Jude the Obscure

Chapter 11

"That's the story about me in Marygreen, is it--that I entrapped 'ee?

Much of a catch you were, Lord send!" As she warmed she saw some of

Jude's dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have

been laid. "I won't have them books here in the way!" she cried

petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon

the floor.

"Leave my books alone!" he said. "You might have thrown them

aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is

disgusting!" In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had

become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently

left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers. She continued

deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude,

incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave

off. Somehow, in going so, he loosened the fastening of her hair,

and it rolled about her ears.

"Let me go!" she said.

"Promise to leave the books alone."

She hesitated. "Let me go!" she repeated.

"Promise!"

After a pause: "I do."

Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to the door,

out of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here

she began to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a

worse disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of

her gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and

the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the

north. People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday

clothes; they were mainly lovers--such pairs as Jude and Arabella

had been when they sported along the same track some months earlier.

These pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she

now presented, bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind,

her bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work,

and her hands reeking with melted fat. One of the passers said in

mock terror: "Good Lord deliver us!"

"See how he's served me!" she cried. "Making me work Sunday mornings

when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my

head, and my gown off my back!"

Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force.

Then he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with the sense that all

was over between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he,

her husband stood still, regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he

thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union:

that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling

which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render

a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

"Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your

mother, and your father's sister ill-used her husband?" she asked.

"All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!"

Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her. But she said no more,

and continued her saunter till she was tired. He left the spot, and,

after wandering vaguely a little while, walked in the direction of

Marygreen. Here he called upon his great-aunt, whose infirmities

daily increased.

"Aunt--did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?"

said Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.

She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that

she always wore. "Who's been telling you that?" she said.

"I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all."

"You med so well, I s'pose; though your wife--I reckon 'twas

she--must have been a fool to open up that! There isn't much to know

after all. Your father and mother couldn't get on together, and they

parted. It was coming home from Alfredston market, when you were a

baby--on the hill by the Brown House barn--that they had their last

difference, and took leave of one another for the last time. Your

mother soon afterwards died--she drowned herself, in short, and your

father went away with you to South Wessex, and never came here any

more."

Jude recalled his father's silence about North Wessex and Jude's

mother, never speaking of either till his dying day.

"It was the same with your father's sister. Her husband offended

her, and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went

away to London with her little maid. The Fawleys were not made for

wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There's sommat in our

blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what

we do readily enough if not bound. That's why you ought to have

hearkened to me, and not ha' married."

"Where did Father and Mother part--by the Brown House, did you say?"

"A little further on--where the road to Fenworth branches off, and

the handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with

our history. But let that be."

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt's as

if to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out

upon it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued,

though it was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead

came out slow and flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the

ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did

not deter him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice

making sharp noises as he went. When just about the middle he looked

around him and gave a jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did

not go down. He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude

went back to the edge, and stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed

he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide. Peaceful

death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was

there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position?

He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten.

Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing

worthless. He began to see now why some men boozed at inns. He

struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house.

On entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson and

Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as that he

had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday evening of their

courtship. He called for liquor and drank briskly for an hour or

more.

Staggering homeward late that night, with all his sense of

depression gone, and his head fairly clear still, he began to laugh

boisterously, and to wonder how Arabella would receive him in his

new aspect. The house was in darkness when he entered, and in

his stumbling state it was some time before he could get a light.

Then he found that, though the marks of pig-dressing, of fats and

scallops, were visible, the materials themselves had been taken away.

A line written by his wife on the inside of an old envelope was

pinned to the cotton blower of the fireplace:

"_Have gone to my friends. Shall not return._"

All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the carcase of the

pig to Alfredston. He then cleaned up the premises, locked the door,

put the key in a place she would know if she came back, and returned

to his masonry at Alfredston.

At night when he again plodded home he found she had not visited the

house. The next day went in the same way, and the next. Then there

came a letter from her.

That she had gone tired of him she frankly admitted. He was such

a slow old coach, and she did not care for the sort of life he

led. There was no prospect of his ever bettering himself or her.

She further went on to say that her parents had, as he knew, for

some time considered the question of emigrating to Australia, the

pig-jobbing business being a poor one nowadays. They had at last

decided to go, and she proposed to go with them, if he had no

objection. A woman of her sort would have more chance over there

than in this stupid country.

Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her going. He

thought it a wise course, since she wished to go, and one that might

be to the advantage of both. He enclosed in the packet containing

the letter the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig,

with all he had besides, which was not much.

From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly, though her

father and his household did not immediately leave, but waited till

his goods and other effects had been sold off. When Jude learnt

that there was to be an auction at the house of the Donns he packed

his own household goods into a waggon, and sent them to her at the

aforesaid homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as

many of them as she should choose.

He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a shopwindow the

little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law's furniture.

He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude's going near

the place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by

the southern road was materially increased by the auction. A few

days later he entered a dingy broker's shop in the main street

of the town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a

clothes-horse, rolling-pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-glass,

and other things at the back of the shop, evidently just brought in

from a sale, he perceived a framed photograph, which turned out to be

his own portrait.

It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man

in bird's-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given

her on their wedding-day. On the back was still to be read, "_Jude

to Arabella_," with the date. She must have thrown it in with the

rest of her property at the auction.

"Oh," said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles

in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself:

"It is a small lot of stuff that was knocked down to me at a cottage

sale out on the road to Marygreen. The frame is a very useful one,

if you take out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling."

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought

home to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of

his portrait and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required

to demolish all sentiment in him. He paid the shilling, took the

photograph away with him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he

reached his lodging.

Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had

departed. He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal

leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise,

since she was bent on going, which perhaps was true. On the evening

following their emigration, when his day's work was done, he came out

of doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too

familiar road towards the upland whereon had been experienced the

chief emotions of his life. It seemed to be his own again.

He could not realize himself. On the old track he seemed to be a

boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the

top of that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for

Christminster and scholarship. "Yet I am a man," he said. "I have

a wife. More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having

disagreed with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted

from her."

He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at

which the parting between his father and his mother was said to have

occurred.

A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he

had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible. A milestone, now

as always, stood at the roadside hard by. Jude drew near it, and

felt rather than read the mileage to the city. He remembered that

once on his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an

inscription on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations.

It had been done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before

he had been diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman. He

wondered if the inscription were legible still, and going to the back

of the milestone brushed away the nettles. By the light of a match

he could still discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long

ago:

THITHER

J. F.

[with a pointing finger]

The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,

lit in his soul a spark of the old fire. Surely his plan should

be to move onward through good and ill--to avoid morbid sorrow

even though he did see uglinesses in the world? _Bene agere et

loetari_--to do good cheerfully--which he had heard to be the

philosophy of one Spinoza, might be his own even now.

He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original

intention.

By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a

north-easterly direction. There actually rose the faint halo, a

small dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith.

It was enough for him. He would go to Christminster as soon as the

term of his apprenticeship expired.

He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.