Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure


---

little kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he
could not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably
would have done. She shut the casement, and he returned to his
cottage.
At Shaston


---

IV.–iii.
S
’ distressful confession* recurred to Jude’s mind all the night as
being a sorrow indeed.
The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours
saw her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill
path which led into the lonely road to Alfredston. An hour passed
before he returned along the same route, and in his face there was a
look of exaltation not unmixed with recklessness. An incident had
occurred.
They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and
passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on
how far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled,
and she had said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a
parson in embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in
farewell, as he now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the
fact of the kiss would be nothing; all would depend upon the spirit of
it. If given in the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection:
if in the spirit of a lover she could not permit it. ‘Will you swear that
it will not be in that spirit?’ she had said.
No: he would not. And then they had turned from each other in
estrangement, and gone their several ways; till at a distance of twenty
or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously. That look
behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained.
They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most
unpremeditatedly, kissed close and long.* When they parted for good
it was with 
flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.
The kiss was a turning-point in Jude’s career. Back again in the
cottage, and left to re
flection, he saw one thing: that though his kiss
of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his faultful life,
as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it was glaringly
inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the soldier and
servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at its best a
frailty, and at its worst damnation.* What Sue had said in warmth was
really the cold truth. When to defend his a
ffection tooth and nail, to
persist with headlong force in impassioned attentions to her, was all
he thought of, he was condemned ipso facto as a professor of the

---

accepted school of morals. He was as un
fit, obviously, by nature, as
he had been by social position, to 
fill the part of a propounder of
accredited dogma.
Strange that his 
first aspiration towards academical proficiency
had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration––
towards apostleship––had also been checked by a woman. ‘Is it,’ he
said, ‘that the women are to blame; or is it the arti
ficial system of
things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devil-
ish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who
want to progress?’
It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however
humble, to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of
personal gain. Yet with a wife living away from him with another
husband, and himself in love erratically, the loved one’s revolt
against her state being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be
barely respectable according to regulation views. It was not for him
to consider further: he had only to confront the obvious, which was
that he had made himself quite an impostor as a law-abiding
religious teacher.
At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow
hole, to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works
that he possessed, and had stored here. He knew that, in this country
of true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher
price than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his
own way, even if he should sacri
fice a little money to the sentiment of
thus destroying them. Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with,
he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a three-
pronged fork shook them over the 
flames. They kindled, and lighted
up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till they were
more or less consumed.
Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers
talked to him over the garden hedge.
‘Burning up your awld aunt’s rubbidge, I suppose? Ay; a lot gets
heaped up in nooks and corners when you’ve lived eighty years in
one house.’
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning before the leaves, covers,
and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey,
Newman,* and the rest had gone to ashes; but the night was quiet,
and as he turned and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the