Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Shaston


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see to it, he pulled o
ff his coat and idled quietly enough for a few
minutes, when, 
finding she did not come, he went out upon the
landing, candle in hand, and said again ‘Soo!’
‘Yes!’ came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen
quarter.
‘What are you doing down there at midnight––tiring yourself out
for nothing!’
‘I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger 
fire here.’
He went to bed. Some time in the night he awoke. Sue was not
there, even now. Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the
landing, and again called her name.
She answered ‘Yes!’ as before; but the tones were small and con-
fined, and whence they came he could not at first understand. Under
the staircase was a large clothes-closet without a window; they
seemed to come from it. The door was shut, but there was no lock or
other fastening. Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if
she had suddenly become deranged.
‘What are you doing in there?’ he asked.
‘Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late.’
‘But there’s no bed, is there? And no ventilation! Why, you’ll be
su
ffocated if you stay all night!’
‘O no, I think not. Don’t trouble about me.’
‘But––’, Phillotson seized the knob and pulled at the door. She
had fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke at his pull.
There being no bedstead she had 
flung down some rugs and made a
little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet
a
fforded.
When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed
and trembling.
‘You ought not to have pulled open the door!’ she cried excitedly.
‘It is not becoming in you! O, will you go away; please will you!’
She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white night-gown
against the shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried. She
continued to beseech him not to disturb her.
He said: ‘I’ve been kind to you, and given you every liberty; and it
is monstrous that you should feel in this way!’
‘Yes,’ said she weeping. ‘I know that! It is wrong and wicked of
me, I suppose. I am very sorry. But it is not I altogether that am to
blame!’
Jude the Obscure
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---

‘Who is then? Am I?’
‘No––I don’t know! The universe, I suppose––things in general,
because they are so horrid and cruel!’
‘Well, it is no use talking like that. Making a man’s house so
unseemly at this time o’ night! Eliza will hear, if we don’t mind.’ (He
meant the servant.) ‘Just think if either of the parsons in this town
was to see us now! I hate such eccentricities, Sue. There’s no order
or regularity in your sentiments. But I won’t intrude on you further;
only I would advise you not to shut the door too tight, or I shall 
find
you sti
fled to-morrow.’
On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet,
but Sue had already gone downstairs. There was a little nest where
she had lain, and spiders’ webs hung overhead. ‘What must a
woman’s aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!’ he
said bitterly.
He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal began
almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement––or
rather roadway, pavements being scarce here––which was two or
three feet above the level of the parlour 
floor. They nodded down to
the happy couple their morning greetings, as they went on.
‘Richard,’ she said all at once; ‘would you mind my living away
from you?’
‘Away from me? Why, that’s what you were doing when I married
you. What then was the meaning of marrying at all?’
‘You wouldn’t like me any the better for telling you.’
‘I don’t object to know.’
‘Because I thought I could do nothing else. You had got my prom-
ise a long time before that, remember; then, as time went on, I
regretted I had promised you, and was trying to see an honourable
way to break it o
ff. But as I couldn’t I became rather reckless and
careless about the conventions. Then you know what scandals were
spread, and how I was turned out of the Training School you had
taken such time and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and
this frightened me, and it seemed then that the one thing I could do
would be to let the engagement stand. Of course I, of all people,
ought not to have cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I
never did care for. But I was a coward––as so many women are––and
my theoretic unconventionality broke down. If that had not entered
into the case it would have been better to have hurt your feelings