Jude the Obscure

heir next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,
though it was begun on the morning following the singular child’s
arrival at their home.

Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and
weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in the
substantial world.

“His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene,” said Sue. “What is
your name, dear? Did you tell us?”

“Little Father Time is what they always called me. It is a nickname;
because I look so aged, they say.”

“And you talk so, too,” said Sue tenderly. “It is strange, Jude, that
these preternaturally old boys almost always come from new countries.
But what were you christened?”

“I never was.”

“Why was that?”

“Because, if I died in damnation, ’twould save the expense of a
Christian funeral.”

“Oh—your name is not Jude, then?” said his father with some
disappointment.

The boy shook his head. “Never heerd on it.”

“Of course not,” said Sue quickly; “since she was hating you all the
time!”

“We’ll have him christened,” said Jude; and privately to Sue: “The day
we are married.” Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.

Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that a
marriage at a superintendent registrar’s office was more private than
an ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time. Both
Sue and Jude together went to the office of the district to give
notice: they had become such companions that they could hardly do
anything of importance except in each other’s company.

Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his shoulder
and watching his hand as it traced the words. As she read the
four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which her own
and Jude’s names were inserted, and by which that very volatile
essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be made permanent,
her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. “Names and Surnames of
the Parties”—(they were to be parties now, not lovers, she thought).
“Condition”—(a horrid idea)—“Rank or Occupation”—“Age”—“Dwelling
at”—“Length of Residence”—“Church or Building in which the Marriage is
to be solemnized”—“District and County in which the Parties
respectively dwell.”

“It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it!” she said on their way home. “It
seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the
contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church. But we’ll
try to get through with it, dearest, now.”

“We will. ‘For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath not
taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the
battle, and another man take her.’ So said the Jewish law-giver.”

“How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to have been a
parson. I can only quote profane writers!”

During the interval before the issuing of the certificate, Sue, in her
housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the office, and furtively
glancing in saw affixed to the wall the notice of the purposed clinch
to their union. She could not bear its aspect. Coming after her
previous experience of matrimony, all the romance of their attachment
seemed to be starved away by placing her present case in the same
category. She was usually leading little Father Time by the hand, and
fancied that people thought him hers, and regarded the intended
ceremony as the patching up of an old error.

Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in some slight
degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining on earth
who was associated with his early life at Marygreen—the aged widow Mrs.
Edlin, who had been his great-aunt’s friend and nurse in her last
illness. He hardly expected that she would come; but she did, bringing
singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brass snuffers, an
ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enormous bag of goose
feathers towards a bed. She was allotted the spare room in Jude’s
house, whither she retired early, and where they could hear her through
the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord’s Prayer in a loud voice,
as the Rubric directed.

As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and Jude were
still sitting up—it being in fact only ten o’clock—she dressed herself
again and came down, and they all sat by the fire till a late
hour—Father Time included; though, as he never spoke, they were hardly
conscious of him.

“Well, I bain’t set against marrying as your great-aunt was,” said the
widow. “And I hope ’twill be a jocund wedding for ye in all respects
this time. Nobody can hope it more, knowing what I do of your families,
which is more, I suppose, than anybody else now living. For they have
been unlucky that way, God knows.”

Sue breathed uneasily.

“They was always good-hearted people, too—wouldn’t kill a fly if they
knowed it,” continued the wedding guest. “But things happened to thwart
’em, and if everything wasn’t vitty they were upset. No doubt that’s
how he that the tale is told of came to do what ’a did—if he were one
of your family.”

“What was that?” said Jude.

“Well—that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted just on the brow of the
hill by the Brown House—not far from the milestone between Marygreen
and Alfredston, where the other road branches off. But Lord, ’twas in
my grandfather’s time; and it medn’ have been one of your folk at all.”

“I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well,” murmured
Jude. “But I never heard of this. What—did this man—my ancestor and
Sue’s—kill his wife?”

“’Twer not that exactly. She ran away from him, with their child, to
her friends; and while she was there the child died. He wanted the
body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn’t give it up. Her
husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke into the house to
steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and being obstinate,
wouldn’t tell what he broke in for. They brought it in burglary, and
that’s why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House Hill. His wife
went mad after he was dead. But it medn’t be true that he belonged to
ye more than to me.”

A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out of
the earth: “If I was you, Mother, I wouldn’t marry Father!” It came
from little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him.

“Oh, it is only a tale,” said Sue cheeringly.

After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve of the
solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest good-night, retired.

The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified with the hours,
took Jude privately into the sitting-room before starting. “Jude, I
want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally,” she said, tremulously
nestling up to him, with damp lashes. “It won’t be ever like this any
more, will it? I wish we hadn’t begun the business. But I suppose we
must go on. How horrid that story was last night! It spoilt my thoughts
of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family, as
it did the house of Atreus.”

“Or the house of Jeroboam,” said the quondam theologian.

“Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying! I am going
to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you
to me in the same as you used to your other wife; regardless of the
deterrent lesson we were taught by those experiments!”

“If you are uneasy I am made unhappy,” said he. “I had hoped you would
feel quite joyful. But if you don’t, you don’t. It is no use
pretending. It is a dismal business to you, and that makes it so to
me!”

“It is unpleasantly like that other morning—that’s all,” she murmured.
“Let us go on now.”

They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no witness
accompanying them except the Widow Edlin. The day was chilly and dull,
and a clammy fog blew through the town from “Royal-tower’d Thame.” On
the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marks of people who
had entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas. Within the office
several persons were gathered, and our couple perceived that a marriage
between a soldier and a young woman was just in progress. Sue, Jude,
and the widow stood in the background while this was going on, Sue
reading the notices of marriage on the wall. The room was a dreary
place to two of their temperament, though to its usual frequenters it
doubtless seemed ordinary enough. Law-books in musty calf covered one
wall, and elsewhere were post-office directories, and other books of
reference. Papers in packets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed
around, and some iron safes filled a recess, while the bare wood floor
was, like the door-step, stained by previous visitors.

The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and timid; she was
soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye. Their
little business was soon done, and the twain and their friends
straggled out, one of the witnesses saying casually to Jude and Sue in
passing, as if he had known them before: “See the couple just come in?
Ha, ha! That fellow is just out of gaol this morning. She met him at
the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She’s paying for
everything.”

Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely cropped, with
a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquor and the
satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire. They jocosely
saluted the outgoing couple, and went forward in front of Jude and Sue,
whose diffidence was increasing. The latter drew back and turned to her
lover, her mouth shaping itself like that of a child about to give way
to grief:

“Jude—I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The place gives me
the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love! I wish it
had been at church, if it had to be at all. It is not so vulgar there!”

“Dear little girl,” said Jude. “How troubled and pale you look!”

“It must be performed here now, I suppose?”

“No—perhaps not necessarily.”

He spoke to the clerk, and came back. “No—we need not marry here or
anywhere, unless we like, even now,” he said. “We can be married in a
church, if not with the same certificate with another he’ll give us, I
think. Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear, and I too, and
talk it over.”

They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed a
misdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the widow,
who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them; that they
would call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary. When in
the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley where they
walked up and down as they had done long ago in the market-house at
Melchester.

“Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of it, it strikes
me. Still, anything that pleases you will please me.”

“But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there,
didn’t you?”

“Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn’t care
much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did you—it
was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this morning as to
whether we ought.”

They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began
anew: “It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much
better than to act rashly a second time… How terrible that scene was to
me! The expression in that flabby woman’s face, leading her on to give
herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a
lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a nominal
shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading
herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her—a man
whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of salvation… This is our
parish church, isn’t it? This is where it would have to be, if we did
it in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going on.”

Jude went up and looked in at the door. “Why—it is a wedding here too,”
he said. “Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.”

Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there was
always a crowd of marriages. “Let us listen,” she said, “and find how
it feels to us when performed in a church.”

They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings
at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to the
well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary
prettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in the
bride’s hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical
murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all
under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude listened,
and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same form
of self-committal.

“It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it
over again with my present knowledge,” Sue whispered. “You see, they
are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course. But
having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at least as
I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings perhaps
sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and undertake the
same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and seeing this has
frightened me from a church wedding as much as the other did from a
registry one… We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may
feel confident in I feel doubts of—my being proof against the sordid
conditions of a business contract again!”

Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were both
too thin-skinned—that they ought never to have been born—much less have
come together for the most preposterous of all joint ventures for
them—matrimony.

His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed felt that
they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that life-undertaking
again? “It is awful if you think we have found ourselves not strong
enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing to perjure ourselves,”
she said.

“I fancy I do think it—since you ask me,” said Jude. “Remember I’ll do
it if you wish, own darling.” While she hesitated he went on to confess
that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked
by the dread of incompetency just as she did—from their peculiarities,
perhaps, because they were unlike other people. “We are horribly
sensitive; that’s really what’s the matter with us, Sue!” he declared.

“I fancy more are like us than we think!”

“Well, I don’t know. The intention of the contract is good, and right
for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends because
we are the queer sort of people we are—folk in whom domestic ties of a
forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness.”

Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:
that all were so. “Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a
little beforehand, that’s all. In fifty, a hundred, years the
descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will see
weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as

Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,

and will be afraid to reproduce them.”

“What a terrible line of poetry! … though I have felt it myself about
my fellow-creatures, at morbid times.”

Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:

“Well—the general question is not our business, and why should we
plague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are, we come
to the same conclusion: that for us particular two, an irrevocable oath
is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream! Yes?
How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!”

“They accord very much with my own.”

He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of
everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession
entering the vestry; and then they came outside the building. By the
door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for a
while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open
daylight. Sue sighed.

“The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland which
decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!”

“Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That’s what
some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the
conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a
woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is
only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him.”

“Yes—some are like that, instead of uniting with the man against the
common enemy, coercion.” The bride and bridegroom had by this time
driven off, and the two moved away with the rest of the idlers.
“No—don’t let’s do it,” she continued. “At least, just now.”

They reached home, and passing the window arm in arm saw the widow
looking out at them. “Well,” cried their guest when they entered, “I
said to myself when I zeed ye coming so loving up to the door, ‘They
made up their minds at last, then!’”

They briefly hinted that they had not.

“What—and ha’n’t ye really done it? Chok’ it all, that I should have
lived to see a good old saying like ‘marry in haste and repent at
leisure’ spoiled like this by you two! ’Tis time I got back again to
Marygreen—sakes if tidden—if this is what the new notions be leading us
to! Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much
else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor man
were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!”

“Don’t tell the child when he comes in,” whispered Sue nervously.
“He’ll think it has all gone on right, and it will be better that he
should not be surprised and puzzled. Of course it is only put off for
reconsideration. If we are happy as we are, what does it matter to
anybody?”