Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Melchester


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because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their natures
which wore out women’s hearts and lives.
When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying
that she had forgotten something. Jude and the landlady o
ffered to
get it.
‘No,’ she said, running back. ‘It is my handkerchief. I know where
I left it.’
Jude followed her back. She had found it, and came holding it in
her hand. She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her
lips suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something. But she
went on, and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.
Jude the Obscure


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III.–viii.
J
 wondered if she had really left her handkerchief behind; or
whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love
that at the last moment she could not bring herself to express.
He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were gone, and
fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol he
went upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots
for his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.
But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to
be possessed with an idea that she would come back. She could not
possibly go home with Phillotson, he fancied. The feeling grew and
stirred. The moment that the clock struck the last of his working
hours he threw down his tools and rushed homeward. ‘Has anybody
been for me?’ he asked.
Nobody had been there.
As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o’clock
that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had
struck eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake o
ff the
feeling that she would come back and sleep in the little room adjoin-
ing his own, in which she had slept so many previous days. Her
actions were always unpredictable: why should she not come? Gladly
would he have compounded for the denial of her as a sweetheart and
wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on
the most distant terms. His supper still remained spread; and going
to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the room
and sat as watchers sit on old-Midsummer eves* expecting the
phantom of the Beloved. But she did not come.
Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked
out of the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to
London, whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their
rattling along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same
sky of ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon
showed its position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger
stars made themselves visible as faint nebulae only. It was a new
beginning of Sue’s history. He projected his mind into the future,
and saw her with children, more or less in her own likeness, around

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her. But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her
identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness
of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone. Every desired
renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy. ‘If at the
estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see her child––
hers solely––there would be comfort in it,’ said Jude. And then he
again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more fre-
quency, the scorn of nature for man’s 
finer emotions, and her lack of
interest in his aspirations.
The oppressive strength of his a
ffection for Sue showed itself on
the morrow and following days yet more clearly. He could no longer
endure the light of the Melchester lamps: the sunshine was as drab
paint, and the blue sky as zinc. Then he received news that his old
aunt was dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost
coincided with a letter from his former employer at Christminster,
who o
ffered him permanent work of a good class if he would come
back. The letters were almost a relief to him. He started to visit aunt
Drusilla, and resolved to go onward to Christminster to see what
worth there might be in the builder’s o
ffer.
Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication from the
Widow Edlin had led him to expect. There was every possibility of
her lingering on for weeks or months, though little likelihood. He
wrote to Sue informing her of the state of her aunt, and suggesting
that she might like to see her aged relative alive. He would meet her
at Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back
from Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed
his down-train at that station. Next morning, accordingly, he went
on to Christminster, intending to return to Alfredston soon enough
to keep the suggested appointment with Sue.
The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost
all feeling for its associations. Yet as the sun made vivid lights
and shades of the mullioned architecture of the façades, and drew
patterns of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the quad-
rangles, Jude thought he had never seen the place look more beauti-
ful. He came to the street in which he had 
first beheld Sue. The chair
she had occupied when, leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a hog-
hair brush in her hand, her girlish 
figure had arrested the gaze of his
inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its former spot, empty. It was as if
she were dead, and nobody had been found capable of succeeding
Jude the Obscure


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her in that artistic pursuit. Hers was now the city phantom, while
those of the intellectual and devotional worthies who had once
moved him to emotion were no longer able to assert their presence
there.
However, here he was; and in ful
filment of his intention he went
on to his former lodging in ‘Beersheba,’ near the ritualistic church of
St. Silas. The old landlady who opened the door seemed glad to see
him again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder
who had employed him had called to inquire his address.
Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked. But the old
sheds and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it impossible to
engage himself to return and stay in this place of vanished dreams.
He longed for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where
he might probably meet Sue.
Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by these
scenes, there returned upon him that feeling which had been his
undoing more than once––that he was not worth the trouble of being
taken care of either by himself or others; and during this half-hour
he met Tinker Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at
Fourways, who proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink
together. They walked along the street till they stood before one of
the great palpitating centres of Christminster life, the inn wherein he
formerly had responded to the challenge to rehearse the Creed in
Latin––now a popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance,
which gave admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and
re
fitted in modern style since Jude’s residence here.
Tinker Taylor drank o
ff his glass and departed, saying it was too
stylish a place now for him to feel at home in, unless he was drunker
than he had money to be just then. Jude was longer 
finishing his, and
stood abstractedly silent in the, for the minute, almost empty place.
The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany
fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the
back of the standing-space there were stu
ffed sofa-benches. The
room was divided into compartments in the approved manner,
between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing,
to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush by the
recognitions of those in the next. On the inside of the counter two
barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of
little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter trough.
At Melchester


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Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train left,
Jude sat down on one of the sofas. At the back of the barmaids rose
bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on
which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in
bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst. The moment was
enlivened by the entrance of some customers into the next com-