Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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VI.–iii.
S
 was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had
again obtained work at his old trade. They were in other lodgings
now, in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of
Ceremonies––Saint Silas.
They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of
things than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness. Vague and
quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect
scintillated like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody
composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-
aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that
the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not
re
flectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial condi-
tions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a devel-
opment of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to
those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity.*
But a
ffliction makes opposing forces loom anthropomorphous; and
those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of Jude and herself
fleeing from a persecutor.
‘We must conform!’ she said mournfully. ‘All the ancient wrath of
the Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and
we must submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use 
fighting
against God!’
‘It is only against man and senseless circumstance,’ said Jude.
‘True!’ she murmured. ‘What have I been thinking of ! I am get-
ting as superstitious as a savage! . . . But whoever or whatever our foe
may be, I am cowed into submission. I have no more 
fighting
strength left; no more enterprize. I am beaten, beaten! . . . “We are
made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!” I am
always saying that now.’
‘I feel the same!’
‘What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may
only be because our history and relations are not absolutely
known. . . . Possibly, if they knew our marriage had not been
formalized they would turn you out of your job as they did at
Aldbrickham!’

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‘I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I
think that we ought to make it legal now––as soon as you are able to
go out.’
‘You think we ought?’
‘Certainly.’
And Jude fell into thought. ‘I have seemed to myself lately,’ he
said, ‘to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous––
the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it! I have not
been conscious of it, or of any wrong-doing towards you, whom I
love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any
other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as I. Yes,
Sue––that’s what I am. I seduced you. . . . You were a distinct
type––a re
fined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact.* But I
couldn’t leave you alone!’
‘No, no, Jude!’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t reproach yourself with
being what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I.’
‘I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without
me perhaps you wouldn’t have urged him to let you go.’
‘I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not
having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our
union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity
of our 
first marriages.’
‘Solemnity?’ Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew
conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.
‘Yes,’ she said, with a little quiver in her words, ‘I have had
dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have
thought––that I am still his wife!’
‘Whose?’
‘Richard’s.’
‘Good God, dearest!––why?’
‘O I can’t explain! Only the thought comes to me.’
‘It is your weakness––a sick fancy, without reason or meaning!
Don’t let it trouble you.’
Sue sighed uneasily.
As a set-o
ff against such discussions as these there had come an
improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in their
experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite
unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost dir-
ectly he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution;