Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere


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‘The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was my
husband’s fault!’
Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told so much
to Arabella.
‘Happy?’ he murmured.
She nodded.
‘Why? Because you have come to the great Wessex Agricultural
Show––or because we have come?’
‘You are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of absurd-
ities. Because I am improving my mind, of course, by seeing all these
steam-ploughs, and threshing-machines, and cha
ff-cutters, and
cows, and pigs, and sheep.’
Jude was quite content with a ba
ffle from his ever evasive com-
panion. But when he had forgotten that he had put the question, and
because he no longer wished for an answer, she went on: ‘I feel that
we have returned to Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to
sickness and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-
five centuries
have taught the race since their time, as one of your Christminster
luminaries says. . . .* There is one immediate shadow, however,––
only one.’ And she looked at the aged child, whom, though they had
taken him to everything likely to attract a young intelligence, they
had utterly failed to interest.
He knew what they were saying and thinking. ‘I am very, very
sorry, father and mother,’ he said. ‘But please don’t mind!––I can’t
help it. I should like the 
flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on
thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!’
Jude the Obscure


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V.–vi.
T
 unnoticed lives that the pair had hitherto led began, from the
day of the suspended wedding onwards, to be observed and dis-
cussed by other persons than Arabella. The society of Spring Street
and the neighbourhood generally did not understand, and probably
could not have been made to understand, Sue and Jude’s private
minds, emotions, positions, and fears. The curious facts of a child
coming to them unexpectedly, who called Jude father and Sue
mother, and a hitch in a marriage ceremony intended for quietness to
be performed at a registrar’s o
ffice, together with rumours of the
undefended cases in the law-courts, bore only one translation to
plain minds.
Little Time––for though he was formally turned into ‘Jude,’ the
apt nickname stuck to him––would come home from school in the
evening, and repeat inquiries and remarks that had been made to him
by the other boys; and cause Sue, and Jude when he heard them, a
great deal of pain and sadness.
The result was that shortly after the attempt at the registrar’s the
pair went o
ff––to London it was believed––for several days, hiring
somebody to look to the boy. When they came back they let it be
understood indirectly, and with total indi
fference and weariness of
mien that they were legally married at last. Sue, who had previously
been called Mrs. Bridehead, now openly adopted the name of Mrs.
Fawley. Her dull, cowed and listless manner for days seemed to
substantiate all this.
But the mistake as it was called of their going away so secretly to
do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and they
found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as
they had expected to do thereby. A living mystery was not much less
interesting than a dead scandal.
The baker’s lad and the grocer’s boy, who at 
first had used to lift
their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands,
in these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage,
and the neighbouring artizans’ wives looked straight along the
pavement when they encountered her.
Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive atmosphere

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began to encircle their souls, particularly after their excursion to the
Show, as if that visit had brought some evil in
fluence to bear on
them; and their temperaments were precisely of a kind to su
ffer from
this atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous and
open statements. Their apparent attempt at reparation had come too
late to be e
ffective.
The headstone and epitaph orders fell o
ff: and two or three
months later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have
to return to journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate
just now, in that he had not as yet cleared o
ff the debt he had
unavoidably incurred in the payment of the law-costs of the previous
year.
One evening he sat down to share the common meal with Sue and
the child as usual. ‘I am thinking,’ he said to her, ‘that I’ll hold on
here no longer. The life suits us, certainly; but if we could get away
to a place where we are unknown, we should be lighter hearted, and
have a better chance. And so I am afraid we must break it up here,
however awkward for you, poor dear!’
Sue was always much a
ffected at a picture of herself as an object of
pity, and she saddened.
‘Well––I am not sorry,’ said she presently. ‘I am much depressed
by the way they look at me here. And you have been keeping on this
house and furniture entirely for me and the boy. You don’t want it
yourself, and the expense is unnecessary. But whatever we do, wher-
ever we go, you won’t take him away from me, Jude dear? I could not
let him go now. The cloud upon his young mind makes him so
pathetic to me; I do hope to lift it some day. And he loves me so. You
won’t take him away from me?’
‘Certainly I won’t, dear little girl. We’ll get nice lodgings, wher-
ever we go. I shall be moving about probably ––getting a job here and
a job there.’
‘I shall do something too, of course, till––till——Well, now I can’t
be useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my hand to something
else.’
‘Don’t hurry about getting employment,’ he said regretfully. ‘I
don’t want you to do that. I wish you wouldn’t, Sue. The boy and
yourself are enough for you to attend to.’
There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it. Sue could
hear the conversation: