Jude the Obscure

was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatisfied; she was
always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.

One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she had
grown brighter. That evening she kept an appointment with Jude, who
seemed sad.

“I am going away,” he said to her. “I think I ought to go. I think it
will be better both for you and for me. I wish some things had never
begun! I was much to blame, I know. But it is never too late to mend.”

Arabella began to cry. “How do you know it is not too late?” she said.
“That’s all very well to say! I haven’t told you yet!” and she looked
into his face with streaming eyes.

“What?” he asked, turning pale. “Not…?”

“Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?”

“Oh, Arabella—how can you say that, my dear! You know I wouldn’t
desert you!”

“Well then—”

“I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have
thought of this before… But, of course if that’s the case, we must
marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?”

“I thought—I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the more for
that, and leave me to face it alone!”

“You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or even
three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans—I mean my
plans before I knew you, my dear. But what are they, after all! Dreams
about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships, and all that.
Certainly we’ll marry: we must!”

That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing. He
knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that Arabella
was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind. Yet, such being
the custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had
drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done,
he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences.
For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of
her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he
sometimes said laconically.

The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. The people of
the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was. All his
reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his books to
buy saucepans. Those who guessed the probable state of affairs,
Arabella’s parents being among them, declared that it was the sort of
conduct they would have expected of such an honest young man as Jude in
reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent sweetheart. The parson
who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too. And so, standing
before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time
of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe,
feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired
during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the
undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at
what they swore.

Fawley’s aunt being a baker she made him a bride-cake, saying bitterly
that it was the last thing she could do for him, poor silly fellow; and
that it would have been far better if, instead of his living to trouble
her, he had gone underground years before with his father and mother.
Of this cake Arabella took some slices, wrapped them up in white
note-paper, and sent them to her companions in the pork-dressing
business, Anny and Sarah, labelling each packet “In remembrance of
good advice.”

The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not very
brilliant even to the most sanguine mind. He, a stone-mason’s
apprentice, nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till he
should be out of his time. His wife was absolutely useless in a
town-lodging, where he at first had considered it would be necessary
for them to live. But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so
little a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between
the Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a
vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep
a pig. But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it was
a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. Arabella, however,
felt that all these make-shifts were temporary; she had gained a
husband; that was the thing—a husband with a lot of earning power in
him for buying her frocks and hats when he should begin to get
frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw aside those stupid
books for practical undertakings.

So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage, giving up
his old room at his aunt’s—where so much of the hard labour at Greek
and Latin had been carried on.

A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing. A long tail of
hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back of
her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon the
looking-glass which he had bought her.

“What—it wasn’t your own?” he said, with a sudden distaste for her.

“Oh no—it never is nowadays with the better class.”

“Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed to
be different. Besides, you’ve enough of your own, surely?”

“Yes, enough as country notions go. But in town the men expect more,
and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—”

“Barmaid at Aldbrickham?”

“Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house
there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to
getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have the
better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town than all your
Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair—the barber’s
assistant told me so.”

Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be true
to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would
and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their
simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct
towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in
counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was
no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no
more of it.

A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few weeks,
even though the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy.
There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her
acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts,
and renders even the humblest bride independent awhile of the real.
Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one
market-day with this quality in her carriage when she met Anny her
former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.

As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them
without saying it.

“So it turned out a good plan, you see!” remarked the girl to the wife.
“I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear good fellow, and you
ought to be proud of un.”

“I am,” said Mrs. Fawley quietly.

“And when do you expect?”

“Ssh! Not at all.”

“What!”

“I was mistaken.”

“Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that’s
clever—it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o’,
wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the real
thing—not that one could sham it!”

“Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I didn’t know.”

“My word—won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’ Saturday
nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick—a double one, by the
Lord!”

“I’ll own to the first, but not to the second… Pooh—he won’t care!
He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down, bless
’ee—men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is married.”

Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached
the time when in the natural course of things she would have to reveal
that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. The occasion
was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their chamber in the
lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his work
every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve hours, and had retired
to rest before his wife. When she came into the room he was between
sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her undressing before
the little looking-glass as he lay.

One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her face
being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she was
amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the dimple
before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was mistress,
effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for the first
time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face during his
intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the earlier weeks
of their acquaintance.

“Don’t do that, Arabella!” he said suddenly. “There is no harm in it,
but—I don’t like to see you.”

She turned and laughed. “Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!” she said.
“How countrified you are! That’s nothing.”

“Where did you learn it?”

“Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I
was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was fatter then.”

“I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a
woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you.”

“Most men think otherwise.”

“I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?”

“I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.”

“Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the
adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening.
I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father’s
house.”

“You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more
finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. There was
not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away
for three months.”

“You’ll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won’t you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, of course—little things to make.”

“Oh.”

“When will it be? Can’t you tell me exactly, instead of in such general
terms as you have used?”

“Tell you?”

“Yes—the date.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I made a mistake.”

“What?”

“It was a mistake.”

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. “How can that be?”

“Women fancy wrong things sometimes.”

“But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of
furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn’t have hurried on our
affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if
it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to
save you, ready or no… Good God!”

“Don’t take on, dear. What’s done can’t be undone.”

“I have no more to say!”

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between
them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a
different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to accept
her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while
ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes
involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man’s one
opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of
contributing his units of work to the general progress of his
generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory
instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be
only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he
had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught
in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a
lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the
immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But the
marriage remained.