Jude the Obscure

Chapter 7

It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with

Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to

set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,--the re-reading of

his Greek Testament--his new one, with better type than his old copy,

following Griesbach's text as amended by numerous correctors, and

with variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the book,

having obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing

he had never done before.

He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon's reading, under

the quiet roof of his great-aunt's house as formerly, where he now

slept only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had

happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life,

and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter

skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its

new one.

He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened the

book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands

to his temples, began at the beginning:

H KAIN DIATHK

Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait

indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him.

There was a something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from

promises. He ought not to break faith with her. Even though he had

only Sundays and week-day evenings for reading he could afford one

afternoon, seeing that other young men afforded so many. After

to-day he would never probably see her again. Indeed, it would be

impossible, considering what his plans were.

In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary

muscular power seized hold of him--something which had nothing in

common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto.

This seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for

his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent

schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar, in a direction

which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no

respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own except

locality.

H KAIN DIATHK was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude

sprang up and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had

already arrayed himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was

out of the house and descending by the path across the wide vacant

hollow of corn-ground which lay between the village and the isolated

house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.

As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours,

easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading

after tea.

Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path

joined the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left,

descending the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown

House. Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook

that oozed from it, and followed the stream till he reached her

dwelling. A smell of piggeries came from the back, and the grunting

of the originators of that smell. He entered the garden, and knocked

at the door with the knob of his stick.

Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on the

inside said:

"Arabella! Here's your young man come coorting! Mizzle, my girl!"

Jude winced at the words. Courting in such a businesslike aspect as

it evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking

of. He was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her; but "courting"

was too coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas.

The door was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs

in radiant walking attire.

"Take a chair, Mr. What's-your-name?" said her father, an energetic,

black-whiskered man, in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard

from outside.

"I'd rather go out at once, wouldn't you?" she whispered to Jude.

"Yes," said he. "We'll walk up to the Brown House and back, we can

do it in half an hour."

Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt

glad he had come, and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto

haunted him.

First they clambered to the top of the great down, during which

ascent he had occasionally to take her hand to assist her. Then

they bore off to the left along the crest into the ridgeway, which

they followed till it intersected the high-road at the Brown

House aforesaid, the spot of his former fervid desires to behold

Christminster. But he forgot them now. He talked the commonest

local twaddle to Arabella with greater zest than he would have felt

in discussing all the philosophies with all the Dons in the recently

adored university, and passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana

and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people in

the mythology, or that the sun was anything else than a useful

lamp for illuminating Arabella's face. An indescribable lightness

of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the incipient scholar,

prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not, felt himself

honoured and glorified by the condescension of this handsome country

wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her Sunday frock and

ribbons.

They reached the Brown House barn--the point at which he had planned

to turn back. While looking over the vast northern landscape from

this spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke

from the neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a

distance of a couple of miles.

"It is a fire," said Arabella. "Let's run and see it--do! It is not

far!"

The tenderness which had grown up in Jude's bosom left him no will to

thwart her inclination now--which pleased him in affording him excuse

for a longer time with her. They started off down the hill almost at

a trot; but on gaining level ground at the bottom, and walking a

mile, they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than

it had seemed.

Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on; but it was not

till five o'clock that they found themselves on the scene,--the

distance being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen,

and three from Arabella's. The conflagration had been got under

by the time they reached it, and after a short inspection of the

melancholy ruins they retraced their steps--their course lying

through the town of Alfredston.

Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered an inn of an

inferior class, and gave their order. As it was not for beer they

had a long time to wait. The maid-servant recognized Jude, and

whispered her surprise to her mistress in the background, that he,

the student "who kept hisself up so particular," should have suddenly

descended so low as to keep company with Arabella. The latter

guessed what was being said, and laughed as she met the serious and

tender gaze of her lover--the low and triumphant laugh of a careless

woman who sees she is winning her game.

They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and

Delilah which hung on the wall, and at the circular beer-stains on

the table, and at the spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust. The

whole aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which

few places can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when

the setting sun is slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the

unfortunate wayfarer finds himself with no other haven of rest.

It began to grow dusk. They could not wait longer, really, for the

tea, they said. "Yet what else can we do?" asked Jude. "It is a

three-mile walk for you."

"I suppose we can have some beer," said Arabella.

"Beer, oh yes. I had forgotten that. Somehow it seems odd to come

to a public-house for beer on a Sunday evening."

"But we didn't."

"No, we didn't." Jude by this time wished he was out of such an

uncongenial atmosphere; but he ordered the beer, which was promptly

brought.

Arabella tasted it. "Ugh!" she said.

Jude tasted. "What's the matter with it?" he asked. "I don't

understand beer very much now, it is true. I like it well enough,

but it is bad to read on, and I find coffee better. But this seems

all right."

"Adulterated--I can't touch it!" She mentioned three or four

ingredients that she detected in the liquor beyond malt and hops,

much to Jude's surprise.

"How much you know!" he said good-humouredly.

Nevertheless she returned to the beer and drank her share, and they

went on their way. It was now nearly dark, and as soon as they had

withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer together,

till they touched each other. She wondered why he did not put his

arm round her waist, but he did not; he merely said what to himself

seemed a quite bold enough thing: "Take my arm."

She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder. He felt the warmth of

her body against his, and putting his stick under his other arm held

with his right hand her right as it rested in its place.

"Now we are well together, dear, aren't we?" he observed.

"Yes," said she; adding to herself: "Rather mild!"

"How fast I have become!" he was thinking.

Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland, where they

could see the white highway ascending before them in the gloom. From

this point the only way of getting to Arabella's was by going up the

incline, and dipping again into her valley on the right. Before they

had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been

walking on the grass unseen.

"These lovers--you find 'em out o' doors in all seasons and

weathers--lovers and homeless dogs only," said one of the men as

they vanished down the hill.

Arabella tittered lightly.

"Are we lovers?" asked Jude.

"You know best."

"But you can tell me?"

For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder. Jude took the

hint, and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled her to him and

kissed her.

They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had desired, clasped

together. After all, what did it matter since it was dark, said Jude

to himself. When they were half-way up the long hill they paused as

by arrangement, and he kissed her again. They reached the top, and

he kissed her once more.

"You can keep your arm there, if you would like to," she said gently.

He did so, thinking how trusting she was.

Thus they slowly went towards her home. He had left his cottage

at half-past three, intending to be sitting down again to the New

Testament by half-past five. It was nine o'clock when, with another

embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father's door.

She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so

odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave

way, and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he

found, in addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round.

They all spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as

Arabella's intended partner.

They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place

and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of

pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did

not stay longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet

woman without features or character; and bidding them all good night

plunged with a sense of relief into the track over the down.

But that sense was only temporary: Arabella soon re-asserted her

sway in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man

from the Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him? what were

his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a

single minute of time day by day? "Wasting!" It depended on your

point of view to define that: he was just living for the first

time: not wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a

graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!

When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a general

consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things

confronting him. He went upstairs without a light, and the dim

interior of his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his

book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the

title-page regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight,

like the unclosed eyes of a dead man:

H KAIN DIATHKTH

* * * * * *

Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of absence at

lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that he threw into his

basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had

brought with him.

He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself.

Arabella, on the contrary, made them public among all her friends

and acquaintance.

Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours

earlier under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his side, he

reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and stood

still. He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss. As

the sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed

there since. Jude looked on the ground and sighed. He looked

closely, and could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of

their feet as they had stood locked in each other's arms. She was

not there now, and "the embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of

nature" so depicted her past presence that a void was in his heart

which nothing could fill. A pollard willow stood close to the place,

and that willow was different from all other willows in the world.

Utter annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he could

see her again as he had promised would have been his intensest wish

if he had had only the week to live.

An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way with her

two companions of the Saturday. She passed unheedingly the scene of

the kiss, and the willow that marked it, though chattering freely on

the subject to the other two.

"And what did he tell 'ee next?"

"Then he said--" And she related almost word for word some of his

tenderest speeches. If Jude had been behind the fence he would have

felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings

and doings on the previous evening were private.

"You've got him to care for 'ee a bit, 'nation if you han't!"

murmured Anny judicially. "It's well to be you!"

In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low, hungry tone of

latent sensuousness: "I've got him to care for me: yes! But I want

him to more than care for me; I want him to have me--to marry me! I

must have him. I can't do without him. He's the sort of man I long

for. I shall go mad if I can't give myself to him altogether! I

felt I should when I first saw him!"

"As he is a romancing, straightfor'ard, honest chap, he's to be had,

and as a husband, if you set about catching him in the right way."

Arabella remained thinking awhile. "What med be the right way?" she

asked.

"Oh you don't know--you don't!" said Sarah, the third girl.

"On my word I don't!--No further, that is, than by plain courting,

and taking care he don't go too far!"

The third girl looked at the second. "She DON'T know!"

"'Tis clear she don't!" said Anny.

"And having lived in a town, too, as one may say! Well, we can teach

'ee som'at then, as well as you us."

"Yes. And how do you mean--a sure way to gain a man? Take me for an

innocent, and have done wi' it!"

"As a husband."

"As a husband."

"A countryman that's honourable and serious-minded such as he; God

forbid that I should say a sojer, or sailor, or commercial gent from

the towns, or any of them that be slippery with poor women! I'd do

no friend that harm!"

"Well, such as he, of course!"

Arabella's companions looked at each other, and turning up their eyes

in drollery began smirking. Then one went up close to Arabella, and,

although nobody was near, imparted some information in a low tone,

the other observing curiously the effect upon Arabella.

"Ah!" said the last-named slowly. "I own I didn't think of that

way! ... But suppose he ISN'T honourable? A woman had better not

have tried it!"

"Nothing venture nothing have! Besides, you make sure that he's

honourable before you begin. You'd be safe enough with yours. I

wish I had the chance! Lots of girls do it; or do you think they'd

get married at all?"

Arabella pursued her way in silent thought. "I'll try it!" she

whispered; but not to them.