Jude the Obscure

Chapter 3

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 s*x, 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!_"