Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Marygreen
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had withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer
together, till they touched each other. She wondered why he did not
put his arm round her waist, but he did not; he merely said what to
himself seemed a quite bold enough thing: ‘Take my arm.’
She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder. He felt the warmth of
her body against his, and putting his stick under his other arm held
with his right hand her right as it rested in its place.
‘Now we are well together, dear, aren’t we?’ he observed.
‘Yes,’ said she, adding to herself: ‘Rather mild!’
‘How fast I have become!’ he was thinking.
Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland, where
they could see the white highway ascending before them in the
gloom. From this point one way of getting to Arabella’s was by going
up the incline and dipping again into her valley on the right. Before
they had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had
been walking on the grass unseen.
‘These lovers––you 
find ’em out o’ doors in all seasons and
weathers––lovers and homeless dogs only,’ said one of the men as
they vanished down the hill.
Arabella tittered lightly.
‘Are we lovers?’ asked Jude.
‘You know best.’
‘But you can tell me?’
For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder. Jude took the
hint, and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled her to him and
kissed her.
They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had desired,
clasped together. After all, what did it matter since it was dark, said
Jude to himself. When they were half way up the long hill they
paused as by arrangement, and he kissed her again. They reached
the top, and he kissed her once more.
‘You can keep your arm there, if you would like to,’ she said
gently.
He did so, thinking how trusting she was.
Thus they slowly went towards her home. He had left his cottage
at half-past three, intending to be sitting down again to the New
Testament by half-past 
five. It was nine o’clock when, with another
embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father’s door.
She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so
Jude the Obscure
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odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark. He gave
way, and followed her in. Immediately that the door was opened he
found, in addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round.
They all spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as
Arabella’s intended partner.
They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place
and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleas-
ant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay
longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet woman with-
out features or character, and bidding them all good night plunged
with a sense of relief into the track over the down.
But that sense was only temporary: Arabella soon reasserted her
sway in his soul. He walked as if he felt himself to be another man
from the Jude of yesterday. What were his books to him; what were
his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a
single minute of time day by day? ‘Wasting,’ it depended on your
point of view to de
fine that: he was just living for the first time: not
wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a
parson; ay, or a pope.
When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a
general consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all
things confronting him. He went upstairs without a light, and the
dim interior of his room accosted him with sad inquiry. There lay his
book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-
page regarded him with 
fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the
unclosed eyes of a dead man:
Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ∆ΙΑΘΗΚΗ
Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of absence
at lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that he threw into his
basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had
brought with him.
He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself.
Arabella, on the contrary, made them public among all her friends
and acquaintance.
Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few
hours earlier, under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his
side, he reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and