Jude the Obscure

ut under the various deterrent influences Jude’s instinct was to
approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went to the morning
service in the Cathedral church of Cardinal College to gain a further
view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended there.

She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was finer.
He knew that if she came at all she would approach the building along
the eastern side of the great green quadrangle from which it was
accessible, and he stood in a corner while the bell was going. A few
minutes before the hour for service she appeared as one of the figures
walking along under the college walls, and at sight of her he advanced
up the side opposite, and followed her into the building, more than
ever glad that he had not as yet revealed himself. To see her, and to
be himself unseen and unknown, was enough for him at present.

He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way
advanced when he was put into a seat. It was a louring, mournful, still
afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to ordinary
practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional and leisured
classes. In the dim light and the baffling glare of the clerestory
windows he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only,
but he saw that Sue was among them. He had not long discovered the
exact seat that she occupied when the chanting of the 119th Psalm in
which the choir was engaged reached its second part, In quo corriget,
the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian tune as the singers gave
forth:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?

It was the very question that was engaging Jude’s attention at this
moment. What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as he
had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead to such
disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to himself;
then to go recklessly and get drunk. The great waves of pedal music
tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had
been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm
was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment of
his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was the ordinary
psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.

The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary
tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those
which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him. She
was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in
church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt,
much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man the
consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which
promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like
the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a
sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.

Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him
that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen
before he himself moved. She did not look towards him, and by the time
he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path. Being dressed
up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her and reveal himself.
But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with the kind
of feeling that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the
service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he could
not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism. She was
such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he said, “It
can’t be! I, a man with a wife, must not know her!” Still Sue was his
own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though she was not in
evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one sense. It would put
all thought of a tender wish on his part out of Sue’s mind, and make
her intercourse with him free and fearless. It was with some heartache
that he saw how little he cared for the freedom and fearlessness that
would result in her from such knowledge.

Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the
pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman, Sue Bridehead, had an
afternoon’s holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in
which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country
with a book in her hand. It was one of those cloudless days which
sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,
as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god. She went along for a
mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the city
she had left behind her. The road passed between green fields, and
coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was reading,
and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles new and old.

On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a foreigner
with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass beside a large
square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they could stand, a
number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed, which he was
re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way. They were in the
main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a
very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see
portrayed, among them being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and,
of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. Though the figures were
many yards away from her the south-west sun brought them out so
brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern their
contours with luminous distinctness; and being almost in a line between
herself and the church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly
foreign and contrasting set of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and,
seeing her, politely took off his cap, and cried, “I-i-i-mages!” in an
accent that agreed with his appearance. In a moment he dexterously
lifted upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities
divine and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them
on to her and resting the board on the stile. First he offered her his
smaller wares—the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then a
winged Cupid. She shook her head.

“How much are these two?” she said, touching with her finger the Venus
and the Apollo—the largest figures on the tray.

He said she should have them for ten shillings.

“I cannot afford that,” said Sue. She offered considerably less, and to
her surprise the image-man drew them from their wire stay and handed
them over the stile. She clasped them as treasures.

When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be
concerned as to what she should do with them. They seemed so very large
now that they were in her possession, and so very naked. Being of a
nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise. When she handled
them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and jacket. After
carrying them along a little way openly an idea came to her, and,
pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other rank growths from
the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she could in these, so
that what she carried appeared to be an enormous armful of green stuff
gathered by a zealous lover of nature.

“Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!” she
said. But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to wish
she had not bought the figures.

Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus’s arm was not
broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian city
in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main one,
and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to which she
was attached. Her purchases were taken straight up to her own chamber,
and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was her very own
property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped them in large
sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner.

The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in
spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as become
one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St.
Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also had
begun to attend. She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years
before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little
shop of church requisites and developing it to its present creditable
proportions. She wore a cross and beads round her neck as her only
ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.

She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not
respond for a moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily
putting a string round each parcel.

“Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?” she asked, regarding
the enwrapped objects.

“Yes—just something to ornament my room,” said Sue.

“Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already,” said Miss
Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints, the
Church-text scrolls, and other articles which, having become too stale
to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber. “What is it?
How bulky!” She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer, in the
brown paper, and tried to peep in. “Why, statuary? Two figures? Where
did you get them?”

“Oh—I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts—”

“Two saints?”

“Yes.”

“What ones?”

“St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.”

“Well—now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if
there’s light enough afterwards.”

These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest
passing fancy created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects and
looking at them; and at bedtime, when she was sure of being
undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort. Placing the pair of
figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them, she
withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began reading a
book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew nothing of.
It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the chapter dealing with the
reign of Julian the Apostate. Occasionally she looked up at the
statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place, there happening to
be a Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene suggested
the action, she at length jumped up and withdrew another book from her
box—a volume of verse—and turned to the familiar poem—

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:
The world has grown grey from thy breath!

which she read to the end. Presently she put out the candles,
undressed, and finally extinguished her own light.

She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she kept
waking up, and every time she opened her eyes there was enough diffused
light from the street to show her the white plaster figures, standing
on the chest of drawers in odd contrast to their environment of text
and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was only
discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being obscured by
the shades.

On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour. It
fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his books at
a not very distant spot in the same city. Being Saturday night the
morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to call him at
his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as was his custom,
two or three hours later than he could afford to do on any other day of
the week. Just then he was earnestly reading from his Griesbach’s text.
At the very time that Sue was tossing and staring at her figures, the
policeman and belated citizens passing along under his window might
have heard, if they had stood still, strange syllables mumbled with
fervour within—words that had for Jude an indescribable enchantment:
inexplicable sounds something like these:—

“All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis
auton:”

Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard to
close:—

“Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di
autou!”