Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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dislike to you!’ she brokenly murmured. ‘Dislike to you! But I can’t
say any more––it breaks my heart––it will be undoing all I have
begun! Jude––good-night!’
‘Good-night,’ he said, and turned to go.
‘O but you shall kiss me!’ said she, starting up. ‘I can’t––
bear——!’
He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely
ever done before, and they remained in silence till she said, ‘Good-
bye, good-bye!’ And then gently pressing him away she got free,
trying to mitigate the sadness by saying: ‘We’ll be dear friends just
the same, Jude, won’t we? And we’ll see each other sometimes––
Yes!––and forget all this, and try to be as we were long ago?’
Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended
the stairs.
At Christminster Again
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VI.–iv.
T
 man whom Sue, in her mental volte-face, was now regarding as
her inseparable husband, lived still at Marygreen.
On the day before the tragedy of the children, Phillotson had seen
both her and Jude as they stood in the rain at Christminster watch-
ing the procession to the Theatre. But he had said nothing of it at the
moment to his companion Gillingham, who, being an old friend, was
staying with him at the village aforesaid, and had, indeed, suggested
the day’s trip to Christminster.
‘What are you thinking of ?’ said Gillingham, as they went home.
‘The University degree you never obtained?’
‘No, no,’ said Phillotson gru
ffly. ‘Of somebody I saw today.’ In a
moment he added, ‘Susanna.’
‘I saw her, too.’
‘You said nothing.’
‘I didn’t wish to draw your attention to her. But, as you did see
her, you should have said: “How d’ye do, my Dear-that-was?” ’
‘Ah, well. I might have. But what do you think of this: I have good
reason for supposing that she was innocent when I divorced her––
that I was all wrong. Yes, indeed! Awkward, isn’t it?’
‘She has taken care to set you right since, anyhow, apparently.’
‘H’m. That’s a cheap sneer. I ought to have waited,
unquestionably.’
At the end of the week, when Gillingham had gone back to his
school near Shaston, Phillotson, as was his custom, went to Alfred-
ston market, ruminating again on Arabella’s intelligence as he walked
down the long hill which he had known before Jude knew it, though
his history had not beaten so intensely upon its incline. Arrived in the
town he bought his usual weekly local paper; and when he had sat
down in an inn to refresh himself for the 
five miles’ walk back, he
pulled the paper from his pocket and read awhile. The account of the
‘Strange Suicide of a stone-mason’s children’ met his eye.
Unimpassioned as he was, it impressed him painfully, and puzzled
him not a little, for he could not understand the age of the elder child
being what it was stated to be. However, there was no doubt that the
newspaper report was in some way true.

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‘Their cup of sorrow is now full!’ he said: and thought and
thought of Sue, and what she had gained by leaving him.
Arabella having made her home at Alfredston, and the school-
master coming to market there every Saturday, it was not wonderful
that in a few weeks they met again––the precise time being just after
her return from Christminster, where she had stayed much longer
than she had at 
first intended, keeping an interested eye on Jude,
though Jude had seen no more of her. Phillotson was on his way
homeward when he encountered Arabella, and she was approaching
the town.
‘You like walking out this way, Mrs. Cartlett?’ he said.
‘I’ve just begun to again,’ she replied. ‘It is where I lived as maid
and wife, and all the past things of my life that are interesting to my
feelings are mixed up with this road. And they have been stirred up
in me too, lately; for I’ve been visiting at Christminster. Yes; I’ve
seen Jude.’
‘Ah. How do they bear their terrible a
ffliction?’
‘In a ve-ry strange way––Ve-ry strange! She don’t live with him
any longer. I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left, though I
had thought things were drifting that way from their manner when I
called on them.’
‘Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought ’twould
have united them more.’
‘He’s not her husband, after all. She has never really married him
although they have passed as man and wife so long. And now, instead
of this sad event making ’em hurry up, and get the thing done legally,
she’s took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my a
ffliction at
losing Cartlett, only hers is of a more ’sterical sort than mine. And she
says, so I was told, that she’s your wife in the eye of Heaven and the
Church––yours only; and can’t be anybody else’s by any act of man.’
‘Ah––indeed? . . . Separated, have they!’
‘You see, the eldest boy was mine——’
‘O––yours!’
‘Yes, poor little fellow––born in lawful wedlock, thank God. And
perhaps she feels, over and above other things, that I ought to have
been in her place. I can’t say. However, as for me, I am soon o
ff
from here. I’ve got father to look after now, and we can’t live in
such a humdrum place as this. I hope soon to be in a bar again at
Christminster, or some other big town.’