Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘This is terrible!’ said Jude, verging on tears. ‘It is monstrous and
unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no
wrong.’
‘Ah––you don’t know my badness!’
He returned vehemently: ‘I do! Every atom and dreg of it! You
make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism,* or what-
ever it may be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration
in you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul
shone like a diamond––whom all the wise of the world would have
been proud of, if they could have known you––should degrade her-
self like this! I am glad I had nothing to do with Divinity––damn
glad––if it’s going to ruin you in this way!’
‘You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don’t see how things
are!’
‘Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall. I
am over-burdened––and you too are unhinged just now.’ He put his
arm round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to
walk without his support.
‘I don’t dislike you, Jude,’ she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
‘I love you as much as ever! Only––I ought not to love you––any
more. O I must not any more!’
‘I can’t own it.’
‘But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to
him. I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter
it.’
‘But surely we are man and wife if ever two people were in this
world? Nature’s own marriage it is unquestionably!’
‘But not Heaven’s. Another was made for me there, and rati
fied
eternally in the church at Melchester.’
‘Sue, Sue––a
ffliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to 
find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this––for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little a
ffection and reverence I had left in me
for the church as an old acquaintance. . . . What I can’t understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it
peculiar to you, or is it common to Woman? Is a woman a thinking
unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? How you argued
that marriage was only a clumsy contract––which it is––how you
At Christminster Again
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showed all the objections to it––all the absurdities. If two and two
made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now?
I can’t understand it, I repeat!’
‘Ah, dear Jude; that’s because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music. You say “What are they
regarding? Nothing is there!” But something is.’
‘That is a hard saying from you, and not a true parallel! You threw
o
ff old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go
back upon yourself. I confess I am utterly stulti
fied in my estimate of
you.’
‘Dear friend, my only friend, don’t be hard with me. I can’t help
being as I am, I am convinced I am right––that I see the light at last.
But O, how to pro
fit by it!’
They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the
building, and she had returned the key. ‘Can this be the girl,’ said
Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now
that he was in the open street: ‘can this be the girl who brought
the Pagan deities into this most Christian city;––who mimicked
Miss Fontover when she crushed them with her heel?––quoted
Gibbon, and Shelley, and Mill? Where are dear Apollo and dear
Venus now!’
‘O don’t, don’t, be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!’ she
sobbed. ‘I can’t bear it! I was in error––I cannot reason with you. I
was wrong––proud in my own conceit. Arabella’s coming was the
finish. Don’t satirize me: it cuts like a knife!’
He 
flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately there in
the silent street, before she could hinder him. They went on till they
came to a little co
ffee-house. ‘Jude,’ she said with suppressed tears,
‘would you mind getting a lodging here?’
‘I will––if, if you really wish? But do you? Let me go to our door
and understand you.’
He went and conducted her in. She said she wanted no supper,
and went in the dark upstairs and struck a light. Turning she found
that Jude had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door.
She went to him, put her hand in his, and said ‘Good-night.’
‘But Sue! Don’t we live here?’
‘You said you would do as I wished!’
‘Yes. Very well! . . . Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue distaste-
fully as I have done! Perhaps as we couldn’t conscientiously marry at