Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘ ’Od damn it all!’ she cried, ‘that ever I should say it! You’ve over-
stuck un! And I telling you all the time——’
‘Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!’
‘Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don’t talk!’
However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done.
The blood 
flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream
she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and 
final
tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on
Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing
at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.
‘Make un stop that!’ said Arabella. ‘Such a noise will bring some-
body or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing
it ourselves.’ Picking up the knife from the ground whereon Jude
had 
flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The
pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘It is a hateful business!’ said he.
‘Pigs must be killed.’
The animal heaved in a 
final convulsion, and, despite the rope,
kicked out with all his last strength. A tablespoonful of black clot
came forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some
seconds.
‘That’s it; now he’ll go,’ said she. ‘Artful creatures––they always
keep back a drop like that as long as they can!’
The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude
stagger, and in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which
the blood had been caught.
‘There!’ she cried, thoroughly in a passion. ‘Now I can’t make any
blackpot. There’s a waste, all through you!’
Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole
steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the
snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle––to those who
saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat. The lips and
nostrils of the animal turned livid, then white, and the muscles of his
limbs relaxed.
‘Thank God!’ Jude said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘What’s God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I
should like to know!’ she said scornfully. ‘Poor folks must live.’
‘I know, I know,’ said he. ‘I don’t scold you.’
At Marygreen
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Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand.
‘Well done, young married volk! I couldn’t have carried it out
much better myself, cuss me if I could!’ The voice, which was husky,
came from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaugh-
ter they saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate,
critically surveying their performance.
‘ ’Tis well for ’ee to stand there and glane!’* said Arabella. ‘Owing
to your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! ’Twon’t fetch
so much by a shilling a score!’
Challow expressed his contrition. ‘You should have waited a bit,’
he said, shaking his head, ‘and not have done this––in the delicate
state, too, that you be in at present, ma’am. ’Tis risking yourself too
much.’
‘You needn’t be concerned about that,’ said Arabella, laughing.
Jude too laughed, but there was a strong 
flavour of bitterness in his
amusement.
Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the
scalding and scraping. Jude felt dissatis
fied with himself as a man at
what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and
that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out
by deputy. The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-
mortal, wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a
Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended.
No doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.
He did not like the road to Alfredston now. It stared him cynically
in the face. The wayside objects reminded him so much of his court-
ship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he read whenever
he could as he walked to and from his work. Yet he sometimes felt
that by caring for books he was not escaping commonplace nor gain-
ing rare ideas, every working-man being of that taste now. When
passing near the spot by the stream on which he had 
first made her
acquaintance he one day heard voices just as he had done at that
earlier time. One of the girls who had been Arabella’s companions
was talking to a friend in a shed, himself being the subject of dis-
course, possibly because they had seen him in the distance. They
were quite unaware that the shed-walls were so thin that he could
hear their words as he passed.
‘Howsomever, ’twas I put her up to it! “Nothing venture nothing
have,” I said. If I hadn’t she’d no more have been his mis’ess than I.’