Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘O no.’
‘We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn’t want any-
thing thrown away. He makes that into dubbin.’* She nodded towards
the fragment on the grass.
‘What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?’ Jude asked,
politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as
to its truth.
‘Impudence. Don’t tell folk it was I, mind!’
‘How can I? I don’t know your name.’
‘Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?’
‘Do!’
‘Arabella Donn. I’m living here.’
‘I must have known it if I had often come this way. But I mostly go
straight along the high-road.’
‘My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me wash
the innerds for black-puddings and such like.’
They talked a little more, and a little more, as they stood regarding
each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge. The
unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly by
Arabella’s personality, held Jude to the spot against his intention––
almost against his will, and in a way new to his experience. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had never
looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely regarded
the sex as being outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her
eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked
arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and 
firm as marble.
‘What a nice-looking girl you are!’ he murmured, though the
words had not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.
‘Ah––you should see me Sundays!’ she said piquantly.
‘I don’t suppose I could?’ he answered.
‘That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just now,
though there med be in a week or two.’ She had spoken this without
a smile, and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. ‘Will you
let me?’
‘I don’t mind.’
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning
her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking
operation before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more
At Marygreen
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than a general impression of her appearance. ‘Next Sunday?’ he
hazarded. ‘To-morrow, that is?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shall I call?’
‘Yes.’
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost
tenderly with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the
brookside grass, rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely
way, 
filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had
just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evi-
dently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not
how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing
as by a sheet of glass. The intentions as to reading, working, and
learning which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes
earlier, were su
ffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not
how.
‘Well––it’s only a bit of fun,’ he said to himself, faintly conscious
that to common-sense there was something lacking, and still more
obviously something redundant, in the nature of this girl who had
drawn him to her, which made it necessary that he should assert
mere sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her; something
in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied
with literary study and the magni
ficent Christminster dream. It had
been no vestal who chose that missile for opening her attack on him.
He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short 
fleeting while, as
by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscrip-
tion on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then this
passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to all
conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that
of having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto
unsuspected though it had lain close beside him. He was to meet this
enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions; and she silently
resumed her 
flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid
stream.
‘Catched un, my dear?’ laconically asked the girl called Anny.
‘I don’t know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!’
regretfully murmured Arabella.