Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere
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at the gaol gates, and brought him straight here. She’s paying for
everything.’
Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely
cropped, with a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm,
ruddy with liquor and the satisfaction of being on the brink of a
grati
fied desire. They jocosely saluted the outgoing couple, and went
forward in front of Jude and Sue, whose di
ffidence was increasing.
The latter drew back and turned to her lover, her mouth shaping
itself like that of a child about to give way to grief:
‘Jude––I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The place gives
me the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love! I
wish it had been at church, if it had to be at all. It is not so vulgar
there.’
‘Dear little girl,’ said Jude. ‘How troubled and pale you look!’
‘It must be performed here now, I suppose?’
‘No––perhaps not necessarily.’
He spoke to the clerk, and came back. ‘No––we need not marry
here or anywhere, unless we like, even now,’ he said. ‘We can be
married in a church, if not with the same certi
ficate with another
he’ll give us, I think. Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear,
and I too, and talk it over.’
They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed a
misdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the
widow, who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them;
that they would call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary.
When in the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley,
where they walked up and down as they had done long ago in the
Market-house at Melchester.
‘Now, darling, what shall we do? We are making a mess of it, it
strikes me. Still, anything that pleases you will please me.’
‘But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there,
didn’t you?’
‘Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn’t care
much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did
you––it was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this
morning as to whether we ought.’
They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began
anew: ‘It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much
better than to act rashly a second time. . . . How terrible that scene
Jude the Obscure
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was to me! The expression in that 
flabby woman’s face, leading her
on to give herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would,
but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul––to escape a
nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her character,
degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who
scorned her––a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of
salvation. . . . This is our parish church isn’t it? This is where it
would have to be, if we did it in the usual way? A service or
something seems to be going on.’
Jude went up and looked in at the door. ‘Why––it is a wedding
here too,’ he said. ‘Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.’
Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when
there was always a crowd of marriages. ‘Let us listen,’ she said, ‘and
find how it feels to us when performed in a church.’
They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the pro-
ceedings at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to
the well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of
ordinary prettiness and interest. They could see the 
flowers tremble
in the bride’s hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mech-
anical murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather
not at all under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude
listened, and severally saw themselves in time past going through the
same form of self-committal.
‘It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it
over again with my present knowledge,’ Sue whispered. ‘You see,
they are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course.
But having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at
least as I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings
perhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and
undertake the same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and
seeing this has frightened me from a church wedding as much as the
other did from a registry one. We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude,
and what others may feel con
fident in I feel doubts of––my being
proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!’
Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were
both too thin-skinned––that they ought never to have been born––
much less have come together for the most preposterous of all
joint-ventures for them––matrimony.