Jude the Obscure

Chapter 9

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.