Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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individual. Yet she seemed unaltered––he could not say why. There
remained the 
five-mile extra journey into the country, which it was
just as easy to walk as to drive, the greater part of it being uphill.
Jude had never before in his life gone that road with Sue, though he
had with another. It was now as if he carried a bright light which
temporarily banished the shady associations of the earlier time.
Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation
from herself. At length he inquired if her husband were well.
‘O yes,’ she said. ‘He is obliged to be in the school all the day, or he
would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to accompany
me he would have dismissed the school for once, even against his
principles––for he is strongly opposed to giving casual holidays––
only I wouldn’t let him. I felt it would be better to come alone. Aunt
Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being almost a stran-
ger to her now would have made it irksome to both. Since it turns
out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not ask him.’
Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed. ‘Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,’ he
said.
‘Of course.’
‘You ought to be a happy wife.’
‘And of course I am.’
‘Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks
since I gave you to him, and——’
‘Yes. I know, I know!’ There was something in her face which
belied her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly
spoken that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches
in ‘The Wife’s Guide to Conduct.’* Jude knew the quality of every
vibration in Sue’s voice, could read every symptom of her mental
condition; and he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she
had not been a month married. But her rushing away thus from
home, to see the last of a relative whom she had hardly known in her
life, proved nothing; for Sue naturally did such things as those.
‘Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson.’
She reproached him by a glance.
‘No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson,’ murmured Jude. ‘You are dear,
free Sue Bridehead, only you don’t know it. Wifedom has not yet
assimilated and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no
further individuality.’
At Melchester
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Sue put on a look of being o
ffended, till she answered, ‘Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!’
‘But it has,’ he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the 
firs, between the
Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived
and quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there
now. He could not help saying to Sue: ‘That’s the house my wife and
I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her
home to that house.’
She looked at it. ‘That to you was what the school-house at
Shaston is to me.’
‘Yes; but I was not very happy there, as you are in yours.’
She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way
till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. ‘Of course I may
have exaggerated your happiness––one never knows,’ he continued
blandly.
‘Don’t think that, Jude, for a moment even though you may have
said it to sting me! He’s as good to me as a man can be, and gives me
perfect liberty––which elderly husbands don’t do in general. . . . If
you think I am not happy because he’s too old for me you are
wrong.’
‘I don’t think anything against him––to you, dear.’
‘And you won’t say things to distress me, will you?’
‘I will not.’
He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in
taking Phillotson as a husband Sue felt that she had done what she
ought not to have done.
They plunged into the concave 
field on the other side of which
rose the village––the 
field wherein Jude had received a thrashing
from the farmer many years earlier. On ascending to the village and
approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door,
who at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly. ‘She’s down-
stairs, if you’ll believe me!’ cried the widow. ‘Out o’ bed she got, and
nothing could turn her. What will come o’t I do not know!’
On entering, there indeed by the 
fireplace sat the old woman,
wrapped in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that
of Sebastiano’s Lazarus.* They must have looked their amazement,
for she said in a hollow voice:
‘Ah––sceered ye, have I! I wasn’t going to bide up there no longer,
Jude the Obscure
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to please nobody! ’Tis more than 
flesh and blood can bear, to be
ordered to do this and that by a feller that don’t know half as well as
you do yourself ! . . . Ah––you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!’ she
added turning to Sue. ‘All our family do, and nearly all everybody
else’s. You should have done as I did, you simpleton! And Phillotson
the schoolmaster of all men! What made ’ee marry him?’
‘What makes most women marry, aunt?’
‘Ah. You mean to say you loved the man!’
‘I don’t mean to say anything de
finite.’
‘Do ye love un?’
‘Don’t ask me, aunt.’
‘I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!––I don’t want to wownd your feelings, but; there be certain
men here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I
should have said he was one. I don’t say so now, since you must ha’
known better than I; but that’s what I should have said.’
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in
the outhouse, crying.
‘Don’t cry, dear!’ said Jude in distress. ‘She means well, but is very
crusty and queer now, you know.’
‘O no––it isn’t that,’ said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. ‘I don’t mind
her roughness one bit.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It is that what she says is––is true!’
‘God––what––you don’t like him?’ asked Jude.
‘I don’t mean that!’ she said hastily. ‘That I ought––perhaps I
ought not to have married!’
He wondered if she had really been going to say that at 
first. They
went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took
rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly
married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the
afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to drive
her to Alfredston.
‘I’ll go with you to the station, if you’d like?’ he said.
She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and
Jude helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she
looked at him prohibitively.
‘I suppose––I may come to see you some day, when I am back
again at Melchester?’ he half crossly observed.
At Melchester
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She bent down and said softly: ‘No, dear––you are not to come
yet. I don’t think you are in a good mood.’
‘Very well,’ said Jude. ‘Good-bye!’
‘Good-bye!’ She waved her hand, and was gone.
‘She’s right. I won’t go,’ he murmured.
He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in
attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her.
He read sermons on discipline and hunted up passages in Church
history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before
he had returned from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter
from Arabella. The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of
self-condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his
attachment to Sue.
The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the
Christminster one. Arabella informed him that a few days after their