Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

parting. You had been so very good and kind to me that when you were out
of sight I felt what a cruel and ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has
reproached me ever since. If you want to love me, Jude, you may: I don’t
mind at all; and I’ll never say again that you mustn’t!
‘Now I won’t write any more about that. You do forgive your thought-
less friend for her cruelty, and won’t make her miserable by saying you
don’t?––Ever,
S
.’
It would be super
fluous to say what his answer was; and how he
thought what he would have done had he been free, which should
have rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unneces-
sary for Sue. He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own
victory if it had come to a con
flict between Phillotson and himself for
the possession of her.
Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue’s impul-
sive note than it really was intended to bear.
After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she
would write again. But he received no further communication; and
in the intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that
he should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under
eighteen miles.
He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his
missive, but none came. The third morning arrived; the postman did
not stop. This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety about
At Melchester


---

her he sent o
ff three brief lines, stating that he was coming the
following day, for he felt sure something had happened.
His 
first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her
immersion, but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have
written for her in such a case. Conjectures were put an end to by his
arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright morn-
ing of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when the parish
was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered
inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in
unison.
A little girl opened the door. ‘Miss Bridehead is upstairs,’ she said.
‘And will you please walk up to her?’
‘Is she ill?’ asked Jude hastily.
‘Only a little––not very.’
Jude entered and ascended. On reaching the landing a voice told
him which way to turn––the voice of Sue calling his name. He
passed the doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a
dozen feet square.
‘O Sue!’ he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand.
‘How is this! You couldn’t write?’
‘No––it wasn’t that!’ she answered. ‘I did catch a bad cold––but I
could have written. Only I wouldn’t!’
‘Why not?––frightening me like this!’
‘Yes––that was what I was afraid of ! But I had decided not to write
to you any more. They won’t have me back at the school––that’s why
I couldn’t write. Not the fact, but the reason!’
‘Well?’
‘They not only won’t have me, but they gave me a parting piece of
advice——’
‘What?’
She did not answer directly. ‘I vowed I never would tell you,
Jude––it is so vulgar and distressing!’
‘Is it about us?’
‘Yes.’
‘But do tell me!’
‘Well. Somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and
they say––you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake
of my reputation! . . . There––now I have told you, and I wish I
hadn’t!’
Jude the Obscure


---

‘O poor Sue!’
‘I don’t think of you like that means! It did just occur to me* to
regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn’t begun to. I have
recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as
total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude––why, of course, if I
had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn’t have come to you so
often. And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying
me till––the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a
little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It is all
my fault. Everything is my fault always!’*
The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded
each other with a mutual distress.
‘I was so blind at 
first!’ she went on. ‘I didn’t see what you felt at
all. O you have been unkind to me––you have––to look upon me as a
sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it
myself ! Your attitude to me has become known: and naturally they
think we’ve been doing wrong! I’ll never trust you again!’
‘Yes, Sue,’ he said simply: ‘I am to blame––more than you think. I
was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting
or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as
strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of
subterfuge to avail myself of it.* But don’t you think I deserve a little
consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments,
since I couldn’t help having them?’
She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked
away as if afraid she might forgive him.
By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that
fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue’s
undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have
changed its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the
winds, and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue’s declaration of her
neutral feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of
Arabella’s parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in part
to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the hour of this
distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to dwell upon the
recognized barriers between them.
‘Of course––I know you don’t––care about me in any particular
way,’ he sorrowed. ‘You ought not, and you are right. You belong
to––Mr. Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?’