Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

‘Done because we are too meny.’
At sight of this Sue’s nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the
tragedy throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no abate-
ment. They carried her away against her wish to a room on the lower
At Christminster Again
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floor; and there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her gasps, and
her eyes staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house vainly trying
to soothe her.
They could hear from this chamber the people moving about
above, and she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept
from doing so by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her
presence might do harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to
take care of herself lest she should endanger a coming life. Her
inquiries were incessant, and at last Jude came down and told her
there was no hope. As soon as she could speak she informed him
what she had said to the boy, and how she thought herself the cause
of this.
‘No,’ said Jude. ‘It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there
are such boys springing up amongst us––boys of a sort unknown in
the last generation––the outcome of new views of life. They seem to
see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to
resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish
not to live. He’s an advanced man, the doctor; but he can give no
consolation to——’
Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now
broke down; and this stimulated Sue to e
fforts of sympathy which in
some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach. When
everybody was gone, she was allowed to see the children.
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that
little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow
which had darkened the 
first union of Jude, and all the accidents,
mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their
focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those
parents he had groaned, for their ill-assortment he had quaked, and
for the misfortunes of these he had died.
When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await
the coroner’s inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air
of the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.
‘What is it?’ said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.
‘The organ of the College chapel. The organist practising I sup-
pose. It’s the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; “Truly God is
loving unto Israel.” ’
She sobbed again. ‘O, O my babies! They had done no harm! Why
should they have been taken away, and not I!’
Jude the Obscure
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There was another stillness––broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.
‘They are talking about us, no doubt!’ moaned Sue. ‘ “We are
made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!” ’
Jude listened––‘No––they are not talking of us,’ he said. ‘They are
two clergymen of di
fferent views, arguing about the eastward pos-
ition.* Good God––the eastward position, and all creation groaning!’*
Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrol-
lable 
fit of grief. ‘There is something external to us which says, “You
shan’t!” First it said, “You shan’t learn!” Then it said, “You shan’t
labour!” Now it says, “You shan’t love!” ’
He tried to soothe her by saying, ‘That’s bitter of you, darling.’
‘But it’s true!’
Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The
baby’s frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the
time of his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude
would fain have got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched
them she implored him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely
at the woman of the house when she also attempted to put them
away.
Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms. ‘Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?’ she cried out, after
one of these. ‘Don’t turn away from me! I can’t bear the loneliness of
being out of your looks!’
‘There, dear; here I am,’ he said, putting his face close to hers.
‘Yes. . . . O my comrade, our perfect union––our two-in-
oneness*––is now stained with blood!’
‘Shadowed by death––that’s all.’
‘Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t know I
was doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be
out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I told
him I was going to have another child. It upset him. O how bitterly
he upbraided me!’
‘Why did you do it, Sue?’
‘I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t bear
deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for
with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.––Why was I half wiser
than my fellow-women? and not entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him
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pleasant untruths, instead of half realities? It was my want of self-
control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!’
‘Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases;
only in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must
have known sooner or later.’
‘And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I
shall never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! . . . My eyes
are so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year
ago I called myself happy! We went about loving each other too
much––indulging ourselves to utter sel
fishness with each other! We
said––do you remember?––that we would make a virtue of joy. I said
it was Nature’s intention, Nature’s law and raison d’être that we
should be joyful in what instincts she a
fforded us––instincts which
civilization had taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I
said! And now Fate has given us this stab in the back for being such
fools as to take Nature at her word!’
She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, ‘It is best, per-
haps, that they should be gone.––Yes––I see it is! Better that they
should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!’
‘Yes,’ replied Jude. ‘Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy.’
‘But they don’t know! . . . O my babies, my babies, could you be
alive now! You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he
wouldn’t have done it. It was not unreasonable for him to die: it was