Jude the Obscure

ow Gillingham’s doubts were disposed of will most quickly appear by
passing over the series of dreary months and incidents that followed
the events of the last chapter, and coming on to a Sunday in the
February of the year following.

Sue and Jude were living in Aldbrickham, in precisely the same
relations that they had established between themselves when she left
Shaston to join him the year before. The proceedings in the law-courts
had reached their consciousness, but as a distant sound and an
occasional missive which they hardly understood.

They had met, as usual, to breakfast together in the little house with
Jude’s name on it, that he had taken at fifteen pounds a year, with
three-pounds-ten extra for rates and taxes, and furnished with his
aunt’s ancient and lumbering goods, which had cost him about their full
value to bring all the way from Marygreen. Sue kept house, and managed
everything.

As he entered the room this morning Sue held up a letter she had just
received.

“Well; and what is it about?” he said after kissing her.

“That the decree nisi in the case of Phillotson versus Phillotson
and Fawley, pronounced six months ago, has just been made absolute.”

“Ah,” said Jude, as he sat down.

The same concluding incident in Jude’s suit against Arabella had
occurred about a month or two earlier. Both cases had been too
insignificant to be reported in the papers, further than by name in a
long list of other undefended cases.

“Now then, Sue, at any rate, you can do what you like!” He looked at
his sweetheart curiously.

“Are we—you and I—just as free now as if we had never married at all?”

“Just as free—except, I believe, that a clergyman may object personally
to remarry you, and hand the job on to somebody else.”

“But I wonder—do you think it is really so with us? I know it is
generally. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that my freedom has been
obtained under false pretences!”

“How?”

“Well—if the truth about us had been known, the decree wouldn’t have
been pronounced. It is only, is it, because we have made no defence,
and have led them into a false supposition? Therefore is my freedom
lawful, however proper it may be?”

“Well—why did you let it be under false pretences? You have only
yourself to blame,” he said mischievously.

“Jude—don’t! You ought not to be touchy about that still. You must take
me as I am.”

“Very well, darling: so I will. Perhaps you were right. As to your
question, we were not obliged to prove anything. That was their
business. Anyhow we are living together.”

“Yes. Though not in their sense.”

“One thing is certain, that however the decree may be brought about, a
marriage is dissolved when it is dissolved. There is this advantage in
being poor obscure people like us—that these things are done for us in
a rough and ready fashion. It was the same with me and Arabella. I was
afraid her criminal second marriage would have been discovered, and she
punished; but nobody took any interest in her—nobody inquired, nobody
suspected it. If we’d been patented nobilities we should have had
infinite trouble, and days and weeks would have been spent in
investigations.”

By degrees Sue acquired her lover’s cheerfulness at the sense of
freedom, and proposed that they should take a walk in the fields, even
if they had to put up with a cold dinner on account of it. Jude agreed,
and Sue went up-stairs and prepared to start, putting on a joyful
coloured gown in observance of her liberty; seeing which Jude put on a
lighter tie.

“Now we’ll strut arm and arm,” he said, “like any other engaged couple.
We’ve a legal right to.”

They rambled out of the town, and along a path over the low-lying lands
that bordered it, though these were frosty now, and the extensive
seed-fields were bare of colour and produce. The pair, however, were so
absorbed in their own situation that their surroundings were little in
their consciousness.

“Well, my dearest, the result of all this is that we can marry after a
decent interval.”

“Yes; I suppose we can,” said Sue, without enthusiasm.

“And aren’t we going to?”

“I don’t like to say no, dear Jude; but I feel just the same about it
now as I have done all along. I have just the same dread lest an iron
contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as
it did between our unfortunate parents.”

“Still, what can we do? I do love you, as you know, Sue.”

“I know it abundantly. But I think I would much rather go on living
always as lovers, as we are living now, and only meeting by day. It is
so much sweeter—for the woman at least, and when she is sure of the
man. And henceforward we needn’t be so particular as we have been about
appearances.”

“Our experiences of matrimony with others have not been encouraging, I
own,” said he, with some gloom; “either owing to our own dissatisfied,
unpractical natures, or by our misfortune. But we two—”

“Should be two dissatisfied ones linked together, which would be twice
as bad as before… I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the
moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government stamp, and I
was licensed to be loved on the premises by you—Ugh, how horrible and
sordid! Although, as you are, free, I trust you more than any other man
in the world.”

“No, no—don’t say I should change!” he expostulated; yet there was
misgiving in his own voice also.

“Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign to
a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must
and shall be that person’s lover. There would be a much likelier chance
of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony
consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease
loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession
being given, and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in
public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy
the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials
of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and
the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling then.”

“Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are not
the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue. People go on
marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of
them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s
pleasure with a life’s discomfort. No doubt my father and mother, and
your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled us in habits
of observation. But then they went and married just the same, because
they had ordinary passions. But you, Sue, are such a phantasmal,
bodiless creature, one who—if you’ll allow me to say it—has so little
animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when
we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t.”

“Well,” she sighed, “you’ve owned that it would probably end in misery
for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women
like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity
it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages it gains them
sometimes—a dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do
without.”

Jude fell back upon his old complaint—that, intimate as they were, he
had never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she
loved or could love him. “I really fear sometimes that you cannot,” he
said, with a dubiousness approaching anger. “And you are so reticent. I
know that women are taught by other women that they must never admit
the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on
full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don’t know
that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man’s
heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct.
The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging
and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who
plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her
that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow
her to go unlamented to her grave.”

Sue, who was regarding the distance, had acquired a guilty look; and
she suddenly replied in a tragic voice: “I don’t think I like you
to-day so well as I did, Jude!”

“Don’t you? Why?”

“Oh, well—you are not nice—too sermony. Though I suppose I am so bad
and worthless that I deserve the utmost rigour of lecturing!”

“No, you are not bad. You are a dear. But as slippery as an eel when I
want to get a confession from you.”

“Oh yes, I am bad, and obstinate, and all sorts! It is no use your
pretending I am not! People who are good don’t want scolding as I do…
But now that I have nobody but you, and nobody to defend me, it is very
hard that I mustn’t have my own way in deciding how I’ll live with you,
and whether I’ll be married or no!”

“Sue, my own comrade and sweetheart, I don’t want to force you either
to marry or to do the other thing—of course I don’t! It is too wicked
of you to be so pettish! Now we won’t say any more about it, and go on
just the same as we have done; and during the rest of our walk we’ll
talk of the meadows only, and the floods, and the prospect of the
farmers this coming year.”

After this the subject of marriage was not mentioned by them for
several days, though living as they were with only a landing between
them it was constantly in their minds. Sue was assisting Jude very
materially now: he had latterly occupied himself on his own account in
working and lettering headstones, which he kept in a little yard at the
back of his little house, where in the intervals of domestic duties she
marked out the letters full size for him, and blacked them in after he
had cut them. It was a lower class of handicraft than were his former
performances as a cathedral mason, and his only patrons were the poor
people who lived in his own neighbourhood, and knew what a cheap man
this “Jude Fawley: Monumental Mason” (as he called himself on his front
door) was to employ for the simple memorials they required for their
dead. But he seemed more independent than before, and it was the only
arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on
him, could render any assistance.