting me go," she
resumed. "And here's a note I found on my dressing-table,
addressed to you." "Yes.
He's not an unworthy fellow," said Jude, glancing at the note. "And I am ashamed of myself for
hating him because he married you." "According to the rule of women's whims I
suppose I ought to suddenly love him, because he has let me go so generously and unexpectedly,"
she answered smiling. "But I am so cold, or devoid of gratitude,
or so something, that even this generosity hasn't made me love him, or repent, or want
to stay with him as his wife; although I do feel I like his large-mindedness, and respect
him more than ever." "It may not work so well for us as if he had
been less kind, and you had run away against his will," murmured Jude.
"That I NEVER would have done." Jude's eyes rested musingly on her face.
Then he suddenly kissed her; and was going to kiss her again.
"No—only once now—please, Jude!" "That's rather cruel," he answered; but acquiesced.
"Such a strange thing has happened to me," Jude continued after a silence.
"Arabella has actually written to ask me to get a divorce from her—in kindness to her,
she says. She wants to honestly and legally marry that
man she has already married virtually; and begs me to enable her to do it."
"What have you done?" "I have agreed.
I thought at first I couldn't do it without getting her into trouble about that second
marriage, and I don't want to injure her in any way.
Perhaps she's no worse than I am, after all! But nobody knows about it over here, and I
find it will not be a difficult proceeding at all.
If she wants to start afresh I have only too obvious reasons for not hindering her."
"Then you'll be free?" "Yes, I shall be free."
"Where are we booked for?" she asked, with the discontinuity that marked her to-night.
"Aldbrickham, as I said." "But it will be very late when we get there?"
"Yes. I thought of that, and I wired for a room
for us at the Temperance Hotel there." "One?"
"Yes—one." She looked at him.
"Oh Jude!" Sue bent her forehead against the corner of
the compartment. "I thought you might do it; and that I was
deceiving you. But I didn't mean that!"
In the pause which followed, Jude's eyes fixed themselves with a stultified expression on
the opposite seat. "Well!" he said...
"Well!" He remained in silence; and seeing how discomfited
he was she put her face against his cheek, murmuring, "Don't be vexed, dear!"
"Oh—there's no harm done," he said. "But—I understood it like that...
Is this a sudden change of mind?" "You have no right to ask me such a question;
and I shan't answer!" she said, smiling. "My dear one, your happiness is more to me
than anything—although we seem to verge on quarrelling so often!—and your will is
law to me. I am something more than a mere—selfish fellow, I hope.
Have it as you wish!" On reflection his brow showed perplexity.
"But perhaps it is that you don't love me—not that you have become conventional! Much as,
under your teaching, I hate convention, I hope it IS that, not the other terrible alternative!"
Even at this obvious moment for candour Sue could not be quite candid as to the state
of that mystery, her heart. "Put it down to my timidity," she said with
hurried evasiveness; "to a woman's natural timidity when the crisis comes.
I may feel as well as you that I have a perfect right to live with you as you thought—from
this moment. I may hold the opinion that, in a proper state
of society, the father of a woman's child will be as much a private matter of hers as
the cut of her underlinen, on whom nobody will have any right to question her.
But partly, perhaps, because it is by his generosity that I am now free, I would rather
not be other than a little rigid. If there had been a rope-ladder, and he had
run after us with pistols, it would have seemed different, and I may have acted otherwise.
But don't press me and criticize me, Jude! Assume that I haven't the courage of my opinions.
I know I am a poor miserable creature. My nature is not so passionate as yours!"
He repeated simply! "I thought—what I naturally thought.
But if we are not lovers, we are not. Phillotson thought so, I am sure.
See, here is what he has written to me." He opened the letter she had brought, and
read: "I make only one condition—that you are
tender and kind to her. I know you love her.
But even love may be cruel at times. You are made for each other: it is obvious,
palpable, to any unbiased older person. You were all along 'the shadowy third' in
my short life with her. I repeat, take care of Sue."
"He's a good fellow, isn't he!" she said with latent tears.
On reconsideration she added, "He was very resigned to letting me go—too resigned almost!
I never was so near being in love with him as when he made such thoughtful arrangements
for my being comfortable on my journey, and offering to provide money.
Yet I was not. If I loved him ever so little as a wife, I'd
go back to him even now." "But you don't, do you?"
"It is true—oh so terribly true!—I don't." "Nor me neither, I half-fear!" he said pettishly.
"Nor anybody perhaps! Sue, sometimes, when I am vexed with you,
I think you are incapable of real love." "That's not good and loyal of you!" she said,
and drawing away from him as far as she could, looked severely out into the darkness.
She added in hurt tones, without turning round: "My liking for you is not as some women's
perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of
a supremely delicate kind, and I don't want to go further and risk it by—an attempt
to intensify it! I quite realized that, as woman with man,
it was a risk to come. But, as me with you, I resolved to trust you
to set my wishes above your gratification. Don't discuss it further, dear Jude!"
"Of course, if it would make you reproach yourself... but you do like me very much,
Sue? Say you do!
Say that you do a quarter, a tenth, as much as I do you, and I'll be content!"
"I've let you kiss me, and that tells enough." "Just once or so!"
"Well—don't be a greedy boy." He leant back, and did not look at her for
a long time. That episode in her past history of which
she had told him—of the poor Christminster graduate whom she had handled thus, returned
to Jude's mind; and he saw himself as a possible second in such a torturing destiny.
"This is a *** elopement!" he murmured. "Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me
with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so—to see you
sitting up there so prim!" "Now you mustn't be angry—I won't let you!"
she coaxed, turning and moving nearer to him. "You did kiss me just now, you know; and I
didn't dislike you to, I own it, Jude. Only I don't want to let you do it again,
just yet—considering how we are circumstanced, don't you see!"
He could never resist her when she pleaded (as she well knew). And they sat side by side
with joined hands, till she aroused herself at some thought.
"I can't possibly go to that Temperance Inn, after your telegraphing that message!"
"Why not?" "You can see well enough!"
"Very well; there'll be some other one open, no doubt.
I have sometimes thought, since your marrying Phillotson because of a stupid scandal, that
under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as
any woman I know!" "Not mentally.
But I haven't the courage of my views, as I said before.
I didn't marry him altogether because of the scandal. But sometimes a woman's LOVE OF BEING
LOVED gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating
a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all.
Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair
the wrong." "You simply mean that you flirted outrageously
with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though
you tortured yourself to death by doing it." "Well—if you will put it brutally!—it
was a little like that—that and the scandal together—and your concealing from me what
you ought to have told me before!" He could see that she was distressed and tearful
at his criticisms, and soothed her, saying: "There, dear; don't mind!
Crucify me, if you will! You know you are all the world to me, whatever
you do!" "I am very bad and unprincipled—I know you
think that!" she said, trying to blink away her tears.
"I think and know you are my dear Sue, from whom neither length nor breadth, nor things
present nor things to come, can divide me!" Though so sophisticated in many things she
was such a child in others that this satisfied her, and they reached the end of their journey
on the best of terms. It was about ten o'clock when they arrived
at Aldbrickham, the county town of North Wessex. As she would not go to the Temperance Hotel
because of the form of his telegram, Jude inquired for another; and a youth who volunteered
to find one wheeled their luggage to the George farther on, which proved to be the inn at
which Jude had stayed with Arabella on that one occasion of their meeting after their
division for years. Owing, however, to their now entering it by
another door, and to his preoccupation, he did not at first recognize the place.
When they had engaged their respective rooms they went down to a late supper. During Jude's
temporary absence the waiting-maid spoke to Sue.
"I think, ma'am, I remember your relation, or friend, or whatever he is, coming here
once before—late, just like this, with his wife—a lady, at any rate, that wasn't you
by no manner of means—jest as med be with you now."
"Oh do you?" said Sue, with a certain sickness of heart.
"Though I think you must be mistaken! How long ago was it?"
"About a month or two. A handsome, full-figured woman.
They had this room." When Jude came back and sat down to supper
Sue seemed moping and miserable. "Jude," she said to him plaintively, at their
parting that night upon the landing, "it is not so nice and pleasant as it used to be
with us! I don't like it here—I can't bear the place!
And I don't like you so well as I did!" "How fidgeted you seem, dear!
Why do you change like this?" "Because it was cruel to bring me here!"
"Why?" "You were lately here with Arabella.
There, now I have said it!" "Dear me, why—" said Jude looking round
him. "Yes—it is the same! I really didn't know
it, Sue. Well—it is not cruel, since we have come
as we have—two relations staying together." "How long ago was it you were here?
Tell me, tell me!" "The day before I met you in Christminster,
when we went back to Marygreen together. I told you I had met her."
"Yes, you said you had met her, but you didn't tell me all.
Your story was that you had met as estranged people, who were not husband and wife at all
in Heaven's sight—not that you had made it up with her."
"We didn't make it up," he said sadly. "I can't explain, Sue."
"You've been false to me; you, my last hope! And I shall never forget it, never!"
"But by your own wish, dear Sue, we are only to be friends, not lovers!
It is so very inconsistent of you to—" "Friends can be jealous!"
"I don't see that. You concede nothing to me and I have to concede
everything to you. After all, you were on good terms with your
husband at that time." "No, I wasn't, Jude.
Oh how can you think so! And you have taken me in, even if you didn't
intend to." She was so mortified that he was obliged to
take her into her room and close the door lest the people should hear.
"Was it this room? Yes it was—I see by your look it was!
I won't have it for mine! Oh it was treacherous of you to have her again!
_I_ jumped out of the window!" "But Sue, she was, after all, my legal wife,
if not—" Slipping down on her knees Sue buried her
face in the bed and wept. "I never knew such an unreasonable—such
a dog-in-the-manger feeling," said Jude. "I am not to approach you, nor anybody else!"
"Oh don't you UNDERSTAND my feeling! Why don't you!
Why are you so gross! _I_ jumped out of the window!"
"Jumped out of window?" "I can't explain!"
It was true that he did not understand her feelings very well.
But he did a little; and began to love her none the less.
"I—I thought you cared for nobody—desired nobody in the world but me at that time—and
ever since!" continued Sue. "It is true.
I did not, and don't now!" said Jude, as distressed as she.
"But you must have thought much of her! Or—"
"No—I need not—you don't understand me either—women never do!
Why should you get into such a tantrum about nothing?"
Looking up from the quilt she pouted provokingly: "If it hadn't been for that, perhaps I would
have gone on to the Temperance Hotel, after all, as you proposed; for I was beginning
to think I did belong to you!" "Oh, it is of no consequence!" said Jude distantly.
"I thought, of course, that she had never been really your wife since she left you of
her own accord years and years ago! My sense of it was, that a parting such as
yours from her, and mine from him, ended the marriage."
"I can't say more without speaking against her, and I don't want to do that," said he.
"Yet I must tell you one thing, which would settle the matter in any case.
She has married another man—really married him!
I knew nothing about it till after the visit we made here."
"Married another? ... It is a crime—as the world treats it, but
does not believe." "There—now you are yourself again.
Yes, it is a crime—as you don't hold, but would fearfully concede.
But I shall never inform against her! And it is evidently a prick of conscience
in her that has led her to urge me to get a divorce, that she may remarry this man legally.
So you perceive I shall not be likely to see her again."
"And you didn't really know anything of this when you saw her?" said Sue more gently, as
she rose. "I did not.
Considering all things, I don't think you ought to be angry, darling!"
"I am not. But I shan't go to the Temperance Hotel!"
He laughed. "Never mind!" he said.
"So that I am near you, I am comparatively happy.
It is more than this earthly wretch called Me deserves—you spirit, you disembodied
creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom—hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round
you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air! Forgive me for being gross,
as you call it! Remember that our calling cousins when really
strangers was a snare. The enmity of our parents gave a piquancy
to you in my eyes that was intenser even than the novelty of ordinary new acquaintance."
"Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley's 'Epipsychidion' as if they meant me!" she
solicited, slanting up closer to him as they stood.
"Don't you know them?" "I know hardly any poetry," he replied mournfully.
"Don't you? These are some of them:
There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft.
* A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman... Oh it is too flattering, so I won't go on!
But say it's me! Say it's me!"
"It is you, dear; exactly like you!" "Now I forgive you!
And you shall kiss me just once there—not very long."
She put the tip of her finger gingerly to her cheek; and he did as commanded.
"You do care for me very much, don't you, in spite of my not—you know?"
"Yes, sweet!" he said with a sigh; and bade her good-night.
VI In returning to his native town of Shaston
as schoolmaster Phillotson had won the interest and awakened the memories of the inhabitants,
who, though they did not honour him for his miscellaneous aquirements as he would have
been honoured elsewhere, retained for him a sincere regard.
When, shortly after his arrival, he brought home a pretty wife—awkwardly pretty for
him, if he did not take care, they said—they were glad to have her settle among them.
For some time after her flight from that home Sue's absence did not excite comment.
Her place as monitor in the school was taken by another young woman within a few days of
her vacating it, which substitution also passed without remark, Sue's services having been
of a provisional nature only. When, however, a month had passed, and Phillotson
casually admitted to an acquaintance that he did not know where his wife was staying,
curiosity began to be aroused; till, jumping to conclusions, people ventured to affirm
that Sue had played him false and run away from him.
The schoolmaster's growing languor and listlessness over his work gave countenance to the idea.
Though Phillotson had held his tongue as long as he could, except to his friend Gillingham,
his honesty and directness would not allow him to do so when misapprehensions as to Sue's
conduct spread abroad. On a Monday morning the chairman of the school committee called,
and after attending to the business of the school drew Phillotson aside out of earshot
of the children. "You'll excuse my asking, Phillotson, since
everybody is talking of it: is this true as to your domestic affairs—that your wife's
going away was on no visit, but a secret elopement with a lover?
If so, I condole with you." "Don't," said Phillotson.
"There was no secret about it." "She has gone to visit friends?"
"No." "Then what has happened?"
"She has gone away under circumstances that usually call for condolence with the husband.
But I gave my consent." The chairman looked as if he had not apprehended
the remark. "What I say is quite true," Phillotson continued
testily. "She asked leave to go away with her lover,
and I let her. Why shouldn't I?
A woman of full age, it was a question of her own conscience—not for me.
I was not her gaoler. I can't explain any further.
I don't wish to be questioned." The children observed that much seriousness
marked the faces of the two men, and went home and told their parents that something
new had happened about Mrs. Phillotson. Then Phillotson's little maidservant, who
was a schoolgirl just out of her standards, said that Mr. Phillotson had helped in his
wife's packing, had offered her what money she required, and had written a friendly letter
to her young man, telling him to take care of her.
The chairman of committee thought the matter over, and talked to the other managers of
the school, till a request came to Phillotson to meet them privately.
The meeting lasted a long time, and at the end the school-master came home, looking as
usual pale and worn. Gillingham was sitting in his house awaiting
him. "Well; it is as you said," observed Phillotson,
flinging himself down wearily in a chair. "They have requested me to send in my resignation
on account of my scandalous conduct in giving my tortured wife her liberty—or, as they
call it, condoning her adultery. But I shan't resign!"
"I think I would." "I won't. It is no business of theirs.
It doesn't affect me in my public capacity at all.
They may expel me if they like." "If you make a fuss it will get into the papers,
and you'll never get appointed to another school.
You see, they have to consider what you did as done by a teacher of youth—and its effects
as such upon the morals of the town; and, to ordinary opinion, your position is indefensible.
You must let me say that." To this good advice, however, Phillotson would
not listen. "I don't care," he said.
"I don't go unless I am turned out. And for this reason; that by resigning I acknowledge
I have acted wrongly by her; when I am more and more convinced every day that in the sight
of Heaven and by all natural, straightforward humanity, I have acted rightly."
Gillingham saw that his rather headstrong friend would not be able to maintain such
a position as this; but he said nothing further, and in due time—indeed, in a quarter of
an hour—the formal letter of dismissal arrived, the managers having remained behind to write
it after Phillotson's withdrawal. The latter replied that he should not accept
dismissal; and called a public meeting, which he attended, although he looked so weak and
ill that his friend implored him to stay at home.
When he stood up to give his reasons for contesting the decision of the managers he advanced them
firmly, as he had done to his friend, and contended, moreover, that the matter was a
domestic theory which did not concern them. This they over-ruled, insisting that the private
eccentricities of a teacher came quite within their sphere of control, as it touched the
morals of those he taught. Phillotson replied that he did not see how
an act of natural charity could injure morals. All the respectable inhabitants and well-to-do
fellow-natives of the town were against Phillotson to a man.
But, somewhat to his surprise, some dozen or more champions rose up in his defence as
from the ground. It has been stated that Shaston was the anchorage
of a curious and interesting group of itinerants, who frequented the numerous fairs and markets
held up and down Wessex during the summer and autumn months.
Although Phillotson had never spoken to one of these gentlemen they now nobly led the
forlorn hope in his defence. The body included two cheap Jacks, a shooting-gallery proprietor
and the ladies who loaded the guns, a pair of boxing-masters, a steam-roundabout manager,
two travelling broom-makers, who called themselves widows, a gingerbread-stall keeper, a swing-boat
End of Chapter I