Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure


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his point; for presently a tap came to Sue’s door, and the woman
appeared.
‘I am sorry to tell you, ma’am,’ she said, ‘that I can’t let you have
the room for the week after all. My husband objects; and therefore I
must ask you to go. I don’t mind your staying over to-night, as it is
getting late in the afternoon; but I shall be glad if you can leave early
in the morning.’
Though she knew that she was entitled to the lodging for a week,
Sue did not wish to create a disturbance between the wife and hus-
band, and she said she would leave as requested. When the landlady
had gone Sue looked out of the window again. Finding that the rain
had ceased she proposed to the boy that, after putting the little ones
to bed, they should go out and search about for another place, and
bespeak it for the morrow, so as not to be so hard driven then as they
had been that day.
Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just been
sent on from the station by Jude, they sallied out into the damp
though not unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not to disturb her hus-
band with the news of her notice to quit while he was perhaps
worried in obtaining a lodging for himself. In the company of the boy
she wandered into this street and into that; but though she tried a
dozen di
fferent houses she fared far worse alone than she had fared
in Jude’s company, and could get nobody to promise her a room for
the following day. Every householder looked askance at such a
woman and child inquiring for accommodation in the gloom.
‘I ought not to be born, ought I?’ said the boy with misgiving.
Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where she was
not welcome, but where at least she had temporary shelter. In her
absence Jude had left his address; but knowing how weak he still was
she adhered to her determination not to disturb him till the next day.
At Christminster Again
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VI.–ii.
S
 sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the
scene outside the uncurtained window. At some distance opposite,
the outer walls of Sarcophagus* College––silent, black and
windowless––threw their four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay
into the little room she occupied, shutting out the moonlight by
night and the sun by day. The outlines of Rubric* College also were
discernible beyond the other, and the tower of a third further o
ff
still. She thought of the strange operation of a simple-minded man’s
ruling passion, that it should have led Jude, who loved her and the
children so tenderly, to place them here in this depressing purlieu,
because he was still haunted by his dream. Even now he did not
distinctly hear the freezing negative that those scholared walls had
echoed to his desire.
The failure to 
find another lodging and the lack of room in this
house for his father had made a deep impression on the boy;––a
brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him.
The silence was broken by his saying: ‘Mother, what shall we do
to-morrow!’
‘I don’t know!’ said Sue despondently. ‘I am afraid this will
trouble your father.’
‘I wish father was quite well, and there had been room for him!
Then it wouldn’t matter so much! Poor father!’
‘It wouldn’t!’
‘Can I do anything?’
‘No! All is trouble, adversity and su
ffering!’
‘Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?’
‘Partly.’
‘It would be better to be out o’ the world than in it, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would almost, dear.’
‘ ’Tis because of us children, too, isn’t it, that you can’t get a good
lodging.’
‘Well––people do object to children sometimes.’
‘Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?’
‘O––because it is a law of nature.’

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‘But we don’t ask to be born?’
‘No indeed.’
‘And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real
mother, and you needn’t have had me unless you liked. I oughtn’t to
have come to ’ee––that’s the real truth! I troubled ’em in Australia;
and I trouble folk here. I wish I hadn’t been born!’
‘You couldn’t help it, my dear.’
‘I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they
should be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not
allowed to grow big and walk about!’
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this
too re
flective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted,
she would be honest and candid with one who entered into her
di
fficulties like an aged friend.
‘There is going to be another in our family soon,’ she hesitatingly
remarked.
‘How?’
‘There is going to be another baby.’
‘What!’ The boy jumped up wildly. ‘O God, mother, you’ve never
a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you’ve got!’
‘Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!’ murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.
The boy burst out weeping. ‘O you don’t care, you don’t care!’
he cried in bitter reproach. ‘How ever could you, mother, be so
wicked and cruel as this, when you needn’t have done it till we was
better o
ff, and father well!––To bring us all into more trouble! No
room for us, and father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-
morrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soon! . . . ’Tis
done o’ purpose!––’tis––’tis!’ He walked up and down sobbing.
‘Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!’ she pleaded, her bosom heav-
ing now as much as the boy’s. ‘I can’t explain––I will when you are
older. It does seem––as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in
these di
fficulties! I can’t explain, dear! But it––is not quite on
purpose––I can’t help it!’
‘Yes it is––it must be! For nobody would interfere with us, like
that, unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever, ever! I’ll never
believe you care for me, or father, or any of us any more!’
He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in