Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Melchester


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When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily tidy
herself, looking 
flushed and tired, she went to her cubicle in silence,
none of them coming out to greet her or to make inquiry. When they
had gone downstairs they found that she did not follow them into the
dining-hall to breakfast; and they then learnt that she had been
severely reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week,
there to be con
fined, and take her meals, and do all her reading.
At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they thought,
too severe. A round robin was prepared and sent in to the Principal,
asking for a remission of Sue’s punishment. No notice was taken.
Towards evening, when the geography mistress began dictating her
subject, the girls in the class sat with folded arms.
‘You mean that you are not going to work?’ said the mistress at
last. ‘I may as well tell you that it has been ascertained that the
young man Bridehead stayed out with was not her cousin, for the
very good reason that she has no such relative. We have written to
Christminster to ascertain.’
‘We are willing to take her word,’ said the head girl.
‘This young man was discharged from his work at Christminster
for drunkenness and blasphemy in public-houses, and he has come
here to live, entirely to be near her.’
However, they remained stolid and motionless: and the mistress
left the room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.
Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard exclam-
ations from the 
first-year’s girls in an adjoining class-room, and one
rushed in to say that Sue Bridehead had got out of the back window
of the room in which she had been con
fined, escaped in the dark
across the lawn, and disappeared. How she had managed to get out
of the garden nobody could tell, as it was bounded by the river at the
bottom, and the side door was locked.
They went and looked at the empty room, the casement between
the middle mullions of which stood open. The lawn was again
searched with a lantern, every bush and shrub being examined, but
she was nowhere hidden. Then the porter of the front gate was
interrogated, and on re
flection he said that he remembered hearing a
sort of splashing in the stream at the back, but he had taken no
notice, thinking some ducks had come down the river from above.
‘She must have walked through the river!’ said a mistress.
‘Or drounded herself,’ said the porter.
Jude the Obscure


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The mind of the matron was horri
fied––not so much at the pos-
sible death of Sue, as at the possible half-column detailing that event
in all the newspapers, which, added to the scandal of the year before
would give the College an unenviable notoriety for many months to
come.
More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and then,
at last, on the opposite shore, which was open to the 
fields, some
little boot-tracks were discerned in the mud, which left no doubt
that the too excitable girl had waded through a depth of water reach-
ing nearly to her shoulders––for this was the chief river of the
county, and was mentioned in all the geography books with respect.
As Sue had not brought disgrace upon the school by drowning her-
self the matron began to speak superciliously of her, and to express
gladness that she was gone.
On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the Close
Gate. Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the silent Close,
and stand opposite the house that contained Sue, and watch the
shadows of the girls’ heads passing to and fro upon the blinds, and
wish he had nothing else to do but to sit reading and learning all day
what many of the thoughtless inmates despised. But to-night, having
finished tea and brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of
the Twenty-ninth Volume of Pusey’s Library of the Fathers, a set of
books which he had purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price
that seemed to him to be one of miraculous cheapness for that
invaluable work. He fancied he heard something rattle lightly against
his window: then he heard it again. Certainly somebody had thrown
gravel. He rose and gently lifted the sash.
‘Jude!’ (from below).
‘Sue!’
‘Yes––it is! Can I come up without being seen?’
‘O yes!’
‘Then don’t come down. Shut the window.’
Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough, the front
door being opened merely by a knob which anybody could turn, as in
most old country towns. He palpitated at the thought that she had
fled to him in her trouble as he had fled to her in his. What counter-