Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘Absolutely sure. I have no feelings of love left in me.’
‘That’s news. How has it come to be?’
‘I’ve seen Arabella.’
She winced at the hit: then said curiously, ‘When did you see her?’
‘When I was at Christminster.’
‘So she’s come back; and you never told me! I suppose you will
live with her now?’
‘Of course––just as you live with your husband.’
She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and cactuses,
withered for want of attention, and through them at the outer dis-
tance, till her eyes began to grow moist. ‘What is it?’ said Jude, in a
softened tone.
‘Why should you be so glad to go back to her if––if––what you
used to say to me is still true––I mean if it were true then! Of course
it is not now! How could your heart go back to Arabella so soon?’
‘A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way.’
‘Ah––it isn’t true!’ she said with gentle resentment. ‘You are
teasing me––that’s all––because you think I am not happy!’
‘I don’t know. I don’t wish to know.’
‘If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that I
should have a right to dislike him! He is considerate to me in every-
thing; and he is very interesting, from the amount of general know-
ledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his
way. . . . Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his
own age, or one younger than himself––eighteen years––as I am than
he?’
‘It depends upon what they feel for each other.’
He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go
on unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears:
‘I––I think I must be equally honest with you as you have been
with me. Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say?––that
thought I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him––it is a
torture to me to live with him as a husband!––There, now I have let it
out––I couldn’t help it, although I have been––pretending I am
happy. Now––you’ll have a contempt for me for ever, I suppose!’ She
bent down her face upon her hands as they lay upon the cloth, and
silently sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged table
quiver.
‘I have only been––married a month or two,’ she went on, still
At Shaston
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remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands. ‘And it is
said that what a woman shrinks from in the early days of her mar-
riage she shakes down to with comfortable indi
fference in half-a-
dozen years. But that is much like saying that the amputation of a
limb is no a
ffliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to
the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time!’
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, ‘I thought there was some-
thing wrong, Sue! O I thought there was!’
‘But it is not as you think!––there is nothing wrong except my
own wickedness I suppose you’d call it––a repugnance on my part,
for a reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one
by the world in general! . . . What tortures me so much is the neces-
sity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he
is morally!––the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a
matter whose essence is its voluntariness! . . . I wish he would beat
me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk
about as a justi
fication for feeling as I do! But he does nothing,
except that he has grown a little cold since he has found out how I
feel. That’s why he didn’t come to the funeral. . . . O, I am very
miserable––I don’t know what to do! . . . Don’t come near me, Jude,
because you mustn’t! Don’t––don’t!’
But he had jumped up and put his face against hers––or rather
against her ear, her face being inaccessible.
‘I told you not to, Jude!’
‘I know you did––I only wish to––console you! It all arose through
my being married before we met, didn’t it? You would have been my
wife, Sue, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t been for that?’
Instead of replying she rose quickly and saying she was going to
walk to her aunt’s grave in the churchyard to recover herself, went
out of the house. Jude did not follow her. Twenty minutes later he
saw her cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin’s, and soon she
sent a little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired to see
him again that night.
In the lonely room of his aunt’s house Jude sat watching the
cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade.
He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and
disheartened; and again questioned his devotional motto that all was
for the best.
He retired to rest early, but his sleep was 
fitful from the sense that