Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere
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himself, keenly regarded him with gloomy tenderness, and telling
him he would have been met if they had known of his coming so
soon, set him provisionally in a chair whilst he went to look for Sue,
whose super-sensitiveness was disturbed, as he knew. He found her
in the dark, bending over an arm-chair. He enclosed her with his
arm, and putting his face by hers, whispered, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What Arabella says is true––true! I see you in him!’
‘Well: that’s one thing in my life as it should be, at any rate.’
‘But the other half of him is––she! And that’s what I can’t bear!
But I ought to––I’ll try to get used to it; yes, I ought!’
‘Jealous little Sue! I withdraw all remarks about your sexlessness.
Never mind! Time may right things. . . . And Sue, darling; I have an
idea! We’ll educate and train him with a view to the University. What
I couldn’t accomplish in my own person perhaps I can carry out
through him? They are making it easier for poor students now,* you
know.’
‘O you dreamer!’ said she, and holding his hand returned to the
child with him. The boy looked at her as she had looked at him. ‘Is it
you who’s my real mother at last?’ he inquired.
‘Why? Do I look like your father’s wife?’
‘Well, yes; ’cept he seems fond of you, and you of him. Can I call
you mother?’
Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue
thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a
harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could
make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
‘You may call me mother, if you wish to, my poor dear!’ she said,
bending her cheek against his to hide her tears.
‘What’s this round your neck?’ asked Jude with a
ffected calmness.
‘The key of my box that’s at the station.’
They bustled about and got him some supper, and made him up a
temporary bed, where he soon fell asleep. Both went and looked at
him as he lay.
‘He called you mother two or three times before he dropped o
ff,’
murmured Jude. ‘Wasn’t it odd that he should have wanted to!’
‘Well––it was signi
ficant,’ said Sue. ‘There’s more for us to think
about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the
sky. . . . I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that
ceremony over? It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel
Jude the Obscure
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myself getting intertwined with my kind. O Jude, you’ll love me
dearly, won’t you, afterwards! I do want to be kind to this child, and
to be a mother to him; and our adding the legal form to our marriage
might make it easier for me.’
At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere
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V.–iv.
T
 next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,
though it was begun on the morning following the singular child’s
arrival at their home.
Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and
weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in the
substantial world.
‘His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene,’* said Sue. ‘What is
your name, dear? Did you tell us?’
‘Little Father Time* is what they always called me. It is a
nickname; because I look so aged they say.’
‘And you talk so, too,’ said Sue tenderly. ‘It is strange, Jude, that
these preternaturally old boys almost always come from new
countries. But what were you christened?’
‘I never was.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because, if I died in damnation, ’twould save the expense of a
Christian funeral.’
‘O––your name is not Jude, then?’ said his father with some
disappointment.
The boy shook his head. ‘Never heerd on it.’
‘Of course not,’ said Sue quickly; ‘since she was hating you all the
time!’
‘We’ll have him christened,’ said Jude; and privately to Sue: ‘The
day we are married.’ Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.
Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that a
marriage at a Superintendent Registrar’s o
ffice was more private
than an ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time.
Both Sue and Jude together went to the o
ffice of the district to give
notice: they had become such companions that they could hardly do
anything of importance except in each other’s company.
Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his
shoulder and watching his hand as it traced the words. As she read
the four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which
her own and Jude’s names were inserted, and by which that very
volatile essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be made

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permanent, her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. ‘Names
and Surnames of the Parties’––(they were to be parties now, not
lovers, she thought). ‘Condition.’––(a horrid idea)––‘Rank or
Occupation.’––‘Age.’––‘Dwelling at’––‘Length of Residence.’––
‘Church or Building in which the Marriage is to be solemnized.’––
‘District and County in which the Parties respectively dwell.’
‘It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it,’ she said on their way home. ‘It
seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the
contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church. But we’ll try
to get through with it, dearest, now.’
‘We will. “For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath
not taken her? Let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in
the battle, and another man take her.”* So said the Jewish law-giver.’
‘How you know the Scriptures, Jude! You really ought to have
been a parson. I can only quote profane writers.’
During the interval before the issuing of the certi
ficate Sue, in
her housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the o
ffice, and
furtively glancing in saw a
ffixed to the wall the notice of the pur-
posed clinch to their union. She could not bear its aspect. Coming
after her previous experience of matrimony, all the romance of
their attachment seemed to be starved away by placing her present
case in the same category. She was usually leading little Father
Time by the hand, and fancied that people thought him hers, and
regarded the intended ceremony as the patching up of an old
error.
Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in some
slight degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining
on earth who was associated with his early life at Marygreen––the
aged widow Mrs. Edlin, who had been his great-aunt’s friend and
nurse in her last illness. He hardly expected that she would come;
but she did, bringing singular presents, in the form of apples, jam,
brass snu
ffers, an ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enor-
mous bag of goose feathers towards a bed. She was allotted the spare
room in Jude’s house, whither she retired early, and where they
could hear her through the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord’s
Prayer in a loud voice, as the Rubric directed.
As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and
Jude were still sitting up––it being in fact only ten o’clock––she
dressed herself again, and came down; and they all sat by the 
fire till