Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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more degrading, immoral, unnatural than another in my life, it is
this meretricious contract with Arabella which has been called doing
the right thing! And you too––you call yourself Phillotson’s wife! His
wife. You are mine.’
‘Don’t make me rush away from you––I can’t bear much. But on
this point I am decided.’
‘I cannot understand how you did it––how you think it––I
cannot!’
‘Never mind that. He is a kind husband to me––And I––I’ve
wrestled and struggled, and fasted, and prayed. I have nearly
brought my body into complete subjection. And you mustn’t––will
you––wake——’
‘O you darling little fool; where is your reason? You seem to have
su
ffered the loss of your faculties! I would argue with you if I didn’t
know that a woman in your state of feeling is quite beyond all appeals
to her brains. Or is it that you are humbugging yourself, as so many
women do about these things; and don’t actually believe what you
pretend to, and only are indulging in the luxury of the emotion
raised by an a
ffected belief?’
‘Luxury! How can you be so cruel!’
‘You dear, sad, soft, most melancholy wreck of a promising human
intellect that it has ever been my lot to behold. Where is your scorn
of convention gone? I would have died game!’
‘You crush, almost insult me, Jude. Go away from me.’ She turned
o
ff quickly.
‘I will. I would never come to see you again, even if I had the
strength to come, which I shall not have any more. Sue, Sue, you are
not worth a man’s love!’
Her bosom began to go up and down. ‘I can’t endure you to say
that!’ she burst out, and her eye resting on him a moment, she
turned back impulsively. ‘Don’t, don’t scorn me! Kiss me, O kiss me
lots of times, and say I am not a coward and a contemptible
humbug––I can’t bear it!’ She rushed up to him and with her mouth
on his, continued: ‘I must tell you––O I must––my darling Love! It
has been––only a church marriage––an apparent marriage I mean!
He suggested it at the very 
first!’
‘How?’
‘I mean it is a nominal marriage only. It hasn’t been more than that
at all since I came back to him!’
At Christminster Again
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‘Sue!’ he said. Pressing her to him in his arms he bruised her lips
with kisses. ‘If misery can know happiness, I have a moment’s happi-
ness now! Now, in the name of all you hold holy, tell me the truth,
and no lie. You do love me still?’
‘I do! You know it too well! . . . But I mustn’t do this.––I mustn’t
kiss you back as I would!’
‘But do!’
‘And yet you are so dear!––and you look so ill——’
‘And so do you. There’s one more, in memory of our dead little
children––yours and mine.’
The words struck her like a blow, and she bent her head. ‘I
mustn’t
––I can’t go on with this!’ she gasped presently. ‘But there,
there, darling; I give you back your kisses, I do, I do! . . . And now I’ll
hate
myself for ever for my sin!’
‘No––let me make my last appeal. Listen to this. We’ve both
re-married out of our senses. I was made drunk to do it. You were
the same. I was gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk. Either form of
intoxication takes away the nobler vision. Let us then shake o
ff our
mistakes, and run away together!’
‘No; again no! . . . Why do you tempt me so far Jude. It is too
merciless! . . . But I’ve got over myself now. Don’t follow me––don’t
look at me. Leave me, for pity’s sake!’
She ran up the church to the east end, and Jude did as she
requested. He did not turn his head, but took up his blanket, which
she had not seen, and went straight out. As he passed the end of the
church she heard his coughs mingling with the rain on the windows,
and in a last instinct of human a
ffection, even now unsubdued by her
fetters, she sprang up as if to go and succour him. But she knelt
down again, and stopped her ears with her hands till all possible
sound of him had passed away.
He was by this time at the corner of the green from which the
path ran across the 
fields in which he had scared rooks as a boy. He
turned and looked back, once, at the building which still contained
Sue; and then went on, knowing that his eyes would light on that
scene no more.
There are cold spots up and down Wessex in autumn and winter
weather; but the coldest of all when a north or east wind is blowing is
the crest of the down by the Brown House, where the road to Alfred-
ston crosses the old Ridgeway. Here the 
first winter sleets and snows
Jude the Obscure
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fall and lie, and here the spring frost lingers last unthawed. Here in
the teeth of the north-east wind and rain Jude now pursued his way,
wet through, the necessary slowness of his walk from lack of his
former strength being insu
fficient to maintain his heat. He came to
the milestone, and, raining as it was, spread his blanket and lay down
there to rest. Before moving on he went and felt at the back of the
stone for his own carving. It was still there; but nearly obliterated by
moss. He passed the spot where the gibbet of his ancestor and Sue’s
had stood, and descended the hill.
It was dark when he reached Alfredston, where he had a cup of
tea, the deadly chill that began to creep into his bones being too
much for him to endure fasting. To get home he had to travel by a
steam tramcar, and two branches of railway, with much waiting at a
junction. He did not reach Christminster till ten o’clock.
At Christminster Again
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VI.–ix.
O
 the platform stood Arabella. She looked him up and down.
‘You’ve been to see her?’ she asked.
‘I have,’ said Jude, literally tottering with cold and lassitude.
‘Well, now you’d best march along home.’
The water ran out of him as he went, and he was compelled to lean
against the wall to support himself while coughing.
‘You’ve done for yourself by this, young man,’ said she. ‘I don’t
know whether you know it!’
‘Of course I do. I meant to do for myself.’
‘What––to commit suicide?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Well, I’m blest! Kill yourself for a woman.’
‘Listen to me, Arabella. You think you are the stronger; and so you
are, in a physical sense, now. You could push me over like a ninepin.
You did not send that letter the other day, and I could not resent your
conduct. But I am not so weak in another way as you think. I made
up my mind that a man con
fined to his room by inflammation of the
lungs, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a