Jude the Obscure

ext morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten
o’clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had
accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same
intractable temper.

“That’s the story about me in Marygreen, is it—that I entrapped ’ee?
Much of a catch you were, Lord send!” As she warmed she saw some of
Jude’s dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have
been laid. “I won’t have them books here in the way!” she cried
petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon
the floor.

“Leave my books alone!” he said. “You might have thrown them aside if
you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!” In
the operation of making lard Arabella’s hands had become smeared with
the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible
imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the
books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing,
caught her by the arms to make her leave off. Somehow, in going so, he
loosened the fastening of her hair, and it rolled about her ears.

“Let me go!” she said.

“Promise to leave the books alone.”

She hesitated. “Let me go!” she repeated.

“Promise!”

After a pause: “I do.”

Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to the door, out
of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began
to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse
disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her
gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the
bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north.
People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday clothes;
they were mainly lovers—such pairs as Jude and Arabella had been when
they sported along the same track some months earlier. These
pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she now
presented, bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind, her
bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work, and her
hands reeking with melted fat. One of the passers said in mock terror:
“Good Lord deliver us!”

“See how he’s served me!” she cried. “Making me work Sunday mornings
when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my head,
and my gown off my back!”

Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force. Then
he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with the sense that all was over
between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he, her husband
stood still, regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined
by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having
based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no
necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong
comradeship tolerable.

“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother,
and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you be
a queer lot as husbands and wives!”

Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her. But she said no more,
and continued her saunter till she was tired. He left the spot, and,
after wandering vaguely a little while, walked in the direction of
Marygreen. Here he called upon his great-aunt, whose infirmities daily
increased.

“Aunt—did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?” said
Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.

She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that
she always wore. “Who’s been telling you that?” she said.

“I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all.”

“You med so well, I s’pose; though your wife—I reckon ’twas she—must
have been a fool to open up that! There isn’t much to know after all.
Your father and mother couldn’t get on together, and they parted. It
was coming home from Alfredston market, when you were a baby—on the
hill by the Brown House barn—that they had their last difference, and
took leave of one another for the last time. Your mother soon
afterwards died—she drowned herself, in short, and your father went
away with you to South Wessex, and never came here any more.”

Jude recalled his father’s silence about North Wessex and Jude’s
mother, never speaking of either till his dying day.

“It was the same with your father’s sister. Her husband offended her,
and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to
London with her little maid. The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it
never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that
won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily
enough if not bound. That’s why you ought to have hearkened to me, and
not ha’ married.”

“Where did Father and Mother part—by the Brown House, did you say?”

“A little further on—where the road to Fenworth branches off, and the
handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our
history. But let that be.”

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt’s as if
to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon
it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued, though it
was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow
and flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the
other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He
ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as
he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a
jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped
again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge, and
stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he
was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful death
abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was
there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position?
He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten. Drinking
was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless. He
began to see now why some men boozed at inns. He struck down the hill
northwards and came to an obscure public-house. On entering and sitting
down the sight of the picture of Samson and Delilah on the wall caused
him to recognize the place as that he had visited with Arabella on that
first Sunday evening of their courtship. He called for liquor and drank
briskly for an hour or more.

Staggering homeward late that night, with all his sense of depression
gone, and his head fairly clear still, he began to laugh boisterously,
and to wonder how Arabella would receive him in his new aspect. The
house was in darkness when he entered, and in his stumbling state it
was some time before he could get a light. Then he found that, though
the marks of pig-dressing, of fats and scallops, were visible, the
materials themselves had been taken away. A line written by his wife on
the inside of an old envelope was pinned to the cotton blower of the
fireplace:

“Have gone to my friends. Shall not return.”

All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the carcase of the
pig to Alfredston. He then cleaned up the premises, locked the door,
put the key in a place she would know if she came back, and returned to
his masonry at Alfredston.

At night when he again plodded home he found she had not visited the
house. The next day went in the same way, and the next. Then there came
a letter from her.

That she had gone tired of him she frankly admitted. He was such a slow
old coach, and she did not care for the sort of life he led. There was
no prospect of his ever bettering himself or her. She further went on
to say that her parents had, as he knew, for some time considered the
question of emigrating to Australia, the pig-jobbing business being a
poor one nowadays. They had at last decided to go, and she proposed to
go with them, if he had no objection. A woman of her sort would have
more chance over there than in this stupid country.

Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her going. He
thought it a wise course, since she wished to go, and one that might be
to the advantage of both. He enclosed in the packet containing the
letter the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig, with
all he had besides, which was not much.

From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly, though her
father and his household did not immediately leave, but waited till his
goods and other effects had been sold off. When Jude learnt that there
was to be an auction at the house of the Donns he packed his own
household goods into a waggon, and sent them to her at the aforesaid
homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as many of them
as she should choose.

He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a shopwindow the
little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law’s furniture.
He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude’s going near the
place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by the southern
road was materially increased by the auction. A few days later he
entered a dingy broker’s shop in the main street of the town, and amid
a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a clothes-horse, rolling-pin,
brass candlestick, swing looking-glass, and other things at the back of
the shop, evidently just brought in from a sale, he perceived a framed
photograph, which turned out to be his own portrait.

It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man
in bird’s-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given her
on their wedding-day. On the back was still to be read, “Jude to
Arabella,” with the date. She must have thrown it in with the rest of
her property at the auction.

“Oh,” said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles
in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself, “It
is a small lot of stuff that was knocked down to me at a cottage sale
out on the road to Marygreen. The frame is a very useful one, if you
take out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling.”

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought home
to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of his portrait
and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required to demolish all
sentiment in him. He paid the shilling, took the photograph away with
him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he reached his lodging.

Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had
departed. He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal
leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise, since
she was bent on going, which perhaps was true. On the evening following
their emigration, when his day’s work was done, he came out of doors
after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too familiar road
towards the upland whereon had been experienced the chief emotions of
his life. It seemed to be his own again.

He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed to be a boy
still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the top of
that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for
Christminster and scholarship. “Yet I am a man,” he said. “I have a
wife. More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having disagreed
with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted from her.”

He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at which
the parting between his father and his mother was said to have
occurred.

A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he had
taken for that city, had seemed to be visible. A milestone, now as
always, stood at the roadside hard by. Jude drew near it, and felt
rather than read the mileage to the city. He remembered that once on
his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an inscription
on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations. It had been
done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before he had been
diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman. He wondered if the
inscription were legible still, and going to the back of the milestone
brushed away the nettles. By the light of a match he could still
discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long ago:

[THITHER—J. F. [with a pointing finger]]

The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,
lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan should be to
move onward through good and ill—to avoid morbid sorrow even though he
did see uglinesses in the world? Bene agere et lætari—to do good
cheerfully—which he had heard to be the philosophy of one Spinoza,
might be his own even now.

He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original
intention.

By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a
north-easterly direction. There actually rose the faint halo, a small
dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith. It was
enough for him. He would go to Christminster as soon as the term of his
apprenticeship expired.

He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.

Part Second AT CHRISTMINSTER

“Save his own soul he hath no star.”—SWINBURNE.

“Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;
Tempore crevit amor.”—OVID.