Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Marygreen


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‘Don’t touch me, please,’ she said softly. ‘I am part egg-shell. Or
perhaps I had better put it in a safe place.’ She began unfastening the
collar of her gown.
‘What is it?’ said her lover.
‘An egg––a cochin’s egg. I am hatching a very rare sort. I carry it
about everywhere with me, and it will get hatched in less than three
weeks.’
‘Where do you carry it?’
‘Just here.’ She put her hand into her bosom and drew out the egg,
which was wrapped in wool, outside it being a piece of pig’s bladder,
in case of accidents. Having exhibited it to him she put it back. ‘Now
mind you don’t come near me. I don’t want to get it broke, and have
to begin another.’
‘Why do you do such a strange thing?’
‘It’s an old custom. I suppose it is natural for a woman to want to
bring live things into the world.’
‘It is very awkward for me just now,’ he said, laughing.
‘It serves you right. There––that’s all you can have of me.’
She had turned round her chair, and, reaching over the back of it,
presented her cheek to him gingerly.
‘That’s very shabby of you!’
‘You should have catched me a minute ago when I had put the egg
down! There!’ she said de
fiantly, ‘I am without it now!’ She had
quickly withdrawn the egg a second time; but before he could quite
reach her she had put it back as quickly, laughing with the excite-
ment of her strategy. Then there was a little struggle, Jude making a
plunge for it and capturing it triumphantly. Her face 
flushed; and
becoming suddenly conscious he 
flushed also.
They looked at each other, panting; till he rose and said: ‘One kiss,
now I can do it without damage to property; and I’ll go!’
But she had jumped up too. ‘You must 
find me first!’ she cried.
Her lover followed her as she withdrew. It was now dark inside the
room, and the window being small he could not discover for a long
time what had become of her, till a laugh revealed her to have rushed
up the stairs, whither Jude rushed at her heels.
Jude the Obscure


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I.–ix.
I
 was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval. Arabella seemed dissatis
fied; she was
always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.
One day she met the itinerant Vilbert. She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences. Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she had
grown brighter.* That evening she kept an appointment with Jude,
who seemed sad.
‘I am going away,’ he said to her. ‘I think I ought to go. I think it
will be better both for you and for me. I wish some things had never
begun! I was much to blame, I know. But it is never too late to mend.’
Arabella began to cry. ‘How do you know it is not too late?’ she
said. ‘That’s all very well to say! I haven’t told you yet!’ and she
looked into his face with streaming eyes.
‘What?’ he asked, turning pale. ‘Not . . . ?’
‘Yes! And what shall I do if you desert me?’
‘O Arabella––how can you say that, my dear! You know I wouldn’t
desert you!’
‘Well then——’
‘I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have
thought of this before. . . . But, of course, if that’s the case, we must
marry! What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?’
‘I thought––I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the
more for that, and leave me to face it alone!’
‘You knew better! Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or
even three, of marrying. It is a complete smashing up of my plans––I
mean my plans before I knew you, my dear. But what are they, after
all! Dreams about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships,
and all that. Certainly we’ll marry: we must!’
That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark, self-
communing. He knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain,
that Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of woman-
kind. Yet, such being the custom of the rural districts among hon-
ourable young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a
woman as he unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what

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he had said, and take the consequences. For his own soothing he kept
up a factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most
consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes said laconically.
The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday. The
people of the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was. All
his reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his
books to buy saucepans. Those who guessed the probable state of
a
ffairs, Arabella’s parents being among them, declared that it was the
sort of conduct they would have expected of such an honest young
man as Jude in reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent
sweetheart. The parson who married them seemed to think it
satisfactory too.
And so, standing before the aforesaid o
fficiator, the two swore that
at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would
assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt,
and desired during the few preceding weeks.* What was as remarkable
as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all
surprised at what they swore.
Fawley’s aunt being a baker she made him a bridecake, saying
bitterly that it was the last thing she could do for him, poor silly
fellow; and that it would have been far better if, instead of his living
to trouble her, he had gone underground years before with his father
and mother. Of this cake Arabella took some slices, wrapped them up
in white note-paper, and sent them to her companions in the
pork-dressing business, Anny and Sarah, labelling each packet ‘In
remembrance of good advice.’
The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not
very brilliant even to the most sanguine mind. He, a stone-mason’s
apprentice, nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till he
should be out of his time. His wife was absolutely useless in a town-
lodging, where he at 
first had considered it would be necessary for
them to live. But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so little
a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between the
Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the pro
fits of a
vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her keep
a pig. But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for, and it was a
long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day. Arabella, how-
ever, felt that all these makeshifts were temporary: she had gained a
husband; that was the thing––a husband with a lot of earning power